Spotlight on Festival 451iNDY & the Ray Bradbury Center

Jason Aukerman at the Ray Bradbury Center

Ray Bradbury is arguably the most important science fiction and fantasy author of the 20th century. One of his most popular works, Fahrenheit 451, is a dystopian novel in which firemen spend more time burning books than they spend putting out fires. But the Ray Bradbury Center’s Festival 451iNDY is about more than, say, highlighting Mom’s for Liberty’s latest attempts to keep adolescents from reading certain books. The festival is “a campaign that will encourage lifelong learning through a variety of public programs, collaborative workshops, performances, and other events throughout Indianapolis” per the website.

Festival 451iNDY will include a film festival at Kan-Kan Cinema with a program with American Book Award winning author, Tananarive Due. You can also catch the world premiere of Adversary, a stage play performed and written by Emmy-winning actor Bill Oberst Jr.

Why the Center is located in Indy has a lot to do with the fact that his biographer and close personal friend, Jonathan Eller, is a longtime professor at IUPUI. He is also a Bradbury biographer and the Center’s founding director.

The Bradbury Center not only has one of the larger single-author archives in the US, which makes it a hub for Bradbury studies, but the repository for more than 100,000 pages of his published and unpublished literary works. These are housed in Bradbury’s filing cabinets, which the Center acquired after his death in 2012.

“The taller ones were in his Los Angeles residence,” says Jason Aukerman, the current Center director. “The shorter ones were at his weekend home in Palm Springs. “They arrived in situ, all the original contents intact.  He had a very reactive filing system, which is my polite way of saying he didn't have a filing system.”

One of the big challenges for Ray Bradbury Center staff is to sort through these documents.

But the highlight of the Center for most is the full-scale recreation of Bradbury’s office, where you’ll find his desk, his typewriter, his library, and all sorts of memorabilia.  Much of this memorabilia highlights his connection to the film industry, which is unsurprising considering his history as a screenwriter. But Bradbury spent much of his life in close proximity to Hollywood.

At the age of 14, Bradbury moved to Los Angeles with his family from Waukegan, Illinois where he was born in 1920.   

“He was within rollerskating distance of the major Hollywood Studios,” Aukerman says. “So he'd roller skate out there and just hanging out waiting for celebrities to come out of the studios.

He points out a photo of a teenage Bradbury with actor George Burns.

“I love this photograph because he's obviously wearing his father's trench coat,” Aukerman says. “And there's this little string that's attached. He wasn't allowed to leave the house of the family camera unless he had it tied to him because he had such a tendency to lose things.”

But he collected many other things that are part of the Center’s collection. This includes some of George Burns’ DNA because Bradbury picked up Burns’ discarded cigar stub and saved it for posterity. 

“Eventually it found its way to us when we assumed curatorial control of the collection,” Aukerman adds.  

But soon Bradbury was collecting opportunities to work as a Hollywood screenwriter.  One of the first of those opportunities was writing the script for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a 1953 monster movie. 

“People watch it today and they think it's a cheap knockoff of the Godzilla movies,” Aukerman says. “Well, in reality The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms came out two years before any Godzilla was ever made. And all of the major tropes in the Godzilla franchise are present in the beast from 20,000 fathoms. So it's loosely based maybe for the first five minutes of the story loosely based on Bradbury short … originally published as The Fog Horn.” 

It was this story that caught the eye of John Huston, the director of the classic films Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Dead. The script the notoriously tempestuous director wanted Bradbury to write was for Moby Dick, based on the Herman Melville novel. 

“It was really remarkable that Bradbury lasted,” Aukerman continues. “Of course, it went on to win an Academy Award. I think it's still considered the definitive film adaptation of Moby Dick. And so that really opened up the doors in Hollywood. He also did the screenplay for It Came From Outer Space. And, you know, back in the 1950s, there were a lot of hokey 3D science fiction films that were just meant to show off the gimmicky special effects with 3D. This one actually holds up pretty well.”

One of those who saw It Came From Outer Space was another director you may have heard of: Steven Spielberg. According to Aukerman, this film was the inspiration for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. On Sunday, September 3, as part of the F.451 Festival, It Came from Outer Space will be screened as a “Book to Film” event at Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie.

Also among his admirers were the Apollo astronauts. Many of them had read Bradbury’s science fiction magazines in pulp magazines when they were kids. His stories had inspired them to become astronauts when they were young. Realizing this, Bradbury started to think he could reach a broader audience by writing nonfiction stories.

“That's really where you see a change in his career where he starts writing nonfiction articles for Life magazine, trying to get the public excited about why we need to explore space and understand our place in the cosmos,” says Aukerman.

If you are interested in taking a tour of the Ray Bradbury Center, click on this link.