Among Bradbury’s story fragments that never made it to publication were a dozen discarded pages of a radio script called “Masks” which includes Bradbury’s notation that it was “a play for the World Security Workshop. The story was eventually published in 1953. (Thanks to Jim Widner at OTR.com for some of this info)Īn award-winning one-act radio play adapted by Bradbury himself from a then-unpublished story of the same title. It was the beginning of a significant Bradbury radio presence, spanning the final decade of radio’s golden age.
This was before he became a film star and you can hear the beginnings of Tommy Udo, his breakout character from Kiss of Death. When it finally hit the airwaves, the show starred a young Richard Widmark in the lead role. It was a slow process, with Joseph Ruscoll adapting Bradbury’s interesting but somewhat lackluster story into a very good noirish play for radio.
Eventually Frank Telford, Young & Rubicam’s director for the Friday night Mollé show, approached Schwartz and Mike Tilden of Detective Tales for permissions. Bradbury was a young writer trying to get published wherever he could, so he wrote stories in a wide range of genres - not just science fiction. Bradbury’s first submission was a crime story called “Autopsy,” later retitled “Killer, Come Back to Me!” when it was published in Detective Tales in July 1944. The firm had already approached Bradbury’s agent, Julius Schwartz, for stories by two other authors he represented - Robert Bloch and the late Stanley Weinbaum. In March 1945, Bradbury began to send stories to Young & Rubicam, the New York advertising firm that handled the writing talent for NBC’s very popular Mollé Mystery Theatre. Mollé Mystery Theatre - Killer, Come Back to Me! I tried to include the best possible recordings I could find, including lossless FLAC files whenever possible. This collection doesn’t include any Bradbury adaptations from the BBC, which I’ve collected here. Phil Nichols’ essays on Bradbury adaptations and J. Eller’s book Becoming Ray Bradbury which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Bradbury’s early career. I’ve tried to add some context where relevant, most from Jonathan R.
Radio also played a pivotal role in Bradbury’s development as a writer early in his career. Ray Bradbury’s stories lend themselves well to radio, so it’s no surprise that there have been so many adaptations over the years - some adapted by Bradbury himself.
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