In 1973, after Francois Truffaut's movie about moviemaking Day for Night opened in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard sent him a letter. Fifteen years earlier, Truffaut and Godard had been friends and comrades, self-educated film nuts and critics who were beginning to make good on their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. Truffaut's The 400 Blows premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and was such a success that Godard was able to get funding for his own debut feature, Breathless, by having Truffaut agree to pretend that he had written the script. (Breathless originated with a news story about a young car thief turned killer that Truffaut had considered filming himself before making The 400 Blows.) The two had achieved fame as the twin giants of the French New Wave, but they had gradually drifted apart, both in their aesthetic aims and their personal relationship. In his letter, Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest movie but also brought the happy news that he had a way for Truffaut to repent: he offered to allow Truffaut to use some of his ill-gotten proceeds to fund a movie by Godard that would tell the truth about film sets, with a political-minded focus on the people who do the grunt work. The sensitive, gentle-natured Truffaut freaked out; he sent Godard a lengthy reply in which he discharged years' worth of pent-up resentments and declared that Godard's radicalism, which Godard wore as a badge of honor even as it limited his access to the large audiences that turned out for Truffaut's movies, was actually practiced in bad faith: "Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anyone or anything else."
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