Edward Marshall

A humorous, often on-the-money look at what it's like to be a small town garage band with a chance at success dangling in front of your face.

Tony (Lee Holmes), an introverted singer who fears performing publicly, forms an indie rock band with a gregarious drummer (Matthew Hennessey), stoner guitarist (Kevin Corrigan) and unstable bassist (Steve Parlavecchio). Together, they encounter tension, temptation and turmoil out on tour. But as their group plays gigs and wins over fans, the bandmates struggle with annoying rivalries, bitter infighting and an untrustworthy record company.

Manager Dick Harper and his attractive young wife Jane are used to a comfortable lifestyle. They just build a swimming pool when Dick is fired very unexpectedly - leaving him with $70,000 in debt on the house. They try to hide this from the neighbors and just cut down their expenses, but soon it's obvious. Living from unemployment drives them crazy - it's uncertain if they can keep the house. Dick decides that robbing drug stores is their only way out - but this takes more skill than expected! Only as a team Dick and Jane can succeed.

A hapless, hustling young attorney, Leo Harrigan (Ryan O'Neal), is on the run from an irate client when he falls into the hands of pioneer independent filmmaker H. H. Cobb (Brian Keith). As Harrigan begins writing for Cobb's Kinegraph Studios, he meets Kathleen (Jane Hitchcock), an aspiring actress, and falls instantly in love. Hoping to avoid the prying eyes of larger, rival production companies, Cobb hustles Harrigan off to direct several silent action films in the prairies of the Midwest. Although one of the major studios sends an enforcer, ex-alligator wrestler "Buck" Greenway (Burt Reynolds), to make trouble, after a fight with Harrigan, he agrees to join the company as its leading man. And during the filming of an action sequence, Buck and Kathleen are brought together in the basket of a runaway balloon and agree to marry. The entire crew, including Alice (Tatum O'Neal), a teenage truck driver who runs her own prop rental business, moves to Hollywood where they walk into a nickelodeon that is showing edited versions of the films they have been sending Cobb. Irate, they confront the studio tycoon and announce plans to form their own company. But the restrictions of a large studio and a romantic triangle conspire to break up the relationship until they reunite at the opening of D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," where a new age in filmmaking is born.