Lewis Tater (Jeff Bridges) is the Iowa farmer in the 1930s who is an aspiring western writer, in the style of Zane Grey, who signs up for a correspondence course, only when he travels to Nevada to see if he can pick up some local color he finds out he’s been taken by two scam artists (Anthony James & Richard B. Shull). The “college” is just a post office box, as the owners never expected any applicant to appear in person. While sleeping in his hotel room, one of the crooks tries to kill Lewis. Lewis escapes and steals his car, but the car runs out of gas in the desert. Lewis steals a box in the trunk with all the stolen money the crooks swindled from the students, and crosses the desert on foot. He’s rescued by a film crew of cowboys and brought back to Los Angeles. They hook him up with a dish washing job in the Rio Cafe. The likable Lewis manages to get work as an extra on a B-film being shot by Kessler (Alan Arkin). When he takes on a stunt of jumping onto a horse from a building, a stunt that was Ken Maynard’s favorite, he endears himself with the tyrannical Kessler. He’s then groomed as a Western star of B-pictures directed by the talentless Kessler. Lewis’ cowboy career is interrupted by the crooks arriving in LA to get their money. He also finds the time to complete his first novel, which he calls Hearts of the West, and fall in love with the script girl. It leads to a crowd-pleasing but hardly plausible contrived ending.