Don’t Cry Out Loud

A faithful short film adaptation of Mike Resnick’s Hugo-nominated short story “Robots Don’t Cry” may soon be shown at a movie screen near you. Metal Tears, directed by independent filmmaker John Bradbury, premiered at Noreascon 4 last September to a sellout crowd, and its scheduled to screen at science fiction conventions and film festivals for most of 2005.
The story takes place three hundred years from now on an abandoned planet where salvagers stumble upon a valuable robot that has been deactivated. The robot has a memory cube, and the salvagers hope that if they reactivate it, the information stored inside the robot’s memory will lead them to heirlooms or other objects they can sell to collectors. Instead they learn that the robot, Sammy, was a nursemaid to a very sick girl, Miss Emily, who considered him her only friend.
As the salvagers – the human Mike and the alien Rezz – question the robot, Sammy plays aback his memories of Miss Emily and his experiences with her. They gradually realize that Sammy isn’t just hardware and software; this robot has developed feelings and compassion. The mystery is, what happened to Miss Emily and why has Sammy been abandoned on this lifeless planet?
“There are so many sci-fi stories out there that are just about technology and science,” director Bradbury says. “When I read ‘Robots Don’t Cry,’ I thought, this is a great story. This is a human story. It’s about loneliness and loss, and it’s in the context of science fiction, something that I love. It got to me. I started to cry when it came to the end.”
Metal Tears is Bradbury’s twelfth short film. He had been looking for a new project when his father passed along Resnick’s story, which he’d just read in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. After securing Resnick’s permission to adapt the piece, Bradbury kept Resnick in the loop by providing updates on the film’s progress. It was Resnick who suggested Bradbury premiere the film at Noreascon 4.
“We are showing it at a lot of sci-fi cons, again upon Mike Resnick’s insistence,” Bradbury says. For a current schedule of upcoming screenings of Metal Tears, visit the website of Bradbury’s production company, smashandgrabpro.com.

By Resa Nelson