The streets of lower Manhattan are deserted--also spotlessly clean and glowing in the light of the golden hour--when the studio head takes the movie director outside to tell him he's washed up. Those were great dreams he had in New York in the old days, with Cassavetes, but they're over. How it must wound the director to hear these words in Hollywood, on a mere back-lot simulacrum of New York--and from his own ex-wife! How it must shame him to hear the name of Cassavetes! Although the director claims to be the last American auteur, who is being fired because he won't compromise, we've seen some of the picture he was shooting, and it looks less like Cassavetes than a feature-length ad for "Dysfunction" by Calvin Klein.

But Hollywood holds out hope even for a moviemaker who's so pretentious that he spells his first name "Viktor." The director receives a genie in a bottle--or, in this case, a wonderful computer program on a hard drive. This gift puts into his hands a virtual actress, or synthespian, who can be molded exactly as he wishes and secretly inserted into his not-quite-finished movie. The computer program is known as Simulation One; the virtual actress, as Simone. When the picture is released, it will be Simone, not Viktor, who wins the public's unconditional love--after which it's only a matter of time before he's struggling to shove the genie back into its bottle.

"Our ability to manufacture fraud," muses the director, "now exceeds our ability to detect it." These words will do to sum up a theme that has emerged in the work of Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed Simone. He first made a name for himself as the screenwriter of The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey unwittingly resided on a TV soundstage the size of an entire village. Niccol next wrote and directed Gattaca, a futuristic fantasy about a world where you have to be physically perfect, or else. Now comes Simone, a story about the public's adoration for an actress who is too good to be true, and isn't. "Simone has the voice of the young Lauren Bacall, the body of Sophia Loren and the face of Audrey Hepburn crossed with an angel," raves one critic about the new star. "Almost right," the director mutters.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.