It all started out in 1984 as a Groundlings sketch by Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll.
Then it became a play. That play ran for a year instead of eight weeks. Then Ivan Reitman saw a review in the LA Times, bought the rights, and handed the project to his wife Geneviève Robert as her directorial debut. It would also be her only one.
And that’s how Casual Sex? began… And there’s a but.
The movie that was released was not the same movie they started filming. What it ended up turning into was closer to a gender-swapped 80s resort sex farce – two women hunting for men at a health spa instead of the usual duo of guys chasing wardrobe-challenged coeds.
Lea Thompson plays Stacy, the sexually experienced one. Victoria Jackson, then almost two years into her SNL run, plays Melissa, the nervous virgin, obviously. They talk about their histories, their anxieties, their disappointments. Sometimes to the camera, and sometimes to each other. It can sometimes come off like Woody Allen directed Private Resort and cast Andrew Dice Clay.
Dice plays Vinny, who is also Dice, but yeah, let’s call him Vinny, a Jersey meathead who gets with the Mr. Sensitive makeover to win Stacy over. In the original script, he didn’t get the girl, but test audiences being always right, just loved him to bits, so Universal demanded rewrites and reshoots. Goldman and Toll had to stomach it since they had zero leverage.
Hence, the movie is the way it is and it won’t change. It was destined for joyless low shelf-esteem relationships with Private Resort, Fraternity Vacation, Malibu Bikini Shop or Breaking All The Rules.
The film is also apparently noteworthy for being the first studio feature to acknowledge AIDS. The characters carry condoms. They talk about risk, I mean. It’s handled with a light touch, but it’s there. It was weird suddenly seeing movies take on the same language as after school specials and PSAs. We didn’t talk much about it before Salt-N-Pepa made us.
Casual Sex? did modest business and got mixed reviews. Critics didn’t know what to make of a tame studio sex comedy written and directed by women that was more interested in talking about sex than showing it. Audiences asked for the check.
It’s not always being itself, but it’s a movie you can take home to mother. Thompson and Jackson have real chemistry, and the script, even after the studio notes, still feels like it was written by people who’d actually been on bad dates. -Pop