Ted Newsom wrote:
Oh, Bill, c'mon. Bradbury didn't write BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. You could excise the entire lighthouse segment from the film-- the only thing which remotely relates to any Bradbury work-- and the film would still be intact, 1950s scifi archetypes and all. But nobody wants to call Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger the Fathers of 50s SciFi; it's not sexy. So it's scarcely fair to credit him with establishing the Big Bug films.

Oh, Ted, gimme a @@%*!%+%* break.  Bradbury was then, and is now, the most famous science fiction writer on Earth.  I guess fans today assume that what they see around them is the way it always was.  In the very late forties and on into the fifties, science fiction in general underwent a gigantic burst of popularity; the number of magazines on the stands annually increased from something like eight to around thirty--and this was exactly when science fiction films kicked.  It was also exactly when Bradbury's stories were appearing in not just science fiction magazines, but The Saturday Evening Post (possibly also Collier's; haven't checked that), the most popular general interest magazine of the day.  He was prestigious in a way that only a later writer like Stephen King became.  He was the big cheese in terms of science fiction.  There was a very good reason that his name was plastered all over the ads for BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE.
    Anyway, I did not, and never have, called Ray Bradbury "the father of 1950s SF movies;" I jokingly referred to him as their Uncle.
    The astronomer character in the Welles broadcast is not at all like John Putnam except in BEING an astronomer; the important things that Bradbury plugged into this equation was that he was brilliant, a scientist, a loner, misjudged by the authority forces around him.     Perhaps one reason he rarely has referred to William Alland is that he was shocked and disappointed when Alland ratted out his friends to HUAC.

  

Last Edited By: Bill Warren Aug 8 10 6:48 PM. Edited 1 times.