Raspberry Picking: The Lonely Lady (1983)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at The Lonely Lady, 11-time Razzie nominee, winner of six, and film debut for, of all people, Ray Liotta.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Raspberry Awards have a bit of a lady problem.

It doesn’t take long for one to begin to notice patterns in the types of movies that tend to win or be nominated for lots of Razzies. Sometimes these patterns shift over the years. The Razzies of the ‘80s punished all-around goofy ill-conceived camp, while those of the ‘90s and ‘00s reserved much of their ire for gross humor, juvenile comedians, and the occasional terminally self-serious auteur. But if there’s one thing the Razzies have always hated (loved?), it’s star vehicles for pretty young actresses. We’ve seen this with Bo Derek and Lindsay Lohan. We will see it some unknown time in the future with Elizabeth Berkley and Demi Moore. And we’re seeing it today with one Pia Zadora in a little picture called The Lonely Lady.

Zadora, a now-successful singer, first tried to make it as an actress. It didn’t go well. Her film debut at age 11 as a Martian child in the execrable Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) could not have been less auspicious. But by the early 1980s, she had a leg up in the form of her husband, shady businessman and gazillionaire Meshulam Riklis. Riklis not only fully financed Zadora’s first adult career picture, Butterfly (1981), he organized a lavish junket and screening for the film at his Vegas hotel for members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The HFPA votes for the Golden Globes, and the 1981 Golden Globe for Newcomer of the Year went, despite the critical disdain for the film in which she had starred, to Pia Zadora. The choice was widely mocked, other performers cried foul, and the Golden Globes quietly killed the Newcomer award two years later.

While all this was happening, an adaptation of Harold Robbins’s The Lonely Lady was stuck in development purgatory. A sordid tale of a small-town innocent who becomes an Oscar-winning screenwriter by screwing every protein-based lifeform in Hollywood, the book had been a runaway bestseller and Universal had snagged the film rights before it even hit shelves. Susan Blakely had been attached to star, but she clashed repeatedly with the writers until the project folded. After the “success” of Butterfly, Meshulam Riklis was looking for another career-launcher for his wife, and when he discovered the languishing Lonely Lady, he tossed about $3.5 million at Universal to get it made. Robert R. Weston, who had helmed other Robbins adaptations, produced, and the studio brought in Hammer stalwart Peter Sasdy to direct.

Things went wrong from the start. Zadora and Sasdy didn’t get along. The entire writing team turned over multiple times, resulting in a story and script (and oh, we will talk about this script) cobbled together in a hash of conflicting visions. Audiences booed the film at test screenings. Zadora claims she started asking her husband to buy the film and bury it so that it never saw the light of day. And it probably could have flown under the radar with all of this, except for a final stroke of bad luck: among the publicists assigned to promote The Lonely Lady was one John J.B. Wilson, who three years earlier had co-founded the Golden Raspberry Awards. In an ironic inversion – some might say a karmic one – of Riklis’s Golden Globes hawking for Butterfly two years prior, Wilson tirelessly promoted the film for the Razzies.

From here it’s a familiar story of careers keeling over left and right, to an even greater degree than we usually see. The Lonely Lady nosedived at the box office, making about $1 million against its $6.5 million budget. Aside from a couple of Sherlock Holmes TV movies, Peter Sasdy never directed another film. Except for John Kershaw, who wrote one other film and some obscure TV, none of the credited writers have any further career to speak of. The established actors, like Lloyd Bochner and Bibi Besch, emerged mostly unscathed, but with the notable exception of Ray Liotta, the rest of the cast continued to dwell in obscurity. And Pia Zadora would star in one other film, the midnight-movie sci-fi musical Voyage of the Rock Aliens, before she almost completely gave up acting. She claims she always knew The Lonely Lady was a turkey, but she also insists that most of the flack she caught was undeserved.

Let’s see if we agree, shall we? Spoiler alert: we do. At least I do. On all counts.

THE STORY

Funny word, “story.” Strong word. I’m going to go into some detail on the beginning here, because you deserve the full picture of how criminally insane parts of this story are.

It’s the night (day?) of the prestigious and glamorous Awards Presentation Ceremony in Hollywood. No no, not the Oscars. The “Awards Presentation Ceremony.” And it’s so prestigious and glamorous that you could easily mistake it for a mid-size Fourth of July parade.

Among the throng of celebrities-I-guess is Jerilee Randall (Zadora), there because she’s been nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Awards Presentation. She walks into the venue while Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone warbles the theme song (“Looooon-leeeeee-layayay-deh…”) and onlookers comment on how, gasp, that woman doesn’t have an escort. Subtlety is not a major strength of this script.

Flashback to a high school auditorium, where a younger Jerilee is winning some kind of creative writing award. She gives an acceptance speech, which is not typical for high school awards ceremonies, and is received by her fellow students in a manner that suggests the writers mistook “writing prize” for “homecoming queen.” Realism is not a major strength of this script.

We then transition to a party featuring the oldest group of high school students you ever did see. Twin Peaks, Dawson’s Creek, Glee, and even Ben Platt’s infamous turn in the film version of Dear Evan Hansen have nothing on this old folks’ home of a high school. Zadora was a petite but womanly 28 at the time of filming, which The Lonely Lady compensates for by dressing her in pigtails and baby doll clothes. They don’t even try with 28-year-old Lou Hirsch, 24-year-old Kerry Shale, or 29-year-old Ray Liotta, who play Jerilee’s Good, Average, and Very Extremely Bad suitors respectively. The combination creates the effect of middle-aged office workers hitting on their boss’s gussied-up twelve-year-old daughter at the company Christmas party.

At the party, Jerilee meets Walt Thornton, Jr. (Shale), son of famous screenwriter Walter Thornton (Lloyd Bochner). Jerilee excitedly tells Walt that she has “read all [his father’s] work,” which makes no sense, because why is she reading screenplays instead of watching movies? Whatever, she’s weird. Walt invites her back to his place to meet his father, and his friends Joe (Liotta) and Marion (Glory Annen) ride along in the back seat. Joe gropes Jerilee’s chest and forces Marion to give him head in the backseat. This is treated as mildly upsetting behavior. Decency is not a major strength of this script.

Once they arrive at the Thornton estate, Jerilee creeps around Walter’s office while Joe and Marion go in the pool. But when she heads outside to enjoy the night air, Joe – there’s really no way to make this better – rips off her clothes and rapes her with the garden hose, until Walter Thornton Senior stops it by arriving home.

Yep, with the garden hose. You can, if you want, find lots of screenshots of Liotta with the hose, because Internet gonna Internet.

Jerilee’s mother Veronica (Bibi Besch) decides not to report the garden hose rape, because People Might Talk. And this is the last evidence we see that this brutal sexual attack has had any lasting effect on Jerilee whatsoever, because the next day, Walter Thornton Senior comes over to apologize for what happened on his property, and both Jerilee and Veronica receive him warmly and flirt like mad with him. Walter takes a liking to Jerilee because she can talk about Hemingway, they get friendly, and then they get…more than friendly. In no time flat, Jerilee and Walter – yes, Walter, not Walt – are married, and she moves into the same house with the same pool and same lawn where she was sexually assaulted with a hose. Later on, Walter will wave the same hose in her face and demand to know whether it is “more [her] kick” than having sex with him.

Jerilee’s first novel is a hit, but living with Walter makes her think she might like to try her hand at writing a movie. Walter doesn’t like the idea of competing with her, and flat-out tells her so, but Jerilee is determined and pushes forth. She soon learns that her success in Hollywood is going to be contingent not on her talent, but on her ability to give powerful men (and occasionally women) what they want. The movie teaches her that lesson through an endless cycle of the following series of events:

1. Jerilee pushes her screenplay at some LA bigshot.
2. The LA bigshot agrees to help her, but only if she helps him (or her) too.
3. She is horrified, but resigned, to learn that helping him (or her) means sexual intercourse.
4. The LA bigshot either passes her off to the next link in the intercourse chain or kicks her to the curb, never having intended to do jack with her screenplay.

The basics of story construction are not a major strength of this script.

THE BAD

Full disclosure, I haven’t read Robbins’s novel. It’s regarded as one of his better works, and I understand Jerilee’s story is much more complex and ambiguous in the book than it is here. I’ll refrain from trash-talking Robbins for now, but my goodness, I need someone to blame for the writing in this thing. Because my Jesus, this script.

The script, if we wish to continue calling it that, is credited to Ellen Shepard, Shawn Randall, and John Kershaw, none of whom had much career to speak of before or after The Lonely Lady. I can’t imagine why. Perhaps it’s because, between the three of them, they seem to have the understanding of Hollywood, sex, and human behavior that we might expect of a Martian whose exposure to humanity has consisted of commercials for pharmaceuticals and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Beyond what we’ve covered in the story section, let me give you one more example of a real set of events that made it into the final version of this movie:

Jerilee goes to the set of a movie that is being made from one of Walter’s screenplays. They are filming a scene that takes place at the funeral of the leading lady’s son, and said leading lady complains that the scene isn’t working for her. To Walter’s annoyance, Jerilee rewrites the scene, but everyone agrees that her rewrite is much better, it becomes the highlight of the movie, and Walter steals the credit for it. What was this brilliant, game-changing rewrite? Jerilee replaced all of the dialogue in the scene with a single scream of “Why!?” from the leading lady. The writers have succumbed to what I think of as “Doctor Who Syndrome”: when people who are average or worse at something try to write a character who is exceptional at that thing, they end up making their character look like a hack.

Everything touched by the script, and everything that touches the script, turns to crap. The script is the worst thing, but Peter Sasdy’s direction is the saddest thing on display in The Lonely Lady. The director of Hands of the Ripper (1971), an ultraviolent and strikingly well-composed serial killer flick that I happen to love, could not be more obviously here to collect a paycheck and do nothing else. Every scene is flat and overlit, except the ones that are flat and underlit. One attempt at meaningful visual symbolism is made – Jerilee gets to be on top during sex with Walter, because she’s on top now, do you get it – and given how much that made me feel like I needed to pause the film and shower, I’m thankful Sasdy didn’t try for more.

The performances range from “adequate” (Bochner, Besch, Anthony Holland as Jerilee’s gay best friend Guy Jackson) to “hate crimes” (Joseph Cali as a caddish club owner, Jared Martin as a caddish leading man). The actors all know they don’t really matter here, and they can’t be bothered to pretend that they do. Therefore, I won’t bother much with them either.

Oh, also the songs are maudlin and schmaltzy, and the theme song gets bonus bad points because it’s been stuck in my head for three days now.

THE GOOD

But let us not dwell on the bad, for it will make us depressed if we think about most of The Lonely Lady too much for too long. Let us instead turn our thoughts to the main event, the Lonely Lady herself, Pia Zadora.

Is she good? That’s a complicated question. What would it mean to be “good” in this role? Jerilee Randall, as she is written, is not a character, but a human chameleon starring in a series of vignettes about stereotypical female behavior. When the story needs her to be a sweet, naive summer child, she’s that. When the story needs her to be a cynical, soul-deadened prostitute-in-all-but-name, she’s that. When the story needs her to be a plucky go-getter who doesn’t take no for an answer, she’s that. And damn if Zadora does not commit hard to every single version of Jerilee that shows up in The Lonely Lady.

In scenes where Jerilee needs to be innocent and naive, Zadora makes her painfully so; she perfects a Pollyanna smile that melts easily off her face when she learns, over and over and over, what happens to Pollyannas in the cruel sexual jungles of the movie industry. When the story calls for Jerilee to be an unflappable go-getter, Zadora fills her with sassy charm and buoyant determination to the point where she could pass for an early-stage Disney princess. When Jerilee gets taken advantage of one too many times and snaps, Zadora stages a breakdown for the ages.

And when Jerilee delivers her burn-it-all-down speech at the Awards Presentation Ceremony at the very end of the film, it comes remarkably close to being good, because Zadora’s channeling a lot of probably very real, very heartfelt, and barely concealed anger and frustration into it. The speech itself is one of the better parts of the film. It stinks of Message Movie, but the amount of crap that women trying to make it in the film industry had/have to eat on a daily basis is not an unimportant message. If The Lonely Lady had been released in 2022 and had starred Jennifer Lawrence as Jerilee, it would have won seventeen Oscars.

One of the perverse joys of watching and enjoying a bad movie is watching someone – and in a good bad movie, there’s always someone – take the movie much more seriously than it deserved, and making the movie a much better experience for viewers. Occasionally this person is a composer or a designer – think Alan Silvestri’s score for Mac and Me – and you get a garbage movie that looks or sounds way better than it has any right to. Usually, this person is a one-scene wonder or supporting actor, like Dan Janjigian as Chris-R in The Room. But when this person is the star, already in charge of carrying the movie…well, this person has given themselves a difficult and thankless job.

Is Zadora good? Not really, and in this movie, she was never going to be. But she’s a spark of fire and life in a movie where every other person on set is simply counting the days and the dollar signs until it’s over. She single-handedly elevates The Lonely Lady from “unwatchable disaster” to “pretty darn watchable disaster.” Of course, given all the bile flung her way afterward by everyone from Harold Robbins to Roger Ebert to Zadora’s own hero Sally Field, that’ll teach her to do a damn fool thing like that again.

So, The Lonely Lady. Secretly great? Not so much. Worst movie of 1983? In a year that also gave us the Lou Ferrigno Hercules, Jaws 3-D, and Porky’s II: The Next Day, not even close. It got punished for being a showpiece for a pretty young actress, a pretty young actress who threw herself into the project even though she knew in her heart nothing good could come of it. Let us consider, dear Razzies, whether that’s really such an awful thing to be.

By the way, while The Lonely Lady is not easy to find for a casual view, you can totally watch Voyage of the Rock Aliens for free on Amazon.

Quality of Movie: 1.5 / 5. Existing in the world where this story is being told for 92 minutes will make you beg for the rising floodwaters to take you.

Quality of Experience: 3 / 5. Pia’s worth watching. Nothing else is.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.