Harryhausen and Bradbury, best friends
SPOILER ALERT: While this post doesn’t give away any plot points, it’s best read after listening to Episode #6: “Reflections”
HARRYHAUSEN: Ollie, this is my friend, Ray Bradbury... Ray’s a writer.
OLLIE: Really? Of what?
BRADBURY: Science Fiction, things like that.
HARRYHAUSEN: Weird stuff.
BRADBURY: Yeah, weird like everything in here.
RAY BRADBURY was the author of my youth, the writer that turned me into a compulsive reader. At age 13 or 14, I devoured pretty much everything he wrote, from anthologies like The Illustrated Manand The Martian Chronicles to novels like Fahrenheit 451. He helped me form a world view. And the love of science fiction his work instilled in me holds to this day. One of my most memorable theatrical achievements was in 1972 when, taking a Children’s Theatre class in college, I directed a class of 4th graders in an enactment of a scene from Something Wicked This Way Comes, having them collectively play the role of the blind Dust Witch in her hot air balloon, inhaling and exhaling as she hunts the young heroes before one of them vanquishes her with an arrow to her balloon.
In 1995, I had the honor of meeting Ray Bradbury when he gave an evening talk at my daughter’s elementary school. The many worn-out paperbacks of my youth having long disappeared, I no longer owned any of his books to bring for him to sign. Fortunately, they had some for sale in the auditorium lobby before the talk. There wasn’t a huge selection, but I bought hardbound editions of Something Wickedand a novel I had never heard of before: A Graveyard for Lunatics. These in hand, I nervously approached Bradbury, who was sitting behind a table, asked him to sign the books and babbled on about what a huge influence he had been on me.
It was not until three or four years ago that, looking for something to read, I pulled A Graveyard For Lunatics off the shelf. Published in 1990, it is the second of three mystery novels set in 1950s Hollywood in which the unnamed young screenwriter Narrator is a fictionalized version of Bradbury himself. In telling a Phantom of the Opera-like tale that takes place at the equivalent of the Paramount Studio and the adjacent Hollywood Forever cemetery, Bradbury draws much from his own life, notably the key supporting character of stop motion animator/special effects wizard Roy Holdstrom, who is a thinly disguised version of Bradbury’s real-life close friend, RAY HARRYHAUSEN.
My introduction to Ray Harryhausen was in 1963 when, as an 11-year-old, I went to see the film Jason and the Argonauts and was awed by a scene I still remember vividly to this day: Seven skeleton warriors – grown from sown Hydra’s teeth – emerging from the ground to battle Jason and his men. This Ray Harryhausen wizardry is still considered his greatest effect.
In Graveyard, the character of Roy is introduced with this paragraph:
“Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching.”
Read anything about Harryhausen’s beginnings in special effects and you’ll see that Bradbury is simply describing his friend. Harryhausen was only 13 when he saw King Kong. Inspired by it and the burgeoning literary genre of science fiction, he began experimenting with animation.
“The scenes (in King Kong) utilizing stop-motion animation (and) featuring creatures on the island of Kong, were the work of pioneer model animator Willis O’Brien… A friend (of Harryhausen’s) arranged a meeting with O’Brien, who critiqued Harryhausen’s early models and urged him to take classes in graphic arts and sculpture to hone his skills. Taking O’Brien’s advice, while still at high school, Harryhausen took evening classes in art direction, photography and editing at the newly formed School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.” (Wikipedia.)
Both born in 1920, Bradbury and Harryhausen met in 1938 at a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society held at the home of Forrest Ackerman, the magazine editor who published Bradbury’s first story in the fanzine “Imagination” in 1939 and would coin the genre nickname “sci-fi.” The two young men immediately developed a friendship that would last a lifetime. Harryhausen served as best man in Bradbury’s wedding to Marguerite McClure in 1947. According to Bradbury, the two “made a pact promising to grow old, but never to grow up“.
A Graveyard for Lunatics might be a piece of fiction, but it reveals much about the dynamic of the real-life friendship between Bradbury and Harryhausen. The relationship between Roy Holdstrom and the Narrator has such kinship, understanding, respect and love that you just know it’s rooted deeply in something real.
When I began writing Season 2 of Tinsel Front, this paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Harryhausen jumped out at me:
“During World War II, Harryhausen served in the U.S. Army’s Special Services Division under Colonel Frank Capra, as a loader, clapper boy, gofer and later camera assistant, whilst working at home animating short films about the use and development of military equipment.”
I knew then that Ray Harryhausen had to be a character Ollie would befriend. The fact that Harryhausen worked a myriad of jobs at Fort Fox allowed me to envision Ollie being asked to do the same. As for Harryhausen working “at home animating short films about the use and development of military equipment,” it inspired the scene in which Harryhausen brings Ollie home with him one night. I’m not ashamed to admit that Ollie’s awe at what he beholds in Harryhausen’s garage is absolutely inspired by this description of Roy Holdstrom’s workshop in A Graveyard for Lunatics:
“Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer’s trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion-year slumbers.”
A magical Ray Bradbury sentence if there ever was one.
Originally, I was just going to have Bradbury show up at the very end of that garage scene for a very brief cameo. But then I learned how Bradbury’s poor eyesight had kept him out of the service. As he had “washed out” like Ollie, I realized there was an opportunity for Bradbury to impart the lesson he might have learned from his “failure” to get in the fight. Bradbury’s theory that fate had other things in store for him and Ollie is pure speculation on my part, but it’s based in the fact that, as a young man, Ray Bradbury was especially driven and focused in his ambition to become a great writer. I could very well imagine him concluding that Fortune did indeed keep him home to write… and so he wrote twice as hard.
Endless thanks to actors John Katona (Harryhausen) and Zane Acord (Bradbury) for giving such fun voice to these two exceptional men. Each diligently listened to recordings in hopes of making Harryhausen and Bradbury speak like they may have in 1943. See John’s and Zane’s bios in Cast.
Leave a Reply