Build a movie plot around this: What is stolen from Alice Her beloved dress
Answer:
A young boy by the name of Robert sees his hillbilly father shoot a horse with a broken leg to put it out of its misery.Years later, it's the Great Depression, the 1930's. Robert dreamed of being a great filmmaker but is now almost broke. He decides to enter a Los Angeles dance marathon, a craze that many people are falling into in California with the promise of winning cash. It is there that he meets his first dance partner, a beautiful but caustic and bitter woman named Gloria, apparently recovering from a suicide attempt. For her, after years of bad luck with men and no money herself, the dance competition offers her false happiness. Together, she and Robert form a friendship.As the competition goes on, it becomes evident that the show host, Rocky, doesn't have much money himself and, despite showing genuine remorse about it, he frequently exploits and psychologically abuses the dancers and makes a spectacle out of them for the viewers of the show, who pay him a great deal of money every day just to get into the arena. Alice, an aspiring actress, goes into hysterics when her beloved dress is stolen, and a man's leg becomes paralyzed. When he falls unconscious, he is given castor oil and doused in ice water, and then forced to dance again. A pregnant woman dances and has to race with her husband around a track, often becoming exhausted and collapsing.Gloria becomes frustrated and snaps at Robert, jealous of the attention he gives to Alice, who bears a resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. When Robert discovers that Rocky is the one who stole and ripped up Alice's dress, he questions him, but Rocky tells him that it's just show business, and that the spectators want to see the dancers as miserable as they themselves feel because of the Depression.During a repeated, timed race around a track, Gloria's new dance partner, an elderly sailor, has a heart attack and dies, which Rocky cheerfully covers up from the audience. Upon seeing his death, Alice has a mental breakdown, losing her mind and hiding in the shower....