What Could Have Been

Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.

Distraught by a recent breakup, Tony moves into a new house while he finishes his latest book. But what begins as a peaceful setting for his composition, turns deadly. He finds himself implicated in a murder and locked in a fight for his life against someone or something in the house.

Impoverished priest Harihar Ray, dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1996.

The lives of Ted and Marion Cole are thrown into disarray when their two adolescent sons die in a car wreck. Marion withdraws from Ted and Ruth, the couple's daughter. Ted, a well-known writer, hires as his assistant a student named Eddie, who looks oddly similar to one of the Coles' dead sons. The couple separate, and Marion begins an affair with Eddie, while Ted has a dalliance with his neighbor Evelyn.

Humiliated and down on his luck, a superintendent turns his life around when he decides to write a book.

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work - which he doesn't remember writing.

Nicolas Cage is Charlie Kaufman, a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald. While struggling to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean, Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman, Orlean's book, become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the others'.

A cashier poses as a writer for blacklisted talents to submit their work through, but the injustice around him pushes him to take a stand.

Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, a place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers, and where the normal laws of physics are victim to frequent anomalies. A stalker guides two men into the Zone, specifically to an area in which deep-seated desires are granted.

Hit man Cleve approaches writer/cop Dennis about a story for his next book: How Cleve made a living, working for one of the most powerful politicians in the country. To get the story right, they travel around the country to gather statements and evidence, while strong forces use any means they can to keep the story untold.