Bright Lights, Big City (1988) on Netflix
Jamie Conway fact-checks for a New York magazine, and nights of cocaine with his friend Tad Allagash leave him late and behind on deadlines. His wife Amanda has left him.
- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb5.7/109,824 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes57%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jamie Conway, 24 and originally from Pennsylvania, fact-checks for a major magazine in New York City, a job he reaches late and whose deadlines he misses. Cocaine and nights out with his best friend Tad Allagash, who also uses the drug, are behind it. Amanda, his wife, left him two months earlier as her modeling career took off, and his mother had died of cancer a year before. He also follows the tabloid saga of a pregnant woman lying in a coma. Clara Tillinghast, the research editor, is his boss, and their relationship is strained. Tad asks him to take Tad's cousin Vicky, visiting from out of town, on a date, leaving Tad free for a woman he calls a Penthouse Pet.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bright Lights, Big City (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael J. Fox had to be back in Los Angeles to tape his TV series Family Ties by mid-July, giving director Chopra only ten weeks to finish the film. A week into shooting, the studio's chairman and its president of production flew from L.A. to New York to check on the film, and neither had read the script.
- James Bridges was called on a Friday that the film was in trouble, read the novel that night and flew to New York on Sunday. He agreed to direct only if he could start from scratch and hire Gordon Willis as his cinematographer.
- Joyce Chopra had her agent send McInerney's novel to Michael J. Fox, who won the lead and, at his request, got the Tad Allagash part for fellow Canadian Kiefer Sutherland. Fox's casting raised the budget to $15 million and moved principal photography to New York City.
- In seven days, James Bridges wrote a new draft restoring the novel's heavy drinking and drug abuse and replaced six actors, bringing in Jason Robards, John Houseman, Swoosie Kurtz, Frances Sternhagen and Tracy Pollan while keeping Kiefer Sutherland and Dianne Wiest.
- Tom Cruise was offered first refusal on the script while Jay McInerney and Joel Schumacher tried to capture the novel's distinctive voice. McInerney, Cruise and Schumacher scouted locations in New York City and checked out the atmosphere of the club scenes described in the novel.
SPOILER
The filmmakers shot two endings: one where Fox's character vaguely decides to start his life over, and a studio-pleasing alternative where he has finished a novel called Bright Lights, Big City and has a new girlfriend proud of his writing.
