Director Danny Boilass's paean to Eastern Long Island through the story of an urchin’s quest for love on a game show swept the Oscars and won Best Picture and Best Director this week. Hamptonsdog Billionaire is about a young man on the verge of winning a one-hundred and twenty-million-dollar beachfront property in East Hampton on Plum TV's Who Wants to be a Billionaire, a game show hosted by a smug prick from the East Hampton Town Board. The problem is that the boy Marcos is an undocumented day laborer from Central America, and Hispanic culture dictates that you can't be smart if you come from the lowest classes. Only the privileged and wealthy should be able to answer the difficult questions.
Plot Summary
In a story inspired (but not written by) Capra and Dickens, Marcos is arrested by the East Hampton Town police the night before he is to answer the 120-million-dollar question. They suspect him of cheating and force him to listen to testimony regarding a new commercial development proposal in front of the East Hampton Town Board. Town Supervisor and ex-cop Ed McGintee beats the shit out of him to make Marcos confess. The former local East End cop straps him to batteries, punches him and handcuffs him to a chair, all in an effort to get him to confess. Instead of confessing, he reveals how he knows the answers, and in so doing tells his life story. It reveals how his mother was killed in a stampede to get dinner reservations during the summer, how he was taken in by a Fagin-like magazine promoter, how he survived as a sales clerk at Ralph Lauren, how he has loved the same cocaine his entire life, and his strained relationship with his pet hamster Pickles.
We know Marcos will win the grand prize, because Capra wouldn't have it any other way. But we also know that winning is not really what Marcos wants. That would be his true love, Pickles. He only appears on the show because he hopes to find more hamsters.
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