Jules Dassin/Night and the City

I interviewed Jules Dassin, still dapper and articulate, in the mid 1990s and brought along a vintage paperback copy of Night and the City, hoping I'd have the nerve to ask him to sign it. Fortunately, we got along like a house afire: Though I was much younger than he was, we both grew up in a New York that bore little resemblance to the new, improved version. So at the end of the interview I bit the bullet and handed him the movie tie-in paperback and asked.

He looked at it intently for a moment and then said, "Would you mind

if I wrote my name across Gene Tierney's creamy bosom?" And he did.