This is an early work. Naive, innocent, but charming nevertheless.
THE FALL AND RISE OF MICKEY GOODBAR
Screenplay © By David Collins and Peter Devonald
LOGLINE
Can you be successful and stay true to your ideals? Can you produce quality films and remain at the top? Armed with some dusty old scripts and a dream, Mickey goes to Hollywood to find out...
SYNOPSIS
It's the 1980s... a world of Reagonomics, bright pastels, big hair and shoulder pads. Mickey is a hard working guy, but his restaurant business has gone bust and his wife and kids have left him in the doldrums. Tired of New York, with its bad traffic and high cost of living, he sets out for Hollywood with some dusty old scripts and a dream.
He’s interviewed for a secretary job at a major film studio. A top movie producer, Allen Burke hires him but Mickey soon gets the assistant job when Leila (the previous assistant) is shot and killed in an armed robbery at a fast food joint. Mickey moves quickly into the fast-lane lifestyle of movies, girls, drugs and booze, but Hollywood isn't what he expected.
Although Mickey manages to produce a few films, they are all box-office flops due to their moral high ground, lack of budgets, nosy writers or drug frazzled actors. Mickey's life falls apart; Burke is busted on narcotics charges and serves time, Mickey's fiancé leaves him for an up and coming director and Mickey's morality disintegrates into a haze of drugs and booze.
Mickey becomes increasingly paranoid as the journey progresses. Thinking the whole world has got it in for him, he builds up an armoury of guns and hides away in his editing studio at home to complete his final masterpiece, a three-hour epic account of a Middle Eastern Revolution. Neither the studios nor the producers support his viewpoints and insist on the final cut... The studio changes the story from a factual account of a nation’s cultures and traditions to a Hollywood farce of epic proportions. However it is hugely successful and goes on to win Golden Globe and Academy Awards. This infuriates the Middle Eastern backers of the picture. They feel that Mickey has let them down and send a gang of thugs to do away with him.
Mickey may be rich and famous, but he is definitely not happy. He contemplates doing himself in after a night of drugs and booze. He stands on the edge of a building about to throw himself off… but at the last minute he misinterprets a large neon Coca-Cola billboard for the light of god. He is spiritually awakened and returns to Hollywood on a new high.