Q: Build a movie plot around this: What kind of person is Rhodes? Coarse and abusive
A: The setting for the film is late 1950s America, a time during which television was rapidly replacing radio as the most popular entertainment medium. Although Rhodes is coarse and abusive, he possesses a colloquial, on-air charm that quickly endears him to the hearts and minds of rural listeners after Marcia Jeffries (Neal), a small-town radio personality, discovers him in the county jail of the fictional town of Pickett, in northeast Arkansas, and lands him a radio show there. A talent scout invites him to appear on television in Memphis, Tennessee, where Rhodes is introduced to Mel Miller (Matthau), a bookish Vanderbilt graduate who writes his scripts. However, Rhodes makes a name for himself by insulting his sponsor to the delight of his adoring audience. Rhodes's sponsor, the "Luffler Mattress" company, is offended but forced to relent in canceling the show when they discover Rhodes's antics are actually increasing their sales (and that the wife of owner Luffler is a Lonesome Rhodes fan).An opportunistic "office boy" (portrayed by Anthony Franciosa) lands Rhodes a contract in New York City, where he becomes the national TV spokesman for Vitajex, an innocuous dietary supplement. A frenetic montage of Rhode's hyperbolic ads for Vitajex is one of the film's most memorable sequences, revealing the gullibility of the American public to a persuasive con-artist. In the tradition of classical tragedy, Rhodes is undone by his thirst for power and by Jeffries who, despite building his stardom, becomes so fed up that she allows him to expose his contempt for his fans on the air.As a "Cracker Barrel" broadcast ends, Rhodes is shown, with sound off and an announcer doing a voiceover, smiling and waving to the camera as he speaks contemptuously of his audience. In the control room, Jeffries and the technical staff hear him continue to mock his viewers as "idiots," "morons," "guinea pigs." Fed up with Rhodes' betrayal, aware she helped create the monster, Jeffries pushes slide switches that throw Rhodes's comments on the...

Q: Build a movie plot around this: What is Arindam Mukherjee's profession? Star of Bengali films
A: A famous film actor Arindam (Uttam Kumar), a star of Bengali films, has been invited to the capital to receive a prestigious award. As all the flights are booked, he is forced to travel by a train from Calcutta to New Delhi. He is in a foul mood as the morning's papers are filled with his being involved in an altercation and his latest film is slated to become his first flop.In the restaurant car, he meets Aditi (Sharmila Tagore), a young journalist who edits a serious women's magazines. Filled with contempt for the likes of him, she secretly plans to interview him because she thinks it would make a saleable 'copy'. It soon leads to him pouring out his life history. Aditi takes notes, surreptitiously. Critical of the star, she interrogates him and the star ends up re-examining his life. In a series of conversations with Aditi, he reveals his past and guilt.He talks about Shankarda, his mentor, taking us back to his early youth. His selling out to films and giving up theatre against the wishes of his old teacher... His first day's shoot, and he being snubbed by a successful actor Mukunda Lahiri. A few years later Mukunda Lahiri, now a forgotten actor after a series of flops, comes to him to beg for a small part. He rejects the ageing actor in revenge. His taking refuge in alcohol. And his refusing to help a friend in politics.In the fag end of the train journey, he is drunk and contemplates suicide. He asks the conductor to fetch Aditi. He begins to confess an affair with a married woman. But Aditi stops him. It was an affair with a heartless and ambitious Promila, which ended in a brawl with her husband.As the star re-lives and examines his life with Aditi, a bond develops between them. Aditi realises that in spite of his fame and success, Arindam is a lonely man, and needs her sympathy and understanding. Out of respect for his frank confession, she chooses to suppress the story and tears up the notes she has written. She lets the hero preserve his public image.

Q: Build a movie plot around this: Who is the village constable? Tommy
A: A spaceship from a previously unknown planet lands in the Scottish moors, bringing an alien creature to earth near the observatory of Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond), just days before the planet will pass closest to the earth. When the professor and his friend, American reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke), discover the creature, they help it when it is in distress and try to communicate with it, but fail. They leave, and the alien follows them home. A colleague of the professor, the unscrupulous and ambitious scientist Dr. Mears (William Schallert), discovers how to communicate with the creature and tries to get from it by force the formula for the metal the spaceship is made of. He shuts off the alien's breathing apparatus and leaves it for dead, telling the professor that communication was hopeless.Soon, Lawrence discovers that the alien is gone, as is the professor's daughter, Enid (Margaret Field). Tommy, the village constable (Roy Engle), reports that others from the village are missing as well. Lawrence takes the constable to the site where the spaceship has been, but it is no longer there. With more people now missing including Mears the phone lines dead and the village in a panic, they get word to Scotland Yard by using a heliograph to contact a passing freighter.When an Inspector (David Ormont) and sergeant fly in and are briefed on the situation, it is decided that the military must destroy the spaceship. Lawrence objects that doing so will also kill the people who are under the alien's control. With the mysterious planet due to reach its closest distance to the earth at midnight, Lawrence is given until 11:00 to rescue them. He sneaks up to the ship, and learns from Mears that the alien intends the ship to become a wireless relay station in advance of an invasion from its home planet, which is dying. Lawrence orders the enthralled villagers to leave and attacks the alien, shutting off its breathing apparatus, then escapes with Enid and the professor. Mears, however, returns to the ship...

Q: Build a movie plot around this: Who does Emmi begin to neglect? Ali
A:
Ali (Salem), is a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (guest worker) in his late thirties, and Emmi (Mira), is a 60-year-old widowed cleaning woman. They meet when Emmi ducks inside a bar, driven by the rain and drawn by the exotic Arabic music (Al Asfouryeh by Sabah) she says she has heard so often on her walk home from work. A woman in the bar (Katharina Herberg) who is part of Ali's Arabic-speaking cohort tauntingly suggests Ali ask Emmi ("the old woman") to dance, and Emmi accepts. A strange and unlikely friendship develops, then a romance and soon they are living together in Emmi's flat. Out of a professed sense of responsibility but also hopefulness, Emmi first confides in her newfound love when she goes to visit her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and her tyrannical son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder himself) and announces that she is in love with Ali; Eugen thinks she is screwy and Krista as well can only think that her mother - who has been a widow for years - is fantasizing.The first real threat to their relationship comes with a visit by the landlord's son, who has been sent on the assumption that Emmi has taken in a lodger to point out to her that sub-letting is against Emmi's tenancy agreement, and that Ali must leave within a day. Impulsively, and fearful of losing this new joy in her life, Emmi claims that she and Ali are planning to marry to alleviate this little difficulty. This changes everything for the landlord's son, the only character in the film who consistently accepts their relationship as unproblematic. After he has apologized for the misapprehension and departed, Emmi speaks to Ali with embarrassment of her having invented the idea of their marrying but, to her surprise and delight, Ali concurs that it is an excellent idea, and we next see them emerging from the civil court, married.What follows is a bitter and noxious reaction over their relationship, revealing every character in their lives, especially every German in Emmi's former life, as being mired in prejudice against foreign workers as dirty...