God grant that I could come up with such a thing: I could sell it instantly to my piglets.

the peppy little producers, co-producers, copro-producers who teem and crowd wherever the milk of financial assistance, government grants, and development prizes pours from the overlapping folds of showbiz and the culture industry:

the bright, alert magician’s apprentices, soon outstripping the great film sorcerers—and the hatchlings of the movie business, living it up on expense accounts; rosily fattening on petits fours, foie gras, crab claws, slices of Nova Scotia, caviar dollops at the press conference buffets (with champagne, of course!), their tiny eyes sated and wearied by young starlet flesh—

yet physically in top shape—supremely fit, swept along by the process of beauty-construction in the studio and location wardrobes—groomed and spruced up, their little fingernails pared, filed, and polished between the motherly breasts of staff manicurists, their cheek skin smoothed and salved by epidermically solicitous makeup men, their intervertebral disks loosened and their bodies shaken aright by studio chiropractors, kneaded and massaged to firm up their tissue by junior-star gym teachers, their blood circulation refreshed in stars’ genuine Finnish saunas in the bungalows of leading men, their flesh treated to ultraviolet rays even in the winter months and then tanned to a crisp by the spring sun over the beach promenades of Mediterranean festival settings—

men of the world, of course: well traveled, as they go about preparing big unrealizable projects, and thus surefooted on the parquet floors of Hilton hotel banquet rooms—

hence mentally too at the highest attainable peak: shrewd, crafty, brazen, hard-boiled—and infernally clever at wielding the magic wand that every moviemaker carries in his old kit bag and that opens wide all doors, hearts, female legs—yes, even bank accounts:

so that over and over again by the fictions of uncovered checks and uncashed allowances they manage to keep shooting off a firework of verisimilitude, of adventurously colorful and dynamic, lightly pulsating life; and with swindling promises and dishonest assurances they determine destinies (and not even necessarily for the worse) without ever being troubled by the law: for they do nothing but add more and more possibilities to the everlasting game of the exchange of fiction and reality . . .

•

For two decades now, I have been their partner in this game, their stooge and assistant, their officious servant and loyal stable boy. I know them and their keen instincts. I know how eagerly their little ears perk up to the whisper of movie ideas, wriggle with every flash and trash therein; and I know that this particular thought-trash would most blissfully tickle their little piglet ears.

It would be best to funnel it in through the telephone receiver early in the morning.