Smartypants Has Act Two Problems

SOME DAYS, WHEN you're a screenwriter, you just need an extra lift to keep going.  Like, oh, I don't know ... how about this nifty Salon article on the unproduced screenplays of famous intellectuals?

It's actually courtesy of two of my favorite reads that I don't have time for: The Believer magazine, and the always amusant McSweeney's. (Now available in an iPhone app!)

Vladimir Nabokov
As a struggling young writer in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov once wrote a phenomenally depressing screenplay titled "The Love of a Dwarf" (1924). The protagonist, a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, has a one-night stand with the depressed, childless wife of a circus magician. The dwarf quits the circus and retires to a small northern town, waiting vainly for the magician’s wife to join him. Eight years later, she turns up on his doorstep, announces that he has a son, and rushes away. The dwarf pursues her, but dies of a heart attack at her feet. To the gathering onlookers, the magician’s wife announces that her son died a few days ago. In 1939, Esquire printed a short-story version of "The Love of a Dwarf," titled "The Potato Elf": it was Nabokov’s first American publication.

Read more at Salon.