During a recent meeting, studio executives were bandying names about for the role of Gideon Chickenstalker in a film version of The Hillbilly Vampire Chronicles, which is in the development phase. When asked my opinion (as author of the novel), I immediately said—Chris Farley.
Their response was, “He’s dead, dude (they love that term of endearment in Hollywood). What, have you been living in a cave or something?”
I could only speak the truth, and said, “Well, actually I have been living in that cave in Lascaux, Corrèze for awhile. At first I was taking part in an isolation experiment for the Laboratory for Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne, where Tonto was cut off from communication with other people. After ten years of delusions and loss of reality and personal identity, my thinking became less directed, and was eventually replaced by highly personal fantasies and hallucinations. This was something that turned out to be not that unpleasant. Anyway, my intimate knowledge of the cave came in handy at the end of the experiment and I was hired to do some touch-up work on the Paleolithic cave paintings, for the Werner Herzog documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
Their response was something like, “tchea, right!”
Tonto could only respond with a little bit of dactylology. Small minds will never be able to understand the free lance.
