In 2010, Gil Pender, a successful but creatively unfulfilled Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Inez, are in Paris vacationing with Inez's wealthy, conservative parents. Gil is struggling to finish his first novel, centered on a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Inez dismisses his ambition as a romantic daydream, and encourages him to stick with lucrative screenwriting. Gil is considering moving to Paris (which he notes, much to the dismay of his fiancée, is at its most beautiful in the rain). Inez is intent on living in Malibu. By chance, they are joined by Inez's friend Paul, who is described as both pedantic and a pseudo-intellectual, and his wife Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on the highlights of Paris up to the point of even contradicting a tour guide at the Musée Rodin, and insisting that his knowledge of Rodin's relationships is more accurate than that of the guide. Inez admires him; Gil finds him insufferable.

A night of wine tasting gets Gil drunk and he decides to walk the streets of Paris to get back to the hotel; Inez goes off with Paul by taxi. He stops to reconnoiter his location. At midnight, a 1920s car pulls up beside him, and the passengers, dressed in 1920s wardrobe, urge him to join them. They hit a party for Jean Cocteau attended by notable people of 1920s Paris: Cole Porter and his wife Linda Lee Porter, Zelda, and Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda gets bored at the party and encourages Scott and Gil to leave with her. They head first to Bricktops where they see Josephine Baker dancing, and then to a cafe, where they run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. Zelda gets upset when Hemingway says her novel was weak, and she heads with Belmonte to St. Germain, followed shortly thereafter by Scott, who doesn't like the thought of his wife and the toreador. After discussing writing, Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein. As Gil exits the building to fetch his manuscript from his hotel, he finds he has returned to 2010; the bar where the 1920s literati were drinking is now a laundromat.

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