Gonda: A Hollywood Story
"Gonda" started as an idea to create a project that would reflect my love for the movies--especially as an homage to great women of the screen--and incorporate vintage scenes from Ayn Rand's play, "Ideal" (which were shot in the early 1990s for inclusion in the Oscar-nominated feature documentary, "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life" but were never used). Hollywood, 1968. Jason Price, a struggling screenwriter whose agent is about to drop him unless he comes up with the next big moneymaker, is forced to move into a low-rent housing complex in West Hollywood. Here he discovers that Kay Gonda, a movie star from the early days of Hollywood, now in her late 60s and a recluse, lives across the hall. A chance meeting with this Greta Garbo-like actress intrigues the young writer, and they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite growing closer to the actress, Price feels she isn't telling him the whole story of her life or why she abandoned her career at the height of her popularity. Soon, he becomes obsessed with her story, and uncovers facts surrounding her having been accused of murdering an infamous tycoon, Granton Sayers. As Price struggles to write his commercial movie script, he is plagued by Gonda's story and begins to have dreams where parts of her life come to him as black and white scenes from a '30s movie. He imagines what might have happened to Gonda as she visited her fans at the time of the alleged murder, building to a climax that he cannot resolve until he learns the truth from the forgotten star on the eve of her death.
