Sullivan's travels

In year of 2000ad the Coen Brothers brought out O Brother Where Art Thou and I saw one of the interviews they did about it.

In that interveiw the Coen Bros. revealed a tidbit of info that simultaneously solved a life-long mystery for me and also made me feel kinda cool.

Way, way back: so far back that I have no idea how far back it is, I saw a black and white fillum on the telly that must have impressed itself fairly deeply into my consciousness because my mind has drifted back to it again and again, throughout my life.

It was such an unusual fillum; it has as it's theme:

the value of straight out entertainment

vs

educational and morally instructive work that raises empathy and
benefits society.

It begins with a fight on top of a train, which, (in the style of the newsreel opening to Citizen Kane), then cuts to a group of film-makers discussing it.

Because I spent the majority of my life pre-interweb, I was, for years, describing this film to random folk hoping that someone would know the title; with zero success, until finally I was beginning to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

An then it happened, with the dawning of the new millenium,— there was meself watchin' the Coen lads blatherin' on about their newest flick like as what they doin' that was going to have George Clooney in it and then they started talking a bout a film called 'Sullivans Travels' in such a way that I knew it had to be that exact same fillum I'd been talking about my whole life long and never knew the name of and two things shook my world in a fundamentally positive way.

#1 The fillum was real and now had a name.
#2 The Loneliness of being the only person who'd ever seen it was over: it went from bein' 'The Film That Nobody But Darren Has Ever Seen' to 'That Film that only Darren and the Coen Brothers Have Ever Seen.' which was a vast improvement, of sorts.

Incidentally the film that they're trying to make in 'Sullivan's Travels'— that we see at the beginning with the fight on the train,

is called 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

100% FACT!