There were, as best I recall, about half a dozen films. Fairly ordinary stuff, I guess. The guys in the back of the room kept coming up with stale gags. One moment that will never recede from my memory was when a film opened featuring two purported lesbians. This went very much against the grain of the audience. “Get those two goddamned queers off the screen! Get rid of those perverts!” Actually, I thought at the time that the two girls came closer to spontaneity than any of the other performers.
I didn’t experience any physical arousal during the night’s entertainment. I found it very interesting to watch the films and would have watched dozens more had they been available, but that was the extent of my response. I lost a few dollars shooting craps and won them back playing a local variant of blackjack, and I drank a lot of beer and went home and astonished myself by masturbating four times in less than an hour. I guess the films had a delayed effect or something.
I wonder if they still show films at those stags. Nowadays anybody can see well-made porn with color and sound, and I suppose it’s been a good many years since any yokel talked back to a lesbian sequence.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
—Thursday Night
It’s been another long day, but a lot less taxing than yesterday. I think it was the crowd that made it such a drag yesterday, the sheer number of people around. I just reread what I wrote this morning and I don’t think it comes across just how wearying the whole thing was. Well, I guess you had to be there.
Today we filmed the sexual parts, the more overtly sexual parts, of the cabaret sequence. I think it went fairly well, but I have to admit that I’ve reached a point where I can’t tell what’s good and what isn’t.
In the world of Real Films, a world which I’m afraid we have not penetrated in this piece of crap we’re filming, they have what are called rushes or dailies, or so I’m told. Which is to say that everything shot during a day is printed immediately so that you can look at them before the next day’s shooting. It’s all completely unedited, but if you know how to watch film you can see whether you got what you wanted.
We can’t afford to do that. So we are consequently at a point where we have filmed most of the movie, more than half of it anyway, and we don’t know what any of it looks like. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody, and I guess there’s no reason why it should, because if we find out we don’t much like the way something turned out, there is precious little we can do about it. We’re not about to re-shoot anything. We’re too tightly budgeted to do that. All we can do is get the film in the can as quickly as possible and pray it turns into something when it’s printed and when Vinnie is done editing it.
• • •
We had a truly inspired ad-lib moment.
Jeremy, bless his heart, was plunking furiously away at the piano throughout the onstage balling scene. The script called for occasional cuts of him getting more and more aroused as he played, removing his string tie, opening his shirt, and finally getting up from the piano and starting to strip.
I thought he was really acting beautifully. He sure looked aroused, all right. And finally, sure enough, he got up from the piano with a wild light dancing in his eyes, and he took his shirt off, and he took his pants off, and he kicked his shoes off and he pulled his underwear off, and he left his socks on, and he went over and pulled the transvestite out of the way and threw Sophie a wholly unexpected fuck.
Vinnie had the presence of mind to get all of this on film, including, he told me, an ECU of Sophie’s utterly astonished face.
After the scene reached its (and Jeremy’s) climax, he got to his feet with a dazed look in his eyes. Then he began to blush, whereupon everybody began to laugh; whereupon he grabbed up his clothes and bolted backstage.
He emerged a few minutes later, wearing his clothes and what is frequently described as a shit-eating grin, a term the derivation of which has never been clarified for me. He seemed at once proud and embarrassed over what he had just so impulsively done.
• • •
I let him know that his moment of glory had all been immortalized on film.
“Oh, Christ,” he said.
“You didn’t notice the camera was grinding away?”
“I was too busy grinding away myself to notice anything. What an incredible turn on.”
“You hadn’t planned it?”
“Not exactly. I thought about it. I must admit that I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to go through with it. But it wasn’t a question of nerve. Nerve never entered into it. I just got, uh, carried away.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t suppose they’ll use that scene.”
“The hell they won’t.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the most spontaneous and authentic act we’ve filmed to date. You can’t expect us to throw it all away, can you?”
“Uh,” he said. “I don’t know how my wife is going to feel about this.”
His wife’s an actress. I mentioned this to him. “Just tell her you were acting,” I suggested. “Your approach to the characterization was essentially a Method approach and you got excessively involved in the role.”
“Sure.”
“Tell her the reason you were so excited was you imagined it was her while you were balling Sophie.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, I suppose I could talk Vinnie out of showing you actually fucking her.”
“Could you?” He thought it over. “Oh, the hell with it,” he decided. “Leave it in.”
“You positive?”
“Yeah, why not? Fifty years from now I can run the film and remember when I used to be potent.”
• • •
We had to scrap the player piano shtick. In the script, when Jeremy gets up from the piano and stalks toward Sophie we didn’t know he’d do more than stalk toward her. There’s a shot of the piano, a player piano, still playing madly away after he has left it. Since we didn’t have a player piano, and since the only one we were able to find was not a look-a-like for our regular piano, we decided to throw it out. Someone pointed out that, while it might be a cute sight gag, it was also on the corny side, and I was forced to agree.
• • •
Jeremy’s number was certainly the high point of things. It was all anybody could talk about for the rest of the day. It seemed to remind everybody of a story.
The guy who plays the role we call First Stooge in the script has worked in a batch of these films. He told a story about an actor he knew out on the West Coast with an erection machine. I’ve seen them advertised in places like Screw but never thought they really worked. Apparently they work for some people. What they are, essentially, is a vacuum pump arrangement. A plastic sphere goes around the penis and then the air is pumped out. The vacuum thus created causes blood to flow to the organ, which manifests itself as an erection.
This one actor used the thing all the time. I gather he never got an erection without it. When it was time for him to demonstrate his masculinity, they would cut the film and he would pump the air out of his Mechanical Marvel, at which point his penis would expand to majestic proportions.
Once he had done this, he had no difficulty in sustaining the erection as long as necessary, and could virtually ejaculate on command. His machine never failed him, and his penis never became erect without it.
According to the First Stooge, other actors had less satisfactory results with the same device. It was frequently employed because of the excellent effect it had on its owner, but with only middling success. It almost invariably produced an erection, but because the erection thus induced was purely physiological in origin, it quite often softened upon removal of the instrument. In other cases, it induced premature ejaculation in actors who were not commonly troubled by that problem.
“You can’t argue that it worked for this one guy,” First Stooge said, “but nobody else who tried it thought it was much good. Science is wonderful but there’s
some things you can’t replace, and there’s never going to be a machine to take the place of a good woman’s mouth.”
Right on, brother.
• • •
Somebody else told a story about a film they just finished shooting a couple of weeks ago. It won’t be released for a while. They are reportedly unsure what to call it yet, although the title Rear View has been bandied about.
Basically it seems to be an anal variant of Deep Throat. The lead character is a girl who loves to fuck and suck but cannot have an orgasm, until finally she is buggered, and loves it, and that’s the plot. The story line very nearly makes our film sound terrific in comparison.
Anyway, the girl they signed for the lead was not originally in the Linda Lovelace class. She had had experience with anal sex and said she didn’t mind doing it, which is occasionally hard to find in the porno film industry. There are plenty of anal scenes in gay films because there are plenty of gay guys who are into that sort of scene, but a great many of the girls who make these films find anal intercourse painful. Especially when the male performers are unusually well-endowed, as they so often are.
This girl didn’t find it painful, and she had, I guess, a good looking behind, so they gave her the part. They shot the script, such as it was, in more-or-less chronological order, and the big buggery scene came close to the end.
It started off well enough, and then all of a sudden the role absolutely captured the heart and soul (not to mention the rectum) of the female lead. She began shrieking how wonderful it was, how good it felt, and on and on and on, and the director thought he was getting the performance of all time out of this chick, and then the male star obligingly withdrew and permitted the camera to record his orgasm as it splashed upon the girl’s buttocks, and she started yelling that she was almost able to get off and would somebody for Christ’s sake stick it in and give it to her some more.
Which, in the next hour or so, everybody proceeded to do. They put the cameras aside and every male on the set took a turn at the gang-buggering, and evidently the young thing hovered on the very brink of orgasm for close to eternity, until by the Grace of God somebody gave her enough to get her off.
At which point she was totally tapped out, zonked, drained, and had to go home and stay in bed alone for the next three days, utterly fucking up the shooting schedule. And of course they had to retake the buggery scene anyway because she was supposed to fake an orgasm at the end of it and they had to shoot it over.
So maybe the chick’ll do for the anus what Linda L. has done for the throat. I wonder what new frontiers remain in contemporary erotic film. The nostril? The belly button? The ear?
• • •
I’m going to skip tomorrow’s filming. They’re doing the auction scene and a couple of other things, and I really can’t see that my presence should be required, either for work on the film or to accumulate more material for the diary.
I have an appointment at three at a sound studio at 8th Avenue and 54th, where I’m going to attempt to do the Rasputin song. I suppose it would be a hell of a lot more professional to hire somebody to sing it, since I have to hire a guitarist anyway, but I might as well indulge myself and save the company some dollars at the same time. I know what I sound like and I don’t sound wonderful, but what the hell, it doesn’t make any real difference.
Speaking of songs, Alan seems concerned about the “Hitler, He Only Had One Ball” number that Madge and Pluto do. He likes it and says it will be no trouble and not much expense getting newsreel footage of silly looking Germans, but he thinks the music, the Colonel Bogey’s March from Bridge over the River Kwai, may not be in public domain. And it seems that it costs quite a bit to get permissions for film use.
I can’t believe there’s an existing copyright © on that. The tune was around long before the film, they used to sing it during the war, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, we can change a couple key notes in the melody and steal it, since the words are our own.
He was also concerned about the Rasputin tune, until I told him it was to the tune of “I Am A Rebel Soldier” which was written anonymously in perhaps 1870. That reassured him, but he still doesn’t want to use the song, damn him.
I’m scheduled to have dinner with Sophie tomorrow. To interview her, that being one of the components of this here book. See what you get, folks, is a screenplay, a production diary, and an interview with the leading lady herself.
I don’t know where I’ll take her for dinner. I was going to ask her what she likes to eat but I was afraid what her answer might be.
—Friday
Well, Sophie has been wined and dined and interviewed. You’ll read about it elsewhere. I violated a longstanding principle of mine and taped the interview. I usually prefer to go straight to a typewriter and write it out as I remember it, but I knew I wasn’t going to feel like doing that tonight, so I took the easy way out and dragged a cassette recorder along. In a couple of days I’ll have to get somebody to type it up for me. I refuse to hassle with transcribing tapes, I’m rotten at it. It’s expensive to have them done professionally but I’ll just have to spend the money. It would be nice to stick Alan with the fee, but I’d never get away with it. I just hope I get away with sticking him for the expenses incurred this afternoon.
I met an old-timey friend at Advantage Studios, a musician named Cary Feldborn. I had originally conceived the song as one voice: mine with one guitar to back it up. Cary decided to back me on banjo with a friend of his on guitar, and after our first run-through he decided a harmonica track would be good, so he made a phone call, and later a black chick whose name I never did catch wandered in and he had her sit down at the piano, and Cary sang along with me on the choruses, and all of a sudden we’ve got a whole production number and three hours of studio time, not counting the mixing and everything, and it’s the stupidest goddamned thing ever, but I heard the final playback and by God it sounds pretty good. It honestly has a nice sound to it, and it’s only a shame that the nature of the lyrics preclude using it in anything but the film.
I don’t even want to think about the cost. The way I feel right now I would pay it myself, since it’s so unequivocally an indulgence of my own ego and an unwarranted production expense in terms of the film, but I just can’t afford to pay it myself. I haven’t got that kind of dough on hand. Maybe I’ll fence with Alan and agree to pay a portion of the cost out of my share of the profits, if and when such profits accrue. Since I don’t really expect ever to see any profits, I’m not that leery of bargaining some of them away.
Oh, the hell with it. It was fun to do and Alan won’t be able to prevent its inclusion in the movie, and I only got involved in this dumb venture in the first place because I thought it would be fun. And I guess it has been fun, at least from time to time, but if I had it all to do over again . . .
Oh, forget that line of reasoning, too. If I had it all to do over again, I’m sure I’d do it all over again.
• • •
Sophie and I had a late dinner at one of those ersatz British pubs that have been springing up like measles all over the East Side. She was a pleasant enough companion, although aside from the interview we did not have very much to say to each other. Filming went well enough today, she said, but she’ll be glad when this picture is finished. She is not alone in this sentiment. After shooting’s completed, she’s going to Bermuda for a week.
I know how she feels. I’d like to get out of town for a while myself. The heat is getting oppressive lately. It was hot as hell today, and it may be some time before the heat wave breaks, according to the Weather Bureau soothsayers. Maybe I’ll take off and get up to Vermont for a little while.
While Sophie and I were dining, I indulged in a private fantasy of suggesting to her that we rehearse our scene together. I don’t know whether she would have gone for it or not. I decided not to bother finding out. I’m not sure what stopped me, whether I didn’t honestly want to have sex with her or whether I thought she might regard my
proposition as unprofessional and uncool and I was thus afraid of rejection. Very possibly a combination of the two. I should think it would be fairly devastating to be turned down by a girl you have already watched do everything in the world. Also, if it did go poorly in any way, it would make it still more difficult when it comes time to film our scene together.
So it’s a lonely night, and I’ve already typed more than I intended to. I think I’ll go out and hit a bar or two. I might run into somebody. You never know.
—Saturday
Well, I didn’t run into anybody last night, but I hit a lot of watering holes in the process of reconnaissance, and I had a real rat bastard of a hangover this morning when Tim Benton called me. He was in town, he announced, and he had his fucking sheepdog in tow, and he hoped today was really the day when we were going to film the orgy sequence.
It was, and we did, most of it, anyway. Including the bit with the sheepdog.
The girl who co-starred with the dog was a little awestruck when she got a look at the animal. I guess she thought sheepdogs were smaller, or less ponderous. She kept saying things like, “How will she be able to see what she’s doing, she’s got all that hair over her eyes.” Tim assured her that the dog could see out of that forest of hair even though one couldn’t see in. He parted the mop and invited the girl to examine the dog’s eyes, one blue and one brown, and he told us some folklore about why sheepdogs commonly have one blue eye and one brown eye. I don’t remember the explanation, and I have a hunch you don’t care about it any more than I do.
The girl was still a little dubious, for which I can’t say I altogether blame her, but damned if she wasn’t game. Tim got her to get acquainted with the dog, and I’ll have to say this for the dog, she was friendly enough. The girl just had to pet her a little bit to get the dog very enthusiastic about being her friend.
The original plan called for us to have the girl tied up when the dog went at her. The girl didn’t seem to object to this, but it suddenly occurred to me that, if the dog did get carried away or start biting or anything, it would be more sensible to have the girl capable of flight. So she just sort of sat down and spread out and Tim pointed the dog in the right direction.
Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 16