Jansy Mello: "There's a book that offers connections between Nabokov's story "The Assistant Producer" and Erich Rohmer's movie "The Triple Agent," namely "Nabokov's cinematic afterlife," authored by Ewa Mazierska....In "Stranger than fact: Nabokov's "The Assistant Producer" and Rohmer's "Triple Agent" we read: "Against a backdrop of political intrigue, Rohmer presents a moral tale of how people make themselves unknowable not only to each other but to themselves. Nabokov, on the other hand, examines role-playing, and, as always, the gap between reality and perception, and wrings a peculiar poignancy out of a scenario into which he has injected very little of what you might call the 'human element' ..."

P.S: A few days ago I brought up a series of items relating V.Nabokov and Eric Rohmer, but, at that time, I hadn't yet watched the movie. Now I must conclude that, although both artists based their work on the same historical facts, there doesn't seem to be any other actual link between short-story and film. Rohmer's plot is disclosed through incessant verbal exchanges, something Nabokov didn't favor, just as he avoided centering the action on his characters's internal turmoils.* That the same historical event chosen by VN for his short-story was also selected many years later by movie-director Rohmer is, in my eyes, one of the ironies or coincidences engendered by an "assistant producer"

Nabokov's story begins: "Meaning? Well, because sometimes life is merely that - an Assistant Producer. Tonight we shall to to the movies." A few paragraphs later he notes: "But the unexpected is the infra-red in the spectrum of Art." (several lines later he marks the pun, with the Red in caps) Amazing, eh? "Stranger than Fact," indeed!

* - What do you think of American writing? I noticed there are no American masterpieces on your list. What do you think of American writing since 1945?
VN: Well, seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years. The sexy, phony type of best seller, the violent, vulgar novel, the novelistic treatment of social or political problems, and, in general, novels consisting mainly of dialogue or social comment-- these are absolutely banned from my bedside. And the popular mixture of pornography and idealistic humhuggery makes me positively vomit.