• • •
This first discovery, that Irving couldn’t act, led in short order to a second discovery.
Vinnie can’t direct.
Let me qualify that because it’s unfair. As far as framing a scene and seeing things with the eye of a camera, Vinnie seems to be something of a genius. I’ll know more about this when we see some film, but for the time being I’m willing to believe he’s brilliant.
The other job of a director, though, is to get actors to give the best possible performance. And in this area Vinnie doesn’t know what to do. He could tell Irving was going over like a landmine, everybody could tell that, but he didn’t know how to change things.
In fact, he didn’t even know how to try. I see this, incidentally, as a potential obstacle of major importance, and it’s going to be particularly problematic in the sex scenes. Vinnie has already confessed to me that he has a lot of trouble with sex scenes, and that strikes me as an odd admission to come from the lips of a porno director. That was his main reason for naming me Assistant Director. He wants someone else to tell the girl to brush her hair out of the way so the camera can see her giving head.
(My favorite porno cliché, that one. I can’t remember ever seeing a film in which at least one chick doesn’t spend a lot of time carefully moving her hair aside so we can all see her lips working. Maybe we can hire a Second Assistant Director to stand just off camera holding the girl’s hair back.)
The thing with Vinnie is that sex embarrasses him. Sex that involves him, that is. Maybe just sex that involves him verbally; I have no reason to suspect his sex life is other than normal, and I believe he has a girl currently living with him.
Well, he tried to talk to Irving. His directorial method consisted of telling Irving haltingly that perhaps Irving wasn’t reading his lines with expression. We tried it again, and Irving sounded as though he was a kid in second grade who had been told to read with expression. It certainly sounded as though he was reading, by George. He had everything memorized, but if you closed your eyes you could just see him holding the book in front of him.
I went over and whispered to Pluto, who suggested that maybe it didn’t matter.
“Maybe nothing matters,” I said, “but I think we have to pretend otherwise.”
“He’s a complete lecher, Jack. And I know he’s really dying to screw what’s-her-name, Sophie. And he opens his mouth and you lose all of that.”
“I know.”
I went over and talked with Irving, who was very distressed that he seemed to be giving everybody the shivering shits with his debut. I hit at the point that he had to be natural, just be himself, blah blah blah, and so help me God, he nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, and grinned a lecherous grin, and his eyes sparkled. Then we all moved on inside to try out one of the bits that go on inside the apartment, although that was not something we could film yet because we had Sophie in her Old Lady makeup, but just trying it on for size figuring that Irving might be less uptight in the apartment than in the hallway, and he fucked it up the same as ever.
Time was beginning to be a factor. Irving had taken the morning off for the filming but he had to be somewhere at twelve-thirty. Also, we wanted to have the afternoon for the other scenes at the apartment. Vinnie was talking to me about bringing Irving back and shooting his scenes at night, or possibly recruiting another Irving, which he didn’t really want to do because this Irving was so perfect physically, and also because this would hurt Irving’s feelings and that bothered Vinnie. He’s too softhearted to be a director, I think.
Meanwhile, Sophie was whispering to Alan, who nodded. Then she asked all of us except Irving to clear out. She said he was uptight acting in front of other people, but that if the two of them could go over their lines privately she was sure it would work out all right. I figured that made as much sense as anything else, which was not saying a hell of a lot for it, but what the hell. We all filed out, camera crew, Vinnie, Pluto, Alan, script girl, and me.
In the hallway, Alan told us what was up.
“Her idea,” he said. “Sophie. She’s going to fuck him.”
“Huh.”
“He’s hot as hell for her, but he gets nervous about it and he can’t get it across. So she’s going to go through a couple of lines with him and then she’s going to ask him does he want to fuck her. And they’ll make it, and it ought to relax him.”
“But it’s a nonsexual part,” Pluto said.
“Well, we’re not gonna film it. She’ll throw him a quickie and it should relax him.”
“Or give him a coronary.”
Alan’s face fell. He hadn’t thought of that.
• • •
What can I tell you?
It worked.
We stood around in the corridor having an inane conversation for about fifteen minutes. Then Sophie opened the door, grinning like the cat that swallowed the cream, and I use the image advisedly. She assured us Irving had a better grip on the part now, and I’d just as soon leave that one on the plate, friends, but she turned out to be right. We shot all his scenes one right after the other. He had the script down pat which hadn’t been the problem originally and he also emerged as a sly, droll, lecherous old cocker. He’s not going to get a Best Supporting Actor nomination out of it, nothing like that, but he did a damned good job and made it all work on the first take.
Go figure it out. In the beginning he couldn’t act horny because he was horny. Then Sophie did her number to dehorn him, and thus prepared, he was able to act.
He’s a lovely foil for Sophie. Dammit, I find myself admitting that Vinnie was right about the Irving character. His scenes are useful.
They’re good for a couple of reasons, including one I should have appreciated before. Namely that it is going to provide some nice balance to have Sophie shown as the object of someone else’s unfulfilled desires in addition to having ungratified desires of her own.
But one I couldn’t have foreseen is that our Sophie is at her best in scenes when she’s putting somebody down. She’s very effective in this capacity, which bodes well for the rest of the picture, as she gets to put people down a lot. I was worried, for example, that she might have trouble with the Rasputin scene. She has to deliver a lot of lines without being impossibly off-putting as a castrating bitch. I didn’t know how well she would be able to handle this. Now I feel a little more confident.
I didn’t care for her quite as much in her scenes with Pluto. It will be interesting to see how those look. He does overshadow her, no way around it, but he also carries her to an extent. In their first scene together, after his appearance when she goes down on the lamp, there’s the bit where he explains the terms of the contract to her. I thought she was very wooden in it. I would have liked to go for another take on it, but everybody else seemed happy, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. Probably just as well.
There was one scene where you really believed she was an actress. It’s a solo number. She’s in the apartment after the failure of the orgy scene, going through everything, throwing all her sexual artifacts in the garbage. There’s a really subtle play of emotions on her face. She shows it all—defeat, nostalgia, everything. I just hope Vinnie got in close on her at the right moments. She went through it several times so we could cover it from different angles and she was really good all the way through.
She may not be a bad actress. She’s best at reacting. She moves well and uses her face nicely. I wish she used her voice as well as she uses the rest of herself.
• • •
People pick strange times to get inhibited. For example, the most interesting thing that happened all day was her bit with Irving, balling him while we all waited outside. Afterward, the incident was not discussed in her presence, not before Irving left and not afterward either. We all knew she had made it with him, and she knew we knew, yet nobody said word one about it. We did talk about how Irving performed better, and recognized without voicing it that she had been responsible for his sudd
en emergence as a dramatic talent, but that was as far as it went.
Pluto and I had dinner together. He told me a lot of stories about show business types who have to have sex before they go on. One very famous singer has a call girl appear in his dressing room before he goes on. He gives her a couple of bills to fellate him before the performance. They don’t clear the dressing room or anything. He’ll sit around on the couch, maybe talking on the phone, maybe not, maybe having a drink, and his agent’s there, or some of his buddies, and the girl’s on her knees giving him head. He doesn’t even make her take off her clothes. She blows him until he comes, and then one of his flunkies gives her whatever the price is and she goes away, and he goes on stage and sings torch songs.
Well, people with artistic temperament need special consideration. And writers are no exception. I’ve got a lady friend coming over tonight to help me rehearse my scene for the film. We’re going to do it without dialogue, just so I can get the moves down pat. We may have to have quite a few takes before we get it right, too.
—Saturday
We spent the entire morning shooting the chessboard sequence.
Maybe it was worth it. It was the one idea of mine that Alan was unequivocally crazy about from start to finish. He just plain loved it. It’s just a quickie bit, and the cost of it was a sonofabitch. Not just in time and in amount of film expended, but costs of staging and personnel. We needed sixteen black girls, sixteen white girls, and two devils to carry the white pawn away. The white girls were all bit types who turned up at our casting call, but only two black girls appeared at the casting sessions and we had to hire the rest from a model agency that specializes in black talent, so they cost us a little more.
Staging the thing was a pain in the ass. Alan spent a couple of days scouting locations, searching the five boroughs for a huge courtyard with a checkerboard floor. Then Vinnie came up with the observation that we didn’t need a checkerboard floor, that any asshole could lay out a checkerboard floor in a few minutes with big squares of cardboard, so all we needed was a big courtyard, and that shouldn’t be too hard to find.
Then Vinnie complicated things beyond belief by insisting that Madge’s office had to overlook the courtyard. All this because we get an aerial view of the scene from Madge’s point of view. We have the loan of an apartment that is perfect for Madge’s office, and all free of charge, but it doesn’t overlook anything remotely resembling a courtyard.
Alan and I took turns pointing out that it would be child’s play to fake the shot. You have a shot of Madge and Pluto at the office window, and then you cut to an aerial shot from some other window overlooking the chessboard scene, and you’ve done it.
“But it would be so much better to see it over Madge’s shoulder,” Vinnie whined.
Repeatedly.
We finally found a way to satisfy the prick. Alan turned up an apartment complex out in Queens where we could shoot the scene, and he found a tenant there who would give us a minute’s shooting time in his apartment. We used that apartment for our aerial view of the chessboard and we shot over Madge’s shoulder. Of course the window is vastly different from the window of Madge’s office, but maybe nobody will notice in the couple of frames we’ll be using. Later, when we shoot the rest of that scene in Madge’s office, we’ll have Madge and Pluto pick up the same spots when they walk to the window.
And then, ultimately, we’ll probably throw out the shot from over Madge’s shoulder that we took today, because it won’t work, and we’ll substitute an aerial view we shot without Madge in the frame. Alan told me privately that he thinks we’ll have to do it this way, because the scenes won’t match, but that it was worth shooting that extra POV scene today because it keeps Vinnie happy. He and I do a certain number of things to keep Vinnie happy, and Vinnie and I do a certain number of things to keep Alan happy, so I suppose the two of them do a certain number of things to keep me happy.
Though I haven’t noticed any of them yet.
• • •
When I first wrote the chessboard sequence I didn’t really expect them to use it. If nothing else, I know how to count, and I know that a scene with thirty-four people in it is expensive, especially when it does nothing to advance the plot.
Also, it’s not enormously original. The idea of playing chess with human pieces, subject to death upon capture, is nothing new. Fredric Brown used it in a science fiction short story that I read ages ago, and I think some other SF writer, probably Poul Anderson, did so also. I’ll admit it hasn’t been done before in a pornographic movie, and that it’s a nice visual, but I thought Alan would want to throw it out. I included a certain number of things in the first draft for him to throw out, and while I sort of liked this one, I included it mentally in that category.
Instead he fell in love with it.
It was a bitch to stage. Vinnie brought along his sixty-four squares of black and white cardboard. Since the floor was white to begin with, we could have done fine with thirty-two black squares, but this never occurred to him. Or to anyone else, myself included, as far as that goes.
We set up the floor, and then we set up the girls. The taxi fare alone involved in transporting thirty-two young ladies from Manhattan to Queens is something to think about. We dressed our two devils in devil suits and Prussian helmets—this last was a nice idea of Alan’s—and we got everybody in place, and then we shot the scene.
It took three and a half hours.
Now isn’t that ridiculous? But that’s what happened. Things kept going wrong. Admittedly there were a lot of people out there, but only four of them had to move. The black bishop, the white pawn, and the two devils. The thirty other girls just had to stand there and look naked and stiff. The pawn had a couple of elementary lines of dialogue. The devils and the black bishop had to look stern. That was all there was to it.
Except that things kept going wrong. One problem was that the girls would keep moving, the ones who were supposed to stay still and look like statues. I could have lived with this, frankly, but Vinnie and Alan both wanted the scene just right. We really spent a lot of film retaking this crap.
Another problem was the white pawn. I picked the tallest black girl for the bishop and the smallest, youngest looking girl for the white pawn.
(And kicked myself mentally for not using that twelve-year-old nymphomaniac for the white pawn. She would have been perfect and in a part like that I think we could have gotten away with using her. As soon as I thought of it I realized the last thing to do was to mention it to Vinnie or Alan, because they would want to do it, and that would mean packing up and postponing everything for at least a day. It would have been great, though.)
The black bishop played her part very well. She’s about six feet tall and very dark-skinned, and she has elegant large uplifted breasts and a protruding behind, and her facial expression during the capture of the pawn was a study in menace. She never cracked a smile.
Which cannot be said for the white pawn, who tended to crack up in mirth when the cameras were on her. This seemed to be contagious. We wound up dropping the sound, figuring to loop it all later on. There’s only one spot where she talks into the camera, and that’s when the bishop first advances on her. Her words as she’s led off are delivered with her back to the camera, and of course her scream is completely off-camera. It took us a long time before we decided on this, however. We first went through a ton of takes with on-camera sound during which some cretinous asshole in the back broke up. We’ll loop the whole thing, and needless to say we won’t use the stupid white pawn to do the dubbing. (Sophie may do it; she does a nice little-girl voice, as I learned yesterday when she tried out some of her dialogue for her scene with me.)
Another thing that got in the way was the fact that this apartment complex where we shot everything was not unoccupied. That was another reason on-camera sound proved impossible. All it takes is one shrill housewife bellowing for her kid to kill a soundtrack.
Well, we got it done. Alan paid off
the girls and we tucked them into cabs. Then we went back to Manhattan, Vinnie and Alan and Madge and Pluto and I. We blew ourselves to a two-hour lunch at Sign of the Dove. We felt we had it coming.
During lunch we remembered that we didn’t have the props for Madge’s office. This is because we hadn’t originally planned to shoot Madge’s scenes today. But because Alan gave in to Vinnie on shooting the aerial view over Madge’s shoulder, we wanted to get a little more out of Madge in return for the hundred and a half she was getting. We figured we could at least get some of her scenes with Pluto wrapped up.
So after lunch the rest of them went up to the apartment while I ran over to the Pleasure Chest.
• • •
There are two Pleasure Chests, one in the Village and the other in the East Fifties, but they both amount to the same thing. They are sex stores. They sell creams to heighten excitement, ointments to delay orgasm, dildoes and French ticklers and masturbatory aids and God knows what else. A lot of the sexual arcana we used to establish Alan’s apartment as Sophie’s apartment came from there. Vibrators, sex toys, all sorts of silly dreck.
But what these stores sell the most of is sadomasochistic paraphernalia. This isn’t because such a high percentage of their customers are into torture and bondage, but because other forms of sexual activity don’t really require very much in the way of gadgetry.
S-and-M aficionados, however, are very prop oriented. They are also likely to have a special affinity for leather. As a result, perhaps two-thirds of the store’s inventory was given over to whips and chains and anklets and wristlets and cock rings and God knows what else.
One thing I had never realized before was how expensive all of this gear was. I have been in the shop before but never paid all that much attention to the S-and-M displays.
Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 10