Everyone who loves movies plays the Casting Game: Who would you cast if you could make a movie based on this novel or that comic? My son and I play this game on a regular basis and so have developed a series of more-or-less formal rules: for instance, he decreed some time ago that suggesting Daniel Day-Lewis for pretty much any part amounts to using a cheat code: not the sort of thing a person who takes a game seriously should do.

But that example raises another question: Is Day-Lewis eligible for the game at all?

There are two general version of the Casting Game, and it can only be played properly once you decide which version you’re using:

  1. Only actors who are active, age-appropriate, and available may be considered. For instance, if you try to cast a good Fantastic Four movie, you can't pick Mark Ruffalo as Reed Richards. In the Marvelworld, he's taken. (But Ruffalo would be a great Richards.) And now you can't cast Daniel Day-Lewis in anything, because he has retired from acting to become a dressmaker. You can't say "A young Meryl Streep would be great" for this or that part.
  2. In this second version, you can cast anyone from any time. I can do what I've wanted to do for thirty years now: cast a young Day-Lewis in an adaptation — to be written by myself — of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. (Other cast members: a young Naomi Watts as Sonia and a middle-aged Wallace Shawn as Porfiry Petrovich.)
My son thinks that V1 offers the proper degree of challenge, while V2 is the equivalent of playing a video game on the easiest setting. I am not so sure — but of course, that may be because I've watched more old movies than he has, which gives me a bit of an advantage while playing V2. I like V2 because it allows the imagination free play: it's wonderful, I think, to consider what a Batman movie directed by Billy Wilder would look like, especially if it starred the best possible Bruce Wayne: Cary Grant.

On the other side of the ledger, a significant advantage for V1 is that what it imagines could possibly happen, which can make for some real excitement.

So maybe the best way to think about V1 and V2 is not as versions of the same game, but as two completely different endeavors. But in any case, you have to know what the rules are before you play, or bickering will ensue.