A creative couple’s relationship turns meta-bizarre when Jack’s fledgling screenwriting career is derailed by writer’s block just as Imojean’s first book blows up, and Jack’s jealous, delusional insecurities lead him to believe they’re really characters in a movie.

SYNOPSIS:

Jack Thickins is a newly optioned screenwriter on the set of an independent movie he wrote but has zero control over. He’s just there to observe, but he’s not happy because to his eyes and ears it’s not going well. He hates the revisions made without his input and the acting sucks.

Jack is in a relationship with Imojean, a first-time author of a collection of Sapphic short stories, “Native Tongues,” which has just been published. Both have oppressive office jobs they’re holding onto until their careers kick into regular bill-paying mode (fingers crossed).

Jack’s disgruntlement with how his optioned screenplay is turning out as a movie is compounded by the stress of another, bigger project: he has less than six months to write a new screenplay for a fellowship he’s been awarded, but he can’t think of a plot or even settle on a genre to save his life, even though he is surrounded by colorful characters and real-life story lines for inspiration. Paralyzing writer’s blocks has set in, and as Jack’s self-absorbed creative life begins to unravel, Imojean’s women-loving-women prose career begins to blow up. This brings out jealousy and acrimony in Jack, who begins to spiral personally as well, which leads to Jack’s and Imojean’s relationship slowly disintegrating.

Jack becomes impossible to live with as he desperately searches for a plot while watching Imojean rise to the brink of mass renown as an author. Jack may be becoming delusional; he starts to believe that he and Imojean are actually characters in a movie. He begins to notice film title credits hanging in midair next to him, and he starts to question what he feels are the cliches and tropes of his own miserable existence.

Imojean is having none of this, and eventually has quite enough of Jack. In a fit of anger following one too many condescending comments, she bludgeons him to death in her office. In the wake of this turn of events and now free of Jack’s toxicity, Imojean uses elements of Jack’s failed creative life – a writer uses everything and everyone, after all – and becomes a literary sensation and sexual politics icon after the publication of her first acclaimed novel, “The Death of the American Male Writer.”

Imojean dives into her next highly anticipated project, a novel titled “The Clit Mistress,” unencumbered and with passionate confidence, having fully absorbed the useful mojo of living with a paranoid, creatively atrophied writer and combining Jack’s sensibilities with her own … leaving Jack Thickins a forgotten never-was. But … it’s just possible Jack and Imojean WERE in their own little movie, with a plot forged from plotlessness.

THE PLOT, THICKINS!