David Edelstein's letter to the New York Times:

Boy, could I relate to Wes Anderson's "My Private Screening with Pauline Kael" [Jan. 31] about traveling to the Berkshires to show his film Rushmore to the retired New Yorker critic. Here's a young guy who adored Ms. Kael's work all his life, learned how to watch movies from it, and dreamed of screening for her his own film. Doubtless the response he'd hoped for was along the lines of: "You're a genius. You've revolutionized filmmaking. You've captured the adolescent experience as no one has before."

What a bummer it must have been to find Ms. Kael somewhat hobbled by Parkinson's Disease. And then, when she gently implied that she didn't think the picture added up to much, how devastating. Here's the thing, though. A person with even an trace of decency would not have turned around and written up the encounter in a way designed to make sport of her infirmities. I hope that if Mr. Anderson is ever on the kind of mind-altering medications that advanced Parkinson's and meningitis sufferers find it necessary to take simply to function, someone doesn't visit his home and then surprise him with an account of what he said and did in a major newspaper.

Anderson's response had enough half-truths and distortions to warrant a reply in this column. Let's look at his assertions line by line:

I sent a copy of my article to Pauline Kael before it was published because I didn't want to refer to her Parkinson's without her permission. I told her I wouldn't publish the story if she didn't want me to.

According to Kael, she said it was OK to publish the story as part of the introduction to the Rushmore script: Printed screenplays generally have runs of no more than a few thousand copies and are largely read by buffs and wannabe screenwriters. But she didn't know that Anderson's account would appear in the New York Times until the day the paper landed on her doorstep--and if she had known, she told me, she'd have screamed.

She read the piece and thanked me for dedicating our script to her.

According to Kael, she first learned she was the dedicatee of the Rushmore script when she read Anderson's reply to my letter in last Sunday's Times.

She also suggested some grammatical changes and asked me to correct a few details, which I did.

She asked that Anderson note that her recollection of the events in question was quite different--which he didn't.

The suggestion that I wanted "to make sport" of Ms. Kael's infirmities causes me great pain and embarrassment.

So much pain and embarrassment that a few nights ago he was telling the story all over again on national television to Tom Snyder. Anderson's encounter with the retired New Yorker critic has now become comic fodder for his autobiography. How long before it turns up in a movie?

I thought it was clear in my article that I not only deeply respect Ms. Kael but that I very much enjoyed meeting with her.

I like Ken Tucker's description of the piece in a recent appreciation of Kael in Salon: "putatively affectionate but peculiarly heartless." Like the obnoxious hero of Rushmore, Max Fischer, Anderson has trouble seeing much beyond the bubble of his narcissism.