Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  ALAN: I see. Well, the thing is, being no stranger to the industry, you probably know that there are often certain things one person will do and another one won’t. It’s a question of personal feelings, of personal sensibilities.

  GIRL: I don’t do anal.

  ALAN: In this case that’s not a—

  GIRL: Not from inhibitions but because I can’t handle it. Like it’s painful.

  ALAN: Well, that wouldn’t be a factor here. Well, to put it in perspective, there’s a Roman Orgy scene I would want to use you in. Your role—

  GIRL: Yeah, they do a lot of the Roman Orgy scenes. I was in one of them as a matter of fact, I forget the name of the film.

  ALAN: Your role, uh, the question is whether you would have any objection to a scene with a dog.

  GIRL: A dog?

  ALAN: An Old English sheepdog. What the script calls for, the dog would go down on you.

  GIRL: Would I eat the dog or anything?

  ALAN: No, it would just be the dog eating you. You wouldn’t have to worry about being bitten or anything. The dog is well trained.

  VINNIE: The dog’s a trouper.

  GIRL: Well, uh. Would the dog also fuck me or is this just an eating scene?

  ALAN: Strictly an eating scene. The dog—

  GIRL: Because, well, I would probably do it, I don’t know, but I never did and—

  ALAN: No, that definitely wouldn’t enter into it. As a matter of fact, the dog’s a female.

  GIRL: It’s a female dog?

  ALAN: That’s right.

  GIRL: You know, that’s really far out. But sure, I could handle it Why not?

  • • •

  What am I doing here?

  I mean, is this why I went to college? Is this why I set out to master the techniques of the writing profession? Is it even why I learned to type? So that I can sit in a hotel for cockroaches while some brainless twit decides whether or not she cares to play a scene in which a female Old English sheepdog performs cunnilingus upon her? A scene that I, God forgive me, actually sat down a couple of weeks ago and wrote?

  What am I doing here?

  • • •

  Okay. I’ll tell you what I’m doing here.

  I am functioning as a sort of ex officio assistant director on a film tentatively entitled Different Strokes. I am going to play one of the secondary roles in the film, that of the Dirty Old Man. I have done what is officially known as a rewrite on the film, in that there was an original script which I for the most part tore up and threw out. And I am at the same time writing a production diary of the two or three weeks which will be spent producing this epic.

  The main reason I am doing this production diary is that some very good friends at Dell read the screenplay, liked it, and agreed that a book consisting of the screenplay and a diary recounting production experiences might constitute a book which a lot of people might want to read. And the existence of such a book, on the other hand, would constitute a hell of a lot of free publicity for the film.

  If the film does well, I will make some money. (If it does poorly, I will make zilch; they are paying me off in a percentage of profits.) So I have an incentive for writing this production diary, but now that I’m sitting down and starting to do it, I find another incentive.

  Namely that I am involved in something obviously insane, patently insane, and I would like to try to keep a relatively sane record of it as it unfolds. I can’t count on my conversations with Alan the Producer or Vinnie the Director to keep my head straight. They are both out of their minds.

  Hence this diary. I am starting it today, which is a Tuesday, and I will be writing it for about two weeks, and I will try to use that stretch of time and space to convey to you (and perhaps to myself as well) what the experience of making a pornographic movie is like.

  I won’t be getting particularly technical. It might be possible to write a book that would enable the reader to make his own movie after reading it. But I’m afraid I couldn’t write such a book even if I were so inclined. I don’t know a hell of a lot about cameras and film. I’m hoping to learn a little about the subject that, after all, is one of my motives for going through all this.

  I will also, in the course of this diary, discuss some of the preproduction experiences of the past couple of months, feeding them in as they seem appropriate. My present game plan, subject to change, without notice, is as follows: I will spend a couple of hours every night typing away furiously before going to bed, and I will write whatever comes to mind at the time. And, because I’m doing this for your benefit as well as my own, I’ll try to limit myself to material that will be informative or entertaining or, with luck, both.

  Which brings us to the point that this is a sort of bastard diary. A pure diary is a monologue, or perhaps one could better call it a dialogue of the writer with himself. But this is a diary undertaken with the understanding that it is to be published, a diary written specifically to be published.

  I suspect this is both good and bad. Diaries written for the writer alone can be more completely honest. No doubt I’ll have thoughts and observations over the next couple of weeks that I will be disinclined to share with you, and I will therefore fail to commit them to print. On the other hand, I’ve never had the temperament of a true diarist. So, if this diary were not going to be published, I would not be writing it at all.

  Enough. Let us return to that grotty hotel room.

  • • •

  What we were doing today, from nine in the morning until almost six this afternoon, is called Casting. Alan had inserted notices in a couple of theatrical trade papers announcing an open casting call for Different Strokes which he described as an erotic film. He did not say it was hardcore. He implied this, however, by not saying it was soft-core. Of the people who turned up, I would estimate that nine out of ten took it for granted that it was to be hardcore, and most of the rest figured this was a strong probability.

  I would never have believed so many people would show up. I can’t say how many did appear, because we didn’t see all of them. The front room, where they were supposed to wait, filled up early on. They were spilling over into the hallway, and I’m sure a hell of a lot of hopeful thespians took a look at the waiting line and went away. I do know that we saw well over two hundred people in the course of the day.

  In many instances all we did was see them; one look and we knew we didn’t need them for anything. I understand some of the homeliest girls in the world try to enter beauty contests. I don’t know why this happens, but I do know some of the world’s ugliest people showed up today (mostly in the morning, true early birds who caught no worms this time around). These were people we wouldn’t even use as extras in the crowd scenes. Alan just gave them a very professional, “Sorry, nothing for you today,” and pointed them back out again. None of them seemed surprised. I guess they get used to it, or else they are awed in the presence of a genuine movie producer. I wouldn’t quite call Alan that yet, but he knows the moves well enough to fake out people who don’t know him.

  I guess the casting process went pretty well. We have most of the roles nailed down, and tomorrow’s casting session should wrap it all up. One good thing is that we had most of the hard parts cast in advance. Our lead signed for the thing three weeks ago. The two nonsexual male roles, Irving and Pluto, were nailed down almost as long ago.

  (A word of explanation. A nonsexual role, in this context, doesn’t mean a eunuch. It means no fucking. There’s also a nonsexual female role, Madge, and we signed that the day before yesterday after Alan shadowboxed with this woman he’s known for weeks. Her name is Gertrude and she’s been in a lot of Russ Meyer type tit-and-ass movies over the years. She’s physically perfect for the part, and in a sense it was written for her; Alan wanted to use her and I thought up the character of Madge based on his description of Gertrude. For weeks she sat around trying to decide whether she would be compromising her professional reputation by appearing in an out-and-out fuck-suck movie, even if s
he were not doing any of the fucking and/or sucking. Her decision was favorable. I think a guarantee of four days shooting at a hundred and a half per diem had something to do with this.)

  We also had cast those parts that are to be played by friends, backers of the film, and assorted agreeable hangers on. These are mostly nonsexual: the auctioneer’s a backer, the piano player’s a writer friend of mine, and a variety of friends and backers have already agreed to drop around for the crowd scenes. But there have also been two sexual volunteers: me for the Dirty Old Man, and a girl Alan knows who wants to be in the orgy scene because she always wanted to be in a porno film.

  We also precast Rasputin, which is generally acknowledged to be the most physically demanding role. I haven’t met the guy who’s playing the part, but I’ve seen him in a couple of films. He seems to be capable of rising to the occasion with ease, and that in turn seems to be the major criterion for evaluating male performers in fuck films, that and the possession of a large penis.

  Because the property of Instant Erection is the name of the game, the same male performers tend to appear over and over in these films. I don’t know whether this is good or not. There was an argument over looking for a New Face (or new something else) but we decided to stick with the tried and true. Our Rasputin is called Joe, and I can hardly wait to meet him and start feeling inferior.

  • • •

  Who did we cast today? Anna and Karenina, first of all, and I’ll be damned if they don’t look like sisters, both of them slim and blonde and rather toothsome. I’m not sure they can read lines, but neither am I sure that it matters. I don’t know their names, so I think I’ll just call them Anna and Karenina henceforth. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll do that with all the actors and actresses. It will save us all a lot of aggravation.

  Both Anna and Karenina auditioned nude, incidentally. And no, not everyone was asked to strip. Most were not, including a few whom we hired. Except for a major role, it doesn’t matter too much what a body looks like, as long as it’s within certain limits. You can tell enough about a girl’s figure with her clothes on to know if she can stand around and look tolerable in something like the chessboard scene, for instance.

  But Anna and Karenina are going to get a lot of close-ups, so we had to know what they looked like. They look pretty good, as a matter of fact. I have the sinking feeling, truth to tell, that they look a damn sight better than our leading lady, Sophie. I don’t know if this is awful or not. The important thing is that Sophie ought to be able to act. She has a hell of a demanding part considering the medium. She has to range in age from around twelve to around fifty with a stopover around twenty-two. Sophie herself will not see twenty-two again, and I doubt that we are going to hide this from the camera. I’d guess she’s twenty-seven or thereabouts, which ain’t old, but oh, I don’t know.

  I wonder if it matters. Linda Lovelace is not the most stunningly beautiful girl who ever copped a joint on the silver screen. Or the most talented actress. Her claim to fame is the capacity to swallow the top spire of the Chrysler Building and give every appearance of enjoying it.

  Speaking of which, three different girls in the course of today’s casting session announced that they were able to give deep throat, and all three offered a demonstration. One was a beast. The other two were attractive enough. However, the script just doesn’t call for any sword swallowing. As far as the offer of a demonstration, I don t think any of us were remotely tempted. I know I wasn’t.

  Nor was I tempted in any respect. I think the majority of the girls who turned up today would have happily put out for a part, possibly with the rationale that putting out constitutes a logical form of audition for a porn flick. As perhaps it does. But there was something enormously off-putting about the whole idea of the cattle call casting procedure.

  I want to explain this properly. It would be inaccurate to say that the entire day was a sexual turnoff, and that thoughts of getting laid never entered my mind. They did, now and then, though not with any of the girls who stripped; by making their nakedness so public a matter they kept me from responding. A couple of times a girl happened by who had some quality I found personally appealing, and it crossed my mind that, after all, sex is good clean fun, and this would be a nice person to have fun with. As far as that goes, there was a cloud of low-grade horniness overhanging the whole mood of the day.

  But the idea of doing something about it, no. No.

  —Wednesday

  The show is cast I think.

  It’s hard to tell. We are going to need a certain number of clothed extras, for example. We pay twenty bucks a day for clothed extras, but not if we can avoid it. We can avoid it by using friends or friends of friends, and the word is that it is very easy to get such people, because almost everybody would love to be in a movie once in the course of his life.

  (That was my own thought originally. I wanted to be the Auctioneer, partly because I’ve always had a Walter Mitty-type desire to be an auctioneer, and I had that in mind when I wrote that scene. Then, when I conceived the Dirty Old Man scene, I realized that far greater than the ego trip of conducting an auction was the ego trip of being in a porno movie and fucking on camera. I am beginning to come down with a cross between stage fright and bridegroom’s nerves on this subject.)

  The thing is, Can you count on these freebie extras to turn up? The answer is, Who knows? I don’t think there’s a precedent. Porno films never have crowd scenes, because they haven’t cared to achieve the production values we’re aiming for in this opus of ours.

  But hell, the cabaret scene has to have a hundred people in it in order to work, and we have to shoot it in the middle of the afternoon when the bar we’re using is not open for business, or more likely in the morning and afternoon, and how do we get all our promised freebie extras to leave their offices and play Hollywood? Vinnie insists it’s no problem; if you suddenly need extras, if you have to fill in with paid talent, you can fill a house in an hour with a couple of phone calls. I wish I was convinced he was right.

  We filled most of the blanks today. We got a rotten comic to play the rotten comic, which I think is terrific. We’ve been having virtually every male who came in give us a reading of that unspeakable monologue, and at three-thirty this afternoon we hit a guy who was far and away the worst of them all, so we gave him the job immediately. The schmuck is so excited he’s talking about remaking his whole act around the concept of being a rotten comic with a bad Cherman accent. Well, he’s got the qualifications. His Cherman accent sucks, and he’s as rotten a comic as you can get.

  We also got the transvestite. We began getting people today who were applying for specific roles. What happened was that people who came around yesterday left with some information as to what parts we were looking to fill, and they told their friends, and this worked to everybody’s advantage.

  The transvestite was tentatively cast yesterday, but our boy (or girl) made us recast it. He was brilliant. He evidently knew the whole bit from the script, because he showed up in full drag, and really did look like a girl. I must admit that I had a psychic twinge when I saw him. I didn’t go so far as to think it was a guy in drag, but about a second before he exposed himself and flashed his cock at us I knew he was going to do it.

  And he sure did. Just lifted up his skirt and there it was. Not erect, in case you wondered.

  What we wondered was, Could he get it erect long enough to stick it in Sophie? He insists that’s no problem. He’s completely bisexual, he says, and thinks of himself as a bisexual female, insofar as he defines himself at all. He asked if we had a picture of Sophie. Vinnie dug out a still and the transvestite said he could get a hard-on just looking at her adorable picture. I don’t know if he could have, or if he did, for that matter; he had lowered his skirt by this point. We decided to take his word for it. We signed him and we sent him away and we sat around feeling vaguely uncomfortable.

  Later Vinnie said, “I might try it with somebody like that. I just might.
I never did. Gay scene never appealed to me, but you know, you get curious, you wonder what it would be like if you tried it, even though you don’t want to try it anyway. Somebody like that, though, I don’t know. I can see myself trying it out just for the hell of it I don’t especially want to, but I can see where, you know, where I might.”

  That’s the longest statement I’ve ever heard him make.

  Oh, before I forget, we got a chick in there today who I swear was no more than twelve years old. No hyperbole. Eleven or twelve, no more. Or maybe she’s fourteen and looks ridiculously young for her age. That’s faintly possible.

  She walked in and we looked at her and looked at each other and each of us waited for one of the others to tell her we weren’t planning a remake of Little Miss Marker. Obviously she thought it was a call for a legit picture. Finally I blurted out something about this being an adult movie, and she said, “Oh, I know all about that. I’ll do anything. I fuck and suck, I do gay scenes, animals, anything.” In this little girl voice, with these little girl innocent eyes, the whole number.

  Swore she was eighteen and had a birth certificate to prove it. I had a look at it, and it looked genuine enough. That is, it looked to be a genuine birth certificate. It’s possible to carry around someone else’s birth certificate. A few years back, my cousin Jim’s baptismal certificate enabled me to be a fifteen-year-old barfly back in Rhinebeck.

  I’ll tell you. If that birth certificate had said seventeen, I might have believed it was hers, and I might have voted to use her, figuring one year ain’t really gonna hang statutory rape on anybody. But there was no way that birth certificate could fit that girl.

  We sent her home in a nice way, took her name and number and all. After she left we spent some more time staring at each other.

  Then Alan said, “The flashback sequence. The Dirty Old Man.”

  I glared at him.

  “Now I admit she doesn’t look like Sophie, Jack. You’d know right away it was another actress playing Sophie as a child.”

  “Nice of you to admit it,” I said.