Oh my god. I am speechless. Trembling – I can’t even tell you what I’m feeling.
I have been haunted by a documentary I saw in about 1978 for 30 years. It was about Ray Bradbury and the process of writing, and featured a story he was working on called “Dial Double Zero,” which was dramatized intermittently throughout the documentary. I spent about 10 years trying to find that story. I remember looking in card catalogues, talking to stuffy librarians. Since the advent of internet, I’d google the story every now and then, and gradually I found out the backstory that the documentary was about a story that never actually was published, and that several other people had the exact same memory of it that I did. Haunting and mesmerizing. Apparently it was a documentary that aired only once, on NBC only on the West Coast, and then was rented out to schools such as mine – the John F. Kennedy elementary school. A few years back I saw it was available as a DVD, but I was too frightened to purchase it. I didn’t want to spoil that childhood memory. What if it wasn’t as magic?
Well – I checked tonight, and as I suspected it might be, it’s on YouTube. I am freaking out. I am embedding it here in three parts. I haven’t seen it yet. Tell me what you think.
