The censor in this film is accustomed to watching characters of the films he sees speak only the lines he has permitted them to speak. He generally knows within a word exactly what he will hear. It's a boring job, but he appreciates the cat-and-mouse game of trying to suppress anything forbidden in the face of steady efforts to sneak something past him. However, it has all become old hat to him. One day at the Liberty Cinema, a commercial movie theater near his offices, the characters on the movie screen start speaking out of character and refuse to speak the lines written for them. This provokes a furor, and he is called in to attempt to deal with the situation -- to no avail. Eventually he relates the obduracy of the characters to that of those in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, but his efforts to control the situation with that understanding backfire when characters from one film start showing up in the other one.