9½ Weeks is an American erotic romantic drama film from 1986, directed by Adrian Lyne, and starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

Basinger stars as a NYC art gallery employee who has a brief yet intense affair with a mysterious Wall Street broker.

The screenplay by Sarah Kernochan, Zalman King and Patricia Louisianna Knop is adapted from the 1978 memoir of the same name by Austrian-American author Ingeborg Day, under the pseudonym "Elizabeth McNeill".

However, its soundtrack sold well and the film itself became a huge success internationally in its unedited version, particularly in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, making $100 million worldwide.

They start dating, but John's strange behavior escalates, and he gives her an expensive gold watch with instructions to think about him touching her at noon every day.

John arranges for her to crossdress for a rendezvous at a bar at the Algonquin Hotel, but after the exit they are mistaken for a gay couple and attacked by a group of tramps in an alley.

Excited from the incident, Elizabeth declares her love for John, strips, reveals wet informal undergarments, and has passionate sex with him at the scene of the crime.

Elizabeth is confident and sexy at home with John, but she becomes withdrawn at work and thinks about her ex-husband Bruce, who starts dating her co-worker and roommate Molly.

[6] Kim Basinger said the audition was grueling; she was asked to act out a scene from the film wherein her character is made to crawl like a prostitute groveling for money in a sexual game devised by the male protagonist.

[7] Lyne refused to conduct rehearsals for Basinger and Rourke so that the interactions between their characters would be their first time meeting in real life.

However, shooting fell two weeks behind schedule at the cost of an additional $500,000 due to constant fighting between Basinger, Rourke, and Lyne.

Rourke claimed the tensions between the three worked to the film's advantage by making his and Basinger's characters' on-screen conflicts more convincing, and that Lyne even encouraged it.

He also chose locations around New York where he could film using natural light, including Trinity Church, the Canal Street Flea Market, the Algonquin Hotel, the Café des Artistes, Coney Island, Wall Street, Little Italy, SoHo, Bloomingdale's, Comme des Garçons, and the Chelsea Hotel.

[6] After negative test screenings in the United States and an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, MGM removed three minutes from the film's original North American theatrical release.

In particular, the scene in which John snaps his belt at Elizabeth and forces her to crawl around the room picking up cash was cut after causing two-thirds of the test audience to leave the theater.

[6] Originally Stewart Copeland was going to compose the film's score, but his involvement ended after Geffen Records deemed the script "offensive.

The soundtrack also included tracks from Luba, Bryan Ferry, Dalbello, Corey Hart, Joe Cocker ("You Can Leave Your Hat On"), Devo, Eurythmics and Stewart Copeland.

Winston Grennan's reggae "Savior" as well as Jean Michel Jarre's "Arpegiateur", played during the sex scene on the stairs in the rain, were not included on the record.

The critical consensus reads: "9 1/2 Weeks' famously steamy sex scenes titillate though the drama unfolding between the beddings is relatively standard for the genre".

Roger Ebert praised the film, giving it three and a half stars out of four, stating: "A lot of the success of 9+1⁄2 Weeks is because Rourke and Basinger make the characters and their relationship convincing".