10 Best Films About Writer's Block

Curtis Hanson followed up L.A. Confidential – a film grand in scope and budget – with this modest Pittsburgh tale of a washed-up English professor working on his next novel.

Over the course of 48 hours, Michael Douglas' disheveled, consistently stoned Grady Tripp is forced to dodge dead dogs, a missing Marilyn Monroe jacket, a pregnant, married girlfriend, self-inflated literary phonies and an eccentric student – all the while haunted by a 2,000-plus page novel whose ending keeps getting further and further away. It could be said that Tripp suffers from the opposite of writer's block, but the result is the same. To put it in his own words, "I couldn't stop."

Hanson wisely set the film's soundtrack to 60s and 70s music reflective of Douglas' character, highlighted by an Oscar-winning song by Bob Dylan.