Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Kubrick, also, had considerably sexed up his movie’s original source material, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. He did his eroticizing less with dialogue than with his visuals. For example, the Korova Milk Bar, barely described in the novel, got the full Kubrick treatment: The director had admired the nude sculptures of Michel Climent, but when Climent demanded to be paid for his work, the parsimonious Kubrick hired another designer (Liz Moore, who had created the Star Child for 2001: A Space Odyssey) to make tables and drinking fountains from naked female mannequins, complete with fluorescent wigs and matching pubic hair. Elsewhere in the film, girls in a record shop suck on phallic lollipops. And one victim, the Cat Lady, received a major makeover, as did her abode, the walls of which were now replete with erotic art. In a production memo, Kubrick detailed many of his original touches, including the Cat Lady’s death by dildo when she is bludgeoned by a huge penis-like work of art.

  During production of A Clockwork Orange, the movie’s Alex, Malcolm McDowell, inquired if Kubrick had ever met with Burgess to discuss the project.

  “Oh, good God, no!” exclaimed Kubrick. “Why would I want to do that?”

  Or, as McDowell surmised, “Kubrick didn’t want interference from the author, who probably didn’t know the first thing about making a movie.”

  McDowell turned out to be the perfect Alex. He conveyed the requisite antic anarchy, and had no qualms about appearing naked on camera either alone or with an equally naked actress—a fact Kubrick well knew from viewing McDowell’s first major stint in front of the camera, Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . , about a revolution in an English boarding school. In that film, McDowell and actress Christine Noonan got so carried away filming their nude tussle that an assistant director quit the production in a fit of moral pique.

  Burgess was equally squeamish. He harbored his doubts about Kubrick’s making an acceptable screen version of his novel. Despite having much admired the director’s Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Burgess was not a fan of Kubrick’s Lolita, and he feared what would happen to his A Clockwork Orange when all the sex and violence had to be visualized onscreen. “Lolita could not work well,” Burgess wrote, “because Kubrick had found no cinematic equivalent to Nabokov’s literary extravagance. Nabokov’s script, I knew, had been rejected; all the scripts for A Clockwork Orange, above all my own, had been rejected too, and I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complimentary pornograph.”

  Initially, Burgess liked what he saw—or, at least, he said he liked what he saw—when Kubrick eventually deigned to meet and give him a private screening of the complete film. Burgess didn’t hold it against the film version of A Clockwork Orange when his wife, repulsed by its choreographed sex and violence, asked to leave that screening after a mere ten minutes. After seeing the movie, Burgess initially told the press, “This is one of the great books that has been made into a great film.”

  Maybe he meant what he said. Or maybe he simply wanted to persuade Kubrick to direct his screenplay “Napoleon Symphony.” In the following weeks, as well as years, Burgess would radically reassess his opinion of A Clockwork Orange the movie.

  THE SEX-AND-VIOLENCE CONTROVERSIES REGARDING Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange were to play out on such a grand stage that a little X-rated film could come and go with scant notice that year—even one directed by a movie star.

  At the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Jack Nicholson put aside his actor’s hat to watch for the umpteenth time the film he’d produced, directed, and cowritten. As soon as the end credits started to roll on Drive, He Said, there were screams of approval from the gala audience. “I thought I was Stravinsky for a moment,” said Nicholson. For a moment. Then the boos and catcalls began. To Nicholson’s eyes and ears it looked like “a riot,” and one that was not going to help his picture. “It was a disaster and I knew it was going to set me back,” he said.

  Drive, He Said got hit with an X rating from the MPAA, the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it, the Canadian censors asked for forty-five cuts, and the British censors rejected it outright. Columbia Pictures, which released the movie, stood by their star director and refused to make any cuts. The studio even went so far as to obtain a few hundred affidavits from psychiatrists who declared it a morally fit film, which was enough to convince the MPAA to reconsider and give it an R rating.

  Nicholson had a theory for why his film inspired all the censorship woes, and it had everything to do with a scene, early in the movie, where actor William Tepper simulates sex with Karen Black as she is slumped over the steering wheel of a car. “I felt it was because they didn’t have orgasms in American films up until now,” argued Nicholson. Plus, “The orgasm is audible, not visible. The person says, ‘I’m coming.’ ” He explained, “You can have everybody moaning and saying, ‘It feels good’ and ‘Screw me,’ but you can’t have someone saying, ‘I’m coming!’ ”

  One reporter at Cannes found the front-seat sex scene unattractive and especially demeaning to women. Nicholson challenged the journalist, telling him that he’d had intercourse in the front seat of a car many times and the man-behind-woman position is the only one that works. And as for being “unattractive,” Nicholson wanted to know, “Well, is it only beautiful people who are allowed to enjoy sex?”

  Others charged the film with being racist, since its locker-room sequences featured full-frontal nudity of only the African-American actor-athletes; it was an accusation that ignored the fact that Caucasian costar Michael Margotta, playing a draft dodger, is featured streaking full-frontally across a college campus for a good sixty seconds of screen time.

  Despite the controversy, Drive, He Said sunk like reinforced concrete in the public consciousness, garnering both bad reviews and box office.

  Being a Mike Nichols film, Carnal Knowledge had no such place to hide. Jules Feiffer thought he sat on an unqualified hit, both with the critics and the moviegoing public. Then a few weeks before the film’s official June release, he and Nichols attended a Directors Guild of America screening in Los Angeles. They stood in the theater’s foyer as their illustrious colleagues in the movie business made their collective exit.

  “Uncompromising,” said William Wyler, director of The Best Years of Our Lives.

  “It was like open-heart surgery,” said John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate.

  Feiffer turned to Nichols. “We’re dead,” he said.

  It seemed to Feiffer that the Hollywood establishment hated his movie. “It was too raw, too revealing, it stuck in their craw,” he would later write in his memoir. And there were other problems, ones that had nothing to do with Hollywood’s snub (only Ann-Margret would receive an Oscar nomination). On the right, the state of Georgia banned Carnal Knowledge. On the left, feminists hated Carnal Knowledge. “It was assaulted by some women writers as sexist and exalted by other women writers as the first film conceived by men to show what we’re really like: creeps,” wrote Feiffer.

  There were a few good reviews—like Vincent Canby’s in the New York Times, a review that managed the print legerdemain of offering a long dissertation on the history of the word “cunt”—it goes back to Chaucer—without actually printing the word “cunt.”

  And there were bad reviews. And not just bad reviews, but damning reviews. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote, “This movie doesn’t just raise a problem, it’s part of it.”

  In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert saw Carnal Knowledge as a film that succeeded commercially because of that rarest of phenomena: “bad word-of-mouth. The more people hear that Carnal Knowledge is only about sex, or that its characters seem obsessed by sex and lack three dimensions, etc., the more people want to go so that they, too, can agree about the movie’s lamentable shortcomings.”

  In that regard, feminist writers definitely led the charge. In the New York Times, Rosalyn Drexler railed against Carnal Knowledge: “But what
do we learn of the flesh that any self-respecting carnivore does not already know? Only that if you are a male, it can lie there like a lump of pasta until woman, as magical fork, lifts it up again. Sexual attitudes and activities are the meat of this picture, but there are maggots in the meat . . . dead meat . . . meat laid out, not laid!”

  Jack Nicholson didn’t help matters. He threw a lot of combustible bad language into the feminists’ bonfire when he told a Newsweek interviewer, “I’ve balled all the women, I’ve done all the drugs, I’ve drunk every drink.”

  To help publicize the movie, his interview in Playboy further stoked the flames, especially when he sang the praises of cocaine and why “chicks dig it sexually. . . . While it numbs some areas, it inflames the mucous membranes such as those in a lady’s genital region. That’s the real attraction of it.” Or when he said, “Within three days in a new town, you are thinking, Why can’t I find a beaver in a bar?” Or that his word for unattainable women was “skunks.”

  At moments like these—and there were a lot of them—Nicholson sounded just like that sex-crazed Jonathan cad from Carnal Knowledge.

  “I can’t go around picking up stray pussy anymore,” Nicholson complained, blaming his predicament on the high-profile Carnal Knowledge. “The Jonathan role turned off a lot of chicks. In a casual conversation with me, you could have a certain difficulty in separating my sexual stance from Jonathan’s. You can imagine what that does to a chick who sees the film, then meets me. For her, I become that character, the negativity she saw in the film. And she doesn’t want to be in a pussy parade. I mean, no chick wants to be part of some band of cunts. And I certainly don’t blame ’em for that.”

  Feiffer weathered the Carnal Knowledge firestorm with feminists, owning up to what he’d written. “Men don’t like girls,” he said. He also didn’t write another screenplay for ten years.

  Mike Nichols had the better cover. “I was going with Gloria Steinem at the time,” he said.

  Jack Nicholson, however, immediately took his place on the feminist hit list, somewhere between Hugh Hefner and Norman Mailer, as one of the most reviled men in America.

  Mailer made the list with his recently published Prisoner of Sex, written in response to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which didn’t have much good to say about Mailer’s—or D. H. Lawrence’s or Henry Miller’s—attitude toward women. Mailer resented Millett’s attack on his novels, especially her opinion that his novel An American Dream “is an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after.” He retaliated in the book Prisoner of Sex, pointing out that “some of the women were writing like very tough faggots.”

  To promote Prisoner of Sex, Mailer appeared at Town Hall in New York City to debate the feminists. Millett declined the invitation to speak, but Germaine Greer, ready to promote her Female Eunuch book, accepted, as did Jill Johnston, who wrote about being a militant lesbian on a weekly basis for the Village Voice. The Town Hall debates were mud-wrestling for the intelligentsia or, as Jules Feiffer put it, “ego-tripping at a very high level.”

  Sometime after Johnston and Greer spoke that night at Town Hall, two women in dungarees emerged from the audience and walked onstage to embrace Johnston. The three of them then began to kiss and hug but quickly lost their collective balance and fell off the stage.

  Mailer was outraged. “C’mon,” he ordered. “You can get as much prick and cunt as you want around the corner on Forty-Second Street for two dollars and fifty cents. We don’t need it here.”

  The crowd at the Town Hall applauded that reprimand, but booed when Mailer later called fellow feminist Betty Friedan “a lady.”

  VANESSA REDGRAVE UTTERING THE word “cunt” was not the biggest problem Ken Russell confronted in getting The Devils approved by the British censors. That spring, Sir John Trevelyan met with the director to give him the bad news. “I’m afraid I’m going to cut your best scene,” he said. “Don’t hold it against me. That’s my job, lad.”

  In truth, Trevelyan wasn’t talking specifically about the “cunt” scene. He was talking about “The Rape of Christ” scene, as Russell well expected.

  Russell affectionately called Trevelyan a “garrulous” old character, and he thought he “worked wonders” in getting the BBFC to approve as much controversial material as the board did over the years, namely the nude wrestling match in his Women in Love.

  But the director had no such luck getting Trevelyan to approve either “The Rape of Christ” or the scene near the end of the film where Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne masturbates with a burnt fragment of Grandier’s shinbone. Also, there was that language problem.

  “I’m afraid we can’t have Vanessa saying ‘cunt,’ ” Trevelyan told Russell. “It’s taken me ten years of fighting just to get ‘fuck’ accepted. I’m afraid the British public isn’t ready yet for ‘cunt.’ ”

  Trevelyan also cut seconds of footage here and there, most of them having to do with scenes of torture, as Russell recalled, “such as the skewering of Grandier’s tongue with needles, or the breaking of his knees—all Trevelyan did was to tone down or reduce the scenes as I had cut them.”

  It could have been much worse for The Devils—if someone other than Trevelyan had headed up the censorship board.

  “Trevelyan admired the film greatly and prevented them from cutting it further,” said BBFC member James Ferman. “Many members of the board thought [The Devils] was shameful . . . and needed to be censored heavily.”

  Trevelyan retired shortly after the release of Russell’s film about a philandering priest and sexually obsessed nuns. Many critics were glad to see him go, and thought he shouldn’t have approved The Devils under any circumstance. Russell, for one, understood the uproar. “There’s nothing too subtle with a naked nun waggling her breasts in front of the camera,” he quipped. In truth, there were lots of naked nuns waggling their breasts, as well as their bums. This much female nudity had never been seen in a mainstream movie—and that the women were young, voluptuous actresses playing nuns only compounded the problem in some critics’ eyes.

  The Evening Standard film reviewer Alexander Walker called it “the masturbation fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood,” and went on in his review to imagine a scene in which Oliver Reed’s character has his penis cut off. Since the scene was never shot, much less put in the movie, Russell whacked the critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Evening Standard in a BBC encounter and, even worse for his cause, Russell uttered the word “fuck” on-air, which only further incensed the organizers of the Festival of Light, led by that sixty-one-year tower of self-appointed puritanism, Mary Whitehouse. Together with the festival, Whitehouse’s letter-writing campaign forced seventeen British municipalities to ignore the BBFC ruling and ban The Devil outright in those townships.

  Other high-profile critics of the film included no less a personage than the future Pope John Paul II, then the Patriarch of Venice, who called out “excesses never seen before” when The Devils screened at the Venice Film Festival that summer.

  More problematic than the future pope were the current executives at Warner Bros. They’d read and approved Russell’s script (the same script that UA’s David Picker had read and rejected), and voiced no preliminary objections. But there was a difference between reading directions like “they give Sister Jeanne an enema of boiling water” and seeing it depicted onscreen. There’s even a difference between those visuals and how Aldous Huxley in his novel described it: “The purging of Sister Jeanne was the equivalent of a rape in a public lavatory.”

  Russell offered a defense of his script, which was really a defense of the film medium or, at least, an explanation of its powers as well as its limitations. “When one reads these events in Huxley’s account, one can sift the words through one’s imagination and filter out as much of the unpleasantness as one cares to,” he maintained. “You can’t do this when you are looking at a film.”

  Maybe Warners chief Ted Ashley never actually read the screenplay—that’s
what he paid readers to do—but he most certainly didn’t see what he expected to see when he and a few other studio “henchmen,” as Russell called them, first saw The Devils in a London screening room. Russell showed them the version that had already been cut and approved by the BBFC. Even without witnessing “The Rape of Christ” scene, “they walked out stunned,” said Russell.

  A Warners vice president told him, “Better come and see us in our suite at the Dorchester in an hour.”

  An hour later, Ashley and the others let him have it. “That’s the biggest load of shit I’ve ever seen,” Ashley told Russell. “I’ve never seen the likes of this disgusting shit.”

  Russell said something about their having seen the script; he’d shot it as written. “But the fact is they weren’t very visual people,” despite their exalted jobs at a movie studio, he said.

  Overall, the British censors didn’t have a problem with the nudity in The Devils. The American executives, however, were another story. According to the director, “Ashley cut The Devils to pieces because of an apparent fear of pubic hair.” And there was a lot of pubic hair to be cut. “They took the film and got my editor to cut out all the shots which they wanted removed, which basically consisted of all the shots in which there was graphic nudity. This adversely affected the story, to the point where in American the film is disjointed and incomprehensible,” said Russell.

  JOHN SCHLESINGER’S SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY made it to premiere night without any cuts from the censors or its studio. Schlesinger, on the other hand, did a lot of editing when it came to publicly discussing his love life. The subject matter of the film made that veil of privacy difficult to maintain, especially on opening night, when reporters asked if he identified with the gay characters in Sunday Bloody Sunday or if the film’s plot in any way resembled his own life story.

  “I make no personal statement about my private life,” Schlesinger replied. “My private life is my private life. Actually, I identify with all three characters in Sunday Bloody Sunday.”