Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  The Devils had that effect on people, including Russell’s own wife, Shirley Russell, who designed the film’s costumes. During production, she started taking driving instructions. As Ken Russell described it in his memoir, “These lessons often extended well into the afternoon, as I discovered whenever I sent word for her to join us on the set to discuss one of her bizarre costumes and explain, for instance, which way round it should be worn. Shirley was never to be found and, although there was nothing unusual in this because as the director’s wife she was a law unto herself, it nevertheless started me wondering if a little back-seat driving might not be involved.”

  AUTUMN 1970 EMERGED AS an especially rowdy season for the world’s moviemakers: Ken Russell gave enemas to a nun, Mike Nichols wrestled with a sexist pig, Luchino Visconti lusted for an angel, and Sam Peckinpah fired yet another secretary.

  The director of The Wild Bunch had already gone through four secretaries in two weeks by the time he met up with Katy Haber, whom he hired on the spot. They started work on a Wednesday afternoon in his London hotel room and worked straight through Sunday, and they didn’t quit until Monday at two thirty in the morning. Peckinpah, in a burst of creative energy laced with speed and booze, adapted Gordon M. Williams’s novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm to the screen. He was calling his script Straw Dogs, and in addition to the novel’s title, he pretty much ignored the novel’s story, too, which he called “shitty,” except for those few pages where some drunken thugs attack a professor and his wife in their Cornwall farmhouse.

  Beginning that Wednesday afternoon, the first scene Peckinpah gave his brand-new secretary to type was the rape scene. Actually, it was two rape scenes, neither of them in the novel, in which the wife half-wants sex with an old boyfriend and then really, really doesn’t want sex with that guy’s two cohorts. Haber, who considered herself a “nice Jewish girl from London,” wondered about her new boss. “Jesus Christ, who am I working for, Jack the Ripper?” she asked herself.

  Peckinpah didn’t want to rewrite the script he’d been given but found he had no choice when Harold Pinter, having also passed on Kenneth Tynan’s offer to direct Oh! Calcutta!, went on a rejection binge and refused to do any work on The Siege of Trencher’s Farm or whatever it was being called. The playwright, a master of all that goes unspoken, wanted nothing to do with Peckinpah’s new movie. He even wrote a letter letting Peckinpah know his displeasure at having to read the rough draft, much less his having to rewrite it: “I can only say I consider it an abomination.”

  Even before shooting commenced, Peckinpah lost one cinematographer, Arthur Ibbetson, who, after reading the script, left the project for “religious reasons.” Somehow, the script held an allure for Dustin Hoffman, who, as an actor, never wanted to repeat himself onscreen, having quickly gone from the college-grad nerd in The Graduate to the burnt-out bum in Midnight Cowboy to the peace-loving Native American wannabe in Little Big Man. Since he’d never played a revengeful math-professor cuckold before, Straw Dogs would be his next film.

  As the actor explained, “What appealed to me was the notion, on paper at least, of dealing with a so-called pacifist who was unaware of the feelings and potential for violence inside himself that were the very same feelings he abhorred in society.”

  In Straw Dogs, Hoffman’s character would be called upon to kill his movie nemeses in any number of ways: gunfire, acid, bludgeoning by stairway rail, animal trap. Regarding the double rape, he worried about the casting of the comely twenty-one-year-old Susan George, whom he described as “this kind of Lolita-ish girl.” Hoffman couldn’t understand why his character, an uptight professor, would be married to such a woman. He thought an older actress might be more appropriate, because it would make the rape more convincing. “I thought a woman who was a little older and starting to feel a little out of it in terms of being attractive—had a sensuality but was losing it—might be more ambivalent about being raped.”

  That bit of pre-feminist thinking aside, it was not an easy shoot for Susan George or anyone else, for that matter. Production shut down for four days when Peckinpah had to be rushed to a London hospital to recover from walking pneumonia, brought on by the Cornwall cold, wet weather, as well as his incipient alcoholism.

  Hoffman defended his director. Kind of.

  “I do think of Sam as a man out of his time. It’s ironic that he’s alive as a gunfighter in an age when we’re flying to the moon,” said Hoffman, forgetting for a moment that Peckinpah was a director of Westerns and not an actual veteran of the O.K. Corral.

  Four days after drying out in London, Peckinpah returned to Cornwall. On the train ride there, Hoffman made his way to Peckinpah’s cabin. The hospital visit hadn’t done him much good. “He was plastered,” said Hoffman. But the booze hadn’t dulled his talent.

  “I have an idea for this scene,” Peckinpah told him.

  “What is it?”

  “She’s getting raped and we cut to you shooting the gun with these guys,” Peckinpah began. Hoffman recalled being “transfixed. The way he described it was unbelievable. Film was in his blood, more than alcohol. Talent is talent.”

  Peckinpah wasn’t in great shape when he returned to the wilds of Cornwall, but he was strong enough to scare the shit out of his leading lady. As he put it to one visiting reporter on the set of Straw Dogs, “I’m like a good whore. I go where I’m kicked.”

  BACK IN SAM PECKINPAH’S America, the president of the United States finally released a statement regarding “The Report on the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.” Richard Nixon’s condemnation began:

  “Several weeks ago, the National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography—appointed in a previous administration—presented its findings. I have evaluated that report and categorically reject its morally bankrupt conclusions and major recommendations.

  “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life. . . .

  “The Commission calls for the repeal of laws controlling smut for adults, while recommending continued restrictions on smut for children. In an open society, this proposal is untenable. If the level of filth rises in the adult community, the young people in our society cannot help but also be inundated by the flood.

  “Pornography can corrupt a society and a civilization. The people’s elected representatives have the right and obligation to prevent that corruption. . . .

  “American morality is not to be trifled with. The Commission on Pornography and Obscenity has performed a disservice, and I totally reject its report.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1971, Fatigue

  In addition to calling himself a whore, Sam Peckinpah liked to brandish photographs of dead deer. “I shot that stag in Scotland,” he’d brag to reporters. “All my family are hunters, meat-hunters, not for sport. They hunt to kill an animal as quickly as possible. I hunt for meat. I shot that stag and killed it and skinned it and roasted it over a fire, and I ate the meat . . . and it was good.”

  No, it wasn’t easy being a woman—the only woman—on the set of Straw Dogs.

  The actual shoot began in January, and the Cornwall weather cooperated with Peckinpah’s story by being brutally cold and otherwise inhospitable—kind of like the way Peckinpah treated Susan George. In the beginning, Dustin Hoffman behaved much more deferentially to the film’s leading lady. “Like a princess,” said Daniel Melnick, the film’s producer. Hoffman kept his Lolita-ish opinion of George to himself. Peckinpah, on the other hand, “became increasingly cold and hostile to Susan. . . . He got the performance by provoking her into it,” said Melnick.

  In contract negotiations, Susan George’s representatives had approved the rape scene but asked for a body double, a request that was immediately refused. A few weeks into the shoot, as the violent scene loomed on the production schedule, the actress had severe second thoughts about the rape and the requisite nudity. It didn’t help her cause that she expressed he
r concerns to Melnick about Peckinpah’s being an animal. Word of their talk got back to the director, who immediately fired off a memo to Melnick:

  “This afternoon when we discussed the rape scene and Susan George’s relationship to it, I was stunned.” Peckinpah felt betrayed by both Melnick and George. “I have no intention of coming anywhere near anything faintly smelling of pornography. Pussies and penises do not interest me. The emotional havoc that happens to [the character of] Amy is the basis of our story.”

  Melnick, for his part, thought his actress had reason to be worried. “She didn’t trust Sam and a couple of the actors, who were quite primitive in their art, not to really rape her,” he said. “I didn’t want to devastate her and didn’t think it was worth having a huge drama about. But Sam insisted.”

  Finally, Melnick told George that he would be present for the filming of the rape scene.

  Peckinpah balked at that news. “You don’t trust me,” he told his producer.

  “It’s not that I don’t. She doesn’t,” Melnick replied. “Between you and me, I think you really would have someone fuck her.”

  “I’d only do it if it were really necessary,” replied Peckinpah.

  HOW BADLY WERE HOLLYWOOD movies doing at the box office?

  For two weeks that spring, Melvin Van Peebles’s tiny Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song outgrossed Paramount’s Love Story, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. That wasn’t supposed to happen, because Sweet Sweetback wasn’t supposed to happen.

  Van Peebles, after receiving a fifty-thousand-dollar loan from friend Bill Cosby to finish his film, had little luck securing a distributor and he finally had to go with Cinemation. Even then, the nearly bankrupt company could book the film into only two theaters: one in Detroit, the other in Atlanta.

  “There were only two people at the first screening in Detroit,” Van Peebles recalled, “no one at the second, then three or four black guys came to the third. They were Black Panthers and they spread the word, and that evening there were lines around the block. I knew it was a hit when the theater ran out of hot dogs that night.”

  Eventually, the Black Panthers’ Huey P. Newton saw Sweet Sweetback, and quickly dashed off a ten-thousand-word paean, devoting an entire issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper to the film. Panther member David Hilliard agreed with Newton’s high opinion of Van Peebles’s work, because in the movie “the [black] community comes to Melvin’s defense. We see this as a self-defense movement. The community embraces Melvin and he’s a hero.”

  That year, the Black Panthers had forty-eight chapters. “And every one of our chapters mobilized to see the film,” said Hilliard.

  Newton’s assistant Billy “X” Jennings saw Sweetback at his leader’s recommendation. “When we arrived at the theater,” Jennings recalled, “there were comrades coming out who had just seen it, and they were slapping each other five, saying, ‘It’s going to be a bad movie; they’ve got some good shit in there.’ And this was the first time you’ve ever seen sex on-screen, and there were some people saying, ‘The young guy getting some!’ actually talking to the movie.”

  Of course, the young guy getting some in the film was Van Peebles’s own thirteen-year-old son, Mario, cast as the adolescent Sweetback, a nickname for “a man who could make love,” as the director described it.

  In his Black Panther Party essay, Newton praised the opening scene, wherein the boy loses his virginity at the coaxing of a prostitute. Newton wrote, “Not only is he baptized into his fullness as a man, he gets his name and his identity in this sacred rite. After that, whenever Sweetback engages in sex with a sister it is always an act of survival and a step towards his liberation.”

  Newton linked the sex to the violence, and put them both on equal ground in a positive, revolutionary light: “Sweetback grew into a man when he was in bed with that woman and he also grew to be a man when he busted the heads of his oppressors. When he was with the woman it was like a holy union, and when he takes the heads of his oppressors it is like taking the sacrament for the first time.” (Tellingly, Newton is one of the few commentators who correctly identified Sweetback as “not a pimp” but an employee of the brothel.)

  Others disagreed vehemently with Newton. And they disagreed in publications that far exceeded the readership of the monthly Black Panther Party newspaper. The Los Angeles Times assigned the Kuumba Workshop of Chicago, a collective of black artists, to write an article to voice its collective opinion: “Van Peebles pictures sexual freakishness as an essential and unmistakable part of black reality and history—a total distortion and gross affront of black people. . . . We don’t know what film Huey Newton watched but neither the background spirituals nor the whore’s reminder that nobody will take his picture makes the scene ‘spiritual.’ Van Peebles does not use sex as a spiritual force as Newton argues, but the same as any other pornographer—to arouse and to give his audience a vicarious thrill.”

  Van Peebles didn’t see the big fuss over the scene—or the fact that he had his own thirteen-year-old son strip naked to lie on top of an equally naked adult woman and grind their hips together. “Hell, my father got me a girl. What’s the big deal?” he asked critics.

  Van Peebles found the film’s many graphic sex scenes downright revolutionary. “Up to this point we’d never seen black people with sexuality. We didn’t have a Mae West. Only time you have sexuality was [black women] being raped by the Ku Klux Klan.”

  Nor did he offer excuses for his portrayal of Sweetback as a superstud, one who proves his sexual prowess in not one but two staged scenes: first, in the brothel, when he performs before paying customers, and second, when the white female leader of a biker gang taunts him into having sex with her in front of the other bikers. “I took a stereotype and stood it on its head,” Van Peebles bragged.

  The MPAA, true to form, slapped an X rating on the film. Van Peebles called it “cultural genocide” and enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union to take up his cause, which they did.

  “They don’t have the right to rate a film dealing with the black community,” said the ACLU’s Eason Monroe. But of course the MPAA did have the right.

  In the end, Van Peebles turned even that brouhaha to his advantage by creating a classic T-shirt to help promote the film. It read “Rated X by an all-white jury.”

  He won in other ways as well. Over at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, executives studied the Sweetback grosses, then took another look at their Shaft script, its lead private-detective character written for a white actor. They promptly cast Richard Roundtree instead.

  ONE DAY THAT SPRING, with nothing better to do in America’s capital, John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman were sitting in the Oval Office, chewing the fat about the Black Panthers and welfare mothers, when their boss just couldn’t help but tell them about something he’d seen on the tube the night before. It was this new hit TV show on CBS called All in the Family, about this lovable “hard-hat father” and his “hippie son-in-law.” In this particular episode, titled “Judging Books by Covers,” the hard-hat father, named Archie Bunker, goes to a bar to meet an old friend, an ex–professional linebacker. Archie is shocked to learn that his macho friend is gay.

  The president of the United States was equally mortified.

  “God, he’s handsome, strong, virile, and this and that,” said Richard Nixon, almost swooning over the masculine image he’d seen on the little screen. Then the president couldn’t contain himself. “They were glorifying homosexuality!” he yelled at Ehrlichman and Haldeman. “Goddammit, I don’t think you should glorify homosexuality on public television. I turned the goddamned thing off. I couldn’t listen anymore. What do you think that does to eleven- and twelve-year-old boys? You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. We all know Aristotle was a homo, so was Socrates.”

  “But they didn’t have the influence of television,” Ehrlichman chimed in.

  Back in the Sodom and Gomorrah of America, otherwise known as Hollywood, the show�
�s producer, Norman Lear, had fought long and hard for that “homo-glorifying” episode of All in the Family. Just as he had fought for every “coons” and “Hebes” and “spics” and “Polacks” and “micks” that aired in the show’s first episode, on January 21.

  Against even stronger objections from the CBS brass, Lear had fought to keep the show’s initial story line in which Archie and his wife, Edith, come home from church on Sunday to find their daughter and son-in-law in bed upstairs having sex.

  The CBS censors objected, but Lear held firm. He told them, “It’s gonna go the way it is or it’s not gonna go.” Carroll O’Connor, the show’s Archie, recalled Lear’s telling the executives, “We’re going to be getting into a lot of this stuff as the series goes on, and we might as well get the audience used to it.” The network buckled and Lear won: The young couple would get to have sex, even if it was Sunday morning.

  CBS, fearing a deluge of angry phone calls, posted extra telephone operators on its switchboard the night of January 21. CBS also expected no fewer than “fifty stations to jump off the network!” one executive predicted.

  O’Connor feared as much and took out insurance by insisting that his contract guarantee him and his family round-trip tickets back to their home in Italy when the network yanked All in the Family.

  But no stations fled CBS, few angry viewers phoned to complain, and the O’Connor family had to give up their home in Rome. By season’s end, All in the Family was the number-one-rated show, having explored such hot topics as Sunday sex, impotence, and Archie Bunker’s homosexual friend.

  “That was awful!” Nixon said of the latter. “It made a fool out of a good man.”