Book vs. Movie: Love and Other Drugs
By Russ Bickerstaff
December 3, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Love And Other Drugs
A number of years ago, slacker Jamie Reidy dropped out of the military to move back in with his father. Somewhere along the line he got a phone call from Pfizer - evidently they were interested in possibly hiring him as a drug rep. Reidy’s lackluster initial performance as a sales rep found him being promoted and relocated to California, where he continued to falter even after Pfizer’s introduction of the obscenely popular prescription drug Viagra. Reidy quit. Just as inexplicably as he had failed to sell the most popular drug on the planet, his sales had gone through the roof. Somehow, he had managed to quit while he was ahead without even being aware that he had.
Reidy shifted gears some time later and wrote a breezy biography of his life with Pfizer. Hard Sell had promptly become a hit. It wasn’t long before Hollywood was looking to bring it to the big screen. Released over Thanksgiving weekend by Fox, the resulting movie has failed to generate much in ticket sales. Even with big name stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, the film has been steamrolled by Tangled and the latest Harry Potter film. The question is: How does a book about an underachiever who makes it big compare with an underachieving film based on it?
The Book
Hard Sell is only 210 pages long, so it’s hardly a waste of time. In simple, conversational prose, Reidy relates some of the basics of his life as a drug rep for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Much like Viagra, the story of a pharmaceutical drug rep is interesting and novel enough that Reidy doesn’t have to do much to sell it to the reader. And at only 210 pages, it’s an exceedingly easy pill to swallow. But much like Viagra is likely to be for many of its users, the book itself isn’t all that memorable.
Reidy introduces himself quite respectably in the opening pages. He’s a military dropout who didn’t seem to have much going for him. A call from Pfizer was just what he needed to get his father off his back about not having any clear direction of any kind. He interviewed for the position and ended up getting hired through people who had also served in the military - evidently there was some kind of military in-crowd at Pfizer.
And as the reader gets to know Reidy, his biographical charm, such as it is, begins to set in. To his credit, Reidy seems perfectly comfortable relating the less than savory ends of his personality - particularly his lack of motivation, which seems to almost be a point of pride for the author. Whether it’s entirely honest or not, Reidy successfully gives the impression that he is relating the events of his life in a plain, straightforward fashion - one that in no way embellishes or glamorizes his life. If there’s a source of Reidy’s charm - a place where readers have connected-up with him solidly enough to make his book successful, it’s the casual humility of his narrative.
The biggest appeal of the book itself is Reidy’s straightforward and evidently honest look at the sales end of the pharmaceutical industry. While it’s gotten considerably more sophisticated and regulated since the events of the book, it’s a fascinating look at the way drugs are marketed. For the uninitiated, it’s a bit of a shock to find out where some of the money paid for new prescription drugs ultimately ends-up. Anyone who has paid what seems like black market prices for brand new prescription drugs may find it a bit unnerving to read about the kind of money being spent marketing those very drugs. Busy people who are as overworked as they are overpaid, doctors don’t have time to keep-up on the latest trends in pharmacology, so they rely on the sales reps for information. Reidy relates all of this with an admirable impartiality, making it a surprisingly balanced look at the way prescription drugs get sold in this country.
The books merits burn-out pretty quickly. Shoddy overall composition keeps the book as a whole from being very satisfying. The Viagra portion of the book doesn’t really arrive until the very end, by which time Reidy has evidently run out of steam. The news that Reidy has, in fact, become one of Pfizer’s leading sales reps after he’d decided to quit the job altogether is delivered with no particular sense of significance. Reidy may as well have ended the book going on at great detail about drinking a beer or cleaning-up after a dog. There’s no sense of conclusion to Hard Sell. And without an overall plot arc or any cohesive sense of narrative, the story feels a bit lopsided. The lack of polish does help support the overall feeling of unpolished honesty, but it’s an honesty in the service of a remarkably directionless narrative. Without much insight beyond the basic delivery of the information, Hard Sell feels like a strikingly promising first draft.
The Movie
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie Randall - a variation on the book’s author Jamie Reidy. Though there are parallels between Jamies, the two are distinctly different and thus take the center stage in significantly different stories. As the film opens, we see the first significant difference - Randall is seen working an electronics store in the mid-‘90s. Lacking the military background of Reidy, Randall is seen here as a born salesman who is working way below his potential in a cheap electronics store. Sure, he makes commission, but he’s clearly a brilliant salesman. His one big limitation is his lack of motivation to succeed in anything other than charming women, which he does exceedingly well.
Not long into the film, Randall is fired from the electronics store for having sex with a female co-worker in the back room. Reidy’s dropping out of the military simply because it did not suit him is an interesting parallel here. Whereas Reidy is merely lazy, Randall is a womanizer. Reidy casually shuffles through the book, carrying something of a bemused narrative with him. There isn’t much driving the book from one seen to the next. By contrast, Randall’s sex drive (later seen as a desire for a real and meaningful human connection) drives a much more emotionally compelling story.
Rather than being exposed to the possibility of working for Pfizer through military connections, Randall is exposed to the career through his brother (Josh Gad), who runs an IT company that services the health care industry. A man with wealth beyond his comprehension, Randall’s brother is easily the most interesting character in the film - a bit of a distraction as he is completely fabricated for the film as comic relief.
As Jamie settles-into his job (and job training) with Pfizer, the film starts to resemble the book’s format a bit more closely. Randall goes through the motions of training at a job that Reidy describes in a great degree of detail throughout much of the book. The major difference here is that Randall’s family has a background in the medical field, so he takes to the medical end of pharmacology training exceptionally well. It takes a little while for his natural sales instincts to fit into the mold of the pharmaceutical rep - a portion of the film that makes an interesting parallel with much of the book. Not long after Randall has acclimated himself to the life of a drug rep, the film branches out into completely different territory and spends much of the rest of the story there.
First off, rather than fumbling through life as a drug rep as Reidy did, Randall doesn’t take long to adapt to the job and quickly finds himself excelling in the position. With the sales end of the story mastered, the film wastes little time going into much detail about the job. It seems far more determined to veer off in the direction of a romantic comedy/drama. Randall is trying to obtain the business of a particularly influential doctor (Hank Azaria) and thanks to money from Pfizer, Randall is allowed to shadow the doctor on an average day posing as a student (not an unheard of practice, according to Reidy). On rounds with the doctor, Reidy runs into a young woman suffering from Parkinson’s disease, (Anne Hathaway). From there, the film is a romantic comedy with some very touching dramatic moments only occasionally peppered with bits found in Hard Sell. To its credit, the romance in Love and Other Drugs is far more intelligent and thoughtful than most of that found in romantic movies. This is romance between intellectuals that doesn’t at all shy away from sophisticated subtlety. But it’s not terribly original. All of the romance here is drawn straight from the Hollywood romance style book. It's pretty dull in spite of decent performances by Hathaway and Gyllenhaal.
The Verdict
Jamie Reidy’s Hard Sell is an interesting look at the pharmaceutical sales industry that suffers from the slacker narrative of its author. Not particularly interested relating a coherent narrative, Reidy is satisfied to simply present a series of eye-opening stories in an order that is more or less chronological. It’s interesting and breezy. It’s not terribly fun to read, however, and manages to entertain through sheer brevity. As a film inspired by the book, Love and Other Drugs loses sight of the more interesting aspects of Reidy’s story in the interest of telling a traditional romantic drama that wasn’t really there to begin with. And while it is a particularly nice romance, it lacks the novel interest that makes the book as interesting as it is in the first place. Neither film nor book are terribly satisfying as the book leans too heavily on the sheer impact of the details of the story and the film veers too far away from those details to be anything other than a traditional Hollywood romance.