Nine ½ Weeks at 40
American made/ European financed erotic drama hosed into submission
NINE ½ WEEKS (1986) is exquisitely lit and decorated theater with no show to put on. It’s photographed as well as a feature film can be, and under the circumstances–its depiction of a sadomasochistic relationship, with strong sexual content–is cast as well as it probably could’ve been, with two actors who felt they had a lot to prove, going for broke along with their director. The material so upset test audiences that the final version presented to American theatergoers is honed as if by a backhoe, leaving open graves where its story or characters should be.
In a time when a writer could publish anonymously and keep their personal life out of the public eye, much about Ingeborg Day remains unreported. An article by Sarah Weinman published November 2012 in the New Yorker fills in some details about her life. Day was born in Graz, the capital city of the southern Austrian province of Styria, in 1940. Two years earlier, her father, like the rest of his colleagues in the Austrian police, were inducted into the SS. At the age of seventeen, Day made her way to the States to participate in a one-year study abroad program in Syracuse, New York sponsored by the American Field Service. In 1960, she married an American studying to be an Episcopal priest. They settled in Indiana, where Day earned a B.A. in German studies from Goshen College and spent the next several years teaching. Their daughter was born in 1963, but the death of their infirm son at the age of seven took a heavy toll on Day. She met an artist named Tom Shannon who was also living in the Midwest and left her husband, relocating her daughter and herself to Manhattan with her lover.
Day spent four years as an editor at Ms., the magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem, and it was during this period–whether she was still in a relationship with Shannon is unclear–that she met a man who exploited her desire to be dominated sexually. Their tryst lasted nine and a half weeks, and there is evidence Day admitted herself to a mental institution to seek treatment for what had led her to the arrangement in the first place. Day’s experience served as the basis for a book she published in 1978 titled Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair. Rather than market it as fiction, Day and her publisher Henry Robbins/ Dutton maintained the story was real, and for the next five years, the author would be known by the name of her narrator, “Elizabeth McNeill.” She published a memoir, Ghost Waltz, under that pen name in 1980, but Day would never publicly address her pseudonym, or comment about the movie version of Nine and a Half Weeks. She remarried, to a man whose care she provided for late in his life, and struggling with her own health, took her life at age 70. Her husband passed away four days later.
Zalman King was a modestly successful American television actor, working his way up to a series regular on the short-lived ABC drama The Young Lawyers in 1970. Like many in Los Angeles, what King really wanted to do was direct, and his sculptor wife Patricia Louisianna Knop was willing to help. In an article by Pat Broeske published February 23, 1986 in the San Francisco Chronicle, Knop admitted she didn’t share her husband’s passion for Nine and a Half Weeks, not at first. “I found it frightening–what that woman went through. But we kept talking about it, and I became more fascinated. Also, I couldn’t believe all the excitement the book was causing. There was so much anger about it.” Not long after the book was published, Knop & King optioned the film rights to Nine and a Half Weeks and adapted a screenplay together. In an interview with Psychotronic magazine in the summer of 1992, King discussed his big break behind the camera. [The film would be referred to in print as 9 ½ Weeks, while its opening credits would bestow it Nine ½ Weeks.] King declared, “9 ½ Weeks was an obsession. I read the book and wrote the screenplay with Pat. I also intended to direct. Everybody loved it. At the risk of sounding conceited, it really was an excellent script, and everybody wanted to make it, but we’d get right down to the wire and they’d pull away. So getting it made was an obsession for me. I knew it would be successful. I was positive it was something people wanted to see. A lot of my friends put up a lot of money, and, at a certain point, I had to make a decision.”
King had lassoed a British producer of commercials and feature films named Antony Rufus-Isaacs to produce Nine ½ Weeks with him, and they got their script to Adrian Lyne. The director had spent the 1970s making commercials–for clients like Levi Strauss–that were more exciting than most of the television they were sponsoring and a lot of the movies. Lyne made his leap to feature film directing Jodie Foster, Cherrie Curie (lead vocalist of the punk band The Runaways), and Scott Baio in an American teen exploitation titled Foxes (1980). To the astonishment of many, audiences–young women mostly–propelled Lyne’s sophomore effort to blockbuster status. Starring an unknown named Jennifer Beals, Flashdance (1983) sold more tickets than any movie released that year not titled Return of the Jedi or Terms of Endearment. Its soundtrack album was an equally huge seller. Permitted to bring in Keith Barish, producer of Endless Love (1981) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), to advocate for him as an executive producer, Lyne turned down an offer to direct a film adaptation of the stage musical A Chorus Line in favor of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel. King continued, “After Flashdance, Adrian Lyne was very hot and he expressed interest in directing 9 ½ Weeks. I figured that if a director who’d just come off a mega-million dollar hit, people would probably be willing to take a chance on 9 ½ Weeks and I was right.”
When it came time to cast John, the investment banker who Elizabeth enters a sadomasochistic relationship with, King suggested to Lyne they consider Mickey Rourke. Impressed by the actor’s work in Rumble Fish (1983), Lyne agreed. This pairing of director and leading man snared the commitment of TriStar Pictures, a newly formed risk-sharing partnership between Columbia Pictures (then owned by Coca-Cola), CBS, and HBO. Director Sydney Pollock had been commissioned by the nascent studio as a production consultant and after championing their inaugural production The Natural (1984), did so again with Nine ½ Weeks. To fill the role of Elizabeth, both Teri Garr and Kathleen Turner interviewed with Lyne, while model/ actors Kim Basinger and Isabella Rossellini submitted auditions on tape. Basinger had popped on screen in Never Say Never Again (1983) and The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and was getting notice for a photoshoot she’d done for Playboy magazine in 1981 that hit newsstands in February 1983, with a golden-haired Basinger gracing the cover as well as the centerfold.
In a detailed account by Nina Darnton published in the New York Times on March 9, 1986 chronicling Basinger’s experiences on the show, the actor recounted leaving her audition for Nine ½ Weeks in tears, feeling humiliated rehearsing a scene for Lyne and Rourke in which Elizabeth is ordered by John to roleplay a prostitute, with John as her john. Basinger claimed she told her agent she wanted nothing more to do with the project and wouldn’t accept a role in it. When Lyne did pursue her to accept the role of Elizabeth, Basinger came to view the job as a challenge. “I knew if I got through this it would make me stronger, wiser. I was going against my total grain. I felt disgust, humiliation, but when you go against your grain you just know that emotions you never knew you had will surface.” One of Lyne’s instructions to Rourke and Basinger was that he didn’t want them speaking to each other again prior to the start of production. The director explained his methods to the New York Times. “She needed to be scared of him. If they went out and had coffee together, we’d lose that edge.” Lyne wanted to bottle the sexual energy and hostility he’d observed in rehearsals. “After that, I didn’t want them to meet again until they began work. I didn’t want them to have any relationship that would exclude me. I wanted to have the ten weeks of shooting of the movie be like the nine and a half weeks of the relationship.”
Patricia Knop & Zalman King no longer involved with Nine ½ Weeks as writers, Lyne and associate producer Steven Reuther had commissioned a male screenwriter to dial in changes Lyne wanted to incorporate. Turning in his draft three days before TriStar had deadlined them for a script, Lyne was distraught by the liberties their new screenwriter had taken with the material. Reuther contacted a writer he knew named Sarah Kernochan and offered her a weekend of work. Kernochan had written a highly regarded spec script titled The Psychic about a woman who utilizes her ESP ability to manipulate a client into loving her, and when that fails, resorts to stalking him. Kernochan was commissioned to take shreds that Lyne and Reuther were cutting from their scripts and write connective material that would allow them to paste together a coherent script. Lyne was so impressed with Kernochan’s work that he added her to the payroll, and her contributions led to a screen credit, her first: screenplay by Patricia Knop & Zalman King and Sarah Kernochan, based on the novel by Elizabeth McNeill. With cameras set to roll on April 16, 1984 in New York, TriStar sought relief for a serious case of buyer’s remorse, making the decision to place the project in turnaround. The studio took the risk of having to pay Lyne, Rourke and Basinger a sum of $4 million not to make Nine ½ Weeks, not for TriStar. The studio’s CEO, Victor Kaufman, made the decision to pull the plug.
In an article by Dale Pollock published in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1984, an anonymous senior executive at TriStar stated, “Part of our philosophy is to rely on the filmmaker and let him make his own picture. Rather than get into an adversary relationship with this director, we decided to put the film into turnaround.” Lyne clarified, “TriStar wanted to do a movie about two rare birds in paradise, which I never really understood. I wanted it to have more humanity and be less of an art movie. I wanted it to be something audiences in Ohio could really see in terms of themselves.” Keith Barish tried to allay concerns that Nine ½ Weeks was toxic material. “It’s not whips and chains and cigarette burns. It’s really a psychological love story between two obsessive people, one of whom is continually pushing the other to the limit. We think it could be a breakthrough movie.” To raise financing before they had to send their entire cast and crew home, Barish put in a call to producer Mark Damon, chairman of Producers Sales Organization, a company Damon had co-founded in 1977 to sell American films to international distributors. Looking to expand from distribution to production, PSO had merged with the Delphi limited partnership companies to launch a five-year, $350 million slate of their own films, which would get off to a disastrous start with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Nine ½ Weeks (1986) and 8 Million Ways To Die (1986).
One of Damon’s financiers was Sidney Kimmel, who’d started as an inventory clerk in the garment industry before founding Jones New York, a clothing line catering to fashion-savvy professional women. Kimmel’s first roll of the dice as a movie producer would be Nine ½ Weeks, but Mark Damon–credited as one of the film’s four producers with Zalman King, Antony Rufus-Isaacs and Sidney Kimmel–had already been selling Nine ½ Weeks in Japan and other international markets, and would raise most of the budget overseas. Though MGM agreed to distribute the picture domestically, its financing tree would prompt Sarah Kernochan to point out that Nine ½ Weeks was more of a European film than American one. Impressively, principal photography was underway two weeks after the original start date, on April 30, 1984. Manhattan was mined for locations. Elizabeth (improbably) walks to work on the Lower East Side under the Williamsburg Bridge, on Delancey Street South. The art gallery where she works was found on the corner of Spring Street/ Mercer Street. The Chinese grocery store where Elizabeth first sees John was shot in a working Chinese market on Canal Street/ Bayard Street, while the flea market where they speak to each other for the first time was the Chelsea Market, then held in a parking lot between 25th Street and 26th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood.
Suerken’s Restaurant, a historic German bar in Lower Manhattan long since gone, was used to film Elizabeth and John’s lunch date. Also lost in the past was H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Co, where the couple shop, despite not being very interested in horses (the tack shop was founded in 1875 and held on until 1996). The houseboat John takes Elizabeth to was shot at the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River. The Subway Arcade, Wonder Wheel and Boardwalk West in Coney Island were all used as locations for the couple’s date. The film’s most memorable location was the Clock Tower Building, found in the Tribeca neighborhood. Seeking to capture a relationship as close to real time as he could, Lyne had insisted Nine ½ Weeks be filmed in continuity, at least roughly. Mickey Rourke’s decision to stay in character–an aloof Wall Street operator who wraps a gorgeous woman around his finger–for ten weeks might have qualified as more vacation than work, while Basinger’s decision to match Rourke by living with her character–a vulnerable divorcée who falls under the control of a powerful man–took a toll on her health, as well as the health of her marriage, to Ron Snyder-Britton, a painter she’d met while she was an actor and he was a makeup artist on the movie Hard Country (1981).
On the set, director Adrian Lyne often communicated to Kim Basinger through Mickey Rourke, leaving her in the dark and left to react to whatever Rourke did with her. Interviewed by Seth Abramovitch for an article in the Hollywood Reporter printed February 12, 2015, Lyne stated that to throw her off, Rourke would crank “Rebel Yell” by Billy Idol at full volume before cameras rolled. Basinger would not only survive the job, but later take home an Academy Award for her first and only nomination, winning the Oscar for Best Actress in L.A. Confidential (1997). Twelve years previous, American audiences were not spellbound by Nine ½ Weeks, not at test screenings. Zalman King joked, ”When the film was done, it got worse. We would have test screenings where there were a thousand people in the theater and a hundred when it was over. People were walking out in droves.” Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Lyne added, “When we previewed it, people were absolutely enraged. Sometimes half the theater would empty, and they’d be yelling at the screen. There was one occasion when it was actually frightening–I was sitting there with a line of sweating executives and I went and hid in the projection box. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to be there at the end.’”
As scripted and shot, Nine ½ Weeks was to climax with Elizabeth entering what she believes is a suicide pact with John, popping pills with him, not being given a safe word or understanding the pills contain only sugar. The sick game is what finally motivates her to leave him. As for test audiences, Lyne told the New York Times in 1986, “It made them hate him too much. They hated John for doing it. They hated Elizabeth for accepting it. They hated me for making it. It made them hate the whole film.” The scene would be cut from both the American and European versions of Nine ½ Weeks. As of June 2, 1985, when Patrick Goldstein covered the film’s post-production woes for an article in the Los Angeles Times, MGM had yet to set a release date. Geffen Records had backed out of producing the soundtrack album, A&R rep John Kolodner set to assemble the artists. He was candid about his decision to quit the job. “Speaking just for myself, I found the movie to be offensive to women and I just didn’t want to be associated with the picture. I don’t care if the movie makes $100 million. I’ve washed my hands of the whole thing. I think Adrian is very talented and I respect his work, but I just couldn’t see having my name on this picture. Some people may find it titillating, but it made me nauseous.”
The more time the filmmakers took to trim and test versions of Nine ½ Weeks that would be palatable to theatergoers, the budget not only increased (to as much as $15 million), but music supervisor Becky Mancuso’s job became harder. Selecting and clearing the music for Footloose (1984), The Sure Thing (1985) and Real Genius (1985), her task now, as she explained to the Los Angeles Times, sounded more like triage. “A lot of the scenes that would have had logical places for music have been cut out, so it’s hard to say whether we have enough music slots left for an album. Originally, we had at least eight music slots and now we’re down to about five, and they’re still falling by the wayside.” Speaking to Pop Geeks in 2019, screenwriter Sarah Kernochan offered her appraisal of Nine ½ Weeks. “I never really liked it. I mean, I thought it was a bunch of wonderful set pieces, and was very erotic. I thought it achieved that aim, but I didn’t think, as a story, that it was strong … As a feminist also, I didn’t love it. It was quite demeaning, but on the other hand, I like that it was exploring this side of women who seem like they’ve got it together, but they have a side that wants to be dominated, and the book was very frank about that. I admired it, but it wasn’t a movie that I liked in particular.”
MGM settled on sneaking Nine ½ Weeks into limited release in the U.S. on February 21, 1986. February was a month in which distributors often dumped films with poor commercial prospects. January was regarded as a filmgoing graveyard, as moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas, students returned to school, and inclement weather depressed attendance in many markets, but February, August and September saw plenty of dumping too. Critical reaction to Nine ½ Weeks ran the gamut. In a review Roger Ebert filed for the Chicago Sun-Times, the journalist wrote, “Any story like 9 ½ Weeks risks becoming very ridiculous. The actors are taking a chance in appearing in it. Plots like this make audiences nervous, and if the movie doesn’t walk a fine line between the plausible and the bizarre, it will only find the absurd. A lot of the success of 9 ½ Weeks is because Rourke and Basinger make the characters and their relationship convincing.” Ebert, who interviewed Mickey Rourke for a piece nationally syndicated in March, gave the film three and a half stars out of four. Vincent Canby pulled no punches in his review for the New York Times. “Mr. Lyne may be onto something, though I doubt he has a clue as to what it is. Flashdance only scratched the surface of his singular vision. In 9 ½ Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries. John and Elizabeth aren’t fictional creatures. They are those giant figures that model Calvin Klein underwear on Times Square billboards.”
Author/ critic F.X. Feeney chimed in for L.A. Weekly. “Kim Basinger has a gift (and a beauty) comparable to Liv Ullmann’s in her Persona prime–she projects a sense that she can survive anything precisely because she surrenders so vulnerably, so completely to the demands of a given moment. Alas, like Rourke’s, her performance here seems to have had its guts cut out. We never get a sense of what this woman’s real hungers and conflicts are–or for that matter, whether she’s conflicted about anything at all.” At the box office, Nine ½ Weeks opened quietly against a handful of crowd-pleasing hits: Down and Out In Beverly Hills, F/X, Hannah and Her Sisters. Its commercial prospects were killed the following weekend, when Pretty In Pink opened and held the #1 spot at the box office for two weekends, American audiences voting with their wallets how they preferred their movie romances. The R-rated, 113-minute version of Nine ½ Weeks that played in American theaters (and is now available for streaming) was supplemented by an unrated, 116-minute cut that played for European theatergoers with, in one scene, slightly more explicit sexual content. Europeans not only turned out for Nine ½ Weeks, but did so in enough numbers for the film to perform better commercially in Europe than in the States, at that time, a rarity for an English-language picture.
By 1992, Zalman King had not only carved out a niche for himself as a maker of erotic thrillers, but dominated that niche, as co-writer/ director of Two Moon Junction (1988), co-writer (with Patricia Knop)/ director of Wild Orchid (1989) starring Mickey Rourke, and co-writer (with Knop)/ director of a cable television movie for Showtime with an actor named David Duchovny in the lead titled Red Shoe Diaries (1992). The latter launched an anthology series airing after hours, when the prying eyes of America’s children were supposed to be shut. King observed that Americans who’d rejected a movie about sadomasochism in theaters could rent a copy on videocassette and enjoy it in the privacy of their own homes, which many did. Of Nine ½ Weeks, King told the magazine, “It was written off as a failure. But the film was harder, and better then [sic], for an American film it was really good. After the screenings it got progressively more and more watered down until it became another kind of film.” Wrapping production, Adrian Lyne spoke to Roderick Mann for an article published July 15, 1984 in the Los Angeles Times, and set the table for his film by stating, “In the original story, the woman would do absolutely everything for the man. And there was a lot of S&M with handcuffs, whips and the like. I didn’t want it like that; I didn’t want the woman to be a victim. I wanted these two people to behave as they do because of their overwhelming passion for each other. So much so that people leaving the theater will perhaps examine their own relationships and not just think, ‘I wouldn’t want to know them.’ After all, a lot of people do harbor the sneaking feeling that one day someone could come along who’d so overwhelm them that they’d drop everything. That’s what this film is all about.”
There were two doors Adrian Lyne could’ve opened with Nine ½ Weeks, and either might’ve revealed a story, perhaps even a compelling one. Door #1 would’ve been to fashion Elizabeth McNeill in the guise that author Elizabeth McNeill was presented to readers: a corporate executive, ten years removed from college, someone whose professional success has left her empty and susceptible to surrendering control to a dominant man, even in ways that become harmful. Given the strong sexual content, it’s unlikely a boss leading lady like Sigourney Weaver or Meryl Streep would’ve been interested if they were even available, which leads to Door #2. That would’ve been to depict Elizabeth as a post-graduate, whose drive to compete with men in the business world has been recently forged. She meets a man whose need to dominate women should repel her, but instead, she finds herself unable to live without him, leading two lives until one of them breaks. There are glimpses of that film in the one Lyne was allowed to make, but Nine ½ Weeks has been sharpened down to a pitiful nub where it matters most. It’s missing too many scenes, some of which were written, others shot.
One of those missing scenes needed Elizabeth to introduce John to her friends. Christine Baranski would’ve been good as a condescending mentor, and the end credits reveal that she’s actually in the movie, fifth billed (behind Margaret Whitton and David Marguiles as Elizabeth’s co-worker and boss, respectively). Baranski’s performance has been left almost entirely on the cutting room floor. For a movie about time, the chronology of Elizabeth and John’s relationship is confusing. They go from a casual lunch to holding hands to undressing in front of each other to having sex, as if reels had been loaded backwards. The casting doesn’t really fit the picture Lyne is trying to make. Mickey Rourke is sexually charismatic, but not in the way Zalman King or Lyne seem to think. The danger is your eighteen-year-old daughter staying out late with Mickey Rourke, not your boss. For a man a woman like Elizabeth would take a two and a half hour executive lunch to be thrown around by, Scott Glenn or James Remar would’ve been ideal, the courser, the better. In terms of location scouting and lighting, Nine ½ Weeks does look every bit as dazzling as Flashdance. This was a time in cinema when two other directors whose background was British commercials–Ridley Scott and Tony Scott–were in friendly competition with Lyne as to who could light a set more evocatively.
With Blade Runner (1982) and The Hunger (1983) as his visual comps, Nine ½ Weeks has Lyne making a case for having the best eye among his competition. Using Manhattan as a backlot, he has some of the most photogenic alleyways in North America at his disposal, and is determined to portray sexual activity anywhere but a bed. That’s commendable, and the U.S. needed an unapologetically kinky movie in the mid-eighties, but in an effort to cut everything that was distasteful to test audiences, the end product has been reduced to a sizzle reel. Kim Basinger’s goofiness was sporadically put to use in film, mostly in mediocre comedies by veteran directors, like Blind Date (1987), Nadine (1987) and My Stepmother Is An Alien (1988). Her performance in Nine ½ Weeks has been shrunken to a plastic doll, like Loni Anderson’s character on the sitcom WKRP In Cincinnati without any one-liners. We don’t learn Elizabeth is divorced until nearly 90 minutes into the film, when her co-worker reveals she slept with her ex-husband and the sad bastard shows up at Elizabeth’s office. Half of the curated soundtrack is terrific–”This City Never Sleeps” by The Eurythmics and “Slave To Love” by Bryan Ferry drip with modern desire and seem like they were written for the film–while the track played over the opening credits–”The Best Is Yet To Come” by Luba–frame the movie as a plucky urban female empowerment comedy, as if someone thought the music would prevent walkouts in the first ten minutes.
Video rental category: Drama
Special interest: Fatal Attraction
