Month: February 2021

Dr. Phil Nichols, creator and curator of Bradburymedia, has posted the first video of his new series, Bradbury 101. Nichols’ current program continues the same fresh focus on all things Bradbury that characterized the Bradbury100 podcast introduced to celebrate the 2020 centennial of the author’s birth. Bradbury 101 moves into video with a maiden episode that offers a roadmap for pursuing  an interest in Bradbury’s writing, films, and life story. All episodes of both series are available on YouTube and at Bradburymedia.

Nichols is a perfect guide. Internationally recognized for his study of Bradbury’s own screenplays as well as others’ adaptations of Bradbury’s work for film and television, Nichols also serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University and the Editorial Board of The New Ray Bradbury Review.  He teaches at the University of Wolverhampton in England.

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This February marks 57 years since Ray Bradbury published his short story collection The Machineries of Joy. A mixture of the bizarre and everyday, these twenty stories are a mirror of the author’s own joys: his love of small town life and large dinosaurs, his capacious curiosity, and his steadfast insistence on embracing the things we love despite the obstacles.

In the title piece, two priests debate the value of exploring the unknown universe. “Boys! Grow Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar,” first published as “Come Into My Cellar” in the 1962 October issue of Galaxy Science Fiction and later the basis for Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ disquieting adaptation, “Special Delivery,” follows young boys who respond to the allure of mail order science projects and unknowingly begin spawning space invaders in the cellars of suburbia. Two other stories revisit the Mexican customs illuminated in The Halloween Tree while the often forgotten “The Illustrated Woman” entwines the fantastic, the frightening, and the truly human in classic Bradbury style.

Buy The Machineries of Joy

Watch “Special Delivery” on Peacock

Read “Come into My Cellar”

Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck is now available through YouTube Movies. In 1954 Ray Bradbury spent six months in Ireland working on the screenplay for the film directed by John Huston. It was Bradbury’s first screenplay for a book he hadn’t written himself but Huston, impressed with the lyricism of Bradbury’s writing and the command of sea lore shown in the short story “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” had sought Bradbury out to bring Herman Melville’s American classic to the screen.

The relationship with the notoriously difficult Huston was not without its drama and Bradbury eventually reworked the short stories and plays that fictionalized his experience in Ireland into the 1992 novel Green Shadows, White Whale. With the success of Moby Dick and the reception of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury found himself in demand in Hollywood’s film and television industry, soon adding scriptwriting for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, and The Twilight Zone to his already impressive resume.

Read an excerpt from Jonathan Eller’s Bradbury Unbound dealing with Bradbury’s time in Ireland.

Watch Moby Dick