Ray Bradbury: Mel Gibson Too Busy with 'Russian Girl' to Adapt Fahrenheit 451

You know who are awesome? Old people are awesome. Especially old, brilliant, prolific artists who don’t give a damn what inside information they drop in public — or how they drop it. Take Ray Bradbury, the legendary 89-year-old author whose Fahrenheit 451 film rights belong to...Mel Gibson. Awkward! And of course Bradbury has a funny (if brief) story about it, which he recently shared via Skype with a crowd in Chicago.

The interview comes from Sunday’s Siskel Center screening of Francois Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit adaptation. Bradbury knows as well as the rest of us that we’ll never see Gibson’s version in his or probably any of our lifetimes, and his pragmatic status report might honestly be the most palatable fallout to date from the whole Gibson/Grigorieva horror show. Thanks for keeping it real, Ray.