1986: 9 ½ Weeks, Mickey Rourke & Zalman King (Erotic 80s Part 9)
You Must Remember This
Karina Longworth
4.6 • 15.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2022
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Billed as the hottest Hollywood film since Last Tango, 9 ½ Weeks was considered to have missed the mark by everyone who made it – including director Adrian Lyne, stars Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, producer/writer Zalman King and his wife, writer Patricia Knop. Today we’ll talk about why this intoxicating and troubling film is worth a second look, how to square away the arguably feminist finished product from a production process that robbed Basinger of agency, and we’ll explore the film Rourke and King re-teamed on as a re-do, Wild Orchid. We’ll also talk about Rourke’s “bad boy” persona, and his problematic relationship with his second wife and co-star, supermodel Carre Otis.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | anten |
| 0:08.3 | Kiss you just a kiss, a proud woman. |
| 0:27.3 | Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, |
| 0:31.8 | the podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. |
| 0:40.8 | I'm your host, Karina Longworth, and this is part 9 of our ongoing series, Erotic 80s. |
| 0:51.8 | I'm getting a little fed up at six wheelie-emansivated ladies being referred to as brawls. |
| 0:57.8 | And that doing this because somebody's making me do it. |
| 1:01.8 | You're a strange girl being an ony-bore. |
| 1:03.8 | Last year, he was discovered making amateur videos of his own sex robbers. |
| 1:13.8 | The sexual revolution has been wonderful. |
| 1:15.8 | It's been a remarkable change from sex eating to sin. |
| 1:33.8 | This season began with a discussion of two films, Deep Throat and Last Tango in Paris, |
| 1:40.8 | which were believed to be products of sexual liberation, but which now we have to see as documents of real life abuse. |
| 1:50.8 | In both cases, their filmmakers aimed to capture a certain realism. |
| 1:55.8 | Like most hardcore porn films, Deep Throat contains real sexual acts, |
| 2:01.8 | even though it's about a sexual phenomenon that is totally made up and absurd. |
| 2:06.8 | Today, we are going to talk about two films from the late 80s, both made while Last Tango was still perceived as sexually revolutionary and not sexually abusive, |
| 2:19.8 | that employed and played on a similar type of, quote unquote, authenticity. |
| 2:27.8 | The most significant of these films is 9.5 weeks. |
| 2:33.8 | 9.5 weeks was based on a memoir credited to Elizabeth McNeil, which was a pseudonym for Ingeborg Day, |
| 2:42.8 | a magazine editor who had emigrated to New York from Austria, and would later write another memoir under her own name about her discovery that her parents had been not sees. |
| 2:54.8 | This is how the book 9.5 weeks begins. |
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