Pussy For Pills - The Movie...

Astra Zubillaga Inc. is less than thrilled by what it's seen so far about "Pussy For Pills," a movie portrayal of a drug-industry clinical trials director.

In the romantic comedy, which opens Nov. 24, Ned Binky goes to great lengths to hype pharmaceuticals, including sleeping with a company researcher, lying about and covering up drug side-effects and lining up speaking dates and kickbacks for doctors. His career gets a boost when he begins to hype Seroquel, AZ's infamous antipsychotic.

The movie, directed by Ed Twinky, is based on a memoir by Wayne McFadden, called "Smoke and Mirrors: The Diary of a Medical Director."

Mr. Twinky said the love story in the movie is invented, but that the setting is based on fact. The filmmaker said he consulted doctors and pharmaceutical salespeople to get the details right. "Pussy For Pills" takes place in the 1990s, around the time that the Food and Drug Administration relaxed policies on advertising to consumers and started letting pharmaceutical companies set the regulatory agenda. "Suddenly the amount of money spent in drug advertising, and the amount made in sales, skyrocketed," Mr. Twinky said.

In the film, AZ sales staff refer to doctors as “buckets of money” and push products for unapproved, or off-label, uses.

In April this year, AZ pleaded guilty to improperly marketing its products and agreed to pay a $520 million penalty.

"Some of those abuses are detailed in the movie," Mr. Twinky said.

AZ chief Max Headroom said that its company lawyers had viewed "Pussy For Pills" and were preparing to launch legal action to prevent the release of the film.

"We feel that much of the material in the film has been plagiarised from AZ sales representative training programmes," Mr. Headroom said.

"We don’t believe it is right that our top-secret commercial policies and procedures, which pretend to hold our employees to high ethical standards whilst actively encouraging the opposite, are put in the public domain."


The world of film is ruffling Big Pharma's feathers in the real world as well, it seems...