Missed Encounters with the Movies

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.

Kasimir Malevich
Kasimir Malevich, the Russian artist best known as the painter of The Black Square and the founder of the Suprematist movement, once wrote a three-page film script titled An Artistic and Scientific Film—Painting and Architectural Issues—Approaching the New Plastic Architectural System (1927). Crucial moments in the script included a square rolling on its side to form a circle, and a cross pivoting on its axis to become a cube. Malevich, who was greatly partial to cubes, once remarked that “every Leninist workman must have a cube in his house, as a reminder of the eternal, constant doctrine of Leninism.” After Lenin’s death in 1924, Malevich unveiled what he described as a “Lenin monument.” It consisted of an enormous cube. When asked, “But where’s Lenin?” Male­vich simply pointed at the cube with an offended expression.

Winston Churchill
In Hollywood in 1929, Winston Churchill met Charlie Chaplin, who had long been plotting to make a film about Napoleon. Churchill proposed to write Chaplin a “Young Napoleon” screenplay, and reportedly sketched with great enthusiasm a scene in which Napoleon flies into a rage while taking a bath, and slips on some soap. Chaplin never made a Napoleon movie.

In 1934, Winston Churchill signed a £10,000 contract with British film mogul Alexander Korda for a screenplay on the reign of King George V. Korda observed that the first draft, composed by Churchill in less than two weeks, was “really splendid,” but a bit heavy on politics....