2.13: Naked in 1982 or Bombing in Paradise

In 1982, Phoebe Cates swam naked across movie screens nationwide and nobody cared. Cates had been willing to appear fully nude on camera but had soured on choices the production team had made while editing the film and turned against her own starring role. Paradise told the story of a young couple's sexual awakening in a desert oasis in the early ninenteenth-century. Despite Cates's and her co-star, Willie Aames's, cover-model bodies, the dramatic tension of a human trafficker in hot pursuit of the young heroes, and the comic styling of two chimpanzees audiences and critics alike rejected the movie. Today, the movie has a perfect 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is difficult to see in every sense of the word, available to stream only in low fidelity uploads on YouTube and the Internet Archive. But Paradise's failure was a bit of a mystery. The same general premise had proved box office gold only two years before and Cates would go on to become an international sex symbol and comic talent with her roles in teen sex farces like Fast Times at Ridgmont High and the blockbuster horror comedy Gremlins. So what was the trouble with Paradise?