The Fictional Man Read Online Free PDF

moment.
    “The camera angles around, and he’s... he’s balls deep in a hen.”
    The breath in Niles’ throat expelled itself in a coughing fit. “What?” he spluttered, reaching for the glass of water that still hadn’t arrived.
    Dean stared fixedly at him for a moment, then relaxed completely, leaning back in his chair as though nothing had happened. “Actually,” he said calmly, “I don’t know if now is really the right societal moment for a Kurt Power movie to really thrive, you know? I don’t think the culture’s ready for it.”
    “Did you just say –”
    Dean waved the question away. “There’s a right time and a wrong time, and this is nearly the right time, but it’s the wrong time, you know? It’s like – Kurt Power is really now, but it might be just a little bit too now. Like maybe we should just hold off a little, just until it’s a little bit then , just to really maximise the whole now-ness of the property...” He tailed off, staring into the distance again. Niles looked over at Maurice, who was grinning and nodding as if all this made perfect sense.
    After a moment, Dean steepled his fingers and looked straight at Niles. “I’m going to get real here, Miles. I mean, like, for real real. I love your stuff. The whole wounded-dignity-of-the-working-man thing, the whole Kurt Power thing, the whole...” He thought for a second. “Ordering water. Old school. I love it.”
    Niles looked around. The waitress was nowhere to be seen. Apart from the three of them, the restaurant seemed to be completely deserted.
    “I love everything you do,” Dean continued, “but what I want to do is share the love. Introduce my guys at Talisman Pictures to the real Miles Goland – the man, the writer, the total package. Really sell them on you, show them you’ve got what we need, you know? You with me?”
    Niles wasn’t sure he was, but he nodded anyway.
    Dean grinned, leaning back. “I mean, right now, we’ve got this project that’s almost at the screenplay stage, so I’m looking for people to send in pitches – I mean, you’ve written screenplays, right?”
    Niles thought of the unsold screenplay for Sinfection, lying at the bottom of a box of ancient tax paperwork in his study, and nodded again.
    “Do you remember The Delicious Mr Doll?”
    Niles didn’t nod this time. He grinned like a kid.
     
     
    T HE D ELICIOUS M R Doll , made in 1966 and still available in DVD bargain bins today, was one of many attempts by various studios to spoof, supplant and otherwise ride on the coattails of James Bond. It was also the thirteen-year-old Niles Golan’s favourite film of all time.
    The Talisman Studios of 1966, having failed to anticipate the secret agent boom, had looked at Connery’s Bond in a slightly desperate attempt to work out what could possibly be missing in the formula, and decided that the answer was camp. Enter Dalton Doll, Agent of Y.V.O.O.R.G. (Young Valiant Operatives for Order, Right and Good, which a grown man had at one point been paid real American currency to think up.)
    Doll was, by day, the lead singer of swinging pop combo The All Together, which was made up of himself and five glamorous female assistants in bikinis – his ‘Dolly Birds,’ numbered one through five. By night, he retired to his sumptuous ‘pleasure pad’ to lounge about in a kimono awaiting orders from Y.V.O.O.R.G. – which, in this film, involved infiltrating an organisation made up entirely of beautiful women who planned to blackmail the world with an inhibition-lowering gas.
    Niles Golan, age thirteen, had loved it.
    It was an oddity he’d discovered late one night on Channel 4, long after his parents were in bed. Later in life, when the question of his favourite film came up at parties – usually dull ones – he would claim that it was Apocalypse Now, and would even go so far as to pretend to like the music of The Doors. But first, his mind would travel back in time to The Delicious Mr Doll – in