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"A Sound of Thunder" Movie This Summer
Syberghost writes "Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder" is being released thus summer as a movie. It's directed by Peter Hyams, who's done the time travel thing before, but it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren't in the credits."
Here's what the Man himself has to say.
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Quick summary: Story takes place in 2055 where time travel is possible and occurs on a daily, regulated basis. Time Safari Inc. offers hunting safaris to any point in the past. You pick an animal, they give you big guns, send you back in time and you shoot your animal dead. Hunters are kept on anti-gravity paths in order to prevent them from changing history through the so-called butterfly effect (stomping on a blade of grass may wipe out Texas in the future, etc.)
The actual story is simple. A hunter goes back on a T-Rex safari, panics and runs off the path. He kills a butterfly in the process. The safari returns and finds the future changed for the worse. The end.
Ah, you see, you saw that PR piece in the other timeline, the one where Czechosolvakia ceased to exist on the first of January, 1993 .
for anyone else who enjoyed this story, check out the book that it was published in: R is for Rocket.
although 'A Sound of Thunder' is one of my favorite Bradbury stories, right up there with 'There Will Come Soft Rains' -- I think that the entire 'Maritian Chronicals' will forever be my favorite.
The credits "story by" and "based on" are two entirely DIFFERENT credits, with different meanings. "Based on" means the script (or outline) is based on a story, novel, poem or other work that was pre-existing and (except in a few cases) was written for it's own sake, and not intended to be part of the process of making a movie. If I write a novel, even if I am hoping it will be turned into a movie, and a producer buys rights and someone else does all the writing form then on, I'd get a "based on" credit.
"Story by" means someone wrote the story for the screenplay under contract. I'll use ST: Next Gen as an example (I'd doing this because I came very close to selling to them and had essentially an open door to pitch to them until G.R. died and some things got reshuffled -- it's a TV show, not a movie, but the points are the same). When I pitched a story to Trek, if they bought it, they would likely pay me for the story. I'd write up a story (NOT a screenplay), broken down into acts to give the general outline of the story, along with some sense of the timing of the plot. If I'm lucky, and they think I can do it, THEN they'd offer me the chance to write the script. If you look at the credits on ST:TNG (and many TV shows), often there is a credit "Story by" -- that means that writer wrote the story, but (in most cases) someone else took that story (or outline) and actually wrote the script.
It'd be possible for one person (called Author) write a novel, a producer to buy rights, and assign a writer (called Adaptor) to write a story outline to base a script on, and to pay yet another writer (called ScreenWriter) to write the script. In true Hollywood style, they'd probably hire yet another writer (called Rewriter) to re-write the script (whether it needed or not). The credits would be something like:
Based on the novel by Author.
Story by Adaptor.
Written by
ScreenWriter
And
ReWriter
I can't remember for sure, but I think "&" was used to indicate to writers working together (like "Jane & John Doe") and "and" was used to distingiush between writers that worked on different drafts.
Here!!
It seems it was not The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits after all.. It was on Ray Bradbury Theater .
The term "butterfly effect" derives from the work of Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist who was an early researcher into chaos theory. (In a way, Lorenz was the first chaos theorist -- James Gleick's excellent book Chaos: Making a New Science tells the story in detail.)
Lorenz has said his choice of metaphor was not influenced by Bradbury's story (he hadn't read it). Indeed, he first phrased the idea using a seagull, not a butterfly.
So the term oughta refer to Bradbury's story, but it doesn't. :-)
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
It's "Brooklyn Project" by William Tenn, aka Philip Klass, anthologized in "The Road to Science Fiction" Volume 1 or 2 or 3 (I forget which), and probably anthologized elsewhere.
This post brought to you by Insomnia[tm].
A.
Much as I love and respect Ray Bradbury's writing, and much as I wish your claim were true, it simply isn't: most of those references to "butterfly effects" you cite actually relate to Chaos Theory, and apparently are attributable to none other than Lorenz (of Attractor fame) in the title of a 1972 talk entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?"
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
He's also annoyed that Michael Moore is playing off his title:
"He can't have my title," said Bradbury. "We've got an important film coming out, the book's having its 50th anniversary in October. If he wants his movie to be an homage to me, why not title it, 'Bradbury, where the hell are you now that we need you?'"
It's Vol. 3. http://users.ev1.net/~homeville/isfac/t126.htm#A27 07
It's got Dick's "We can remember it for you wholesale" in there...sweet.
But the Lorenz Attractor looks like a butterfly from certain angles, and not at all like a seagull!
According to the IMDb (the alpha and the omega of movie sites) the film is slated for an October release in the US, not summer as originally reported. --FilmGuru