Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house
By a rather creepy coincidence, it turned out that, up in our room, Kyle Dempsy Coyle and Mario were also watching one of Himself’s old efforts. […] The window’s whole view had the gray grainy quality of a poor photo. […] The cartridge was Himself’s Accomplice!, a short melodrama with Cosgrove Watt and a boy no one had ever seen before or since.
Context
The scene's premise: Hal walks upstairs from cueing Good-Looking Men (172) into his brothers' room, where a second Himself cartridge is already running — the sons independently converging on the father's filmography on the same snowed-in morning, and Hal himself files it as "a rather creepy coincidence." Even the blizzard outside arrives pre-mediated: the window has "the gray grainy quality of a poor photo." The film's second lead is "a boy no one had ever seen before or since" — a performer with no existence outside one JOI cartridge; 178's revolving-door co-star ("He wasn’t one of Jim’s regulars… epicene") and Accomplice!'s "fragile and epicene" boy share both the adjective and the untraceability (echo observed, not pressed).