The Fabulous Baker Boys

United States

1989

114 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.2/5 Stars.
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PROD Mark Rosenberg, Paula Weinstein

CAST Jeff Bridges, Michelle Pfeiffer, Beau Bridges, Xander Berkeley, Ellie Raab, Jennifer Tilly

Jack Baker (Jeff Bridges) and Frank Baker (Beau Bridges) are brothers, living in Seattle, making a meagre living playing in seedy lounges and piano bars. In despair, they hold auditions for a female singer to join the outfit, ending up with the beautiful but hard-nosed Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), a former escort with unusual charisma. The new act, with Susie headlining, becomes unexpectedly successful and leads to bigger gigs and better money, but the sexual tension between Susie and Jack reaches boiling point at a New Year’s Eve show, and in the absence of dutiful husband and father Frank, they give in to their urges. However, Jack’s inability to express his feelings leads their relationship to disintegrate, at the same time as Frank and Jack’s brotherly feud escalates. The act eventually breaks up, and Susie moves on to pastures new, while the brothers reconcile.

Director

Steve Kloves

Stephen Keith “Steve” Kloves (born March 18, 1960) is an American screenwriter mainly renowned for his adaptations of novels, especially for the Harry Potter film series and for Wonder Boys. He has also directed two motion pictures.

Kloves, born in Austin, Texas, grew up in Sunnyvale, California where he graduated from Fremont High School. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles but dropped out after reducing his schedule to only a few courses in his second year. As an unpaid intern for a Hollywood agent, he gained attention for a screenplay he wrote called Swings. This led to a meeting where he successfully pitched Racing with the Moon (1984).

His first experience with professional screenwriting left him wanting more interaction with the actors so that the characters would stay true to his vision. Kloves wrote The Fabulous Baker Boys and also intended it to be his directorial debut. After years of trying to sell the project in Hollywood, the film finally… read more

Stephen Keith “Steve” Kloves (born March 18, 1960) is an American screenwriter mainly renowned for his adaptations of novels, especially for the Harry Potter film series and for Wonder Boys. He has also directed two motion pictures.

Kloves, born in Austin, Texas, grew up in Sunnyvale, California where he graduated from Fremont High School. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles but dropped out after reducing his schedule to only a few courses in his second year. As an unpaid intern for a Hollywood agent, he gained attention for a screenplay he wrote called Swings. This led to a meeting where he successfully pitched Racing with the Moon (1984).

His first experience with professional screenwriting left him wanting more interaction with the actors so that the characters would stay true to his vision. Kloves wrote The Fabulous Baker Boys and also intended it to be his directorial debut. After years of trying to sell the project in Hollywood, the film finally got off the ground and was released in 1989. The Fabulous Baker Boys did reasonably well, but his next shot as writer/director for Flesh and Bone in 1993 fared poorly at the box office. Kloves then stopped writing for three years.

Realizing that he had to return to writing to support his family, he began adapting Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys into a screenplay.Kloves was offered the chance to direct but he declined, preferring to direct only his own original work. This was his first try at adapting another work to film. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award after the film’s release in 2000.

Warner Bros. sent Kloves a list of novels that the company was considering to adapt as films. The listing included the first Harry Potter novel, which intrigued him despite his usual indifference to these catalogs. He went on to write the screenplays for the first four films in the series. After Michael Goldenberg wrote the screenplay for the fifth film, Kloves then returned to write the sixth, seventh and eighth installments, all of which were directed by David Yates. After forming a writer/director partnership with Yates, Kloves accepted to adapt the Stephen King novel The Stand for Yates to direct. In November 2011, however, it was revealed that the two had turned down the offer, and that Ben Affleck will write and direct.

As of 2011, Kloves is working on a film adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which he will write and direct. —Wikipedia

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