Loose business

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Movie
German title Loose business
Original title Risky business
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1983
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Paul Brickman
script Paul Brickman
production Jon Avnet ,
Steve Tisch
music Tangerine Dream
camera Bruce Surtees ,
Reynaldo Villalobos
cut Richard Chew
occupation

Loose business , also Joel's Party (original title: Risky Business ), is a 1983 comedy film by Paul Brickman . Tom Cruise is seen in an early role as a teen who turns his childhood home into a brothel while his parents are away to pay off outstanding debts.

action

Joel Goodson is last year of high school and should be preparing for college entrance exams, but his sexual fantasies distract him and his friends aren't much of a help either. Since his wealthy parents are going on vacation, he is supposed to take care of the house in Glencoe , a suburb of Chicago . For fun, Joel's friend Miles calls the prostitute Jackie, whose number he got from a newspaper ad. He leaves Joel's name and address on Jackie's answering machine. Joel can't cancel the appointment as Miles chews and swallows the piece of newspaper with the ad.

When Jackie comes to Joel's house in the evening, he is very insecure because Jackie is a male transvestite. Though nothing works, Joel pays $ 75 for Jackie's effort to get to Glencoe. Jackie also gives him the phone number for Lana, with whom Joel will be spending the coming night. When he couldn't immediately pay the 300 US dollars demanded from Lana the next morning and had to get the money from the bank, she stole a valuable crystal egg from the Goodsens in the meantime and disappeared.

Joel and Miles track down Lana in Chicago and then the three of them flee from Guido, Lana's pimp, in Joel's father's Porsche 928 . The next day Lana calls her colleague Vicky, who then comes to the Goodsens house. Both want to stay with Joel and have nothing more to do with Guido. After Joel sank his father's Porsche in Lake Michigan and now needs a lot of money for the repair, he finally agrees to the two women’s proposal to convert the parents' house into a brothel while the parents are still on vacation.

Joel takes on the organization of the party at his parents' house, where his school friends and their friends meet Lana's colleagues. When the party is in full swing, Bill Rutherford, who is conducting the Princeton University admission interviews, appears and wants to talk to Joel. Little enthusiastic about the grades and extracurricular activities, he noticed Joel's entrepreneurial skills and stayed a little longer at the party. That night, Joel made more than $ 8,000 in total .

When Joel and Lana take a romantic trip on the subway, Guido and Vicky clear out the house. Before Joel's parents come back, he now has to buy everything back from Guido, including Joel's mother's crystal egg, which Vicky throws off the truck in a high arc and can just about be caught by Joel by diving. Together with two friends, Joel manages to restore the house to its original condition at the very last second. When his parents leave the airport, everything seems to be fine, except for one detail. Joel's mother discovers a crack in the crystal egg and is very angry with her son. Fortunately, Bill Rutherford gets in touch with Joel's father and tells him that Joel's chances of admission to Princeton University are very good. Joel's father is proud of him. Joel looks set to have a brilliant career.

backgrounds

Production history

The production cost of the film, originally produced for US television, was around 5.5 million US dollars. Even so, it achieved gross revenues of around $ 65 million. The film first made Tom Cruise known to a wide audience. At first it was Paul Brickman, the author of the screenplay, who also later took over the direction, but had a hard time finding a film studio for his project at all. The reason was presumed that the satirical and dark echoes of Brickman's script did not fit in with the cheerful teen comedies popular at the time like Porky's .

Under pressure from the producers, Brickman had to change the end of the film significantly compared to his original ideas. This is how Joel and Lana should split up in the end, and Joel would not have come to Princeton in this version. Brickman shot both this bittersweet ending and the classic happy ending after consulting with the producers . Since the happy ending requested by the producers scored a little better with the audience during the test screenings, it ended up in the film. Brickman's originally requested film end has now also been published and can be found on the Internet, for example.

Quotes

  • Miles to Joel: "Sometimes you just have to say, you can all do me!"
  • Joel to Lana and Miles after escaping from Guido in the car: "Porsche, there's nothing like a Porsche."
  • The workshop manager of Joel's group after the Porsche was recovered from the lake: "Okay, who is the submarine commander?"

Influence on pop culture

The mother's crystal egg appears in episode 2.18 (Title: Loose Business ) of the American television series OC, California . There the egg is to be auctioned for a benefit gala, but has been stolen in the meantime and then procured again. Here, too, the crystal egg has to be caught spectacularly after being thrown before it can smash on the ground. The piece Love On A Real Train of Tangerine Dream from the movie is played several times during the episode.

One of the film's cult scenes is: Tom Cruise dances to Bob Seger's Old Time Rock & Roll without trousers on socks . The scene was only roughly described in the script and completely improvised by Tom Cruise. This scene was parodied in several films, series and commercials in the following years, including Alf , The Goldbergs , The Nanny , The Simpsons , Sabrina - Totally Verhext! , Scrubs , South Park, and Our Loud Home .

Soundtrack

The following pieces can be found on the soundtrack of Virgin Records (1984):

Reviews

Loose Business was a success with critics and found itself on several top ten lists of critics in 1983. The US critic portal Rotten Tomatoes lists 49 reviews with a positive rating of 96% for the film.

Dave Kehr of Chicago Reader particularly emphasized the socio-critical elements of the comedy. Risky Business is one of the “finest cinematic explorations about the end of innocence”. In the guise of a “typical teenage sex comedy”, director Brickman deepens the characters and shows drastic situations, which is expressed in cinematic language by the fact that he often captures his characters in shady and dreamlike images. Tom Cruise shows in the leading role what is a complete exception in the genre of teen comedy, a credible performance as an 18-year-old student, the "parental, sexual and social compulsions" would dominate. The film ends with the hint "its complete corruption, in one of the bitterest and most penetrating sequences ever allowed in an American film."

Roger Ebert also wrote positively that the film was one of the “smartest, funniest, most astute satires for a long time” and that comparisons with the classic film The Graduation Test are permitted. Ebert praised Bruckman's economical dialogues, in which only as many words as necessary were used. He also praised the leading actors Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay, the latter having upgraded their actually weak and clichéd role of “prostitutes with a golden heart”. Risky Business succeeds in being a good comedy and at the same time a satire about greed, guilt, sexual desire and secrecy.

The film service was a bit more critical: "Despite a few questionable moments, a largely entertaining teenage comedy, the intended criticism of the performance society, however, remains in the beginning."

Awards

Tom Cruise was founded in 1984 as best actor in the category "Comedy / Musical" for the Film Award Golden Globe nomination. Paul Brickman was nominated for the 1984 Writers Guild of America Award in the Comedy, Written Directly For The Screen category.

Porn film adaptation

In 1984, a pornographic adaptation of the film was released under the title Kinky Business and directed by Jonathan Ross. The actors Tanya Lawson and Tom Byron received the AVN “Best Couples Sex Scene” award for a sex scene .

literature

  • Frank Schnelle: Tom Cruise . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-07315-0 , pp. 37-49.
  • A. Komorek: Tom Cruise . Edel Records, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-927801-14-3 , pp. 16-18, 85-87.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dana Harris: At 20, 'Risky' is still frisky. In: Variety. June 19, 2001, accessed October 17, 2019 .
  2. ^ Risky Business (1983). In: Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved October 17, 2019 .
  3. ^ Dave Kehr: Risky Business. In: Chicago Reader . Retrieved October 17, 2019 .
  4. ^ Roger Ebert: Risky Business movie review & film summary (1983) | Roger Ebert. Retrieved October 17, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Loose business. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 14, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used