At this stage, the final product, the movie, is completely secondary. What’s important is the “project.” At the latest with the treatment, it begins to have substance, i.e., negotiations with the financing bank have begun. According to whether they take a positive or a negative turn, the treatment gets changed, that is, gets made more palatable for the money people—the banks and distributors. And even if a screenplay finally gets written, it only serves as a basis for negotiations to extract more money. The screenwriter doesn’t get paid until final acceptance, i.e., hardly ever, since in most cases the “project” is not completed—nor does it need to be, for the producer has in the meantime gotten together enough money to keep himself and his company afloat. To cover the monies obtained for this project but not spent, he starts a new one.

If it happens that a movie actually gets made, the backers are steam-rolled by the avalanche of cost overruns. The screenwriter has long since been tossed overboard, but the production company is flourishing. If the project fails before a film is made, the intellectual property rights can be sold to some other production company.

Wohlfahrt: “Keep the rubles rolling, man, that’s the main thing!”

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Because whoever resurrects an event in order to place it in relation to the past and the future—and in the end to eternity as well!—is performing a moral act. I would even say the moral act per se. Doesn’t our conscience operate in the same way, by measuring what we do or fail to do against previous good or bad deeds, with regard to future deeds, and all in relation to the timeless absolute, eternity? Thus a story is the mother of morality, and the telling of stories is morality in practice. And so we will end up on the cross with our practice of morality—all of us who take the stories we tell seriously.

•  •  •

Dream:

Christa, S., and I are standing on a bridge suspended on steel cables high above a river. I know they are about to snap. I want to test the tension in the midsection of one of these cables. I pluck it and listen to it vibrating at a high pitch, like a violin string. I’ve never played an instrument in my life and I’m enchanted. I discover I can play like a virtuoso; it sounds like a harpsichord concerto. S. is also ecstatic. Even Christa marvels at me. I become aware that under my fingers, the cable is fraying. With every pluck it gets thinner and the tension increases. I know it’s about to snap and the bridge will collapse, but still I keep on playing without warning S. and Christa. Below, Nagel is waiting. He won’t catch any of us.

•  •  •

Handwritten note:

Select and tailor one’s figures so they become stereotypes—or rather, phenotypes.

But is there any other way?

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