Stay Hungry is a 1976 American comedy-drama film by director Bob Rafelson from a screenplay by Charles Gaines (adapted from his 1972 novel of the same name). The story centers on a young scion from Birmingham, Alabama, played by Jeff Bridges, who gets involved in a shady real-estate deal. In order to close the deal, he needs to buy a gym building to complete a multi-parcel lot. He becomes romantically interested in the gym's receptionist (Sally Field) and drawn to the carefree lifestyle of the Austrian bodybuilder Joe Santo (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who is training there for the Mr. Universe competition. Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture, but it was not his true debut role; he had played Hercules (as Arnold Strong) in the 1970 film Hercules in New York, a gangster's henchman in Robert Altman's 1973 film The Long Goodbye, and a masseur in the 1974 television movie Happy Anniversary and Goodbye. Plot Craig Blake is a young Southern man born of a wealthy family, but left lonely and idle after his parents died in a plane crash. He is content to spend his time fishing, hunting and puttering around his large family mansion in Birmingham, Alabama, inhabited only by himself and a butler. Blake is employed at a shady investment firm run by a slick con artist named Jabo where Blake does very little actual work. He is asked to handle the purchase of a small gym that the firm is buying to clear space for an office high-rise. Blake represents himself as a businessman looking to buy the gym and meets its owner Thor Erikson and employees Franklin and Newton. He is strangely fascinated with the world he discovers there. Blake's usual social life is centered around his upscale country club and its crowd, including his friends Lester and Halsey, and spends his time there playing tennis, shooting poker dice and flirting with women, one of whom asks Blake to find a musical guest for an upcoming party. As Blake moves forward with the business deal, he is smitten with the receptionist, Mary Tate Farnsworth, and befriends bodybuilder Joe Santo, who aspires to win the Mr. Universe title. He finds he ultimately cannot sell out his newfound friends at the gym for the sake of his job, so he constantly evades questions about the progress of the gym deal from friend