As a biographer myself, I have been avidly following the revelation that squeaky-clean General David Petraeus has been under the covers with the author of his biography, Paula Broadwell. The news of their affair has recently made Broadwell’s book, the aptly-titled All In, a best-seller. But it has ruined his public career, while also seriously damaging her professional credibility. My fellow members of BIO (aka the Biographers International Organization) have taken to Facebook to discuss the journalistic ethics of the situation, as well as the dangers facing biographers who get too close to their subjects.
Meanwhile, remembering back to my years at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, I can visualize my former boss Roger Corman dusting off old scripts about illicit affairs, strategizing just how they can be tailored to fit the current situation. Roger came from the world of exploitation films, after all, and he’s never missed a chance to be timely. Back in 1987, the success of Fatal Attraction made him determined to get his own erotic thriller into the marketplace. Enter screenwriter Jackson Barr, a good old boy from Texas with a downhome twang and a wicked sense of fun. Soon thereafter, we at Concorde were shooting Body Chemistry, another love triangle involving a nice-guy husband, a devoted wife, and the femme fatale who tries to ruin both their lives.
Whereas Fatal Attraction introduced an attorney who slept with a sexy business associate while his wife and daughter were out of town, we at Concorde came up with a scientist – one involved in the study of sex pheromones – who succumbed to the allure of a sexy colleague while his wife and young son enjoyed a night at the museum. Though we tried to distinguish our film from the original, there’s no denying that the trajectory was the same: the lover, when firmly told by the male lead that their relationship can’t continue, is overcome with jealous rage. She schemes to get revenge, with deadly consequences.
Body Chemistry did well enough for Concorde that we revisited our femme fatale three more times. One big contrast to Fatal Attraction was that our dangerous dame always lived on to vamp another day. In the original Body Chemistry, Dr. Claire Archer (played by Lisa Pescia) was a research scientist with a few screws loose, but in Body Chemistry 2 we made her a radio psychologist with her own call-in show. Jackson Barr, who knew his way around a late-night radio station, showed Claire enthusiastically embracing the joys of the “on the air club.” Eventually, of course, bad things happened to not-so-good people. Next there came Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III, which combined the B-movie talents of Jim Wynorski, Andrew Stevens, Morgan Fairchild, and me (yes, I have a cameo as a caller to a sex-line). By the time of Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, Claire Archer had evolved into a TV producer played by the lubricious Shannon Tweed -- you can’t get much more B-movie than that. Fortunately no one adopted my admittedly goofy suggestion that Claire give both Siskel and Ebert a thumbs-up experience.
I’m not suggesting that any of this matches the David Petraeus saga. But Body Chemistry, or one of the many other erotic thrillers we produced at Concorde in the early Nineties (Naked Obsession! In the Heat of Passion!) can surely be tweaked by an enterprising screenwriter to involve a straight-arrow general, his trusting wife, and a biographer who’ll stop at nothing to get herself, shall we say, between hardcovers.
No one has claimed, though, that Paula Broadwell ever boiled a bunny.
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