Charles Grodin Was Hired to Adapt The Joy of Sex for the Big Screen, Which Somehow Led to Him Writing and Starring in the 1986 Flop Movers and Shakers
It’s tempting to say that the story behind the doomed, Charles Grodin written and produced movie-world satire Movers & Shakers is more colorful and entertaining than the film itself except that the story behind the movie is also the movie’s premise. As Grodin relays in one of his memoirs, in the 1970s, Paramount bought the film rights to the massively successful bestseller The Joy Of Sex and had the brilliant idea of hiring Charles Grodin, Mr. Sex himself, to write the screenplay.
Grodin was given total freedom. As I imagine thousands of satisfied women can undoubtedly attest, nobody knows more about the carnal arts than Grodin, yet he cooked up a premise about a screenwriter hired to write a movie based on a best-selling sex manual who then finds himself completely lost and overwhelmed. Where does Grodin get his ideas? My guess: drugs.
Hollywood being Hollywood, Paramount then passed on Grodin’s screenplay, as did many other studios and, after, an even more unfortunate attempt to make The Joy Of Sex as a John Belushi vehicle to be written by John Hughes and directed by Penny Marshall fell through, the salacious book was eventually adapted into a little-remembered film by Martha Coolidge in 1984.
Grodin, meanwhile, was free to take his script elsewhere so after some false starts, and Peter Falk dropping out as the lead, the film finally hobbled onto the big screen in 1985, after skittish filmmakers added narration after some “blah” to “lukewarm” to “meh” to “not feeling it” sneak previews.
Against impossible odds, and, despite its dire reputation, Movers & Shakers is not a bad movie, but its narration is one of a number of serious, if not quite fatal, flaws. As an actor and screenwriter, Grodin traffics in subtlety, in nuance, in understatement. He’s one of the all-time great comic actors, but he’s an even more brilliant reactor and a lot of the humor and pathos in Movers & Shakers has nothing to do with the sometimes very clever and sometimes pedestrian script and everything to do with the way Grodin’s body language and facial expressions indelibly convey the desperation and sad, gloomy pragmatic calculation of a man desperately trying to hold on in an industry and a world that he does not understand and that has no interest in understanding him.
Movies hit us differently at different stages in our lives. I responded to Movers & Shakers very differently as a 46 year old survivor (roughly Grodin’s character’s age) than I would have as a 13 year old looking for laughs. Despite its weird connection to a best-selling sex book, Movers & Shakers is a fundamentally sad, relatively subtle exploration of failure, aging and mortality, which helps explain why it traveled such a long, tormented, circuitous route to movie theaters, flopped and has never been available on home video in the United States.
Movers & Shakers is a profound failure about profound failure that seemingly has failure written into its DNA. It opens by introducing its central motif of failure — a giant fake dinosaur constructed for a million dollars for an ill-fated dinosaur movie — being driven through the streets of Hollywood en route to its eventual home in a movie studio where it is greeted as both an eyesore and bad luck.
The fake dinosaur is an impressively hideous piece of work. It is to actual dinosaurs what the notorious Lucille Ball statue was to the I Love Lucy star: an evil, demonic abomination of a familiar sight that’s disturbing on a visceral level. It’s a clever sight gag that retains its shock and horror no matter how many times we see the damn thing but it also works on a ham-fisted symbolic level as well.
Pretty much all our characters are show-business dinosaurs, most notably Grodin’s Herb Derman, a playwright turned screenwriter whose marriage has devolved into a sexless march of dreary obligation, and studio executive Joe Mulholland (Walter Matthau). As the film opens, Mulholland is given the impossible task of turning Joy In Sex, a Joy Of Sex-like best-selling sex guide, into a film by a dear, dying friend who won a fierce bidding war for it despite its glaring lack of a plot, characters and everything else movies generally need.
Derman is brought in and has absolutely no idea how to adapt Joy In Sex for the big screen but he’s a struggling middle-aged man trying to hold onto what’s left of his fading career so he goes to lots of meetings where other, similarly desperate middle-aged men attempt to say things that sound smart and insightful but do little to mask their palpable desperation.
An eccentric director played by Bill Macy is hired to helm a movie the filmmakers figure will either be a story of love, romance and courtship for the entire family or some manner of X-rated blockbuster porno focussing on the broad, some might argue infinite, variety of positions available to consenting lovers. But also the movie should have balloons! And water rides! And the sprit of Clark Gable coursing through it! Or maybe the biggest sex scenes the world would ever know!
The desperate filmmakers meet with a colorful matinee idol played by Steve Martin in an Oscar-worthy silver wig who is either a suspiciously well-preserved movie star in his 70s or an immortal, non-aging, shape-shifting supernatural creature. It’s a big, goofy, Saturday Night Live-broad performance as Martin cycles in and out of dubious, wandering European accents and prattles on about Guava juice while dropping leering double entendres. It’s very funny even if the scene-stealing character, like so much else in the film, is introduced and then unceremoniously dropped.
Movers & Shakers is keenly attuned to the existential angst of its male characters, but wife/fiances played by Tyne Daly and Gilda Radner are much less well-developed. Movers & Shakers is a very male movie but its conception of masculinity is fascinatingly haggard, cranky and exhausted.
Grodin and Matthau set the tone but the film surrounds them with character actors who are, if anything, even older and crankier-seeming, like Vincent Gardenia, Bill Macy and Michael Lerner. As a comic meditation on aging, death and rejection, it’s easy to see why Movers & Shakers was a tough sell to get greenlit, and an even tougher sell to audiences and critics.
Movers & Shakers is almost impressively non-commercial, an ostensible sex comedy without any sex, just the sadness of a bunch of old men. But it’s also extremely flawed. It’s flatly directed by television's William Asher, badly scored and ends abruptly and on an intensely unsatisfying note, seemingly an entire act prematurely.
Yet despite these flaws, I found myself really connecting with the movie. Matthau’s character keeps talking about wanting to make a movie with real substance, something enduring, something they can be proud of. He sounds more than a little like Burt Reynolds’ character in Boogie Nights when he waxes similarly highbrow about his own ambitions to elevate porn into art, or at least motion picture entertainment.
This incongruously lofty rhetoric is supposed to be comic in both cases but it’s also oddly beautiful, even touching. That faint, beaten-down flicker of idealism still residing inside Matthau’s exhausted survivor, all of the compromise and ridiculousness and stupidity he’s willing to endure in a doomed bid to try to achieve his dream, makes the inevitable death of that dream all the more haunting and sad. These men are just self-aware enough to know that they’re lost so they band together in a futile attempt to stave off extinction, the fate of the first, non-symbolic dinosaurs.
Movers & Shakers is funny, if in a more subtle way than I had anticipated, but it’s also genuinely about something: the desperate quest to stay young and vital in an industry and a culture that worships youth and detests the wisdom experience sometimes brings, along with bitterness, disillusionment, exhaustion and all everything else life, and particularly age, has to offer.
Movies find their audiences as much as audiences find them. Some are a little more discriminating than others. So while Paramount might have hoped they’d get a big, rowdy, young, Animal House/Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex blockbuster crowd out of their Joy Of Sex movie, instead Movers & Shakers will have to settle for being not just for people like me, but me, singular, a weird 46-year-old man who has experienced a lot of rejection and failure in his life, much of it entertainment and show-business-related. In that respect, Movers & Shakers might consequently be a cult film whose cult consists exclusively of me.
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