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

by Lawrence Block

  “To the extent that all acting is fake.”

  “I suppose so, but, oh, maybe it’s that I don’t think sex is something that ought to be faked. I don’t know exactly what I mean. I could just never do that. It’s not the idea of exposure, the idea that the whole world could see me going down on somebody. In a sense there’s something exciting about that. The exhibitionism of it. Like if somebody without my knowledge took movies of me balling someone, I’m sure I would be angry, but it would also be a little exciting. But to perform like that, to do an act without feeling it, or to try to force yourself to feel it, God. Not for me.

  “Haven’t you ever faked an orgasm, love?”

  She looked at me over the tops of her glasses. She drawled, “Why, dahhhling, I’ve never had to.”

  • • •

  The shooting itself went pretty well, I guess. How can you tell?

  In terms of quantity, we did better than I really thought we would do. We got virtually all of the Rasputin scene in the can. There’s a little left to finish up tomorrow. Rasputin’s final ejaculation, for one. But we’re done with Anna and Karenina. Alan gave the two of them a ride home. I suspect an ulterior motive.

  Sophie was pretty good. Not as good as she thinks she was—I’m beginning to dislike that girl—but better than we thought she would be. Better than I thought she would be, anyway.

  There were some funny things that happened, some funny lines exchanged, but it’s now after two in the morning and, truth to tell, your boy JWW has bloody well had it. If I wrote anything else right now it would be my own philosophical musings on the effects of pornography on the fabric of society, and I am a little too tired to express them all that cogently at the moment.

  —Monday

  We wrapped up the Rasputin scene this morning in an hour.

  We could have finished it last night except for a problem. The script calls for Sophie to disappear in a finger-snap, while ol’ Rasputin is grinding away. He flashes a baffled expression, still grinding, and ejaculates in the middle of the air, then collapses in a puddle.

  This would have been easier to achieve were Rasputin capable of ejaculating on cue; but as he mentioned and I reported earlier, dear friends, he does not possess that talent. And, since Rasputin was not all that highly primed for orgasm, having had a couple already by then, he was none too sanguine about being able to spew forth without anything to spew forth into.

  So we shot the finale this morning. Sophie and Rasputin got into position and fucked furiously, and then Sophie delivered her line to Pluto asking him to get her the hell away from here, or words to that effect, and then we stopped while Rasputin hunched there on his knees manfully refraining from orgasm.

  Sophie scurried out of the way, and Rasputin got into the same position and made a brief flurry of pelvic thrusts in the middle of the air. After a few seconds of this he wrapped his hand around his cock and commenced jerking himself off manfully, as he and Vinnie had arranged. These manual frames would of course be cut from the final film if only to protect Rasputin’s Box Office Image. Then, when he had frigged himself to the point where orgasm was inevitable, he unhanded himself, returned to mock-coital position, and spewed his seed all over the ratty sheepskins.

  When the film is edited, it will look as though Sophie disappears in a puff of smoke, as though Rasputin continues to screw where she has lately been, and as though he comes spontaneously from this surge of air-fucking.

  At least we hope it will work that way.

  Or they do. Because I don’t really give a damn.

  I took the afternoon off. After we finished the Rasputin sequence I announced that I was taking the rest of the day off. Alan said that was impossible, and Vinnie said they needed me, and I said the hell they did, in the first place, and in the second place I didn’t care. I reminded them that somebody had to see the picture Alan was afraid of plagiarizing, and I told them I had an appointment to talk to Dell about the way the production diary was going, and I said that, in any event, they were just shooting some minor scenes and could certainly shoot them without me.

  They acquiesced, which is just as well, because I was already on my way out the door.

  The business about having an appointment with Dell was a lie. The business about seeing the movie may have been a lie. I’m going to go out for dinner in a few minutes, and afterward I may run down to Times Square and look at the picture. Its title is The Devil In Miss Jones, incidentally, not what I called it earlier.

  I spent the afternoon sitting around and reading and drinking iced tea. And having some thoughts about this project in particular and porn in general.

  Which I will now share with you. Unless wiser editorial heads prevail, that is, in which case we’ll chop out this heavy section of the diary and confine ourselves to all the cute and cunning little things that happened in the course of manufacturing this epic.

  It’s strange. I have always taken it as a fundamental postulate that censorship sucks. The broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution has seemed to me absolutely essential to the functioning of a free society. Any man ought to be able to write anything at all, and any other man ought to have the option of reading it or not, as he chooses.

  I have not ceased to believe this, and doubt that I ever will.

  Nor have I ceased to believe in the social utility of pornography. The arguments against it, whether expressed rationally or in the lunatic style of censorship’s more vocal advocates, have never impressed me. Pornography does not make streets unsafe, does not inspire sex crime, does not corrupt the young. On the contrary, insofar as it has any function at all, I would suspect its function is valuable.

  I don’t go all the way and accept the premise that pornography prevents sex crimes, that a pervert who might otherwise commit rape can sublimate his desires by watching a fuck film. I just don’t think this is true. Rapes are evidently committed by persons whose sexual orientation is such that they prefer to take by force. The proportion of compulsive rapists who have other sexual outlets available to them would tend to confirm this. The example of Denmark, in which sex crimes diminished when pornography was legalized, is less impressive when the facts are scrutinized. The dropoff consisted almost entirely of a decline in certain offenses that were no longer classified as crimes, and thus did not figure in the statistical picture. By extension, the easiest way to effect a decline in reported rapes is to make rape legal; then no one will bother reporting it.

  I’m not even impressed by arguments that pornography will have a deleterious effect upon children. I don’t think this is so. On the contrary, I think pornography is probably one of the most useful media for the sexual education of the young. Children have an intense need to know, to see, to understand, and I would think that the opportunity to watch a movie of people fucking would constitute a more meaningful educational experience than is afforded by sex education classes or pamphlets from Planned Parenthood. This is not to disparage the latter, only to point up the potential utility of the former.

  I saw a G-rated picture a while ago in which one of the good guys chops off the hand of one of the bad guys. Blood everywhere, the whole number. I would think that would be far more likely to warp the psyche of a child (assuming anything will) than a picture in which a couple of congenial people make love. It is perhaps a prejudice of mine, but I believe wholeheartedly that a gun is infinitely more obscene than a penis, and murder a far more antisocial act than copulation.

  These arguments on behalf of pornography are nothing new, neither to me nor to you. I have embraced this pro-porn position for a long time. I still embrace it.

  So?

  So I find myself wondering about some of the other effects of pornography. Effects not upon the reader or viewer, that is to say, but upon society as a whole. And, even more, the effects upon the creators of pornography.

  When an advocate of pornography spends enough time wandering around the Times Square area, he can very easily come away
from the experience with the unsettled feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. It is rather difficult to walk past porno store after porno store, peep show after peep show, theater after theater, massage parlor after massage parlor, and still regard this not as urban blight but as the radiant bloom of a healthy society.

  One may argue that moral judgments against pornography are unwarranted. Yet one may still feel free to render aesthetic judgment. And it is hard to deny that this stuff is garbage. Our film, which presumably attempts to be more amusing and more literate than the rest, is nevertheless garbage at heart. The genre is basically a garbage genre. Pornography, after all, has the key purpose of sexual excitation. If it doesn’t turn you on, it is not doing what it is supposed to do.

  This is not to say that this purpose is bad. But it is to say that it severely limits pornography’s artistic potential.

  Thus the pornography industry gives rise to a situation in which a great many people spend their lives creating garbage for a considerably greater number of people to spend part of their lives watching. It is hard not to conclude that both groups are wasting their time.

  (One must keep a sense of proportion. The same charge could be leveled against Daytime Television, for example, whereas few people have advocated banning Let’s Make A Deal. That something constitutes a social blight does not mean it ought to be prohibited by law. It need only be deplored.)

  • • •

  The other reservation I have about pornography, and one which has had more personal impact of late, has to do with its effects upon its creators. And here I have to distinguish between writers of pornographic novels (or film scripts, for that matter) and active performers. One could argue that those who create from a distance have their souls deadened by their work, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. I know too many successful writers who got their start grinding out sex books, too many successful photographers who started on cheesecake and porn, to buy this line of reasoning. If a man starts writing pornography and goes on forever writing pornography, I would be more likely to believe that he had a dead soul to begin with.

  I’m thinking more of the actors and actresses who make movies like this one. They remind me more than anything else of the girls who work in massage parlors, and, like those girls, represent the darker side of the New Morality.

  Because they are sexual psychopaths, in the sense that Robert Lindner foresaw the coming age as the Age of the Psychopath. They do not feel anything. They engage publicly in intimacy. They perform sexual acts for distinctly nonsexual purposes.

  It is commonplace to regard them as exploited by the owners of massage parlors, by the makers of films. Exploited in the way that more orthodox prostitutes are exploited by their pimps. If this were so it would be a grievous fault, to be sure, but I think their exploitation is a far more serious matter. They are exploited by themselves.

  • • •

  Perhaps none of this matters. It is always a mistake to look at a trend and assume it will continue in its present direction. Human affairs do run in cycles. Hegel’s view of synthesis and antithesis still holds, although his premise that all this is in aid of something is harder to accept.

  One considers again the Scandinavian example. The ultimate effect of the availability of pornography appears to be a speedy saturation; the audience eventually tires of watching people fuck.

  So I still do not believe that the situation calls for censorship.

  It merely calls for despair.

  • • •

  It is now late at night, some hours after I concluded the observations above. I just read them over and find them an accurate enough exposition of my feelings, however pompously expressed. The diary is indeed a fascinating art form, and could well be a more useful vehicle for analysis than the game Freudians play.

  I did wind up seeing The Devil In Miss Jones, and wonder now whether my feelings about it are as they might have been had I not prefaced seeing the movie with the foregoing reflections on pornography. It is an exceedingly well made movie. You may well have seen it by now, but I’ll summarize the plot anyway. A woman kills herself and winds up at the gate of Hell. She protests that she has led a blameless life, has never committed a sin, and that it is utterly unfair for her to be sentenced to Hell in light of her past record. The gatekeeper replies that it is indeed a shame, but that suicide is the ultimate mortal sin and there is no reprieve possible. He agrees, though, that she should at least have the opportunity to experience the pleasures of the flesh before being shuttered off to spend Eternity in the Netherworld.

  With that premise established, she goes through the usual gamut. She learns to enjoy the application of a penis to her three obvious orifices. She participates in a lesbian sequence and in two threesomes, one with another woman and a man, one with two men and herself. In the former she and the other girl mutually fellate their male partner and exchange his semen in a scene disconcertingly reminiscent of what we filmed yesterday with Rasputin and Anna and Karenina; in the latter there is a lovely sandwich sequence in which she is penetrated simultaneously in anus and vagina. There is also an almost endless sequence in which she masturbates in a bathtub with a stream of water.

  The film ends with her in Hell, sharing a cell with a lunatic. All she wants is for him to fuck her because she can’t get off by herself (although she was doing pretty well in the bathtub) and all he wants is for her to shut up, because if you’re very quiet, you can occasionally hear a fly buzzing around.

  The film’s excellences are several. It is very well photographed, first of all. More important, it has a female lead who can really act convincingly. She talks during the sex scenes, really talks, and by God you believe that she’s into what she’s doing. She is by no means the most strikingly attractive woman ever to show her ass to the camera, and she’s a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but she is a convincing actress and the first one I’ve ever seen in a porn flick.

  In spite of all this, and in spite of the fact that the script throughout is at worst written in English and at its best moderately intelligent, there is something very wrong with the film.

  It ain’t erotic.

  To be sure, this is at least in part a subjective judgment. A wholly objective judgment on a film’s erotic effect is beyond my province. Eroticism is, if not in the eye of the beholder, certainly in another organ. The mere fact that I did not respond erotically to the escapades of Miss Jones does not preclude the possibility of such a response on the part of other viewers of the film, especially in view of the fact that porno films rarely move me much anymore, and that hardly any film could have created much of a stirring in my loins given the mood I was in all day.

  It’s my guess, though, that hardly anyone is going to find this film erotic, excepting of course those yoyos who get a reflexive hard-on every time somebody flashes a tit at them. And it’s almost as though the film’s intent is anti-erotic.

  Consider the opening. Miss Jones gets into a bathtub and cuts her wrists. She takes a long time doing this, and the blood wells up so convincingly I was willing to believe she really did cut them. I figured they shot this scene after they shot the rest of the film, and the actress obligingly gave her all for the film by bleeding to death. It was that realistic.

  And, unless you’re a necrophiliac, that doesn’t turn you on; all it turns is your stomach. Not only does it not turn you on but it turns you off to the point where it is very hard for you to get in a sexy mood in any of the sequences that follow.

  The rest of the film was also anti-erotic, although I am not entirely certain why. Maybe because the film never communicated a feeling of fun. Pleasure, perhaps, but not fun. Maybe it was too artsy craftsy. Maybe it was too pretentious. I’m not exactly certain why, but I know one good defense for this film would be that it does not appeal to the prurient interest. And that, as I see it, is its chief flaw. Because a porn movie that does not appeal to the prurient interest must be adjudged a failure. That, after all, is what
pornography is for; without it, its d’être has no raison.

  • • •

  I just called Alan to tell him essentially what I wrote above, much abbreviated, and reassure him that we have nothing to worry about. I suggested we simply avoid emphasizing any of the Devil aspects in the film’s title. We still aren’t set on a title, incidentally. My suggestion is Different Strokes, perhaps because I’ve wanted to use that on a book for so long, and with so little success. Dell seems to like the title; at least they can live with it. Vinnie doesn’t care what we call it. Alan doesn’t hate it, but neither does he love it, and he keeps coming up with ideas of his own. Fortunately they are all so terrible that it’s easy to talk him out of them.

  I have to report my conversation with Alan after that. I didn’t tape it obviously, but it went very much like this:

  JWW: Say, whatever happened with Anna and Karenina?

  ALAN: What do you mean?

  JWW: Well, the other night you wandered away with one of them on each of your arms, ostensibly to drop them at their doors, which I somehow don’t believe for a moment.

  ALAN: Is that right.

  JWW: I thought perhaps you might like to tell me what happened afterward. I’m like this at movies, the final curtain comes down and I can’t help wondering whether or not they live happily ever after.

  ALAN: I’m not sure it’s any of your business.

  JWW: Well, it is, in a way. You know the production diary I’m writing.

  ALAN: Jesus Christ, fella. You’re not putting me in any fucking book.

  JWW: Oh, of course not.

  ALAN: Then what are you talking about?

  JWW: Let me put it this way. You know, I’ve got to have interesting things happen in the diary. To keep the reader awake. It can’t just be we-shot-this-today-and-it-took-seven-takes and like that. It has to be sexy and interesting and all the rest of that shit.

  ALAN: I’m hip. So?

  JWW: So when you walked away with Frick and Frack, it occurred to me that we could include a cutesy bit of one of the backers walking away with the two of them and trying to get something going.