The dog, whose name is Pumpkinseed for reasons that escape me, was interested but not wild with passion. She approached cautiously, took a thoughtful sniff, and then backed away.
The girl said, “I don’t think she likes me.”
Tim guided the dog back in place for another exploratory sniff. Same reaction from Pumpkinseed, and a rather annoyed reaction from the girl.
“You know, I’m like clean and all that. I had a shower this morning.”
Somebody asked if she had done a headstand in the shower. If she heard this impertinence she surely gave no sign of it. She made a rather nasty remark about the dog.
Then Tim had an idea. I feel ridiculous reporting it, but I don’t know how to avoid it. It seems there are these little peppermint candies that Pumpkinseed goes bananas over, and as luck would have it he had some of them with him. He said that, if the girl would cram a handful of them up herself, the dog would probably give a more convincing performance.
The girl wasn’t crazy about this. She said for all she knew she was going to get an irritation from the peppermints, not to mention the possibility of getting an irritation from the dog. Alan suggested we drop the damned sheepdog scene, at which point I thought Tim might go into cardiac arrest. He was literally pleading with the girl to give the peppermints a try.
I think the girl was by now rather surprised to find herself the center of attraction. You could see she was wrestling with the idea, not at all delighted at the prospect of having the dog gobble peppermints from her snatch but unhappy at the thought of letting everybody down. Finally the trouper instinct triumphed and she nodded and accepted the peppermints.
At this point Vinnie and I got into an argument over the relative perversity of showing the girl cramming the peppermints in there or just showing the dog doing her big number. I felt it was sexier without letting the world know about the peppermints because that way the audience thinks the dog is really into the whole thing in a sexual way. Besides, we already have some scenes scheduled of guys eating grapes out of girls and things like that. Vinnie said the idea of the girl conning the dog with the peppermints would be better. Then Alan got into the act and suggested it would be better still if somebody else stuck the peppermints up the girl, and I don’t know what we decided was better about that, but it provided a way for Vinnie and me to come to terms.
It was suggested that Tim do the honors. He wasn’t having any. We got another of the girls to do it, and the way the scene was filmed, or at least the way it’ll look, is something like this: First we open with a shot of a girl leading the dog into place between Our Girl Sunday’s plump little thighs. The dog sniffs, backs expressively away. Then a third girl crouches and rams a handful of peppermints up our blushing heroine. They say a few cute things, provided by the trustworthy Writer On Location. The dog is brought back into position, and at this point the dog goes out of its fucking canine mind.
I’ll tell you, porn freaks, it was really something to watch. I wish there was something on earth that I wanted as much as that dog wanted to scoff those peppermints. And, in the process of reaching them, which took a long time, the peppermints having been placed in the inner recesses of the girl’s inner recesses, that dog did a job that would have made Sappho throw in the towel in resignation.
The girl, very apprehensive at first, rather rapidly lost her apprehension. As nice as a faked filmic orgasm can be, it’s really not a patch on the real thing, and this young lady gave us the real thing. I think she went into some sort of serial orgasmic state that just didn’t quit. Screams and moans and descriptions of just how great it felt. I swear I never heard anything to compare.
After a while Vinnie had all he wanted on film, but neither Pumpkinseed nor the girl felt that way about it. I began to worry that the girl was going to die of sexual excess. I understand that can’t happen, but I was starting to believe that it might be possible after all. Everybody was just standing around staring. Finally the dog backed away and the girl trembled a little and subsided.
• • •
Later, girls would occasionally sidle up to Tim and engage in brief furtive conversations. He confirmed that they were sort of interested in getting together with him and the dog. If he’d let the beast have a go at them, they’d do anything with him that he wanted. He said he had taken a few phone numbers and didn’t know quite what he was going to do about them.
“I knew it would be a good scene,” he said.
“You could call it that.”
“But I don’t know what I’m going to do with the dog. It’s been bugging me a little. I mean, all day long I’m in the office and Pumpkinseed is home with my wife.”
“Just don’t leave any peppermints around.”
“She knew why I was bringing the dog here today. She knows about the scene and all. She’ll ask how it went and I guess I’ll have to tell her.”
“You think she’ll want to try it out herself?”
“Who the hell ever knows what any woman is going to want to do? She’s home all day, stuck in that house and bored out of her fucking mind. Maybe she’ll decide to try the dog. I don’t think I’m too crazy about the idea of having my wife eaten out every day by a sheepdog.”
“Hell, it’s a female sheepdog,” I said. “In that sense there’s nothing to be jealous about.”
“Go screw yourself.”
“It was all your idea,” I added. “The whole sheepdog scene. You absolutely insisted on it.”
“Well, I thought it would be a fantastic scene.”
“Well, it was. I don’t know if that girl will ever walk again, but it’ll take weeks to get the smile off her face.”
“Shit,” he said. “How would you like your wife to have a sexual relationship with your sheepdog?”
“I don’t have a wife,” I pointed out. “I had one once. I never had a sheepdog. As I recall, I would have been happy if my wife had had a sexual relationship with the Washington Monument, but that’s my own personal perspective. You know, I think you’re making too much of this.”
“I wonder if I’ll call any of those girls. I don’t like the idea of getting laid on the strength of my sheepdog.”
“You’re letting this get to you,” I said. “You’re losing your sense of proportion.”
“Well, you don’t have a sheepdog or a wife,” he said. “You’re in no position to understand.”
I suppose he’s right.
• • •
It’s very difficult to tell at this stage whether or not the orgy sequence is going to turn out the way Vinnie wants it to. As far as its sexual content is concerned, I think we’re in good shape. The object is to have a lot of cuts back and forth rather than staying on any one thing. As I conceived it, the audience would not have time to get bored, a major problem with a hardcore sequence late in a film. Instead of concentrating on any specific sexual activity for any length of time, we are jumping back and forth from one wild act of sexual excess to another in the hope that everybody who sees the film will find in it something outrageous to mention to his friends, the consequent word-of-mouth publicity doing much to boost the grosses.
That, at least, is the theory. It still makes sense to me and we all still subscribe to it. The major problem is a technical one. It’s to give the illusion that all of this sexual madness is happening all at once when in fact it is filmed one piece at a time. Vinnie’s secret, such as it is and for whatever it’s worth, is to do everything in close-up so that the audience is never aware that the rest of the room is empty. The way he describes it, it’ll work. The way Icarus described it, flight was a cinch; you just fastened wax wings to yourself and tried not to get too close to the sun.
It’s my feeling that it doesn’t matter. The scene should be sexually strong enough and sexually interesting enough so that nobody is going to stop long enough to notice there are no long shots and you never see anything going on in the background. Far as that goes, it would be possible to include some footage of everything happening
at once, one long shot that could be chopped up and inserted here and there, but we decided it wasn’t worth the effort, and I think that’s true. As long as you give the bastards something interesting to look at, they’re not about to complain.
• • •
Today was the first day when the entire set was a very horny place. We had a lot of backers around, the more adventurous ones who didn’t mind appearing in the film and who expected to be paid by getting their rocks off. And then the sheepdog scene did really get everybody in an aroused state.
All day long there was a tremendous quantity of fucking going on that the camera never stopped to record. One of the backers just wandered over and started muffing a girl, and the general feeling of horniness spread, and another girl came over and obligingly began fucking him, and things kept getting completely out of hand that way all day long. At one point I got into the spirit of things and grabbed up a little blonde girl and sat her on my lap. She bounced up and down for a while. It was a delight to watch her, but I only got to watch for a few minutes before a delightful Oriental girl came over and sat on my face.
Vinnie was filming something else at the time. Not that it would have been anything out of the ordinary. Just a happy little threesome conducted solely for the pleasure of its participants.
• • •
We had this one grotesquely fat man whom we used for the bathtub scene. He sat in a bathtub while one girl jerked him off and several other girls urinated on him. Being peed on was no particular turn-on for the dude, but he’s a real pro and was willing to play his part.
First the girl who was going to masturbate him gave him some head for a while until he said he was reasonably close to orgasm. Then we started the camera and she commenced a hand job. One by one the girls squatted over him and made their respective peepees on his chest, on his face, on his lower abdomen and ultimately he ejaculated.
I wound up talking to him later. “That really turns some people on, doesn’t it?”
He frowned, concentrating. “I’ve been trying to figure out why. I mean, sure, there’s the symbolism of it, right? The masochism, the lowering oneself, but there must also be something physically pleasurable in it, right? Warm liquid, maybe. I don’t know, I’ll tell you, I had all I could do to ignore all the peeing and just concentrate on the sensation of that kid’s hands. She’s got a good pair of hands, that little dark-haired kid. I kept concentrating on her hands and trying not to pay attention to all of this goddamned peeing.”
There had originally been talk of having a bunch of men pee on a woman, but we decided that there was too much in films on the subjection of women to men, so we would reverse it. Besides, the fat man was an absolutely perfect choice for the role of He Who Gets Pissed On.
• • •
The orgy sequence ends with a montage of ejaculation. We don’t really have to shoot anything for this montage. It will be composed of every orgasm we have captured on film everywhere in the course of filming, plus any cum-shot outtakes Vinnie is able to scrounge from other filmmakers. At the rate of one every couple of seconds, the audience is going to be confronted with the most extraordinary collection of ejaculations since Marilyn Monroe posed for that calendar.
I wonder if people will recognize that this sequence is ironic in intent? Or will they actually respond to it sexually?
Damned if I know.
Something good happened today. During a lull, I went over to Advantage and got a rough tape of what we did yesterday. After we finished up for the day I got Alan to listen to it. I knew I was going to have hassles with him, but I figured he might as well hear it as soon as possible.
Incredibly, he liked it very much. He thought it was very nicely done and that it will fit into the Rasputin sequence with no trouble, that it will in fact take some of the ordinariness out of Rasputin’s scene with Anna and Karenina. Which was the point I had been making all along, but evidently it has now become Alan’s point, and that’s fine with me.
I wonder if he was faking his enthusiasm. That’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility. Everybody does a certain amount of that. We all placate one another by pretending to like one another’s work.
Well, I’m not particularly certain I care. My song’s gonna be in the fucking movie and that’s all that really matters to me at this point.
I didn’t tell him what the recording costs were going to be. He asked, and I hedged by saying they didn’t have final figures, but I gather he knows enough to know that a complicated package like that isn’t going to be all his for a dollar and ninety-eight cents.
He didn’t seem upset.
• • •
I have no idea, on the basis of what we shot today, just how much time the orgy scene is going to occupy in the final film. Of course it can be as long or as short as Vinnie wants it to be. He shot a ton of film, and in point of fact he probably shot more film than was necessary. Well, one of the things we made a point of doing in the budget was allowing for plenty of that sort of wastage.
I think it’s going to be necessary in the pornographic films of the future to make well produced films with good scripts, imaginative and competent direction, and perhaps most important, good acting. I think there’s a reverse Gresham’s Law operating here and that the good porno flicks will drive the bad ones off the market. I keep harking back to those b-and-w soundless films I saw at that stag in Rhinebeck. Nobody would sit through a showing of that garbage nowadays unless he was hooked on porno-stalgia, to coin a phrase.
Alan has this great vision of the coming of age of the pornographic film, a vision which is no doubt predicated on the largely unwarranted assumption that our contribution is a part of this coming of age. He sees in the distance all manner of porn films: porn westerns, porn science fiction movies, porn documentaries, ad infinitum and, let me just say, ad nauseam in the bargain.
Shine, perishing republic.
• • •
You know, it was my plan to tell you just what bits of sexual excess were committed to film today, and now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, I’ve decided not to bother. You’ll just have to see the film.
I recognize that you might enjoy reading a catalog of how we fought our way through Krafft-Ebing today with gun and camera, but you in turn must recognize that. I haven’t got the endurance to type it all out.
Pay the five bucks and see the movie. Cast of thousands. Living color. Glorious sound.
Sheepdogs and everything.
I was thinking today about the backers, perhaps because there were so many of them around the place. Now as far as I can determine, most of these guys are not rich in any sense of the word. From what Alan tells me, which may or may not bear any sort of working relationship with reality, no individual has a larger investment than four thousand dollars. The great majority have thousand dollar shares. This is both good and bad from Alan’s point of view. On the one hand, there’s no individual investor who can command much clout. On the other hand, there’s an awful lot of people to report to.
But what amazes me is that there are so many people willing to pony up a grand with no guarantee of anything. I mean, Alan did act in good faith in that he actually made a movie. He could have taken the sixty grand and gone south with it, and if he had done so the investors would have been up a tree. I suppose any wildcat investment implies a certain amount of trust as well as a certain amount of risk, but it would seem to me that both the trust and the risk here are rather disproportionate to the possible reward.
I don’t know what this enterprise can hope to yield in the way of profits. The people with money in Throat obviously are not sitting up nights weeping openly, but we all realize that Throat is a phenomenon which will probably never be repeated in the porn field. I would guess, though, that the backers will be thrilled beyond belief if they get most of their own money back.
Which would tend to suggest that they went into this because it looked like a fun thing to do. Which perhaps it was, and is. Savings ban
ks and mutual funds aren’t very exciting, after all, and pornography, especially if you have had no prior experience of it, is.
Hah!
I say “Hah!” because it suddenly occurs to me that who in hell am I to talk? True, none of my money is riding on this, but a couple months of my time are, and the only way I’m going to make Dime One out of the whole deal is if the picture makes profits, and even then I am not going to get rich out of it.
What it comes down to, I guess, is that we’re all crazy.
—Sunday
We did a little additional orgy footage this morning, most of which we could probably have lived without. Then we went down to the auction gallery and filmed the auction sequence, Sophie once again in her old-lady makeup. Probably for the final time.
I left early and went to Times Square, where I bought some props for my big scene. I have donated my apartment for the filming thereof, it being readily adaptable into the sort of place where a Dirty Old Man would live. All I have to do is paste a lot of revolting pictures on the wall.
Which is what I have been lately doing, and I’ll tell you, it’s beginning to get to me. The main source of pictures has been a batch of magazines with titles like Young Nudist and Youthful Nudes, and while these magazines may not be an argument for censorship, they damned well constitute a powerful argument for murder. They consist of photographs of prepubescent children, naked and unashamed. True, the kids are not doing anything deliberately sexual, but just as I believe adults should have the option of hiring out their photographic images to inspire the masturbatory fantasies of others, so do I believe that children should not. What kind of nauseating parent would pick this particular way to make money off his kid?
Having said that, I am cutting pictures out of these magazines and pasting them on my walls.
Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 17