“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something.” FEDERICO FELLINI
Photo: John Payne
Archives for posts with tag: film directors
Yesterday (August 1st), we celebrated Herman Melville‘s 194th birthday with a few Moby-Dick erasure poems. We continue exploring all-things-Melville today by taking a look at Moby Dick, the 1956 movie directed by John Huston — with a screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury.
In a 2010 interview in The Paris Review, Bradbury offers some fascinating background about how he developed the script. Here is an excerpt…
INTERVIEWER: Why did you do Moby Dick?
BRADBURY: …he [Huston] called me up and said, Do you have some time to come to Europe and write Moby-Dick for the screen? I said, I don’t know, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing…I’ve had copies of Moby-Dick around the house for years. So I went home and I read Moby-Dick…I dove into the middle of it instead of starting at the beginning. I came across a lot of beautiful poetry about the whiteness of the whale and the colors of nightmares and the great spirit’s spout. And I came upon a section toward the end where Ahab stands at the rail and says: “It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay.” I turned back to the start: “Call me Ishmael.” I was in love! You fall in love with poetry. You fall in love with Shakespeare… I was able to do the job not because I was in love with Melville, but because I was in love with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
…read Sam Weller‘s 2010 Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury at parisreview.com
THE GIRL WITH MANY EYES
Poem by Tim Burton
One day in the park
I had quite a surprise.
I met a girl
who had many eyes.
She was really quite pretty
(and also quite shocking!)
and I noticed she had a mouth,
so we ended up talking.
We talked about flowers,
and her poetry classes,
and the problems she’d have
if she ever wore glasses.
It’s great to know a girl
who has so many eyes,
but you really get wet
when she breaks down and cries.
Silver Birch Press 