Decades before Fifty Shades of Grey, a hit novel about a young woman's sadomasoch*stic affair was turned into a film. Helen O'Hara reports on the tragedy of 9 ½ Weeks
Much has been written aboutFifty Shades Of Grey, the huge bestseller that produced a $500 million-grossing film and now a sequel, Fifty Shades Darker. But it is not the first erotic thriller to aim for blockbuster glory. Nine And A Half Weeks was, like 50 Shades, written by an author who hid her identity behind a pseudonym, and it too became a runaway success with female readers.
Itsfilmadaptation also drew in a newly-successful director and sparked a buzzed-about search for the perfect leading lady. But unlike the exhaustively-chronicled, Internet-age story of Fifty Shades Of Grey, 9 ½ Weeks is still shrouded in secrecy.
Its author was no Internet fan-fiction writer but a professional journalist hiding a dark past. While the first Fifty Shades had a considerate female director who protected and consulted her cast, 9 ½ Weeks was made by a director who reportedly put his leading lady through hell to portray a sadomasoch*stic affair.
9 ½ Weeks became a hit that ended best for the happily married producer who became, according to his 2012 obituary, “synonymous with an upscale form of sexploitation that is addressed to women” – just the sort of tradition that the Fifty Shades saga now continues.
The film, 9 ½ Weeks, began as thebookNine And A Half Weeks. Published in 1978, it purported to be a memoir by the female protagonist, Elizabeth McNeill (renamed McGraw for the film). But it was in fact written by journalist and author Ingeborg Day.
Day was born in Graz, Austria, in 1940, the daughter of a policeman who served in the SS during the Second World War. Sheltered from her father’s work, she was sent to live with grandparents in the countryside for the last two years of the War, but she remained haunted by the guilt of his association with the Nazis long into adult life. She moved to the US and married a pastor called Dennis Day in 1960, working as a teacher before the birth of her daughter, Ursula, in 1963. A sickly younger son, Mark, was born soon after, but he died age 7.
The marriage fell apart after this tragedy, and Day made a complete break from her previous life. She took her daughter to New York, where she became an editor at the feminist magazine Ms and something of a style icon for her strictly monochrome wardrobe (entirely black in winter, entirely white in summer).
It was at some point during her time at the magazine that she became embroiled in the affair that inspired her short novel. Like Day, her heroine Elizabeth has a high-powered job (in fiction, as a business executive), but cedes all responsibility for her own life to a man she calls John. Much of her time with her lover is spent tied up or handcuffed, and she gets her pleasure in total surrender to his control. As Elizabeth describes it in the opening line of the book, “The first time we were in bed together he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him.”
On the page, Elizabeth finally becomes aware of how far her obsessive relationship has gone when a few tiny drops of blood suddenly prompt her to wonder if her lover has any limits. She spends months recovering from the emotional storm of the affair. Writing the memoir is presented to the reader as a part of that process – although the book offers no excuses and little explanation for her actions.
Day apparently used the pseudonym to avoid a scandal that might affect her daughter if the real-life affair were made public, and never wrote anything similar again. As she had suspected it would, Nine And A Half Weeks provoked controversy, especially with its scenes of dominance coming soon after the heyday of women’s lib, and its stripped-back prose only heightened the impact.
Still, this bestseller was not an obvious candidatefor the big screen. American filmmaking is notoriously prudish about sex, and had never seen a hit that involved sadomasoch*stic behaviour outside the art house or p*rn cinema. That’s where Zalman King came in. A New Jersey man who had begun his career as an actor, appearing in TV shows like Gunsmoke and Charlie’s Angels, by the early Eighties King had become a producer and writer. Nine And A Half Weeks was only his second writing job, but it was the erotic thriller that would shape the rest of his career.
King himself hated the term "soft core" and indeed the label of p*rnography, preferring to define his work as eroticism or romance. What’s certain is that the films and TV shows he went on to make, including Showtime series The Red Shoe Diaries which launched David Duchovny’s career, were characterised by a certain type of sexual fantasy. His stories saw gorgeous women swept off their feet by hunky, somewhat brutish men, only to – usually – stand up to their lover and establish a newly independent life.
King adapted Nine And A Half Weeks with his wife, Patricia Knop, whom he married in 1965 after they met while working as scuba diving instructors. Despite describing Knop as “the last person you would expect to write eroticism,” their collaboration was key to making films that were marked by an emphasis on female desire and fantasy, with storylines and shirtless male leads that seemed to come straight from a Mills & Boon novel.
King described his method, in an interview with film scholar Peter Lehman in 2006, saying, “I’m very interested in journeys that especially women take in terms of their sexual awakening. It’s usually embracing romance and then rejecting it.”
Director Adrian Lyne then came aboard the film. He was fresh from the success of Flashdance, which also treated potentially risqué material with so much style that it had become a breakout hit. He loved the idea of “passionately going for broke” and turned down A Chorus Line to make it, but tried to turn the script into a more conventional love story.
Said Lyne at the time, “Rather than saying here are two strange people doing perverted stuff in a posh New York apartment, I wanted it to be a movie couples might see and argue about.”
Most of the arguing, however, came behind the camera. Lyne and Zalman quickly zeroed in on rising bad boy star Mickey Rourke as their leading man. Zalman told Lehman that, “Nobody wanted Mickey because he was a struggle. Everyone thought he was a thug. Mickey, to me, was always beautiful, always dangerous, and always charming. He also is not frightened of women, and women can sense that, and he’s got that animal instinct. When I was casting for 9 ½ Weeks I said, ‘You people are going to think I’m crazy but this is the guy I think should be in 9 ½ Weeks.’”
The female lead was a tougher battle, with the likes of Kathleen Turner, Isabella Rossellini and Teri Garr all in the running. But it was relative newcomer Kim Basinger who landed the role, despite finding the screen test so tough that she ran out of Lyne’s office in tears saying that she never wanted to see him again. She reconsidered following a bouquet of roses from her director and co-star, but soon had cause to regret giving in.
The film was shot over 10 weeks, in sequential order to reflect the affair at its heart. Lyne swiftly decided on vastly differing treatments for his two leads that would reflect their characters’ fates. Rourke was ordered to lose weight before shooting, but once he arrived on set was treated like a prince. “Adrian is a great actor’s director,” he said at the time. “He makes sure you make all the right choices. While filming he was concerned about me personally, making sure I got enough sleep, ate the right foods and was comfortable with the people around me.”
Basinger, however, was another story.Lyne had instructed his two stars not to communicate off the set, so that a real-life friendship would not impinge on the onscreen tension. But he went further, isolating Basinger from decisions and whispering secret instructions to Rourke ahead of each shot. “She doesn’t actually act, she reacts,” claimed Lyne shortly after the film came out, and so he would shout and rage at her if he needed her to be upset, or instruct Rourke to be friendly if a scene needed to be softened.
“I was like an exposed nerve throughout the filming,” said Basinger. One scene in particular proved traumatic. In it, John invents a sad*stic game, a phoney lovers’ suicide pact where he convinced the spellbound Elizabeth to swallow pills with him. They are really harmless sugar pills – but Elizabeth believes that they are killing her. It is the last straw in their game playing, and forces her to step back from the brink.
Lyne recalls, “We were shooting the suicide scene, and this woman was supposed to be totally devastated at this point. But Kim looked dewy and lovely. I stopped and called Mickey aside. I told him that the scene wasn’t working, that Kim needed to be broken down.” Rourke, on Lyne’s instruction, then grabbed Basinger’s arm tightly, making her cry and strike him. Rourke slapped her face and Lyne immediately called for shooting to start.
That scene was eventually cut from the film because, said Lyne, it made them hate Rourke’s John too much. “It’s very frustrating,” said Lyne in 1987. “I know there is a real good movie in it which never saw the light of day. I swear to you, when all of us watched that first assembly, which was about five hours of material, we literally jumped up and down with excitement. We thought we had a huge, huge winner. And it just lost its way. In 18 months of editing, I never found a condensation that really worked.”
That was just one aspect of the film’s considerable difficulties in that post-production period. Original backers TriStar experienced “creative differences with the director as to the direction in which the movie should go” and dropped it. It was picked up for distribution by MGM, who called for another round of edits.
Geffen Records had planned to release a soundtrack album, but also withdrew after David Geffen saw an early cut. And then Zalman and the other producers had to battle with the MPAA for an R-rating when the film was originally slapped with a commercially-devastating NC-17.
“I actually went and argued with them,” said Zalman. “I basically argued the fact that I didn’t mind them having a separate rating from an R rating to an NC-17 rating, but it wasn’t fair then to group p*rnography into the NC-17 rating. My argument was there has to be more — you can’t just say this is going to be a catch-all for anything explicit. I probably spent more time with ratings than most people because it becomes arbitrary. And at a certain point, you just give up because you can’t beat them. And it’s expensive.”
Meanwhile, test screenings proved little more successful: in one thousand-seat screening, all but 40 people walked out, and 35 of those filled in their response cards to say that they hated the film. The reviews on release were similarly hostile: The Financial Times called it a “dead duck,” while the Sunday Telegraph called it “monotonous and adolescent”.
“The film as released in the States made no sense,” said Lyne. “In a sadomasoch*stic movie, they took out the only sadomasoch*stic scene! But it’s curious. Abroad, in Italy, in France, in Latin America, all they want to talk about is 9 ½ Weeks.” In the end, the film flopped in the US, earning under $7 million against a budget of $17 million.
But it proved a commercial success internationally, playing in Paris for five years and taking over $100 million around the world. Video sales proved strong even in the US, and it spawned a sequel (Another 9 ½ Weeks, also known as Love In Paris, which again starred Rourke) and prequel (The First 9 ½ Weeks), although Zalman, Basinger and Lyne were not involved in either.
After release, Basinger came to forgive her director for his manipulation, saying that she felt she had done some of her best work on the film. “It was the emotionally wrenching yet emotionally releasing role I could ever ask for as an actress. I’m ecstatic that it’s over with but glad I did it.”
Lyne went on to more success with Fatal Attraction, where he said he learnt from his difficulties and took to heart criticisms that 9 ½ Weeks put style over substance. Day, who remarried and largely retired from writing, never commented on the film – if she even saw it. But it was Zalman who really capitalised on its success.
He had discovered a niche and exploited it for 20 years, establishing himself with films and cable TV shows that explored women’s erotic fantasies to great success. Towards the end of his life he said, “Men watch [my work] because it’s sexy, but consistently it is about relationships and it is about women struggling with their identity and having romance. I don’t know why but I do try to speak to women.”
As for Ingeborg Day, she remarried, largely retired from writing and was ‘outed’ as the book’s author in 1983. But there was no EL James-style publicity tour; in fact, she never commented on Nine and a Half Weeks publicly at all.
Day committed suicide in 2011, shortly after the death of her infirm husband, leaving “Elizabeth McNeill” to speak for her. As her alter-ego writes towards the end of the book: “That it was me who lived through this period seems, in retrospect, unthinkable.”
Fifty Shades Darker is released on February 10
