Set Your DVR: Ray Bradbury on TCM

I vividly remember the first Ray Bradbury story I ever read: It was The Small Assassin, about a toddler who decides to murder his parents. Elegant and creepy at the same time -- good stuff!

So I got a kick out of the fact that he's playing guest programmer for Turner Classic Movies on Novermber 20th. He's picked four films, and he'll be on air with TCM's Robert Osborne to explain why.

The films are:

The 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera, with Lon Chaney (8PM EST)
The Chaney version of Hunchback of Notre Dame, from 1923 (9:45PM EST)
Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 Rebecca 11:45PM EST)
Orson Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane (2AM EST)

I'll be interested to hear what he has to say about the first two: I'm betting he saw them in theaters when he was a child and they made a hell of an impression. And frankly, the look of Chaney's Phantom is a keeper -- I just saw it referenced a few weeks ago on the cover of the New Yorker (see above left), illustrating a story about the current economic freefall.

When an image more than 80 years old has that kind of potency, attention must be paid!