I feel kind of strange about this. I felt strange enough buying the magazines, and paying out five bucks a copy in the bargain. The clerks in the Times Square porn shops are models of discretion, and utterly unflappable, and I’m really past the stage of worrying whether they are going to regard me as a rank pervert or not, but still, it was less than a pleasure to approach the counter with half a dozen copies of Young Nudist in tow.
I simply cannot let anyone into this apartment until the scene is filmed and the pictures are gone. Christ, imagine bringing a girl here now. And imagine trying to explain. There’s just no way.
• • •
This is even worse.
I just finished cutting off a perfectly innocent pair of trousers at the knee so that I can tie them to my legs in the manner of a sexual exhibitionist. I have another identical pair which I am not cutting and which I will wear when Sophie and I take our little walk through the park. Because I am not prepared to go out on the street wearing a raincoat over a pair of pant legs.
I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.
• • •
The big scene, as you have by now doubtless guessed, is to be filmed tomorrow. I have tried to avoid conveying my anxiety over it to anyone. I have also been sitting around reading my lines aloud and committing them to memory, and if you’ve glanced at the scene in question you can probably guess how foolish I feel. I felt fairly ridiculous typing those lines, to tell you the truth, and I feel no less ridiculous reading them aloud in this grotty little room with its walls papered with naked Lolitas. See ya tomorrow.
—Monday
You can call me Star.
We filmed my scene today, right on schedule.
I’ll tell you, I don’t much feel like writing about it. But I can’t see a way to dodge the issue. It’s not unlikely that you’ve been looking forward to reading about it, just as I’ve spent the past few weeks looking forward, albeit nervously, to filming it.
Well.
First we assembled in Central Park, at one of the playgrounds. Sophie’s makeup was better than I’d expected. She had her hair in pigtails and had painted red spots on her cheeks, and she was cuddling a Raggedy Ann doll, and she got on one of the swings, and the whole outdoor sequence went almost exactly as it appears in the manuscript. It was very easy to film. We got virtually all of it on the first take, as she and I both had our lines down perfectly.
I, too, was in makeup, which consisted mostly of rubbing gray crud into my hair and beard and wearing a pair of owlish granny glasses, through which, their lenses being clear, I could perceive virtually nothing. I did little things like walking hunched over, and I tried to talk in a cracked old man’s voice (or in an old man’s cracked voice, but maybe I got it right the first time around).
Then we came back here to my apartment where I removed my trousers and shorts and attached the cut-down trouser legs to my calves. We started the scene and shot it as written, and in that order.
Everybody was very calm about everything. It was a very bloodless procedure. I had been certain that, at the very least, one or the other of us would break up laughing. This didn’t happen. I browsed over Sophie’s charms and spoke my wretched dialogue and finally got down to business, gobbling away at her newly shaven box.
Actually, I suppose I didn’t have to eat her very much if I didn’t want to. Cunnilingus is difficult to film effectively, especially when the performer is heavily bearded, and all I really had to do was stay in position while Sophie read out her lines and delivered the appropriate grunts and groans.
But I’ve always been somewhat inclined toward the naturalistic theory of theater. If you put a desk on a stage you have things in the drawers even if they are not going to be opened. That kind of thing.
Besides, I couldn’t really imagine being in a scene like this and not doing it legit. So I did what I was supposed to do, and Sophie stayed with her lines very well, and faked her orgasm in semi-song, and that was that.
• • •
Was it exciting?
No, frankly. Not in a sexual sense, at any rate. It was exciting as an experience in the way that any experience would have to be exciting after such a prolonged buildup. But in terms of sex it was all quite mechanical.
• • •
Then it was her turn to return the favor. I opened my raincoat and exposed myself in the traditional flasher’s manner, and we read our lines, and she went down on me.
My chief fear, that I would be unable to achieve an erection, happily failed to materialize. Sophie, let it be said, is very capable at fellatio.
Getting erect and getting off, however, proved to be two different things. When Vinnie had as much footage as he wanted he stopped the camera and asked me how I was coming along.
“I’m not approaching anything,” I said.
Sophie asked if there was anything in particular she could do.
“What you’re doing’s fine,” I said, in one of the year’s more impressive understatements. “Maybe if you do a little more of the same.”
“Sure.”
She did a little more of the same, without the camera this time, and there are a lot worse ways to spend a Monday afternoon, by George, but I still wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Maybe if we screwed a little,” I suggested.
“Sure, why not?”
So we did, and there was nothing wrong with that either, until finally there was that little quiver in the innermost self that lets one know that orgasm is just around the corner.
“Orgasm,” I said, “is just around the corner.”
We returned to Position One and she resumed doing as she had been doing, and I read my requisite lines, and we went around the aforementioned corner.
After the scene was completed, Sophie and I got to talking. “You were real good,” she said. “Like when I pretended to come, you know, I almost came.”
“You could hang around for a while,” I suggested.
“That might be cool. Do you have anything to smoke?”
“Yeah. Somewhere.”
“Why not?”
So we stayed around when the other jokers packed up and went home. Then I insisted we take all the pictures of naked children off the walls. She found my insistence on this point amusing, I think, but she went along with it. Then she got her makeup off and unbraided her pigtails while I washed the gray gunk out of my hair and beard.
“If you’re gonna wait for me to grow my fur back,” she said, “we’ll be a long time waiting.”
“I’m not a fanatic,” I assured her.
I put a couple of records on and we smoked an illicit herb and talked for a while, and then we went to bed.
But that wasn’t part of the movie, and I feel under no obligation whatsoever to tell you anything about it.
—Tuesday
There’s still quite a bit of work that remains to be done on the movie. Some continuity still to shoot, some looping of dialogue, and then of course Vinnie’s arduous task of editing the mess. But I think my role in the venture is over and done with, and I am very certain my role as diarist has come to its conclusion. Nothing that remains to be done would be of much interest to you, Gentle Reader.
It’s been fun for me, and I hope it’s been a little fun for you. There were nights, I must say, when the last thing on earth I yearned to do was sit down at this typewriter and commit my thoughts to paper. In retrospect, though, I think it probably helped me keep my perspective on the whole affair, insofar as I did keep it.
Well, enough said. You read the book; now go out and see the movie.
An Interview
JWW: Well, I suppose we open with the standard question.
SOPHIE: Which is?
JWW: Well, how did a crummy lady like you get into a good-looking business like this?
SOPHIE: How did a . . . oh, I get it. Well, as to how I got into the business, I didn’t get into it the way so many other people do. For example, I never played one-reelers or loops. I never had bit
parts.
JWW: You were always a star.
SOPHIE: Not exactly, but pretty close. In a couple of pictures I played the second female lead, in others I had the lead. So what it amounts to is I always had a major part and these were all major films, full-length films shot for theatrical release.
JWW: I see.
SOPHIE: So I came into the business as an actress rather than someone who was just willing to fuck in front of a camera.
JWW: You had had previous acting experience?
SOPHIE: Oh, definitely. A lot of amateur work, some off-Broadway stuff, basically showcase stuff. Also a couple of appearances on television. Mostly walk-ons, but I had five lines in one episode of As The World Turns, for example. And I’ve studied acting, I’ve taken courses. I think I told you about that.
JWW: Uh-huh.
SOPHIE: So getting back to how I got into it, there was this fellow I knew who had made a couple of underground films, something along the lines of what Andy Warhol was doing a few years ago, and he decided it was time to make some money, and he had backing and he wanted to shoot a porn feature. He and I were good friends and he asked me if I wanted to be in it.
JWW: What was your reaction?
SOPHIE: Well, I’ll tell you. At first my reaction was completely negative.
JWW: Why?
SOPHIE: Because that’s the usual reaction, I guess. You know, somebody tells you they want you to take off your clothes and fuck people for a movie, it doesn’t coincide with your image of self. My immediate reaction was that I was an actress and not a whore.
JWW: But you changed your mind.
SOPHIE: Yeah.
JWW: Why?
SOPHIE: Oh, wow. That’s a good question. Let’s see.
JWW: Take your time.
SOPHIE: Well, first of all, I’m a sexually liberated person.
JWW: What do you mean by that, exactly?
SOPHIE: That I’m sexually liberated. Well, in essence, that I’ve outgrown most of the usual hang-ups. A long time ago I managed to figure out that you didn’t have to love somebody in order to dig fucking them. You didn’t even have to like them a hell of a lot. Naturally it’s better if you like the person you’re fucking, and it’s stone dynamite if you also happen to love them, but it’s not absolutely essential to enjoying yourself sexually. And I found that I didn’t wind up feeling guilty over anything that I did sexually. A sexual relationship could still be a bummer, I mean, like nothing is perfect every time, but even a bummer was no reason to feel guilty afterward.
JWW: Uh-huh.
SOPHIE: I had also found out that I could relate to more than one person sexually at a time. Like in the sense of group sex. I was introduced to group sex by a man I was seeing, I had been fucking him on an occasional basis for a few months, and he had some experience in the group scene and asked me did I want to find out what it was all about. I figured why not, and I tried it, and I discovered I dug it. Not a mad passion or anything, but I enjoyed it; I found it pleasurable and I thought of it as a healthy activity.
JWW: Did you get into it very heavy?
SOPHIE: Not exactly. And I was never into it in a structured away, you know, large orgies, that scene. I was more into it in the sense of maybe a dozen people sitting around talking and smoking, and then things reaching a point where everybody just gets into balling everybody else. One thing group sex did for me, it made me able to relate sexually to both men and women. In a complete way, that is. I had had a little prior experience with girls but it had always been complicated by emotional considerations, a function of an intimate friendship, that sort of thing. In group sex I discovered that I could enjoy eating another girl simply because she tastes good. If you know what I mean.
JWW: Uh, yeah, I think so.
SOPHIE: Anyway, all of this was a way of getting beyond sexual hang-ups, and when I thought in those terms I couldn’t see any really sensible reason not to make a film. You have to remember that when I made the first film I didn’t think in terms of ultimately becoming a star. I was thinking of making one film, not of having a regular gig as a star in porno movies. I thought if only for the experience, if only for the purpose of finding out how I actually feel about it, it’s worth doing. You can only, really learn where your head is at by going out and doing something.
JWW: So in a sense you did it for the experience.
SOPHIE: Also for the bread. Let’s be honest.
JWW: Then money was a factor.
SOPHIE: No question about it. It’s a shame the money isn’t better, but it’s like any other business; the workers are the ones who get exploited. With acting there are so many people who want the work and so few jobs to go around that the pay is never as good as it should be.
JWW: Writers have the same problem.
SOPHIE: Yeah, but actors have it worse.
JWW: You’re probably right. How did you feel when you made the first film?
SOPHIE: It was kind of a goof. That first movie, I think the budget was under ten thousand dollars, and there wasn’t anything you could legitimately call a script. There was like a sheet of paper with four or five major scenes sketched out with maybe three sentences about each of them. We would collectively make up the dialogue as we went along, and if somebody ad-libbed something we left it in.
JWW: And it turned out that you didn’t mind fucking in front of a camera.
SOPHIE: No, I didn’t.
JWW: Did you find out you liked it?
SOPHIE: Well, in the sense of it being amusing and goofy. If you mean was it a special turn-on, then the answer is no, but it wasn’t a special turn-off either. Maybe this is a way to explain it. On the set, like on Different Strokes, we’re all friends, and—
JWW: If you think Alan and I are friends—
SOPHIE: Oh, Alan’s an asshole, everybody knows that, but we all have basically a relationship of friends as opposed to a relationship of strangers.
JWW: Granted.
SOPHIE: So the point is that when I first thought of doing a film, I saw it in terms of being up there on the screen while a hundred jerk-off artists drooled and came in their pants. But that’s just a picture on the screen. None of those people are in the room when the film is actually shot.
JWW: Oh, I see.
SOPHIE: Like for example they had these live sex shows in town a while back, and I guess they still have them in Denmark.
JWW: I believe they do, yes.
SOPHIE: Well, I could never do that. The thought of it turns my stomach, to fuck while dirty old men watched you. But making a movie is completely different.
JWW: And it’s possible to enjoy the experience sexually.
SOPHIE: Yes.
JWW: By that I mean do you ever have an orgasm during the filming of a scene.
SOPHIE: Of course.
JWW: Often?
SOPHIE: Not terribly often because you have to stop and start over all the time, and if you’ve also got dialogue to do or things to keep in your head it’s hard to let go. But I’m surprised at the question, to tell you the truth. The male actors have orgasms all the time, so why should you be surprised that the females do?
JWW: Good point. Is there any particular sexual activity that’s most likely to make you come?
SOPHIE: Yes, there is. Doing a number with another girl. Not because I’m primarily gay, because I’m not. But because there’s no pressure in a girl-girl scene. You don’t have the worries you have with a male partner, like does he have a hard-on, is he going to come too soon, is he going to be able to come at all, etcetera. You can put that completely out of your mind and just groove on the pleasure.
JWW: That’s very interesting. Is there any type of scene you especially don’t like?
SOPHIE: Ass fucking.
JWW: Uh-huh.
SOPHIE: In or out of film, I don’t like it.
JWW: Anything else?
SOPHIE: Not really. Oh, any time my partner is a turn-off. Body odor, for example. Or do you know what’s worse? Scenes wher
e you have to kiss someone with bad breath. Also facial acne on a partner turns me off. This is a matter of being turned off by a partner rather than by an act.
JWW: Uh-huh. Do you ever think about how your parents would react? For that matter, do your parents know what you’ve been doing?
SOPHIE: Let’s not fucking talk about my fucking parents, if you don’t mind.
JWW: I’m sorry, I—
SOPHIE: No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I blew up like that. But let’s not talk about them.
JWW: Sure.
SOPHIE: Is there anything else you want to know?
JWW: Let me just think. I had some notes of things to ask but I don’t know where the fuck I put them.
SOPHIE: Oh.
JWW: Let’s see. Uh, what kind of a future do you see for yourself in films?
SOPHIE: I think I have a good future.
JWW: In porn films, do you mean?
SOPHIE: No, there’s no future in porn films because there’s no money in porn films. But I’ve discovered I really like film itself as a medium to work in. I think I prefer it to the stage, for example.
JWW: So you hope to get work in legitimate films.
SOPHIE: Don’t you think I’m good enough?
JWW: I didn’t say that. I just wondered if you see porn films as a logical stepping-stone to other film work.
SOPHIE: Not for most people.
JWW: Oh.
SOPHIE: Because they can’t act worth shit. If all you can do is suck cock, then you’re more or less limited to roles in which cock sucking plays a leading part.
JWW: Not to mention any names.
SOPHIE: I wasn’t even specifically thinking of her, actually. But generally, most of these girls are not actresses, they don’t even have heavy acting ambitions, whereas I consider myself to be an actress first.
JWW: And a cocksucker second?
SOPHIE: (laughs) Okay, I’ll buy that. An actress first and a cocksucker second. You know what they can do? When I die they can carve it on my tombstone. “She was an actress first and a cocksucker second.”
JWW: “And a beautiful human being in her own right.”
SOPHIE: Amen.
AFTERWORD
I can explain.
Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 18