Movies That Flicker Only on the Page Janet Maslin recently reviewed two novels that each featured fictional movies. Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins" includes the idea for a movie called "Donner!" about the Donner party, which, Ms. Maslin writes, "might just be the worst screenplay idea Hollywood has ever known." And in Alan Furst's new novel, "Mission to Paris," an actor stars in a movie about World War I called "Après la Guerre," or "After the War," which begins filming at the dawn of World War II. This spurred thoughts about other movies invented by novelists. Cousins to the fictional books in literature collected by a blog called The Invisible Library. The novels in Bruce Wagner's "cellphone trilogy" ("I'm Losing You," "I'll Let You Go" and "Still Holding") abound in real and fake Hollywood types doing fictional things, including the movies that Mr. Wagner invents to skewer the business. In "I'm Losing You," a made-up producer named Zev Turtletaub wants to adapt Gogol's "Dead Souls" into a movie about people with AIDS getting cash advances on their life insurance, which would "make "Philadelphia" look like the HBO cartoon it was." He plans to approach Alec Baldwin about it, to tell him "this was Academy Award time, "Elmer Gantry" meets "Inferno." " In Mr. Wagner's "Still Holding," the real-life director Darren Aronofsky is said to be working on a movie called "Special Needs": The germ of the idea had occurred to him while he was watching an old Cliff Robertson movie called "Charly"; as it turned out, "Special Needs" was "Charly" in reverse. What would happen, he wondered, if a famous actor set out to do a film - say, a character study of a retarded man - and before shooting began, sustained injuries in an auto accident that left him "neurologically impaired"? As the story wrote itself out, Darren said that his conceit, which seemed at first a kind of knee-jerk satirical response to a genre that had become a perennial audience pleaser and vainglorious actors" showcase staple, revealed itself to be more layered and poignant than he could have imagined. Other novels use their movies as more central plot elements. In Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark," an aspiring actress named Margot is horrified when she sees the results of her first work: "That monster on the screen had nothing in common with her - she was awful, awful! She was in fact like her mother, the porter's wife, in her wedding photograph. When Martin Amis's riotous novel "Money" opens, the TV commercial director John Self is set to make his first feature film, tentatively called "Good Money." Self would prefer "Bad Money." Elements of the plot are revealed throughout as Self deals with the fussy demands of his actors, who have cartoonish names like Lorne Guyland, Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis. For sheer fake-cinema heft, the unsurprising champion may be David Foster Wallace. His novel "Infinite Jest" takes its title from both "Hamlet" and a fictional movie of that same title, made by a character named James O. Incandenza. The movie is said to be so entertaining that it renders viewers incapable of anything but watching it over and over again. Among the novel's legendary footnotes is one that unfurls Incandenza's filmography over the course of more than eight pages of very small type. Two examples of his movies and their plots: "Widower": "Shot on location in Tucson AZ, parody of broadcast television domestic comedies, a cocaine-addicted father (Watt) leads his son (Reat) around their desert property immolating poisonous spiders." And: "Very Low Impact": "A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students and employers." Has anyone more fully imagined a filmography than Wallace did when he invented Incandenza? And what are some other notable examples of cinema that exist only on the page?