S.O.B.

Plot synopsis:
The story is a satire of the film industry and Hollywood society. The main character, Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), is a phenomenally successful film producer who has just made the first major flop of his career, to the dismay of his movie studio, resulting in the loss of his own sanity. Felix attempts suicide four times: 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 into the Pacific Ocean. He then 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. Subsequently, he tries to gas himself in his kitchen oven, but is prevented from carrying out his intent by two house guests with other things on their mind. 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 young woman wearing only a pair of panties. The experience gives him a brainstorm that the reason for his film's failure was its lack of sex.
Felix resolves to save both the film and his reputation. With great difficulty he persuades the studio and his wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), an Oscar-winning movie star with a squeaky-clean 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 finance further production. If he fails, both he and Sally will be impoverished, at least by Hollywood standards.
At first the studio's executives are keen to unload the film onto Felix and move on, but when Sally goes through with the topless scene and the film seems a likely 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. An angry and deranged Felix tries to steal the movie negatives from the studio's color lab vault, armed only with a water pistol. He is shot and killed by police who think the gun is real.
Felix's untimely death creates a crisis for his cronies Culley (William Holden), the director of Night Wind; Coogan (Robert Webber), Sally's press agent; and Dr. Finegarten (Robert Preston), who plan to give him a burial at sea. They steal his corpse from the funeral home, substituting the body of a well-known but underrated character actor who died in the first scene of the movie. Felix gets a Viking funeral in a burning dinghy, while the other actor finally gets the Hollywood sendoff many thought he deserved.
The epilogue later reveals that Felix's revamped film was a box office smash, and Sally won another Academy Award for her performance.
=== The movie within the movie ===
Little is seen of the movie which is the focus of the plot, except for an extended dream sequence and a brief shot close to the end. The title is Night Wind, which provokes the headline "Critics Break Wind" seen on a copy of Variety at the start of S.O.B. after the initial flop. The plot of Night Wind is kept vague; it involves a frigid businesswoman (played by Sally) whose inability to love a "male chauvinist" rival executive stems from a childhood trauma that led to her sexual detachment.
The climax of Night Wind is the first scene of S.O.B., an elaborate song and dance sequence set to "Polly Wolly Doodle", in which Sally wanders through a room full of giant toys (several of which come to life), singing the song while dressed as a tomboy. The implication is that her father's death caused Andrews's character to renounce childhood and become a cold, frigid person.
A second scene, taking place at the end of the film, has Andrews' character arrive at the home of her would-be lover after the dream, where he reveals that he still loves her, "despite everything."
When Felix rewrites the film to make it into soft porn, changes are made: Sally's character goes from sexually frigid to being a nymphomaniac. Her lover goes from male chauvinist to being a secret cross dresser. Felix axes the entire song sequence, turning it from a dream to a hallucination "… caused by a powerful aphrodisiac put into her Bosco" and replacing the regular version of "Polly Wolly Doodle" with a more haunting version. He has the "toys" dress in more erotic outfits, and includes a carnival barker-type muscle man (portrayed by S.O.B.'s choreographer, Paddy Stone), who tempts Andrews' character before she rejects him, by way of flashing her breasts.

Tags: satire

Review:
Hey he got his wife to go topless and his wife was Julie Andrews - he must have heard cash registers in his mind like Richard Mulligan's character when he decides to put his wife in a porno=erotic something or other to make zillions of dollars.
Everyone and everything is a target and he hits it almost every time."S.O.B." tells the story of a big director whose latest film is the biggest flop in movie history.
Both Julie Andrews & Blake Edwards had every reason to hate Hollywood for what they did to them (chastising Blake for his indulgence, boxing Julie into a corner with sticky-sweet roles), so this wicked satire was their way of firing back & people either got the joke & were offended or didn't get it & just hated the movie for what it was.
Moviegoers probably thought more the latter, causing it to flop at the box-office & not exactly giving Julie & Blake the better opportunities they were looking for (both have found it difficult to find films outside of the stereotypical ones they made their name with).
ONLY ONE MOVIE gives us the best all time performances from Richard Mulligan, Robert Webber and Loretta Swit, coupled with over-the-top turns by Julie Andrews, Robert Vaughn, William Holden and the amazing Robert Preston as Dr. Finegarten.
During an orgy/party that his good friend, cheerfully hedonistic director William Holden has at Mulligan's house while on suicide watch, Mulligan gets a brainstorm and decides to redo his last G rated film as soft core porn with Julie Andrews displaying her glockenspiels.
A little fine tuning in his performance might have helped, but the director who should have done this was busy elsewhere.Instead of Blake Edwards doing it himself, he should have begged Billy Wilder to do this film.
The opening credits sequence, in which he see the "Darling Lili" surrogate Night Wind play out (it's supposed to be BAD, so relax), to the great slapstick sequences (Mulligan's suicide attempts are particularly funny) to the ontarget performances which include Andrews, cast against type as a rich bitch actress, William Holden as the director, Richard Mulligan as the Blake Edwards surrogate and especially the great Robert Preston as the local Dr. Feelgood (called Finegarten in this; preston should have received a nomination for his good work)There are also many other Edwards veterans in the cast such as Robert Webber, Craig Stevens and Stuart Margolin, just to name a few.Seeing this film once is just not enough.
A tune-up for Blake Edward's next movie,  Victor/Victoria, but worth watching for Robert Preston's very amusing performance alone....
In this satirical look at Hollywood, a film producer tries to commit suicide after a big-budget flop, but then decides to reshoot it as porn.
I discovered this film on Cable-TV on a wonderfully programmed channel called "Z" in Los Angeles in the late 80's when they had a week long Blake Edwards Director's focus.
Until that time, the only thing I thought Blake Edwards did was "The Pink Panther" which was not my kind of film(s) but was okay.S.O.B. is a funny yet sobering look at Hollywood.
While the film did jump around between various members of its large cast, I loved William Holden, Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston and Robert Webber in almost every scene they were in.The best scenes included Preston's character Dr. Irving Finegarten, but it was the combined interaction of Holden, Preston and Webber near the end of the film, culminating in the Viking funeral, that made it truly enjoyable for me.Also pay attention to the dialogue and not just the actions.
S.O.B. was director Blake Edwards' own "All that Jazz", a self-indulgent, slightly over-the-top, slightly disguised look at a particularly period in his Hollywood career where he and wife Julie Andrews were treated pretty despicably by the Hollywood big shots who can make or break people in Hollywood with one telephone call.
In S.O.B.(which, BTW, stands for Standard Operational Bull***t), Richard Mulligan plays the manic Hollywood director, Felix Farmer, who is suicidal after his film "Night Wind", starring his wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) bombs miserably.
Farmer is practically written off in Hollywood until he gets the inspiration to re-shoot the film as a near pornographic extravaganza and have his wife bare her breasts for the first time on screen.
The merciless screenplay is well executed by a glorious all-star cast backing up Mulligan and Andrews, including William Holden, Robert Vaughn, Robert Preston (hysterical as a doctor who gives out pills like candy), Robert Webber, Loretta Swit, Craig Stevens, Stuart Margolin, Shelley Winters, Marisa Berensen, Rosanna Arquette, Robert Loggia, and Larry Hagman.
There are several funny scenes in this film and a lot of interesting things happen that by the time Andrews does bare her breasts, it is somewhat anti-climactic, but there is much to enjoy here for those willing to pay the attention that is required as the story is painted on a broad canvas with a lot of characters, but it is worth the trip and, after I saw it the first time, I wanted to see it again and again and think it is one of the great sleepers of 1980's..
Robert Preston is my favorite as the perpetually drunk/stoned quack doctor, and William Holden's last performance as the aged, burned-out director is particularly poignant when he gives a brief speech of "encouragement" to Felix (Richard Mulligan) about consciously trying to kill himself with drugs, booze and sexual excesses for the past 40 years.
Director Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) directs a kids movie with his wife Sally Miles (Julie Andrews) in it.
He also got a very talented cast in it--there's William Holden (in his last film), Robert Preston, Larry Hagman, Robert Vaughn, Shelly Winters, Loretta Swit and Robert Webber.
Director Blake Edwards, who was on a winning streak, used his greatest professional disaster, a bomb he made with wife Julie Andrews 11 years before called "Darling Lili," as the basis for an all-star satire on shallow loyalties and bottom-line mentalities in Hollywood.
It's a comedy that forgets to be funny.Richard Mulligan plays moviemaker Felix Farmer, whose latest picture "Night Wind" is in serious trouble after previews.
("N.Y. Critics Break 'Wind'" is the headline in Variety.) At first falling into a suicidal funk, he then gets the idea to reshoot the film as an erotic spectacular, deciding that sex sells and giving the public what it wants means getting his wife, Sally Miles (Andrews), to show them her breasts.
As excitement builds for this second "Wind", hard-charging studio boss David Blackman (Robert Vaughn) decides to use whatever foul means he can to steal Farmer's film out from under him."S.O.B." boasts an all-star cast of TV actors like Mulligan and Vaughn whom Edwards and the script throw out on the screen with lame one-liners they scream at the top of their lungs.
William Holden in his last film wears ugly sunglasses and seems a frail shadow of the actor he was only a few years before in "Network," leaving most of the foreground to Robert Preston, who adds a touch of class and gives "S.O.B" its few decent lines as a drug- and wisdom-dispensing doctor."If he doesn't remember me, mention his first case of the clap," he says of Blackman.
A flaccid score by Henry Mancini kills any lingering affection you may have had for that old number "Polly-Wolly-Doodle." Mulligan's overacting is embarrassingly bad and shticky, and the narrative is advanced in the form of unrealistic television reports, including a live bulletin when Sally Miles is getting ready for her nude scene.Andrews' breasts are the fifth- and sixth-best reasons to see "S.O.B" (Rosanna Arquette and Marisa Berenson appear topless here as well).
I love Blake Edwards taking dark comedic turns on Hollywood but some of it doesn't work..
just thinking about poor lovesick Moore hotfooting his way across a Mexican beach, or trying to explain who he is after a long dentist's visit and too much brandy and painkillers, makes me chuckle..In "S.O.B." Edwards tried to expose/dissect/shred the inner workings of Hollywood, the rivalries, deals, back-stabbing, all as a film-within-a-film, a dismal flop called "Nightwind" is being re-made by hapless Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan, who earned his claim to fame in the TV series "SOAP")..
"9 to 5"'s stealing a body from a Funeral Home was 100 times funnier than the one acted out in "S.O.B." Hard as this may be to say, "Weekend at Bernie's" excruciatingly reptitive jokes about transporting around a corpse were absolutely hilarious compared to the way Edwards tries to pull off the same routine..A lot of "S.O.B." is like that - you feel like you're being set up for something truly hilarious, but the payoff is a huge let-down..And the yelling..
(Although a brief topless scene with a very young Rosanna Arquette almost makes up for it ;)..The film is absolutely chocked-full of legendary actors, and the late Robert "The Music Man" Preston as a wacko flaming Doctor to the stars, (with the film's worst hair-styling)..
Its the story of a director (Richard Mulligan) that has a major career disaster with a universally panned film called "Night Wind".
The director is suicidal while all of those around him are amusingly wrapped in their own ego-centric worlds.The movie is hysterically funny and rather touching,  a recurring vignette in the film is a cut-away to a man that has died jogging on the beach and his little dog.
If you are a Richard Mulligan or Robert Preston fan this is a must see.For fans of Blake Edwards this is, in my opinion, one of his best comedic films..
Star turns by Richard Mulligan and William Holden, with outstanding support by the remarkable Robert Preston, Julie Andrews and especially Robert Vaughn (cast brilliantly against type).The Viking funeral scene was affecting, even if it was a rip-off of several fictionalized accounts of John Barrymore's demise.Only the boring could find this boring..
Featuring many comedic talents including Richard Mulligan, Robert Preston, Julie Andrews, Loretta Swit, Robert Loggia, Robert Vaughn, Robert Webber, William Holden and Shelley Winters.
Richard Mulligan plays Edwards' alter ego, a successful film director suddenly on the outs with the Hollywood honchos after his latest film tanks.
On the plus side, Robert Preston was very good and has great lines is about every scene he's in ("the world is my armadillo") and William Holden lends dignity and style to any film just by walking on the set.
From the opening scene to the final fade out, this movie, for it's genre, is as good as it gets.I noticed when they gave Blake Edwards his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars this past year, they did NOT mention S.O.B. amongst his list of films.
From Julie Andrews, playing a delicious parody of herself, to William Holden, who in the course of the movie declaims his own obituary, to Robert Preston (not a shyster ...
the best comedy of the eighties.Brilliant,funny,grotesque,noir,dramatic,all these stiles mixed greatly thanks to an almost perfect script(nothing to do with the comedy of the last 20 years,based on a simple "situation" which exhaust itself after 20 minute)and a great and ironic Julie Andrews on a parody of herself and of her career-which has been less shiny of what it deserved to be-,not to forgive all the other actors,william holden overall in his last stage,but also the great "double Oscar winner" shelley winters and "J.R." Larry Hagman.An irresistible film full of ideas and definitely rich of style and elegance, with something which is almost impossible to find in nowadays movies:an atmosphere.
S.O.B. is a great, biting satire on Hollywood that has many surprising stars turning up in unexpected places; Richard Mulligan is superb as the depressed director/producer of a failed Ishtar-like opus who tries to redeem himself when he has an epiphany at a typical Hollywood orgy, and remakes his movie to the sordid taste of today's audience.
When I saw it on cable a couple years later, I was surprised; it was a very funny satire on Hollywood with some of my favorite stars; everyone from Loretta Switt to Larry Hagman (as a beleaguered executive) showed up to play small but very funny bits in the movie.
Apparently Good Samaritans don't exist in Southern California!A failing director has just premiered his latest movie starring Julie Andrews (probably her worst performance ever) which has bombed, and he tries several times to kill himself.
If it had ended with the savagery with which it had begun, it would be a classic.For those who don't know, the film is a satire about a movie director who tries to revive what is looking to be a huge flop by turning it into a semi-porn film.
Unfortunately it turns chicken, and doesn't follow through on its nastiness.Key to the plot is that the director, played by Richard Mulligan, intends to cast his wife, played by Julie Andrews, in an X-rated role, after she has spent her entire career in G-rated family movies.
And if you're going to have Julie Andrews get down-and-dirty---then go ahead and have her get down-and-dirty.THEN you could have the director slowly turn from an obsessed nutcase trying desperately to hang on to his paltry Hollywood success---to a jealous husband who decides he would rather not have the rest of the world see his ex-wife like this.
The last act of the film becomes much better motivated than the lame slapstick Edwards used, and gives a much greater opportunity for real comedy as Felix tries valiantly, but too late, to stop the juggernaut he has created, which rolls right along over him.As with all such hypotheticals, there's no way to tell if that would have worked any better.
Full of cameos, but the best characters were played by Stuart Margolis, Robert Webber and, of course, William Holden, in his last movie..
In many ways, it resembles a bad dream.Everything in this picture is aesthetically and conceptually hideous - even the characters' names ("Felix Farmer") - and though Edwards presumably intended S.O.B. as a grand slam against mainstream Hollywood, his sense of humor here is so off that the film immediately becomes physically repellent - it turns one's stomach...
Even old actors have to make a living:  Julie Andrews (Director Blake Edwards' real-life wife who's career struggled under him...she has since recovered nicely with THE PRINCESS DIARIES), William Holden (yes, he was in THE TOWERING INFERNO too...it's no PICNIC when you're old in Hollywood, this was his last film so there goes our first victim up in flames), Robert Loggia (he danced with Tom Hanks on the giant toy piano in BIG so he survived nicely), and Robert Preston (formerly of Cecil B.
(what's with these relatives of directors anyway?), recovering drunKie and boobie-flasher Drew Barrymore (please someone tie her tubes, the Barrymore lineage must end!), recovering sex addict Charlie Sheen (let's include Martin and his assorted brothers in just for fun), would make us forget about the OCEAN'S ELEVEN remake.Next we have what could have been a typical HOLLYWOOD SQUARES cast of that era (if only Edwards would have found a role for Rose Marie): TV's Larry Hagman (he played the astronaut turned oil well baron on I DREAM OF DALLAS), Stuart Margolin (he played Angel on TOUCHED BY A ROCKFORD), Richard Mulligan (of the dirty SOAP and the clean EMPTY NEST), Loretta Swit (M*A*S*H* with four asterisks), Robert Vaughn (MAN FROM U*N*C*L*E*...that's five asterisks, he's still the champ...please no more shows with asterisks!), Robert Loggia (ELFEGO BACA, hey they still play it at 3am on the Disney Channel), Larry Storch (F-TROOP, back when you could use the letter "F" without someone thinking it was a dirty reference), Joe Penny (JAKE, NOT THE FAT MAN), and Corbin Bernsen (LA-LA LAW).
If you feel like renting this film and fast forwarding it to scenes with naked and half-naked young babes in them then it's okay, you just got to put up with all those stupid scenes with old Hollywood actors not really acting, just playing themselves, TV-actors trying to ride a hit to stardom and catching autographs during their break, and that old broad Julie Andrews Mary Poppin' out of her blouse (not a pretty sight).
Ultimately, my 48 year old mind understands that I missed something in SOB, but I can't get by the quarter century old memory of thinking that this Blake Edwards comedy was a dud.I do remember laughing.
Funny, Biting, And Sad. Blake Edwards, "S.O.B.," is one of the funniest satires of the vicious machine known as Hollywood ever made.
Robert Preston practically steals the film away from the fact that you see Julie Andrews pretty much kill her "Mary Poppins" image by showing her boobs, swearing and being a total witch!
Edwards and his wife Julie Andrews wanted to make a kiss-off to Hollywood.
William Holden and Robert Preston are excellent in the film as old time cynics with a heart.
Richard Mulligan (looking very much like Blake Edwards) is a producer whose latest saccharine soaked musical is a colossal flop.
Felix Farmer(Richard Mulligan)is a well known producer with a string of hits, but falls upon hard times when his latest movie, a full blown musical, is not received well by test audiences.
Farmer comes out of his funk with a major idea of having the star of the movie, his wife Sally(Julie Andrews), bare her breasts.
Since she has such a clean pollyanna image, this bit of titillation will highlight the new soft-porn version of his film.Some strong performances from familiar stars like Robert Preston, Larry Hagman, Stuart Margolin, Loretta Swit, Robert Vaughn, Larry Storch and William Holden in his last motion picture.
Blake Edwards busts his hump to make you laugh.Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) is a famous Hollywood producer who just created the biggest box office bomb in movie history.
His movie star wife, Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), takes the kids and abandons Felix in his beach house and even considers divorcing him.