Studio head Joe Mulholland promises his dying producer and mentor, Saul Gritz, to adapt a popular sex manual into a film, despite his better judgment. Unable to figure out how to turn the nonfiction book into a narrative movie, Mulholland enlists the services of Herb Dorman, a screenwriter of popular romantic films with a bad marriage, and volatile director Sid Spokane to help him create a movie.

A deported gangster trains an Italian convict to take over his operations in the U.S.