Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!
When I started writing about a very specific kind of bad movie on my own personal blog, I found it helpful to develop a simple acronym to identify them as a group. I call them WWTTMs, which stands for What Were They Thinking Movies. The term is meant to describe those films that – for any of a number of reasons – were so inherently flawed in their conception, you are forced to question the sanity of the people who made them.
Greatly compelling for all of the wrong reasons, many WWTTMs began life as avant-garde, literary or just-plain-incomprehensible books whose popularity clouded a filmmaker’s judgment and convinced them to go ahead with an inevitably doomed adaptation. Last week’s investigation of such foolish endeavors continues now with a series of sarcastic and mean-spirited comments about what Hollywood did to THE JOY OF SEX and EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.
THE JOY OF SEX by Dr. Alex Comfort
About the Book: What can you say about THE JOY OF SEX? Well, it taught people in the ’70s how to fuck, which is a pretty noble thing to do. A quick online search reveals that Comfort was a pretty interesting dude whose interests went beyond titillating bored housewives with his insights on oral sex and light bondage: He was an anarchist before punk rock made it cool and gave it an easily graffiti-able symbol, and besides his famous rip-off of the KAMA SUTRA, he also published dozens of books of poetry, prose and criticism.
After reading about him, it is easy to imagine how he might have reacted when he learned that someone in Hollywood was willing to pay him a buttload of cash to make a movie based on his only bestseller:
Dr. C: Hello, Dr. Comfort at your service. Fight the power!
Movie Executive: Excuse me?
Dr. C: Sorry, it’s an old anarchist’s reflex. Can I help you?
ME: Yeah, is this the Dr. Alex Comfort who wrote THE JOY OF SEX?
DR C: The one and only.
ME: Great! I’m Soulless Asshole from Some Shitty Studio and I’m very interested in buying the film rights to your book.
Dr. C: Really? Which one? A GIANT’S STRENGTH? COME OUT TO PLAY?
ME: Noooo, I’ve never heard of those books. I’m talking about the one that’s been on the Top 5 bestseller list for the past three years.
Dr. C: What? The sex book?
ME: That’s the one!
Dr. C: But it’s a guidebook!
ME: Yeah? And?
Dr. C: It doesn’t have a plot! How could you possible make a movie out of it?
ME: That’s for some dumb-schmuck writer to figure out! All I know is that people love your book and everyone in the country knows its title. You can’t buy that kind of publicity! Think about it! If that weird Allen freak can have a hit with EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX* BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, imagine what we’ll be able to do with a much shorter and snappier title!
Dr. C: I’m not sure…
ME: We’ll pay you (insert obscene amount of money here).
Dr. C: Let’s make a movie!
Why the Book Defies Adaptation: Do I really need to explain it to you? It’s a freaking sex manual!
About the Movie Adaptation: In his 1994 book “IF YOU DON’T BUY THIS BOOK, WE’LL KILL THIS DOG!”: LIFE, LAUGHS, LOVE, AND DEATH AT NATIONAL LAMPOON, the late magazine publisher and movie producer Matty Simmons gives a brief behind the scenes look at the development of the movie “inspired” by Dr. Comfort’s famous manual. According to Simmons, he received a call from future train-wreck and Jerry Bruckheimer partner Don Simpson in 1981, asking him if he was interested in selling the National Lampoon name to the long-in-development THE JOY OF SEX movie.
Not surprisingly, Paramount – the studio that owned the film rights to Comfort’s book – had had little success in turning the kinky how-to book into a movie, and they thought that maybe the folks behind the comedy phenomenon ANIMAL HOUSE might have better luck with it. Simmons agreed and hired John Hughes (THE BREAKFAST CLUB) to write a script about one man’s lifetime of sexual discovery, starting from his first hearing his parents having sex as a kid, all the way to his cheating on his wife with another woman.
Thanks to Hughes’ script, LAVERNE & SHIRLEY’s Penny Marshall expressed an interest in making her directorial debut with the project and John Belushi agreed to star in the picture after the studio passed on another film he had been developing and he needed some immediate cash to pay for his enormously expensive drug habit. With these elements in place, the movie was greenlit and ready to go into production, only to be canceled two days after Belushi died from an overdose.
With just a few months left on the option, it was decided that the title would be used for a low-budget teen comedy to be filmed in five weeks by Martha Coolidge, the director of the surprise hit VALLEY GIRL. In JOY OF SEX (the decision having been made to drop the THE), the main character was a young woman named Leslie (played by the tragically forgotten Michelle Meyrink) who, mistakenly believing she only has a short time to live, attempts to lose her virginity before she dies. Despite its plot and expensive title, the film featured very little sex and – beyond an amusing subplot involving the efforts of a very busty 30-something undercover cop (Colleen Camp) to pose as a student to uncover a high school drug ring – made for one of the more excruciating teen movie experiences from that period.
The finished film proved so horrible that Simmons agreed to pay Paramount $250,000 not to have the National Lampoon brand name attached to it (and remember, this was after NATIONAL LAMPOON GOES TO THE MOVIES and NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CLASS REUNION, so that says a lot) and Paramount learned that paying a lot of money for what amounts to a well-known title is a pretty stupid idea.
We Suggest: That you rent EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX* BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, if only for the brilliant sequence where Gene Wilder willingly sacrifices everything for the love of a sexy sheep.
EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES by Tom Robbins
About the Book: Among the many possible words that could be used to describe Tom Robbins’ literary career, prolific would not be one of them. Since 1971, he has managed to produce just eight novels and one collection of miscellanea, which averages out to one book every four years. Speaking as someone who wrote 12-and-a-half books in four years, I think I’m justified in suggesting that Robbins is a lazy slacker, though I would prefer that no one made the effort to compare and contrast our different literary achievements (since many of my books, y’know, suck).
But then, the reason Robbins can get away with working so slowly is because he is one of those rare writers who can truly be described as one-of-a-kind. His is a voice so unique only the worst kind of fool would dare try to imitate it – in any medium.
What makes Robbins’ books so unique is his strange ability to make the patently absurd seem completely credible. In any other author’s hands, his characters and narratives would seem hopelessly contrived and embarrassingly fantastic, but somehow he is able to make them seem totally natural and believable.
That’s not to say that his gift is one worthy of universal appreciation. You have to be a bit fucked-up to enjoy a Robbins book. If you aren’t, then you’re likely going to end up finishing his books feeling pissed off and confused. These are not works for the literal-minded.
Probably the most extreme example of this is his second novel, EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES, the strange tale of Sissy Hankshaw, who holds the title of the World’s Greatest Hitchhiker – not because of her incredible beauty, but because of her inescapably enormous thumbs. Add to this a cast of lesbian cowgirls, an effeminate homosexual douche magnet and an inscrutable Chinese hermit, and you have a book that you most likely will find either brilliant or impossible to finish.
I have to admit, that in this case, I am of the latter disposition. As much as I love Robbins’ other books (especially STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER and JITTERBUG PERFUME), I’ve never been able to get more than a third of the way through COWGIRLS before putting it down and not picking it back up again. But despite my never having finished it, I can say with total certainty that only a colossal asshole would ever think to turn it into a movie.
Why the Book Defies Adaptation: As stated, what makes Robbins’ work so unique is his ability to make the outlandish seem credible. Once you take him out of the equation, you are left with characters and scenarios that would seem to be too far-fetched for a Bugs Bunny cartoon, much less a live-action motion picture.
About the Movie: The central irony of Gus Van Sant’s 1993 adaptation of Robbins’ book is that in trying to make it more realistic, he only succeeded in making it more absurd, with the primary example of this being the main character’s peculiar deformity. While reading the book, we are somehow able to accept the gigantic proportions of Sissy’s incredible thumbs and appreciate how they would be impossible for any driver to resist, but in this case, what works in our imaginations simply doesn’t translate onto the silver screen.
In the movie, Sissy (Uma Thurman) does indeed have enormous thumbs – ones far larger than any we have ever seen in any movie that didn’t feature Andre the Giant – but they simply aren’t big enough. If they were any larger, they would have looked truly ridiculous, but as they are, they cannot convincingly sell the notion that they enable their owner to get a ride from anyone she flashes them in front of. It’s a paradox the film cannot escape from.
It also doesn’t help Van Sant’s cause that his screenplay is horrible, his direction flat and lifeless, and his talented roster of actors all giving the worst performances of their careers. But mostly it’s about the thumb thing.
We Suggest: That you all pray that no one at Pixar ever realizes how neat it would be to take the inanimate heroes of SKINNY LEGS AND ALL (Dirty Sock, Spoon and Can o’ Beans) and give them their own full-length feature film.
Well, that’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll look at how not everything Stephen King has written deserves to be given the motion-picture treatment. –Allan Mott
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