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

by Lawrence Block

  (Not that I’m putting it down. A friend and I have discovered that light restraint is a pleasant enough way to pass a lazy Sunday afternoon, offering as it does an interesting change of pace and an opportunity to act out a lot of one’s subliminal impulses. But we’ve always made do with dog collars and binder’s twine, and it was somewhat jarring to see wristlets going for ten dollars a copy and whips for similarly exorbitant prices. I just can’t appreciate the intrinsic superiority of a ten-dollar wristlet to a forty-nine cent dog collar. The fault is probably mine. That, no doubt, is the difference between a dabbler and a devotee.)

  In any event, I saw right off that I could easily squander a couple hundred dollars of the production company’s money on props. I stood there picking and choosing, trying to economize, and realizing that they were all waiting for me and that I was wasting time as well as money. Then I asked myself what Alan would do, and that was the right move. By thinking like a producer I managed to save us a nice piece of change.

  I got hold of the manager and explained I wanted the props for just a couple of days. Just as he was starting to say they didn’t do rentals, I sidestepped him and suggested that he loan us the gear free of charge, in return for which we would give him a credit in the titles. “Properties and special consideration courtesy of the Pleasure Chest.”

  It got him where he lived, by God. He took time to insist that the credit line specify the Pleasure Chest of New York, as there were other stores similarly named elsewhere, with whom he had no connection.

  No problem there, I assured him. Then it occurred to him that he was perhaps being hustled. How did he know who I was? How did he know I would bring the shit back when I was done with it?

  I told him to write it all up as a sale and I would give him a check, but that I wanted him to note on the receipt his willingness to take back for full refund any merchandise returned in good order within seven days of purchase. I figured we would probably shoot all the scenes in Madge’s office within two days at the outside, but I wanted to give us room if we needed retakes.

  And I had an ulterior motive on top of that. I figured my little friend and I could determine whether there is in fact any intrinsic difference between a ten-dollar wristlet and a forty-nine cent dog collar.

  Once we came to agreement, which did not take long, the manager went out of his way to be helpful. He brought out special stuff from the back room, torture devices far too hideous to describe. Since they were costing us nothing, and since they would turn Madge’s office into a veritable chamber of horrors, I saw no reason to turn anything down. Then he wrote up the bill of sale and it came to $539.73, tax included.

  Swear to God.

  He agreed to hold my check for the week, which was just as well, because that’s more than I’ve got in my account. Then he had one of his assistants drive me to our location in the store’s half-ton panel truck. I could never have shlepped all that crap in and out of a cab. As a matter of fact, it took two people to carry the Iron Maiden around.

  Alan started to throw a fit, talking about costs. “Why, you must have spent two hundred dollars on all this shit!” Which shows what he knows about the current market price of sadomasochistic paraphernalia.

  I told him the bottom line figure and watched the color leave his face. It was an alarming sight, so I cut it short by explaining that it was costing us nothing.

  “That’s my boy,” he kept saying. I thought he was going to kiss me.

  • • •

  Madge and Pluto played together just the way we had all thought they would. Which is to say that they were perfect. They both had all morning to get to know each other and to establish the characterizations they would bring to their roles. They were both on hand during the entire chessboard fiasco, with nothing to do outside of that one framing shot, and they evidently hit it off fairly well.

  I have a sort of hunch that Madge and Pluto may share a mattress together before this film is over and done with. I can’t say whether this notion generates from the rapport they seem to have or from the poetic beauty of a romance blooming between the film’s two leading nonsexual performers. She’s maybe ten years older than he is, but her body has certainly borne the years well. One of the bits filmed today, where she shrugs off her shapeless bathrobe and gears up in studded leather belts and such, should warm the cockles (among other things) of any devout masochist, and if that masochist has a healthy Oedipal fixation blooming in his soul, he may well go through the ceiling.

  I mentioned my notion to Vinnie just to have something to say. Vinnie and I don’t have that much to say to each other. He said he thought Pluto was married.

  I admitted this was so.

  “Well, he wouldn’t cheat on his wife,” said Vinnie the Director. “I mean, be serious, will you?”

  “Just a little joke,” I said, and walked quickly away.

  Here we are making this film, arranging people who’ve never met before in weird sexual postures and taking pictures of them, and Vinnie can’t believe that one of our number would be physically unfaithful to his wife.

  Would you mind being eaten by a sheepdog, my dear? Does it matter to you if it’s a male or female sheepdog?

  Christ.

  • • •

  I just got a very nervous telephone call from a very nervous Alan the Producer. It seems he just got a call from a comparably nervous backer who read him a review from, I think, Variety. It seems somebody just released our film.

  It is called something like Mrs. Jones Meets The Devil. It concerns some woman who dies without losing her virginity, and protests the injustice of this, and the Devil agrees and lets her return to earth to sample sexual pleasure before spending eternity in Hell.

  According to Alan, this means we’re dead. I told him that, while the news does not exactly thrill me, neither does it make me puke. We will be sued, says Alan, for plagiarism. To this I replied that I found it highly unlikely that one producer of porno films would sue another producer of porno films for plagiarism. Also, from what he’s told me of the plot (which may be garbled, having gone through so many repetitions) we are less likely to be sued by these people than, say, by Goethe. We’re spinning off the Faust legend.

  Anyway, who cares?

  Alan does, I’m afraid. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to rewrite the script and remove all of the Devil aspects. I told him that would leave us with the Rasputin scene and a few hundred feet of footage showing Sophie walking around various exteriors. He laughed apologetically and said he was just kidding, which I’ll reserve judgment on, thanks just the same.

  We did agree that it might behoove one or the other of us to see this movie as soon as possible.

  • • •

  Tomorrow we get to shoot some sex stuff. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not I’m looking forward to it. On the one hand, the preceding few days have been a sort of stalling. We haven’t really filmed anything you couldn’t show to a third grade class at a convent school. At the same time, I’m a little bit apprehensive about my role in tomorrow’s proceedings. It seems as though I’m going to wind up doing a lot of the actual directing.

  Vinnie himself has been working, in his subtle fashion, to give me this impression. The scene we’re filming tomorrow is the Rasputin number. Specifically we’re shooting all the action that involves Anna and Karenina, so as to avoid having to pay them for more than the day. We might have to pay them for another day’s dubbing and such, but we want to avoid more than one day’s shooting. If things go well, we may be able to finish the entire Rasputin sequence in the day. It’s all inside, and daylight’s not a factor at all.

  • • •

  Of course we won’t be doing the song tomorrow. Rasputin doesn’t sing.

  I have had more aggravation over that fucking song than anyone should be expected to believe.

  I love the song. We all have our madnesses, and as adamant as Tim is about including a sheepdog scene, that’s how I am about the fucking song. I wil
l kill in order to have that song in the picture.

  I did not write the song specifically for the picture, although it has seemed strategically wise to give Alan that impression. I wrote it a few months ago while I was driving somewhere. That’s when I usually write songs, when I’m driving, and I do it largely to keep awake. I generally forget the songs when I get wherever it is I’m driving. Some of them linger in the mind, though, and I become quite proud of them.

  When I first gave Alan a draft of the screenplay, he went out of the way to praise the Rasputin song and the other one as well, “He Never Touched My Heart,” which of course I did write specifically for the film. Ever since then, though, he has been questioning the Rasputin song. Why do we need a song there, he’ll ask. How does it advance the story line?

  I replied that it advanced the plot as much as having Rasputin play stinkfinger with Anna and Karenina. What did the song have to do with anything? It was topical, said I, and answered the possible charge of male chauvinism by depicting Rasputin as a male chauvinist and holding him up to ridicule. (When you are reasoning with idiots, it is permissible to use idiot reasoning; moreover, it is essential.)

  Ah, said Alan, but therein lay another problem. The problem of anachronism. For, after all, the whole concept of Women’s Liberation and Male Chauvinism was unknown in Rasputin’s time! I swear he said this. And not just once. He made this point on several occasions. Some of the time I yelled at him. Other times I took the position that this anachronism would constitute a sort of inside gag for history buffs.

  Then he pointed out that it would slow things down to have Rasputin pick up a balalaika and wail away for four verses in the middle of his big sex number. I felt it would give everybody a chance to heal up, but said instead that we wouldn’t have Rasputin do his thing right there but would have him record it and use it as a voiceover during the threesome with the two girls. Vinnie and I had earlier discussed the inherent problem of having something for the audience to listen to while watching people ball. You have a few obvious choices, all of them slightly bad. You can run a music track, you can leave things more or less silent, or you can encourage your performers to ad-lib enough dialogue to keep the more verbally oriented members of your audience from dozing off. Since a lot of the performers have enough trouble looking aroused without having to sound aroused as well, this last method is often done by looping moans and groans and shouts of “Stick it in deeper!” or “You sure suck like an angel!” or whatever afterward. There’s no lip-synch problem, because you do this over extreme close-ups of genitalia.

  My feeling was that the song would let us get away with a nice long sex scene here between Rasputin and the two girls, and would be amusing for people amused by that sort of thing, whereas the bug-eyed porno freaks would have little trouble concentrating on the ins and outs of the sex without being distracted by my male chauvinist anthem. Alan agreed, Vinnie agreed strongly, and that seemed to be that.

  The next question was, suppose our Rasputin couldn’t sing? As it turned out, he can’t. I finally assured Alan I would arrange for a tape of somebody singing the thing. I think what I’m finally going to do is sing it myself. I’ll buy an hour or two of studio time and hire a guitarist and just do it. I’m not a singer, but then I’m not a songwriter either. Or a screenwriter, or a director, or an actor, or any of these things.

  Which gets us back to the question of my directing this, or being de facto director of the sex bits. I was talking to one of the camera crew today and he told me about an experience he had on Vinnie’s last picture. The script called for the female lead to get herself buggered by one of the guys. (The film was a quickie, so I doubt there was a script as such, just a very thin story line for the performers to improvise from.)

  Anyway, the girl refused. So what they did was pantomime it, with the actress being taken dog-style but with her more conventional portal employed, and then they got a stand-in for buggery close-ups which would be intercut with the movie, so that the viewer would get the impression that the young lady was really being anally employed. I understand this does not happen that infrequently—they also have cum shot stand-ins, who have orgasms for stud actors who just can’t manage one more ejaculation. But the capper on this one was that the stand-in was a male. The cameraman swears to this. They used a guy who evidently had an appealing and somewhat feminine behind, and Vinnie later had to edit the film very carefully so as to avoid any frames in which the stand-in’s masculine genitalia were displayed.

  • • •

  The same cameraman asked me who we were going to use for the Arouser.

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Seems he has worked on films in which a certain person is employed to provide erections for male performers who are having difficulties. The usual process is to send one of the actresses into another room with the guy and give him head until he gets hard, then send him back on stage to do his number. But one producer has a girl he uses just for this purpose. She’s either camera shy or ugly, I didn’t ascertain which, but the thing is that she gives head to all these male performers but has never appeared in a film. In fact she doesn’t even sit there and watch them film. She’s in another room reading comic books or something, and when difficulties arise (in that they fail to arise), the person with the problem goes into her room and gets himself gobbled until he can do his thing for the cameras.

  All this was prelude to an anecdote I’m not sure I believe. The cameraman says he was there, but people always have a tendency to attribute firsthand knowledge to stories they’ve heard third-hand themselves, so I don’t know. But I rather prefer to believe this happened, and I’m certainly not going to keep it to myself.

  Seems this chick was curled up on the couch with a Wonder Woman comic or something when the door opened and a guy walked in. The guy was not an actor. He was some sort of hanger-on, the producer’s cousin or an investor or the delivery boy from the liquor store, God knows what exactly. And he was looking for the men’s room or the elevator or something, and he walks in and sees this naked girl on the couch.

  “Hi,” she says. “Well, take off your clothes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Take off your clothes, silly, and I’ll give you some head.”

  “You’ll, uh, give me some head?”

  “Sure,” she says. “After all, that’s what I’m here for.”

  Well, the clown is not going to question this too closely, naturally enough, so he shucks his clothes and sets himself down on the couch and our girl goes into her act. And, perhaps because the circumstances are slightly bizarre, it takes quite a while for anything to happen. Which makes sense from the girl’s point of view; she’s used to cases in which desperate measures have to be taken, and occasionally labors for close to an hour to achieve the desired angle of perpendicularity. Anyway, after fifteen minutes or so during which the guy keeps praying that, if this is a dream, he won’t wake up, she finally manages to give him an erection.

  At which point she removes her mouth and says, “Well, that ought to hold you. See you.”

  GUY: Whattaya, crazy or something?

  GIRL: Go on, they’re waiting for you.

  GUY: You can’t leave me like this. Look, you want to fuck or whatever you want, I don’t care, but you gotta get me off!

  GIRL: Get you off?

  Whereupon she explains, whereupon he explains, whereupon he says that, since he’s not an actor, and since she has provoked this undeniable excitement within him, the least she can do is carry him the rest of the way to orgasm. Whereupon she in turn asks him what the hell kind of a girl he thinks she is, anyway.

  The rest of their dialogue is presumably unrecorded. The cameraman says he heard that the girl did finally get the guy off, if that matters.

  In any case, we don’t have an Arouser, at least not as far as I know. It would be a great credit line, though. ”Sexual Excitation by Suzy Slutt.”

  And one envisions Sophie accepting her Oscar and making her speech:
“And last but not least I want to thank all the little people who worked so hard behind the scenes to make the picture a success. The wardrobe man. The script girl. And Suzy Slutt, who made my leading man a tower of strength.”

  Don’t get me wrong. I love Hollywood.

  —Sunday

  This is Rasputin’s fourth feature length film. He broke into the business on the West Coast where he made a lot of short films for quickie outfits who make those two-hundred-foot jobs for private parties and like that.

  It’s been widely assumed that the availability of hardcore features at theaters across the nation would put an end to the private stag film business. I’ve lately learned that this has not happened at all. The private customers may go to theaters to see the features but still want films for private viewing. And even in this day and age there are people who will not go to the theaters.

  Rasputin used to get fifty bucks for a day’s work, which might amount to half a dozen films or more, depending on how the producer wound up cutting the things together. There was no acting required in the quickies, just sexual ability, which Rasputin has in abundance. His penis is larger than average, although he’s not in the same league with that California porno star with a thirteen-inch prong. More importantly, he erects easily and maintains an erection as long as he wants.

  And sometimes longer.

  “There are guys who can come on cue, you know, but I can’t do that. In a way I’m sort of glad I can’t. To me, sex is a very enjoyable thing. You don’t get rich in this business, so if I didn’t enjoy the sexual part of it, well, I guess I’d find something else to do. But I do enjoy it. And an orgasm is a very pleasurable thing, that’s what it is, sheer pleasure, and to be able to turn it on and off like a faucet, I don’t like the idea of it. I mean, when I come, I want it to be because I’m so excited that I would have trouble not coming.

  “Not that I would really have trouble, because that’s something I learned a long time ago, like before I first made a film. To be able to hold back an orgasm anytime I want to. It’s a question of training your mind and your body. Not by doing sums in your head or anything like that, but by concentrating on those muscles and concentrating on your mental attitude and just being, oh, stronger than your sexual impulses. Mind over matter, I guess you could call it