Here is a young man who had found early
and widespread success as a fiction writer.
Now he's well-established in the mainstream magazines, and he's publishing books with major trade houses now with
Doubleday he has "The Martian Chronicles",
he has 'The Illustrated Man', he has 'The
Golden Apples of the Sun' story
collection, and with Ballantine he's just
publishing 'Fahrenheit 451', but deep
inside he had always been in love with
the movies. His mother named him Ray
Douglas Bradbury for Douglas Fairbanks
Jr., her favorite silent film idol. He grew
up going to movies from age 3 on he saw
first-run movies, silent films that no
longer even exist today, movies that he
saw as a child and never left his
imagination and inspired his imagination.
He had followed directors like John
Huston, he had followed their careers, for
Huston with movies like 'The Maltese
Falcon' through 'Treasure of the Sierra
Madre' through the 1940s, and had always had a dream of working with a director
like John Huston, and he arranged a
meeting with John Huston in 1951 through
their mutual friend Ray Stark, a
Hollywood agent turned producer himself,
and from that time on Huston had Ray
Bradbury on his radar screen. He had read
some of the stories, in Ray Bradbury's
collections we have letters from John
Huston to Ray Bradbury that absolutely
indicate that he had read some of these
stories, in spite of the fact that he's
making these films, he's making films
like 'Moulin Rouge' and the 'African Queen', but he never loses track of Bradbury.
In 1953, early in the year, Bradbury sent him a copy of 'The Golden Apples of the Sun',
and in that book John Huston read a
story called 'The Foghorn', it's sometimes
known as 'The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms'. The movie was adopted based roughly on parts
of that story. And Huston saw in
Bradbury's prose, the kind of magic of
description that a tale of the sea
should have in the tradition of Herman
Melville, he heard Melville's influences
echoing in Bradbury's
story, it sounded Shakespearean, it
sounded like Old Testament Bible in
places, and yet it was entertainment and
it was a wonderful story about the last
sea behemoth coming to a lighthouse
because it hears, it's drawn by the
foghorn and the light, and when it
realizes that it's not another behemoth,
that it's the last of its kind, it
destroys the lighthouse. It's a fairly
well-known Bradbury story but Huston
read it and said, "Here's my man", and when
he came back to the States, briefly, in
August of 1953, he contacted Bradbury and
said, "I want you to write the script of
the new movie version of Moby Dick I'm
putting together", and that's how that
happened.
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