or Niagara pouring itself down the studio towers into the film vaults. If you move along the dark alleys past the buildings where the editing rooms on the top floors whisper and bray and roar and snack-chatter until two or three or four in the morning, you hear chariots rushing by in the air. “Late at night a motion-picture studio talks to itself. We also are treated to a moody evocation of the last days of the big-time studios: These include Stanislau Groc, the makeup artist responsible for embalming Lenin the brilliant expatriate German director Fritz Wong, transparently modeled after Fritz Lang J.C., a womanizing alcoholic who has portrayed Christ in so many films that he has permanently adopted the role Roy Holdstrom, a special- effects wizard based on Bradbury’s friend Ray Harryhausen and Constance Rattigan, a reclusive movie queen who retired from films in the 1930s at the height of her fame. In pursuing the solution to this Hollywood Gothic, Bradbury’s unnamed narrator-whose biography parallels Bradbury’s own-introduces us to a host of colorful characters. This grisly prank draws Bradbury’s idealistic hero into the mystery of the executive’s death, a tale that eventually turns into what might be called “The Phantom of the Studio,” with a mysterious “Beast” haunting the back lots of Maximus, killing off anybody who knows what happened to Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot, former head of Maximus, on a ladder, poised to climb from the cemetery to the studio. On Halloween night, 1954, a young screenwriter finds the body of J. The two cities of the novel’s subtitles are the Maximus Films studio and the Green Glades cemetery adjoining it. “A Graveyard for Lunatics” gives us a nostalgic vision of the young Bradbury and the Hollywood he worked in.

Ray bradbury a graveyard for lunatics