Robert Wuhl stars as a movie director who's got integrity, vision and a serious script but no career. Martin Landau is a sleazy producer who introduces Wuhl to De Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach - three guys with money who are willing to invest in the movie. But with one catch: each one wants his girlfriend to be the star. Putting the deal together and keeping the mistress happy turns into a hilarious expose of the truth about Hollywood.

Robert Wuhl stars as a movie director who's got integrity, vision and a serious script but no career.

Robert Wuhl stars as a movie director who's got integrity, vision and a serious script but no career. Martin Landau is a sleazy producer who introduces Wuhl to De Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach - three guys with money who are willing to invest in the movie. But with one catch: each one wants his girlfriend to be the star. Putting the deal together and keeping the mistress happy turns into a hilarious expose of the truth about Hollywood.

Robert Wuhl stars as a movie director who's got integrity, vision and a serious script but no career. Martin Landau is a sleazy producer who introduces Wuhl to De Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach - three guys with money who are willing to invest in the movie. But with one catch: each one wants his girlfriend to be the star. Putting the deal together and keeping the mistress happy turns into a hilarious expose of the truth about Hollywood.

Successful character actor Barry Primus spent seven years trying to get financing for his feature debut as a writer-director, Mistress. In the film, a once-promising writer-director, Marvin Landisman (Robert Wuhl), who now directs instructional videos, is sitting home one night, watching his own print of Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, when he gets a strange phone call. A producer, Jack Roth (Martin Landau), formerly a bigwig at Universal, tells Marvin he was cleaning out his office when he came across Marvin's old script, The Darkness and the Light. Jack claims he can get financing to make the film, and agrees to Marvin's stipulation that he be attached to direct. They take a meeting at a low-rent diner, and Jack brings along a gung-ho novice screenwriter, Stuart (Jace Alexander), to help Marvin polish the script. They meet with three potential backers, played by Eli Wallach, Danny Aiello, and Robert DeNiro, each one more meddlesome than the last, and each with a girlfriend (played by Tuesday Knight, Jean Smar