Movers & Shakers (1985) on Netflix
Joe Mulholland oversees production at a Hollywood studio, where he has promised a dying producer a film from a sex manual. He brings in screenwriter Herb Derman and director Sid Spokane.
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Plot summary
Saul Gritz, a producer and Joe's mentor, is dying, and the project he has long wanted to see made is a film based on a best-selling sex manual. Joe Mulholland, who runs production at a Hollywood studio, has promised him it will happen, against his own better judgment. The book, Love in Sex, is nonfiction, and Joe has no narrative to work from. He means to use the title, if not the content. He calls on Herb Derman, a screenwriter of popular romantic films whose marriage is in trouble, and Sid Spokane, a director of volatile manner, to help him find an idea that can carry it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Movers & Shakers (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In the mid-1970s Paramount Pictures paid a large amount of money to secure the rights to Alex Comfort's sex manual The Joy of Sex purely so that it could use the title, which studio executives thought to be highly commercial.
- Charles Grodin received no salary for writing or producing the film, only the minimum for working five weeks as an actor, about $5,000 for two years of work, seven years counting from the project's inception.
- Grodin turned that situation into his premise: a Hollywood writer struggles to write a script based on a sex manual after a big studio acquires the rights. When he finished his first draft the studio passed, and eventually released National Lampoon's Joy of Sex in 1984.
- MGM initially refused to pay for the picture or to release it, saying "it was not of first-class technical quality" and that it "does not reflect the screenplay".
- Director William Asher agreed to make it on a budget of two million dollars only if the actors and crew would defer their salaries; as a result Grodin and Asher share a producers credit on the finished film.
- Because Paramount held the rights to the title The Joy of Sex, the film was retitled Dreamers, and Columbia Pictures showed interest in producing it with Peter Falk playing the lead role as the producer.
- Years later, on a depression-themed episode of his CNBC talk show, Charles Grodin cited the failure of this film, along with the death of his father, as the cause of a long period of depression.
