Film / S.O.B.

S.O.B. is a 1981 American comedy film written and directed by Blake Edwards, starring Richard Mulligan and Julie Andrews. Also appearing are Robert Preston, Robert Vaughn, Larry Hagman, Shelley Winters, Loretta Swit, Robert Webber, Rosanna Arquette, and, in his last movie appearance, William Holden. This is perhaps best remembered for being "the film where Julie Andrews appears topless".

The story is a satire of the film industry and Hollywood society. The main character, Felix Farmer, is a phenomenally successful producer who has just made the first flop of his career, to the dismay of the studio and the loss of his own sanity. Felix attempts suicide several times:

First, he attempts to die of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, only to have it slip into gear and drive through the side of his garage, down a sand dune and ending up in the Pacific Ocean.

Secondly, he turns on the gas in the kitchen oven, but is prevented from carrying out his intent by two house guests with other things on their mind.

Thirdly, he attempts to hang himself from a rafter in an upstairs bedroom, only to fall through the floor, landing on a poisonous Hollywood gossip columnist standing in the living room below.

Thereafter he spends most of the time heavily sedated while his friends and hangers-on occupy his beach house. The occupation leads to a party which degenerates into an orgy.

Finally, he tries to shoot himself with a police officer's gun but is prevented from doing so by the ministrations of a sweet young thing in a pair of panties, and experiences a revelation of what was missing from his movie - Free Love!

Newly energized, Felix resolves to save both the film and his reputation. With great difficulty he persuades the studio and his wife Sally Miles, an Oscar-winning movie star with a goody-goody image, to allow him to revise the film into a soft-core pornographic musical in which she must appear topless. He liquidates most of his wealth to buy the existing footage and to bankroll further production. If he fails, both he and Sally will be impoverished, at least by Hollywood standards.

At first the studio is keen to unload the film onto Felix and move on, but as it becomes apparent that it will be a success, they plot to regain control. Using California's community property laws, they get the distribution and final-cut rights by persuading Sally to sign them over. Felix then tries to get the movie negatives from the studio's color lab vault, armed with a water pistol, and is shot by police who think it is a real pistol.

Felix's untimely and violent death creates yet another crisis, particularly for his cronies Culley, Coogan and Dr. Finegarten, who plan to give him a burial at sea. They kidnap his corpse, substituting the body of a well-known but underrated character actor who died in the first scene of the movie, having a heart attack while jogging on the beach in front of Felix's home. Felix gets a Viking funeral, being sent out to sea in a burning dinghy, while the actor finally gets the Hollywood burial many thought he deserved.

The epilogue later reveals that the revamped film was a huge success, and Sally won another Academy Award for her performance. "And everyone lived happily ever after..."

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S.O.B. contains examples of:

• Black Comedy: The tone is set in the opening scenes, when a neighbor jogging on the beach collapses and dies just yards away from the Farmer mansion. He lies there for a couple of days before anyone notices.
• Brutal Honesty: Tim Culley asks Felix Farmer "Have I ever lied to you?" and Felix replies "No". Tim goes on to say "Well I have, repeatedly. But the fact that I just admitted I have lied to you in the past means you can believe me now".
• Bungled Suicide: Felix makes multiple attempts to kill himself only to have each of them unintentionally thwarted.
• Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: The central characters decide Felix deserves better than a Hollywood funeral full of phonies, so they steal his body from the funeral home and give him a Viking Funeral (put on a burning boat and sent out to sea).
• Cloudcuckoolander: Dr. Irving Finegarten.
• Conversation Cut: The conversation about Felix falling through the ceiling and landing on gossip columnist Polly Reed cycles through the whole cast this way, with each character getting a line or two over several conversations.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Felix goes from being a Hollywood pariah to having practically the whole town show up for his funeral.
• Dr. Feelgood: Dr. Finegarten doles out prescription drugs like candy. He supplies Sally with the sedatives to relax her enough to do her topless scene.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Coogan, Finegarten, and Culley sit around drinking heavily after Felix's death.
• Fan Disservice: Robert Vaughn's studio exec is briefly seen dressed in...women's lingerie.
• Fanservice: Rosanna Arquette topless. And in-universe, Felix wants Sally to do this in the movie. (It's hardly a spoiler to say that she does.)
  Sally: I'm gonna show my boobies!
• The Fun in Funeral: The Viking funeral scene at the end.
• Fun with Acronyms: Nope, not what you think. See below.
• Hideous Hangover Cure: Dr. Finegarten has one that he takes intravenously:
  "Come to think of it, why should I give you a vitamin shot? I'm the one with the hangover. B-12, B-Complex, Crude Liver, and a generous jolt of adrenal cortex. Chased by a Bloody Mary. L'chaim!"
• Horrible Hollywood: The title is an abbreviation of the term one character uses to describe how Hollywood operates: Standard Operational Bullshit.
• Hotter and Sexier:
  • Felix's plan is to reboot Night Wind as this, and invoke it with Sally herself. ("We sold them schmaltz! They prefer sadomasochism!")
  • The party sequence plays like a raunchier version of the earlier Blake Edwards film The Party.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Julie Andrews is basically playing an Expy of herself. Everything said in the movie about Sally Miles being a former star of family-friendly musicals who was changing her image also applied to Andrews at the time.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: David Blackman is clearly supposed to represent Robert Evans, who was Blake Edwards' chief adversary at Paramount when Darling Lili flopped.
• A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: What happens at the beach house, eventually.
• Porn Stache: Dr. Finegarten.
• Porn with Plot: The Show Within a Show is a softcore version. We don't get to see much of the actual sex (since S.O.B. is rated R), but we do (briefly) get to see Julie Andrews' boobies^note as her character refers to them after being given a sedative to calm her jitters. In-universe, she's doing the show in an attempt to break from her wholesome-girl typecasting; apparently she's basically playing herself.
• Potty Failure: Coogan, while helping to move Felix's corpse, soils himself in the process. And this is in addition to pissing himself.
  Dr. Irving Finegarten: Ben, do you realize that in a matter of a few hours you have demonstrated most of your excremental bodily functions?
• Show Within a Show: Night Wind, the family-friendly musical that Felix wants to Re Cut into a sex movie.
• Something Else Also Rises: Felix firing the gun into the air when he climaxes at his blowjob. And the giant jack-in-the-box on the film set, with its pink head, which pops up out of its box as Felix is telling the studio execs about his plan to make Night Wind Hotter and Sexier.
• Suicide by Cop: Felix kidnaps a security guard using a water pistol and forces a movie film he wants to take to be brought out of storage. Confronted by the police, he points the pistol at them, and he is shot and killed.
• There's No "B" in "Movie": What Felix's career seems to have degenerated into, although it is mostly lowbrow comedies rather than campy horror films. His eulogy mentions movies such as Chicken at the Wheel.
• Title Drop: It is explained in the movie that S.O.B. stands for "standard operational bullshit".
• Two Decades Behind: Despite being filmed (and theoretically set) in the early 80's, the movie's depictions of sex, drugs, and the counter-culture feel more like The '60s.^note Edwards wrote the screenplay in the early 1970s, which made it an Unintentional Period Piece by the time it finally went before the cameras
• Video Credits: Clips of all the players at the end.
• Viking Funeral: Felix's body is sent out to sea on a burning dinghy.
• Wrong Insult Offence:
  Polly Reed: You're gonna let that SHYSTER on?
  Dr. Irving Finegarten: I could sue you for calling me that, Polly! A shyster is a disreputable lawyer. I'M a QUACK!

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"...until the next movie!"