I had a dream that I was attending a special advance-preview screening of a new version (or “special edition”) of
_Sophie’s Choice_.  Richard Dreyfuss was on hand to introduce the film and make a few comments, which was
wholly appropriate, given that he had written, directed, produced, and starred in it.  It was freakishly long, like five or six hours,and seemed to focus almost exclusively on Dreyfuss himself, with hardly any spoken dialogue or scenes in which he
was not the direct focal point.  It was only after the closing credits began to roll that I noticed that nothing from the
original – characters, plotline, even basic premise – were in any way represented or even intimated in Dreyfuss’s version.
In short, Dreyfuss’s “version,” if it could even be called that, had essentially no commonality or point of contact with
the 1982 effort or Styron’s novel.  It was a completely freestanding work that shared nothing with the earlier movie and book
except the title.  What is more, it was the most blatant vanity project imaginable:  Dreyfuss had simply paid someone to take
footage with a handheld camera, as he sat in his living room and rambled endlessly about mundane topics from his personal life
in which nobody but Dreyfuss himself could possibly have been interested.  Yet the work was being treated as high art,
as a watershed moment in the history of cinematic form.