Los Angeles in the 1970s, with all its lazy pleasures and dreams, its crimes spoken and unspoken ...

It's 1978, and a lonely teenage boy named Harris wanders the wide San Fernando Valley streets, searching for meaning in the cars of men who pick him up at strip mall parking lots. When one of his rides asks if he'd like to be in a movie, he discovers a newfound sense of purpose and identity, as the scruffy-haired Southern California boy in low-budget gay porn loops.

Meanwhile, the actress Eva Loesch -- well known for grace, wit, charm and dignity, but now reduced to coffee commercials -- is offered the chance to join a hit TV series, and with it, the possibility of rebuilding her career and self-esteem. As she warns her family -- especially her grandson, Harris -- that nothing must impugn her respectability as DA on the popular crime dramaBowman, Harris's own underground popularity begins to soar as well. As their careers intertwine, their dueling ambitions threaten to bring down the carefully constructed images, and lives, they both worked so hard to create.

Equal parts rueful humor and human heartbreak,A Phantasmagorical Machineis the story of a family of survivors, and the city that made them. One day, years after the unresolved events of his youth, Harris discovers his own obituary in a magazine. As the crimes and mysteries of the past reveal themselves, the search for who died in a lonely desert trailer brings the whole family together, to finally reckon with the meaning of love, attachment, loss and forgiving.