The Boys

The Boys (1991)

A Story of Love, Life & Cigarettes

When Walter is diagnosed with lung cancer, despite his squeaky clean lifestyle, he has to tell his screenwriter partner, a chain-smoker. As Walter fights cancer he tries to put his affairs in order by teaching writing to prison inmates, talking to his son and ex-wife, and getting his partner to quit smoking.

Date of release
1991-04-15
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, TV Movie
Director
Glenn Jordan

Casting

Interesting facts

The Boys is a drama/black comedy television film starring James Woods and John Lithgow. It was directed by Glenn Jordan, who had previously worked with Woods on the 1986 TV movie Promise and later worked with Woods again in 1994 for the TV drama film Jane's House. The film first aired on September 15, 1991 on the ABC Network.

Production

The film was largely inspired by the lives of the film's writer William Link and his long-time writing partner, Richard Levinson, and Levinson's death. However, the key plot point of the story didn't happen in reality, as Levinson was the smoker.

Link spoke of the film's story and the writing of the script. "Call it therapy. I had mentioned this concept to Dick several years before he died, but he did not want to write it. I asked him why, and he said "you guess". I don't think he wanted to be under scrutiny in promoting the show, with people asking him, "Why are you chain-smoking in this interview when you just produced a movie that is against it?" A week after Dick died in 1987, I was a…

Link's worries of writing solo were soothed considerably with the signing of the two central roles to Woods and Lithgow. "It's rare in this business that you get two people who are so dedicated to the material. They wouldn't change one syllable, and they treated the script like Biblical text.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Link used to say that his relationship with Levinson was like marriage without the sex. The story was written by Link as a form of private therapy to get over Levinson's death. Neither Woods or Lithgow worried about taking time out of their film careers to do a TV film. "Each of us looks for good material.

The film was the first TV movie to deal directly with the issue of secondary smoke, although both leading actors insisted that The Boys was not a network disease-of-the-week movie. "The secondary smoke is certainly an important aspect of the story," Lithgow said. "One man is dying because the other man smokes. It's an important little turn of the plot, but it's sort of the last thing I think about.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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