Indie Film Reveals Side Effects of Pharmaceutical Industry

Will the Truth About the Pharmaceutical Industry Make You Sick … or Make You Laugh?

In Side Effects, filmmaker Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau (of Madison, WI) has turned her ten years’ experience as a rep for a top drug company into a darkly funny – and enlightening -- feature film starring Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl. The movie will play at the Regal Galaxy 4, Berkeley 7 - starting November 11th.

Consider …


• In the last few months, PHARMA spent over $90 million to support CA Prop 78


• In 2002, the combined profits (not revenues) for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses combined ($33.7 billion)!


• The pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on marketing as it does on research and development, a minimum of $25 Billion per year (and probably closer to $70 Billion, but the hard numbers are hard to access)!


• The pharmaceutical industry spends more on lobbying than any other industry.


• The first Vioxx lawsuit was settled in Texas to the tune of $253 million.


• The very next day, the pharmaceutical industry was all over the national media trying to say the jury didn't "understand' all the issues.


• More lawsuits are on the way, since Vioxx alone killed over 60,000 people according to FDA insider David Graham.

The facts about the drug industry are slowly coming to light, as lawsuits accusing patient misinformation continue to force medications off the market. Writer/director Slattery-Moschkau, whose personal story serves as the basis for Side Effects, says, “Right now, it is an absolute crapshoot as to whether any given individual will benefit from the industry or be harmed by it.”

Side Effects reveals the techniques that drug companies use to market their products to physicians. “Even the medical community has had limited knowledge as to what is really going on behind the scenes of these companies,” Slattery-Moschkau notes. “It was important to me to raise awareness with both doctors and patients.”

“For ten years, as a drug rep, almost daily I experienced the comical marketing tactics of the industry, as well as their dangerous pursuit of profits that can, and have, come at the expense of patients’ lives.” Slattery-Moschkau finally left the industry. “It was very difficult,” she recalls, “because the money and perks are so seductive, but eventually I couldn’t look in the mirror any longer.”

The first-time writer/director felt, however, that she needed to share her knowledge and experience with the world. “I chose to do it as a story instead of a documentary,” she notes, “because I thought I could reach a wider audience that way. I felt that through fiction I could get people to laugh, be shocked, and get educated at the same time.”

Emails from others in the industry support the veracity of Slattery-Moschkau’s claims --

“I was caught in the industry for five years, till I lost the will to live and left.” -- Sarah

“As a former sales rep in the pharma industry … I have thought about showing what the industry is truly like.” -- Unsigned

“I work at an industry-related company where many of us grapple with these issues every day.” -- Unsigned

“I was a pharma rep in Italy, lost my job due to mobbing, then published a book in 1999 that was the start of the trial that involved Glaxo Smith Kline and 3,000 people, from physicians, to reps and managers.” -- Franco

“My wife is an area manager for a pharmaceutical company…. The trailer, so far, has been an accurate description of a rep’s life.” -- Unsigned




Slattery-Moschkau filmed the entire production on a budget of $190,000, in Madison, Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband and children, A “closet writer,” she jotted down some of her astonishing experiences while in the industry on “stickie notes.” Eventually, she had a whole pile of them, and “the script practically wrote itself.”

“I reached out to Hollywood, found an agent for the project, and everyone the agent showed it to came up with more ideas about how to dumb it down. It got so generic, it was like a bad TV movie of the week. There was no more pharmaceutical industry in it. Then my husband said, ‘ever thought about making it yourself?’ Boom! I was off and running.

Side Effects can be seen in the Bay area starting 11/11 at the Galaxy 4 and Berkeley 7

http://www.sideeffectsthemovie.com