Company Business

Company Business (1991)

You can't judge a man by the company that keeps him!

An aging agent is called back by "the Company" to run a hostage trade of a Soviet spy for an American agent.

Date of release
1991-09-06
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (84)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Action, Thriller
Director
Nicholas Meyer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Berlin, Paris, Washington, D.C., and Anguilla

Company Business is a 1991 American action film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd, a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko, a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin.

Production

According to writer/director Nicholas Meyer's memoir The View from the Bridge, Meyer decided to try his hand at writing an original screenplay at the behest of then CAA co-chairman Rick Nicita. Due to the changing political environment in the Soviet Union, Meyer was forced to quickly finish his screenplay "that struggled to reflect fast-moving events in Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall was collapsing." As a result, the film went into preprod…

The title "Company Business" comes from the depiction in the movie of the word "company" as meaning the CIA, so "company business" means operations not to be revealed to anyone outside the CIA. The working title was Dinosaurs and the scene relating to this term was left in the finished film: a restaurant scene in which the young lady calls the two main characters "dinosaurs" meaning that CIA and KGB agents are no longer needed in the post–Cold Wa…

The film was produced by frequent Nicholas Meyer collaborator Steven-Charles Jaffe, who also served as second unit director. Filming took place in Berlin and Paris, as well as numerous locations in the United States.

Meyer later described his experience on Company Business, saying:

The film, which came to be known as Company Business, was a catastrophe, and it was no one's fault but mine. Going forward without a finished script was suicide. And while on paper, the troika of Hackman, Baryshnikov, and Meyer might have appeared promising, in reality we were all pulling in different directions, and my bouts with Hackman just about wrecked me.

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

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