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

by Lawrence Block

  “The way I learned this, originally, it was behind some grass. I used to smoke like a fiend. Get up in the morning and light up a joint. This, to me, is a sickness. I’m serious about this. I don’t put down marijuana. I still smoke, oh, say once a week. I’ll get high. No more than that, and I kind of dig it, but to smoke constantly and go through life being stoned, that has to be sick.

  “Like for example I dig Italian food. I’m a freak for any kind of pasta, and I like a glass of wine with it. Or maybe one or two glasses of wine before I go to bed. Outside of that I’m not a drinker. I never drink hard booze, but I don’t put down drinking, except that anybody who’s drunk all the time, day in and day out, he’s a sick person doing bad things to his body and his head. Same way with grass, using it moderately is one thing and going wild is another.

  “Behind grass, though, I found I could gain control over my sexual responses. It was like I was curling up inside my penis and looking out through the end of it. I’m not good at describing this. What it added up to, I learned to be able to hold back, but I didn’t ever learn to come on cue, and I’m glad. The actors who can, well, they are certainly easy for a director to work with, they save a lot of everybody’s time, but I wouldn’t be in a rush to change places with them.”

  He’s a pleasant enough sort of a guy, Rasputin is. He got into the films because he always liked to screw and thought it would be groovy to be paid for it. He never worried about who might see him in the films or what they might think of him.

  “I’m not close to my family. My mother’s dead, I haven’t seen my father in some years. As far as somebody I know seeing me in a film, it never bothered me at the time because these films weren’t being shown where anybody would see them. Then after you make a few, you know, and you get accustomed to people watching you having sex, and the camera going and everything and them telling you to do this and do that, shit, you couldn’t care less who sees the film afterward. As far as how I feel now, well, everybody I hang with knows I make films, and a lot of them are into the same thing, and it’s really no sweat . . . As a matter of fact, it’s a very good image as far as women are concerned. When they know that you make fuck films professionally, whether they ever saw one of the films or not, they know you are built well and know your way around, and they also know what they’re getting into if they go out with you. And there’s a curiosity factor, too. Maybe there are some girls who avoid you because of doing this for a living, but there are other girls who specifically want to ball you because you do this thing.

  “As far as being an actor, I mean as a permanent thing, I have to say I don’t know. I really don’t know. I can’t kid myself about acting talent. I’m not saying there are no talented actors making sex films. I could name you a lot of them, genuinely talented people. But I don’t kid myself. My talent, if I have a talent, is a sex talent and not a dramatic talent. I think I’m reasonably at ease in front of a camera, but that’s not all it takes.

  “I seriously doubt I could make it in films other than sex films. And I don’t believe there’s a future in this. You hear a lot of talk about how ultimately Hollywood is going to be making big budget porno films, and you hear how this person or that person is going to climb to stardom on the strength of their roles in porno, and I don’t buy any of that. I think the people who say that are just telling themselves stories.

  “But I figure I’m young, I’m single, I’m enjoying myself, so I might as well do this as anything else. I only had a high school education and I’m not qualified for anything good in the way of a job. Eventually maybe I’ll get into producing films, or maybe I’ll find some kind of a business opportunity in some other field, but for the time being I get paid to screw, and that’s the American dream, right?”

  • • •

  We filmed part of the American dream today. We didn’t get started until a little after noon, perhaps because Sunday morning is a sacrilegious time to be filming a fuck film, perhaps because everybody got stoned last night. We set up in an artist’s loft in SoHo on Prince Street. The set was just about right once we had thrown some cheap sheepskin rugs all over the floor and bed. The artist, a friend of a friend of Vinnie’s, let us use the place in return for our setting up a water bed there and leaving it for him when we’re finished. We got one for around seventy bucks installed, so the price is right. The loft itself has a nice monastic feel to it.

  We began by dressing the scene with chicken bones. Alan brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we all wolfed down enough of it to create a realistic pile of bones. Then we piled the rest on a plate for Rasputin to gnaw on later.

  Vinnie got an inspiration a little later, but I’ll mention it now while we’re on the subject of the chicken. There’s the bit where Sophie, unseen, masturbates with the chicken leg, which Rasputin subsequently devours. Vinnie thought of a way to show this. He attached some wires to the chicken leg and filmed it rising magically off the pile of food, then bobbing up and down as if manipulated by Sophie’s invisible hand in and out of Sophie’s equally invisible whatsit. He swears this will look very effective after he has edited it. It didn’t look very effective to me, but I’m willing to believe it will be better on film than it was in the flesh.

  • • •

  Rasputin doesn’t fancy himself an actor. I think, though, that he may be better than he realizes. He was nicely cast for the role in terms of looks. We dolled him up in a full beard, and whoever chose the beard found one that fit his face nicely enough. His monk’s robe looked pretty good, too, and he’s got a high cheek-boned face and rather piercing eyes that fit the character decently.

  At the beginning he was less than sensational. We open with him on his knees, evidently praying, and then you find out that while he’s praying he’s also playing with himself. Well, when we rehearsed his dialogue he kept playing it comic, very comic, and it was awful. Vinnie was rather bad at explaining why it was awful.

  I took Rasputin aside and said the problem was he was playing it for laughs. He gave me a funny look and said he had understood that the scene was supposed to be comic, that his role was supposed to be comic. Yes, I said, but the way to get that effect was to do it absolutely straight. Because the concept was ridiculous and the dialogue absurd, the straighter he played it the funnier it would be.

  Once he took it from that slant, he was quite good. I’ve never liked the way they’ve played comic characters in porn films. The shrink in Deep Throat, for example, goes through all this comic opera shtick, this Borscht Belt mad-scientist accent, and I think that diminishes the comic possibilities of the scene. If Harry Reems had delivered essentially the same lines with utter deadpan sincerity, the scene would have played funnier.

  Not that I wouldn’t be delighted to settle for their box office grosses.

  • • •

  When we came to the entrance of Anna and Karenina, we had the same problem; Rasputin forgot this new principle of the acting trade and began camping it up again. I got him to do it straight, and I really think the shot of him walking straight into the camera with his eyes glaring hypnotically will be a good one. We got all their dialogue scenes shot and reshot, and then we got down to business.

  • • •

  Well, we’ll have a lot of footage to sing I Am A Male Chauvinist over.

  It was a strange experience. I have watched people copulate before, I’ve been to group sex scenes of one sort or another, and while I’ve occasionally found the experience faintly off-putting, I’ve never been particularly unnerved or embarrassed by it. Like all of these things, perhaps the most surprising element is the short amount of time it takes almost everyone to become quite blasé about the whole thing.

  We went rather quickly through the early stuff specified in the script, including all the dialogue parts where Rasputin plays with them and has them diddle each other. Then they went into what you might call an improvisation. One of the girls sat on the waterbed with her legs wide, the other girl knelt in front of her and began
gobbling away, and Rasputin played the role of Canine Lover. We stayed with that for a while, shooting from various angles, exhorting the girls to moan and groan a lot, and then both girls faked gigantic orgasms and collapsed in what we hope is a convincing manner.

  The idea was for Rasputin to seemingly fuck these girls half to death before they can finally induce an orgasm out of him; then Sophie later turns the tables on him by screwing him brainless without getting him off. (I have found, by the way, that every night when I recap more of the plot of this epic in this here diary, I am less and less delighted with having become involved in all this shit in the first place. It keeps sounding progressively dumber.) Anyway, this requires lots of positions, lots of fake orgasms, and lots of shots of Rasputin, cock still magically erect, and proud of it.

  After the first fake orgasm, Vinnie nudged me. “Tell ’em to do something different,” he muttered.

  “Do something different,” I told them.

  “No, no,” he said. Tell ’em what you want ’em to do, for Chrissake.”

  “What do I want them to do?”

  He closed his eyes. “You gotta direct this part. You gotta handle specifying the sex.”

  “What should I specify? I mean do you have anything in mind?”

  “Use your imagination. For starters, oh, have Rasputin sitting with what’s-her-name astride, you know, but she’s facing the same direction he is, toward the camera, and then the other one, she can suck his balls and lick him and maybe play with his asshole or something like that.”

  “That’s original as hell,” I said.

  “You got some better idea, we’ll go with it.”

  I arranged them in the position described above. Rasputin sat back and one of the girls, I can’t remember which is which, and believe me, it doesn’t matter, sat down on him and engulfed his chief dramatic talent with her own. Then, for the hell of it, I gave the other girl a couple of lines to ad-lib. I had her say something about how mighty Rasputin will split her sister in half like a ripe melon, and then I had the sister say she could feel his penis all the way up to her throat.

  (A digression, if you don’t mind. A friend of mine writes movies out in Hollywood. Real movies. One time he was the writer on location, which meant he stayed with the picture while they went out in the desert and shot it, in case they needed any line changes. He was sleeping late one morning when there was a knock on his motel room door. It was a gopher from the lot. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Sigafoos, but they need a line. In the scene where Newman drops the frammis and Kennedy picks it up and hands it back to him, they want Newman to thank him, and so they need a line, and they asked me to ask you.” My friend scratched his head and said, “Have Newman say ‘Thanks.’ The gopher wrote this down and went away and my friend went back to sleep. That’s why they needed a writer on location. They needed me there this afternoon so that I could tell these three people how to fuck and what to mutter at each other while they did it.)

  Anyway, they got in position and played around for awhile. That position, incidentally, man and woman both seated and both facing the same direction, is one which I suspect is spreading all over the country largely as a result of porn films. It is a standard in the industry because it affords maximum visibility. You can see the penis sliding in and out, you can see the vagina, you can see the girl’s breasts, you can see the faces of both partners, and you don’t have to see a lot of pimples on a lot of asses. I am sure the country is full of a lot of couples who have tried that position primarily because they’ve seen it in so many movies. Once again, Life imitates Art.

  • • •

  We moved through a nice little catalog of positions. Every now and then we would cue the girls to go into the throes of orgasm, and they would oblige. Once one of them obliged without being told, giving a very engaging and evidently very real orgasm. The rest of the time they were real pros and stayed with the script. Eventually Vinnie had as much film as he needed and asked Rasputin if he felt like coming.

  He said he had been feeling like coming for quite a while now, and would be delighted to. The script called for both girls to do an oral number on Rasputin and share the fruits of their labors. Vinnie had them work up to it, then cut the camera while they continued. Rasputin was prepared to give him a cue when he was within seconds of release. The girls did their number very convincingly, and it’s a shame we picked that moment to save film, because they gave out with some of their best fellatory techniques. Then, after we had instructed Rasputin to make a lot of noise at the critical moment, and to please not get so far carried away that he lost his Russian accent, he announced that the moment was indeed at hand.

  It went beautifully. He ejaculated magnificently into one mouth, and the girls passed his gift back and forth, and we got as much film as we wanted, and Vinnie yelled, “Cut,” and one of the girls got up and ran into the corner and vomited.

  I wish we had filmed that, too.

  • • •

  Back when we were in script conferences, and when Vinnie and I were going through general discussions of what would or would not work in the film, he wanted my opinion on the extreme close-ups that have become such a cliché in porn films. “Nothing turns me off like a urethra covering an entire thirty-foot screen,” he said. “I hate those fucking close-ups. But what do I know? I mean, I’ve seen so many of the damned things, and they don’t excite me sexually in the first place, so maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?”

  I said I didn’t much like them either, but that I didn’t really know what our average customer felt about it. Maybe people wouldn’t get off unless they were able to zoom in on genitalia. Maybe they would feel it wasn’t really hardcore unless they could see the world’s largest mouth around the world’s hugest glans.

  “Alan talks a lot about the female audience,” I said. “Not that there’s much of one, but I somehow can’t believe the women who do go to pornographic films want to see genitalia that close. It doesn’t seem to mesh with what we’re told about female sexual response.”

  We kicked it around a lot. Then one night I was with a girl who enjoyed porno movies and said so. She has seen Throat three times. And she did have a few things to say about how movies pander to the male audience, as if Alan had written some of her lines for her. (Nevertheless, she was very specific about how Throat in particular degraded women and pandered to the male audience, and that didn’t keep her from seeing it three times, so the hell with her.)

  I tried out our discussion about close-ups. “God, of course I like the extreme close-ups,” she said. “You wouldn’t possibly have a good movie without them.”

  I told Vinnie about this the following day. "I guess we zoom,” he said. “You know something? I don’t know a single goddamned thing about women.”

  • • •

  The exchange between Sophie and Rasputin contains a lot of lines I am not responsible for. I would keep throwing them away and Vinnie would keep putting them in. At one point Rasputin has to say something along the lines of, “Think only in distinct shapes and in the primary colors.”

  When it became obvious that Vinnie thought that line was right up there with Give me liberty or give me death, I gave up and left it alone. But I got enormous satisfaction out of the way Rasputin fucked up that line this evening, over and over and over. He just could not get it right. It wasn’t even a question of his giving the line a bad reading. There is, after all, no way to give it a good reading. But ol’ Rasputin couldn’t get his mouth around the words. He kept putting them in the wrong order, or stumbling on them, or otherwise messing it up to hell and gone. After wasting a certain amount of film, we made him do it over and over until he got it right four times in a row. Then we filmed it and he got it.

  Afterward Vinnie came over to me. He said, “You bastard, I still think it’s a good line.”

  “Why am I a bastard? I didn’t even laugh.”

  “I know. But I could tell you wanted to!”

  • • •

 
; I had dinner tonight with a girl I went with briefly about six years ago. I had told her about the film the last time I saw her, two or three weeks back, and this evening she was full of questions about it. I told her a lot about what we had been doing and she asked if she could come watch the rest of the shooting after dinner.

  There’s a rule about no non-film people on the set, but it’s not that strictly adhered to. We’ve had people around from time to time, and today Alan brought a girl around, so I figured what the hell. I wanted to oblige her, and also I was interested to see what her reaction would be.

  She was a model of decorum, stayed off to one side, didn’t get into any raps with anybody, and generally managed to blend with the furniture. Afterward we went out and did a little semi-serious drinking at Downey’s.

  She said, “I can’t imagine what it’s like. I wanted to see this to get some idea what it’s like for the people involved, the actors and actresses, and I saw, and I still don’t know. I cannot imagine myself doing that.”

  “Have you ever considered it?”

  “No. But I’ve thought about it. I’ve seen a few films, primarily out of curiosity, I don’t really dig them. And my reaction always has been a lot of wondering what it was like and how people could go through with it.”

  “Have you ever done any swinging?”

  “You mean group sex? No. I’ve thought about it, and it’s something I probably could go through with if the situation was right. Nothing structured or planned, but if there were a small group of people with good heads and everybody just sort of winged it and it got to be a group sex scene, I can imagine myself participating in it and enjoying it. But not this. For one thing, it’s fake sex. It’s a terrible fraud.”