"Crude" sometimes seems like improbable fiction, a story co-authored by Charles Dickens and Che Guevara in which a former oilfield worker named Pablo Fajardo, who still lives in the two-room house where he grew up, is now the plaintiffs' lead attorney, threatening to bring the world's fifth-largest corporation to its knees. One of the story's many oddities is that Chevron was never involved in Ecuadoran oil exploration, or in the alleged systematic and deliberate discharge of oil sludge and contaminated water that has sometimes been called the "Amazon Chernobyl." But when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it also took on that company's assets and liabilities, and now must defend itself in a case that has had many unexpected twists and turns.

After lawyers for the 30,000 or so Ecuadoran plaintiffs filed suit in the United States, Chevron fought for years to have jurisdiction returned to Ecuador, probably assuming that that country's traditional pro-business oligarchy would make the whole thing go away. Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for: Now Ecuador has a left-leaning president, Rafael Correa, who is allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and openly sympathetic to the anti-Chevron case. As Berlinger's camera captures, the trial was largely conducted outdoors, on the site of the alleged contamination, with soil samples taken in public with the cameras rolling. Chevron's attorneys respond with various contradictory claims: That sludge in the ground isn't dangerous; it isn't ours; it wasn't taken from the right place; people shouldn't be living here anyway.

Over the course of four years in diverse and difficult conditions, Berlinger captures Fajardo and his American consultant, Steven Donziger, as they travel from Ecuador to New York to Houston and back. He meets residents and nurses in the Cofán indigenous community who discuss the cancer clusters and epidemic skin diseases found in the area around the contaminated waterways. He follows Trudie Styler, the jet-set fashion-plate spouse of Sting, as she tours the region and renders it an international cause célèbre. At the last minute, just as Berlinger was preparing the film for Sundance this year, he was granted interviews with a senior Chevron scientist and a corporate counsel, who assured him that A) everything is fine in the affected region, and B) we're off the hook, legally speaking, even if it isn't.

Berlinger is a leading practitioner of the cinéma-vérité method, which avoids voice-over narration or other devices aimed at directing the reader toward a specific conclusion. This is somewhat unusual in a film that seems so clearly a work of advocacy, but as he explained during a phone call that was scheduled for 15 minutes and stretched to 45, his job is to convince the uncommitted viewer that what Texaco did in the Amazon was an immense moral crime -- not to create agitprop on behalf of the plaintiffs in a specific lawsuit. First, here's the official trailer for "Crude":

Joe, I was thinking that the vérité method must have posed a special challenge in this case. You're not in the business of telling the audience who is right and who is wrong, and that comes with certain advantages and certain disadvantages for a storyteller.

Definitely. I don't believe in voice-over narration, but voice-over narration helps you speed the story along and gets you through difficult moments you may not have coverage on. This film was one of the hardest editing challenges I've ever faced, because there's a complicated 13-year history behind this lawsuit, which you have to dole out to the audience so they understand the context. Then you can get to the present-tense story.

I think my point of view is all over this film. This film has been criticized at film festivals by more activist-oriented folks, who think I've given Chevron too much screen time and think that I need to have a clearer point of view. But I have a certain view of how to engage an audience. I'm a pretty active television producer and executive producer, and I see a lot of environmental and human-rights films that have this style of banging a singular message over somebody's head. That's a very different theatrical experience from engaging the audience to be a judge or a juror, to weigh the pros and cons of all the issues.

I think it makes a more persuasive film, and, ironically, a more effective advocacy film, if you allow people to arrive at a point of view on their own. When you whitewash certain troubling aspects of a situation because you think, oh, it takes away from the main point of view that Chevron is evil -- that makes the film less honest and less interesting and less real. You end up just preaching to the converted, when the mission ought to be to bring people who aren't sure about what they think into your camp. A non-narrated approach, a warts-and-all portrait of all sides, is to my mind a more persuasive moviegoing experience.

Right. I mean, just in terms of the lawsuit, I didn't come out of this film absolutely sure who was going to win, or who should win. The issue of liability seems immensely complicated, and I'm not sure if anybody really understands it.

People have said to me, "You give Chevron too much airtime. You don't seem utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit." Well, I'm not utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit, because I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Specifically, I'm not smart enough or well enough equipped -- I'm not a judge or a scientist, and I haven't read the 100,000 pages in binders in that judge's office. I can't tell you whether Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legalese to prevail in that lawsuit. But I can tell you that some things are larger than the lawsuit, and that the moral responsibility lies at their door. You don't go into somebody's backyard and treat it the way they treated it. I don't care about the legality. Manifest destiny was a legal philosophy that justified all sorts of terrible acts in this country. The Nuremberg racial laws made discrimination against Jews legal in Germany. So I can't tell you whether Chevron should win or lose in this lawsuit, but I don't think they have morality on their side.

The film to me is not about the lawsuit. After having spent almost four years on this situation, I see a certain inadequacy to the legal structures in place to deal with these human rights and environmental crises. It has taken 17 years to get to this point, and it will probably take another 10 or 15 years for the whole thing to be appealed and counter-appealed and worked out, and then God knows how long before payment is made. That's just too long. Generation after generation are suffering. While this legal proceeding goes on, people are dying and generations are being affected.

So I'm comfortable showing both sides of the lawsuit, to show how messy it is and how long it takes. Also, I think truth rises to the top. No matter how much corporate-speak legalese they wrap themselves up in, the ultimate message of the film is that for 600 years white people have treated indigenous people abysmally. It's a part of our history we really don't grapple with. I mean, at some level we know, in the back of our heads, that that Jack in the Box over there used to be a Cherokee village, and we moved these people out of sight.

Here was the big epiphany for me in making this movie -- it seemed like that was something that happened in the distant past, but the reality is that multinational corporations of the late 20th century, particularly in the extractive industries, are just the modern-day continuation of this shameful treatment of indigenous people. The Chevron lawyer in the film says, "People shouldn't be living here. This is an industrial zone." No, sorry. People have been living here for millennia. So I think this is an advocacy film. It's an advocacy film on behalf of indigenous people who were fucked over by Catholic missionaries, and then by their own governments, and then by the oil companies.

On one side you have this enormous oil company, and on the other side you have this former oilfield worker just out of law school, and they're fighting it out in the legal system of a country that, let's face it, has a long record of cronyism and corruption. It doesn't seem like a fair fight.

Chevron fought for years to get the case moved to Ecuador, and I don't think they ever imagined it would go to trial. At the time Ecuador was run by a military junta that was very pro-business, run by the Spanish-descended oligarchy. It was a very comfortable and cozy relationship: extracting minerals and fucking over the indigenous population. I don't think they counted on a couple of things that have taken place that happened that, luckily for me, were very cinematic. One of them was the emergence of this local populist hero, Pablo Fajardo. A local oilfield worker, impoverished but horrified by the humiliation of the workers and the environmental degradation, pulls himself up by the bootstraps and gets educated, gets a law degree, and his very first legal case -- which gains traction and results in at least a moral victory -- is against the fifth-largest company in the world. You simply couldn't make that up.

Chevron also didn't count on the emergence of a global environmental movement and the rise of mistrust of large corporations and their way of doing business, of pursuing profit at all costs. Then there was the change of regime in Ecuador, the election of Rafael Correa, who gets a bad rap in this country as a left-wing, anti-corporate protégé of Hugo Chávez. And a lot of that is accurate, to be fair. But he's the first president to visit the region, the first one to have some sympathy for the indigenous people and the first one to eschew cozy relationships with the extractive industries. Ecuador actually passed certain constitutional rights for flora and fauna last year, as a demonstration of their new commitment to the environment. Correa is having mixed results, but instead of extracting the oil, he wants to sell the oil rights to people who will keep it in the ground.

There are a lot of fascinating characters in the film, but I was really interested in Sara McMillan, the environmental scientist Chevron supplied to you at the last minute. She says everything is fine in Ecuador, there's no problem, if people are getting sick it's not our fault. She's very reassuring and comes off as really sincere. If she's lying, she's doing an extraordinarily good job of it.

She does come across as sincere, and I think she is. That's one of the deeper and more troubling aspects of those interviews. I think she believes every word coming out of her mouth. She's been down there, but she's drunk the Kool-Aid.

It reminds me of our earlier film, "Paradise Lost" [about the dubious conviction of the "West Memphis 3" on murder charges], when co-director Bruce Sinofsky and I were so flabbergasted at what was going down that we'd pull the judge aside, or the prosecutor, and ask them, "Are you guys kidding?" It became very clear that the judge, the prosecutor and the chief inspector had utterly convinced themselves of the righteousness of their mission and the evilness of Damien Echols [accused of masterminding the killings]. It's not that they were covering something up. It's more difficult to change that mind-set than it is to expose a coverup.

It's the same thing with this woman from Chevron. I believe she believes every word that comes out of her mouth. That to me is scary, and it's a signal of institutional denial. We're not talking about bad individuals, we're talking about an institution with no regard for indigenous people.

Another ambiguous area in "Crude" is the presence of Trudie Styler, Sting's wife. On one hand, she's clearly done a lot for the Amazonian people, and has raised the international profile of the case tremendously. On the other hand, you've got the bogus architecture of celebrity, and this beautiful, well-mannered English lady showing up in an outfit that cost more than every physical object in the Cofán village, all put together.

Absolutely. I have tremendous regard for Trudie and Sting. The only tangible benefit these people have received in 17 years of outside involvement are the water-filtration systems Trudie brought to the region. She and Sting have been talking about the rain forest and the rights of indigenous people for many years, long before celebrity drive-by cause-embracing had become favorable.

But the film is observing and commenting upon that uncomfortable intersection between celebrity culture and social activism. It is a shame that only when the wife of a rich and famous rock star comes to town, this case gets kicked up a notch. There are many places around the world that don't have a film and don't have a rock star or a celebrity to help them.

To go back to "Paradise Lost," Damien Echols is alive today -- and I don't say this arrogantly -- because the film produced a great outpouring of support from people like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Norman Lear. There were a tremendous amount of people who saw that movie and joined an international movement. The film came out at just the right time, just when the Internet was becoming a communication device in a big way. Lots of money has been raised, and if it hadn't been for that outpouring of support, Damien might not be alive today. I don't think the state of Arkansas has the balls to inject the guy, because of all the international attention and celebrity involvement.

I bring that up because that's an example of a guy being lucky, because a film was made. I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten over the years from wives or mothers or girlfriends of people on death row who claim they're innocent. Of course, not everybody is innocent, I'm not that naive. But those people don't have a film or a celebrity, and it's the same thing with these human-rights cases and pollution cases. This is just one part of the world that's been ravaged by the oil industry. They happen to have a celebrity involved and a film being made. The film is definitely a comment on that -- not just on Trudie's involvement but the film's involvement. It's a shame that that's what it takes to move the needle.

"Crude" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Sept. 18 in Los Angeles; Sept. 25 in New Orleans, San Diego and San Francisco; Oct. 1 in Toronto; Oct. 2 in Chicago; Oct. 9 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas; Oct. 16 in Coral Gables, Fla., Denver and Santa Fe, N.M.; and Oct. 23 in Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.

So take my enthusiasms knowing full well my prejudices, but watching "Julie & Julia" was like having fizzing joy injected directly into my veins. And it wasn't just about the sizzle of the sole meunière and the glisten of the oysters slurped down at Parisian market stalls.

The deeper pleasures of the movie come not from the gloss and satisfying chomp of it all, but from the empty spots, the hungers and the imperfections.

There is Child, whom we now adore, but who in the late 1940s (when her portion of the movie's split narrative begins) was searching for meaning outside her loving, sex-filled marriage. Streep's Child is outsize in every way: big and gangling in her affections for butter and for her husband, Paul, and in her frustrations with the limited options for wives in Paris, her politically conservative father, and her inability to have children.

Then there is her contemporary acolyte, cubicle drone Julie Powell, striving in 2002 to escape the grief of daily calls from family members of World Trade Center victims, to have something to say to a table full of girlfriends with expense accounts and assistants, to live up to the potential she'd once believed she had. Powell takes refuge in her food, and at the urging of her well-fed mate realizes she might make her refuge her life. As she did in life, the cinematic Powell takes her own professional future in hand by starting a Salon blog on which she chronicles cooking her way through every recipe in Child's opus "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

So yes, it's a movie about women and food, women and cooking, women and butter. It's a love story about women and men, especially men who do for their mates what women have traditionally done for theirs: provide the ballast and support that make the pursuit of professional goals more possible. And it's a romance of women and women, sisters and pen pals and muses these women may never have met, but whose written voices echo daily in their heads. Perhaps most sweetly and most rarely, it is a paean to ambition -- the drive to work, to achieve, to succeed, and to be recognized and compensated for it.

I recently sat down and spoke with Ephron, who was raised in Hollywood by screenwriter parents, about menu planning, vintage typewriters, cooking in the 1960s, chicken Marengo, Rice-A-Roni, single life and, well, mostly about food.

When you were a journalist, you chronicled the birth of "The Food Establishment," writing in the late '60s an early iteration of something that could be written today about artisanal, seasonal, local obsessions of foodies: "American men and women were cooking along with Julia Child, subscribing to the Shallot of the Month club, and learning to mince garlic instead of pushing it through a press ... Food became, for dinner-party conversations in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties." What do you think of how that culture has evolved?

It's such a huge business now. Just think that when I wrote about the food establishment, there were basically four main people [James Beard, Julia Child, Michael Field and Craig Claiborne]. It was such a tiny, backbiting world. Now it is a very large backbiting world. There's so much money involved! It used to be that people would lord over the tiny number of endorsements and the small number of big cookbook advances that were out there. Now it's a monster industry. And by the way, I always have the sense that people don't cook nearly as much as they used to. But they're in love with watching people cook and reading about food and gasping when the pot of chocolate is poured into a cup, you know?

It seems there are warring sensibilities, as you say, between actually cooking and watching people cook, and with regard to food culture and the economy, from Alice Waters and the White House vegetable garden ...

The thing I am always amazed by with this whole eating local thing is that if we actually did this, all we would eat in January and February and March in New York are ramps and cabbage. I don't think people quite understand that this is really isn't going to work unless you live within driving distance of Fresno, Calif.

You also wrote about the culture of high-priced media consumption of food as being part of the new porn in the '70s. Now that food as pornography has become cliché, does it correspond to your feelings about cooking and appreciating food?

It's so unfair to call it pornography, because it has such a negative connotation. That photograph of the pizza in this week's New York magazine, it's so beautiful. So I think of it more as art than pornography. Years ago, [Ephron's sister and frequent collaborator] Delia and I were working one day and the Martha Stewart Living magazine arrived and it had a photograph of a coconut cake on the cover, and we both looked at it and gasped. It was so beautiful. By the way, the woman who styled that photograph is the woman who did all the food in "Julie & Julia," Susan Spungen. It just seems unfair to call that pornography, just because I gasped when I saw it, and it made me want it. Immediately.

When did you start cooking?

When I got out of college. My mother had an IBM Selectric typewriter that IBM had given her when she and my father wrote "The Desk Set," which had that IBM computer in it, and it was the typewriter where every letter was a different size, so if you had to backspace you had to backspace three times to eliminate the "M," two times for the "N" and once for the "I" and it was very beautiful type, and she sent me all these index cards with recipes on them. My mother was a late-in-life cook but a person who loved food, so I had all these recipes that were from just before things changed, like rumaki and chicken Marengo.

What is chicken Marengo?

It's chicken in a tomato sauce, but it is something that everyone made, and I noticed a Marengo recipe in Julia Child. And she gave me the two volumes of the Gourmet cookbook. She also did this weird thing when I was about 16. My summer job was that I had to plan all the menus in our house and then go do all the food shopping.

It was this amazing lesson in how you did menus. I had to talk it over with people in the house, including the cook, by the way, but it was a great thing in terms of understanding what a meal was, and what went with what and what didn't go with what.

So then I got out of college and entered into the derby of competitive cooking that became this hilarious subplot to the '60s. I mean, the political '60s  hadn't really begun, but things were changing. Part of the change was that the intelligent woman was cooking from Julia Child, of course. And Michael Field, and all those cookbooks that were so great, and everyone served the same things.

In waves?

Absolutely. Everyone served the beef bourguignon. And everyone served the chicken curry from Michael Field. In fact, I have friends who still serve that.

So when everyone was serving beef bourguignon, was it a competition?

Well, it sometimes got very pretentious and overreaching, but the food was really good! Nobody had caterers; no one had any money. And people really did say things like "Is this Julia?" after they tasted something, and it was men, not women, doing it. It was just part of a right of passage into New York adulthood. It included our group discovery of dim sum, and the pilgrimages to find barbecue in Queens.

You were also cooking for yourself as a single young woman.

I would cook a meal for four and eat it. Really ... By the way, I had an entire marriage that I mainly only remember Rice-A-Roni from.

Was that the first marriage?

He was insane over Rice-A-Roni. It's not too bad, by the way. Rice-A-Roni. Really.

You have written about having had long-term imaginative relationships with individual cookbook authors, and that you yourself had a Julia period.

I did, yes. But I was surprised when I made the movie, since I thought I had cooked so much in her cookbook but the truth is I'd never made a lot of things I still regard as idiotic like aspic. Why you would ever make aspic I don't know, and nobody liked it but me, so you would never serve it to anyone. And I never made quiche. I never really liked quiche.

When you cooked from her cookbook, did you follow all her many intricate nutty steps?

I did. She's such a great teacher. Because you really -- you know beurre blanc, the one with white vinegar? That is the most delicious thing in the whole world. You learn to do that stuff and then you get very calm about it, because you now understand that almost anything can be fixed, that you don't quite have to be that exact, that you don't have to be that crazy.

I am interested in the imaginative relationship that develops when you're cooking from one person's cookbook, so someone else's voice is in your head, every night in your home. There's intimacy there.

And fantasy! I have written about that, the endless fantasy that the cookbook author will come for dinner, and about the subsequent confusion about whether to serve them something in their cookbook or someone else's cookbook. At a certain point Craig Claiborne did come to my house for dinner, and it wasn't particularly successful in any way. It was a giant letdown.

That is a powerful part of the film -- Powell hearing through another source what Child thinks of her project, and getting terribly let down. If that had happened to me, I would have quit!

It's lucky it happened at the end of her project. Because her imagined Julia had to have been such an animating thing as she became more and more obsessed. Because it is an obsession to do something like that. I mean, it was also ambitious in every sense of the word, and all of them good. She really did see this as a way to dream, a way to become a writer, and it worked! But yes, oh, it would be terrible if the person you wanted to essentially sleep with said, "No way."

I always think that that relationship of someone who meets their idol has a built-in shelf life. Julia Child, I have to say, may have been an exception to all of this, in that I think that when most people met her they continued to love her. Everybody wants to tell you about how charming she was. Most of the people I know who knew her, like my editor Bob Gottlieb, who was the head of Knopf at the time, said that she was like a giant Christmas tree. She had this generosity of spirit that was so irresistible.

You never met her yourself?

No, I never met her. Maybe it's just as well, who knows. I always felt when we were [writing] "Silkwood" that if I had ever met Karen Silkwood, it would have been -- not to equate the two of them except that I've written movies about both of them -- that she was so problematical that it would have gotten in the way of writing about her.

How much of the movie food got eaten?

Enormous amounts. We built this huge kitchen on the soundstage and everything that's in the movie we had to have eight of, and therefore there were always unbelievable leftovers. Everyone on the set watched Chris Messina [as Powell's husband] eat, which was one of the great treats for me of the movie. I had made it so clear to everyone that there had to be real eating in the movie. So everyone was watching the lust that people were bringing to the eating, and then we got to eat it all.

Everyone is kvelling about how the Julia in Paris portion of the film is an incredibly lush fantasy of mid-century Paris and a romantic marriage and a larger-than-life cook. But it's also about the time before she was Julia Child, when she was a little aimless, wasn't sure what she was going to do, couldn't have kids.

And now everyone thinks she was a spy during World War II, when in fact she was a clerk. She did have a very romantic marriage to a husband who was making about $3,200 a year and couldn't catch a break. He was essentially a failure, and the movie deals with that explicitly. And yet, the thing I can never get over is that she became Julia Child at the age of 49. That is so amazing to me, this thing that we only get a glimpse of at the end of this movie. She was a Smith girl who had made what was to her a thrilling marriage, because I don't think she ever expected to get married, but to her family it was a disappointing marriage. After Europe, they thought their life was sort of over, and they were just going to live on their pensions and her trust fund -- we must not leave that out -- in this little house in Cambridge. And then, a miracle.

Julie and Julia's stories seem more parallel, less aspirational, than the Parisian-fantasy element would initially suggest. These were women who had good things in life and hard things in life, but for whom food was a window to something better.

One of the great things about food is if you have no field of expertise, which a huge number of us don't, it's one of the easiest things to become an expert in, even if just from the point of view of eating it. Don't you feel terrible for people who don't love food? I feel tragic about it.

Food has brought me joy in times when there wasn't love or work or sex or money. It's something that brings you pleasure even when you have little control over the lack of other pleasures. You can bring food into your home; when you're a single girl who doesn't have plans in the evening you can make yourself dinner for four.

And feel that you are not sad, because you're not eating yogurt. And then if you're having a good life, it adds something wonderful. I have friends who really do not understand why I would drive 40 miles for this cheese thing that we once drove 40 miles for in Italy, and I just feel terrible for them. What's wrong with them? Uphill, also. On a winding road.

What was the cheese thing?

It was in this little town near Portovenere, this little hill town that has a festival. In the main square is a gigantic copper pan hanging on the side of some building and every year in July they have a fritto misto festival and they heat up the oil in this 16-feet-across pan and they fry fish in it. Meanwhile, in this tiny little bakery off the main street is this cheese and crust thing. It was one of those things where you say, "Oh, I've just eaten the greatest thing of my life, which happens to me about five times a year." I know there are people who would drive that long to see a painting. I would never do that. Never. But I feel bad for the people who wouldn't drive for the cheese thing.

English writer and director Anthony Minghella has died at age 54, according to various news reports. It's a sad and early departure for one of the best-loved figures in the British film industry. Minghella was chairman of the British Film Institute, where he had vowed to stem the outflow of British talent to the United States. He won the 1997 best-director Oscar for "The English Patient," an international hit that launched a new wave of high-gloss, star-studded literary adaptations. His other films as a director included "Truly Madly Deeply" in 1990, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" in 1999 and "Cold Mountain" in 2003. Minghella apparently underwent surgery for a growth in his neck last week at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He had seemed to be recovering normally, but suffered a fatal hemorrhage early on Tuesday morning.

Minghella had recently completed a 90-minute pilot episode of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," a planned television series based on Alexander McCall Smith's best-selling novels about a Botswanan female detective. The program is scheduled to premiere this weekend on BBC One in Britain, and has been acquired for U.S. broadcast by HBO. He was reportedly close to beginning production on his next film, "The Ninth Life of Louis Drax," which he had adapted from Liz Jensen's novel and was planning to shoot in California. It's too early to know whether that film will be scrapped, or possibly made with another director.

I'll set aside my own mixed assessment of Minghella's work and observe that he had an unerring eye for projects that combined big-screen cinematic spectacle, a literary pedigree and wide appeal among upscale audiences. He saw himself first and foremost as a storyteller, and had few artistic pretensions. Unlike so many people in his trade, Minghella was universally well liked on both sides of the Atlantic. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who worked with Minghella on a 1995 campaign video and became his friend, told the BBC: "Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with. Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber."

The son of Italian immigrants who owned an ice cream factory, Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954. His brother Dominic and sister Edana both work as writers for British television. He is survived by his wife, the choreographer Carolyn Choa, and two children, one of them the actor Max Minghella, who appeared in "Syriana" and "Art School Confidential" and is now a student at Columbia University in New York.

So I'm sorta successful, but I still feel that "artist" is my life's calling. It's what I'm best at and what I love. And yes, I go through all the crap too -- the stress, the inaction, the procrastination and so on, but I really feel it's what I was born to do. People like it -- smart people, the people I'd hoped would like it, and they like it for the right reasons. I sell enough out of my studio to counter my expenses (not huge but significant nonetheless). I've been selected for juried shows by curators of major museums and been waitlisted on grants and residencies that are awarded to emerging contemporary artists -- exactly where I'd hope my artwork would fall within the giant spectrum of the art world.

But it has yet to pay off with true success: representation by a gallery, which is the equivalent of getting an agent and all that that would hopefully bring.

In the meantime I have to work as a producer (lucrative, challenging, creative but I sublimate my own interests to be "mainstream" enough to be functional in this world) and then, while I'm working on freelance producing jobs, I have to get the rejection letters from things I've applied to. I realize I can't get accepted to everything I apply to, but each time I get rejected, it takes me down a notch, if only for that day. And then I recover (or forget) and go back to making art, and I've realized that this whole creation/rejection dichotomy actually creates the sort of manic-depressive (or bipolar) worldview that artists are known for: You get all excited about some idea and work in a creative frenzy and then you get a rejection notice and feel like "What the fuck am I doing anyways?"

My problem right now is that I don't get the "manic" highs of creation because I'm doing a freelance producing job which is very, very time-consuming (and creativity-consuming), so I can't make my own art at the moment and yet I am getting the "depressive" rejection letters that send me into a downward spiral for which there is no "manic" corrective. And I start to think, maybe "producer" is all I get to be; after all, I worked hard to get to be that too!

I don't think that I should give up on the artwork (I don't think I can, literally. I think I'd be miserable. It's pretty much my higher purpose in life). But how do I deal with the rejection during these periods where I can't make up for it with creative zeal? Because it's so fucking easy to get a rejection notice in the middle of the day at work on the cheesy TV show and think, "Who the fuck am I to think I am an artist?"

- S.

Dear S,

I'm glad you wrote this letter. The problem you describe is important. The best way I can respond to it is by talking about my own experience.

I am a very critical person. This is a problem in my life. I have high expectations. If you are doing something and I am watching, I will have a different idea how you should do it, and I will take you apart and not even realize I am doing it until I have ruined your experience. Then I will apologize. I will say I was just trying to help. Then I will go deeper and admit I am a destructively critical person. So I have this. I am critical of you and I am also critical of me.

Now, I also have high expectations. I have experienced literature that opened the skies for me, that made the earth tremble, that proved the existence of a world right alongside ours, so far superior to ours that one might as well commit suicide. I have had these experiences with literature. So I expect a lot when I read. I have high expectations.

But that means I have high expectations for myself as well when I write. Every time I write I think I am required to make the skies open. I think I have to make the earth tremble. I think I have to reveal the existence of a dazzling universe quietly superseding our own, right next to us in another dimension.

That is of course impossible -- as well as being destructive. Realistically speaking, maybe once in my life I'll write something pretty good. Maybe twice.

So I have unrealistic expectations of myself and of other people.

So naturally I fail every day. And so does everyone else in my eyes. That is not a very comfortable world to live in, where I am failing every day, and everyone around me is failing every day too.

It became clear to me a while ago that if I went on writing in this kind of hell I would not last. If you have a voice in your head that is telling you every day that you suck and you can't write, because the heavens are not splitting open and the earth is not trembling, you're not going to last long. You're going to find yourself depressed. You're going to be paralyzed, unable to send out manuscripts.

You need constant encouragement and reinforcement in order to keep going. It's not even about feeling good so much. It's just about keeping going.

I began to think about athletes. I thought, what do athletes do? Are they rejected every time they perform? A batter gets a hit maybe every four or five at bats. So that's pretty tough.

How would an athlete deal with all that rejection?

In sports there is rejection and pain. But there is also joy and encouragement. There are coaches. There are teammates.

Those of us who work alone trying to make the heavens open up and the earth tremble, we need regular encouragement. We need coaches to say, Hey, good game. We need hand slaps and high-fives. Without support we will stop sending out our work. (Most of us, anyway. There are some who are like diamonds inside, brilliant and hard and unreachable. But most of us, we're sensitive.)

So, having never been, by temperament or upbringing or cultural leaning, a workshop person, and having had only the worst experiences in graduate school workshops, I nevertheless began looking for some organic forms of support. The only thing I knew in terms of groups was support groups for addiction and alcohol. I thought something along that line might work, but I had no idea what. I just knew that the unconscious needs to be cradled and encouraged.

So browsing in Borders last fall before a long plane ride, I saw that book "Writing Alone and With Others." I liked the title. It was sufficiently descriptive and exact. It did not promise me that I could write a novel in 30 days. It did not address problems of self-esteem that I did not have. It spoke to me.

So I read it and became convinced that the workshop method it outlines could help me and others improve our relationships with our own creative selves and with each other as creative people. So last week I completed a weeklong workshop with the author of that book, Pat Schneider, and was reinforced in my belief that this is the way to go.

We critical types are hard on ourselves. I have been very hard on others but I have believed it was OK because I was also very hard on myself. Others have been hard on me as well, and I have sort of invited that. I have said, That's OK, give it to me straight, I can take it. Actually, I couldn't take it. But I would say I could. I believed in the interest of telling it like it is that everybody had to be hard on everybody else and on themselves. That would ensure that we were all aesthetically honest and pure.

Well, so now I am thinking, what good does that do if we become so embittered and afraid of rejection that we can't continue our work? I think what we need is more acceptance and more love. But how do I become more accepting of myself? Well, if being hard on others and being hard on myself are so closely linked, perhaps being accepting of others and accepting of myself are also linked. So what if I were start being easier on others, and then eventually perhaps easier on myself? That is what happened in this workshop. We sat around and talked only about what we liked and what we remembered. We didn't tear each other up. Dangerous things were allowed to be said, and were said. They were said well. It was an atmosphere in which the dangerous and difficult things could be said. I was pretty amazed. It produced good work, to my mind, because the good work is the difficult work. It is the work that says things on the edge of acceptable.

So to you, fellow sufferer, I would say that you must build into your life some support systems. You may say that you know you are good. That is fine. I know I am good too. Still, I need to hear it every day. You may know that you are loved as well. You still need to hear it every day. You need to be told. And you need to tell others.

Another thought that prevented me from participating in workshops was this: Well, I'm a professional. I'm different. I'm better.

What I found was that as a professional I had certain things I could contribute. But it did not make me any better than anyone else. Rather, I stood in surprised awe. I said, What, you are not publishing? My God! It was astonishing.

So now in spite of my long-cultivated anti-workshop bias and my pride and my ego and my defensiveness and my well-suppressed desire to crush all other artists, in spite of my debilitating expectation that every word ought to split the sky or make the earth tremble or hint at the existence of a fantastic other world, in spite of my fear and my anger and my feeling of hopelessness and despair, I believe in the workshop.

It's what you have to do. Something inside you needs it.

There is much more to be said about this, but I think that is enough for now. There are cultural and political implications. There are spiritual implications. But that is enough for now. It's about the workshop. It's about finding structured support. It's what you have to do.

By the way, one practical way to avoid the crushing futility of never-ending rejection is to have a friend send out your work for you. This little tip came to me from Pat Schneider. The trick is to work with a friend. You send out your friend's work, and your friend sends out yours. Your friend gets the rejections but doesn't tell you. You don't need to know. When something encouraging happens, then your friend gives you the news.

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Even if some critics hailed early flicks like "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon," by the early '80s most seemed to agree with John Simon's acerbic assessment that Bogdanovich's "entire filmmaking prowess is not much more than a mnemonic feat." Whatever; in person, the 62-year-old is thoroughly charming, and lacks the pretense so often ascribed to him by caricaturists. Can a guy who schleps his own water around with him in a tote bag be all bad?

Moreover, his latest picture, "The Cat's Meow," is an elegant, entertaining little film detailing the famously puzzling 1924 cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida; just a few days after, one of the passengers died mysteriously. Among those who were onboard: Hearst (Edward Herrmann); his paramour Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst); her aspiring paramour Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard); and the fly in the ointment, conniving producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes). Gossip maven Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly) and novelist Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley) round out the ship's manifest. And Bogdanovich plays them all like a sly maestro. "Citizen Kane" it ain't, but it's fun to watch. Give the devil his due.

Do you think your old friend Orson Welles would have liked the film?

I hope so. I certainly felt his spirit around when we made it, watching. I don't know about guiding me, but I think he was on our side. He was the one who told me the story in the first place. He told it to me over 30 years ago as an example of how different Hearst was from Charles Foster Kane. The general misunderstanding about "Citizen Kane" is that it was supposed to be about Hearst, but it wasn't.

Charles Foster Kane was a composite character based on three or four press lords including a famous one in Chicago named McCormick, who built the Chicago Opera House for his girlfriend, who was a singer. That whole aspect of Kane had nothing to do with Hearst. And Orson didn't play it like Hearst. Hearst was a kind of pear-shaped fellow who had a high voice and whose hair fell down over his forehead. He looked a lot like Edward Herrmann, but not as handsome.

How did Mr. Welles come to tell you the story?

I was interviewing him for the book we did, "This Is Orson Welles," but we didn't use it in the book because at the time, it seemed a bit incendiary. Interestingly enough, he heard the story from a member of Hearst's inner circle -- Marion Davies' nephew Charles Lederer, the screenwriter. I talked to Charlie Lederer a few years later and he confirmed it. Charlie had known it since he was 12. That's about how old he was when it happened. He confirmed this as fact, that there was this "accident" during the cruise.

How ironic that after Welles told you that story so long ago, you wound up directing this picture.

Yes, it was ironic. The script arrived on my desk 30 years later and neither the writer nor the producer had any idea that I knew anything about it ... I don't know if I would have read it with as much interest if Orson hadn't told me. I often don't read scripts that are sent to me, I have someone read them for me. This one I read on my own. I saw these characters in it and I thought, "My God, it's that story." So I owe it to Orson. If it hadn't been for him, I might not have done it.

Your Hearst seems rather likable in some ways.

Actually, he's pretty ruthless. But he's human. It's the humanity, I think, that makes you understand him. When you understand someone, it's hard to hate them. If you get to know anybody, I suppose, you discover that people are good and bad and all the shades in between. Nobody's all one thing.

Do you think people have changed much since that era, or do you think we're all pretty much still the same?

Human nature stays the same, but maybe certain aspects of it get exacerbated. I think we're in a more cynical era than ever before, and I think that the audience for movies, for example, has been somewhat debased and brutalized by the enormous amount of violence and slaughter on the screen. You sort of say, "Well, 30 people just got killed, so what's next?" Having been, I'm afraid, part of a murder, when Dorothy Stratten was murdered, I can tell you that one murder reverberates for the rest of the life of the people who were close to that person. That's one of the things about this picture, it's about a murder that changes everything. One murder. Not three, not 10 -- one.

So we've been "desensitized," as they say.

Yes, a little. On the other hand, you take any individual out of that audience and have them exposed to the murder of someone they care about, they won't be desensitized. We're only desensitized to the spectacle of it.

Did Ms. Stratten's death change the way you look at violence?

Yes, it did. I never particularly liked violence in movies, but I didn't have the same reaction to it that I do now. I think it's all handled by people who don't know what it's really like. It's just people making movies, and saying, "OK, well, this guy gets killed, and then we go over here and this guy gets killed," and I'm thinking, each death counts.

Is there any solution to that problem, or is it something we just have to accept?

I think it's everybody's personal responsibility. Filmmakers have a responsibility to the audience and to the work, and I wish they felt that responsibility more, especially to what's true in life. The tragic events of September brought knowledge of premeditated murder to an awful lot of people who didn't know about it.

I watched those people on TV afterwards, and it broke my heart. I knew where they were coming from. And I knew they were in for a life of it. They talk about closure and getting past it -- Christ, it doesn't ever happen that way. These poor people on television a week later talking about it, thinking that they're dealing with it. You know, it's a truism for people who've been through this that the fifth year is the worst. It happened to me. For some reason after five years, it's like it's just happened again. It's also something you don't recover from, you learn to live with. You don't get past it, you learn to move on with it as part of your life.

You have to think of it in this context; the murder in "The Cat's Meow" affects everyone there for all their lives. I don't know that Marion would have stayed with Hearst had it not been for the murder. I think she felt guilty that she was kind of the cause of it.

Then it's established that Chaplin and Davies actually were fooling around?

Well, nobody was under the bed. But that gossip item that's referred to in the film linking Chaplin and Davies actually appeared in the Daily News that weekend. I have a copy of it. Chaplin was a notorious philanderer. And Marion evidently had some affairs with other people. We presume it happened.

Of all the characters in the film, who do you identify with?

That's an interesting question. Really, I can identify with all the men. I've been down and out like Ince. I've been obsessed with a woman like Hearst. I've been lookin' to get laid like Chaplin. So, I understand where they're coming from. And I understand, as I said, what a murder does. My sympathy, if you want to ask that, is with Marion, which you can see in the picture to a degree.

It's her tragedy, I think. It's a woman's story -- she's trapped between powerful men. In 1924, women had only been able to vote for the second time. I made a reference to that in the film, because it's fairly shocking to remember that. It was November of 1924 and the election had just happened. Nineteen-twenty was the first year women were allowed to vote. It's about a woman who seems to have everything, but doesn't quite. "I have me," she says. But she's not really right.

If you could go back in time, which decade would you want to go back to?

If I had a time machine? I'd pick the '30s. I'd want to be a filmmaker under contract at Paramount as Lubitsch was head of the studio.

So you might've been one of Mr. Welles' colleagues?

I would've met him, yeah. I looked it up one time and I told Orson, "You know the day you started shooting 'Citizen Kane' I was 1 year old?" And he said, "Aw, shut up!"

You think about him often, don't you?

He was a very dear friend for most of our association, and yes, his spirit ranges over everything. He was quite extraordinary.

You speak of Mr. Welles' spirit. I'm curious, what do you think happens to us after we die?

Kind of a personal question. I don't think the spirit dies. I think the spirit is imperishable, that it remains, and is around or not, depending on different things. I don't know about murderers, though. I don't know where they go. I keep feeling that the murderers who blew up the World Trade Center are doomed to haunt that area for the rest of their lives.