"As you know, to tell 18-year-olds that we're cool and funny is disaster," said Charles Rosen, president at Amalgamated.
While a total dearth of anxiety was a fantastically enviable character trait in real life, how could we write a film about a man who just didn't care when everything went wrong and in fact found disaster funny?
At one point, the film presents subtitles to translate the street language, but that was a lot funnier when the disaster spoof "Airplane" did it for Barbara Billingsley ("I speak jive") 25 years ago.
In "The Uses of the Blues," he writes about finding in the blues "something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster … so that it's this passionate detachment, this inwardness coupled with outwardness, this ability to know, all right, it's a mess, and you can't do anything about it … so, well, you have to do something about it".
So, as he set out to buy the opening-night suit, it did seem like a classic Cromer choice — unexpected and funny while simultaneously courting disaster — to cast as his personal shopper a heterosexual man.
One relaxes into it, I suppose a bit like knitting.' The diaries are very funny about the many disasters in his life - his shattered health, his sliding reputation, his chaotic finances.
To him, disaster was seldom funny.
If anything went wrong, it would probably just float to the ground like a deflated balloon, so picturing any kind of disaster was almost funny – like, "Here's this big, billowy aircraft and it's having some problems!
If you can get started on perfecting the squirrel-kabob now, people will eventually stop criticizing you and rather be drawn to your mastery, sing your praises, and champion you as the disaster zone M.V.P. Funny how quickly social conventions can change when everything falls to shit.
It sounds funny but the potential for ecological disaster is massive".
