Stay Hungry

Stay Hungry (1976)

If you've got an appetite for life…

A dishonest businessman asks rich layabout Craig Blake to help him buy a gym, which will be demolished for a development project in Alabama. But after spending time with weightlifter Joe Santo and gym worker Mary Tate Farnsworth, Craig wants out of the deal. The property negotiations turn ugly, causing a brawl at the gym and a spectacle at a big bodybuilding meet, as Craig learns that it's not easy to turn your back on fair-weather friends.

Date of release
1976-04-23
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (92)
Runtime
1h 42m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Bob Rafelson

Casting

Interesting facts

Stay Hungry is a 1976 American comedy-drama film by director Bob Rafelson from a screenplay by Charles Gaines.

Production

In an interview, Bob Rafelson noted that he had hitchhiked across the South after the making of The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) and had become interested in doing a film in the region. When he decided to not go through with making a film about the slave trade, he was suggested to check out a book by Charles Gaines called Stay Hungry. As he noted:

With Stay Hungry, I wasn’t in the least interested in making this book into a movie, but I was interested in the writer. So I met Gaines in Birmingham, Alabama, and it was only at the end of a very long conversation that I said to him that the conclusions of his novel were not unlike the conclusions I had come to in both Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens.

Rafelson estimated one-third of the of the characters in the film were not present in the book and also came up with a completely new subplot involving the uncle and William, the family retainer. He then spent six weeks travelling with body-builders to seek out the profession with the Mr. Olympia contest in New York, which convinced him to pursue the film.

"grateful appreciation to the people of Birmingham, Alabama and to the International Federation of Body Builders

Stay Hungry marked the final collaboration between production designer Toby Carr Rafelson and her then-husband, director Bob Rafelson. After learning that Rafelson pursued women during production, including Sally Field, she filed for divorce and never worked with him again.

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

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