Woody Allen as Charlie Chaplin (photo by Irving Penn, 1972)
Actually, I have a conceptual notion that I get a machine that projects me into a work of fiction because I’m in love with Anna Karenina or something, and I have an affair with her there, and finally she comes to New York and I stash her in a hotel room in town and cheat on my wife with her. I’ve been toying with that idea in different forms - that my wife is involved with J. Alfred Prufrock and I go to find her, or this guy has a machine that will project me into Anna Karenina, for instance, or Madame Bovary because I’m in love with her and it goes wrong and projects me into a French grammar book by mistake and there are no humans but only verbs and other parts of speech (in the finished piece, The Kugelmass Episode, the main character is “projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener [‘to have’]-a large and hairy irregular verb- raced after him on its spindly legs.”) - Woody Allen, 1974.