The new Netflix movie titled ‘Pain Hustler’ which stars Emily Blunt and Chris Evans is a film that keeps you hooked untill the end.
The movie is different, it based as a structure like a documentary, featuring different characters that are being interviewed by an unseen person and directly addressing the camera.
The Emily Blunt and Chris Evans starrer is a two-hour movie that is loosely based on a true story and is aimed at a picture of capitalistic corruption along the outskirts of the pharma industry, where beautiful sales representatives provided doctors with financial incentives, bribing them into writing as many prescriptions as they could despite the risks to their patients.
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. 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.
How is the movie different from the article?
The Insys story is ultimately very tragic, because of all the real people involved who developed addictions under the care of doctors they trusted.
The world of Pain Hustlers was made smaller, to allow for more streamlined character development. The film is set in Florida, where there were most likely sales reps for Insys, but Insys salespeople were all over the U.S. so it was actually a much bigger operation.
Is Liza Drake from Pain Hustlers a real person?
The actual events in Pain Hustlers are similar to the article, but the fictional characters create opportunities for dramatization.
In one major plot point of the movie, Liza’s fictional daughter has epilepsy and a brain tumor. This give some context to her decision making and what quiets her conscience as she comes to understand exactly how badly she’s scamming people and it connects her selling the drug to actual drug use in a personal medical situation.
