Bradbury Week: The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit

RAY BRADBURY WEEK: THE WONDERFUL ICE CREAM SUIT

All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downwards, are emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want. On the other hand, all Emblematic things are properly Clothes, thought-woven or hand-woven: must not the Imagination weave Garments, visible Bodies, wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirits, revealed, and first become all-powerful; the rather if, as we often see, the Hand too aid her, and (by wool Clothes or otherwise) reveal such even to the outward eye? Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine ME of his, cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body. - Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself. - Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

john cribbs

Last summer, I started a series on the Pink Smoke in honor of Ray Bradbury's 90th year on planet Earth. Although it's being published much later than I had hoped, this is what it's all been leading up to: my revisiting of a truly exceptional film that I earnestly hope more people begin to discover and re-discover over the next few years. It's a movie about one suit that five people buy together to share, a suit that over a single incredible night allows each of them to shine brighter than they ever thought possible. Like the suit, the movie brings out the best in the considerable talent of those involved in its production and, like the suit, makes for that rare communal experience that can be passed on and enjoyed from one person to another - if the viewer can check his cynicism at the door for the modest 77 minutes it takes to be charmed by this film, it will work the same magic on him. Bradbury's story is such that the film seems constructed from the same stitch and fabric as its eponymous outfit, magically bespoke to whoever might be "wearing" it at the time. At its heart it is essential Bradbury: a story about everyday people who find themselves in a fantastic situation that nevertheless brings out their most pointedly human characteristics. But it's also about a specific group of people at a certain time in their lives, and that's what makes their adventure so remarkable.

The origin of the film goes back to 1974 when Stuart Gordon, founding artistic director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company*, was looking for a follow-up to the group's premiere production of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a huge success for the company as well as a breakout for its playwright. Gordon's brother brought to his attention a quirky comedy called The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit by famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Bradbury had already produced the play through his own L.A.-based Pandemonium Theater Company: they had taken it to New York, opened Off Off Broadway and closed the same week due to a newspaper strike that limited publicity. Gordon instantly recognized the appeal in the play's simple story of five down-and-out Latinos living in Los Angeles whose lives are marvelously changed by a vanilla white suit they purchase together and take turns wearing. Organic's staging of Ice Cream Suit, with a cast that included young Joe Mantegna, Dennis Franz and Bruce (later Meshach) Taylor, was another hit for the company and they ended up touring the show. Bradbury attended a performance at UCLA Berkeley and, delighted by the uninhibited zest and energy with which his work had been presented, climbed on stage afterwards to say hello.

"He said, 'I want to wear the suit.'" Gordon remembers. "We didn't believe him, then all of a sudden he starts taking off his clothes! All the guys gathered around him, like in the play, to try and help him in terms of modesty. He literally stripped down to his boxers and put on the suit. This was the first time we were meeting him! And once you've seen someone in their boxer shorts, you're friends forever."

Friendship is the central concern of the story, which came from the writer's own relationship with Mexican-American immigrants he lived among as a young man making ends meet from a tenement at the corner of Figueroa Street and Temple in the Boyle Heights district of East Los Angeles. "I saw my friends coming and going from Mexico City, Laredo, and Juarez," Bradbury explained. "Their poverty and mine were identical. I saw them share clothes, as I did with my father and brother**...I knew what a suit could mean to them." The young writer would also watch the Latina women "on the porches after a big party, like Cinco de Mayo, throwing their dresses off the tenement to other women down below. So the dresses the women used during Cinco de Mayo became the clothing the young women who owned no dresses used for the rest of the year." Bradbury turned these experiences into stories like "En La Noche" and "I See You Never," both included in his fantastic short story collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, but most extensively into "The Magic White Suit," originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1957.

"What would inspire him to write something like this? Why would you want to write a story about these people?" actor Clifton Collins Jr. wanted to know, and asked the author during the movie's production. Bradbury's answer: "Well, I hung out with them!" He felt an affinity towards the men and women who inspired "Suit," borrowed their names and transferred their larger-than-life personalities into the five characters who find each other in the story: lovestruck, luckless Martinez; shifty opportunist Gomez; handsome street guitarist Dominguez; frustrated poet and thinker Villanazul; impulsive, uncontrollable Vamenos. Their lives are a reflection of the kind of noble poverty Bradbury saw all around him, with people uniting to help each other make ends meet. "They would all share their clothes, which was very common for any family who's struggling," says Collins. "But these stories came from his personal memories, which made it that much more special." Just as he had once looked at a wrecked roller coaster on the beach and seen the sad remains of an ancient dinosaur, Bradbury took those memories and reflections and added a spectacular symbol of that shared desire to survive and succeed.

The story, retitled "The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit," was adapted for a 1958 episode of the anthology series "Rendezvous" before Bradbury reimagined it as a play; there would later be a musical version. Remarkably, the first person to show interest in bringing the story to the big screen was Federico Fellini. He and Bradbury were mutual fans of each other's work and Fellini must have felt a fantasist's bond: when they first met, he embraced the writer and proclaimed "My twin, my twin!" They became great friends but the Ice Cream Suit project, which Fellini intended to relocate to Rome with poverty-stricken Italian protagonists*** rather than Latinos, never came to be. Instead Gordon, who had kept in touch with Bradbury since the writer's impromptu disrobing at the UCLA theater, contacted him in the mid-90's about collaborating on a film version. Since his days at the Organic theater, Gordon had entered into a distinguished and prolific movie career directing a series of excellent adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and Edgar Allan Poe (The Pit and the Pendulum) for Charles Band's production company. After his family-oriented screenplay Teenie Weenies became the 1989 hit Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Gordon was given an office at Walt Disney Studios, which is where he opted to pitch the project with Bradbury. The author also had a relationship with the company from the early 80's, when he was hired as an imagineer to help design Spaceship Earth, the 18-story geodesic sphere that doubles as the centerpiece and an exhibition at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. "We went to the head of production at Disney," Gordon recalls, "and Ray turned up wearing an ice cream suit. I'm thinking, we can't lose here. Here's Bradbury himself, wearing a white suit - this is going to happen."

But it didn't; a few days later Gordon was informed that Disney would be passing on the project. "The reason, they said, was that the movie was too small, the idea was too small for a film. So I called up Ray to tell him the bad news, and he was disappointed. Then he said, 'Roy Disney is a big fan of the play, he's come to see it many times.' I said, 'Roy Disney? THE Roy Disney?'" Disney, nephew of Walt and longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company, had fended off hostile takeovers and weathered two decade's worth of corporate civil war within the company before taking over as head of the animation department. He greenlit Gordon and Bradbury's proposal on the spot, and for a year Ice Cream Suit was developed as an animated film with character sketches and background drawings**** being created from Bradbury's script. Eventually the idea to animate the story was also axed, but Roy Disney ensured that a live action version be produced through Touchstone Pictures, which he was also overseeing at the time. However the stipulation from the reluctant production office was that the budget not exceed $5 million, and that the movie would be released direct-to-video, a marketing tactic the Disney Company had only recently started (coincidentally the first live action title Disney introduced to this new distribution practice was Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, the second sequel to the hit film Gordon had brought to the studio - Ice Cream Suit would be its first non-sequel to go straight to video.)

Gordon was willing to work under these conditions, considering the amount of freedom he was given and the people he was working with. Joe Mantegna returned to the role of wily Gomez, the same part he had played in the Organic Theater's production 25 years earlier. Collins, who had co-starred in Gordon's futuristic action thriller Fortress, took the role of down-and-out Martinez. Esai Morales, the handsome Puerto Rican who turned heads as Bob Valenzuela in La Bamba 10 years earlier, and Gregory Sierra, known for co-starring on "Barney Miller" and "Sanford and Son"*****, were cast as guitarist Dominguez and poet Villanazul, respectively. The part of Villanazul was originally offered to Edward James Olmos, but the Academy Award nominee had a different suggestion: that he play against type as wild vagrant Vamenos. "Stuart was going to go after a comedian," Olmos remembers. "He was going after Paul Rodriguez for the role. He told me he wanted me to play the poet, and I said 'I would love to and I'll do anything I can to help, but could I ask you something? Can I play Vamenos?' And he took a beat, a long one, and said, 'Well...that's different.'"

"I couldn't quite get my head around that idea," Gordon admits. "Everything I'd seen him in, he'd been so serious! I said, 'I don't know Eddie, I've never seen you be funny.' He said, 'Watch this,' and he starting acting out some of the lines, and he was hilarious. It was like working with Charlie Chaplin."

Another delight for Gordon and the crew was having Bradbury, who had written the screenplay (to date, the only adaptation of his own work written for a completed feature film), present on set every day of production. "I just wanted to sit next to him," Collins says. "Just wanted to hear him talk, just wanted to ask him questions. We'd all crowd around him; anything that came out of the man's mouth you just wanted to sit and listen." Mantegna reflects on the original Chicago production as "a major touchstone for my career," but found the filming of the movie even more enriching, having grown up a Bradbury fan. "My idol as an author had now become a friend and an associate," he told Sam Weller for his Bradbury biography. "Of all the joys my career has afforded me, my relation to Ray Bradbury will stand as one of the most shining aspects of it. "It was the best thing in the world," Olmos attests. "I love that man. A truly gifted genius."Bradbury himself was happy with what he saw, telling interviewer Sandy Hill in 1997, "The filming has gone beautifully. I'm very happy about it. For the first time in my life they are filming exactly every word and every scene that I wrote. Unbelievable."

The film opens with a catchy number sung in both English and Spanish by Nydia Rojas, set to a gorgeous title sequence designed by Robert Dawson, who had done the title sequences for Gordon's early films and has since gone on to become one of the most famous title designers in Hollywood. Dawson hired artist Aleksandra Korejwo, who used salt animation to create a colorful wave of painted particles that look like sand being blown into semblances of Diego Rivera-like murals. Gordon was particularly impressed by Korejwo's work. "It sounds like something Bradbury would dream up - she would move the salt around with a feather, I think it was a condor feather. And it had to be that kind of feather, that strong a feather. She said she used to go to the zoo in Warsaw and get condor feathers from the zookeeper, that those were the best feathers to use!" At the film's Sundance screening, the credits were given a standing ovation and Korejwo's sequence was subsequently nominated for the International Animation Film Association's Annie Award (imdb doesn't list a winner among the nominees - maybe they forgot to give out the award?)

The first shots of the film glide slowly across spillways and interchanges and over buildings until we reach Boyle Heights, dwarfed by the towering architecture of West L.A. across the river. Gordon intentionally evokes the opening shots of West Side Story, although the Latinos living here are less the dance-prone Puerto Rican street gang of Robert Wise's New York and more the big hat-wearing, guitar-noodling corner dwellers with stripes down the side of their pants. "We were right there in Mariachi Plaza," says Gordon. "There were taco trucks, mariachis were still there. It felt like you were living in the area where that story took place." In fact these were the exact same streets a twenty-something Bradbury shared with the people who inspired the story. Their five cinematic equivalents are jobless and on the brink of eviction, so poor they have to cheat a scale to weigh themselves in a pool hall. As it turns out, they're all roughly the same weight and their measurements miraculously match: each a variant of the same hopeful dreamer. They each pull their last $20 to buy a single suit - "The only suit in the world!" - white as vanilla ice cream, to wear around the highly populated streets of the neighborhood in hopes of gaining some of the visibility that's been absent from their lives.

* "Venturesome, innovative, energetic, improvisational, and always on the edge of disaster or triumph, (the Organic Theater Company) was a small but powerful and influential force in fostering the talent and shaping the personality of the city’s theater scene. It produced more than a few duds, but it also presented a handful of Chicago-born masterworks that were both supremely of the moment and way ahead of their time." - Richard Christiansen, A Theater of Our Own: A History and Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago

** Bradbury elaborates: "I remember graduating from Los Angeles High School wearing a hand-me-down suit in which one of my uncles had been killed by a holdup man. There was a bullet hole in the front and one going out the back of the suit. My family was on government relief when I graduated. What else, but wear the suit, bullet holes and all?"

*** An Italian comedy-social drama with fantastic elements featuring dirt poor protagonists? Makes me think of Vittorio De Sica's equally wonderful Miracle in Milan.

**** I tried so hard to find out if any of this pre-production work still existed, going back and forth over the phone with the archives & research people at Disney's animation studio. The most-quoted reason for their reluctance to help me was "we usually don't help people outside of Disney." Too bad - I'd love to see some of those character sketches.

***** Sierra's weirdest TV appearance was as a Jewish radical going up against Neo-Nazis, ultimately being killed by a bomb planted on his car, in a very special episode of..."All in the Family?" He also did an episode of "Ray Bradbury Theater" in 1992.

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