Under the Rainbow 2023

In 1938, on the edge of a world about to be torn apart by war, a young, dreaming homeless boy named Rollo Sweet in Kansas clutches at a hopeful future in Hollywood. He spends his days at a shelter and his nights haunted by a radio broadcast from the President, chasing a fantasy that feels just out of reach. A desperate fix goes wrong when he climbs to repair an antenna on a rooftop, only to slip and fall, turning a hopeful ascent into a crisis he can’t control.

Across the country, in Culver City near the famous studios, a hotel becomes the unlikely stage for a dozen separate stories that blend into one tangled night. Among the guests are Annie Clark, a long-suffering MGM employee, and her assistant Homer, as well as an Austrian duke and duchess with their Secret Service escort Bruce Thorpe. Tension brews with the intrusion of Nazi operatives Otto Kriegling and his enigmatic contact Nakamuri, plus a sizable crowd of Japanese photographers and a cast of 150 little people assigned to the studio’s big project. The hotel’s atmosphere is further colored by the owner’s clueless nephew Henry, who has the keys to the chaos when the boss is away.

As the night unfolds, the characters’ paths cross through a series of mistaken identities that keep everyone guessing. Kriegling misreads a photographer as his Tokyo contact, while Nakamuri assumes the Munchkins must hide Kriegling among their ranks. The tension grows when Nazi maps slip into Annie’s copy of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz, and an assassin trailing the Duke and Duchess strikes a blow that changes the course of the evening. Homer, misreading the situation, treats Kriegling as if he were a Munchkin and drags him into the studio’s makeup shop, where the bizarre mix of actors and crew only intensifies the confusion and the boozy mischief of the Munchkins themselves.

In a moment of dramatic confrontation, Kriegling and Nakamuri corner Annie, Thorpe, the Duke, and the Duchess in a hotel room. The murderer closes in, but a strange turn of fate occurs when Nakamuri, aiming a camera, ends up ending the assassin’s life in a fatal exchange of violence. The chase intensifies as Kriegling demands the map, and Thorpe reveals that it is hidden in a locket on the Duchess’s dog’s collar. With the dog leading the way, Kriegling bolts onto the studio lot and sends a crowd of Munchkin performers into a frenzy that disrupts the filming of a legendary film. The pursuit continues as Kriegling hops onto a vintage bus, chased by the relentless Sweet aboard a horse-drawn carriage, and their clash culminates in a spectacular crash.

When the dust settles, Sweet awakens back in Kansas to find that the entire sequence was a dream. The shelter’s residents, transformed into the characters who populated his night, were a reflection of the people he knows from his everyday life. A bus full of little people arrives, signaling that his dream is guiding him toward a new path. With renewed hope, Rollo Sweet heads toward Hollywood, ready to chase the light he has come to trust, and the line between dream and reality fades as he steps forward into a future that feels almost within reach.