Joy of Sex

Here's a film that fully lives up to its reputation as one of the worst movies of its year despite being directed by the great Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl, Real Genius, Rambling Rose). Not only is there no joy in Joy of Sex, there's also no sex! And a neutered teen sex comedy is even more tedious than yet another sloppily-made quicky production based around unfunny adults pretending to be teenagers having their attempt to get laid thwarted in embarrassing ways. This was a doomed project from the get-go because it's a movie based on a title rather than a story shot in 21 days, with everyone involved just trying to get through the production.

Paramount Pictures paid a huge amount of money to secure the rights to Alex Comfort's best-selling 1972 illustrated sex manual just so they could use the name, which their marketing department had discovered was a title that tested through the roof. Many screenwriters were hired, and many drafts were written to come up with a story for this valuable moniker. One writer was Charles Grodin, who was told the script "could be about anything." Much like Charlie Kaufman did when he was hired to turn Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief into a movie, Grodin wrote a story about a Hollywood writer who struggles to pen a script based on a popular non-narrative book acquired by a big studio. Paramount passed, and Grodin made the script as Movers & Shakers the following year. John Hughes was then hired to write a draft consisting of several unrelated comedic vignettes, much like Woody Allen's adaptation of the earlier best-selling sex manual Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). This was before Hughes wrote Vacation or Sixteen Candles, but he was a hot young writer for National Lampoon. Matty Simmons, the chief executive officer for the Lampoon, came aboard to produce the movie, which was then going to be called National Lampoon's Joy of Sex, with Penny Marshal signed to direct. It was meant to be the directorial debut of the Laverne & Shirley star and future helmer of Jumpin' Jack Flash, A League of Their Own, and Big.

Stories around this chapter of the development process are legendary because of how they factor into the final days of John Belushi's life. The screenplay for Joy of Sex was in the Chateau Marmont bungalow where Belushi died. According to Bob Woodward's notorious book Wired, as well as Penny Marshall's delightful autobiography My Mother Was Nuts, Belushi was encouraged to be in the film and was excited about it, but he was despondent after learning that Paramount exec Don Simpson wanted to cast him as either a Cupid character or an overgrown baby (no one seems to know which as there's no segment like this in the Hughes script) and that the image of him wearing only diapers would be the key art for the poster. A distressingly upset Belushi called Marshall, who was his good friend, asking, "Is this how they see me in Hollywood?" Marshall set up a meeting on March 6th, 1982, at Paramount to talk it over with Belushi and the suits, but that meeting never happened because the night of March 5th was the night Belushi overdosed from a speedball after a long downward spiral. Without Belushi, the project went into turnaround.

The script that eventually got greenlit was hastily written by Kathleen Rowell (The Outsiders) and J.J. Salter because the studio's option on the book was running out. Rather than a comedic anthology-style film like Hughes had envisioned, the story ended up being a bog-standard high school movie, essentially a watered-down-to-nothing-but-vaper version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but without any memorable characters. Michelle Meyrink (best remembered for playing two very different types of nerdy girls in this same year's Revenge of the Nerds and Coolidge's film of the following year, Real Genius) plays Leslie Hindenberg, a hypochondriac teen who, through a comedy-of-mis-overhearing not worthy of even the worst sitcom, mistakenly believes she has just three months to live. She figures that's not enough time to fall in love, but she tries to lose her virginity before she dies. Unfortunately, her father (Christopher Lloyd) is the school's phys-ed coach, who has made it clear that if any boy lays a hand on one of his daughters, he'll "have his balls for lunch." Cameron Dye (also from Valley Girl) plays a frustrated boy who is also trying to lose his V-card after spending so much time listening to his friends boast about their sexual encounters.

These are the only storylines that register, though there are others that have potential yet never go anywhere. Cristen Kauffman plays a pregnant teen who is asked to drop out of her class and attend night school in order to graduate, which causes Leslie to intervene. Jeanne Mori plays a waitress dealing with constant sexual harassment from her leering boss, Danton Stone plays an exchange student from Abu Dhabi learning about the American ways of teendom, Ernie Hudson is the school principal dealing with a crazy-glue vandal, and DeVera Marcus is a biology teacher trying to get through a semester on sexual reproduction. The one semi-bright spot is the always enjoyable Colleen Camp (star of Death Game, They All Laughed, and Coolidge's previous pictures Valley Girl and The City Girl). Camp plays a thirty-year-old NARC awkwardly working undercover in the high school who becomes involved with Dye's character, but she completely disappears from the movie about midway through.

Paramount figured if they got the hot young female filmmaker of the sleeper hit Valley Girl to direct an ultra-low-budget film, they might see some return on their investment in the title. Coolidge was trying to get her Valley Girl follow-up, The City Girl, released without much luck (as far as I know, that movie only played a handful of film festivals but was never released), so she took the job. The project was rushed, with just eight days of prep and a twenty-day shoot. With Martha Coolidge at the helm of a script written by women, the picture does have a female-centered perspective like Valley Girl and Fast Times, but Paramount assumed they were making a Porky's style teen-sex comedy and insisted on plenty of topless nudity, which Coolidge pushed back on but shot. When the movie tested poorly with preview audiences, especially with women who complained about the gratuitous TA, Paramount found itself in the odd position of asking the female director of its Joy of Sex movie to cut out as much of the nudity she'd shot as she could.

The whole experience was unpleasant for everyone. The producer, Frank Konigsberg, held his nose throughout the production, and assistant director Tony Brown quit in disgust midway through shooting. The picture was taken away from Coolidge and recut by the studio in an attempt to make it more broadly funny. She considered removing her name and going with the director's guild pseudonym, Alan Smithee, but decided not to rock the boat. Matty Simmons got his name and the National Lampoon brand removed, as he and the magazine had nothing to do with this version. The studio downplayed the idea of a mostly female team making a movie with this title rather than making that a focus. The picture retained its R-rating despite movies with far racier content coming out this year with a PG. One wonders what might have been if Marshal had gotten to make the Hughes script or if any time or money had been allotted to Coolidge to turn this version into something worthwhile. Every once in a while, this movie delivers a funny line, such as Meyrink's, "I want to leave my mark in this world, and it's got to be more than a wet spot in somebody's backseat!" But the mark left by the film itself is little more than a dark stain on everyone involved's careers and on the great cinematic year of 1984.