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Where Mexico surprised me with so much darkness at the heart of the noon sun, Ireland surprised me with so much sun swallowed in the heart of the fog to keep one warm. The distant drummer I listened to in Mexico tread me to a funeral march. The drummer in Dublin tread me lightly through the pubs. The plays wanted to be happy plays. I let them write themselves that way, out of their own hungers and needs, their unusual joys, and fine delights.
So I wrote half a dozen plays and will write more about Ireland. Did you know that people meet in great head-on bicycle collisions, and suffer from fearful concussions for years after, all over Eire? They do. I have caught and held them in one act. Did you know that in the cinemas each night just an instant before the Irish National Anthem is due to explode its rhythms, there is a terrible surge and outflux as people fight to escape through the exits so as not to hear the dread music again? It happens. I saw it. I ran with them. Now I have done it as a play, "The Anthem Sprinters." Did you know that the best way to drive at night in the fog across the boggy midlands of Irish country is to keep your lights off? And to drive terribly fast is better! I have written that. Is it the blood of an Irishman that moves his tongue to beauty, or the whiskey that he pours in to move his blood to move his tongue and tell poems and declaim with harps? I do not know. I ask my secret self which tells me back. Wise man, I listen.
So, thinking myself bankrupt, ignorant, u
So again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion, or my Ouija subconscious again.
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.
We never sit anything out.
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
The time, indeed, is theatrical. It is full of craziness, wildness, brilliance, inventiveness; it both exhilarates and depresses. It says either too much or too little.
And one thing is constant through all the instances cited above.
Ideas.
Ideas are on the march.
For the first time in the long and plague-some history of man, ideas do not merely exist on paper, as philosophies in books do.
Today's ideas are blueprinted, mocked-up, engineered, electrified, wound-tight and set loose to rev men up or run men down.
All this being true, how rare the motion picture, the novel, the poem, the story, the painting, or the play which deals with the greatest problem of our time, man and his fabulous tools, man and his mechanical children, man and his amoral robots which lead him, strangely and inexplicably, into immorality.
I intend my plays to be first entertaining and grand fun that will stimulate, provoke, terrify, and, one hopes, amuse. This, I think, is important, to tell a good story, to write the passions well, on to the end. Let the residue come when the plays are over and the crowd goes home. Let the audience wake in the night and say, Oh that's what he's up to! Or the next day cry, He means us! He means now! Our world, our problems, our delights and our despairs!
I do not want to be a snobbish lecturer, a grandiloquent dogooder, or a boring reformer.
I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all the history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.
I have been stopped once too often by policemen at night who ask me what I am doing, walking on the sidewalk.
I have written a play called "The Pedestrian," laid in the future, about the plight of similar walkers in the cities.
I have witnessed i
And I have written a play about a poet-of-the-ordinary, a master of the mediocre, an old man whose greatest feat of memory is to recall how a 1925 Moon or Kissel-Kar or Buick once looked, down to the hub-caps, windshields, dashboards and license plates. A man who can describe the color of every candy wrapper ever purchased, and the design of every package of cigarettes ever smoked.
These plays, these ideas, put in motion now on the stage, I hope will be considered a true product of our time.
1965
SHOOTING HAIKU IN A BARREL
It started as The Black Ferris a g,ooo-word story, published in Weird Tales (1948), about two youngsters who suspect there is something peculiar about the carnival that comes to town. The story became a seventy-page screen treatment, Dark Carnival (1958), a project for Gene Kelly to direct. Unproduced, the treatment became a novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962); the novel, a screenplay (1971), then a second screenplay (1976), and now, at last, a film. The author of the story, the treatment, the novel, and the screenplays is of course Ray Bradbury. Lucky that Bradbury feels, "I have always been a good editor of my own work. "
"I've tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don't kill it or hurt it in any way. When you start out life as a writer, you hate that job, but now that I'm older it's turned into a wonderful game, and I love the challenge just as much as writing the original, because it's a challenge. It's an intellectual challenge to get a scalpel and cut the patient without killing."
If editing is a wonderful game, then Something Wicked This Way Comes is a veritable Parker Brothers of possibilities, so long has Bradbury been adapting and readapting and readapting the little story of Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade and the demonic carousel whose riders age a year with each revolution. He is satisfied that the Jack Clayton version, which Disney will release in February, "is the closest yet of anything of mine on the screen. " He seems pleased with their collaboration; "I spent six months doing a whole new screenplay for Jack, which was a gorgeous experience, because Jack is a wonderful man to sit with every afternoon. "
MITCH TUCHMAN
I had to a 260-page screenplay. That's six hours. Jack said, "Well, now you've got to cut out forty pages." I said, "God, I can't." He said, "Go ahead, I know you can do it. I'll be behind you." So I cut forty pages out. He said, "Okay, now you've got to cut another forty pages out." I got it down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, "Thirty more." I said, "Impossible, impossible!" Okay, I got it down to 150 pages. And Jack said, "Thirty more." Well, he kept telling me I could do it, and, by God, I went through a final time and got it down to 120 pages. It was better.
When you gave Clayton 260 pages, did you think he would shoot it that way? As an experienced screenwriter, you must have known…