Plot
Steve Taggart is a Los Angeles sports writer who becomes obsessed with gambling. He volunteers to do a series of articles for the newspaper on a compulsive gambler he calls "Mr. Green," who is, in fact, himself.
Taggart gets deeper and deeper into debt, compounding his problems with associated loan sharks, including the dangerous Dutchman.
The complications spill over into Taggart's personal life, as when he brings his daughter to the racetrack and is physically assaulted by a bookie to whom he owes money. Taggart's newspaper editor (John Saxon) loves the series he's been running and has been advancing the writer considerable money, still unaware that Taggart is actually the risk-addicted Mr. Green.
Taggart goes to Gamblers Anonymous to try to get straight, also becoming acquainted with Las Vegas high-roller Charley Peru to try to get even and also get the Dutchman off his back.
To celebrate kicking his gambling habit, Taggart goes right back to the dice tables, where his solution to getting out of debt turns out to be continuing to gamble until he can win all the money he needs.
Read more about this topic: Fever Pitch (1985 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)