Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.

An Englishman and a cabby try to save an heiress from murder in Spain.

Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

Three retired sea captains living together in genteel squalor. They scheme to improve their fortunes by having one of them solicit a bride through an ad in a Boston newspaper. The loser of a coin toss must get married and take in the other two as boarders. But upon the arrival of the Nantucket woman selected from the applicants, the captains get cold feet.

The rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.

Norman Mailer’s first feature filmmaking effort stars the director and his two longtime collaborators Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox as a trio of gangsters holed up in a ramshackle New York apartment, drinking, braying, and fighting.