the Port Washington meet — "He’d been spotted first by the…"
He’d been spotted first by the late Dr. James Incandenza at age six, eleven summers back, when Incandenza was doing an early and coldly conceptual Super-8 on people named John Wayne who were not the real thespio-historical John Wayne, a film Wayne’s not-to-be-fucked-with papa eventually litigated the kid’s segment out of because the film had the word Homo in the title.
Context
Two fathers cross over a six-year-old. The dead founder first "found" Wayne through a film — JOI trawling for people named John Wayne with a camera, scooping up the miner's boy at age six — and Wayne's "not-to-be-fucked-with papa" fought the film in court to get the kid's segment cut. It's a compact collision of the theme's poles: JOI's paternity always routed through the lens (he meets the future champion the way he meets everyone, as footage), against a biological father whose protectiveness takes the form of litigation. The boy Himself filmed at six is the same boy whose real father is now dying in the mine (previous entry) to fund the greatness Himself's academy is finishing.