Line #5 Trivia/TheLonelyLady


1	* BoxOfficeBomb: Budget, $5 million. Box office, $1,223,000.
2	* CaliforniaDoubling: Literally -- is set in Hollywood, but was filmed in Italy of all places.
3	* CreatorBacklash: Creator/PiaZadora says that she was sure the movie was terrible and tried to make her husbandexecutive producer halt the release. [[http://articles.latimes.com/1985-11-19/entertainment/ca-7761_1_pia-zadora She doesn't spare mean words about how incompetent the whole thing was.]]
4	* CreatorKiller
5	** Director Peter Sasdy had various film credits under his belt during the previous decade. After this, he never worked on another film again.
6	** Ellen Shepard and Shawn Randall, two of the film's credited screenwriters, never wrote a theatrical film again, with Shepard's only other credits being on documentaries and/or as a technical consultant. This is the only known credit for Randall, period, and this combined with sharing the same surname as the film's main character -- a BrokenBird screenwriter -- has led to some speculation that Randall is a [[AlanSmithee pseudonym]] for someone[[note]](possibly the movie's original director, Matt Cimber)[[/note]] who realised how terrible the film was and took their real name off it. The third screenwriter, John Kershaw got off a little lighter in comparison, working on one more film (the extremely obscure ''Film/YellowHairAndTheFortressOfGold'') and various TV shows until his death a decade after the film's release.
7	** Up until this point, author Harold Robbins had a successful career complete with screen adaptations of all of his dozen previous novels. ''The Lonely Lady'' single-handedly transformed him into box-office poison. Though he went on to write another 10 bestselling novels, [[FranchiseKiller none of them were ever adapted again.]]
8	* TheDanza: Carla Maria Peroni was played by Carla Romanelli.
9	* DawsonCasting: Pia Zadora plays Jerilee from teenager to adult. Zadora is a petite 5' (1.5 m), which might make you think that she could pass for a much younger character. Unfortunately, that 5' is ''all'' woman, and the costumers resorted to concealing her curves in oversized sailor dresses and ''Series/PunkyBrewster'' overalls no one over the age of 10 would be caught dead in. This is coupled with a full face of very adult-looking make-up. The effect is...unsettling, particularly when the 29-year-old woman playing an 18-year-old character dressed like a 10-year-old child starts smooching a 60-year-old man.
10	** 29-year-old Ray Liotta also plays a high school student.
11	* DisownedAdaptation: [[https://books.google.com/books?id=BPFcLRe1b9UC&pg=PT123#v=onepage&q&f=false Harold Robbins only saw a rough cut, which made him sleep and later blast the hell out of it to his assistantfuture wife.]]
12	-->The movie will be a bummer, everyone will lose money. Except me. I got six hundred thousand dollars before it opened.
13	* HostilityOnTheSet: Creator/PiaZadora clashed with director Peter Sasdy and the studio-appointed script doctors throughout filming.
14	* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: Never released on DVD, although it was released on [=VHS=] and [=LaserDisc=] back in the day, copies of which are hard to find, not that you'd ''want'' to find them. It was finally released on Blu-ray by Creator/ShoutFactory in June 2017.
15	* SavedFromDevelopmentHell: Creator/{{Universal}} purchased the adaptation rights before publishing, hoping to release the movie in 1976, the year the book hit stores. But these plans went nowhere as the scripts didn't please the actress cast as Jerilee. Then in 1982 the billionaire husband of Creator/PiaZadora joined production and the movie got off the ground.
16	* StarDerailingRole: Pia Zadora, who had only a handful of small roles and cameos after this film. Except for ''Film/VoyageOfTheRockAliens'', anyway.
17	* TitleThemeTune: ''"Loooone-leee laaa-day...oooon-leee you can help yourself..."'' It's probably significant that a recording is almost impossible to find anywhere on the internet--the song is so forgettable, even connoisseurs of bad cinema haven't bothered to upload a copy for posterity.
18	* TroubledProduction: The film had an even tougher time of things in Hollywood than its title character. Along with the aforementioned DevelopmentHell, the studio forced a Film/HammerHorror veteran director which went on to clash with Pia Zadora, the script kept being fine-tuned, and eventually it got booed in test screenings. And yet it got barely changed before release, partly because the publicist who had to PolishTheTurd was the same one who ran the {{UsefulNotes/Golden Raspberry Award}}s...
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Context Trivia / TheLonelyLady