Blue Movie

by Terry Southern

  7

  A CURIOUS AND UNFORSEEN complication arose in connection with filming the sequence. While Feral was again required to have his unruly member plunged into ice water and sprayed with novocaine, neither Hadj nor one of the other quasi-lovers (the “mouth man”) could achieve erection.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” said Tony.

  Boris shrugged. “I guess they just can’t make that kind of vicariousness. I sort of dig them for that.”

  Tony was growing very apprehensive. “But what about the scene? I mean, we’ve got to have her being fucked by one guy, and surrounded by three big hard cocks! Sticking up like . . . flowers! I mean, dig the image—she’s being fucked in a garden of cock!”

  “I’m with you, Tone—how do we get it up for them?”

  “Why don’t you ask Angie to touch it . . . just touch it.”

  “Uh-uh, she’s liable to wig out any minute as it is.”

  “Okay, what about those funeral-car chicks—you know, those two hookers who met me at the airstrip?”

  “Terrific,” said Boris. He called the Freddie over, sent him to locate Mort or Lips Malone and apprise them of the situation.

  “It doesn’t have to be the same two girls,” he called after him, “but we need them right away. And if you see Mr. Krassman, tell him production has ground to a halt.”

  “Say,” Tony mused, “I wonder if Helen Vrobel would do a little stroking—she’s a good company-girl.”

  Boris guffawed. “Christ, she couldn’t get it up for the Boston Strangler!”

  “I don’t know,” said Tony, sounding serious, “I have an idea that these guys would prefer fucking her to Angie.”

  “Are you out of your skull? Why in God’s name would they prefer fucking her to Angie?”

  Tony did a little two-step, rolled his eyes back, and went into his minstrel delivery: “’Cause she done been white . . . long-ah! Yak-yak-yak!”

  Before Boris could hit him with his rolled-up script, they were joined by the smiling Feral, who kept nodding, Japanese style, to express apology at the intrusion.

  “Excuse, excuse. I may speak, yes?”

  “Of course, Feral,” said Boris, “you may speak.”

  “You have trouble, yes? You have trouble with Hadj and with Achmed. Here, yes?” He pointed down at his loincloth.

  “That’s right,” said Boris, speaking carefully, “and now we are going to bring in two pretty girls, and see if that will help. Understand?”

  “Understand, yes. Pretty girl very good for Achmed,” then he shook his head, beaming ecstatically, “but for Hadj—no. Girl no good for Hadj.”

  Boris groaned, putting his hand to his head, “Oh, my God . . .”

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” said Tony, “a fruit! A monstro black fruit!”

  Feral resumed his joyous nodding. “Hadj no like girl, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Boris wearily, “Hadj like men, right?”

  “Yes, Hadj like men.”

  “Well, well,” Boris could not recall a similar quandary in his film-making experience, “this presents quite a problem. Tell me, Feral, just, uh, what kind of man does he like? I mean, how about some of the other Senegalese on the picture—does he like any of them?”

  “No, no, Hadj no like. Hadj like white man.”

  “Strong white man, yes?”

  “No, no, weak white man . . . like woman, but man, yes?”

  “Hmm.” Boris was genuinely disturbed. “Christ, Tony, I think we’re in a lot of trouble. I mean, where the hell—”

  But Tony snapped his fingers, face suddenly alight. “I’ve got it! Ho-ho, B., baby, just call me Mr. fucking matchmaker! Are you ready for this?”

  “Lay it on me, Tone,” said Boris patiently.

  “Then, dig . . . Nicky Sanchez!”

  8

  WHEN PRODUCER SID KRASSMAN arrived at the stage that afternoon, he was taken aback by a succession of untoward events. The first occurred when, in looking for Boris, he stopped at the trailer sometimes used as an office, opened the door, only to find Tony Sanders lying on the couch, his member being kissed and fondled by an unfamiliar girl in black panties and bra. Sid quickly shut the door, and moved on toward the set, looking back at the trailer several times, before he practically stumbled over another such coupling—now featuring a black-panty-and-bra girl, rendering avid fellatio to giant Achmed. As he stepped around them, muttering something incoherent, his glance happened to cross the set, where, in the shadow of the camera itself, he could clearly see his art director, on hands and knees, voraciously sucking the organ of yet another huge black, the great Hadj.

  “What in the name of Christ is going on here!?!” he roared at Fred the First.

  Had these incidents occurred on the set—that is to say, on camera, it would have been understandable, but for them to be occurring off the set—and at three in the afternoon—was incomprehensible. An orgy! A bacchanal! And to Sid it could signal only one thing—total collapse of the organizational discipline so absolutely vital to efficient production.

  “Where the hell is your director?!?” he demanded. “Christ, I’ve never seen so much cocksucking going on in my life!”

  Fred the First explained the problem, and how it was being dealt with.

  “Oh yeah?” Sid was dubious. “What about Tony Sanders? I know he don’t have trouble getting it up! Besides that, he ain’t even in the picture!”

  “Yeah,” said Fred, “well, I think he and Mr. Adrian just figured that seeing she was already here and paid for, there was no sense to waste it.”

  “Waste, my ass! That’s not going to be charged against the picture! Now where the hell is Boris—off somewhere getting blowed too?”

  “No sir, he went to the John.”

  “How many shots you get since lunch?”

  “Well, uh, we’re still working on the first one, because of that unexpected development . . .”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t got one shot since lunch?” He frowned down furiously at his wristwatch. “Holy Christ, man, we’re supposed to be making a picture! And you’re supposed to keep things moving around here!”

  “Yessir, well, we were all set up, and then that unexpected development—”

  “‘Unexpected development’! You call casting a fag in the role of a . . . a whatever the hell he is . . . you call that an ‘unexpected development’?!?” He glanced over to where Nicky and Hadj were still locked in fervent embrace, then turned back, with an expression of acute distaste. “Christ, that’s disgusting! Nicky Sanchez! Three Academy Awards! You know, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t of believed it.”

  Fred the First shrugged. “Well, I guess somebody had to do it.”

  “Had to do it! Christ, he loves it! Just look at him, for Chrissake!”

  “Yeah, well, what I mean is maybe we’re lucky that he does—because we were in real trouble before.”

  “‘Trouble before’!” Sid blustered, forcibly tapping his watch, then the first assistant’s chest. “Three-fifteen, and you haven’t got the first shot! You’re in trouble now, buster!”

  Only Boris’s arrival kept the admonition from becoming more severe. “Lay off, Sid, it’s not Freddie’s fault.”

  “Awright, awright, can we please get the first shot now?”

  “We have to wait a few more minutes.”

  “Wait? For what?”

  “For Hadj,” he nodded in that direction, “the big one with Nicky.”

  “You mean it’s not working?”

  “Oh yeah, it was working great. A little too great, I guess.”

  Sid’s brow furrowed. “You mean . . .”

  Boris nodded. “Didn’t stop in time . . . I guess Nicky just got carried away.”

  “Why that . . . that dirty little . . . cocksucker!” Sid was raging. “Of all the . . . rotten . . . selfish . . . why, I’ll kill the little bastard!” and he moved as if to actually rush toward them, but Boris restrained him.

 
“Just take it easy, Sid—he’ll have it up again in a minute.”

  Tony joined them, looking relaxed and affable. “Hello, Sidney, how’s the boy?”

  Sid glowered at him. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “What? Oh, I was over in one of the trailers, uh, working on the script.”

  “Like hell you were! You were in there getting your cock sucked! Ha! I saw you!”

  “How was that, by the way?” asked Boris.

  “Oh . . . I think I’d rate it good to excellent.”

  Sid was not amused. “Ha! And how would you rate the work you’ve done on the script today?”

  Tony gave Boris a quizzical look. “What’s with him?”

  “He’s a little uptight about the schedule.”

  “Plus,” Sid added, “plus the fact that Les Harrison is liable to drop in here any minute—and we’re two days behind schedule, and no script to show him! What if he had walked in today? Huh? Not one shot since lunch, and a lot of crazy cocksucking going on all over the place!”

  “That reminds me,” said Boris, looking around, “I better check on Nicky.” He started to go over, then stopped short, seeing that they were no longer embraced but were walking to the set, hand in hand. “Well, I guess we can shoot,” he said, and signaled the first assistant to get everyone ready.

  “Holy Christ,” muttered Sid, “look at the whang on that coon!”

  Boris left them to go to the camera, and Sid glanced at his watch. “Three-thirty—I hope to Christ he can finish that scene today.” He seemed much more at ease now that work was about to resume. He and Tony walked slowly along the row of trailers, approaching the one Boris sometimes used as an office. At the window the silhouette of the girl inside could be seen moving about.

  Sid coughed a couple of times, and looked at his watch again, before speaking: “You say that broad gives pretty good head, huh Tone?”

  9

  THE AFTERNOON’S WORK had extended into evening, but it had gone extremely well—the Around the Clock sequence was completed, and another begun. In addition, the three “finalists” for the job of doubling for Angela were auditioned, and a decision reached. The “audition” had consisted merely of scrutinizing each girl’s anatomy in the appropriate areas to determine which of them most closely matched Angie’s, and finally, in ascertaining that she was fully and realistically aware of what she would be required to do in the “scene.” As in the case of the double for Arabella, it was Lips Malone who had once more prowled mean streets and. delivered the goods—scoring on this occasion, not from Paris, but from the infamous port city of Hamburg, where he had succeeded in procuring half a dozen extraordinary, although somewhat cynical, nifties.

  Ordinarily, it would be necessary to employ only one double, but because of the strenuous nature of this particular role, Boris had asked for two—and Sid was even more cautious. “Christ, let’s take all of them—those fucking boogs may turn cannibal any minute! Then we’d really be up shit creek!”

  So the three were engaged—but Sid’s problems on this count were not at an end. He was flabbergasted, then furious, when the doctor who represented the insurance firm the company was using, upon seeing the horde of giant blacks, and being informed of the details of the sequence, had flatly refused to insure the girls at all. “Why, the fucking quack!” Sid stamped about the set in a rage which turned to apprehension. “Christ Almighty, if Les Harrison finds out we’re working uninsured actors, he’ll blow his stack! Holy Christ, man, he could even shut us down!”

  “We just won’t tell him,” said Boris.

  “Okay, but what if something does happen to one of the broads? I mean, suppose one of those big boogs flips his wig, and does something screwy?”

  “Listen,” said Tony, sounding serious and confidential, “why don’t you get the First to wear a pistol? Clyde Beatty style, right? Animal-trainer time. One of the boogs blows his stack, goes for a broad—pow, you blast him!”

  The mere image seemed to excite Sid terrifically. Christ, that’s it! Where the hell is he?” And he rushed off to find Fred, while Boris and Tone enjoyed a hearty guffaw.

  10

  DURING THE PAST TWO days, in another part of the studio, a second unit had been shooting the “Maude, as a child” footage with Jennifer Jeans—supported, of course, by the two great veteran thesps, Louise Larkin and Andrew Stonington, as Mom and Dad—neither of whom had any real notion of what was taking place on the neighboring set. The footage being prepared here was thoroughly conventional, even wholesome—including the occasional pseudo-artistic use of a partially smeared lens to render the image in an impressionistic style of things dreamed or remembered. Visiting this set gave Sid a warm, nostalgic feeling and a comfortable reassurance, suggesting as it did, with its cliché treatment of extremely genteel material, a certain normalcy of film-making. He even took a sympathetic interest in the material itself, feeling that, after all, this was just the sort of childhood he would have liked—with its huge, white-pillared manse, servants in livery, and a back-projection of countless rolling acres. So he visited the set often. “An island of sanity and decency,” he called it, and only once was this appraisal briefly shaken—when he happened to notice, sitting on top of a lens case, a small jar of Vaseline, and his face contorted in anger and confusion, while his eyes raced frantically around the set. “What the hell’s going on here!?!” he demanded, with feverish urgency, of the unit director, thinking that somehow the weirdness and corruption of Boris’s set had spread plaguelike to his own sanctuary—but then was enormously relieved to realize that the jar of Vaseline was, of course, merely being used, and in almost infinitesimal quantity, to haze the camera lens and soften even more the already very romantic image.

  “Frankie, my boy,” Sid had grown fond of saying to the unit director, “let’s do another take,” and he would snap his fingers with what he assumed to be the largesse of the grand seigneur, “better safe than sorry, eh Frankie? Ha-ha,” while the crew looked on in irate wonder, some of them knowing him from Hollywood days as “Mr. Shorts,” a reference to penury and avarice based on his use of “short ends” of film—that is to say, the last bit of film remaining on the spool after the shot is finished, generally discarded as of no use, but often snipped by lab assistants, prior to processing, and sold for little or naught. One of the less apocryphal of the Bev Hills after-dinner anecdotes was the story of how Sid Krassman had tried to structure an entire shooting script on the use of “short ends.” But, unbeknownst to the grips and gaffers, scowling in confusion, was that this apparent foible of Krassman’s—this absurdly tremendous overshooting—was, in fact, boss relevant . . . because it was this footage which they intended to show to Les Harrison, or, for that matter, to anyone else who might suddenly drop by, and insist on seeing “just what the heck kind of motion picture they were sinking their hard-ready into!”

  And now, of course, he had arrived. Tony was up all the night before, writing some fairly conventional—and wholly arbitrary—scenes and dialogue, supposedly representing Angela’s Casbah sequence. For the purposes of this subterfuge, the locale had been retained, since a tour of the handsome Casbah set was planned as part of Les Harrison’s diversion. What had been changed, quite basically, were the characters in the sequence: the protagonist was no longer a decadent, drug-crazy nymphomaniac, but a sort of Eva Marie Saint type Peace Corps worker, who had come to the dark continent in search of “inner values,” or—“and I hope this doesn’t sound too darn pretentious,” Tony had written in a marginal note—“what I like to think of as ‘the eternal verities,’” while, for the dozen or so black ravishers, he had substituted a single lover—an ofay Frenchie Pepe le Moko type. Les perused it with considerable interest, even making an occasional suggestion.

  “I think we can play this love scene pretty hot,” he would say, boldly thumping the script at an open page, “you know, the whole bare-tits bit—naturally, we’ll do a cover-shot on it, so there won’t be any hassle about a TV sale
. Too bad, though, we couldn’t get Belmondo—what’d you say this other kid’s name is?”

  “Uh, Lamont,” said Sid, “yeah, André Lamont . . . I mean, when we couldn’t get Jean-Paul, we decided what the hell, let’s go with an unknown . . . get a fresh face up there—right, Les?”

  Les nodded wisely. “‘If you can’t get the best, go with the unknown every time!’ Dad told me that when I was nine years old, Sid, and I remember it like it was yesterday.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, sun’s over the yardarm—you know, I wouldn’t mind having that drink about now.”

  Sid beamed. “Coming up, Les!” and he poured out the bubbly.

  “And I’ll tell you something else, Sid,” Les hit the script again, hard but curiously affectionate, slapping it the way a businessman might smack a good-natured whore on the ass, or like the football players do each other, “you know, this is pretty damn good . . . I mean, I don’t say it’s Stan Shapiro, but, Christ, when Tony’s hot, he can really wrap up the old ball game, right?”

  Sid had to cough for a second, but quickly recovered. “Yeah, oh yeah, he’s . . . well, he’s . . . well, I mean, you know how he is . . . right?”

  Then he took him to see some footage—six hours of Jennifer Jeans, playing Angie as a child.

  There was a moment when Jen—as an eight-year-old with pigtails and innocently short schoolgirl hemline—back to camera, slowly bent over to tie her shoe.

  “Say, said Les, next to Sid in the darkened projection room, “how is Jen, anyway?”

  “Oh she’s fine, Les, just fine—she’ll sure be glad to see you, I bet.”

  “Hmm, said Les, returning his scrutiny to the cineramic stretch of back-of-calf, back-of-knee, back-of-thigh, right up to back-of-straight-edged-simple-snow-white-young-girl-panties, “uh, you know, she might be just right for . . . well, uh, see if you can get her up to my room, Sid, in, say, half an hour after we finish here.”