That night he dreamed that Miles defined movie-making as dancing with a city shoe on one foot and a country on the other.
But he did direct pictures that defined movies for generations of Americans, smash hits like "Gone With the Wind," "The Wizard of Oz," "Captains Courageous" and "A Guy Named Joe".
He was not pressed to define "movies" nor how they might be seen.
First-run Hollywood movies are defined as movies from the six major studios – NBC Universal, Viacom, Fox, The Walt Disney Company, Sony and Time Warner and their wholly owned or controlled subsidiaries – shown in the first pay-TV subscription window.
There has been no generally accepted verification of the existence of a snuff film as it is strictly defined: a movie in which a premeditated killing takes place for the benefit of the camera, and by implication the viewer.
Devotion to playthings and playmates, a fascination with bodily fluids and a queasy obsession with sex — these were what defined a movie hero not preoccupied with killing bad guys.
While the Bay Area now has only a handful of rep theaters -- loosely defined as movie houses that don't screen first-run films from major studios -- there are more than 60 festivals, according to the San Francisco Film Society.
The film that defined road movies for today's audiences, Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider," was about the end of innocence and the implosion of the American dream during the Vietnam years.
Boyle's love of the band's first LP saw him initially cut his second, career-defining film, Trainspotting – the defining Britpop movie – solely to Dubnobass.
In some respects "The Big Lebowski" was Mr. Bridges's "Raging Bull," a defining movie.
They were also inextricably tied to the disco era's defining movie, "Saturday Night Fever," a showcase for their music that included the hit "Stayin' Alive," its propulsive beat in step with the strut of the film's star, John Travolta.
