(2008) Based on fact and adapted from Robert Kaplow's novel, director Richard Linklater's intimate drama, in which a mystery of romance takes place behind the scenes of the Mercury Theater, from Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo's screenplay, responds to Gretta's question: "Why does everything have to have a big plot?"

Inside the Gaiety record shop in New York City in early November 1937, Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a 17-year-old high-school thespian, hears an aspiring young writer Gretta Adler (Zoe Kazan) playing Gershwin on the piano. Across the street on West 41st a troupe of actors in front of the Mercury Theater are "waiting for Orson."

After playing a drum roll and singing a Wheaties jingle during an impromptu audition for Orson Welles (Christian McKay, while capturing the voice, general appearance, and character of Welles, at 35 doesn't look as young as the genius of 22), Richard hears: "You're hired!" His small part as Lucius in Caesar, Welles's abbreviated version of Shakespeare's tragedy in modern dress with Romans in fascist uniforms, introduces him to actors such as Joseph Cotton (James Tupper), Norman Lloyd (Leo Bill), and George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin), in the roles of Publius, Cinna the poet, and Mark Antony, respectively, as well as to Orson's attractive assistant Sonja Jones (Claire Danes).

Taking the part of Brutus ("a reprieve from being myself"), Welles is the dictatorial director ("every single one of you stands here as an adjunct to my vision") - as Sonja says to Richard, "very competitive, very self-centered, very brilliant." Married to a very pregnant Virginia, Orson, feeling he's surrounded by "small-mindedness," is having an affair with a ballerina; he rides in an ambulance to avoid traffic. Producer John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) is left with the task of soothing the ruffled feathers of egos, such as set-designer Sam Leve's grievance, by saying: "He's young."

In a taxi on the way to the radio studio for a live broadcast of The Shadow (employing the proceeds to pay for the play), Welles reads to Richard from Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, the same cribbed passage he inserts into his speech as improvisation on the air.

While everyone else is rehearsing, Richard in the basement accidentally sets off the sprinkler system throughout the theater, leading Orson to exclaim sabotage; but the young actor avoids incrimination by reminding Welles of his superstition of having to exorcise the malevolent spirit before opening night: "Maybe this is just the bad-luck thing."

After Richard (fixing a lottery to win a date and a night at Welles's "illicit retreat") and then Orson (enticing her with an introduction to David O. Selznick) share "quadruple space" with Sonja (who says to Richard, "You romanticize everything"), "junior" (as Orson calls the "kid," but whom he has praised as being "a God-created actor") takes Cotton's advice: "Fight for her. That's what she wants."

Richard asks a favor of Sonja to use her connections with Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, to have him take a look at Gretta's short story, "Hungry Generations." The great manipulator after negotiating a deal with Richard ("I need you" after having denigrated him with "a talentless little shit") to keep him in the cast and bucking up George's courage to take the stage for the two-dollar tragedy after a panic attack, soliloquizes from Othello: "This is the night that either makes me or foredoes me quite." For everyone else, the possibilities are merely promising.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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