Found Drama in practice: the hoax-revenge on the critics — the dart, the phone book, "the ultimate Neorealism"

texture · UNDATED (B.S./early-Subsidized boundary; run "for a few months")

• When: UNDATED — planned during JOI's McLean Hospital stints, run "for a few months" until "Himself couldn't keep a straight face anymore or had had enough revenge on the critics"; recounted 3 Nov YDAU (Orin to "Helen Steeply")
• What: The doctrine of events 4-5 enacted as a career episode. Per Orin, Found Drama was revenge on the tenure-jockeys of the trendy "Orthochromatic Neorealism" who kept writing that JOI was "still mired in this late-century self-referencing unentertaining formalism": he "made up a genre that he considered the ultimate Neorealism," got film-journals to run proclamatory edicts, and seeded it through cronies — "Duquette at M.I.T." and "a Brandeis critic named like Posener" (each of whom landed "a mammoth grant"; JOI "got two smaller ones," lecturing turgidly at graduate film programs). The form itself: tear a random metro-Boston White-Pages page, thumbtack it up, throw a dart — "the name it hit becomes the subject of" the Drama, an unwitting, unfilmed, audience-less protagonist for the next hour and a half, because the joke's theory was that there's no audience, director, stage, or set in Reality either, and "in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama." Nothing was ever recorded; critics hailed it anyway. When the hoax was unveiled JOI "made a lot of enemies because he refused to give [the grants] back" — he spread the money among local improvisation companies. The purest anticonfluential gesture in the oeuvre is a prank with no film in it at all. See the JOI timeline (the McLean commitments).