Paramount announced they have picked up the rights to The Martian Chronicles, a collection of classic sci-fi short stories by Ray Bradbury.  While you may only know Bradbury from his most famous piece of work, Fahrenheit 451, or the mediocre film adaptation of the same book, he has become to be known as one of the leading names in 20th century science fiction.

Producing the film is John Davis, who has been trying to get this project off the ground ever since Universal acquired the feature rights in 1997.  But even before that, NBC and the BBC made a TV miniseries based on the same source, but judging by the photos and lead actor Rock Hudson, it’s safe to say that it was exactly what you would expect from a low-budget, early 80s TV show.

Originally published by Bradbury in late ’40s as separate stories in science fiction magazines, The Martian Chronicles is more of an episodic novel rather than a collection of short stories.  The main plot chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans following the atomic destruction of Earth, as well as the conflict between the native Martians and the new colonists.

The original script being worked on with Steven Spielberg, among other producers, when Universal first acquired the film rights, focused on a spaceship commander investigating two missing missions on the red planet.  Nothing has been said as of yet to whether Davis will be using this same premise, or go back to the original material for inspiration.

The original stories were broken down into three sections: the stories dealing with the attempts to colonize and settle on Mars, the native Martian’s efforts to fight off the colonists, and the eventual nuclear war that forces most of the humans back to earth and the remaining to become the new Martians.  Can we say franchise?

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Moby Dick is probably the pinnacle of 1950s Huston. Moving from his ‘40s adaptations of contemporary American pulp (The Maltese Falcon) and popular works (In This Our Life) to more ambitious projects (The African Queen, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, and, eventually even The Bible), the decade marks a grandiose turn in Huston. It’s a bittersweet transformation. On the one hand, these works have a high spirit of adventure to them that still holds up and stay true to the original material. On the other, they lack the deeper, personal, more profound humanity of his earlier films.

Moby Dick is grounded firmly in the former, and, watching it now in 2010, nearly 55 years after it was made, it’s still a fun watch. Moby Dick is among the finest novels this country has ever produced and has held a special place in this English majors’ heart since college, when I took an hour-a-week class on it taught by my grizzled advisor “Uncle” Vic, a mid-fortiesh Virginian with a dusty leather jacket, beady horse eyes, and a half-kempt beard.

The class was only an hour long and held once a week, but in it, we exhausted nearly every theme, brought in a biology professor whose specialty was cetology, and garnered an appreciation for Melville’s epic prose.

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