I approached Rupert Everett’s new collection of writings with some degree of scepticism. The American No isn’t a set of short stories, except in the loosest sense. Framing most of these pieces are the author’s own experiences as a strolling player, someone too thoughtful and discerning for his own good, and therefore accustomed to his film or television projects not getting the nod or else going irretrievably astray. 

Central to such frustrations is the type of rebuff evoked by the book’s title. A phrase coined by a producer friend ‘with a gallows sensibility’, it identifies the ritual whereby, following an elaborate pitch of some fantastic idea, the Hollywood bosses you have been addressing walk you out, arm on shoulder, giving a firm impression that everything is in the bag. Afterwards, of course, you don’t hear another word from them. Most of the items in The American No originated as ideas or proposals for films. Gathering them together has been a kind of solace for Everett ‘during the long winter afternoons of the soul when the phone doesn’t ring’. 

Pride of place is given to the film script that Everett painstakingly devised from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which he clearly hopes might still be produced, despite the grim fact that almost nobody has so far succeeded in compressing the great roman-fleuve into a convincing screenplay. Everett’s