Who Leith is: Himself's production assistant, endowed in perpetuity at E.T.A. ("The Diz")

texture · UNDATED (standing role, B.S. film years through YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing status; the payroll arrangement runs from Incandenza's will into the YDAU present)
• What: Mr. Disney R. Leith is the late founder/director's "production assistant" — one of four film-world loyalists (with sound engineer Mrs. Pricket, Best Boy Mr. Ogilvie, and third-favorite actress Ms. Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne-Chawaf) whose presence on E.T.A.'s academic payroll is "legally willed and endowed-for-perpetuity": Incandenza's testament keeps him at the Academy for good. Persona texture reaches the reader entirely secondhand: Pemulis calls him "The Diz" (scene 032); he is physically enormous and round — Hal sizes up a stranger at a Meeting as "almost morbidly round, his body nearly Leith-sized and globularly round" (scene 160, a comparison only, Leith absent); and John Wayne's dosed on-air WETA castigation of his instructors, read back by deLint at Pemulis's hearing, immortalizes him as the "sort of man you always end up sitting next to at civic functions" (n.332).