Movers & Shakers

Movers & Shakers (1985)

A new comedy about a movie that doesn't get made and the people who don't make it.

Studio head Joe Mulholland promises his dying producer and mentor, Saul Gritz, to adapt a popular sex manual into a film, despite his better judgment. Unable to figure out how to turn the nonfiction book into a narrative movie, Mulholland enlists the services of Herb Dorman, a screenwriter of popular romantic films with a bad marriage, and volatile director Sid Spokane to help him create a movie.

Date of release
1985-05-03
TMDB
3.9 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Comedy
Director
William Asher

Casting

Interesting facts

Movers & Shakers is a 1985 American comedy film distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Walter Matthau and directed by William Asher.

Production

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 large 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 that the movie "could be about anything".

After Paramount put Grodin's script in turnaround in 1978, he was free to offer it to other studios. However, because 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 lead role as the producer.

Grodin persuaded some of his actor friends to become involved. Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Penny Marshall, Tyne Daly and Grodin all agreed to work for the least amount of money that the union allowed. Martin agreed without reading the script.

When the film was ready to go in front of the cameras, original lead actor Peter Falk was no longer available. An unnamed well-known comic actor had to drop out when he did not pass his insurance physical. At the last minute, Walter Matthau agreed to star, receiving $1 million, half his usual fee for his work at the time.

Following some unsuccessful preview screenings, the son of MGM executive Greg Morrison suggested that narration by Grodin be added to the picture.

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

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