S.O.B. (film)


S.O.B. is a 1981 American comedy film written and directed by Blake Edwards. It stars Julie Andrews, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Larry Hagman, Robert Vaughn, Robert Webber, Loretta Swit, Shelley Winters and William Holden in his final film role. The film was produced by Lorimar and was released by Paramount Pictures on July 1, 1981.

Plot

The story is a satire of the film industry and Hollywood society. The main character, Felix Farmer, is a phenomenally successful film producer who has just made the first major flop of his career, to the dismay of his movie studio, resulting in the loss of his own sanity. Felix attempts suicide four times: He attempts to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, only to have it slip into gear and drive through the side of his garage, down a sand dune and into the Pacific Ocean. He then attempts to hang himself from a rafter in an upstairs bedroom, only to fall through the floor, landing on a poisonous Hollywood gossip columnist standing in the living room below. Subsequently, he tries to gas himself in his kitchen oven, but is prevented from carrying out his intent by two house guests with other things on their mind.
Thereafter he spends most of the time heavily sedated while his friends and hangers-on occupy his beach house. The occupation leads to a party which degenerates into an orgy. Finally, he tries to shoot himself with a police officer's gun, but is prevented from doing so by the ministrations of a young woman wearing only a pair of panties. The experience gives him a brainstorm that the reason for his film's failure was its lack of sex.
Felix resolves to save both the film and his reputation. With great difficulty he persuades the studio and his wife Sally Miles, an Oscar-winning movie star with a squeaky-clean image, to allow him to revise the film into a soft-core pornographic musical in which she must appear topless. He liquidates most of his wealth to buy the existing footage and to finance further production. If he fails, both he and Sally will be impoverished, at least by Hollywood standards.
At first the studio's executives are keen to unload the film onto Felix and move on, but when Sally goes through with the topless scene and the film seems a likely success, they plot to regain control. Using California's community property laws, they get the distribution and final-cut rights by persuading Sally to sign them over. An angry and deranged Felix tries to steal the movie negatives from the studio's color lab vault, armed only with a water pistol. He is shot and killed by police who think the gun is real.
Felix's untimely death creates a crisis for his cronies Culley, the director of Night Wind; Coogan, Sally's press agent; and Dr. Finegarten, who plan to give him a burial at sea. They steal his corpse from the funeral home, substituting the body of a well-known but underrated character actor who died in the first scene of the movie. Felix gets a Viking funeral in a burning dinghy, while the other actor finally gets the Hollywood sendoff many thought he deserved.
The epilogue later reveals that Felix's revamped film was a box office smash, and Sally won another Academy Award for her performance.

The movie within the movie

Little is seen of the movie which is the focus of the plot, except for an extended dream sequence and a brief shot close to the end. The title is Night Wind, which provokes the headline "Critics Break Wind" seen on a copy of Variety at the start of S.O.B. after the initial flop. The plot of Night Wind is kept vague; it involves a frigid businesswoman whose inability to love a "male chauvinist" rival executive stems from a childhood trauma that led to her sexual detachment.
The climax of Night Wind is the first scene of S.O.B., an elaborate song and dance sequence set to "Polly Wolly Doodle", in which Sally wanders through a room full of giant toys, singing the song while dressed as a tomboy. The implication is that her father's death caused Andrews's character to renounce childhood and become a cold, frigid person.
A second scene, taking place at the end of the film, has Andrews' character arrive at the home of her would-be lover after the dream, where he reveals that he still loves her, "despite everything."
When Felix rewrites the film to make it into soft porn, changes are made: Sally's character goes from sexually frigid to being a nymphomaniac. Her lover goes from male chauvinist to being a secret cross dresser. Felix axes the entire song sequence, turning it from a dream to a hallucination "... caused by a powerful aphrodisiac put into her Bosco" and replacing the regular version of "Polly Wolly Doodle" with a more haunting version. He has the "toys" dress in more erotic outfits, and includes a carnival barker-type muscle man, who tempts Andrews' character before she rejects him by flashing her breasts.

Cast

"S.O.B." stands for "Standard Operational Bullshit" and refers to misinformation being the norm. The abbreviation also means "sexually oriented business" and more generally "son of a bitch".
A Spanish dub of the film keeps the abbreviation S.O.B., claiming that it stands for "Sois hOnrados Bandidos". The Argentine title for the movie was changed to Se acabó el mundo, having no relation to the original title.
Three years later, when Edwards had his name removed from the writing credits of 1984's City Heat, he was billed under the pseudonym Sam O. Brown.

Influences

When writing the screenplay, Edwards drew upon several of his own experiences as a film maker. The character of Felix Farmer is a person not unlike Edwards, while actress Sally Miles bears certain similarities to real-life wife Julie Andrews.
The story of S.O.B. parallels the experiences of Edwards and Andrews in their infamous, but Academy Award-nominated, failure, Darling Lili. Intended to reveal Andrews' heretofore unseen wicked and sexy side, that film had a troubled shoot, went significantly over budget, and was subjected to post-production studio interference. The early 1970s brought more bad news for Edwards; he made two more films, Wild Rovers, a western with William Holden, and The Carey Treatment with James Coburn. Once again, the studio interfered in the post-production of both films, which were edited without any input from Edwards. Both movies opened to negative reviews and poor business. Hit hard financially and personally by these events, Edwards moved to Europe to work independently, away from the meddling and restrictions of the Hollywood studios. The plan worked, leading to several successful projects including three very profitable Pink Panther sequels starring Peter Sellers.
In S.O.B., Andrews's character agrees to "show my boobies" in a scene in the film-within-the-film. For this scene, comedian Johnny Carson thanked Andrews on the Academy Awards for "showing us that the hills were still alive," alluding to a famous line from The Sound of Music opening sequence.

Production

The film was in development by Edwards since 1976. In 1979, he set the film up at Orion Pictures, Edwards's third with the company after 10 and The Ferret, which was due to star Dudley Moore. In July 1979, Orion put the film into turnaround. Later in 1979, Edwards signed a deal with Lorimar with United Artists set to distribute. In 1981, Lorimar's agreement with UA ended and Paramount became the distributors, but they and Edwards did not get on.
Filming took place between March and July 1980 in Los Angeles and Malibu.

Reception

Critical response

S.O.B. was released in July 1981, with critical opinion of the film sharply divided. Remarkably, the screenplay was nominated for both a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen and a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay. It was also nominated for a Razzie for Worst Director and a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical.
The film currently holds an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 22 reviews with the consensus: "A sustained blast of unbridled vitriol from writer-director Blake Edwards, S.O.B. is one of the blackest – and most consistently funny – Hollywood satires ever put to film."
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote in his review:
S. O. B., Blake Edwards' newest, most manic, most bitter farce, is about the Hollywood you didn't see in the screen adaptation of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust. It's not about the smalltime failures, hustlers and nuts living on the sleazy fringes of the movie industry. Instead, S.O.B. has the class consciousness of a snobbish press agent. It's about sleazy, big-time wheelers and dealers who run the studios, who hire and fire people who make a million dollars per picture, and who cut a throat one day and the next day attend a gaudy, sentimental tribute to the fellow whose throat was so untimely cut. It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time. It opens today at the Coronet. Mr. Edwards, the man principally responsible for the string of successful Peter Sellers-Pink Panther comedies, is here pouring out his heartwhich pumps pure bileabout his own ups and downs with the Hollywood establishment of the early 70's. It was then that he made a string of flops, the biggest, most spectacular being his funny, stylish Darling Lili, which went so far over its budget that it almost sank the financing studio, Paramount Pictures, which also, by chance, is releasing S.O.B. But that's S.O.P. in Hollywood. It's difficult to remember a film as mean-spirited as S.O.B. that also was so consistently funny. The battling lovers in the Sidney Lumet-Jay Presson Allen Just Tell Me What You Want are Romeo and Juliet compared to the people in S.O.B., none of whom pays much attention to love anyway, unless it will have some effect on the box-office grosses.

Box office

The film grossed $3,116,078 over the 5-day 4th of July holiday weekend and went on to gross $14.8 million in the United States and Canada. The Village Voice dubbed the film a box office flop.

Television version

Broadcast television prints of the film contain alternate takes and edits of several scenes originally containing sex and nudity, such as the party and orgy scenes and Night Wind's erotica dream sequence where Julie Andrews exposes her breasts. The television version contains a scene where Robert Vaughn, as studio head David Blackman, receives a phone call while in bed with his mistress, and is simply seen naked from the waist up. In the original theatrical print, he is wearing a bustier, nylon stockings and other transvestite paraphernalia.

Home media

The original video release was made by CBS Video Enterprises in 1982, on both VHS and CED Videodisc, and was later reissued on VHS by CBS/Fox Video in the mid-1980s. Warner Bros. bought ancillary rights in 1989 with their purchase of Lorimar, and the film was released on Laserdisc through Warner Home Video in 1990. Warners released a DVD edition in 2002 and reissued in 2012.

Citations