Sundays with Ray Bradbury
I've been lecturing at the University of Southern California cinema department for twenty-two years — I go down there a couple of times a year — and various students have come up to me and said, “Can we make films of your short stories?” I say, “Sure, take them. Do it. But there's one restriction I put on you. Shoot the whole story. Just read what I've done and line up the shot by the paragraphs. All the paragraphs are shots. By the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it's a close-up or a long shot.” So, by God, those students, with their little cameras and $500, have shot better films than the big productions I've had, because they’ve followed the story.

All my stories are cinematic. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

When I first talked to Sam Peckinpah years ago about directing Something Wicked, I said to him, “How are you going to shoot the film if we do it?” He said, “Tear the pages out of the book and stuff them into the camera.” I said, “Right.”

The job finally is to pick and choose among all metaphors in the book, put them into a screenplay in just the right proportion were people don't start to laugh at you.

For instance, I saw The Only Game in Town, George Stevens’ film about gambling in Las Vegas, on TV recently. Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor, who was a little bit Porky Pig. About a half hour in, Taylor turns to Beatty and she says, “Carry me into the bedroom.” Well, there's no way to do anything but laugh. I thought, “He's going to throw his back out.” I mean there goes your film.

So when you do a fantasy for the screen, make sure people don't fall off their seats.
['Scott Myers']
['Creative Writing', 'Writing', 'Screenplay', 'Fiction', 'Screenwriting']