Plot
George Hanley, a down-on-his luck office worker, is offered one wish by a genie summoned from an antique lamp. The genie, dressed in modern garb except for his old-fashioned shoes, explains that the traditional three wishes have been discontinued due to misuse by wishers. Rather than make a rash wish, George carefully considers the three most popular options.
He wonders what it would be like to wish for love. While he imagines marriage to a beautiful, successful actress, he soon discovers that his wife is obsessed with her acting career, living the very public life of a starlet, and always trying to keep her face and hair in perfect condition. He imagines a dashing lead actor vying for her attention and realizes that he would eventually lose a wife like that.
Hanley next decides whether or not wealth is a proper wish. Hanley imagines life as bored tycoon with excessive amounts of money and chooses not to make this wish.
Hanley's final thoughts are on wishing for power: he imagines being President of the United States and being paralyzed by indecision when faced with a global UFO crisis.
Realizing that he's not really cut out for any of the things that most people would wish for, Hanley decides to make a truly original wish. In the next scene, a homeless man in an alley finds the genie's lamp in a garbage can. As he thoughtlessly polishes it a little and puts it back, a genie emerges from the lamp and offers him three wishes, on the condition that the lamp be returned to the alley afterward for another needy person to find. The camera pulls away from the stunned man to reveal that the genie is Hanley himself.
Read more about this topic: I Dream Of Genie
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“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)