Fahrenheit 451, the novel.
A discussion with Ray Bradbury.
Written, directed, and produced by Laurent Bouzereau.
Edited by David Palmer.
Director of photography, Michael Osment.
Sound, Bret Brook.
Music by Bernard Herman.
Universal Studios Home Video Production Manager Maryann Mancie.
Universal Studios home video executive in charge of production, Colleen A. Benn.
A lot of people ask me about the genesis of Fahrenheit 451.
What was I up to, where did I live, what was I doing?
Well, I lived in Venice, California with my wife in a litlle $30/month apartment.
We had no money and my wife got pregnant and I went to New York and manage to find enough
money to finance us for a while, but in the meantime I was writing short stories.
I wrote a story called The Pedestrian because I had an encounter with a policeman one night
who asked me what I was doing.
I was walking with a friend.
I said to the policeman, I'm putting one foot after the other, which was the wrong answer.
Very suspicious, being a pedestrian walking, because I looked to the sidewalks this way
and that way and there's nobody except me and my friend.
So the policeman reprimanded me and I promised never to walk again and I went home in a rage
and I wrote this short story.
I called it "Pedestrian."
It was published, finally, and then I took The Pedestrian out for a walk one night in
another story, and he turned the corner and he bumps into a little girl named Clarisse
McClellan.
She sniffs the air and she says to the him, "I know who you are.
You're the fireman.
You're the one who burns books."
Nine days later, Fahrenheit 451 was done.
The original version of Fahrenheit was published in Galaxy Magazine, a science fiction magazine.
Then a young editor came along a few years later who had no money and he needed material
and said can you sell me something for $400?
I said yes, I have a novel, Fahrenheit 451 and he bought it for $400.
That was Hugh Hefner.
It appeared in the second, third, and fourth issues of Playboy.
So all the young men and all the old men of America owe me a debt of gratitude for helping
start that magazine.
I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois and I'd walk down to the beach, my father and I, and on
the way, we'd stop at the fire station.
My dad knew all the firemen.
Some of them were relatives of mine.
I'd go in and pet the dalmatian and so I had intimate knowledge of firemen and one of my
uncles was a fireman who was killed falling off a firetruck when I was a kid.
He just struck me in thinking about firemen.
What are we going to do with them in the future?
A time will come when all the houses are fireproof.
So you've got a lot of firemen with no jobs.
What are you going to do?
I said well, you reverse it.
Have them start fires instead of put them out.
Then, I'd had no title for the book.
The original title was The Fireman.
I got curious as to what the temperature was that book paper would burn at.
I called UCLA the chemistry department.
They couldn't help me.
I called USC, some of the other physics departments.
They couldn't help me.
I said dummy, call the fire department.
So I called downtown, got the fire chief on the phone, I said this sounds stupid, but
tell me what temperature does book paper catch fire at?
He said just a moment.
He came back, he said it catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
I reversed that, I said Fahrenheit 451.
Yes.
So, I don't know if that's true.
I've never researched that since.
But it has a wonderful sound to it, doesn't it.
That's how it came to birth.
I wrote the short novel in the basement of the UCLA library because I had no office.
There was a typewriter there you could rent for ten cents a half hour.
I took a bag of dimes down there and I rented the typewriter for nine days, and spent nine
dollars and eighty cents, and wrote a dime novel.
It was published in the science fiction magazine and later I extended it to 50,000 words and
it became the novel that you know now.
The book was a long time coming to birth.
You could say it went back to my great-great-great-grandmother Mary Bradbury, who was tried as a witch in
Salem in 1580.
Of course, she escaped, but she's in all the books about witches and witch burning.
And then over the years I read about the various libraries of Alexandria burning three or four
thousand years ago.
I think twice by accident, once on purpose.
And then in China, heard rumors of burnings of libraries and books, and Hitler of course
in Germany in the early thirties.
And since I'm a library person, I've never made it to college, you see.
I'm self-educated in the library.
Anything that touches the library touches me.
I was vitally concerned and upset to see what was going on in the world.
Then there were rumors of this kind of thing during the McCarthy period.
The Joseph McCarthy period.
Nothing really substantial.
He never really got going, but he hurt a lot of people along the way and he threatened
books.
I heard rumors also of book burnings and censorship in Russia.
It all came true later.
We found out they burned millions of books and millions of authors.
Fahrenheit 451 is the only science fiction novel I've written.
People call me a science fiction writer - I'm not.
Martian Chronicles is a Greek myth, an Egyptian myth.
It's fairy tales, it's fantasy.
There's no science fiction in there at all.
But Fahrenheit is firmly based in technology and what we are doing to ourselves with television.
I could foresee the day would come when you'd have wall-to-wall television.
We have it right now.
If you want to install it, you know.
I had the seashell radio and years later some Japanese film people came to my office and
they had the first Walkman radio, and they put it on my ears and they said, Fahrenheit
451.
Fahrenheit 451.
So in a way, I invented the damn Walkman, huh?
It's a big step over the ghetto blaster.
When you finish a story, years later you find out why you picked the names.
It just pops into your head.
Now Montag, I didn't really know what it meant, but it had a nice sound.
The real reason I picked Montag is the name of a paper company puts out all kinds of stationery.
My subconscious gave him that name.
Faber, who appears later in the novel, is a philosopher.
He is a maker of pencil.
I didn't realize this until years later, after the book came out.
You just go with these things and hope that they make sense later and generally they do.
The salamander, which is common in the novel and the film, goes back to Francis I of France.
His symbol was the salamander.
In other words, this lizard was loose on the hearth and comes out of the fire, huh.
Again, I didn't realize this, it was all subconscious.
I verified it later when I went to France, visited Francis I castle and saw the salamander
on the hearth.
It was the novel first.
I put it in the back of my head.
The threat of atomic war was very fresh in my mind when I wrote the novel because it
was just four or five years after Hiroshima.
We all were living in anticipation of being hurt or destroyed by this new device and the
hydrogen bomb was in the process of being embedded.
It was a threat to all of us.
I wrote the book under the cloud of this concept, but in making the film, I advised two fold,
and I would advise any others, eliminate the atomic bomb thing.
You don't need it.
It's an extra threat, but the real threat is ignorance and the lack of education.
I have a literary representative named Don Congdon, and when I was married fifty-three
years ago, the same Don Congdon who was the editor for a publishing firm called me and
said, I'm becoming a literary agent.
Do you need one?
I said, only if I can have one for a lifetime.
And he said, that's me.
I said okay.
He's been my agent for fifty-three years.
I married him the same month I married my wife.
I've been very lucky to have these bookends on my life.
That's why the book Fahrenheit is dedicated to Don Congdon.
The history of Fahrenheit is the history of all of my books.
I'm creeping up on the public very slowly.
The initial edition of Fahrenheit was five thousand copies the first year.
That's all.
Then every year after that it sold two thousand copies, hard cover.
Then the paperback edition, ten or fifteen thousand copies and every year since then,
maybe twenty, thirty thousand copies.
So you accumulate hundreds of thousands of copies over forty years, but that's not a
bestseller.
It's an accumulated bestseller.
To speak of Fahrenheit, you have to speak of all my other books.
Everything has been an accident.
Everything has been unplanned.
Everything has been a passion, a madness, or a great love.
I've had fun all of my life.
I've never worked a day in my life.
I've done all these things.
Now I go on to the next thing.
These are my books, it's a special love.
I have no one that's above the other.
Everything that's happened to me about Fahrenheit since is reward from playing the game for
the fun of it to see what in the hell was in the back of my mind.
All these things are a reward for me now.
It's wonderful.
Thank God I behaved unconsciously and didn't try to intellectualize my career left or right,
black or white, up or down, male or female, none of that junk.
Just me, the typewriter, and the future.