Pulp

“Write it. Live it. But try not to be it.”

Mickey King (Michael Caine) writes cheap paperback thrillers under a string of pseudonyms, and a job that pays well is hard for him to turn down. A reclusive former film star named Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney) wants his life story ghostwritten and flies King out to his house in Malta. Mike Hodges sets the work in a sunbaked, lazy drift where a hack's trade, spinning cheap fiction for money, starts to look no less honest than anyone else's.