A young man, trying to find about his once-famous grandfather, time-travels back to the 60s to confront his father and then, further back into the 40s, to meet up with the grandfather he never met. The grandfather was a hard-boiled detective who also wrote pulp fiction novels that were made into films. In his search for his film noir past, the young man and the other characters interact with film backgrounds that were originally used in The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, The Maltese Falcon, Young Man With a Horn, Dark Passage, The Fontainhead, and Strangers on a Train, among other movies from the Warner Brothers library.