The preview screening of the studio’s new comic blockbuster, calculated to jump-start buzz among Manhattan’s movers and shakers, evoked the kind of silence one associates with outer space. When the credits rolled, heralding the evaporation of a hundred and eighty million smackeroos, the audience rose and shuffled toward the exits like the brethren en route to their factory in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” While the assorted opinion-makers regained consciousness in the cold air of Broadway, I found myself vis-à-vis none other than Nestor Grossnose, a porky nudnik I knew from our years frequenting the great wheat-germ dispensaries of Sunset Boulevard. Grossnose was a Hollywood producer who had mastered the knack of creating insolvency from the most promising projects. Less vigilant fressers in our golden years, we now repaired to the Carnegie Deli to deconstruct some pickled meat and eviscerate what we’d just seen.“It’s all schlock,” the impresario railed. “Chazerai for pubescent sub-mentals.” Producing a clipping from his pants pocket, he said, “Lamp this. I culled it from a little magazine called The Week. Is this or is this not our open sesame to Fort Knox?” The kernel of the Grossnose squib centered on Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where it seemed that a pizzeria owner was charged by police with planting mice in rival pizza shops. “We never had anything like this,” the Police Superintendent said, “where mice have been used as an instrument of crime.”
Grossnose looked for my reaction to the tabloid snippet, smiling like a man with aces back to back.
“The minute I eyeballed this I started working on my acceptance speech,” he said, knocking back his Dr. Brown’s.
“What are you saying?” I asked, realizing that his latest film, “Holiday for Cretins,” had garnered just two Oscar nods, and not from the Academy but from inmates at Bellevue.
Nothing short of mace could have prevented him from pitching his new scenario, which I succumbed to while vaguely discerning the Hindenburg floating into view.
by Woody Allen, The New Yorker | Read more:
iStockphoto via: Discover Magazine
