Blue Movie

by Terry Southern

  “You’re a real doll,” he said gently, “but I think I’ll have to pass, too.”

  “What a couple of wet-blanket creeps!” cried Teeny crossly, scrambling to her feet and executing a little dance of wrath. Then she seized a microphone from a wall bracket, flicked the button, and wheeling toward the glass tableau, screamed at the top of her voice: “Sock it to ’em, Les! You rat-prick fruit!”

  The volume of this transmission must have been stupendous. It had the effect of a tidal wave, literally knocking the three revelers off the bed into a tangled heap on the floor. But then Les was on his feet in a trice, hopping mad and shouting furiously:

  “You crazy freak-bitch! We were coming I tell you! We were all coming!”

  Presumably he knew that his tormentor was behind the mirror, because he stared in that direction—but he was staring at the wrong part of it, so the impression of being unobserved persisted.

  “We won’t listen to that kind of talk!” shrieked Teeny, and turned off the amplification on their side, while Les covered his ears against the new blast, then began to shout (silently, for he could no longer be heard) and race about the room looking for something to hurl against the glass—but apparently the room had been designed with such contingencies in mind, for although lavishly appointed, there were literally no movable furnishings; everything was either built-in or secured to the floor. Finally he was reduced to snatching up his own shoes and flinging them ineffectually, at the wrong section of the mirror.

  “Missed us, you great ninny!” Teeny cackled. “It wasn’t even close!”

  By now the two nifties had gotten it slightly together and were sitting up on the floor on the far side of the bed, only their blond heads and bare shoulders visible, their lips moving at Les in some indecipherable remonstrance or perhaps simple inquiry as to what was happening.

  His reply, if any, was not audible, of course, as he slumped down on the bed, a total collapse of defeat and dejection.

  This seemed to tear Teeny apart.

  “Oh my God,” she moaned, “what have we done to him?”

  She began ripping off her clothes. “I’m coming, Les!” she cried, “I’m coming, my darling!” Then she flipped the switch on the two-way mirror, twisted the lock, and rushed madly out of the room, still tearing her garments from her and dropping them in flight.

  Boris and Sid sat looking at the dark panel for a moment.

  “Well, that seems to be that,” said B.

  Sid grunted, and lumbered to his feet. “You know, I wouldn’t mind some of that teeny head.”

  B. was thinking of something else, walked silently, while Sid continued to muse: “Wonder where the hell he found them . . . Christ, they sure are shicksa . . . probably Swedes . . . I hate the fucking Swedes. Except for Bergman, natch,” he added, hoping to amuse B.—who acknowledged the effort with scarcely more than a grunt.

  Sid looked at him, undisturbed by his preoccupation. One thing in particular was locked in his mind concerning Boris; it was a conversation they had after the premiere of one of his movies, a movie on which Sid had been executive producer—a simple, poignant, tender, love story . . . a film which received the highest acclaim, and which was distinguished for, among other things a poetic and rather daring (for its day) bedroom two-shot. In this brief scene, the lovers, entwined in bare embrace, are visible only from the waist up. The man is lying on top, gently kissing the girl’s face, her throat, her shoulders . . . as his head moves slowly down between her breasts, the camera remains stationary, and his head gradually slides out of the frame and, presumably, down to her honey-pot, whereupon the camera moves up to her closed-eyed face and holds on her expression of mounting rapture.

  Naturally, the film had been interfered with in various quarters of hinterland—including New York City. Petitions were rife, and vigilante groups active, to get “that monstrous cunnilingus episode” (as the N.Y. Times critic described it) out of the film.

  There were abortive attempts to delete the major portion of the scene . . . with the projectionist, under union instruction, or management bribe, causing the film to jump the sprocket at the crucial point, and then rethreading several frames (two hundred feet actually) afterward.

  Responsible critics, of course, were quick to seize ready cudgel in the film’s defense. The scene was lauded by the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma as a “tour de force érotique” unique in the history of contemporary film. It was described by Sight and Sound as “masterfully aesthetic . . . sheer poetry, and in the best possible taste.”

  The critic’s use of the word “taste” in this instance had caused B. to smile. “How can he talk about taste?” he asked Sid (putting him on a bit), “. . . with the camera on the girl’s face, who knows how it tasted! Right, Sid?”

  Understandably this had elicited the coarsest sort of rejoinder from Sid. “Huh?” not quite getting it at first, but then nodding violently, laughing, coughing, spitting, slapping his leg, urgently scratching his crotch: “Yeah, yeah, I know, you’d even like to show the guy after—pickin’ cunt-hair outta his teeth, huh? Haw, haw, haw!”

  “Not necessarily,” said B., gentle and very earnest, “I would like to have followed his head, though . . . when it went down, out of the frame. I should have done that. It was a cop-out not to.”

  Sid realized he was serious. “What . . . you mean, show him suckin’ her cunt, for Chrissake?!? Whatta you, nuts?”

  Of course this had been several years ago, six in all, and was now a part of cinematic history. In a subsequent film, Enough Rope, during a scene in which the voyeur-antagonist fastens his eye to a crack in the wall, while in the next room the heroine disrobes against the terrible heat of a Mexican summer afternoon, the camera (voyeur’s POV) finds occasion to linger, in a desultory, almost caressing fashion on her pubes. In commercial film prior to this, other than documentaries on nudism, a view of the pubic region—the “beaver shot” it was called—occurred only as a brief glimpse, a seven- or eight-frame cut, never in close-up, and, above all, never integrated as part of a “romantic,” or a deliberately erotic, sequence. Naturally, the studio was quick to snap its wig.

  “Damn it to hell,” Les Harrison had wailed, “you’re sabotaging your whole career! And you’re taking a lot of good guys down the drain with you,” adding this last a bit piously, voice faltering, “. . . guys who were counting on this picture to get into general distribution . . . guys with families . . . kids . . . toddlers . . .”

  Changed his tune, of course, when attendance pressure moved the film from the Little Carnegie to Loew’s big circuit, breaking all prev.

  But last time out had been the big one: male genitalia. Somewhat flaccid, granted, but still there it was, right up there on the silver screen, bigger than life you might say.

  That was a bit too much—even for those who had cheered him past previous milestones of cinema history. “Well,” they muttered, “this time he’s gone too far!”

  But Boris, of course, knew better. No erection, and no penetration—how to explain that little oversight to the muse of creative romance?

  From his point of view, the stag movies they had just seen were more relevant, albeit unwittingly, to the crucial aesthetic issues and problems presented by the film of today, than were those of the master filmmakers, including himself. He was aware that the freedom of expression and development in cinema had always lagged behind that of literature, as, until recent years, it had lagged behind that of the theater as well. Eroticism of the most aesthetic and creatively effective nature abounded in every form of contemporary prose—why had it not been achieved, or even seriously attempted, on film? Was there something inherently alien to eroticism in the medium of film? Something too personal to share with an audience? Perhaps the only approach would be from the opposite side.

  “Listen, Sid,” Boris was asking now, “those films we were looking at—do you think they could be improved?”

  “Huh? ‘Improved?’ Are you kiddin’?” Understatement always se
emed to antagonize Sid. “Christ, I seen better cunt at a senior-citizen trailer camp! Jeez, half the time I didn’t know I was watchin’ a stag film or a dog-show, for Chrissake! Ha, you bet your sweet ass they could be improved! Get some halfway decent cunt in there for openers!”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Huh? Whatta you mean ‘what else’? What else is there?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m talking about,” said Boris, “the totality of it, not just how the girl looks—that’s only one aspect . . . besides, the redhead wasn’t bad, you know, she could have been very effective; she was wasted, totally wasted.”

  Sid could bear it no longer—he flung his cigarette over the balcony, and struck his fist against his palm in a gesture of complete and bitter defeat. “Jesus fucking Christ, B.!” he said between clenched teeth, “here you are with everything in the world going for you, and you worrying about making some dumb broad hooker look good in a dirty movie! Whatta you, nuts?!?”

  That’s how frustrated and impatient he had become with Boris. During the past two years he had approached him with any number of lucrative, if not exactly original, film properties and ideas—ideas which seemed uniquely suited to the genius and prestige of the master . . . without whom, forget it. One of his so-called “boss projects,” for instance, had been a monumental “fictional documentary,” entitled Whores of the World—a twenty-hour, ten-part film, to be shot in every capital and metropolis of both hemispheres. “Talk about your everlovin’ audience-appeal,” Sid had exclaimed repeatedly, “this baby’s got it all! Sex, travel, human interest! Christ, we’ll give ’em so much fuckin’ human interest, it’ll be comin’ out their ass-hole!” He claimed to have researched the project thoroughly, “. . . at considerable personal expense,” he would always add, paving the way for a handsome reimbursement out of the first front money that might come to hand. The way he envisioned it, the entire series of ten feature-length flicks would take two years to shoot. “Now get this,” he said softly, with a dark glance around the room, as though he were about to divulge the World War III invasion date, “by the time we get into release, each of the hooker scenes will have changed—new broads, new prices, etcetera and we can start all over again! Like the old ‘Follies’ pix! Whores of the World—1968! Whores of the World—1969! It’ll become a fuckin’ institution, for Chrissake!”

  And for a while the notion had actually seemed to interest B., but when finally pressed by a desperate, overextended Sid (“I got ’im, I got ’im, I got the King B.!” he had told the studio with tremendous glee and what proved to be typical exaggeration), he declined. “I don’t think whores interest me very much,” he had to admit, almost wistfully, “I don’t think I understand them.”

  “So well go for the pathos,” pleaded Sid urgently, “Christ, we’ll have the fuckin’ pathos comin’ out their ass-holes!”

  But B. shook his head. “I have a hunch that whores are all alike,” he said, with a little smile that seemed especially for Sid, and momentarily depressed him no end. But Sid was nothing if not boss resilient, so he was quick to bounce back with additional “winners.”

  But as yet they hadn’t been for B.; he was after something else, something more . . . ambitious, if that was the word—and tonight he thought he’d found out what it was.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” he said with studied deliberation, while he and Sid lolled, smoking pot, on the moon-washed, wave-lapping terrace of Teeny Marie’s monstro hacienda, and through the candlelight and the fragrance of pine and gardenia, the chicks floated or flounced by, in minis and micros, in leopard leotards, in bikinis and hot-pants peek-a-boos—all looking to get discovered, or otherwise straight, if only for the moment. “I’d like to make one of those.” He nodded toward the projection room. “One of those stag films.”

  Sid stared at him for a moment, then looked at the cold roach of cigarette between his fingers. “This pot is better than I thought,” he said, flipping it away. “You wantta make one of those, huh?”

  Boris nodded.

  “Yeah, well, that figures,” said Sid with painful irony, “the best director in the world wants to make a stag film. That’s great. Yeah, that’s very amusing. I mean, that’s really hilarious, ain’t it? Hah-hah-hah . . .” converting his forced laugh into a sound of sick retching.

  Boris simply stared ahead, expressionless, into the endless Pacific night of stars and dark waters, his head somewhere else.

  “I ran into Joey Schwartzman today,” said Sid, with what now sounded like cold hatred, “. . . he told me how you blew the Metro deal.” A deal, it should be noted, which Sid himself had proposed and would have participated in.

  From a farther room, and drifting past, came the incredible wailing lament of the extraordinary Plastic Ono. Boris said nothing, didn’t appear to have heard, nodded benignly in time to the sound.

  “Okay,” said Sid, emboldened by drug to self-expression, “okay, okay, you’re a saint! You’re a motherfuckin’, insane saint! You turn down a ten-million-dollar picture—Dante’s Inferno, and that’s one helluva property, you know that, don’t you?—you turned it down, and the next day you’re talking about making a stag film! That’s very amusing, that’s very cute. Another chapter in the legend . . . The Legend of King B.!—could be a title, right?”

  Through drug and adrenaline, Sid had worked himself into a state of vehemently righteous indignation. He coughed, searched his pockets for a cigarette, tamped it with great vigor against the onyx tabletop between them, cleared his throat, and was about to speak again, but was circumvented by the sudden appearance of their gay hostess, cavorting right up to their faces, swirling the raised skirts of her new costume—featuring several crinoline petticoats—in haughty can-can fashion, flashing black lace panties and one spoke-like stretch of ivory thigh, screeching: “Anyone for box lunch?!?”

  Sid chortled lustily: “Whatta you got in it—dried shrimp? Haw-haw-haw!” slapping his leg, coughing and spitting, while she flounced on and away in her mad dervish.

  “I’ve got to find out,” B. said, having barely noticed her flashing pass, “how far you can take the aesthetically erotic—at what point, if any, it gets to be such a personal thing that it becomes meaningless.”

  “I got news for you,” said Sid, firm and terse, “they been doing it for years—‘underground movies’ they’re called, ever hear of ’em? Andy Warhol? They show everything—beaver, cock, the whole store! It’s a fucking industry, for Chrissake!”

  Boris sighed, shaking his head. “They don’t show anything” he said softly, even sadly, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you. They haven’t started to show anything. No erection, no penetration . . . nothing. And besides that, they’re Mickey Mouse . . . amateurish, just like the stuff we were looking at tonight—bad acting, bad lighting, bad camera, bad everything. At least in the stag films you actually see them fucking . . . in the underground movies, it’s only represented, suggested—erection and penetration are never shown. So the underground films don’t even count. But what I want to know is, why are the others ones—the stag films—always so ridiculous? Why isn’t it possible to make one that’s really good—you know, one that’s genuinely erotic and beautiful.” This said with an ingenuousness not to be denied.

  Despite the pot, Sid’s years as a yes-man had given him a quick automatic nod in certain serious circumstances, which he now recognized as prevailing. “Yeah, yeah,” he said expectantly, but obviously confounded.

  “I mean,” said Boris, “suppose the film were made under studio conditions—feature-length, color, beautiful actors, great lighting, strong plot . . . how would it look then?”

  “Christ, I can’t imagine,” admitted Sid.

  “Neither can I,” said Boris, and after a pause, “I just wonder if it’s possible.”

  Sid, now taking it all as a perfectly absurd joke on himself—the joke of Life—didn’t care much anymore. “Possible? Sure. You gotta camera? You can start shooting tomorrow. You can use, u
h, let’s see . . . you can use Teeny as the lead, and you can use me . . . we’ll both work on deferment, haw-haw . . .” He laid his head down laughing—crying really, morosely, thinking about the waste of it, B.’s turning down the Metro deal, “. . . you’ve really gone round the fuckin’ bend this time, you know that?” Saying this through a hairy-arm-covered sob as Teeny arrived with Les’s previous mini-skirt starlet in tow.

  “Gotta live one for you, boys,” she screamed. “Last one out is a hole in the ass!” And she began grappling at Sid’s fly.

  “Aw for Chrissake,” he said in mock anger, feigning karate chops at her hand, “lemme work it up first!”

  “But she likes you simply for what you are, Sid,” explained Teeny with an extravagant expression of outraged innocence, “a short, fat, hairy, simpleminded . . . kike creep!”

  Sid closed his eyes, in a gesture of exasperated, weary tolerance. “Oh, that’s great,” he said, “that’s all I need right now, some kind of racial . . . racial allusion—is that what you call it, ‘racial allusion’?”

  “Actually,” Teeny went on, glittering toward B., “she’s really interested in Mr. King Fruit here,” pressing the cutie-pie starlet into him, “she said she’d be pleased to suck his thing. Correct, Miss Pilgrim?”

  “Oh Teeny, really!” the darling girl gushed, “you’re just too awful!”

  “Well, anyway,” said Teeny, suddenly bored, “here she is—Miss Penny Pilgrim, if you can believe that. And she wants to be in the movies. So go ahead boys—fuck her brains out!” She cackled and gave the girl a playful—not entirely playful—push into their midst, then flounced away.

  Sid made elaborate motions of brushing spilled drink and ash off his front. “Jesus Christ, I’m sopping!” he said.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry” said the girl, trying to help him, leaning over in such a way that her extremely brief mini revealed the back of bare brown legs and a precious, perfectly rounded derrière, gift-wrapped, as it were, in panties of ice-blue trimmed with white. Boris fingered the edge of lace then patted her bottom. The girl didn’t change her position immediately, just turned her head toward him and smiled sweetly.