In 1996, Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is fired from a Pittsburgh electronics store for having sex with his manager’s girlfriend. His wealthy brother Josh (Josh Gad) announces at the dinner table at their parents’ (George Segal and Jill Clayburgh) house that he has found Jamie a job as a pharmaceutical sales representative. After attending a Pfizer training program where he has sex with the instructor (Kate Jennings Grant), Jamie goes to work for the company and tries to get doctors to prescribe Zoloft and Zithromax.
He is rebuffed, much to the dismay of his regional manager, Bruce (Oliver Platt), who sees Jamie as his ticket to the “big leagues” of Chicago. Bruce says if Jamie can get Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria) to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac, other doctors will follow his lead. Jamie tries to get access to Dr. Knight by hitting on his female employees until, exasperated, Dr. Knight unethically permits him to observe him at work, during which time he accidentally sees a disrobing patient, Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), who suffers from early onset Parkinson’s disease.
Jamie angles a date with Maggie, who has sex with him. Jamie is later beaten up by top-selling Prozac rep Trey (Gabriel Macht), one of Maggie’s ex-lovers, who warns him to stay away from her and the doctors. That night, Jamie is unable to get an erection. Maggie teasingly says he should use the new erectile dysfunction drug that his company has developed. Bruce confirms that such a drug, to be called Viagra, is about to be marketed.
Jamie soon starts selling Viagra, an instant success. Jamie wants a committed relationship, but Maggie refuses. Jamie confronts her while she helps senior citizens onto a bus bound for Canada to get cheap prescription drugs, and they get into an argument.
Love & Other Drugs is a 2010 American erotic romantic drama comedy film directed and co-written by Edward Zwick and based on the non-fiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman by Jamie Reidy. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, who originally starred together in Brokeback Mountain. Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria, Josh Gad and Gabriel Macht also star. The film was released in the United States on November 25, 2010, received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $102 million.
Love and Other Drugs was released on November 24, 2010, and opened in 2,455 theaters in the United States, grossing $2,239,489 on its opening day and $9,739,161 in its opening weekend, ranking No. 6 with a per theater average of $3,967. On its second weekend, it remained No. 6 and grossed $5,652,810—$2,300 per theater. By its third weekend it dropped down to No. 8 and made $2,981,509—$1,331 per theater. The film barely broke even at home with a domestic total gross of $32,367,005 as opposed to a production budget of $30 million. It fared much better overseas where it grossed $70,453,003.
Introduction
Edward Zwick directs, produces and co-wrote the screenplay for this unconventional and realistic romance that explores the nature of love and sex, how sex/lust evolves into love, and the ways people try and figure it all out. “Love & Other Drugs presents two people who are desperate not to go to a deeper, more profound place in their connection to one another,” says Zwick. “But their appeal to each other and the nature of the love are so powerful they defeat the couple’s impulses to resist connecting. Jamie and Maggie just can’t help but fall in love no matter how much they try to avoid it. They surrender to something stronger than their intentions. And that’s fun to watch because it provides comedy and emotion.”
Those themes certainly resonated with the film’s two leads. “Love & Other Drugs is about what it takes to let love in,” says Anne Hathaway. “Love is hard work and it’s scary – and it’s all totally worth it!” Adds Jake yllenhaal: “It’s a comedy and a love story about two people who are running away from the same things: intimacy, connection, and caring. These are some of the most difficult things you can ask of another human being. But the movie is first and foremost a comedy; that’s what we were trying to bring out in almost every scene.”
Love & Other Drugs has thematic ties to Zwick’s feature directorial debut, About Last Night, a critical and box-office hit that, like Love & Other Drugs, presents a realistic, non-glossy romance that begins one way, then evolves into something quite unexpected. In between these two films, Zwick helmed several epic dramas set in such locales and periods as 19th-century Japan (The Last Samurai), contemporary African diamond mines (Blood Diamond) and displaced persons camps and Eastern Europe forests during the Holocaust (Defiance). But even painting on these larger canvasses Zwick always focused on character and relationships.
For television, Zwick and writing-producing partner Marshall Herskovitz, who co-wrote and produces Love & Other Drugs, helped redefine character-driven narratives. “I think many people had forgotten that I started my career with stories of this intimate nature, especially on television, whether it was thirtysomething or My So-Called Life,” says Zwick. “Since I hadn’t played with this voice in movies in a long time, when this opportunity materialized, I was drawn to it. I am interested in what is epic in the personal; sometimes the smaller struggles loom just as large with stakes that are just as high.”
“Ed and I are drawn to projects for multiple reasons,” adds Herskovitz, “and it’s the thematic complexity that brings us to a specific project. We’ve wanted to do a motion picture comedy for a long time and we were quite intrigued by the world of pharmaceutical reps and the kind of silly, almost absurdist aspects of that subculture. With Love & Other Drugs, we saw a real and very interesting relationship between these two people who have avoided connections and serious relationships. You see that possibly neither one has the capability to be in a relationship so therefore you are pulling for them.”
Producer Scott Stuber notes that “the truth of any good love story comes from how the characters grow up and that’s really what this movie is about. It’s about two people who have to step out on the cliff that is love. Jamie’s got to mature and Maggie needs to let someone love her with all of her flaws.” Another longtime Zwick collaborator, producer Pieter Jan Brugge, who first worked with the director on Glory, notes, “Ed possesses the ability to fuse different tonal elements with remarkable skill and ease, which is not an easy thing to do. Love & Other Drugs is not just a romantic comedy or drama or love story or social satire. It has many different elements and Ed’s ability to fuse these tones into a seamless whole is his gift as a director. To accomplish this he needed great collaborators, principally in the cast. What sets our actors apart is their ability to play multiple things at the same time.”
The fictional world of Love & Other Drugs is based on the nonfiction Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, by Jamie Reidy (published in 2005), in which a cocky young Pfizer salesman chronicles his experiences as he played and beat the pharmaceutical industry at its own game in the late 90s. Hoping to adapt the book, Charles Randolph (who ultimately was a co-writer and producer on Love & Other Drugs) brought the tome to Scott Stuber in 2006. “It was actually the first thing that I bought as a producer,” recalls Stuber, who had been co-president of production at Universal. “Jamie wrote about experiences I thought were analogous to films like Jerry Maguire, Wall Street or any movie where a young man goes into the workplace with ideas of what the world is going to be and the world beats them out of him. That’s a very appealing theme.”
Randolph recalls that he was more intrigued with Jamie Reidy and his world then he was in the book itself. “I was interested in Jamie as a person. He’s fun and interesting. I wanted the story of Love & Other Drugs to be more about the tone of his life and some of the experiences he’s had, then a strict adaptation of his book.”
“Charles wanted the adaptation to be a love story set amidst this world of pharmaceutical sales, which inspired the creation of the Maggie character,” Stuber elaborates. “Charles’ story brought Jamie’s journey together with the one Charles invented for Maggie, as her affliction [of early-onset Parkinson’s disease] brings her into Jamie’s world.”
Randolph worked on several script drafts until Stuber thought it was ready to go out to directors. Stuber was delighted that not only was Zwick interested in helming the project he and Herskovitz had some strong ideas for the story and characters. “Ed and Marshall added a lot of texture to the characters, but their real breakthrough was to weave together Jamie’s work life and love life into what feels like one story. They brought in their voices so that Ed could direct the film within his own voice.”
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Love and Other Drugs (2010)
Directed by: Edward Zwick
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal, Judy Greer, Jaimie Alexander, Hank Azaria, Kate Jennings Grant, Katheryn Winnick, Kimberly Scott, Nikki Deloach, Natalie Gold, Tess Soltau, Constance Brenneman
Screenplay by: Marshall Herskovitz
Production Design by: Patti Podesta
Cinematography by: Steven Fierberg
Film Editing by: Steven Rosenblum
Costume Design by: Deborah Lynn Scott
Set Decoration by: Meg Everist
Art Direction by: Gary Kosko
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, and some drug material.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: November 24, 2010