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Mickey Rourke & Kim Basinger. “9 1⁄2 Weeks”
The 9 1⁄2 Weeks screenplay was based on ‘Elisabeth McNeil’s ‘semi-autobiographical, self punishing memoir of a borderline abusive sexual obsession’, as a pseudonym of actually Ingleborg Day, (ironically) an editor on the feminist magazine ‘Ms.’ at the time of its writing.
Rourke played the lead in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, winner of the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, about washed-up professional wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson. Regarding first reading the screenplay, he stated that he originally “didn’t care for it”.
Mickey Rourke
I didn’t really care for the script, but I wanted to work with Darren and I kind of thought that whoever wrote the script hadn’t spent as much time as I had around these kind of people and he wouldn’t have spoken the way the dude was speaking. And, so Darren let me rewrite all my part and he put the periods in and crossed the T’s. So once we made that change I was okay with it.