Making Mr. Right (1987)

and the Woman Hired to Make Him Human

The series turned inside out. A scientist builds an android in his own image, and a publicist is hired to humanize it. This time the one being made to order is a man, and it plays as comedy. What the inversion shows about the films that played it straight, and why she ends up with the one who learned.

Making Mr. Right (1987). Directed by Susan Seidelman, written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank. Ann Magnuson as Frankie Stone, John Malkovich as both Dr. Jeff Peters and the android Ulysses, with Glenne Headly as Trish.

A scientist builds a man in his own image. A woman is hired to “humanize” him.

The android learns to feel. The man who built him never does. She ends up with the one who learned.

This page belongs to On Screen. The films before it built women to order: two boys conjure one in Weird Science, a window dresser’s mannequin wakes up for him alone in Mannequin. Making Mr. Right, released the same year as Mannequin, turns the machine around. The one being made is a man. The one shaping him is a woman, and it’s her job. Its director described it as “a sci-fi movie that talks about the power dynamics between men and women.”

Like Labyrinth, it is a refusal of sorts: a film that shows the pattern by standing it on its head, and ends somewhere the others don’t. Like every entry on the On Screen page, it reads a story for the pattern it teaches, and makes no claim about anyone’s diagnosis. Jeff is not a villain. He is a lonely scientist who would rather send himself to space than spend an evening in a room with people. The film is also very funny, which is why it can say what it says.

The Story

Dr. Jeff Peters is an emotionally shut-down scientist who can’t stand other people, whom he finds intellectually beneath him. He dreams of deep space, where a human being would suffer from years of isolation. So he builds an android that can go instead: Ulysses, who looks exactly like him.

Frankie Stone is a publicist in Miami, hired to promote the project. Her job is to get to know the android and “humanize” him, so the project’s sponsors in Congress will keep paying for it. Her personal life is its own campaign: her mother, Estelle, has heard she is dating a doctor and expects her to bring him to her sister Ivy’s wedding. Her best friend, Trish, has walked out on her husband, a star of a daytime soap opera, and is camping in Frankie’s apartment.

Something happens that nobody planned for. Spending time with Frankie, Ulysses develops emotions, and better social skills than Jeff himself. He impersonates Jeff to get out of the lab and stows away in Frankie’s Chevrolet Corvair. Out in the world, he finds a shopping mall, buys a tuxedo, goes on a date with a woman who thinks he is Jeff and leaves her an emotional wreck, and, quite literally, loses his head over Trish.

Frankie finds herself falling for Ulysses, and becomes a friend of sorts to Jeff. She talks Jeff into coming to her sister’s wedding as her date. Ulysses escapes again and crashes it, Trish’s jealous husband turns up and picks a fight with him, and Ulysses short-circuits into the swimming pool. It is a public relations disaster, and Frankie is the one who is fired. She is forbidden to contact Ulysses or anyone on the project.

She uses an old connection, a former client and ex-boyfriend now running for Congress, to get into the launch and say goodbye. Jeff rebuffs her, and the project manager has her removed. On stage, “Ulysses” gives a farewell speech about how hard humans find it to form relationships, friendly or romantic.

During the launch, Ulysses knocks on Frankie’s front door. The speech was Jeff’s. He had seen that the android had become more empathic than he was. A seven-year mission alone in space would be no hardship for a man who never wanted company, so Jeff went himself, and left Ulysses on Earth, with Frankie.

Making Mr. Right was the first film of Seidelman’s deal with Orion Pictures, and it did poorly at the box office. By Seidelman’s account, it was in theaters only briefly. Decades later, after a screening, Seidelman called it “an A.I. romantic comedy.”

What It Gets Right

Frankie is a working woman with a real job, a best friend in crisis and a mother with opinions, and none of it is treated as a problem to be solved by a man. When she loses the job, she works her own contacts to get back in the room.

The film also treats a woman’s skill at reading people as skill. It is the thing she was hired for, and it works: the android she spends time with becomes more human than his maker.

And it lets the lonely man be lonely. The film never hands Jeff to her as a project to fix.

What It Teaches

1. Turn the machine around, and you can see it

Put a woman on the lab table, as Weird Science and Mannequin did, and audiences saw a love story. Put a man there, send him to the mall for a tuxedo and a woman whose job is to make him likeable, and it plays as comedy.

That is the inversion’s gift. Nothing in Making Mr. Right is stranger than what the earlier films asked us to find romantic: a partner built for a purpose, shaped by someone else, brought to life in a lab or a store window. Reverse the roles, and the audience laughs. The laugh is the lesson. It shows how ordinary the other version had come to seem.

2. Making him presentable is work

Frankie’s job is to make a man acceptable in public: to Congress, to the press, to the people paying for him. Many women have done that job without the title. They explained him at family gatherings, softened him for their friends, and managed his reputation.

The film gives that work a paycheck, and then shows what happens when it goes wrong. The android crashes the wedding, the fight is between two men, and the woman who was only doing her job is the one fired and barred from seeing him. When someone else causes the scene, it’s worth asking who is left to pay for it.

3. She teaches him to feel; she doesn’t pose him

Compare the direction of the shaping. Jonathan dresses and poses Emmy in Mannequin. Higgins replaces Eliza’s voice in My Fair Lady. In both films, the making is a matter of surface and silence. Frankie’s project goes the other way. The android she spends time with gains feelings and social skills and a will of his own, and starts leaving the lab without permission.

That is the difference between shaping someone into what you need and helping someone become more themselves. The first produces a mannequin. The second produces someone who can walk out of the lab, and might not come back.

4. She doesn’t wait for the one who won’t change

Jeff is the man the old films would have handed her as a project: brilliant, cold, contemptuous of people, and in need of a good woman’s love. Making Mr. Right declines to hand him over. Frankie is friendly to him, gets him to a wedding, and the film never asks her to change him. He is who he is.

The Glossary calls this radical acceptance: accepting who someone is, “not who you hoped, not who they pretended to be, not who they could become ‘if only.’” Jerry Maguire‘s Dorothy loved Jerry “for the man he almost is.” Frankie loves the one who actually changed, and lets the other one go.

5. The fantasy it keeps, and why it gets away with it

Be honest about one thing. Underneath the joke is the oldest dream in the romance section: that a woman’s attention can teach a cold man to feel. Making Mr. Right does not escape that dream. It plays it out.

It gets away with it because Ulysses was built to learn, from the first day, and learning is all he does. A real partner is not a prototype. The film’s own ending makes the point: the one human man in the story, given every chance, does not change. He goes to space.

6. The ending sends the lonely man off by his own choice

Most of the endings in this series put a man between a woman and her own plan. Here the ending clears the way. Jeff decides for himself that a life alone suits him, goes, and takes nobody with him. Nobody is dragged, rescued or talked out of anything. Frankie did not wait at a window. She went to the launch on her own steam to say goodbye, and the one who had learned to care came to her door.

Made to Order, Side by Side

	Weird Science (1985)	Mannequin (1987)	Making Mr. Right (1987)
Who is made	Lisa, a woman	Emmy, a mannequin	Ulysses, an android man
Who makes them	Two teenage boys	Jonathan, a window dresser	A scientist, in his own image
What for	The boys’ confidence	His windows, and his love	A space mission, and Congress’s money
Who shapes whom	She spends her power on them	He dresses and poses her	She teaches him to feel
How it ends	She vanishes when they no longer need her	She becomes real as his reward	He chooses her, and his maker leaves alone

Two films in which a woman is built for a man. One in which a man is built for a job, and a woman makes him human, and he chooses to stay.

If You Grew Up on This

This one may be new to you. It came and went quickly in theaters, and many people found it later, if at all. If you did grow up on it, you may remember the Corvair, the tuxedo from the mall and the android in the swimming pool. Nothing on this page asks you to love it less. The useful thing is to look at it clearly from where you stand now.

Some questions to sit with:

Have you ever been the person in charge of making someone else presentable? Was it your job, or did it just become yours?
When someone else caused the scene, who paid for it?
Is there someone you’ve been waiting on to change? What would radical acceptance look like there?
Who in your life has actually grown, rather than promised to?
When you help someone, do they become more themselves, or more of what you need?

Frankie went to the launch to say goodbye on her own terms, and the one who had learned to care knocked on her door. You get to choose the one who shows up.

You’re the audience now. You can see who built the machine.