Rick,
It is great to hear your story. Ray Bradbury was just the best!!! I met him
several times as a kid at birthday parties that Forrest J. Ackerman used to
hold at his house on Sherbourne Drive in the West L.A. area in the 60's. He was
the nicest of people. No matter who you were, you were part of humanity and
that is what seemed to matter to him. I can't imagine how stupid I sounded as a
10 year old talking about The Martian Chronicles or King Kong. He was sooooo
nice.
There was no sense of "How important are you?" or "A bigger name just walked
into the room, so bye". I shed a tear yesterday. Don't do that often and I'm
tearing-up as I write this.
Two of Sci-Fi's Three Musketeers are gone now. Ray Harryhausen will be 92 on
June 29. All of us who love films and fantasy have been blessed to live during
this time.
----- Original Message -----
From: Rix Posterz
To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2012 9:46 AM
Subject: [MOPO] Ray Bradbury, A Remembrance
In the min-1970's, I was a young, aspiring writer living in L.A., working
on a Sci-Fi project with a friend named Tim Bruckner (who is now a well-known
sculptor of super hero and fantasy figures). The story was about a
dream-eating deity called "The Enicol". To make a long story short, both Tim
and I were quite excited about the strange tale we'd come up with and decided
to try to contact as many well-known writers in the Sci-Fi genre as we could.
Believe it or not, back in 1974 Harlan Ellison's home phone number was listed
in the San Fernando Valley white pages, so...after staring at it for a day or
two, I dialed the number and Harlan Ellison did indeed answer my call. I got
as far as saying something to the effect of "Hello, Mr. Ellison, my name's Rick
Ryan and I've always been a huge admirer of your work..." That's as far as I
got before Harlan seemed to go totally berserk, angrily screaming at me about
bothering him with my call, demanding that I promise never, EVER to call him
again! Of course, I quietly did as he asked and immediately hung up the phone.
Within the following month or so, someone had told me that Ray Bradbury had
an office in Beverly Hills (I'm pretty sure that's where it was---if not, it
was very close to Beverly Hills). Anyway, early one afternoon, I entered the
building where Mr. Bradbury's office was supposed to be and. lo and behold, on
the second floor at the end of the hallway was a door that had "Ray Bradbury"
on it in some fashion or another. Unfortunately, the door also had a very
large sign on it saying something like: "WARNING! Please Do Not Disturb! I Am
a Working Author and WILL NOT RESPOND! If you wish to contact me for any
reason, call: 555-6238" (Of course the wording on the sign and the telephone
number were different, but you get the idea...). So. for the next 2 or 3 days
I called and called that number and no one ever answered.
Back then, they didn't have answering machines and Ray Bradbury wasn't the
kind of guy to have one anyway---hey, he never drove a car, so why would he
want an annoying answering machine. Anyway,
after dialing that number for what seemed like 100 times, on the 101st
attempt, a voice answered on the other end of the line. It was Ray Bradbury.
In contrast to Mr. Ellison, Mr. Bradbury talked to me for at least a half an
hour about everything from the craft of writing to his experience working with
John Huston on the set
while they were filming Moby Dick (for which he wrote the screenplay). After
all this time, I don't remember all the incidentals of the conversation. What
I do remember is what a kind, warm and welcoming gentleman the legendary
literary giant Ray Bradbury was when he talked on the phone to some young,
naive
kid who was callling him with some crazy Sci-Fi idea. I also remember his
closing words in our conversation were "God bless you, son". What a wonderful
human being. It's one of the great honors of my life to have had that
experience over 35 years ago....
Rick Ryan
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