City of Angels

This musical imaginatively weaves together two plots, the “real” world of a writer trying to turn his book into a screenplay, and the “reel” world of his fictional film. The setting is Hollywood in the late 1940’s, with two stories occurring simultaneously: a Hollywood comedy and a detective drama. The real-life scenes are in color and the movie scenes are in black and white with settings and costumes reflecting the reality vs. film. A striking socialite is ushered into Detective Stone’s office and hires him to find her step-daughter, a beautiful “bad-girl”. The simple missing daughter case turns complicated (partly because the novelist keeps rewriting the plot of the film to suit the charismatic film producer). When the novelist fulfills the producer’s request to tone down a racially-motivated plotline in the screen play, the character of the detective protests. Thus creator and creation wrangle until the pair of them collaborate on writing an ending that concludes all with self respect and artistic triumph.