Barton Fink

Broadway playwright Barton Fink is still basking in the afterglow of the lyrical reviews of his social-realist melodrama 'Bare Ruined Choirs', when Capital Pictures invites him to Hollywood in 1941. As they put it: people want his ‘urban poetry’. And so it came about that the well intentioned author set up domicile in a grungy hotel room to write his first script for the eccentric mogul Jack Lipnick. The only problem being that it’s a wrestling film, not really his genre, which lands Fink a bad case of writer’s block. He hopes to be inspired by his neighbour, the seemingly jovial insurance broker (John Goodman), who to Fink seems like the ‘common man’ made flesh.