The New York Times looks at the “Slick. Young. Hip. Powerful.” world of studio execs, a lizardlike world where face and ritual rule and knowledge is powerless and truth is a rumor. This generation of players may be slick, hip and powerful, but they still like their comic books, as we witness the primal scene: an account of the pitch of a familiar comics property:

Then Bender got to the matter at hand, a pitch for a movie based on “Y: The Last Man,” a graphic novel by Brian Vaughan, Pia Guerra and José Marzan Jr.

The basic idea, as is often the case in today’s Hollywood, is quite simple: The movie begins with shots of all the world’s men – presidents, airline pilots, farmers, doctors and the rest – dropping dead for an unknown reason. All except one, a slacker who spends the rest of the movie battling a ticking clock as he hunts down the reason for the genetic apocalypse while trying to adjust to being the only man left with billions of women.

“There are 15 of these ‘last man left’ stories going around the town, but they’re all comedies,” said Brener, who shepherded the hit “Wedding Crashers” to the screen last summer. “This is a thriller and a love story. It could work.”

Bender grinned and reached for his BlackBerry. He has sold projects like “Monster-in- Law” and “The Butterfly Effect” to Brener, and he smelled pay dirt. “Wait till Richard hears the part where the only ones left picking up the garbage are supermodels,” he said to a reporter.