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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
At 81, the veteran author of sci-fi classics "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" is suddenly very hot in Hollywood.
Aug 29, 2001 | Author Ray Bradbury, now 81 and recovering from a stroke, has recently become the most sought-after writer in Hollywood.
Renny Harlin ("Die Hard 2," "Cliffhanger") has signed to direct Bradbury's time-travel adventure "A Sound of Thunder." Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile") will direct new productions of "The Martian Chronicles" and "Fahrenheit 451." Bradbury is also adapting his short story collection "The Illustrated Man" for the Sci-Fi Channel and says he's writing a script based on his novella "Frost and Fire" that will be filmed next year. And the literary establishment has also recognized him recently. Last November the National Book Foundation gave its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Bradbury.
The unprecedented interest by Hollywood in Bradbury's work is coincidentally timed to one of the author's major publishing anniversaries. Fifty years ago, the first printed version of "Fahrenheit 451" debuted in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
A future shock masterpiece, "Fahrenheit 451" was largely overlooked during recent millennial sci-fi retrospectives in favor of other dystopian works such as "1984," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Brave New World." The novel's famed central premise (a society where firefighters burn censored books) has long suggested a metaphorical fantasy rather than serious prognostication.
Kerosene-spraying firemen aside, a closer look at the 1953 novel shows Bradbury nailed the new millennium perfectly. There's interactive television, stereo earphones (which reportedly inspired a Sony engineer to invent the Walkman), immersive wall-size TVs, earpiece communicators, rampant political correctness, omnipresent advertising and a violent youth culture ignored by self-absorbed, prescription-dependent parents.
Far from an abstract nightmare, "Fahrenheit 451" is now disturbing because its culture no longer seems disturbing. And its dated terminology, such as calling headset radios "seashell ear thimbles," constantly remind modern readers the novel was written 50 years ago and that its culture -- our culture -- was intended only as a horrifying possibility.
One "Fahrenheit 451" prediction was the technological evolution, and moral devolution, of television news. In the novel, a fireman protagonist accused of hiding illegal books is pursued by a carnivorous news media seeking to satiate the blood lust of home viewers. As the fireman flees down the street, chased by helicopters, he sees himself through his neighbors' windows, running on their television screens.
The day after news helicopters pursued O.J. Simpson fleeing in a Ford Bronco, a New York Times columnist noted that the chase was the "real-life fulfillment" of "Fahrenheit 451."
Bradbury points to a more current example. "Look at the Chandra Levy case," he says. "It's become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they're being prosecutors. They're judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c'mon, that's ridiculous. But they're doing it."
The fictional roots of "Fahrenheit 451's" vision of mass censorship even resemble the complaints of modern media critics.
In the novel, Fire Captain Beatty explains to Montag, the conflicted fireman, that their government didn't ban reading. Books were simply marginalized as an increasingly inoffensive media and a growing population embraced infotainment at the expense of "slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology."
Says Beatty: "Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists ... The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! ... Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling."
Bradbury scored yet another prognostication bull's-eye in his 1953 short story "The Murderer," wherein a man is imprisoned for wrecking "machines that yak-yak-yak." The most offensive devices were the "radio wristwatch" communicators.
Said the electronics murderer: "... my friends and wife phoned every five minutes. What is there about such 'conveniences' that makes them so temptingly convenient? ... Convenient for my office, so when I'm in the field with my radio car there's no moment when I'm not in touch. In touch! There's a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather."
As retribution, the murderer jams radio wristwatch signals on a commuter bus and delights in the "terrible, unexpected silence" he creates: "The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other."
Substitute a few product terms and "The Murderer" could be passed off as modern nonfiction. True, Dick Tracy also wore a primitive cellphone on his wrist, but Bradbury intuitively grasped how annoyingly demanding and oddly isolating such technology could become.
