This week, we continue with the Martha Coolidge lovefest with her one truly awful movie, Joy of Sex.
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TRANSCRIPT
From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
Last week, we talked about Martha Coolidge and her 1983 comedy Valley Girl, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its release this past Saturday.
Today, we’re going to continue talking about Martha Coolidge’s 1980s movies with her follow up effort, Joy of Sex.
And, as always, before we get to the main story, there’s some back story to the story we need to visit first.
In 1972, British scientist Alex Comfort published the titillatingly titled The Joy of Sex. If you know the book, you know it’s just a bunch of artful drawings of a man and a woman performing various sexual acts, a “how to” manual for the curious and adventurous. Set up to mimic cooking books like Joy of Cooking, Joy of Sex covered the gamut of sexual acts, and would spend more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, including three months at the top of the list. It wasn’t the kind of book anyone could possibly conceive a major Hollywood studio might ever be interested in making into a movie.
And you’d be right.
Sort of.
When a producer named Tom Moore bought the movie rights to the book in 1975, for $100,000 and 20% of the film’s profit, Moore really only wanted the title, because he thought a movie called “Joy of Sex” would be a highly commercial prospect to the millions of people who had purchased the book over the years, especially since porn chic was still kind of “in” at the time.
In 1976, Moore would team with Paramount Pictures to further develop the project. They would hire British comedian, actor and writer Dudley Moore to structure the movie as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask. Moore was more interested in writing a single story, about someone not unlike himself in his early 40s coming to grips with being sexually hung up during the era of free love. Moore and the studio could not come to an agreement over the direction of the story, and Moore would, maybe not so ironically, sign on the play a character not unlike himself, in his early 40s, coming to grips with being sexually hung up during the era of free love, in Blake Edwards’ 10.
Still wanting to pursue the idea of the movie as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask, Paramount next approached the British comedy troupe Monty Python to work on it, since that’s basically what they did for 45 episodes of their BBC show between 1969 and 1974. But since they had just found success with their first movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they decided to concentrate their efforts on their next movie project.
In 1978, Paramount hired actor and comedian Charles Grodin to write the script, telling him it could literally be about anything. Grodin, one of the stealthiest funny people to ever walk the Earth, had written a movie before, an adaptation of the Gerald A. Browne novel 11 Harrowhouse, but he found himself unable to think of anything, finding the ability to write anything he wanted as long as it could somehow be tied to the title to be an albatross around his neck. When Grodin finally turned in a script a few months later, Paramount was horrified to discover he had written a movie about a screenwriter who was having trouble writing a Hollywood movie based on a sex manual. The studio passed and released Grodin from his contract. In 1985, Grodin was able to get that screenplay made into a movie called Movers and Shakers, but despite having a cast that included Grodin, Walter Matthew, Gilda Radner, Bill Macy, and Vincent Gardenia, as well as cameos from Steve Martin and Penny Marshall, the film bombed badly.
After the success of The Blues Brothers, John Belushi was hired to star in Joy of Sex, to be directed by Penny Marshall in what was supposed to be her directing debut, produced by Matty Simmons, the publisher of National Lampoon who was looking for another potential hit film to put its name on after their success with Animal House, from a script written by National Lampoon writer John Hughes, which would have been his first produced screenplay. Hughes’ screenplay still would be structured as a series of short vignettes not unlike Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But We’re Afraid to Ask, but Belushi would pass away before filming could begin. Penny Marshall would make her directing debut four years later with the Whoopi Goldberg movie Jumpin’ Jack Flash, while Hughes’ first produced screenplay, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, would actually begin production four weeks before Belushi died. Belushi kept getting the production start date for Joy of Sex pushed back because...
