The more I read about Love and Other Drugs, the film adaptation for which Brokeback Mountain co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are “in negotiations” to star as the romantic leads, the more I become invested in this project.
According to last week’s Hollywood Reporter, multi-talented Academy Award-winning producer Ed Zwick (Shakespeare in Love) will be directing and Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) will write the screenplay for Fox 2000 and New Regency, who are busy securing the rights from Universal Pictures after they’d put it into turnaround.
Normally, with such great talent attached to a project, that should be enough to be excited about it. But it’s the story in and of the original non-fiction book that has me hooked.
It’s based on Jamie Reidy’s nonfiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman and though THR reports that this will be the plot (“Gyllenhaal will play the salesman, who begins a relationship with a woman [Hathaway] who has Parkinson’s while on one of his sales calls”) I think the better way to go for this movie would to be to turn it into a mishmash of Thank You for Smoking, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction (but without the last one’s fluffy ending). Too bad I don’t have any pull in Hollywood.
And the best part about Reidy’s personal story is that he didn’t set to write a “tell-all” about the pharmaceutical industry, as he notes in the closing to this interview at Natural News.com:
[Interviewer Jessica] Smith: So is the part that bothered [former employers Eli Lilly who fired him after the book came out in 2005] the most was that it might leave the wrong impression with future trainees; that they could get away with less work? That bothered them more than you talking about the industry as a whole?
Reidy: Yeah, because I didn’t really bash the industry in the book. That was one of my things; I didn’t want to be a whistleblower. I thought it would be really unreal to say, “Hey, I’ve been doing this for nine years and these are all the things that are wrong!” People would say, “Well, asshole, if you thought that, why did you work there for nine years?” So I didn’t ever want anyone to say that. I wanted to write a funny, funny book, that also opens a lot of peoples’ eyes to what happens, but I didn’t really trash the industry too badly, or really at all. I just tell my story, and then people can extrapolate that how they want.
I mean, I don’t think people think I’m the only rep in America that slept late and quit early. They can probably figure out that. But I had an interview with the guy on NPR’s Marketplace, and he says to me, “Well surely you aren’t the only one doing this.” And I said to him, “Am I the smartest guy you ever met?” He just sat back in his seat and started laughing, and that was the last line in the interview.
Production is set to start in the fall.