Director's Cut — Roger L. Simon

A quarter of a century after he first appeared in the now-classic The Big Fix, Moses Wine remains a private investigator par excellence. Still a Berkeley radical at heart, Moses is now thoroughly chastened by the events that have led to the war on terrorism -- so much so that he's started to find himself agreeing with John Ashcroft, which for Moses is like saying that the Grateful Dead were overrated. Then the call comes -- a film crew in Prague keeps finding hate messages on the set and in their hotel rooms, and it's Moses's job to find out who's trying to shut the movie down. In a twist of fate that might only happen to a man like Wine, the director of the film gets knocked off a bridge by a runaway truck, and Moses agrees to take over -- Moses Wine is an auteur!

But there are obstacles: The costars, the sexy Donna Gold and the brooding Goran, can't decide whether to kill each other or have an affair; Moses's wife has a surprise for him; Moses keeps finding himself in places he really shouldn't be; the CIA seems interested in the film, and that's a first; and a guy who resembles the Michelin Man keeps turning up with threats of violent destruction. Clearly something more is at stake than an art-house film, and things turn deadly serious when the threat of terrorism appears at the screening of the film -- Moses has to race to save not only the movie, but the whole of the Sundance festival, too.