Movers & Shakers
| Movers & Shakers | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | William Asher |
| Produced by | William Asher Charles Grodin |
| Written by | Charles Grodin |
| Starring |
|
| Music by | Ken Welch Mitzie Welch |
| Cinematography | Robbie Greenberg |
| Edited by | Tom Benko |
|
Production
company |
|
| Distributed by | MGM/UA Entertainment Company |
|
Release date
|
May 3, 1985 |
|
Running time
|
80 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3.5 million |
| Box office | $372,438 |
Movers & Shakers is a 1985 American comedy film distributed by MGM, starring Walter Matthau and directed by William Asher.
The story follows the head of production at a Hollywood studio who wants to make a movie to fulfill a promise made to a dying friend.
The film was written by Charles Grodin, who also appears in the movie. The cast includes Tyne Daly, Gilda Radner, and Vincent Gardenia. Steve Martin makes a cameo appearance as Fabio Longio.
Hollywood studio mogul Joe Mulholland (Matthau) vows to produce the pet project of a dying acquaintance, who has been trying to find a way to make a film out of a best-selling sex manual. He and screenwriter Herb Derman (Grodin) try to make it happen, but fail in every possible way. Meanwhile, Herb is distracted by his own marital problems.
Charles Grodin recounted the making of this film in his autobiography, It Would Be So Nice if You Weren't Here: in the mid-1970s, Paramount Pictures paid a great amount of money to secure the rights to Alex Comfort's sex manual The Joy of Sex just so it could use the title, which studio executives thought to be highly commercial. In 1978, they hired Grodin to write a script, telling him the movie "could be about anything." Grodin decided to use this exact situation as the premise: a Hollywood writer struggles to write a script based on a sex manual after a big studio acquires the rights. When he finished his first draft, the studio passed and eventually released National Lampoon's Joy of Sex in 1984.
After Paramount put Grodin's script in turnaround in 1978, he was free to offer it to other studios. However, since Paramount held the rights to the title The Joy of Sex, the film was retitled Dreamers. Columbia Pictures showed interest in producing it with Peter Falk playing the leading role of the producer. But when the deal with Columbia fell through, Grodin ended up pitching his screenplay to every studio several times over the course of the next seven years. Eventually, director William Asher agreed to make it with a budget of two million dollars if people would defer salaries. This is why Grodin and Asher share a producers credit on the finished film.
...
Wikipedia