The Carnival Master

And I have written a play about a poet-of-the-ordinary, a master of the mediocre, an old man whose greatest feat of memory is to recall how a 1925 Moon or Kissel-Kar or Buick once looked, down to the hub-caps, windshields, dashboards and license plates. A man who can describe the color of every candyPwrapper ever purchased, and the design of every package of cigarettes ever smoked. These plays, these ideas, put in motion now on the stage, I hope will be considered a true product of our time. 1965 SHOOTING HAIKU IN A BARREL It started as The Black Ferris a g,ooo-word story, published in Weird Tales (1948), about two youngsters who suspect there is something peculiar about the carnival that comes to town. The story became a seventy-page screen treatment, Dark Carnival (1958), a project for Gene Kelly to direct. Unproduced, the treatment became a novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962); the novel, a screenplay (1971), then a second screenplay (1976), and now, at last, a film. The author of the story, the treatment, the novel, and the screenplays is of course Ray Bradbury ...»