“I liked Lost in Space,” Stefan said.“The movie or the TV series?”“The movie? Right. I had forgotten about the movie,” he said soberly. “It was better that way.”

“The movie was Son of Frankenstein, and there was a Gene Autry film along with it. I liked the Frankenstein movie. I liked all Frankenstein movies. But as for Gene Autry, I never liked him very much. He had a bad habit of pulling out his guitar and singing, right in the middle of the movie.”

“Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?”

“The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.”

“The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.”

“Yeah, I say. Haven't you ever noticed that life is like a series of movies?”