![]() She's a single mother living in Florida and working as a stripper when she meets Pete Brenner, a sales rep portrayed by Chris Evans, leaning into his Boston accent, who drunkenly offers her a job while flirting at the bar of the strip club that is soon to be her former place of employment.ĭesperate for something else, she shows up at his office and, after Pete fudges her resume, she's hired by the eccentric John Kapoor-type figurehead (Andy Garcia) at the pharma company Zanna. "It's inspired by that-the fringes of that industry and how they exploit one very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and make a fortune out of it."Įmily Blunt plays Liza Drake, a composite of a number of figures that appear in Hughes' book. "This isn't the Insys story in detail at all," Yates said. For example, none of the characters on screen are strict one-to-one representations of Insys employees. "My role was to be a sounding board and a consultant and help them ground the story in the truth," Hughes said.īut Tower's script takes big dramatic license. There's outrageous in terms of wild, larger than life, chaotic, funny, but then there's the moral outrage of the story-all of that was taking place and all of that was being achieved against the backdrop of patients that were being hurt."Īt the time screenwriter Wells Tower started adapting the article into a screenplay, Hughes was working on his book, The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, an account that tackles the scope of Insys' misdeeds. "I would use the word ‘outrageous’ to describe both the story and the film-and you could say outrageous in two senses of the word. ![]() "This was this kind of scrappy startup and they had this wild rags to riches tale," Hughes said. Ultimately, in 2020, Kapoor would be sentenced to 66 months in prison for bribing medical practitioners. ![]() Insys produced Subsys, the spray described above, which thrived through a "speaker program," in which doctors were paid to spread the gospel of their product to colleagues, essentially giving them money for prescribing a potentially very dangerous drug. Pain Hustlers began as a 2018 article for the New York Times Magazine by Evan Hughes, chronicling the travails of Insys, founded by billionaire John Kapoor. Read more: Netflix's Opioid Crisis Miniseries Painkiller Is Another Frustrating Explainer Drama "Primarily we wanted to bring an audience into the issues and the opioid crisis overall." "We always felt we wanted it to be as subversive and as naughty and as different as we could compared to those," Yates explained to TIME during an interview at TIFF. ![]() His goal was to both acknowledge the hurt and death this broken system caused, but also take viewers on a wild ride. 27, to have an edge that he felt other stories lacked. In condensing a sprawling story into about two hours, the filmmakers aimed to paint a picture of capitalistic corruption along the outskirts of the pharma industry, where beautiful sales representatives provided doctors with financial incentive, bribing them into writing as many prescriptions as they could despite the risks to their patients.įrom Dopesickto Painkiller, a number of stories about the drug crisis have been told on-screen recently, but Yates wanted Pain Hustlers, which lands on Netflix Oct. Instead, the movie starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, from director David Yates, is a heavily dramatized account of the rise and fall of a small opioid company that hawked a pain relief spray for cancer pain with fentanyl as the highly addictive main ingredient. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival, uses a structure like a documentary, featuring characters being interviewed by an unseen person and directly addressing the camera-but it isn't one. Pain Hustlers, the new Netflix film that premiered on Sept. ![]()
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