Search Results

Chapter nine opens with Bradbury’s growing association with the 1976 success of the Viking Mars landers. He was featured in the JPL’s mission control center during the landing of Viking 1, meeting Wernher von Braun for the last time before von Braun’s passing. He returned to the JPL at Caltech to open the symposium on “The Search for Life in Our Solar System.” The chapter also surveys the growing momentum toward a film adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although an option with Paramount failed, producer Peter Douglas and his father Kirk Douglas were able to keep momentum going as Bradbury and director Jack Clayton worked to improve and shorten Bradbury’s screenplay for the future.

News of Douglas’s death triggered a plethora of newspaper obituaries and other valedictory pronouncements from the California legislature and Congress. Most of these hailed his leadership; some compared him to John Muir. During a 34-year career with the Coastal Commission Douglas witnessed an overall severe cut in the agency’s funding and staffing; still, development had been checked and regulated while California registered the nation’s largest coastal economy, proving that effective regulation and economic growth could be compatible. Moreover, beach access had been increased substantially. Though Peter Douglas’s achievements for the coast have been singular and might land him in the pantheon of California’s greatest environmentalists, more time will have to transpire before history hands us its verdict on his legacy.

Chapter 18 centers on the 1982 filming of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Disney Studios, and the 1982-1983 reshooting and reediting stages of production. Producer Peter Douglas and his father Kirk Douglas were able to convince Disney to finance the film, with Jack Clayton as director. Bradbury’s 1976 script was subsequently reworked by Clayton and British writer John Mortimer. Bradbury’s reaction to these changes, his fascination with the Green Town set built on the Disney studio lot, and the dynamics of the reshooting relationships between Bradbury, Clayton, and the studio form the focus of chapter 18. The chapter concludes with post-production work and promotions involving Orson Welles and Bradbury, and a brief summary of the critical reactions and awards the film received.

Big Sur is compelling not only for its exceptional beauty but also for what it reveals about Californians’ relationship to their coastline. Today, California’s coast reflects residents’ dual desire to protect a remarkable environment and a high quality of life. The world-famous coastline is integral to the state’s economy, to residents’ sense of well-being, and to the California Dream. In Big Sur, residents and local officials pioneered creative preservation measures that would later become common throughout the state. Open-space planning, conservation easements, intergovernmental collaboration and citizen activism, land trusts, and transfer development credits all addressed preservation in an age of increasingly high land values, erratic voter support, and unpredictable government funding. The epilogue examines several key people and places that illustrate contemporary economic and social realities along the Big Sur and California coast, including Peter Douglas, the late, influential executive director of the California Coastal Commission; Billy Post, a fourth-generation Big Sur resident who helped design the luxury resort Post Ranch Inn; and the idiosyncrasies of the Big Sur softball league.