I just came across this odd and wonderful little collection of video clips, taken at Ray Bradbury’s home in LA in 2001, by the folks who publish raybradbury.com. In it you’ll see the chaotic basement where the exceedingly prolific Bradbury works, and hear him joking about holding the record for rejections from The New Yorker. I didn’t realize until visiting the site that Bradbury had a new book out in 2006, Farewell Summer, a follow-up to Dandelion Wine, first published in 1957. You’ll also see Bradbury talking about linked story collections, something he did way back in the 1940s with The Martian Chronicles, and on how he put together his collection of metaphorical objects from Hollywood and beyond that surround him (according to Bradbury, in the old days all you had to do was ask for something and it could be yours).

Mamet was interviewed in Time Out New York by Joshua Rothkopf. The subject: Mamet’s new book about film, Bambi vs. Godzilla.

Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using the tools of the marketplace. As such, it’s vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people.

On audience:

I write for the audience. The small market or the mass market may be a function of the worth of my script, or of the assiduousness by which it was sold. But, like any other artist, I consider my potential audience everybody alive and half of the people who are dead.

And, by my vote, a Mamet must-read for writers: Writing in Restaurants, circa 1987.