Once, I was in the desert with some cowboys. We came upon a little shack, hardly bigger than this room, that cowboys used to rest. Absolutely nothing within fifty miles, just that one little building, and on the floor there were girlie magazines and some about guitar-playing cowboys too. I discovered they believed those cowboys were real ones, and not them. They were not something called ’cowboys’, they were just working men. Reality was in the movies. It was terrible. I remember feeling it was the end of human consciousness that they should devalue themselves and value that nonsense. Because the world didn’t respect them, the realities, but respected the facsimilies, they were nothing.

Arthur Miller in an interview with Serge Toubiana about the making of the film The Misfits, 1998, Phaidon Press 2000