Did you hear the one about three paranoid film theorists? They were sure someone in a cinema somewhere was watching them. The most significant Soviet semiotician and literary thinker, Iurii Lotman, in a conversation with Iurii Tsivian and Mikhail Iampolski remarked,

I argue counter to Lotman, not only that it is possible to make a film based on Tolstoy’s last story The Forged Coupon (Fal’shivyi kupon), published posthumously in 1911, but that the story, its structure and its themes have been a source for countless other films. The Forged Coupon was a culmination of a lifetime’s work, a spiritual and conceptual legacy that has created a complex network of cinematic influences – the first emerged in Russia in 1913 as The Counterfeit Note (Fal′shivyi kupon, Petr Chardynin); it was followed by a much shorter Italian version in 1914, The Altered Note (Il falso cupone); then in 1926 came a German variation, The Adventures of a Ten Mark Note (Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines, Berthold Viertel); and this was succeeded by perhaps the best-known adaptation, in France, directed by Robert Bresson, L’Argent (1983). This dark interpretation in turn inspired the Finnish director Aki Louhimies’s even more miserable 2005 version Frozen Land (Paha Maa). Further unattributed re-imaginings include Twenty Bucks (Keva Rosenfeld, 1993); Pay It Forward (Mimi Leder, 2000) and Loot (Bablo, Konstantin Buslov, 2011). Not all these variations directly attribute Tolstoy’s tale, but the distinctive narrative relay structure of The Forged Coupon has created the complex ‘network narratives’ identified by David Bordwell as becoming a remarkably common ‘dominant principle of offbeat storytelling’ that has spread globally in resistance to mainstream cinema narratives.