Louie (Shemp Howard), the projectionist of the Universal Theatre, starts showing a musical pageant of chorus girls promenading down a staircase.

Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (playing themselves) arrive in the midst of the mayhem by taxi and after a series of pranks, step back to reveal that they are on a movie soundstage.

In it, theater producer-composer Jeff Hunter (Robert Paige) wants to marry wealthy ingenue Kitty Rand (Jane Frazee), but doesn't want to interfere because her fiancé is his best friend, Woody Taylor (Lewis Howard).

Olsen and Johnson arrive at the palatial Rand estate, laden with props for an elaborate musical revue Jeff is staging as a vehicle for Kitty.

Immediately dissatisfied with their revue being turned into the usual Hollywood movie, Ole and Chic spend the remainder of the film disrupting the adaptation's narrative and the central romance by any means possible.

Chic's hoydenish, man-crazy sister Betty (Martha Raye) pursues Pepi (Mischa Auer), the revue's leading man and a former Russian nobleman.

After a series of mishaps and adventures -- including frequent run-ins with magician/detective Quimby (Hugh Herbert) and constant technical problems while the film is being projected -- Jeff's revue is finally performed for a society audience.

The director, frustrated, shoots the screenwriter -- who is uninjured and pays scant attention, but leaks like a sieve when he drinks a glass of water.

Potter staged an elaborate finale, where Olsen and Johnson attend the opening of their film at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and plant their footprints in the movie palace's famous celebrity courtyard.

Film editor Milton Carruth inserted a quick clip of Olsen and Johnson into the new ending, which has director Richard Lane expressing his disgust with the script and shooting Elisha Cook, Jr., repeatedly.

"[8] The reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald wrote, in August 1942: "Sections of its extraordinary pattern materialise with uproarious unexpectedness, while hilarious development of some ridiculously funny incident adds to the farcical, burlesque, and slapstick appeal of a production astounding in its originality and verve.