"The world just doesn't owe you anything -- I'm probably just too Midwestern for that -- even if you're really good," he said.

"Perhaps, you know, it's absolutely awful that 'The Sound and the Fury's' first printing was 5,000 copies, and any Barbara Cartland novel is trillions, but so what?" he continued. "That's absolutely the way the world is, and you know what? People had better get used to it. And sometimes really talented people are discovered, and sometimes they're not. There is no justice in that. And if that's what some of our films have had to do with, we've probably lived those lives.

"Obviously we'd all like it to be easier. Obviously we'd all like it to be not such a struggle to do what are essentially quite small independent films that are funny, compelling, of interest. But it hasn't been easy, and it probably won't be any easier. But that's the way it is."

Mr. Mudd's roots stretch back much further than Thailand, to a setting that by Hollywood standards is at least as exotic: a high school basketball court in southern Illinois.

That's where Mr. Malkovich, who grew up in Benton, Ill., a coal mining town, first noticed Mr. Smith, who was a star guard and forward for the Springfield Lanphier Lions. They became roommates as freshmen at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. "Smart alecks, plaid shirts, that kind of back-of-the-class thing," recalled Mr. Malkovich, now 52, who moved to Chicago after college to help start the Steppenwolf Theater Company.

A few years later, the sandy-haired, white-as-a-biscuit Mr. Smith -- who relishes disclosing his unlikely first job, running an African-American political organization in Springfield -- remembers getting a call from Mr. Malkovich, "who said: 'You know how to write a grant. Come take over our theater.' "