movies

Especially given his love for movies. I got to see him speak and he talked about how he and his childhood friends used to make stop motion movies in their garage, and how much that influenced his choice of career. He said the secret to happiness as an adult was to find a career as close to the activities you used to do for fun as a child.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ray-bradburys-uneasy-rela_b_6102430

And so few good ones...

Ugh. Personal memory unlocked.

Years ago, when I was teaching English Lit, I was doing a whole short fiction unit on Bradbury. A terrible, TERRIBLE adaptation of "A Sound of Thunder" had just been dumped on DVD. I hadn't watched it, but I used to screen films for my classes after teaching the texts they were adapted from. 9 times out of 10, the films were garbage, but it was an interesting way to study adaptation.

So I grabbed the dvd. And watched it for the first time alongside my students and had to physically hold in my anger. Guys, it's that bad.

The best part was reading my students' papers on the adaptation, which were mostly on the lines of "why is this a thing that exists" and "how can cgi dinosaurs look this bad" and "this movie has baboonlizards, why does this story need baboonlizards" and so on.

Of course, being a classroom, there was still the requisite one or two responses of "I liked the movie better than the story because it was a movie and I didn't have to read."

But yeah, don't watch "A Sound of Thunder." And if you do, go back in time and prevent yourself from doing it. It's that important.