Joy of Sex

The 80s Movie Podcast

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 of he was working on a screenplay for a movie he really wanted to make, a diamond smuggling caper called Noble Rot, which Paramount had agreed to make if Belushi would make Joy of Sex first.

After that, Paramount would hire the unlikely team of screenwriting teacher Syd Field and shock jock Don Imus to try their hand at it, before going back to Hughes, who at one point turned in a draft that was 148 pages long.

After the success of Porky’s around this time, Paramount would have the script rewritten again, this time by The Outsiders’ screenwriter Kathleen Rowell, trying to make it into a raunchy comedy. Amy Heckerling, the director of Fast Times, was approached to direct, but she would turn it down because she didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a raunchy sex comedy director.

The studio needed to get the film in production by the end of May 1983, or the rights to the book and the title would revert back to its author. After Valley Girl started to get some good buzz just before release, Paramount would approach Coolidge to direct. Although the budget for the film would only be around $5m, Coolidge would earn far more than the $5,000 she made for Valley Girl. So even if she wasn’t too thrilled with the script, it was good money.

Maybe she should have waited.

The film would begin production in Los Angeles and Santa Monica beginning on May 31st, 1983, literally the day before the movie rights would have reverted back to the author, and Coolidge would only be given twenty-six days to film it. It also didn’t help that the production was working under Paramount’s television division, and the producer, Frank Konigsberg, had never produced a feature film before. This final version of the script she would be working with, credited to Kathleen Rowell and first-time screenwriter, J.J. Salter, would be the nineteenth draft written over the course of eight years, and wouldn’t quite be the raunchfest Paramount was hoping for, but they were literally out of time.

To try and make things as comfortable for herself as possible, Coolidge would hire a number of actors and crew members from Valley Girl, and tried to shoot the film, as straight as possible, even with the studio’s request for lots of gratuitous nudity. Michelle Meyrink, one of Julie’s valley girl friends in Coolidge’s previous film, would star as Leslie, a high school senior who tries to lose her virginity when she mistakenly believes she only has six weeks to live, alongside her Valley Girl co-stars Cameron Dye, Colleen Camp and Heidi Holicker. Also on board would be Ernie Hudson, who would go straight from making this film into making Ghostbusters, and Christopher Lloyd, who was still a couple years away from starring as Doc Brown, as Leslie’s dad, a coach at her school. Coolidge’s saving grace was that, despite the pressure to have scenes of nubile young co-eds running naked down the school halls for no good reason, the core of the story was about two teenagers who, while trying to learn about sex, would discover and fall in love with each other.

Paramount would set the film for an April 13th, 1984 release, even before Coolidge turned in her first cut of the film. But when she did, that’s when the proverbial poop hit the proverbial fan. Coolidge made the movie she wanted to make, a sweet love story, even with some scenes of gratuitous and unnecessary nudity. Which is not the movie Paramount wanted, even if it was the script they approved. Her relationship with the studio further soured when the first test screening of the film turned out to be a disaster, especially with teenage girls and women, who loved the love story at the center of the film but hated the completely gratuitous and unnecessary nudity.

Coolidge would be fired off the film, the television and film departments at Paramount would get into vicious finger pointing arguments about who was to blame for this mess and how they were going to fix it, and Matty Simmons would pay Paramount $250,000 to have National Lampoon’s name removed from the film, claiming the film did not represent what the magazine had originally signed up for.

Paramount would cancel the April 1984 release date, while hiring two new editors to try and salvage the mess they felt they were given. The Directors Guild offered to allow Coolidge to take her name off the film and have it credited to Alan Smithee, but she would decide to leave her name on it. Even if the film bombed, it was another directing credit to her name, which could still help her get future jobs.

When the new editors finished their work on the film, they had whittled down Coolidge’s original version that ran 115 minutes into a barely cohesive 93 minute mess, and the studio decided to release the film on August 3rd. In the 80s, the entire month of August was pretty much considered a dumping ground for movies, as families were often eschewing going to the movies for their last moments of summer fun before the kids had to go back to school.

Opening on 804 screens, Joy of Sex would open in ninth place, grossing an anemic $1.9m in its first three days. Ghostbusters, in its ninth week of release, was still in first place with $6.5m, and it would also get outgrossed by Gremlins, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Karate Kid, all three having been released in May or June. After a second weekend where the film would lose nearly 20% of its theatres and 55% of its first week audience, Paramount would stop tracking the film. It’s final reported ticket sales total would be just $3.69m.

Because I am cursed with the ability to remember the most mundane things from nearly forty years ago while being unable to remember where I left a screwdriver yesterday, I still remember seeing Joy of Sex. It was on the #1 screen at the Skyview Drive-in in Santa Cruz. It was the A-title, playing a double bill with Cheech and Chong Still Smokin’, which had not done very well when it had been released the previous May. My friends and I would head out to the theatre, Dick and some friends piled in his Impala, me and some friends in my AMC Pacer, with lawn chairs and frosty beverages in the trunks, ready to completely rip apart this film we heard was really bad.

And rip it apart we did.

I think there were maybe ten cars on our side of the drive-in, plenty of room for a bunch of drunken teenagers to be far away from everyone else and be obnoxious jerks.

In 1984, we didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have easy access to the industry newspapers where we may have heard about all the troubles with the production. We just knew the film stunk something foul, and we had one of our most fun evenings at the movies destroying it in our own inimitable way. Not that I was going to give the movie another chance. It stunk. There’s just no two ways about it, but I am now more forgiving of Martha Coolidge now that I know just how impossible a situation she was put in.

Ironically, the debacle that was Joy of Sex would be part of the reason I so enjoyed Coolidge’s next film, 1985’s Real Genius so much, because Joy of Sex was still fresher in my mind than Valley Girl.

But we’ll talk more about Real Genius on our next episode.

Thank you for joining us.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Joy of Sex.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.