Group Marriage

Group Marriage (1973)

There Are Marriages... And Then There Are Marriages

Chris is not getting along with boyfriend Sandor and has an affair with parole officer Dennis. Dennis invites the couple to dinner with his ex-girlfriend Jan. At a picnic on the beach, Jan meets lifeguard Phil, who later sleeps with Chris and moves in with the other five. Phil brings in a person, lawyer Elaine. The "group marriage" of the six of them attracts media attention, which brings trouble and prejudice.

Date of release
1973-03-01
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Drama, Comedy
Director
Stephanie Rothman

Casting

Interesting facts

Group Marriage is a 1972 American sex comedy film co-written and directed by Stephanie Rothman. It was the first film she made for Dimension Pictures, a company in which she was a minor shareholder with her husband Charles Swartz along with Larry Woolner.

Production

According to Rothman, Larry Woolner, who ran Dimension, "wanted me to make a sexy film, and I tried to think of how I could do that and anchor it in something that said something about sexual mores." She was reading a book Future Shock which included discussion of group marriage and thought that "might be a wonderful framework in which to create a sex comedy that said something about the temperaments of the people involved, their goals, the socia…

Rothman was determined to handle the topic "in a way that was not sordid and sleazy" but rather "humorous and pithy and imaginative... my intention at least was to make something that was a surprise."

"I was trying to make a bedroom farce," she said. Rothman admired that genre because "I like the fact that it's very dynamic, things are always happening in it. The humor is fast and furious. The people are put in extreme situations and must devise ways to get out of them." (She had even acted in a production of Georges Feydeau's Hotel Paradiso.)

She gave the characters different jobs because she "wanted a mix of people who... could draw on their work experience in some way that would affect the common life experience that they shared during the time of the story."

The film was announced in January 1972 and shot later that year in and around Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California. Rothman said, "I like comedy best of all and Group Marriage was the first chance I had to do an outright comedy. Unlike The Velvet Vampire, it didn't go under the guise of being something else."

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

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