While solving this mystery, they work on creating the Beast for the film. The body goes missing, and the narrator visits Roy’s house, who teams up with him to track it down. Arbuthnot, whose funeral was the subject of much media attention at the time. There, he finds the decomposed corpse of the film studio’s former head, J.C. With the ramping up going smoothly, the narrator’s job is complicated when he receives an anonymous invite to go to the cemetery next to the studio. He joins his friend from his hometown, Roy, who has been hired in the art department to make models that help animate clay figurines representing the grotesque Beast that is pivotal to the plot.
His claim to fame being having sold a hundred copies of a story through a publisher called Weird Stories, the narrator is brought to Hollywood by Maximus Pictures to help write the script for a monster film. A third character, Clarence, possibly represents Bradbury’s childhood self, as he lingers for long hours outside of various studios in Hollywood waiting to catch sights and collect the autographs of movie stars. The unnamed narrator works with Roy Holdstrom, a childhood friend and stop-motion animator, and Fritz Wong, a director with an individualist spirit. Bradbury juxtaposes the two to highlight themes of mortality, existentialism, and aspiration, and how they come to influence and either subordinate to or dominate the human will. The novel is set entirely in two starkly different spaces, the movie studio of Maximus Pictures and the cemetery that adjoins its backyard.
Bradbury draws from his formative experiences with the different absurdities of Hollywood culture while creating the science fiction films It Came from Outer Space, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and King of Kings. Set in 1954, it is a fictionalized autobiography loosely based on the author’s time working in Hollywood as a writer in a movie studio. A Graveyard for Lunatics is a 1990 mystery novel published by speculative fiction author, Ray Bradbury.
0 kommentar(er)
