The Rob Lowe movie “too sexy” for Hollywood to handle: “It was pretty gratuitous”
Fans of the big-screen erotic thriller were spoiled for choice in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the subgenre enjoying a ‘Golden Age’. According to Rob Lowe, he wasn’t really allowed to get in on the act, after he accused the studio of burying his contributions because they were too sexy for their own good.
At first glance, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Have a wee gander at any of the titillating titles that hit cinemas during that particular boom period, and most of them made money at the box office. Even Madonna’s Body of Evidence recouped its budget at the box office, and it was shite.
Films like Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, Philip Noyce’s Sliver, Barry Levinson’s Disclosure, and more indicated that audiences were ready, willing, and able to get hot under the collar, but Lowe was nonetheless adamant that when he muscled his way into the sexier side of cinema, he was sabotaged.
Bob Swaim’s 1988 potboiler, Masquerade, starred Meg Tilly as the wealthy recent heir to her mother’s fortune, and it isn’t long before Lowe’s yacht captain sets her heart aflutter. At first, she doesn’t think he’s interested in her solely for the money, but that obviously isn’t the case, with the sneaky bugger formulating a plot to kill her and claim the cash. Oh, and he’s also having an affair with his boss’ wife.
During a rant on his podcast where he bemoaned how little shagging there is in modern movies, the actor harked back to a simpler time when things were hotter and heavier than they are now, or at least that’s the way he remembers it, even if he’s not entirely correct on either count, if we’re being honest.
“Kim Cattrall and I did a movie called Masquerade together, which, I love that movie,” he said. “It got good reviews, but the studio kind of dumped it because they thought it was too sexy. It was pretty gratuitous, but it was great.” It did get decent enough reviews, but since it premiered on over 1,000 screens in its opening weekend, it’s a stretch to say that it was dumped.
Not only that, but it was four weeks before the picture’s screen count dropped below 999, so you can’t really say that MGM getting cold feet over the salacious subject matter was the reason why Masquerade failed to even reach $16 million in ticket sales in the United States, with the $12 million budget ensuring that it was a minor flop, a word nobody wants to hear associated with the erotic thriller.
As fate would have it, by the summer, that wasn’t even the Rob Lowe sex movie that people were talking about anyway, after the star found himself embroiled in a sex tape scandal that took a sledgehammer to his mainstream career, although he eventually clawed his way back to relevancy.
In the late ’80s, there probably wasn’t such a thing as a film being so sexy that it frightened a major studio into sweeping it under the rug, but evidently, he would wholeheartedly disagree.
