Choose Me (1984) on Netflix
Mickey leaves a mental hospital and returns to Los Angeles seeking Eve. Eve's Lounge is owned by a former call girl named Eve, and the radio host Nancy becomes her roommate.
- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb6.7/103,574 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mickey comes out of a mental hospital, where nobody accepts the stories he tells, and returns to Los Angeles hunting for a woman named Eve. He lands at Eve's Lounge, a bar whose owner, a former call girl who shares the name, bought it after the previous owner killed herself over a man. She keeps clear of any single commitment, believing she has wrecked too many marriages to keep one for herself, so she turns Mickey away, sleeps with a bartender, and dodges Zack, the wealthy married man she has been seeing. Nancy, a French host of a radio romance advice show who cannot hold a relationship of her own together, answers Eve's ad for a roommate and moves into her house.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Choose Me (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gordon offered around $500,000 to commission Rudolph to direct a music video for "You're My Choice Tonight (Choose Me)" by Teddy Pendergrass, but Rudolph suggested making a feature film instead, for a few hundred thousand dollars more, and wrote a figure on a napkin that he said was $639,000.
- The production design budget was limited to around $10,000, so Rudolph found a deserted street on the edge of downtown Los Angeles and created a neon-lit set for the film's fictional Eve's Lounge; both Choose Me and Night of the Comet used the 300 block of Boyd Street.
- During editing Rudolph wanted to use some old Teddy songs that were not under Shep Gordon's control, and to pay for them he agreed to take a directing job, Songwriter, that everyone else was turning down.
- Costume designer Tracy Peacock Tynan, daughter of Kenneth Peacock Tynan, recalls that the budget was so small, $640,000, that she could not budget second costumes for actors if outfits were damaged or needed dry cleaning.
- Rudolph started planning the film without a completed script, listened to the Pendergrass song repeatedly for inspiration and summarised it as "romantic roulette", then wrote the screenplay over the course of one week.
SPOILER
The original script ended with Pearl opening her apartment door to Nancy, who was answering a roommate-wanted ad, but that scene was scheduled on the final day of Pearl's location and never got shot, so the movie ended with Mickey and Eve on their honeymoon.
