Dang, there were A LOT of movies about sex that all came out on August 3rd, 1984. Let’s take a look back…
On this date in 80s movie history, three new moderate to wide releases would join three New York City exclusive openings in theatres:
After the mess that was Superman III, Christopher Reeve was done with the iconic role that made him famous, and he purposely sought out projects and filmmakers that would help audiences accept him as more than just The Man of Steel. And there were few filmmaking teams that could help him achieve this objective than director James Ivory, producer Ismael Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Between 1963’s The Householder (based on Jhabvala’s novel) and 2003’s Le Divorce, this writer/producer/directing team made more than twenty films together, including future collaborations A Room With a View (1986), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993). The Bostonians would be their 12th movie together, and the second to be based on a novel by Henry James, after 1979’s The Europeans. When they found out a star like Christopher Reeve was interested in working with them, they would meet with the actor, and all would agree that Reeve would be great at Basil Ransom, a chauvinist Southern lawyer who falls in love with the protege of his distant relation Olive (Vanessa Redgrave), a Boston spinster and leader of the local women’s suffrage movement, who herself is in love with the same young woman.
The film would be embraced by critics, who thought Reeve did a terrific job as the Southern lawyer, and practically every screening of the film at the Cinema I opening weekend would sell out, with ticket sales for the first three days totally to a mind-blowing $85k. But outside of the major cities, distributor Almi Pictures just couldn’t get people to see Reeve as anything more than Superman, and the film would only gross $1.01m during its entire five-month theatrical run, never playing on more than 12 screens in any given week. Not even two Academy Award nominations (Redgrave, for Best Actress, and Best Costumes) could goose apathetic audiences into giving it a chance.
Reeve would continue to have problems crossing over into non-Superman roles for most of the rest of his career, although the Merchant/Ivory team’s respect for him would lead them to cast him in an important role in 1993’s Remains of the Day. But despite that film’s success, he would continue to languish in roles beneath his abilities until a 1995 horseback riding accident paralyzed him. Ironically, becoming paralyzed would energize his career, giving him the chance to produce his own projects, including a 1998 remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for which he would win a Screen Actors Guild Award. He would also win a Grammy Award in 2000 for the audiobook version of his autobiography, Still Me.
Jean-Luc Godard is, inarguably, one of the most polarizing filmmakers to have ever worked in the art of cinema. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground when it comes to Godard. You either really love his work, or you really hate it. I fall into the latter category, and First Name: Carmen is one of the many reasons why I just cannot regard him as anything more than an enfant terrible.
Loosely based on the opera by Bizet, a young girl (newcomer Maruschka Detmers) falls in love with an inept bank guard when she and some friends try and rob a bank in order to fund a kidnapping of a big manufacturer, with cover for the kidnapping to be provided by her uncle, a former film director (played by Godard), who will “direct” a “movie” that will fool onlookers that the kidnapping is just part of the film.
It’s one of Godard’s cruelest movies, which is really saying something, but Godard fans ate it up, making it his biggest hit in both France and America in years. In France, it would gross more than $3m, while in America, after its exceptional $39k opening weekend at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, it would gross more than $1.5m.
Jamie Lee Curtis had been one of the most beautiful and interesting young actresses to hit Hollywood in years when she made a splash in the original 1978 Halloween and 1983’s Trading Places, but she wasn’t always the greatest at picking good material, and Grandview U.S.A. would continue her streak of big-screen stinkers.
Curtis stars as a small town mechanic who wants to restore the local demolition derby, and gets herself involved with a married demolition derby driver (Patrick Swayze) and an eighteen-year-old who wants to become a driver (C. Thomas Howell). One wishes the film could have been better, since it not only has Curtis and Swayze but also Jennifer Jason Leigh, M. Emmitt Walsh, and both John and Joan Cusack, but it really just doesn’t work at all. The film would be the highest grossing new opener this week, but with only $2.19m from 1069 theatres, that’s really not much to brag about. It would completely disappear from theatres in just four weeks, with only $4.74m in the bank.
The title for The Most Worthless Adaptation of a Best Seller Ever goes to this absolute turkey of a film. For those who don’t know, The Joy of Sex was a book that celebrated sex and all the different ways a man and a woman in 1972 could have intercourse, with graphically detailed drawn images of each act, to make sure the experimenting couple would be doing things correctly. So how do you turn that into a movie? If you’re a Hollywood producer, you turn it into the kind of generic 80s teen sex comedy that could have been titled Bad Reputation or Desperate But Not Serious or I Know What Boys Like or one of a hundred other new wave songs from the early 80s and not have made one bit of difference.
And, in fact, that’s exactly what Paramount Pictures did. Bought the rights to the book in 1978 just for the title, which they felt would be highly commercial. And the first thing they’d do after buying the rights to the book just for the title was to hire funny man Charles Grodin to write a screenplay. Unsure of what to write, he wrote a screenplay about a Hollywood writer who struggles to write a script based on a sex manual after a big studio acquires the rights. (This was nearly 25 years before Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Adaptation. did a similar gag.) Paramount would pass on the script, and Grodin would finally make that movie as Movers and Shakers in 1985.
Over the next few years, there would be a wealth of people who tried to make something happen.
At one point in 1981, Penny Marshall was supposed to make her directorial debut on the film, working from a script featuring several unrelated storylines written by John Hughes (which, had it been made, would have been his first produced screenplay), starring John Belushi. And during this time, National Lampoon would become a part of the production, so it’s official title was National Lampoon’s The Joy of Sex.
Eventually, it would be director Martha Coolidge, hot off her surprise 1983 hit Valley Girl, who would get the movie made. Michelle Meyrink, one of Coolidge’s Valley Girl stars, would get the lead role here as Leslie, a high school senior who, after a misunderstanding from her doctor, believes she only has six weeks to live, and becomes desperate to lose her virginity before she dies. Coolidge would shoot the movie in the fall of 1983, with a cast that included Ernie Hudson (who would do directly from shooting this movie to his role as Winston Zeddmore in Ghostbusters) and Christopher Lloyd. Coolidge would find herself removed from the movie by Paramount during the editing process, for removing a number of gratuitous nude scenes they were hoping to sell the film with, and National Lampoon would actually pay Paramount $250k to have their name removed from the project before its release, although Lampoon head Matty Simmons would still receive an Executive Producer credit.
When Paramount finally did release the movie on 804 screens, they didn’t screen it for critics (always a bad sign), and they didn’t release it in the largest movie market in America, New York City (another bad sign). The film would only gross $1.91m, and would soon disappear from theatres with only $4.46m worth of tickets sold.
I remember seeing the film at the Skyview Drive-In with my friends, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the movie. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than seeing it at the drive-in. I don’t remember loving it or hating it or being completely indifferent to it. It’s also possible we just ignored the film and talked to each other while sitting in folding chairs, which we would throw in the trunk and sit on outside of the car if the weather was good enough. I just know I’ve never had the desire to watch it again, or even look up to see if it’s available on any kind of home video format and/or streaming service.
When translated into English, La Petite Sirène is The Little Mermaid, except this La Petite Sirène is not some magical Disney musical but a pretty messed up French movie about a fortysomething mechanic who starts to have an affair with a fourteen-year-old girl. The girl, who is obsessed with the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, starts to fantasize that he is her Prince Charming, and slowly shows that she is willing to do anything, including kill herself, to prove her love to him. That’s pretty messed up, which might explain why the movie, which competed at the Venice Film Festival in 1980, took five years to travel from France to America. Although the film is allegedly tame in its depiction of pedophilia (one movie database website not called IMDb considered the movie to be “appropriate for children”), the film’s content so put off New York City moviegoers when it opened at the Metro, the distributor didn’t report any grosses for the film during its short run, and would never release the movie anywhere else in America.
The Philadelphia Experiment… man, I have nothing to say about this movie. As much as I loved Nancy Allen in the 80s, and wished more filmmakers had seen in her the things De Palma and Verhoeven saw in her, it was absolute suckage like this that helped secure her place on the B list. In the film, based on an urban legend, two Navy sailors from 1943 are transported to 1984 when a Naval experiment goes awry, and they must find a way back home before a time vortex created by the experiment (and a second failed experiment happened in 1984 by the same scientist who ran the first failed experiment) sucks Earth into the vortex. But which Earth? 1943 Earth? 1984 Earth? Both Earths? Man, this is why you don’t mess with the space/time continuum!!!
Michael Paré’s follow-up to Eddie and the Cruisers and Streets of Fire would be the lowest grossing new major release of the weekend, grossing just $1.87m from 490 theatres. And like Joy of Sex, it would completely skip New York City. Also like Joy of Sex, it would be gone from theatres pretty quick, although it would manage to finish its theatrical run with $8.1m worth of ticket sales.
As for the national top ten, here’s what topped the list:
1) Ghostbusters (Columbia)
$6,529,305 from 1439 theatres.
$152.98m after nine weeks.
2) Purple Rain (Warners)
$6,280,779 from 1007 theatres.
$18.88m after two weeks.
3) Gremlins (Warners)
$4,147,845 from 1431 theatres.
$120.04m after nine weeks.
4) The Jungle Book [re-release] (Disney)
$3,807,156 from 1463 theatres.
$12.63m after two weeks.
5) The Karate Kid (Columbia)
$3,609,460 from 1099 theatres.
$48.35m after seven weeks.
6) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount)
$2,354,687 from 1030 theatres.
$155.39m after eleven weeks.
7) The Neverending Story (Warners)
$2,250,624 from 891 theatres.
$14.06m after three weeks.
8) Grandview, U.S.A. (warners)
$2,194,293 from 1069 theatres.
$2.19m after three days.
9) The Joy of Sex (Paramount)
$1,913,001 from 804 theatres.
$1.91m after three days.
10) The Philadelphia Experiment (New World)
$1,877,000 from 490 theatres.
$1.88m after three days.