When, at the beginning of the 1940s, the naïve idealist Barton Fink made his breakthrough on Broadway with a play about “the little man”, he hesitantly accepted an offer to go to Hollywood, where he was hired as a screenwriter by film tycoon Jack Lipnick. Stumped and at a loss for words, the playwright (who has apparently never seen the inside of a cinema) gleans from the producer's torrent of words that he is to write the script for a profane wrestling film.