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

by Lawrence Block

  ALAN: Which backer? Those guys . . .

  JWW: Oh, come on. No real backer, some figment of my endless imagination.

  ALAN: I see.

  JWW: So?

  ALAN: So what?

  JWW: So what happened?

  ALAN: Can’t you get that out of your imagination, too?

  JWW: Probably, but I’d rather it be consistent with reality if it’s just as easy. It’ll give some insight into the girls, see, and I think it might work better than if I just wing the whole thing. Of course if you’re embarrassed . . .

  ALAN: Why in the fuck should I be embarrassed?

  JWW: Well, some people are uptight about sex.

  ALAN: Are you kidding? Me uptight about sex? Be sensible, man.

  JWW: Well.

  ALAN: Oh, fuck it. All right I offered the two of them a ride home, and not because I’m running a taxi service. I got very horny watching them do their thing. Didn’t you?

  JWW: Yeah.

  ALAN: They’re both so young and cunty. And it wasn’t hard to think of things I wanted to do with them. Not after spending the whole day watching them do things. Plus I always wanted two girls at once.

  JWW: You never did that before?

  ALAN: Only with hookers. Hookers are the worst thing in the fucking world, man. You can work out your fantasies with them, and ultimately all you accomplish is you lose the fantasy, because it’s all basically unreal.

  JWW: I know what you mean.

  ALAN: So we got in the car and I told them I had some really good grass at my place and did they want to come up and smoke? Do you smoke?

  JWW: Once in a great while.

  ALAN: I think you told me that once before. I only smoke with chicks around. I don’t get anything out of it. Do you know what I mean? I always pretend to be high but I never feel a goddamned thing.

  JWW: There’s lot of people like that.

  ALAN: You, for instance?

  JWW: No, I invariably get stoned. That’s what I don’t like about it.

  ALAN: I’m not sure I follow that.

  JWW: It’s not important. You invited them to smoke.

  ALAN: Right, and they said fine. You have to have grass around for the chicks, you know. It makes you socially acceptable. If you ask them to come up and fuck, you’re a dirty old man. If you ask them to smoke they know it means to fuck but you become acceptable as a member of the younger generation. They knew what I wanted, for Christ’s sake. But we all went up to my place and got stoned, or rather they did and I faked it.

  JWW: Uh-huh.

  ALAN: I showed them all the props for Sophie’s apartment, which they thought were interesting. All that movie-biz glamour, you know. Then we started fooling around, you know. I’d make out a little with one of them and a little with the other, and then I said how about getting it together and doing that scene, and I’d pretend to be Rasputin.

  JWW: Uh-huh.

  ALAN: It seemed as good an approach as any.

  JWW: Very original, I’d call it.

  ALAN: Fuck off. One of them, I can’t remember which one, damn it I mean I can but I can’t remember which is Anna and which is Karenina. You and your names.

  JWW: Nobody can remember which is which.

  ALAN: The one I’m talking about is the one who vomited. After the blowjob sequence.

  JWW: I know which one you mean.

  ALAN: She said she never made it with girls except in front of the camera. They got into this long stoned discussion and she decided she would like to try it not in front of a camera to find out where her head was really at on the subject.

  JWW: I’ll bet she used those very words.

  ALAN: Huh?

  JWW: Nothing.

  ALAN: So that’s about it. We made it for a couple of hours. They’re very good.

  JWW: I got that impression.

  ALAN: It turned out the other one liked it with chicks even without a camera. She said now she’s going to have to have some time to figure out the meaning of it.

  JWW: The best of British luck to her.

  ALAN: So what else can I tell you? Positions? Forget it, man.

  JWW: Okay.

  ALAN: I came three times, if that’s something you want to put in your book.

  JWW: That’s not bad at your age.

  ALAN: You prick, I’m not all that much older than you are.

  JWW: Hell, it’s pretty good at my age, too.

  ALAN: They got me so fucking hot I thought I was going to die from it.

  JWW: Better than with hookers?

  ALAN: Of course. The attitude is different, you know? Not their attitude necessarily, but your own feelings, the way you feel about it. Paying for it ruins it.

  JWW: It’s good these ladies were doing it for love.

  ALAN: Listen, I didn’t promise them anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.

  JWW: That’s not what I was getting at.

  ALAN: Then I’m not sure I follow you.

  JWW: Nothing to follow. If I sound sarcastic it’s probably because I’m a little envious. You had a better time last night than I did.

  ALAN: I’ve got their phone numbers, if you’re interested.

  JWW: I don’t think so but I appreciate it.

  ALAN: Well, is that enough for your fucking production diary?

  JWW: I guess so.

  ALAN: Just don’t use my name, remember. All of this happened to some backer who doesn’t exist. Don’t forget it.

  JWW: Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alan. What kind of a guy do you think I am?

  ALAN: I was just emphasizing.

  JWW: Well, it’s not necessary. I mean, in a business like this, we have to trust each other. Right?

  ALAN: Damn straight.

  I think I mentioned earlier that I doubted the creation of pornographic films had a particularly bad effect upon the people who worked behind the scenes. After that conversation, though, I’m not so sure about it. My participation in this venture does not seem to have improved my character much.

  Well, I never said I was a nice person.

  —Tuesday

  Today was fun.

  Maybe I got things out of my system yesterday. I don’t know. But just now I reread yesterday’s entry and there’s the odd feeling that it was written by somebody else. I feel very lighthearted about pornography, and perhaps a little lightheaded in the bargain.

  Today’s filming amounted to a lot of running around. First we assembled our caravan and drove up into Rockland County where Alan’s stockbroker lives. Alan’s stockbroker is around forty, much given to conservative business suits and radical politics. He makes a great point of letting you know casually that William Kunstler is a friend of his. I don’t know how radical politics mixes with commuting to Wall Street and lording it in Rockland County, but that’s his problem.

  I’ll tell you, though, he’ll never be my stockbroker, assuming I’ll ever have need of one in the first place. This pillar of the community has invested two thousand dollars of his own money in Different Strokes. If he throws his own bread down rat holes with such joie de vivre, I can just imagine what stocks he touts his clients on.

  The reason we were out there is the guy keeps horses. Three of them. One would have been enough, but what the hell.

  What nobody bothered to determine in advance was if one of the horses was a stallion. Luck was in our corner today, boys and girls. Or in our stall, or something, because one of the rough beasts was indeed a male, and an unaltered male at that. I suppose we could have made do with a gelding, but there is no way on earth to film the Man o’ War scene with a mare. The close-up of the horse’s genitalia would not be all that effective with a mare.

  We had our usual crew plus Vinnie and Alan and Sophie and Pluto. The scene will take way under a minute of film time but it took all morning with the commuting there and back. Well, that’s what we call production values, that’s why we’re spending three times what most porn producers spend. That’s what’s gonna bring ’em into the th
eaters, by God. “Harry, let’s go see Different Strokes. They got this dynamite close-up of a horse’s cock.” Sure thing, boys.

  The scene went briskly enough. Everybody was in a good humor. Pluto had been telling road company stories on the way out, and all of this left Sophie with the happy feeling of really being in show business, so she did her bit better than anybody had hoped. It’s not much, just a facial reaction, but how she reacts determines whether the scene is a cheap sight gag or genuinely amusing.

  Speaking of genuinely amusing, there was a moment that convulsed us. We had this enormous swaybacked stallion posed in his box stall, perhaps taking a little pride in the fact that we had fastened a nameplate overhead proclaiming him to be Man o’ War. (He wasn’t even the same color as Big Red, but what the hell. I wonder, incidentally, if we shouldn’t have changed the script to call the horse Secretariat, in the interest of being up-to-date and all. But it didn’t seem worth getting a new sign made.)

  Anyway, here we had this horse standing there, and we filmed everything but the horse cock extreme close-up, or ECU as we say in the movie biz. Then somebody, I think one of the crew, asked how we were going to get the horse to have a hard-on. The theory seemed to be that an erect horse cock would be more dramatically effective than a limp horse cock.

  Somebody asked Stanley the Stockbroker if he happened to have a mare in heat on the premises. He didn’t, nor did he know where he could find one.

  “But he gets erections all the time,” Stanley said. “You just look at him and he’ll get it up.”

  “We’ve been looking at him for twenty minutes,” Alan said, “and it hasn’t had any effect on him.”

  “Well, maybe we could stimulate him,” somebody said.

  Sophie said, “It’s bad enough when actors have this problem. I’m not giving no head to no horse.”

  “If you do, I’ll film it,” Vinnie said.

  “It wouldn’t fit in the picture,” Alan said.

  “It’d fit in some picture,” Vinnie said.

  “Some picture,” somebody said, with a slightly different inflection.

  “Hey, Sophie,” somebody said, “show him your tits.”

  “Be serious,” Sophie said.

  “Then sing ‘Melancholy Baby.’”

  “Sophie, why don’t you just jerk him off a little?”

  “Why don’t you jerk yourself off, schmuck?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What are you, crazy? I’m not getting in there with him. I’m terrified of horses.”

  “He’s a very gentle horse,” Stanley the Stockbroker said.

  “Go on, Sophie.”

  “Listen, smartass, go in there and jerk him off yourself.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m a male.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I happen to be straight.”

  “Maybe the horse is a fag.”

  Stanley defended the horse, saying he was a proven sire. Everybody was pretty sick of Stanley by now. People suggested showing dirty pictures to the horse or blowing in his ear. There was a lot of speculation as to what sort of picture might have an aphrodisiacal effect upon a horse. There was precious little agreement on the subject.

  We might still be there, but evidently our conversation got to the horse and his penis emerged in a most miraculous way. It very nearly touched the floor of the stall. Somebody caught it with a camera.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” somebody said as we were going. “We turned the mother on, it’s only right that we get him off.”

  “I don’t fuck horses,” Sophie said majestically. “I’m a Star.”

  We had some coffee. Stanley the Stockbroker kept coming on to Sophie, giving her tips on the market. He must have a wife but she didn’t put in an appearance. We told Stanley to be sure to show up tomorrow for the cabaret sequence. He said he didn’t know if he could make it but he would try. We told him to bring anybody he could find. He promised he would.

  Then back to the city.

  • • •

  During the afternoon we shot the ice cream parlor sequence. I kept being reminded of that Alka-Seltzer commercial, the one with the spicy meatball. With various retakes and shooting from other angles and having to diminish the level of ice cream in the bowl, Pluto was starting to turn green from all the goddamned ice cream he was ingesting.

  There were a lot of people around. We filmed in an ice cream place in the Village. I guess this is the first interesting thing that ever happened there because the owner is already overflowing with plans to paper the walls with blowups of the scene and proclaim to the world that Different Strokes was filmed there. I don’t know why that should bring people in off the street for a dish of pistachio ice cream, but then I’m not the world’s best intuitive businessman. At any rate, we got a hell of a lot of cooperation.

  It’s interesting to watch people react to filmmaking. It took a while to shoot that scene, but nobody left in its course. Everybody seemed to find the whole process fascinating. I guess film is still a very mysterious and glamorous thing to most people. The studios may have fallen apart, the star system may indeed be dead and gone, but the melody lingers on. Film seems to have a reality for the multitudes that reality itself lacks.

  Damn, Wells, don’t that sound profound! I wonder does it mean anything . . .

  • • •

  We shot the scene in Pluto’s office over at Dell, where they had an office that was small and cheerless enough. It’s basically a storage room but we unstored some cartons and moved in a desk and piled tons of garbage on it. The problem was getting a telephone. There was no phone in the room, and the suggestion that we rip somebody else’s phone out of the wall and put it back when we were done with it was not well received. A couple of blocks away there’s a firm that sells telephones, so we borrowed one from them and took it back when we were done. They let us use it free in return for a credit line which I don’t think we are going to give them. I can see doing it for the Pleasure Chest, but wasting a credit line to save having to spend ten dollars on a telephone is a little ridiculous.

  Dell just moved into new offices a few months ago, and one of the editors said it was a shame we hadn’t been able to film the scene before the move. “My office was smaller than this,” he said, “and windowless, and more cluttered, and there was a phone in it. I couldn’t always find it but I would hear it ringing and rummage around for it. It had more of a feeling of Hell, too. This place is Hell, too, but you have to spend a lot of time here before you realize it.”

  The Dell people all promised to show for the cabaret scene tomorrow.

  Alan came up with a fairly good idea. We’ve got all these people set for the cabaret sequence tomorrow, all these bodies for the audience, and he suggested we try to do the auction sequence at the same time while we have all those bodies on tap. The only problem is time. The cabaret sequence is, in many respects, the hardest one to film. There’s a lot happening and for it to work there has to be a lot of cutting back and forth between the stage and the audience reactions. He and Vinnie went into a huddle to discuss it. What we did agree was that we would certainly do the cabaret stuff first, because an audience is more important there than in the auction sequence. We can just pull in people off the streets for the auction bit, as all you have to see is their backs anyway.

  • • •

  This evening we shot my favorite scene, the singles bar shtick in which Pluto transforms Sophie into a giant stuffed panda, among other things, and finally into her young and beautiful self. We filmed it at an East Side place, one of the ones we see them entering in the outdoor series in which they do the town. We already filmed them entering and leaving the goddamned place, so now we were ready to show what happened in between.

  This necessitated Sophie’s return to old-lady makeup, and there was a certain amount of concern that she didn’t look exactly the way she had looked previously. I couldn’t see any difference. I suppose we should have shot a Polaroid of her before for comparison. Thi
s is something nobody thought of at the time, of course. And another of the many things I have learned in the course of filming this work of art.

  The scene was slow to film because of all the changes. The special effects were hardly difficult. The touch of a Yakima Canutt was not required, that is to say. Pluto would snap his fingers, we would cut, then Sophie would leave the chair and we would substitute the panda bear, and so on and so forth for quite a while.

  One element that slowed things up was the other people in the bar. They had come there to drink and chase pussy, and they were not as cooperative as the yoyos at the ice cream parlor. Their cooperation was particularly needed, too, in that we used a lot of long shots during the transformation routine. Our solution, finally, was to film the whole thing silent and dub crowd noises in later, as some wiseass always spoke up at the wrong moment when we tried to do it all at once.

  I did a little ad-libbing of my own. The bartender is a huge spade with a shaved head and a gold earring, that number, and I couldn’t see passing him up. He thought it would be sensational to be in a film, so he’s one of the things Sophie is transformed into and out of in the middle of the sequence. Since he also shows up in his official capacity as bartender, it should make for an interesting bit.

  We cleverly waited until the bar closed to finish the scene, because we didn’t dare have Sophie emerge young and beautiful and stark naked in the midst of that crowd of horny superannuated preppies. Not unless we were willing to improvise a gangbang sequence, which is what might well have happened. Incidentally, nobody but the owner, who okayed all this because he has money in the film, knows that the picture is pornographic. We explained it was an underground film full of symbolism and Satanism and like that. God knows what they thought of it all.

  Sometime after three they closed the club and Sophie bared her bod for all to see. Then Pluto snapped his fingers and we cut and she put on her young-style clothes and we filmed some more, and finally we were all done, thank the Great God Jehovah, and I came back here and wrote this.

  The fucking sun is coming up and I’m still sitting here typing. I’m going to have about two hours sleep before it’s time to face the cameras again. I’d love to take the day off, but it promises to be the most hectic day of all, and I have to be there.