We’re always curious to see letters between artists from different media — especially if those artists happen to be as great as Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov. The American Reader has posted an exchange in which the filmmaker asked the author to collaborate with him on a few screenplay ideas, and Nabokov responded with some story sketches of his own. Each of the ideas is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a genius, but we’re particularly taken with one of Nabokov’s scenarios:
“A girl, a rising star of not quite the first magnitude, is courted by a budding astronaut. She is slightly condescending to him; has an affair with him but may have other lovers, or lover, at the same time. One day he is sent on the first expedition to a distant star; goes there and makes a successful return. Their positions have now changed. He is the most famous man in the country while her starrise has come to a stop at a moderate level. She is only too glad to have him now, but soon she realizes that he is not the same as he was before his flight. She cannot make out what the change is. Time goes, and she becomes concerned, then frightened, then panicky. I have more than one interesting denouement for this plot.”
It’s going to kill us that we’ll never know what those denouement ideas were. Visit The American Reader to read the letters in full. [via This Isn’t Happiness]