Making Love (1982) on Netflix
Zack Elliot is a Los Angeles oncologist with a happy marriage to Claire, a television executive. Then novelist Bart McGuire arrives as a patient, and Zack must face his attraction to men.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.9/103,259 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes39%
Trailer
Plot summary
Zack Elliot works as an oncologist in Los Angeles and has been married to Claire, a television executive, for eight years. They met in college, share a taste for Gilbert and Sullivan and poetry by Rupert Brooke, and have just bought a large house because they intend to start a family. Claire does not know that Zack has long fought an attraction to other men; he picks men up in his car and spends lunch hours at gay bars in West Hollywood without going further. Then Bart McGuire, an openly gay novelist, comes to the office for a check-up, and the two men feel an unspoken pull toward each other. A lunch follows, then a dinner invitation.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Making Love (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's release was delayed for almost a year, reportedly in part because Marvin Davis, the Denver oil tycoon who bought 20th Century-Fox in April 1981, stood up at a private screening, bellowed a homophobic insult at the screen and stormed out of the room.
- Making Love opened strong with a four-day tally of $3 million and quickly expanded from 300 to 700 theaters, but it proved a costly flop: against a total cost of $13-14 million, its domestic gross was reported as $6.1 million.
- The film-makers hoped to cast Michael Douglas as Zack, sending him a revision after he passed on the original script, and also approached Tom Berenger, Harrison Ford, William Hurt and Peter Strauss; Arthur Hiller said most actors he approached advised him not to even consider them.
- Screenwriter Barry Sandler resisted scripting Berg's story at first, and six months passed before he agreed to collaborate; he had "always written very glossy, Hollywood type of films" and found the story "very delicate and potentially explosive".
