EDITOR’S NOTE: Endless Love was on the CBS Late Movie on September 10, 1987 and February 24 and June 8, 1988.
Sometimes, the CBS Late Movie plays obscure movies, foreign films, made-for-TV movies and all manner of films that seemed like they snuck onto a major network.
Then there was Endless Love, which felt like a cultural event.
The Diana Ross and Lionel Richie theme song was one of the year’s biggest singles. It made $60 million at the box office. And yet people hated it. Some people. Producer Keith Barish didn’t. He said, “It did over $60 million at the box office. I was disappointed that it wasn’t more faithful to the Scott Spencer book, that it wasn’t a better movie, but from a financial point of view, it was a big success.”
Scott Spencer, the writer of the novel this was based on, sure didn’t like it. He said that, “I was frankly surprised that something so tepid and conventional could have been fashioned from my slightly unhinged novel about the glorious destructive violence of erotic obsession.” Later, when there was a remake being made, he said, “Endless Love was botched — misquoted, as it were — once in 1981, when Franco Zeffirelli tried to make a movie out of it, and it seems as if it has been even more egregiously and ridiculously misunderstood in the movie Universal Pictures is releasing. (I gave up control of the movie rights to my novel in 1980.) I had brief contact with the first filmmakers who tried to adapt my novel, and I had no contact whatsoever with the second wave. But now I don’t really need to raise my voice and say, “No, no, that’s not what I said.” I can take my cue from James M. Cain, who, when asked what he thought about what Hollywood had done to his novels, said something to the effect, “They didn’t do anything to them; my books are right there on the shelf.” My intentions are discoverable, word for word, in paperback, in ebook, or in hardcover—though hardcover copies will have to be obtained from used book dealers, which doesn’t do the author much good, so if I were you, I’d think twice about that. Stick with the paperback or the ebook, and you can quote me on that.”
Roger Ebert summed it all up in the shortest and not sweetest way possible, saying, “Is there anything good in the movie? Yes. Brooke Shields is good. She is a great natural beauty, and she demonstrates, in a scene of tenderness and concern for Hewitt and in a scene of rage with her father, that she has a strong, unaffected screen acting manner. But the movie as a whole does not understand the particular strengths of the novel that inspired it, does not convince us it understands adolescent love, does not seem to know its characters very well, and is a narrative and logical mess.”
15-year-old Jade Butterfield (Brooke Shields) and 17-year-old David Axelrod (Martin Hewitt) are in love, and her parents are old hippies, so they allow them to explore sex in the comfort of her bed. David’s parents are too busy to care, at least at first.
Jade’s mother (Shirley Knight) is living through her daughter’s unflowering, while her father (Don Murray) wants them to chill out at least until school is done for the year. After all, she’s stealing sleeping pills and her grades are down. David takes it badly; Jade wants it to just work out.
When one of David’s friends, Billy (Tom Cruise, first role!), talks about setting fires, David decides to do the same on his girlfriend’s porch, waking the family just in time to save them and look like a hero. But the police realize he set the fire, and he’s sent to an asylum. Despite a no-contact order, he keeps writing Jade and then stalking her when he’s released. Her parents decide to move from Chicago to New York City and get divorced.
We’re moving all over the place, as Jade is now at the University of Vermont in Burlington, where her father and his new girlfriend, Ingrid (Penelope Milford), see David appear. Hugh chases him but ends up running into a moving car and dying. Ann is grief-stricken, and David sneaks over to console her. He then goes to Jade’s apartment and pretty much sexually assaults her, but she’s in love. No one has ever loved her like David, and her mom understands. Her brother (James Spader, also his first role; Ian Ziering and Jami Gertz also are in this, as is Robert Altman as a hotel manager) doesn’t. There’s a brawl, the cops come, and David goes to jail.
Of course the movie ends with Jade visiting him.
Brooke Shields said she was still a virgin when she filmed this — she lost her virginity to Dean Cain at Princeton — and to get the right orgasmic moments during her sex scenes, director Franco Zeffirelli would grab and twist her toes. She said this humiliation caused her to shut down.
I don’t really get the whole Brooke Shields thing, as she seems robotic to me. But then there are moments where the light hits her, and you think, “Well, yes, there is a God out there.”
Zeffirelli is known for The Taming of the Shrew, the TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, Romeo and Juliet, the Cannon film Otello, Brother Wolf, Sister Moon and Hamlet.
You can watch this on Tubi.
