The itinerant Mitchell is the sort of writer who doesn't hunt for profile-worthy subjects but who still manages to find them at almost every turn. Yet Gould proves an exception, and Mitchell works gingerly to bring the taciturn bohemian into his good graces. Mitchell initially catches sight of the trembling, scar-ridden Gould in a Greenwich Village diner as he prepares his lunch by pouring the contents of an entire bottle of ketchup into a cup of steaming water.

Incited by Gould's reputation as a profoundly odd, dynamic character and as a man of letters said to be halfway finished with his nonfiction masterpiece, the journalist offers up meals and bits of cash before Gould consents to be the subject of a Mitchell profile. During their conversations, Gould claims to speak sea gull vernacular -- thus the title of Mitchell's first piece, "Professor Sea Gull" (published in 1942), which earned Gould a brief period of celebrity. Benefactors would drop by the Minetta bar in the Village, where the scribe could be seen hunched by the window, beer or whiskey in hand, muttering to himself and occasionally scrawling in a notepad. And though Mitchell maintained contact with Gould for months after the article came out, he was unprepared for the tenaciousness with which Gould clung to him. At that time he had no intention of following up "Professor Sea Gull" with another piece.

"In New York, especially Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats ... I have always felt at home," said Gould, who died in 1957. In 1964 Mitchell wrote a revealing two-part article entitled "Joe Gould's Secret." And though Mitchell lingered on as a staff writer for the New Yorker for the next 32 years, sealed away in an office and bound to his typewriter, he never published another piece.

"It's so interesting that 'Joe Gould's Secret' was the final thing Mitchell wrote," says Tucci. "It's when he finally reveals Gould's secret that he reveals so much about himself, about how he identified with Gould, about how similar they were, about how at the end Mitchell was Gould.

"One of the main themes in my films has been the artist as pariah in American society," Tucci says with a slightly vexed expression. "The artist's place in our society is always sort of hanging out on this precipice. Why do we have this awful antagonistic relationship with people in the arts? Why is the artist always turned into the enemy? It's fucking bizarre. To be devoted to your art and feel that it is not a luxury -- it is an absolute necessity to society. It's fascinating to me. Joe Gould had written something that I put in the script about how people are afraid of the artist because the artist deals in ambiguity.

"But you know, people don't like ambiguity. I knew I had to make 'Big Night' because, though I had a perfectly fine career as an actor, I was not satisfied. I was frustrated working with directors: When I'd watch the final product of a movie, I felt I was seeing what was happening in American film, that there was this formula taking over. I wanted to see a film that had an ambiguous ending."

Tucci says that he wanted "Joe Gould's Secret" to deal with the idea of creativity in our culture, and the film's subtlety seems to underscore his feelings about the way art is viewed in America. "How many naked sculptures are there in New York? None. You might see a breast here and there," he says, laughing. "But really, no. You'll never see a penis. Lots of horses, you know, guys on them. How many statues of women? One -- of Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, where's the sex? Where is it? And then you look at the Internet and television. It's an adolescent's idea of sex. Things are ambiguous and dark and sexually provocative, just like your wife is sometimes. And the artist expresses that stuff freely, and it's frightening to people."

Tucci's frustrations with the artist's undervalued role in society have become even more personal in his yearlong struggle with the Writers' Guild.

The idea for "Joe Gould's Secret" effectively first came into being six years ago when one of the film's executive producers, Michael Lieber, persuaded Mitchell, who died in 1996, to agree to a film. Howard Rodman, the film's screenwriter, worked on the film for a year and a half before Tucci became involved with the project.

When Tucci did commit, it was with the understanding that he would rewrite the script; he worked on it for four months and estimates that he changed up to 80 percent of it. When the Writers' Guild, after both an arbitration and a hearing, refused to give him a shared credit, he was heartbroken. "I know that because I was both the director and the producer, it was harder for me to get credit. I know I have to let it go, but it was like the Salem witch trials. They said, 'Can you prove we did anything wrong?' And since everything took place behind closed doors, I couldn't."

Tucci refers to Rodman, the initial screenwriter, as a "great talent." But he speaks earnestly about the need for a particular precision in this script, and about how he was compelled to devote himself to the task of getting it exactly right, despite the violation of the Writers' Guild rules. "Well, you want to do him justice," Tucci says about the brainchild behind his film. "If I can make movies the way Joseph Mitchell wrote profiles, then I could die happy."

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