The Bicycle Day

Our setting is 1953 Beverly Hills, home to Hollywood’s elite. It is a neighborhood of perfectly manicured lawns, shiny new cars, palm trees and blue skies. Impeccably dressed housewives kiss their husbands goodbye from the front step as they leave for the studio in the morning and families dutifully attend Sunday church service. And yet there is a darkness lying just underneath the surface. There are secrets hiding behind those closed pastel front doors: depression, abuse, repressed secrets and broken dreams. Hollywood is awash with paranoia of Communist infiltration and a compulsive drive to rid its films of filth and un-Christian values. 300 miles away there are men playing god in the Nevada desert, detonating bombs so large that on any given night you might catch an atomic glow lighting up the LA skyline. Meanwhile just down the road at the Beverly Hills Psychiatric Institute, two doctors are playing with something equally powerful, a new therapeutic drug called Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD. As they administer this treatment to their clientele of depressed June Cleavers, junkie priests and dying soldiers, new doors begin to open that question the very foundations of traditional gender roles, faith in higher powers, and the very meaning of what is reality and what is merely an illusion. But the institute’s most famous patient is Hollywood’s quintessential leading man, Cary Grant, whose charming facade hides a past of abuse, abandonment, alcoholism, and an anguished sexuality. This is ultimately Grant’s story, the story of a man at the top of his game but still desperately seeking to be happy. From an even broader point of view this is the story of the birth of a higher consciousness that begins to shatter the veneer of the American Dream. And like those military generals out in the desert, who sit in Adirondack chairs and aviator shades 10,000 yards from ground zero, you have been given a front row seat.