Dennis Potter

The story of a crime novelist (Downey Jr.) who, languishing in his hospital bed, occupies his time by mapping out a screenplay in his head about a cynical private investigator who doubles as a singer in a dance band. (Paramount Classics)

It's the depression era and Chicago. Sheet music salesman Arthur Parker is trying to sell his products but it's not easy to convince unwilling music store owners to buy them (imdb)

An investigator on the Moscow police force relentlessly pursues the solution to a triple homicide which occurred in Moscow's Gorky Park... (imdb)

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, two young clerks at the stuffy Foreign Office in Whitehall display little interest in the decline of the British Empire. To their eyes, it can hardly compete with girls, rock music (including "Lay Down Your Arms"), and the intrigue of romantic entanglements. (imdb)

Brimstone and Treacle is a modern gothic tale about the evil that men do and the price that must be paid to make things right. The film, a remake of a 1976 teleplay that included Denholm Elliot in its original cast as Mr. Bates, the film also included an incredibly cool soundtrack of songs by artists like The Go-Go's, The Police, Squeeze and an irreverently stylish 1930's little diddy called "Spread A Little Happiness", performed by Sting by himself. (imdb)

Detective novelist Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) suffers from the crippling disease of psoriatic arthropathy. Confined to a hospital bed, Marlow mentally rewrites his early Chandleresque thriller, "The Singing Detective," with himself in the title role, drifting into a surreal 1945 fantasy of spies and criminals, along with vivid memories of a childhood in the Forest of Dean... (imdb)

In this dreamlike film, a rape victim attempts to cope with both her husband's infidelity and the return of the son she gave up for adoption.

Exploring the somewhat darker and more mysterious side of the Lewis Carroll's classic book, the movie follows Alice Liddell (the book's inspiration) as an old woman who is haunted by the characters she was once so amused by. As she thinks back on it, she starts to see her relationship with the shy author/professor in a new way and realizes the vast change between the young Alice and the old. (imdb)

Arthur, a sheet music salesman, has an ear for the hit tunes, but nobody will trust it. And his imagination often bursts into full song (imdb)

An English girl marries a German lawyer in the 1930s and they try to live as normal a life as they can in Hitler's Germany. When Allied bombs start falling on German cities, Christabel takes her two young sons to a village in the mountains. She learns that her husband has been arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler, and travels to the prison where he is held, wondering if telling the commandant that she knows Winston Churchill will help her husband or seal his fate. Based on a true story. (imdb)

A reclusive, elderly author is visited by a young admirer...but both men are more than they claim to be. (imdb)

The Italian adventurer and libertine Giovanni Jacopo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798, but in this six-part series Dennis Potter attempted to find a contemporary relevance through his central themes of sex and religion. (imdb)

Complex and multi-layered, the interweaving narrative threads include novelist Maurice James Kingsley who appropriates accounts by his niece Jessica about her life as a professional model. Kingsley's embellishments become a trashy bestseller, "Sugar Bush," tracing the rise and decline of fictional fashion model Blackeyes, victimized by men. Angry and betrayed, Jessica begins to rewrite Kingsley's novel to set Blackeyes free from the abuse of men. (imdb)

During a train ride, an anxiety attack leads middle-aged illustrator John into an identity crisis. As his marital problems merge and blur into his fantasy life with prostitutes and call girls, a long-dormant secret friend of his childhood surfaces in his delusions. Potter viewed John as "a victim of what he himself has created, a sexual fantasy that gets out of control. Fantasy should be one of the registered sexually transmitted diseases which in John's case, it is."

Past and present intertwine: An elderly couple returns to the hotel where they became close when they were young and flashbacks to the earlier visit reveal the origins of both their pleasures and problems. Somewhere between the past and the present, Dennis Potter attempted to find "the shape of a life, of two lives..." (imdb)

A biography of the eighteenth century Viennese physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, who used unorthodox healing practices based on his theory of "animal magnetism." (imdb)

The Bates sadly care for their severely disabled daughter Pattie. Martin arrives at their door claiming to be her college friend. He charms them into accepting him as a lodger and carer for Pattie. But Martin is not all he seems. (imdb)

Dr. Emma Porlock and her colleagues, attempting to unlock the secrets of human memory for the Masdon drug empire, get a cryogenically stored 400-year-old human head to project its memories through virtual reality displays. But Porlock and her team are chronically under-funded, and she may have to go around Masdon to a media sleaze merchant to get the money she needs to maintain the project. (imdb)

Angus Wilson wrote his novel "Late Call" in 1964, and Anthony Burgess ranked it as one of the 99 best novels written since 1939. Adapting Wilson's novel into four episodes, Dennis Potter expanded Wilson's prologue ("The Hot Summer of 1911") into the drama's centerpiece, intercutting between past and present as he probed spiritual desolation in the English Midlands.

Based on the 1907 autobiography by Christian fundamentalist and naturalist Edmund Gosse, but Dennis Potter adapted only one section of the book, adding much material of his own invention. (imdb)

In a drunken and disheartened state, Michael Henchard sells his wife at a fair. When he becomes sober again, he realizes what he has done, and though unable to find his wife and child, changes his ways. He becomes the Mayor of the town. Nearly twenty years later, his past comes back to haunt him. (imdb)

Another of Dennis Potter's "visitation dramas": Adultery by John disturbs Janet, so she flirts with the simple, mistreated Billy during the middle of giving him a reading lesson. Unfortunately, it triggers aggressive behavior in Billy which he directs toward John. (imdb)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel about how the rich languoring on the Riviera in the 1920's are slowly drawn into the coming depression is once again filmed with Peter Strauss, Mary Steenburgen, and John Heard in the leads. (imdb)

An actor who appears in TV commercials begins to lose his grip on reality. (imdb)

Daniel Feeld is a screenwriter with pains in his gut and a new screenplay called "Karaoke", about a girl named Sandra who works in a seedy Karaoke bar and is murdered by a lowlife named Arthur "Pig" Mallion. But whenever Daniel looks around, real people seem to be speaking his dialogue in real situations that mirror the script, including a beautiful young girl named Sandra who works in a Karaoke bar owned by a Mr. Mallion. (imdb)