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

by Lawrence Block

  —Wednesday

  Sorry, folks. I can’t hack it.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted before, which is interesting in view of the fact that I don’t really have to do very much. In my official capacity as Class Historian, all I really do is sit around and suggest things every now and then, a dream of a job if there ever was one.

  But it’s late and I’ve been going all day on very little in the way of sleep, and it has been one hell of a day, and much as I would like to write about it, I can’t. Not now.

  We’ve agreed to cancel tomorrow morning’s shooting in the interest of group morale. I’m going to bed now, and I’ll try to get up tomorrow morning in time to chronicle today’s activities. Believe me, gang, I’m not a shirker. I recognize my responsibilities to you all.

  When this picture is done I’m going to sling a movie camera over my shoulder and start walking. When I reach a place where people stare at me and ask me what the hell I’m carrying around, there shall I build my house.

  —Thursday Morning

  True to his word, the Valiant Screenwriter arose, showered, shaved, drank a cup of instant coffee, and did sit himself down at his Faithful Typewriter.

  As you may have gathered, yesterday was a ball-breaker. It started off rotten when the Master of Ceremonies failed to make his appearance. It’s not a hard part, nor is it a very large part, but the cabaret scene is in trouble without it. We hired this son of a bitch because he gave us a fairly decent reading and he owned a tuxedo. We called the number he gave us and some girl emerged from a sound sleep long enough to tell us he was out of town for the week. May he be planted upside down in the ground like a turnip while maggots eat his brains, and may the moths do perverted things to his tuxedo. We had a whole contingent of backers and people from Dell and friends and friends of friends all assembled, and we were trying to decide who of their number could fill the breach, without much enthusiasm for our range of possibles, when Pluto, who had just come down to the set for the hell of it, came to the rescue. He asked if it might not be consistent to have him involved in the cabaret sequence, much as Madge is present at the preparations for the orgy. I said it would indeed be consistent, and he said would it not make eminent good sense were he to be the Master of Ceremonies.

  “The role,” he said, “should not be beyond the range of my competence.”

  I had no quarrel with this.

  “Furthermore,” he said, “I own a tuxedo.”

  He went off to get the tuxedo, Alan having unnecessarily announced that he would be reimbursed for his cab fare. Alan indeed is a prince.

  He was a much better emcee than the other guy would have been, and that part went smoothly enough. The way we set things up, we filmed virtually all the nonsexual aspects of the cabaret sequence yesterday. All of the audience stuff, for example. And all of the sequences before Sophie brings the various people onstage and balls them. We’ll film the fucking today, and when the film is edited a lot of the reaction shots filmed yesterday will be inserted there, so it will look as though there was a live audience for the fucking.

  Vinnie hates the fact that we had to fake it. The artistic side of him objects strenuously. He’d like to be able to do long shots over the audience of the screwing.

  Hell, I can see the value of that. I can also see how much more aggravating it would be to try filming hardcore scenes with a large audience. With clever intercutting, at which he is alleged to be a master—he does most of the alleging himself—I’m afraid I think anyone who sees the film will swear it was all filmed before an audience. We have bits, for example, where members of the audience stand up and head for the stage, divesting themselves of their ties en route, and inserted in the proper places it will certainly look as though these men are inflamed by what they have seen and on their way to join in on the action.

  • • •

  Somewhere in some draft or other of the script I noted that it might not hurt if one of the waiters looked rather like Hitler.

  Or, failing that, like Luther Adler.

  We ordered a batch of German Officer types through the underground equivalent of Central Casting, and a dozen of them showed up. We hired the eight that came closest to fitting the eight German uniforms Alan scrounged somewhere. Of the others, we hired a few as waiters and to otherwise supplement our coterie of unpaid audience members.

  One of the guys we used as a waiter looks incredibly like Heinrich Himmler. Unfortunately, not one person in a hundred remembers what Heinrich Himmler looked like.

  Nobody looked at all like Hitler.

  • • •

  The comedian was really awful.

  Just as we had hoped. Maybe even worse than we had dared to dream.

  And, wouldn’t you know it, he had enlarged and improved upon his monologue. I suppose that was inevitable. The monologue, except for a line or two, was not my handiwork. Vinnie wrote it. He said he tried to make it as bad as he possibly could, and I couldn’t argue with that. I felt he succeeded admirably. The comedian did make it even worse, though, perhaps merely by making it longer.

  It was not at all hard to get shots of ineffable boredom on the faces of the members of the audience during the comedian’s monologue.

  • • •

  I believe I’ve mentioned Jeremy Six earlier in these pages, though perhaps not by name. He’s our piano player for the cabaret number. In real life, as we laughingly call it, Jeremy writes paperback westerns. He was a professional musician for a few years, had some sort of jazz band, and plays great whorehouse piano that frequently reminds one of Ray Charles. In return for investing a thousand dollars in this fiasco, he earned the privilege of donating his services at the piano.

  He certainly looks the part, tall and lean, straight black hair, intimidating black moustache, and a wardrobe that could have been made by the best goddamned tailor in Tombstone, Arizona. Only man I’ve ever known who wears string ties.

  Well, Jeremy had his hands full during Sophie’s song. He asked her what key she sang in, and she didn’t know. She had assured us all earlier that she could sing, and we were sufficiently pleased to have her for the role that we didn’t make her prove it.

  Live and learn.

  It isn’t so much that she has a rotten voice, although it must be admitted that she does. More to the point is that she is not up to staying with tricky melodies, and I’m afraid I should have taken that into account when I wrote “He Never Touched My Heart.”

  I suppose I was indulging my own ego, and not for the first time; but what I had in mind was to write something that would fit the spot even to the point of reminding the ear of Kurt Weill. According to Jeremy, who has an ear for this sort of thing, it stops an inch this side of plagiarism, so I guess I succeeded. But those Weimar harmonies are not something Sophie can take to as a duck to water, or as a pig to shit, or whatever metaphor appeals to you.

  She kept missing notes, and not just by a little bit. By an awful lot. And she could tell when she missed a note, and she would stop, and, oh, the whole thing was terrible.

  We are going to have to loop her entire number, using somebody else’s voice and lip-synching in a sound studio. This, as I understand it, is an expensive process. Of course the big moviemakers do it all the time, but they are not trying to bring in a film for sixty thousand dollars.

  I don’t know if the song comes off or not. It strikes me as much longer than it ought to be. It times out at a little over four minutes, which shouldn’t be so bad, but maybe it’s out of place, too much of a break in the action. I still think it’s a good song, and if we can get someone decent to dub it, maybe we’ll be all right.

  • • •

  We did have a few bits to make the freebie audience aware that this is a dirty movie. Vinnie wanted some intercuts of sexual activity in the audience. We set up a shot of one guy sitting watching the performance with a very bored expression on his face; then the camera dips to show a girl crouching under the table with his cock in her mouth
. The female performer was hired for the occasion, the male an eager volunteer. He had a certain amount of difficulty looking bored but ultimately obliged with a charming cum-shot all over the girl’s face.

  What was most interesting throughout this was the reaction, such as it was, on the part of the audience. Quite a few of them tended to look the other way. And the others were very cool about the whole thing. I had anticipated a lot of embarrassed and perhaps embarrassing wisecracks, in the manner of oafs viewing a stag film at the Legion Hall, but I can’t recall hearing any of that.

  • • •

  The nightclub where we shot all this is really too large. We got it free, of course, which was a powerful argument in its favor. A further argument, especially in Vinnie’s eyes, was that it gave him room for some interesting long shots and generally lent itself to the kind of gemütlich Weimar atmosphere, at least as he envisions it.

  On the minus side, I think the room was too large for the audience we assembled. We tried to solve the problem by grouping people close and only using the front of the room, but whether this will fool the camera I cannot really say. I would have preferred a much smaller club into which we could have absolutely crammed our audience. I suppose it was technically easier to film the scene with all that extra space, so maybe we were better off as things stood.

  The problem is that we have to do our shooting during the day, as the club has to function as a nightclub by night.

  • • •

  We didn’t get to do the auction scene yesterday, even though we had the crowd on hand. It just took too damned long to shoot the cabaret stuff.

  I was talking with Pluto during a lull. He finds the whole experience of making this film more than a little disconcerting, and he had some interesting things to say.

  “The money’s nice. There’s no question but that the money’s nice, and it’s especially pleasant to get paid in cash after each day’s work.

  “It’s also a nice ego thing. Being the Old Pro in an essentially amateur production.

  “But it’s hard to decide how I feel about the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be. I’ve never had any strong negative feelings about pornography. I don’t go to films often, but I’ve seen a few of them. My wife and I have gone a couple of times. Once I remember we were both just very turned off by the whole thing. Another time we had the opposite reaction. Left the theater, didn’t say a word, ran home and balled each other’s brains out. I suppose anything that makes a man and his wife want to fuck each other can’t be all bad.

  “I feel sorry for the people who play the sexual roles, though. I don’t know why. They’re not slaves, for Christ’s sake. They obviously enjoy what they’re doing. Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.

  “I find Sophie very difficult to figure out. She takes herself very seriously as an actress, you know. She hasn’t just done porn, either. She was telling me about a few things she did off-Broadway, and I think she said she had a walk-on in a TV soaper, and she’s had small parts in a couple of commercials. She was never a success but she did get some work legitimately before she ever got into porn.

  “It’s a funny thing. I’m very glad I don’t have to do anything sexual in the film, and at the same time I sort of feel that I’m not getting the total experience of being in the movie because my part is wholly nonsexual. I don’t want to ball anybody in front of a camera. I don’t want to ball Sophie on or off-camera, as far as that goes. Nothing against her, but after watching her do it for the camera, it’s just impossible for me to take her seriously on a sexual level.

  “Still in all, there’s this feeling of being left out. I can’t exactly explain it.”

  He asked me how I felt about the prospect of doing my Dirty Old Man scene with Sophie.

  “I liked the idea very much at the beginning,” I said. “I wrote the part for myself with that in mind. None of that flashback sequence existed in the original script. I’m not sure why I wanted to do it. Ego, I guess. And the desire for a new experience. I do a lot of idiotic things out of the desire for a new experience.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “Uh-huh. Also, frankly, I thought of it as a potential kick. Partly the kick of acting, of being on a screen, sex or no sex. And partly a sexual kick. I suppose everybody has a slight streak of exhibitionism in his makeup. I can’t imagine myself as a flasher, showing my cock to little girls in public places, but I can see where it might be kicky to see yourself balling somebody in living color on a thirty-foot screen.”

  “But you don’t like the idea as much now.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t. I’m still looking forward to it in a way, but less than before. I’m beginning to be a little apprehensive.”

  “Worried about being impotent, I suppose.”

  “Not worried, exactly. I more or less take it for granted that I’ll have a certain amount of difficulty. Frankly, that isn’t so appalling a prospect. I’m probably no more secure in my masculinity than the next neurotic, but I can’t honestly regard the ability to summon up an erection in absurd circumstances as that accurate an index of masculinity in the first place.”

  “No argument there.”

  “I have to tell you one thing. The more I see Sophie balling other people, the less alluring the prospect of going down on her becomes.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “The script calls for you to muff her, and then she gives you head.”

  “Yes, that’s the immortal plot line.”

  “I can see where you might begin to have reservations.”

  “Well, you need reservations,” I said. “That woman is one of the most popular eating places in town. You can hardly get a table without reservations.”

  “Why didn’t you set things up so as to shoot your scene first? Or wouldn’t that have made any difference?”

  “I don’t know if it would have or not. But we couldn’t do it that way. See, she’s going to shave her beaver for the sequence to coincide with the twelve-year-old image we’re trying to project.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s really dedicated.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So we have to do that scene last, because it’ll take her weeks to grow back a full-fledged merkin.”

  “Uh-huh. Jack? When we were in college, you know, trying to guess what turns our lives would take, did you ever happen to think?”

  “No,” I told him. “No, it never entered my mind.”

  To be honest, the prospect of paying oral homage to Sophie does not turn my stomach. I’m sure the girl bathes between engagements. It’s just that I can’t see the scene as something that is going to turn me on.

  Perhaps the extraordinary thing is that I could originally. I should have been able to guess that this would not turn out to be exciting.

  I don’t think I’ve mentioned my introduction to Sophie. It’s probably worth a few lines.

  Alan knew her, and Vinnie had worked with her on a picture, and she was thus up for the lead. Both Alan and Vinnie thought I ought to have a look at her on the screen, so that I could offer an opinion on her suitability for the role and also so that I could more effectively create dialogue for her. I already had the feeling that Alan was determined to cast her for the part and that my opinion did not matter a whole hell of a lot, but if I came back and reported she was a completely untalented actress and a beast in the bargain, it might have had some effect. I didn’t honestly think watching her cop some actor’s joint would improve my ability to fashion dialogue for her to speak when her mouth was not otherwise employed, but what the hell, it was an excuse to go see a dirty picture, so I went.

  I don’t remember the name of the first film I saw her in. I was not wildly impressed. She was attractive enough but not devastating, and as far as acting, it was impossible to tell whether she could act or not. When I got back from the movie, I called Vinnie and said about as much to him.

  “But what did you think of her as an actress?” he wanted to know.

/>   “Well, I’ll tell you,” I said. “If she hates to suck, then she’s a hell of an actress. That’s about as much as I can say on the subject.”

  About a week later Alan called to report that they were screening Sophie’s latest release in a private screening room on Broadway in the Fifties. He wanted me to go see the film to get a further impression of her talents. She would be attending, he added, and I could meet her and discuss the script with her.

  So I went. I introduced myself to her before we saw the movie, and we chatted about nothing terribly vital, and then we went into the projection room with about fifty other people and I sat next to her while we all watched the film. It was better photographed than her other epic and she came across as more attractive, even if she still didn’t set the screen on fire.

  What was weird about it is that here I was sitting next to this girl I had just met, and we were both of us watching her up there on the screen while she had sex with everything but a camel. And she sat next to me and behaved like the perfect audience, laughing at the parts that were evidently supposed to be funny, nodding in recognition as various scenes unfolded.

  Then the two of us congratulated the film’s director and went down the block to a coffee shop. She talked about her acting career and what sort of future she saw for herself. She dropped names like Stanislavski a lot.

  • • •

  I remember the first time I saw pornographic films. It was at the annual stag of a lodge in Rhinebeck. It was open to the public. You paid three dollars, got all the ham sandwiches and beer you could engulf, watched the movies, and shot crap or played cards. I was back in town on semester break, I was in I guess my second year at Fordham at the time, so I went with a couple of buddies.

  There was a rumor that an unnamed guy was bringing films in color and sound. It turned out that they had this rumor every year, and never in the history of the place had they had anything but grainy silent black-and-white eight-millimeter stuff. The rumor always persisted. I think it was a tradition or something.