Reprinted from Green Man Review.
Ray Bradbury’s pursuit of a finished script for John Huston’s film of Moby Dick is already familiar ground to any fan of Bradbury’s oeuvre. Already famously recounted and fictionalized in Green Shadows, White Whale, Bradbury’s trip to Ireland to produce a script for Huston was a seemingly endless series of incidents, accidents, false starts, and confrontations.
Lost in the hubbub around the book and the movie, however, is the raison d’etre for Bradbury’s trip and all the huggermugger it consequently produced, namely, the script itself. The finished product is credited to Bradbury and Huston, which has always implied that there was a version of the script out there that was just Bradbury, and which die-hard Bradbury fans would give their eyeteeth to read.
The good news, or at least the first part of it, is that thanks to Subterranean and the dogged efforts of editor William F. Touponce, that script is now available. Combing through the various drafts that Bradbury produced, Touponce has settled on this one as striking the best balance between the purity of Bradbury’s effort and clarity of vision. In his superb introduction, Touponce walks the reader through the composition process, (as well as Bradbury’s resonant relationship with Moby Dick throughout his later work. The casual Bradbury fan might be tempted to skip this section to get to the “good stuff,” but that would be a colossal error. The introduction provides both context and reference for what comes after, and adds a richness to the reading experience.
That being said, the main event is still the main event, and the sheer size of the script raises all sorts of questions. Melville’s original novel is, after all, a monster of a book, a titanic slab of prose that clocks in on the north side of 700 pages. The script, by contrast, is roughly 170 pages’ worth of words, long for a non-Costner movie, but greatly reduced from the original source material.
Then, of course, there is the matter of style. Melville’s prose can be safely categorized as “obsessively detailed,” right down to the extended attention given to the eating of soup. Bradbury’s, on the other hand, is ethereal and emotional, given to setting the scene with impressionistic dashes of virtuosity instead of the stolid, grinding portraiture of the source material here.
And yet, somehow, it works. In adapting Melville’s most famous work, Bradbury squeezes the book down to its essence and fills in the gaps that might otherwise ensue with poetry and verbal pyrotechnics. Bradbury cuts straight to the heart of the material, seizing on what is simultaneously most important and most cinematic while never forgetting that what matters most is the interplay of characters on the Pequod, their drives and manias and personal demons urging them on.
It is in the characterization that it becomes clear what an inspired choice it was to have Bradbury write the script. Shorn of the opportunity to observe the characters at length, the scriptwriter instead zeros in on the moments and lines that are most illustrative of their personalities, and which provide the maximum of insight into their motivations in a minimum of screen time.
After the script is an appendix relating to somewhat drier, more textual matters, as Touponce does a bit of literary scholarship and explains the provenance of various Moby Dick scripts, including the one he ultimately chose for inclusion here. It’s a fascinating coda to the script itself, and pinpoints where in the evolution of the actual shooting script this one rests.
If you are looking for all of Moby Dick, you won’t find it here. You can’t; it’s impossible. Instead, what you’ll find is the best of what eventually became Moby Dick instead, and that should be more than enough.
(Subterranean Press, 2008)
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