WAITING FOR HOCKNEY is a comic and poignant tale of a man and the people who believe in him as they collude and collide for an entire decade in the service of a grand idea.  The film explores the sometimes precarious line between dreams and delusion as it looks at the risks, payoffs and consequences when one man single-mindedly pursues his vision. Billy Pappas is a true American original.  An art school graduate from a working class background living in rural Maryland, Billy has decided that his mission in life is to reinvent realism.  He spends eight years on a single drawing of Marilyn Monroe working to show a microscopic level of detail he hopes will reveal something deeper than photography.  Literally, he hopes to create a new art form.   Aided, one might even say enabled, by an eccentric cast of characters including a clergyman, a professor and an architect calling himself “Dr. Lifestyle,” Billy finally completes the portrait and then begins a quest to show it to renowned contemporary artist David Hockney, the one person he thinks can validate everything for which Billy has been striving. 

A Film by Julie Checkoway. A Littlest Birds Films Production.