Elif Batuman looks at seven unproduced screenplays written by famous intellectuals, including Nabokov’s “phenomenally depressing” story of a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, and Sartre’s failed Freud epic. Other would-be screenwriters include Winston Churchill, Aldous Huxley, Georges Bataille, Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, and Frankfurt school philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.