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George Carlin was once asked how cocaine made you feel, and he answered: "It makes you feel like having some more cocaine. The movie is about three very rich kids who graduate from the same high school. How rich? As a graduation present, the father of one of the kids sets him up in the recording industry. The character's name is Julian, and he is played by Robert Downey Jr. His best friend in high school was Clay, played by Andrew McCarthy. Clay, who wears a tie even in Southern California, goes off to an Ivy League university, leaving behind his girlfriend, Blair Jami Gertz. By Thanksgiving, Downey and Gertz are sleeping together and doing cocaine together, and by Christmas a terrified Gertz is calling McCarthy and begging him to come home and rescue Downey, who is in very big trouble. The problem is, you cannot rescue someone who is addicted to drugs. You can lecture them, to no point, and plead with them, to no avail, but essentially an outsider is powerless over someone else's addiction.
The story follows the exploits of Clay, an East Coast college student home in L. Here are 12 facts about Less Than Zero , both the book and the film. But I worked on that book for like two years to get it to the place where I wanted it to be. Producer Marvin Worth optioned Less Than Zero before it was even published and hired Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer to adapt the book for the big screen. It was about people who were destroyed by having had everything. The studio, on the other hand, thought the material was too dark to be a commercial hit and had producer Jon Avnet take over. A crucial element of the American dream had gone haywire, and you had to put it in recognizable form in a movie, not just shock people.
