The film offers a dark, cynical look at Hollywood in the late 1930s and tells the tales of several of the residents of the dilapidated San Bernardino Arms: Faye Greener, a trashy wannabe actress with limited talent, and her father Harry, a former vaudeville working as a Door-to-door; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who desperately loves and is fanatically devoted to Faye; and East Coast of the United States White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist employed by the production department of a major studio, who also fancies Faye. It is filled with unusual and often bizarrely disturbing images: a middle-aged man sits in an untended garden staring at a large lizard that stares back at him; a young woman is transported into the film she's watching and finds herself portraying a harem girl in old Baghdad; a Dwarfism strokes a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cock fight, then tosses it back into the ring to its death; an androgyny child standing on the sidewalk beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West once his attention has been caught. These brief vignette (literature)s do little to advance the basic plot, but they serve to comment on the sleaziness of Hollywood and its varied inhabitants. Spectacle fills the screen - a set of the Battle of Waterloo battlefield collapses on the Extra (actor) during the making of the Story within a story, and in the film's climax, a world premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater evolves into a horrific riot culminating in gruesome tragedy.