| To close our tribute week to Ray Bradbury (and to...

16th Jun 2012

To close our tribute week to Ray Bradbury (and to mark Father’s Day), LARB contributor Jeffrey Kindley and father of LARB Senior Humanities Editor Evan Kindley recalls:

“Back in 1981 Ray Bradbury was hired by NBC to adapt his story ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ as a TV special to be called The Electric Grandmother. The network rejected the script he submitted, and he was angry. NBC then hired me to write the script. I loved the story and I loved Ray Bradbury; I was also keenly aware of the effrontery of trying to produce a 'better’ dramatization than the one submitted by the story’s own creator. When my script was accepted for production I did a very stupid thing, something only a very inexperienced and ill-advised member of the Writers Guild would do: I requested an arbitration to get full Written By credit. I lost the arbitration, quite fairly, and he and I shared the credit. The Electric Grandmother starred the luminous Maureen Stapleton and won a Peabody. Did Bradbury hate me, as he had every right to do? Nope. He was a generous, forgiving man. He said he loved it, and that meant the world to me.”