Bradbury’s 50-year infatuation

Press, 4 August 1987, Page 15

Bradbury’s 50-year infatuation

Ray Bradbury fell in love with writing at 12 years of age and vowed he would write 10M words every day of his life.

So far he has produced close to 510 short stories, novels, poems, essays and plays. Then there are his movie and TV scripts, including those for “The Ray Bradbury Theatre” (tonight on One at 9.45). At 45, Bradbury says he is still enamoured of his craft, his writing still flows naturally and he never plans anything. “It’s all got to be a surprise, otherwise it’s no fun,” he says. “You see, I don’t have to have a routine for writing; my passion is so strong I don’t have to have a routine. Everything in life should be that way. “Everything in life should be like your first love affair, where there’s that element of mystery, of meeting someone and not knowing where it’s going to lead. That’s the same as writing a story. You get lost in it and things happen.” Bradbury’s writing environment is almost as incredible as the terrain of one of his sci-fi stories. A two-room office in a 1939 s building in ■Beverly Hills, it overflows with more memor-

abilia than it seems possible to gather in a lifetime — dusty robots and paper weights, piles of papers, books, posters, toy ray guns, tiny spaceships, dinosaur models, a Mickey Mouse phone. Designers would be hard pressed to come up with a set as bizarre, so producers decided every edition of “The Ray Bradbury Theatre” should open with Bradbury himself unlocking his office and coming in to work.

“Anyone who comes up here to visit — a cinematographer or a director

— runs amok with a camera,” he says. “So my producers and I thought in terms of the opening, what better place than the place where I get all my ideas. There among all the toys and books and posters and photographs that cover a period of 50 years or so.” Tonight’s story by the prolific Bradbury, “Marionettes Inc,” has James Coco as a middle-class, middle-aged computer salesman whose marriage has been smothered by his over-talkative, over-productive wife and by his own tension andd indifference.

But then along comes a golden opportunity offered by a smooth corporation boss.