John Huston by Madsen Axel;

Author:Madsen, Axel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Chapter 14

The Whale

It would have to be a big picture and cost a great deal of course, but what a story! John made a pregnant pause and glanced across at Jack Warner. Death, mystery, affliction, evil! The high seas, the great white whale and the torment of a man trying to wrest from heaven the secret of human woe! Jack didn’t like the fact that there were no women in the story, but John glowed with charm. It could be a winner, he said in his most persuasive voice.

Postproduction was always a bore, but the editing of Beat the Devil was suddenly enlivened. The Warners lived an easy walking distance from the Beverly Hills Hotel in Coldwater Canyon and John kept after his old boss. Herman Melville’s characters were tortured, episodes were lurid, tension diffused, and a lot of the climaxes were given away too soon, but Moby Dick was the central masterpiece of American fiction. It was the greatest romance of the sea and it was the greatest chase story. Its theme was the equal of any attempted by Sophocles or Shakespeare and it was all acted out on the storm-tossed deck of a whaleboat. Moby Dick was a symbol of evil and Captain Ahab’s fight with the leviathan a Promethean struggle with evil. Or the whale was goodness and Ahab, with his insane pride and crazed passion for revenge, was evil. Either way, it was a thrilling story.

Moby Dick was actually an old standby for Warner Brothers. The Melville classic had been made twice before, both times with John Barrymore as Captain Ahab, so Jack said yes—if a star could be found to play Ahab.

While Kohner settled the finer points of a contract, Huston set out to find somebody to help turn Melville’s 1851 novel into a screenplay. The search wasn’t long. A thirty-three-year-old science fiction writer came to mind.

Ray Bradbury had been an admirer of Huston’s movies for years and when Doubleday had published The Martian Chronicles in 1950, he had sent the director an inscribed copy. Since the Chronicles, Bradbury had published The Illustrated Man and many short stories that were considered essays in fantasy and the subjective rather than “straight” s.f. John had liked the Chronicles, expressed interest in bringing it to the screen, and exchanged letters with the California author who, in turn, had continued to forward copies of his books as they were published. “The reason Huston selected me,” says Bradbury, “was that he saw in my books a kinship with Melville. Melville is a poet and a Shakespearean and I’ve been influenced by poetry and Shakespeare all my life. In high school I was an actor and I read all Shakespeare and was influenced by the wonderful sound and look of his plays. Huston had enough sense to see the poet in my writing.”

On their first meeting at John’s hotel, Bradbury was given twelve hours to decide whether he would come to Ireland and write what would be his first screenplay. Bradbury went directly from the hotel to a bookstore and bought Moby Dick, which he had never read.

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