Amazing Stories, Episode 2.17, "Gershwin's Trunk"

It's been almost two hours since I was this excited about a tv episode. "Gershwin's Trunk" is the second episode Paul Bartel directed for the Steven Spielberg-produced Amazing Stories. It was co-written with John Meyer, who had co-written 1984's Not for Publication with Bartel (Meyer has no further IMDb credits).

Tempted to call this a more serious episode, prefer instead to call it the more deadpan of the two. Detective Watts (Bartel) witnesses the cover up of a crime committed by Broadway songwriter Jo-Jo Gillespie (Bob Balaban), and the episode is the telling of Gillespie's dark spiral.

The quick story is nimble and takes unexpected turns. There's rivalry, mysticism, betrayal, murder, housekeeping, detective work, songwriting, back-stage Broadway rehearsal, upscale NY restaurants, and everything in twenty-four minutes and played kind of straight (with Bartel winks); all together it's outrageously absurd.

Pretty sure the episode says that creative people who steal from the same source are bound to create derivative material, and also something about how often creative people steal from each other, and the shades of parasitism inherent to collaboration, and as Detective Watts says, "muses are fickle, Jo-Jo."

Again Bartel handles material with deep seriousness and complete ridiculousness, somehow, and with total understanding of, and control over, the magic of cinema.