FAHRENHEIT 451. Interview with Ray Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451 the novel a discussion with author Ray Bradbury written directed and produced by Moulin Rouge ro edited by David Palmer director of photography Michel Osmond sound Brett Brooke music by Bernard Herrmann Universal Studios Home Video Production Manager Mary Ann Nancy Universal Studios Home Video executive in charge of production Colleen a been a lot of people ask me about the genesis of Fahrenheit 451 what was I up to where do they live what were they doing well I lived in Venice California with my wife and a little $30 a month apartment we had no money and my wife got pregnant and I went to New York and managed to find enough money to finances for a while but in the meantime I was writing short stories I wrote a story called the pedestrian because I had an encounter with a policeman one night who asked me what I was doing I was walking with a friend and I said the policeman I'm putting one foot after the other which was the wrong answer you know very suspicious being a pedestrian walking and because I looked at the sidewalks this way and that and there's nobody except me and my friend so the policeman reprimanded me and I promised never to walk again and I went home in a rage and I wrote this short story I called the pedestrian and it was published finally and then I took the pedestrian out for a walk one night in another story and he turned the corner and he bumps into a little girl named Clarice McClelland and she sniffs the air and she says Jim I know who you are you're the fireman you're the man that burns books and nine days later Fahrenheit 451 was done the original version of Fahrenheit was published in galaxy magazine science fiction magazine and then the young editor came along a few years later who had no money and he needed material and said can you sell me something for $400 and I said yes I have a novel Fahrenheit 451 and he bought it for $400 and that was Hugh Hefner and it appeared in the second third and fourth issues of Playboy so all the young men and all the old men of America Oh me a debt of gratitude for helping start that magazine I grew up in Waukegan Illinois and I'd walked down the beach with my father and on the way we stopped at the fire station and my dad knew all the firemen and some of them were relatives of mine and I've grown and pet the Dalmatian huh and so I had an intimate knowledge of firemen and one of my uncle's was a fireman who was killed falling off a fire truck and when I was a kid and it just struck me in thinking about fireman that what are we gonna do with them in the future the time will come when all the houses are fireproof so you've got a lot of firemen with no job what are you gonna do I say well let's reverse it have them start fires instead of put them out and then I'd had no title for the book the original title was the fireman and I got curious as to what the temperature was that book paper would burn out and I called UCLA the chemistry department they couldn't help me a called SC some of the other physics departments and they couldn't help me I said the dummy call the fire department so I called downtown got the fire chief on the phone I said this sounds stupid but tell me what temperature does book paper catch fire he said just a moment and he came back he said it catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit and I reversed I said Fahrenheit for r1 yes so I don't know if that's true I've never researched his sense but it has a wonderful sound to it doesn't it and that's how it came to burn and I wrote the short novel in the basement of the you la library because I had no office there was a typewriter there you could rent for $0.10 1/2 hour so I took a bag of Dimes down there and I rented the typewriter for nine days and spent nine dollars and 80 cents and wrote a dime novel and it was published in the science fiction magazine and later I extended it to 50,000 words and it became the novel that you know now the book was a long time coming to birth you could say it went back to my great-great-great grandmother Mary Bradbury who was tried as a witch in Salem in 1580 while she escaped but she's in all the books about witches in which burning and then over the years I read about the various libraries of Alexandria burning three or four thousand years ago I think twice by accident once I'm purposed and then in China heard rumors of burnings of libraries and books and Hitler of course in Germany in the early 30s and since I'm a library person I've never made it to college you see I'm self educated in the library so anything that touches the library touches me and I was vitally concerned and upset to see what was going on in the world and then there were rumors of this kind of thing during the McCarthy period the Joseph McCarthy period nothing really substantial he never really got going but he heard a lot of people along the way and threatened books I heard rumors also of book burnings and censorship in Russia and it all came true later we found out they burned millions of books and millions of author Fahrenheit 451 is the only science fiction novel I've written people call me a science fiction writer I'm not Martian Chronicles is a Greek myth an Egyptian myth it's fairy tales it's fantasy there's no science fiction in there at all but Fahrenheit is firmly based in technology and what we were doing to ourselves with television I could foresee the day would come when you'd have wall-to-wall television and we have it right now if you want to install it you know and I had the seashell radio and years later some Japanese film people came to my office and they had the first Walkman radio and they put it on my ears and they said Fahrenheit 410 height for 5-1 so in a way I invented the damn Walkman huh which it's a big step over the ghetto blaster when you finish writing a story years later you find out why you picked the names it just popped into your head now Montag I didn't really know what it meant but we had a nice sound the real reason I picked Montag is to the name of a paper company puts out all kinds of stationery and my subconscious gave him that name Faber who appears later in the novel is a philosopher he's a maker of pencil and I didn't realize this until the years later after the book came out you just go with these things and hope that they make sense later and generally they do the salamander wishes prominent in the novel and the film goes back to Francis the first of France his symbol was the salamander in other words this lizard which lives on the hearth and comes out of the factory and again I didn't realize this was all subconscious and I verified it later when I went to France visited Frances DePriest castle and saw the salamander and the heart but it was the novel first and I'd put it in the back of my head the threat of atomic war was very fresh in my mind when I wrote the novel because it was just four or five years after Hiroshima and we would all were living in anticipation of being hurt or destroyed by this new device and the hydrogen bomb was in the process of being invented it was a threat to all of us and I wrote the book under the cloud of this concept but in making the film I advised Truffaut and I would advise any others eliminate the atomic bomb thing you don't need it it's an extra threat but the real threat is ignorance and the lack of education well I have a literary representative named Don Congdon and when I was married 53 years ago the same month the Don Condon who was an editor for a publishing firm called me and said I'm becoming a literary agent do you need one I said only if I can have one for a lifetime and he said that's me I said okay so he's been my agent for 53 years I married him the same month I married my wife it's been I've been very lucky to have these bookends on my life that's why the book Fahrenheit is dedicated to Don Compton the history of Fahrenheit is the history of all my books I'm creeping up on the public very slowly the initial edition of Fahrenheit was 5000 copies in the first year that's all and then every year after that it sold 2,000 copies hardcover and then the paperback edition 10 or 15,000 copies and every year since then maybe 20 30 thousand copies so you accumulate hundreds of thousands of copies over 40 years but that's not a best-seller it's an accumulated bestseller to speak of Fahrenheit and you have to speak of all my other books everything has been an accident everything has been unplanned everything has been a passion a madness or a great love I've had fun all of my life I've never worked a day in my life I've done all these things now I go on to the next thing and each of my books is a special love I haven't known one that's above the others and everything that's happened to me about Fahrenheit cents is reward from playing the game for the fun of it to see what in hell was in the back of my and all these things are a reward for me now and it's wonderful but thank God I behaved unconsciously and didn't try to intellectualize my career left or right black or white up or down male or female none of that junk just me and the typewriter in the future

Channel: Stray Bradbury

Views: 42,720

Keywords: FAHRENHEIT 451, Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury interview, Julie Christie

Id: xJ0sWvr5Ids

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/historiavitae]

When I first read it in translation, living in a Communist dictatorship, it was mainly about censorship and thought policing for me. It was beautifully poetic about how art and emotions can be sidelined as part of an overall ideology.

However, re-reading it in original language many years later in a well-established historic democracy on the other side of Europe, it suddenly revealed itself as a prophetic novel about dehumanisation and alienation due to mass media, interactive soap operas, wall to wall televisions... that were the main focus for people whilst they barely noticed the human being next to them.

To this day, this dual message of the book is fascinating for me - with its visions of mentioned interactieve soap operas and predictions of what reality TV decades later became, with their manufactured totally fake "real life" that was more obsessive for the viewers than their own actual reality...