Jimmy Hollywood(1994)

Jimmy (Joe Pesci) and William (Christian Slater) commit several acts of vigilante justice against various criminals under the guise of their mock group, the S.O.S. (Save Our Streets), and though the police come to regard the S.O.S. as criminals themselves, more and more of the citizens of Los Angeles come to see them as heroes. Either way, Jimmy anonymously enjoys the fame and attention the S.O.S. receives from the media, and especially the attention he receives for his performance as the group’s mysterious leader, “Jericho.”

However, one day, one of Jimmy’s and William’s acts of vigilantism brings Jimmy to the attention of the police when two detectives pay him a visit at his apartment to question him about it. Afterwards, Jimmy meets with William at their favorite coffee shop, and he tells him that the cops are definitely on to them, but he doesn’t know what to do next. While they are driving around in Jimmy’s car later on, Jimmy notices that the same two detectives who questioned him are now following them, so he stops at a payphone to make a call to his girlfriend, Lorraine (Victoria Abril), who knows about his and William’s activities. He tells her that detectives are following him around, so he thinks that the time has come for him and William to get out of town for a little while, and before he hangs up, he instructs her to meet him tonight at 8:30 at a vacant lot he took her to the night before that Errol Flynn once planned to have a house built on. He then talks to William and tells him that maybe it would be best for them to split up, explaining that he can walk away from all of this without any further worries because the cops are only after him. William refuses, bringing up how he was the one who started the S.O.S., and he tells Jimmy that he wants to stay with him. They then resume driving, and they easily manage to lose the detectives at a stoplight.

At 8:30, Jimmy and William arrive at the vacant lot, and Lorraine is waiting for them with Jimmy’s stuff packed in a bag. After he and Lorraine exchange goodbyes, Jimmy puts his bag in his car and drives away. As he and William make their way towards the city limits, Jimmy expresses his disbelief over how he never made it as an actor here, and how, because of that, he will never be able to fulfill a promise he made to Lorraine to make her “a hairdresser to the stars.” He then remarks that Hollywood is going to remember Jericho; he just wishes that they knew that he was played by Jimmy Alto. Suddenly, a truck comes up behind Jimmy’s car and starts ramming the back of it repeatedly, and when neither he nor William can see who their attacker is, Jimmy surmises that this person must be one of the crooks that they busted in the past. They all go on a chase until they end up in another vacant lot somewhere, and ultimately, Jimmy and William manage to get away when they knock over an old barrier made of chains and metal poles and the attacking truck drives over it and gets its wheels caught in it.

Once they get far enough away from the lot, Jimmy and William park under a bridge to collect their thoughts, and though they try to figure out who attacked them and why, neither of them can come up with an answer. Jimmy then decides that they can’t leave town just yet; he now wants to publicly reveal himself as Jericho before he goes so, that way, he can go out with style and leave people with a hook. Soon after that, he tells William that they will film his farewell speech at the Hollywood Bowl, thinking that it is an appropriate setting that speaks Hollywood. After they get there, Jimmy spends the rest of the night and into the dawn trying to come up with something to say, and during this, William informs him that he just remembered that his M.R.I. appointment is scheduled for today (which he is getting to find out if his short-term memory loss issues are linked to a head injury he suffered a while back), and since an appointment like that takes forever to reschedule, he must go to it before they skip town. In the next scene, Jimmy and William are shown parked outside one of the town’s local TV stations, having finished filming Jimmy’s last message, and after William hands the videotape to a security guard out front, they take off for the hospital. As Jimmy is dropping William off at the hospital’s front doors, he tells him that he will be back to pick him up in a couple of hours, thinking that that is how long the M.R.I. will likely take. He then stops at a phone booth and calls Lorraine to let her know (to her utter disbelief) that he has gone public with his Jericho identity and has challenged the police to come and get him, and he will give her a call as soon as he gets to wherever it is he’s going. Meanwhile, the TV station that William left the tape with airs it on their morning news program, and in the video, Jimmy tells everyone that the police are forcing him and the S.O.S. to leave town, and it is only a matter of time before they get him. He then points out that the police have been spending a lot of time and energy trying to find him and the S.O.S. when they have proven that they are not a threat to the citizens of this city, and they (the police) have not spent the same amount of time and energy trying to do something about the real criminals that plague this city every day and make its citizens live in fear. He also states that he thinks that all of the innocent people of America could sue the federal government for allowing their civil rights to get continuously violated by the criminal element of society.

Two hours later, Jimmy returns to the hospital’s main entrance to pick up William, but when William fails to emerge well after the time limit expires, Jimmy exits his car and goes inside to look for him. After having no success in locating him (during which he meets and gives autographs to a few people who saw his speech on the news program), Jimmy randomly finds him in an elevator that he was just about to get into. Just after they enter the main lobby, they look out the front doors and spot three police officers finding Jimmy’s car, and when the officers start to make their way towards the doors, they effect an escape by running out of a back exit. As the cops pursue them, they sprint around the hospital’s property and then down the street until they decide to hide in an abandoned building not far from the hospital, and Jimmy soon discovers that the building they’re in is the closed-down Egyptian Theater. Jimmy tells William that they are going to stay here and then sneak out when it gets dark, but because the pursuing cops were able to see which building they ran into, an army of regular cops and SWAT officers are soon called to the scene, and they completely surround the theater thinking that Jimmy and the S.O.S. have been using this place as their headquarters and that they will eventually launch an attack against them (by this point, the police think that there are as many as 75 members of the S.O.S. and that they are all heavily armed and dangerous).

That night, Lorraine shows up outside the theater and explains to the cops that she is Jimmy’s girlfriend and that he is just an actor, and they ultimately persuade her to go into the theater to convince Jimmy to surrender peacefully. Meanwhile, Jimmy and William watch a live news report over Jimmy’s portable TV set of all of the cops stationed outside the theater, and – to Jimmy’s delight – they spot a large crowd of onlookers across the street from the theater voicing and showing their support for Jericho and the S.O.S. After seeing a detective on the TV announcing to him over a megaphone that Lorraine is here and she wants to talk to him, Jimmy goes to the front entrance and lets her in. Lorraine tries to convince him to give himself up, but Jimmy tells her that he is not going to do that because he considers his role as Jericho to be the greatest role of his life, and he explains to her that he has come to accept that he will never get another role as good as this one because he is just a one-role actor and doesn’t possess the talent to be a top quality actor like Marlon Brando. Lorraine points out all the attention that he is getting right now, and she tells him that the charges against him probably won’t be that severe, and when he gets out in a couple of years, his fame as a vigilante will easily enable him to get acting jobs. Jimmy replies that this is the role that he has gotten and he is going to play it out, and he doesn’t think that this is over yet because every great role has a great ending and he is not going to cheat that. He then calls for William, and when William comes into the front entrance, he tells him that he wants him to leave with Lorraine. However, before William goes, Jimmy has him fork over the handguns that they have been using in their operation (which they only used to intimidate criminals with and are loaded with blank rounds to prevent themselves from seriously harming or killing anyone with them).

While Lorraine and William are talking things out with the police, Jimmy decides to kill himself, and he opts to go out emulating one of James Cagney’s roles: He will come out of the theater’s front doors with the guns, then charge straight at the police and fire the blanks at them, which will prompt them to return fire and kill him. He puts his plan into action, but to his surprise and confusion, none of the cops shoot back at him. Accepting that he has reached the end of the line, he surrenders to the police, and as he gets the cuffs put on him, Lorraine comes up to him and admits to him that she told the officers that his guns only contained blank rounds. As Jimmy is brought into a police cruiser, he looks around at all the attention he is receiving from the police and the onlookers and smiles. In the next scene, Jimmy is shown sitting in a jail cell and watching a news report on his portable TV about his arrest and the final events that led up to it, and he remarks to himself that what he did was beautiful work and he never could’ve appreciated it if he was dead.

We find out through title cards and the film’s closing scene that Jimmy ended up serving six months in prison, and he is currently completing 800 hours of community service. William’s M.R.I. tests came back negative, and the doctors attributed his short-term memory loss to acute anxiety. Jimmy is next seen working as an associate producer on a movie being filmed about his life, with Harrison Ford (himself) portraying him, and we also see that both Lorraine and William got hired on the production as – respectively – a hair and makeup artist and an assistant director. The movie ends with Jimmy discussing a scene with Harrison after voicing his dislike over a take that was just done of it.