Actor-director-producer-screenwriter Zalman King, among whose credits are "scandalous" sex dramas such as Nine 1/2 Weeks, Two Moon Junction, and Wild Orchid, died of cancer earlier today. King reportedly was 69 years old.
Born Zalman Lefkovitz in Trenton, New Jersey, King began his show business career as an actor, appearing in small roles and bit parts in about 20 television shows during the 1960s, including Gunsmoke, The Man from the U.N.C.L.E., Bonanza, and The Munsters. In the ’70s and early ’80s, he had supporting roles and a handful of leads in about a dozen movies, among them James B. Harris‘ provocative variation on the Sleeping Beauty theme, Some Call It Loving (1973), with Carol White; Jeff Lieberman’s horror thriller Blue Sunshine (1975), as an innocent man accused of murdering several women; and Lee Grant’s family drama Tell Me a Riddle (1980), starring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova.
In the early ’80s, King kickstarted his career as film producer. Starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, Adrian Lyne’s Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986) was King’s first feature as a full-fledged producer. The erotic drama became a cause de scandale at the time because of S&M sex scenes considered much too daring (or what passes for "daring" in American movies).
Roger Ebert, for one, prefaced his review of Nine 1/2 Weeks by remarking that the movie "arrives in a shroud of mystery and scandal, already notorious as the most explicitly sexual big-budget film since Last Tango in Paris." But "mystery and scandal" or no, Nine 1/2 Weeks, made for a reported $17 million (I couldn’t find confirmation for this figure), was received coolly by critics and bombed at the domestic box office, taking in a mere $6.7 million (approx. $14 million today).
More sex and scandalized buzz followed with the 1988 release of King’s Two Moon Junction, his directorial debut. Set in the American South, the film starred Sherilyn Fenn as a bourgeois young woman who ventures into a sexually charged relationship with a carnival drifter (Richard Tyson).
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Zalman King photo via zalmanking.com.
In retrospect, Nine 1/2 Weeks is a vastly underrated film despite some of the facile commentary by critics when it opened. Both Rourke and Basinger are brilliant and Zalman King is no doubt responsible for much of the film’s enigmatic allure.