—fade in on a restaurant in Hollywood in 1957. Two men in business suits are having lunch together—
Lane: Say, you remember that guy?
Lasky: I remember a lotta guys.
Lane: I’m talking about the great one, something about McGinty.
Lasky: Yeah, I know the one. I didn’t know him when McGinty did though.
Lane: Hey, what are you talking about? McGinty didn’t know anybody; he was…
Lasky: I know, I know. I met the guy later, when he did The Power and the Glory.
Lane: You don’t mean McGinty, do you?
Lasky: Of course I don’t mean McGinty. I’m talking about the Power and the Glory guy who invented stuff like this.
Lane: Stuff like what?
Lasky: Like this.
—jump cut to years earlier, Lane and Lasky are talking over lunch at the Universal Studios cafeteria —
Lane: Hey, what just happened?
Lasky: This would be a flashback; our man told the story this way, and that Orson Welles guy just copied him for Citizen Kane.
Lane: Wait a minute, are you talking about the Welles on the radio?
Lasky: Yeah that’s the one. We’re in a flashback, remember? This is 1933 now, when our guy wrote The Power and the Glory. I was planning to send the script out for rewrite, but it didn’t need it. Most perfect script I ever read.
Lane: He didn’t direct it too, did he?
Lasky: Not these days he didn’t. He didn’t pull that off until 1940. His two credits for writing and directing was the first time anybody ever saw that.
Lane: Yeah, I know; I once…I mean, I’m eventually going to write about it as “not old hat, but very new hat.”
Lasky: I don’t think our guy would stoop to using that phrase.
Lane: No, but I would. I’m just a journalist, not a giant of the cinema. Hey, can we get back to when we were before? That is…
Lasky: I know what you mean. Here you go.
— jump cut back to the original scene, in 1957—
Lane: I say, how do you do that?
Lasky: I’m a producer; we’ve got skills.
Lane: Well I find it quite disconcerting. Who were we talking about?
Lasky: Preston Sturges; it’s his birthday. He’s 59 today, and we’d better go visit him. He’s only got a year left.
Lane: How do you know that?
Lasky, pointing at his own chest with his thumb: Producer, remember?
—fade out to rolling credits, starting with following text over musical score—
Not that long ago and not that far away, Preston Sturges, the first person in modern Hollywood to establish himself as a screenwriter and move into directing his own scripts. Winner of the first Oscar for Original Screenplay. Wrote and directed many comedies now considered classics of the 1940s. Began writing plays when he dated an actress who told him he was a bore, and she was only going out with him for “material” for a play she was writing. Feeling insulted, he wrote a play too, The Guinea Pig, and sold it — then found out the actress hadn’t been writing a play at all.
