Better than Ezra?

The Day of the Locust is a comic masterpiece which hilariously berates the Hollywood culture industry of the 30s. Homer Simpson is a vision of genius: a loveable dolt from suburban Des Moines, Iowa who finds hard times in Hollywood's culture of excess and glam. At first he grows lonely: "How empty his house was! He tried to fill it by singing: Oh, say can you see, By the dawn's early light... It was the only song he knew." Donald Sutherland's portrayal of Homer in the 70's film adaptation with Karen Black is quite possibly even stronger than what West had imagined.  But there's so much greatness the movie leaves out:

The outfit Homer wore was very funny.  He had on loose blue linen slacks and a chocolate flannel jacket over a yellow polo shirt.  Only a Negro could have worn it without looking ridiculous, and no one was ever less a Negro than Homer.

And I keep playing the concluding paragraph over and over in my head, where the central character Tod Hackett is carried away after a bloody riot outside a film premiere:

He was carried away through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.