Company Business
| Company Business | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Nicholas Meyer |
| Produced by | Steven-Charles Jaffe |
| Written by | Nicholas Meyer |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Michael Kamen |
| Cinematography | Gerry Fisher |
| Edited by | Ronald Roose |
|
Production
company |
|
| Distributed by | MGM/UA |
|
Release date
|
September 6, 1991 |
|
Running time
|
99 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $18 million |
| Box office | $1,501,785 |
Company Business is a 1991 spy film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman), a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin. The exchange is actually a cover for a CIA plot to use drug cartel money to buy back Benjamin Sobel (Bob Sherman), a U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union during the 1960s. The exchange goes wrong after Boyd recognizes the supposedly imprisoned Sobel as a man he saw two days before at Dulles Airport, and is subsequently told by Grushenko that it really is Sobel, who is now a KGB agent.
The two agents are forced to go on the run from both Boyd's own Company superiors (Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn) and the head of the KGB (Oleg Rudnik), who all wish to see the exchange completed for reasons that are both obvious and not so obvious. Their only hope may lie in Natasha Grimaud (Géraldine Danon), a mysterious French beauty from Grushenko's past.
According to writer/director Nicholas Meyer's memoir The View from the Bridge, Meyer decided to try his hand at writing an original screenplay at the behest of then CAA executive Rick Nicita. Due to the changing political environment in Russia, Meyer was forced to quickly finish his screenplay "that struggled to reflect fast-moving events in Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall was collapsing." As a result, the film went into preproduction before the updates could be completed and actors Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov were signed onto the leading roles. Later, Hackman, exhausted from shooting three films back-to-back (Postcards from the Edge, Narrow Margin, and Class Action), tried to back out of filming two weeks before production was set to begin. Fearing a lawsuit from MGM, Hackman begrudgingly stayed on.
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