Read This: The story of the great, unproduced screenplay and the man who inspired it 

The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or noteworthy pieces that caught our eye.

Film fans know Lem Dobbs as the respected screenwriter behind the Steven Soderbergh films Kafka, The Limey, and Haywire (and to a much lesser extent as the writer of Hider In The House). But in some circles he’s just as well known for a film he wrote that’s never been made, Edward Ford, which has had a reputation as the great unproduced screenplay since it first started making the rounds in 1979. Over at Slate, Matthew Dessem, best known as the man behind the Criterion Contraption blog, has a story about Edward Ford and a the man who inspired it. It’s a great read, and to say more about it would risk spoiling what begins as a tale of Hollywood’s inability to produce a screenplay—written when Dobbs was just 19—that seems to inspire everyone who reads it to try to make it, and ends up telling a smaller, deeper story about missed opportunities of a different sort.