Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a man who crouches in the apartment where he has ground out 62 romance novels for women. Asked how he writes the female characters so convincingly, he replies, "I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability."

 

He hates everyone in the building, and the movie opens with him hurling his neighbor's little dog down the garbage chute. Then he marches out to take his habitual meal in a nearby restaurant, where he lays out his own plastic cutlery.