Plot
The film opens with a monologue by Fletch about his latest story, dealing with the drug trade on Los Angeles' beaches. While undercover, he is approached by Alan Stanwyk (Matheson), who says he has inoperable cancer and wants Fletch to kill him so that his family will receive his life insurance. Stanwyk thinks that Fletch is the perfect man for the job, as he appears to be a person who can simply disappear after the shooting without any suspicions being raised. Fletch agrees to kill Stanwyk when offered $50,000, but is suspicious of Stanwyk's motives. Investigating Stanwyk, Fletch uncovers a story much greater than his exposé of small-time drug dealers. As he uncovers the truth about Stanwyk's double life, he discovers that the police chief (Baker) is behind the drug trafficking.
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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)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)