Ray Bradbury "Moby Dick: A Screenplay" Deluxe Signed Lettered Edition "M" of only 26, Tray-cased [Very Fine]

Personally signed by Ray Bradbury. Lettered M of only 26.

• Edited by William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller
• Dust jacket by Jon Foster

Subterranean Press, Burton, MI, 2008. Ray Bradbury "Moby Dick: A Screenplay". Signed Lettered Edition of only 26 produced in tray-case. This is lettered "M", personally signed by the author Ray Bradbury on a special limitation page. Hardcover with dust-jacket. First Edition. There was no other limited edition of this title. This edition is now OUT OF PRINT from the publisher. 209 pages.

An edition of Bradbury's original script for John Ford's Moby Dick (1956). The script used for the film was revised by Ford, this book attempts to restore Bradbury's original intent. The final 16 pages reproduce Bradbury's holograph notes for the project. These notes are only included in the lettered edition of the screenplay.

About the book

Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick comes to life in this legendary screenplay by Ray Bradbury. In 1953, the young Bradbury was approached by director John Huston, and their efforts produced the definitive film adaptation of Melville's novel, starring Gregory Peck.

Ishmael, a young man in search of adventure, finds more than he bargained for when he signs on the Pequot, an infamous whaling ship captained by the driven Captain Ahab, who will stop at nothing in his quest to confront and kill the legendary white whale, Moby Dick.

In his screenplay, Bradbury's signature prose and eye for imagery distils the best of the novel, vividly drawing the scene on the Pequot, trapped between the divine madness of a powerful captain in search of a worthy foe and the vast indifference of the sea. In this, the first publication of the screenplay, Bradbury and Huston fans alike can gain rare insight into the development of their idols.

Review

Despite the drawbacks of Bradbury's text being a script, Bradbury still manages to tell an excellent story and his characters do come to life, even without the actors' interpretations. His Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, and Queequeg are individuals, in some cases, such as Queequeg, even more fully realized on the page than they eventually were in Huston's film. In addition to Bradbury's own text, the book includes short essays by William F. Touponce and Jon R. Eller. These essays are interesting and tend to deal more with the background of Bradbury's actual work on the script rather than the script itself, but both shed light on the creative process and make Moby Dick: A Screenplay a more fully realized volume than if the scripts had been left to stand on its own. -- SFSite.com

About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Bradbury is credited with writing 27 novels and over 600 short stories. More than eight million copies of his works, published in over 36 languages, have been sold around the world.

Predominantly known for writing the iconic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in fantasy fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).

Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream." The Los Angeles Times credited Bradbury with the ability "to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity." Bradbury's grandson, Danny Karapetian, said Bradbury's works had "influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories". The Washington Post noted several modern day technologies that Bradbury had envisioned much earlier in his writing, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets from Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence within I Sing the Body Electric.