John Warren Wells

Different Strokes: Or, How I Wrote, Directed and Starred in an X-rated Movie

for PEGGY and BILL

but for whom...

Introduction

A Word From John Warren Wells

The book you now hold in your hand is in many respects a unique contribution to contemporary sexological literature. It contains in one volume the screenplay for a pornographic movie, a day-by-day production diary kept by the author of the screenplay (who is himself a performer in the film) and an interview with the film’s leading lady.

The book is thus sufficient unto itself, and surely self-explanatory, and originally no introduction was considered to be necessary. This is no longer the case. Circumstances have since dictated an explanation of why, although you can buy this book, you will very likely never see the movie chronicled herein.

In June of 1973, shortly after the filming of Different Strokes was completed but before the film had been edited, the Supreme Court of the United States of America did one of two things, depending on your point of view; either the Court struck a great ringing blow for public decency, or it effectively repealed the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The Court’s decision, in effect, holds that local communities may determine what is or is not obscene, and hence what may or may not be read or viewed in its confines. This would seem to contradict a principle established early in the past century that state and local governments may not take action in violation of the Bill of Rights, but this is hardly a place for a discussion of the legal aspects of the decision. On the practical side, the effects may or may not be far-reaching and long-enduring.

It is unclear at present just how many erotic efforts will fall victim to the Court’s ruling. It seems certain, though, that the chief victims will be the more expensively produced erotic films, of which Different Strokes had hoped to be an excellent example. Already several theaters throughout the country have wholly abandoned their policy of showing porn flicks, and it seems inevitable that a great many others will follow suit.

It also seems inevitable that a great many works of more enduring merit will be similarly banned or otherwise deprived of an audience, since this is always the case when censorship is given its head. But here the author’s own bias is showing; I am, as shall be made clear herein, unalterably opposed to censorship in any form, and for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps this will all blow over. Perhaps Different Strokes will one day be given final processing and cleared for theatrical release. Perhaps one day you will see it. If this never happens, you will not have been deprived of a major artistic breakthrough. You will have missed few major moments in the development of cinema.

But I do hope you get to see the film some day. And, in the meantime, I hope you find the record of its production interesting and amusing.

John Warren Wells

New York City, 1974

A Screenplay

1. Close-up of penis on erotic lamp. Hold this shot for a few seconds with only general room tone as background. We hear the sound of a gavel.

AUCTIONEER

(OC) Ladies and gentlemen, lot number 453... (Camera pulls back slowly to reveal rest of statue.)

AUCTIONEER

(Doubtfully.)... a lamp... (Camera continues pullback revealing AUCTIONEER.)

AUCTIONEER

An unusually fine and rare example of its kind. Please consult your catalogues. May I have an opening bid of one hundred dollars? (Camera continues pullback revealing people sitting and standing in and around the room. The bidding continues as the AUCTIONEER continues calling for higher bids in increments of twenty-five dollars. People raise their hands occasionally to bid. The camera continues its pullback and now the POV has reached the last row. The camera begins a slow dolly to the right and holds steady after AUCTIONEER says:) I have five hundred, will you go five and a quarter. I have five hundred once. I have five hundred twice...

(SOPHIE jumps into frame, wearing a wild hat of bird feathers, etc. We see her from behind, back of head from top of hat to upper shoulders.)

SOPHIE

One thousand goddamned dollars!

2. Exterior of the auction gallery. We pick up SOPHIE walking out with the package under her arm. Also at this point we begin our opening music. We have a montage at this point. Series of shots of SOPHIE walking in the Madison Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Central Park South area. Then—

3. SOPHIE at the corner of 59th and 5th. (Medium long shot.)

4. Shot across the street from SOPHIE’S POV. We see the traffic sign flash “WALK.”

5. Medium shot from SOPHIE’S side. We see her in frame start to cross the street. She steps off the curb. We see a cab start to turn the corner.

6. Shot of SOPHIE from inside the cab, driver’s POV. The cab just misses her and we see SOPHIE stumble backward.

7. Same shot as #5. SOPHIE’S hat is cockeyed on her head. Zoom in to her face as she mouths the words “fuck you” and gives the cab the finger.

8. Freeze frame on this shot and first credit.

9. Continuation of montage sequence.

10. Long shot of SOPHIE with operating pile driver in the foreground. Focus shifts from the pile driver to SOPHIE. Zoom in to her face watching it go up and down.

11. Freeze frame and second credit.

12. Continuation of montage sequence.

13. Medium shot of doorman opening door for SOPHIE outside her apartment building. Pan down to his crotch.

14. Close on SOPHIE looking down at the doorman’s crotch. She licks her lips and leers.

15. Shot of penis on erotic lamp in close-up.

16. Close shot of doorman’s crotch.

17. Close on SOPHIE’S face licking her lips and leering.

18. Freeze frame and third credit.

19. SOPHIE in the hall outside her apartment She is walking down the hall toward her apartment door. Shot from behind.

20. Reverse of 19. The door of SOPHIE’S neighbor’s apartment opens. We zoom in to see the neighbor’s hand on SOPHIE’S arm. He is IRVING, a seventy-year-old man with a twenty-year-old libido. Dressed in a velvet smoking jacket, rimless glasses, right out of the nineteenth century. You get the type, the kind who wears a bathing suit with socks and shoes. He has a small wrapped gift in his other hand.

21. Shot of IRVING from POV SOPHIE.

IRVING

Sophie, my little rose petal, how about a little...

SOPHIE

(To herself.) Oh, my God. (To IRVING.) Irving, I can’t begin to tell you...

22. SOPHIE POV IRVING.

SOPHIE

What a comfort it is for me to have you watching the hall.

IRVING

...Come and view...

23. IRVING POV SOPHIE.

IRVING

...the new French slides I just got for my stereopticon.

24. Two-shot.

IRVING

(Holds out stereopticon. Looks through it, whistles, snorts, moves eyebrows, etc. Offers stereopticon to SOPHIE.) Ankles, knees, it’s all there out in the open.

SOPHIE

Some other time, Irving, when I’m not in a rush. (Pushes him back into his apartment.) And...

25. SOPHIE POV IRVING.

SOPHIE

...we’ll curl up on your davenport and titillate each other.

IRVING

(As door is closing.) Oh

26. IRVING POV SOPHIE.

IRVING

...you devil you, you... (Door closes.) FADE OUT

27. FADE IN. SOPHIE, in her apartment. Medium shot of lamp being placed on a shelf. Dolly back to reveal SOPHIE’S apartment. It is basically Victoriana. It is loaded with erotic, suggestive and downright pornographic this and that. As we watch she goes around the apartment dusting, cleaning, etc.

28. SOPHIE in medium close-up. She undresses a Barbie doll and a Ken doll, arranges them in the missionary posture.

SOPHIE

Enjoy yourselves, kids. (She picks up a Little Brother doll, tweaks its cock playfully, sets it down. Then she picks up a Raggedy Ann doll and cuddles it. Music cue of mandolin playing “Those Were The Days.”)

29. Close on SOPHIE’S face. She is looking and remembering. DISSOLVE:

30. Same close-up as 29, but now SOPHIE is a thirteen-year-old, stereotyped of course. Quasi Fauntleroy outfit on. Big rouge marks on her cheeks. Pigtails, etc. Fade out “Those Were The Days” and fade in “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Pull back to see SOPHIE in Central Park near the swings in the playground. Music drops and SOPHIE begins humming “Good Ship Lollipop,” cuddling doll, etc.

31. Long shot of SOPHIE. Suddenly in frame appears the back view of a DIRTY OLD MAN. He begins to walk toward her. He is wearing a smarmy raincoat. He is humming a nothing sort of tune to himself in a deep, deep voice. As he gets closer to her, her singing and humming gets louder. SOPHIE notices him.

32. Shot of DOM POV SOPHIE. She stops humming, and watches the DOM approach. His humming gets louder. He stops.

DOM

Why, hello, little one! What a pretty doll.

33. Close-up SOPHIE. She’s listening, but saying nothing.

34. Same as #32.

DOM

...and what a pretty little doll you are. What’s your name, my dear? (Two beats.) What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?

35. Same as #33. SOPHIE still looking. She sticks out her tongue and gives a Bronx cheer.

DOM

(OC) Ahhhh, yes...

36. Two-shot. Dolly around to wind up in a two-shot favoring the DOM.

DOM

...perfectly lovely.

SOPHIE

(Little voice throughout.) I’m not supposed to talk to strange men.

DOM

(Shot favoring him here.) That’s no problem, my dear. There’s nothing strange about me, is there?

37. Pan down DOM’S body from head to crotch. Hold two beats on his crotch.

38. Close-up on SOPHIE as she reacts.

SOPHIE

Well...

DOM

If you’ll come with me for a little walk.

39. Two-shot favoring DOM.

DOM

...my sweet, I’ll give you a lollipop. (Whips five hundred and thirty-six lollipops from his pocket immediately, and just as quickly returns them.)

40. Close-up SOPHIE as she reacts.

SOPHIE

Well...

41. Tracking shot of SOPHIE and DOM walking through the park.

DOM

What’s your name, my dear?

SOPHIE

It’s Sophie.

DOM

Sophie. What a pretty name.

SOPHIE

I think it sucks. (At this point they pass the camera and the camera pans as they pass.)

42. Tracking from the front. Two-shot.

DOM

And how old are you, Sophie?

SOPHIE

I’m thirteen.

DOM

Thirteen!

SOPHIE

Is that bad?

(During the DOM’S next line, we let them pass the camera and pan with them to get a two-shot from the rear. We see that the DOM’S hand is on SOPHIE’S ass.)

DOM

It’s fortunate for both of us, my dear, that I’m not the least bit superstitious. DISSOLVE:

43. Interior of the DOM’S furnished room. We begin our shot on typical children’s-style drawing on the wall. It is obscene but is still obviously done by a child. Hold this for two beats and then pullback and pan to a two-shot of SOPHIE and the DOM.

SOPHIE

When am I going to get my lollipop?

DOM

First my dear, you’d better take off all your clothes...

44. Medium shot of DOM POV SOPHIE. He is stroking his crotch but catches himself doing it and stops.

DOM

...you wouldn’t want to drool all over your pretty dress.

45. Close-up SOPHIE. Pullback after her line to have a medium shot POV DOM.

SOPHIE

Now I’ve heard everything. (She takes off all her clothes. Intercut shots of the DOM’S face.)

SOPHIE

Well?

46. Two-shot.

DOM

First I’ll have some candy for myself, you little angel. (He puts her on the bed while speaking.)... Such a lovely little thing. Aren’t these delightful? Scoops of ice cream with cherries on top. (He works his way down her body with appropriate oohs and ahs, then stations himself between her legs. He is, of course, still fully dressed.) My God, that’s a pretty one!

SOPHIE

It’s the only one I’ve got.

DOM

What an aroma! Cinnamon crumpets, maraschino cherries, mink musk...

SOPHIE

Are you going to eat it or write a poem about it? (A good question, which he proceeds to answer with eager tongue.)

47. Close on DOM eating SOPHIE. Intercut with shots of her face as she delivers the lines.

SOPHIE

A genuine dirty old man. You don’t know what a hassle it is to find a dirty old man these days. The hours I’ve spent in that stupid park, dragging that dumb doll around. And all I saw were cops and muggers... that feels wonnnnnddeeerfuuuulllll... I’ve tried to do it myself but I couldn’t ever reach... When I think of all the years I’ve wasted playing hopscotch and kick the can... Johnnie on the pony wasn’t too bad, but stilllllllll... The camera stays on SOPHIE’S face for the rest of this.

SOPHIE

(Half singing, half talking as she gets closer to orgasm.)

ON THE GOOD SHIP...

LOLL — EE — POP...

WHAT A GREAT TRIP...

OH... DON’T STOP...

MAYBE HE’S A BUM...

BUT I THINK HE’S GONNA... MAKE...

ME... CCUuuMMMMMMM! (And she does just that.)

48. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

I suppose it’s tacky of me to mention this, but whatever happened to that lollipop?

DOM

You’ve earned it, my little one. Here it is!

49. Medium shot of DOM POV SOPHIE. DOM standing as he triumphantly opens his raincoat to reveal that he is naked beneath it, his trousers being merely pants legs cut off and held in place by rubber bands; i.e., typical flasher’s garb. Naturally the actor hasn’t been walking around like this, but the audience doesn’t know this.

50. Close-up SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

You call that a lollipop?

DOM

(OC) Play your cards right, my dear...

51. Two-shot favoring the DOM.

DOM

...and it could turn out to be an all-day sucker. (She gets ready to go down on him.)

SOPHIE

But it’s so small...

DOM

It’s a magic lollipop, my dear. The more you eat, the bigger it gets.

SOPHIE

I was thinking... (DOM puts her head in position.)

DOM

Eat first. Later, well talk. (As she goes down on him, he delivers all or some of the following dialogue. Some on camera, some off camera.)

DOM

Ah, that’s delicious... Careful, Sophie, keep your pretty little teeth out of the way... that’s much better... Oh, that’s much better... Are you sure you haven’t done this before? No, don’t answer, never talk with your mouth full... a natural talent... truly incredible... oooh, ah, etc.

52. Close on SOPHIE’S face. The DOM cums. Her mouth is open and there is a bead of semen on her chin.

53. DOM POV SOPHIE.

DOM

Swallow it, angel. It’s full of vitamins.

54. SOPHIE POV DOM. She swallows.

SOPHIE

You know, I can see this as a turning point in my life...

DOM

(OC) You missed a drop. (She gets the blob of sperm on her index finger and puts her finger in her mouth.) DISSOLVE:

55. Close-up the mature SOPHIE in her apartment in the same position, her finger in her mouth. She takes her finger out of her mouth, looks at it, shrugs. She goes over to the lamp she has just bought. She begins to fondle and stroke the penis-spout. After a bit she kisses it. There is an explosion. SOPHIE’S face goes out of frame. Thick red smoke begins to appear from the spout of the lamp. There is another explosion.

56. Close-up SOPHIE reacting to all this.

57. The smoke clears and we have a shot of PLUTO JONES POV SOPHIE. He is super straight in a Brooks Brothers suit, sincere tie, slim attaché case in one hand. But he does have a Satanic beard, a pair of cute little horns, and a tail.

PLUTO

You rang?

58. Close-up SOPHIE, reaction shot.

SOPHIE

Oh, my God! (She runs away from him.)

59. SOPHIE runs toward camera. Camera pans as she passes to end up in a two-shot of PLUTO and SOPHIE from behind SOPHIE, PLUTO has changed position.

PLUTO

You’re miles away.

60. Close-up SOPHIE over PLUTO’S shoulder.

SOPHIE

What the hell... (She runs again.)

61. Same as #59.

PLUTO

You’re getting warmer.

62. Same as #60.

SOPHIE

What the devil... (She runs again,)

63. Same as #59.

PLUTO

(Snaps fingers; explosion.) Much warmer.

64. Same as #60.

SOPHIE

Well, I’ll be damned... (She stands there and slowly backs away from PLUTO, hands on hips, looking at him.)

65. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

Bull’s-eye!

66. SOPHIE POV PLUTO. She walks to the bar to pour a drink. She speaks over her shoulder as she is pouring.

SOPHIE

And just who or what are you supposed to be, anyway?

67. Two-shot.

PLUTO

PLUTO JONES. My card. (He proffers a card and hands it to SOPHIE, who is standing at the bar.)

68. Close-up of PLUTO’S card, which reads: PLUTO JONES/ HELL/Department of Sexual Fulfillment/Personnel Selection Division/Recruiter, 3rd Asst./Employee number 365566774774. Camera stays here long enough for this to be easily read.

SOPHIE

Oh, my God... (Really drawn out.)

69. Medium close-up of SOPHIE. She is taking a sip of her drink and fingering the edge of the card to check its quality. She nods to herself, impressed. Pause two beats.

SOPHIE

(She hands the card back to PLUTO, walks past him and the camera pans to the couch as she sits down. We are now in a two-shot favoring SOPHIE. She delivers the lines during her motion, ending as she sits down.) So what’s this got to do with me? I still don’t get it.

70. Medium shot of PLUTO POV SOPHIE. He moves to the couch and sits down as the camera pans and dollies to reframe for a two-shot.

PLUTO

Well that’s been the whole problem, hasn’t it.

SOPHIE

What? Oh, I see. Very cute. So the question is what in the hell have you got for me?

PLUTO

Well, if...

SOPHIE

And listen, sweetie, whatever you’ve got for me, it better be something better than what I’m used to getting. Know what I mean?

PLUTO

Well, Sophie, if it’s in Hell, I guarantee I can get it for you. (He has opened his briefcase. He has taken out fourteen thousand forms and is arranging them on the coffee table.)

71. The same, but time has passed. PLUTO’S papers are cluttering the table, his jacket is off, his tie loose, his sleeves rolled up. The ashtray is overflowing with cigarette butts, etc.

SOPHIE

What mixes me up is the way things fit together. You came because I went down on that lamp, but you ain’t no genie with the light brown hair.

PLUTO

One myth can borrow from another.

SOPHIE

Isn’t that plagiarism?

PLUTO

On a grand scale, it’s called research.

SOPHIE

(Over her glass as she drains it.) Oh, it’s like that.

72. PLUTO POV SOPHIE. Fiddling still with papers. Businesslike.

PLUTO

No, actually it’s like this... (Snaps fingers; explosion.)

73. Same as #72. SOPHIE staring at her drink now full again. Looks for a second. Takes a sip.

SOPHIE

Very convenient, that, very convenient.

74. PLUTO, as in #72.

PLUTO

Merely parlor games. (But he looks a bit proud, then again all business.) However, why don’t we get back to the deal I’m offering.

SOPHIE

(OC) Deal? (Picks up forms, shuffles them.) That’s where we go from Aladdin to Faust. I sign on the dotted line. Then I get three wishes, and in return for that you’ve got a claim on my immortal soul.

PLUTO

Check and double-check. (He finds the right form, picks up the pen, uncaps it, leans forward, then pauses and PLUTO lets out breath he has been holding for quite some time.)

SOPHIE

Wait a minute. There’s a trick here somewhere.

75. Shot of PLUTO’S reaction, eyes rolling heavenward, exhausted and exasperated.

76. Two-shot, focus on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

I mean, I could lay it out straight and pick up all the marbles. Three wishes. One: Eternal life. Two: Eternal youth and beauty. Three: Eternal happiness. Which leaves you playing with your tail, doesn’t it?

PLUTO

Let’s back up a couple of frames, SOPHIE. I think you missed the opening credits.

77. Cut to opening shot of #68, business card, as PLUTO reads:

PLUTO

“Hell.” Now, the whole corporation doesn’t have anything substantive to do with life, youth, beauty or happiness. For those subjects you’d have to deal with another firm entirely.

78. Close-up SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

I see.

79. Two-shot favoring PLUTO.

PLUTO

“Department of Sexual Fulfillment.” That’s my specific territory. That’s what I can offer you. Three ultimate fantasies come true. Three trips around the universe. If it’s in Hell, I can give it to you. And if it’s sexy, Hell’s the place to find it... Take a look at this. (He hands her a document.) I’m sure it’s completely self-explanatory.

SOPHIE

(Taking document.) Looks like my first wedding license. (It is a parchment scroll wrapped in a black ribbon. She unties the ribbon.)

80. Close on PLUTO’S face from a fake POV SOPHIE. He is nodding to himself and smiling. As we begin our pullback, zoom lens, he snaps his fingers and winds up holding a plate of ice cream in his hand. He begins eating. We continue the pullback and wind up on a shot of SOPHIE’S hands unrolling the document. PLUTO is still visible, out of focus, in the background. The document itself is heavily illuminated on the top and sides. The first letter is very ornate and the only words we can read are the first words of each paragraph which are the same: “Whereas.” There are several blank lines. The whole thing is out of the Middle Ages. We hold this shot for several beats.

81. SOPHIE POV PLUTO.

SOPHIE

(Reading.) Let’s see. “Whereas the Damned hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part agrees and enters into covenant...”

82. Close-up PLUTO eating ice cream. Nodding as she reads.

83. Same as #81.

SOPHIE

“...with the Lord of Evil hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part.” (She puts down the paper.) Pluto, what the hell is this?

PLUTO

Now, now, Sophie...

84. Two-shot.

PLUTO

...don’t get yourself excited. That’s really only legalese and...

SOPHIE

(She has picked up the form and is reading again.) “...and eternal damnation of the immortal soul hereinafter referred to as part of the party of the first part...”

PLUTO

...only a carry-over from the days when people worried about that sort of thing. You know, (Ticks off on his fingers.) soul, salvation, sinning. You know, the three big S’s of the Middle Ages.

SOPHIE

(Leans over to PLUTO. Then gets up to go to bar.) Look, Pluto, if I have a soul... (There is a knock on the door.)

85. Close on SOPHIE’S face. We start on the back of her head and she turns to the camera.

SOPHIE

Oh, my God, it’s the rough riders again.

86. Medium shot of SOPHIE going to the door. Camera dollies behind her. She opens the door, and it’s no one else but—

SOPHIE

Irving, it’s nice to see you up and around, but...

IRVING

(Carrying a bigger gift this time.) Sophie, you little temptress...

87. Two-shot from behind IRVING.

IRVING

...how about...

SOPHIE

Irving, I can’t talk now, why don’t...

IRVING

...try out my entire collection...

88. Same as #86.

IRVING

...of vulgar expressions. (Gestures madly, one finger after another.)

SOPHIE

I tell you what, Irving, you go back and get things ready...

IRVING

...yeah, yeah, yeah... (Nodding.)

SOPHIE

...we”ll curl up on your davenport and gesture at each other. (She begins closing the door.)

IRVING

(As the door closes.)... you little vixen, you...

89. Two-shot, PLUTO and SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Later, Irving, later... (Rests her back on the closed door.) God, I need a drink. (Heads to the bar.)

PLUTO

A simple courtesy. Compliments of the company. (Snaps, etc.) Here you go.

90. SOPHIE POV PLUTO.

SOPHIE

(Toasts PLUTO.) I expected nothing less. (She walks to the couch, camera follows and reframes for two-shot as previously.)

PLUTO

Who was that, by the way?

SOPHIE

Someone even more unbelievable than you. (Drinks.) Now where were we...?

PLUTO

Discussing your...

SOPHIE

...that’s right, my soul. Three wishes for my soul.

91. Two-shot, focus on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

I don’t know. I mean, what can you give me that I haven’t already had? I’ve been married ten times—

PLUTO

Eleven, according to our research department.

SOPHIE

(Puzzled, then nods.) That’s if you count Walter, but he didn’t amount to much. We met through a lonely-hearts club. I claimed to be a virgin and he claimed to be forty-five.

92. Close on PLUTO, thoughtful.

93. Close on SOPHIE, remembering.

SOPHIE

I’ll never forget our wedding night. I was about as close to virginity as he was to forty-five. I kept moaning that it hurt and he kept trying to strap a splint to it. The only thing that hardened were his arteries, and that was the end of that marriage...

94. Same as #92, with PLUTO getting increasingly thoughtful, and we DISSOLVE TO:

95. Same shot of attentive PLUTO, but he is not in SOPHIE’S apartment now. He is in MADGE’S office, but at first we see no detail because we are in too close. During SOPHIE’S next speech we back up, first to disclose more of PLUTO.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

...the Shetland pony. That was in New Orleans and it was great being in show business until the night the pony’s platform broke.

PLUTO’S VOICE

I can imagine.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

No, you can’t... (Camera pulls back further to disclose tape recorder on table beside Pluto.)

SOPHIE’S VOICE

...Not unless you fell off a roof and landed on a broomstick.

96. Camera pulls back further to show us MADGE. She is a big, full-breasted woman. She smokes a cigarette in a long ivory holder. At this point, she is wearing a rather shapeless velvet robe. Early on in the recorded conversation the phone on her desk rings. She picks it up and says, “Yes, right,” a couple of times and hangs up. Then she stands and removes the robe, under which she is stark naked. We see her from PLUTO’S POV as the recorded conversation continues. In very businesslike fashion she moves about her office getting dressed in every ferocious S-and-M prop the Pleasure Chest can provide — anklets and wristlets, studded leather belts, etc. Puts on a pair of towering high-heeled boots. The whole number.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

...And then there was the time I got raped by all those guys. Fifteen of the bastards, and they still couldn’t get me off. You can imagine how it wound up. They were the ones who had to call the cops.

PLUTO’S VOICE

Not that I’m not enjoying this, Sophie, but we’re wasting time.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

You already know all this?

PLUTO’S VOICE

We have an extraordinary research department. Look at the pool we have to draw on. All the researchers and statisticians in the world — oh, maybe one or two of them might have signed with the other firm, but the rest of them wound up in Hell.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

It figures.

PLUTO’S VOICE

What it comes down to is that you’ve had everything between your legs but a toll booth. But it doesn’t work for you anymore.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

I don’t get off.

PLUTO’S VOICE

Well, I can get you off.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

You?????

97. At this point MADGE is dressed to maim, if not to kill. She reaches over and shuts the tape recorder off.

PLUTO

It gets better, Madge. If you...

MADGE

I was hoping it would. But it’ll have to wait for a minute. I’m on a tight schedule.

PLUTO

Oh?

98. MADGE POV PLUTO. She picks a dildo off the desk, uses it as a prop-cigar, does the Groucho Marx duck walk, and says, eyes rolling and all:

MADGE

It’s my last chance to beat the other couples. (She takes the world’s most menacing whip from a hook on the wall and strides to the door. She goes out the door.)

99. Close-up PLUTO. We stay on him and watch his reactions as we hear horrible sounds from the next room; MADGE flailing with the whip and male and female screams.

100. The door, POV PLUTO, as MADGE comes in, briskly crosses to the desk and turns the recorder on again. During the rest of this she methodically undresses, winding up in the shapeless robe again, her air throughout one of business as usual.

PLUTO’S VOICE

I can’t get you off personally, but I can bring all my resources to bear. Three times, if necessary. That’s the terms of the agreement.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

And in return you get my immortal soul.

PLUTO’S VOICE

That and nothing more.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

I was never even sure I had a soul.

PLUTO’S VOICE

It’s just a carry-over from the days when people needed them. Like the appendix. The way human life has evolved over the years, the soul really isn’t important You don’t use it...

SOPHIE’S VOICE

If you don’t use it, you gotta lose it.

PLUTO’S VOICE

Exactly. (The tape spins in silence, with MADGE and PLUTO drumming their fingers impatiently, waiting in suspense.)

SOPHIE’S VOICE

Oh, hell. I’m probably damned anyway... And if all the sex is Hell’s department, what’s left for heaven? (SOUND of her signing the paper.)

PLUTO’S VOICE

You won’t regret this, Sophie.

SOPHIE’S VOICE

I guess not. (Two beats.) You didn’t answer my question. What’s left for Heaven if Hell gets all the sex?

PLUTO’S VOICE

Oh, nothing much... Just all the love.

101. The camera has come in close for MADGE’S reaction to this last line of PLUTO’S. A grand sigh, and then she reaches to shut off the recorder.

MADGE

Signed and countersigned. Good job. (She studies the document.)

102. Two-shot favoring MADGE.

MADGE

Wait a minute. This is just an option agreement.

PLUTO

I know.

MADGE

Something new?

PLUTO

It’s the latest thing the boys in Legal have dreamed up. A contract’s only valid if it’s equally binding upon both parties. Thus we have to fulfill our promise to satisfy Sophie sexually or the rights to her soul revert to her. I don’t pretend to understand all the whereases and thereinafters but it’ll hold up this way.

MADGE

Of course it will. We’ve got the best damned legal department in existence. But they keep switching things around.

103. Close-up PLUTO POV MADGE.

PLUTO

It’s the same all over Hell. It’s just too crowded. Too cumbersome. The red tape you have to go through—

104. Close-up MADGE POV PLUTO.

MADGE

— Filling out fifteen forms to requisition a few pounds of brimstone—

105. Close-up PLUTO POV MADGE.

PLUTO

— Going through a dozen channels for permission to strike a match—

106. Dolly and pan to a two-shot.

MADGE

— All this bureaucracy. Well, honey, what can you expect? When you wind up with every lawyer who ever lived, and every thieving politician, and every pen-pushing government hack, what do you expect? I don’t want to keep you. You’ve got the devil’s own job ahead of you, getting that old bag’s rocks off.

PLUTO

Don’t I know it. (He stands up and gathers his papers, closes his attaché case. Then he walks over to the roaring fire which we have seen a lot of but which I forgot to mention earlier. He snaps his fingers. There is a small explosion, more like a wheeze. He frowns and snaps his fingers again, same result.)

MADGE

Let me do it, honey. (She puts her hands alongside her breasts. We do a quick zoom to get tight on her breasts. We see nothing but them with her two hands alongside them. She snaps her fingers and there is an enormous explosion, thunder, lightning, etc.)

107. Wide shot of the room, PLUTO has disappeared.

108. Montage of New York By Night: PLUTO and SOPHIE getting in and out of cabs, walking in and out of nightclubs, lots of establishing shots, maybe a pan of Eighth Avenue hookers and massage parlors from a car window, etc.

109. Interior shot of a crowded East Side type singles bar. Camera starts on someone at the bar laughing. All beautiful people at the bar. Pan along the bar and then zoom in toward the rear where we see PLUTO and SOPHIE talking at a table.

110. Two-shot favoring PLUTO.

PLUTO

...computer printout of possible studs for you. The only thing...

SOPHIE

(Interrupting.) Wait a minute. You’ve got computers in Hell?

PLUTO

Where else would computers go when they die?

SOPHIE

It figures.

PLUTO

Thing is, they don’t work any better for us than they do on earth. One of our technicians fed in all our data on you and came up with—

SOPHIE

Casanova? Don Juan?

111. Close-up PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

No, just twenty-four thousand invitations to renew his subscription to Life Magazine.

112. Shot of SOPHIE reacting. Pan and dolly to reestablish two-shot. She spills her drink all over her tits. PLUTO does a The-Moon-Is-Blue thing with a napkin, reaching to wipe it off, then pulling his hand back.

SOPHIE

You could at least give an old girl a quick feel. (PLUTO snaps his fingers.)

SOPHIE

Hey, you didn’t disappear. I thought you were embarrassed and decided it was time to split.

PLUTO

No, I was just freshening your drink. (SOPHIE looks down at her glass, and lo and behold, it’s full again. She shrugs and drinks.)

PLUTO

So the computer didn’t compute and the printout was a washout. But I think I’ve got something for you.

SOPHIE

Oh, yeah? It better be good.

PLUTO

You can’t get better. Unless you’ve got something against Russians...

SOPHIE

Well, Khrushchev wasn’t exactly my idea of a dynamite ball—

PLUTO

Not Uncle Nikita. We go back through the time tunnel to the greatest Russian of them all. The maddest, baddest swinger from Minsk to Pinsk. A legend, larger than life, more powerful than a mighty locomotive, more—

113. Two-shot favoring SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Yeah, right, the greatest discovery since the vibrating dildo. Who is this Moscow Mule, anyway?

PLUTO

The Mad Monk himself.

SOPHIE

You don’t mean...

PLUTO

Rasputin. And now—

114. PLUTO in medium shot, POV SOPHIE. PLUTO is about to snap his fingers.

SOPHIE

(OC) Wait a minute. (Her hand grabs PLUTO’S.)

115. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

Pluto, for Christ’s sake, I can’t meet him like this. I gotta be young and beautiful or you can take the whole deal and shove it.

PLUTO

Almost forgot. I haven’t had much practice at young and beautiful. Let’s see, now. (He pulls out a leatherette memo book from his jacket pocket and thumbs through it, finds the right page, frowns a little, then executes a complex finger snap. There is a puff of smoke, and in SOPHIE’S chair we see the largest stuffed panda bear in America.)

PLUTO

Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch. (We move back to see some of the rest of the place while PLUTO scratches his head and puzzles over his book of formulae. Absolutely no one in the restaurant takes any notice of the panda bear. We remain at a distance while other finger snaps produce one dumb thing after another — a bass fiddle, a four-foot pile of towels, a garden hoe, a filing cabinet, and ultimately SOPHIE herself. No one takes the slightest notice of these startling transformations.)

116. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

Very funny. Very fucking funny.

117. Close-up of PLUTO wearing hangdog expression.

SOPHIE

(OC) I suppose next I’ll show up as the balls on a brass monkey.

PLUTO

No, I think I’ve got the bugs out now. (He snaps his fingers, etc.) Take a look now.

118. Two-shot from behind SOPHIE. She has taken a mirror handed her by PLUTO. She is looking in it and playing with her face and hair. We begin a dolly around to get a two-shot and then a zoom to her face.

SOPHIE

Oh, Pluto!

119. Close on PLUTO beaming in satisfaction.

PLUTO

Just the way you used to look.

SOPHIE

(OC) Just the way I used...

120. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

...to wish I looked. But these clothes. (A finger snap and she’s dressed to kill.) Pluto, you’re wonderful. But don’t snap anymore... If I looked any better than this I’d get arrested.

PLUTO

No more transformations. But now you’re ready for Rasputin.

SOPHIE

Just so he’s ready for me.

PLUTO

Let’s find out (He snaps his fingers, puff of smoke, explosion, and so on.)

121. Establishing shot of RASPUTIN’S den. Sheepskins and steer hides cover most of the floor and completely cover a huge mattress. RASPUTIN wears a monk’s robe and is as large, bearish, and horrible as possible. He gnaws at a chicken bone, finishes it, looks at it, and throws it in a corner which is already loaded with these things. He picks up another one and begins to gnaw it.

122. Two-shot of SOPHIE and PLUTO. They are transparent. (Double exposure against black.)

SOPHIE

(In a whisper.) Pluto, he’s an animal.

PLUTO

You don’t have to whisper. He can’t see or hear us.

SOPHIE

How can he ball me if he doesn’t know I’m alive?

PLUTO

He’ll know when the times comes.

123. Low-angle wide shot of RASPUTIN. He has fallen to his knees and is going through an inarticulate prayer shtik that we hear. During this we do a slow zoom into his face.

RASPUTIN

Lord of All the Russias, keep me contented with the painful role of Thy servant. Let me rejoice in my simple comforts, the bare cell I must live in, the cold hard floor on which Thy servant sleeps, the crust of bread and cup of water which is his nourishment...

SOPHIE

(OC) Who’s he kidding?

RASPUTIN

(Continuing.)... the deprivation of the senses, the melting away of the flesh until Thy servant is a scarecrow of skin and bones, the adherence to the code of piety, chastity and obedience...

SOPHIE

(OC) Chastity???

RASPUTIN

Let me glory in never knowing the sins of the flesh, the pleasures of womanhood, the touch of their skins, the perfume of their loins, the swell of their thrusting breasts — (We have been zooming in until we are tight on his face. We then tilt down his body and discover that while he is renouncing the sins of the flesh he is pulling his pud. There is a knock on the door)

124. Wider shot of RASPUTIN. An up shot.

RASPUTIN

(He turns around.) Who interrupts me at my prayers? (Looks up.) What can I do? (To door.) Who comes to Rasputin!

125. Shot of the door, POV RASPUTIN. It opens and ANNA comes timidly within.

126. Shot of RASPUTIN, hands together, eyes fixed ceiling-ward.

RASPUTIN

It is Anna. Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord for taking such quick notice of his servant’s needs. And who is this with you?

127. RASPUTIN’S POV as a second girl, KARENINA, follows ANNA into the cell and closes the door.

ANNA

My sister, Karenina.

128. Two-shot POV KARENINA.

RASPUTIN

There is a problem, yes. I see it now clearly and with the help of the Deity who allows me to look through his eyes. Come in, Anna, Karenina, come in, come in.

129. Three-shot POV PLUTO and SOPHIE. ANNA and KARENINA walk into the room. Rasputin ushers them to his bed, where they sit down. They never take their eyes off him. RASPUTIN speaks throughout. There is never a moment of silence. This following speech by RASPUTIN is done in a montage of angles and reactions by the girls.

RASPUTIN

Doubly blessed is the Lord’s servant. He makes me an instrument in his hand, a sword to strike away the sins of the flesh. Karenina, my dove, your sister has told me of you. And I can help you. I am entrusted with the responsibility of the holy destiny of Mother Russia, yes. It is so. But the country is the people and the people are the country and I am never too busy to help when I am called.

130. RASPUTIN, eyes burning in hypnotic intensity.

RASPUTIN

And so I am called, and so I am chosen. You have a problem, Karenina. You are troubled. Tell me what it is that bothers you.

KARENINA

I... uh... it’s hard for me—

RASPUTIN

And it will be even harder for you, my sweetling. I guarantee it.

SOPHIE

(OC) Just so it’s hard for me, lover boy.

KARENINA

Gee, I don’t know how to say it.

RASPUTIN

Do You Masturbate?!?

131. Here a shot of KARENINA’S stunned reaction.

KARENINA

How did you know?

RASPUTIN

How did I know? How did I know? You sinful little girl, how could I fail to know?

SOPHIE

(OC) Takes one to know one.

RASPUTIN

The signs are all over you. The tips of your ears. The thrust of your breasts. The glassy stare in your eyes. (He takes her hand and sniffs her fingers.)

RASPUTIN

And there are other signs as well. Yes, it is unmistakable. But you are fortunate, dumpling. It is I who have put my finger upon your problem, and the problem is where you in turn have been putting your finger. That is the problem. But there is a solution!

KARENINA

There is?

RASPUTIN

Indeed there is, with the help of the Most Holy One. You must stop this unspeakable practice at once! Do you know what you are doing when you masturbate? You are only playing with yourself! The problem is one of the precious bodily fluids leaving the body with nothing to replace it. But you must nourish yourself in accordance with the wishes of the All Powerful One who provides us with the food we eat...

PLUTO

(OC) I think we’re getting down to cases now.

RASPUTIN

...and therefore you must take into your body only that which flows from the bountiful wisdom of the Holy One Blessed be He. Take off your clothes. (She does so, completely transfixed.) And you, Anna, to assist in the successful transformation of this wayward unfortunate, throw off those garments which only conceal what the Holy One has given you. (She does.) Now both of you lie on this poor pile of rags that you may better prepare yourselves for the spirit of the Deity which now enters my body that it may flow into yours.

SOPHIE

(OC) Rags my ass — he’s got a waterbed under there! (And so he does.)

RASPUTIN

And now open your thighs that I may see for myself what damage you have done by your selfish use of the sacred receptacle of the goodness that flows from the Holy One. (He gets on the bed so that his head is in the general vicinity of ANNA’S cunt. To KARENINA he says:) You have been doing this, have you not? (He fingers ANNA’S clit.)

KARENINA

Sometimes.

RASPUTIN

Show me what you do to yourself as I do it to your sister. (She hesitates, then begins fingering her clit.) No doubt you do this as well. (He dips his finger in and out of ANNA’S twat. KARENINA commences doing the same to herself. After a bit, both girls now getting pretty worked up, he withdraws his finger, sniffs it, sucks it. KARENINA, puzzled, withdraws her own finger, shrugs, and sucks it.)

SOPHIE

(OC) I can practically taste it from here.

RASPUTIN

And perhaps you have done this as well. (He sticks his finger up ANNA’S asshole.)

KARENINA

No, I never did that. (She does now.) But I think I could learn to like it.

RASPUTIN

And, so aroused, no doubt you and your sister have exchanged kisses?

KARENINA

Yes.

RASPUTIN

Show me, please. (They kiss, mouth to mouth, and feel each other up.) And other sorts of places as well, perhaps. (They segue into a yummy sixty-nine.) Ah, yes. Yes. (He lets them groove awhile.)

132. Two-shot of PLUTO and SOPHIE as in 122.

PLUTO

How about that?

SOPHIE

Are you kidding? I did better than that when I was nine years old.

133. Three-shot favoring RASPUTIN.

RASPUTIN

Stop this immediately! (They try to stop, they really do, but it’s torture for them. RASPUTIN dips a finger into both of their twats and they moan.) Now you recognize the evil you bring to yourselves by these acts. Now I can show you how to eliminate these impurities from your systems. For you see, (Throws off his robes; he is naked and has an erection.) this is what you should use! (RASPUTIN gets on the bed between the two girls and they begin an oral thing with his cock and with each other. We go to a whole sexual number with them, one on two, two on one, fucking, sucking, and all other assorted forms of sexual mayhem. During the course of all of this, we hear “I Am a Male Chauvinist” sung over the chorus of moans and groans. It is not necessary that RASPUTIN sing the song, nor is it necessary that it be accompanied on a balalaika. It would be nice, but not necessary.)

Oh, I am a male chauvinist, it’s what I’ll always be.

I’d like to hang Kate Millet from a jacaranda tree.

Don’t need no libbied lesbian to tell me what I am.

And I won’t be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.

This women’s liberation is a dirty commie plot.

I will not raise my consciousness to please some silly twat.

I will not wash the dishes, I will not make the bed.

I will not even fuck her unless she gives me head.

I know a male quisling and I swear he’s lost his mind.

He’s gone and raised his consciousness and left his balls behind.

I’ve seen him doing housework in a dainty gingham frock.

And his ultimate ambition is to suck Kate Millett’s cock.

So here’s to Germaine and Gloria, to Betty and Ti-Grace.

They’d all be lovely ladies if they only knew their place.

The kitchen and the bedroom is where they ought to stay.

And if they call me pig, “Oink Oink” is all I’ve got to say.

Because I am a male chauvinist, (etc.)

More sex. Last shot in the sequence is oral. RASPUTIN is fingering and eating both of them and they are sucking and kissing his cock together. He comes and they share it between them, lick it off each other’s faces, kiss each other, and finally ANNA and KARENINA, who have come six hundred and seventy-three times before coaxing an orgasm out of RASPUTIN, fall totally collapsed across the bed. They are really exhausted. RASPUTIN gets up, looks at them in disgust, goes over to a table and picks up a chicken leg. He starts to take a bite of it, notices it smells funny, goes through a sniffing routine and shrugs and starts eating it.

PLUTO

(OC) I wonder what’s wrong with the chicken leg.

SOPHIE

(OC) You’ll never guess where I put it.

PLUTO

(OC) Sophie!

SOPHIE

(OC) Well, I had to do something, didn’t I? But it didn’t even take the edge off.

134. Two-shot of PLUTO and SOPHIE. She is hot to give RASPUTIN a try.

PLUTO

Ready to try it?

SOPHIE

Send me in, coach. (There is a finger snap, etc.)

135. Two-shot RASPUTIN in foreground, SOPHIE in back. He looks up at her, then goes back to his chicken leg. He waves her away without looking again.

SOPHIE

Well, hello, tiger. If you like the taste of the chicken, I’ve got more of the sauce.

RASPUTIN

Office hours are over, go away.

SOPHIE

Now come on, Rasputin, you mean to tell me you can’t spare some time away from that chicken leg for the best thing that ever came your way?

136. Close-up RASPUTIN POV SOPHIE.

RASPUTIN

See me Thursday. Next Thursday. Next Thursday about four o’clock. (Pause, then he remembers.) Don’t be late. I charge by the appointment, not the appearance.

137. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

I had a shrink like that once. But instead of him shrinking my head I wound up shrinking something of his. Listen, Rasputin, I figure nobody lives up to his reputation, but your press agent has really been doing a number on the world.

138. Close-up SOPHIE, POV RASPUTIN.

RASPUTIN

What do you mean?

139. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

I mean you’re supposed to be the greatest thing in sex since the discovery of the horizontal surface, and now you’re telling me that you can’t get it up until next Thursday. (He takes his first real look at her. He likes what he sees, but he’s all fucked out and so not interested.)

SOPHIE

Here, take a good look. (She strips.) Pluto’s finest work, but for all the effect it’s having I should have come as a panda bear. (She goes over and sticks her box in his face.) Take a good sniff. Dip your chicken leg in it, you dummy. It’ll do me more good than anything else you’ve got. (He’s on his feet now, and pissed off.)

140. Close on RASPUTIN.

RASPUTIN

Do you dare to criticize my potency?

141. Close-up SOPHIE, POV RASPUTIN.

SOPHIE

First I’d have to experience it. Then I’ll criticize it.

142. Two-shot favoring RASPUTIN.

RASPUTIN

Are you criticizing my organ? My organ? Do you dare to criticize the instrument of the Holy One?

143. Pan down his body to his crotch.

SOPHIE

Look, let’s not make such a fuss over such a little thing.

144. Close-up RASPUTIN speechless with rage.

SOPHIE

(OC) I mean, I guess once a week is enough for a man like you.

RASPUTIN

(He looks at her for the first real good look. He makes a decision while he speaks.) You’ll find me not unprepared. Certainly there is always a spare moment or two to handle special problems that are brought to my attention outside the more normal hours of daily audience. (He gets up and begins his performance. He obviously has done this a million times before and regards SOPHIE as a pushover.)

145. Close on SOPHIE. Oh-no look with a raised eyebrow.

SOPHIE

Look, I’ve already seen the matinee per—

RASPUTIN

And as I stand here blessed with the special perception of the Deity Himself...

146. Two-shot.

RASPUTIN

...THE DEITY HIMSELF!!!! He has implanted in my mind the understanding that you have a particular problem, and thank you, Deity (Does his thank you shtik.) for sending this unfortunate to me for guidance...

147. Over RASPUTIN’S shoulder to SOPHIE. RASPUTIN continues talking throughout.

SOPHIE

I hate to shatter your illusions...

RASPUTIN

...But before I am able to give you the special assistance you require there is a question I must ask...

SOPHIE

...but the Deity didn’t have a damn thing to do with this.

148. Two-shot.

RASPUTIN

...so that I may better offer the unequaled wisdom flowing through my body directly from the Deity, who as you know has the most infinite of concern even for the most infinitesimal of his creatures...

149. Close on RASPUTIN. He moves toward the camera.

RASPUTIN

...do you masturbate?

150. From behind RASPUTIN. Medium close-up of SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Sixteen times every goddamn day.

151. From close on RASPUTIN, reframe for a medium two-shot.

RASPUTIN

You... you do?

SOPHIE

Rain or shine. Day in and day out, in and out, in and out. (Mimes masturbatory motions.)

RASPUTIN

...you do?... (Surprised at her frankness.)... every day? (SOPHIE is nodding agreement. She is enjoying this.) Well then. (He is really taken aback.) Well then, there is only one course of treatment open to you.

SOPHIE

And we both know what that is, don’t we?

RASPUTIN

Yes, definitely only one course of treatment. (He whirls to face her.) You must think only of distinct shapes and only in the primary colors. (He goes back to his chicken leg. He sits again on the floor and begins noisily eating. Camera zooms in and reframes SOPHIE in close-up.)

SOPHIE

Definite shapes! Is that all that came down to you on your special pipeline to the infinite?

152. Two-shot. SOPHIE gets down on the floor next to RASPUTIN and shoves her face toward his.

SOPHIE

I’ve heard better than that whispered in a public latrine.

RASPUTIN

Refrain from boiled beef for seventeen days.

SOPHIE

If that’s all you’ve got for me, there goes your reputation.

RASPUTIN

What reputation?

SOPHIE

The iron man of the bedroom. The only man with selective rigor mortis. (Stands up.)

153. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

You know something? I think I’ve got you figured. All you’ve been doing is overcompensating for a subliminal virility anxiety.

154. Close-up RASPUTIN POV SOPHIE.

RASPUTIN

What means this — virility anxiety?

155. Close-up SOPHIE POV RASPUTIN.

SOPHIE

It’s a polite way of saying you’re a faggot.

156. Close-up RASPUTIN POV SOPHIE.

RASPUTIN

(Really mad.) By the potent penis of Saint Peter of Parma, will you simply look at those two young women? (Indicates ANNA and KARENINA.) Personally saved from the eternal degradation of a life of sinful self-abuse. Personally brought to glorious fulfillment time and time again, beyond man’s power to count. PERSONALLY FUCKED INTO A BLIND STUPOR!!!

157. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

Oh, be serious, Rasputin.

RASPUTIN

What do you mean?

158. Close-up SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

What I mean is that those two could fuck themselves into a blind stupor with the stub of a Chanukah candle. They go through life in a state of preliminary orgasm. The question is whether you’re man enough for a woman like me, and I’m afraid I know the answer.

159. Close-up RASPUTIN.

RASPUTIN

All right. You have brought this on yourself. I will make you scream with pleasure until you perish from the draining of your precious bodily fluids. I will destroy you.

160. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

I should live so long. (He throws open his robe.)

RASPUTIN

On your knees! (She shrugs, sinks to her knees.) Now worship at the throne of heaven!

161. Close-up SOPHIE POV RASPUTIN’S cock.

SOPHIE

(Taking his cock between her fingers and shaking her head sadly.) So much for legend. (And she pops his cock into her mouth.)

162. Whole sexual montage of the two of them. After a bit of this and that on the floor, they go to the bed where ANNA and KARENINA have recuperated enough to get into the act. What happens is this: loads and loads of sexual numbers. Everybody getting into everything. ANNA and KARENINA fall out exhausted. RASPUTIN looking good in the stretch. Only one left. Two down and one to go. SOPHIE still in there strong. At this point he is screwing her from behind, pumping away like mad. We then have a shot of SOPHIE’S head POV RASPUTIN.

SOPHIE

(She turns her head to him.) What’s the matter, is something the matter?

163. Close on RASPUTIN POV SOPHIE. Sweat, panting, the whole exhaustion number.

RASPUTIN

No, no no... Why? (Pull back to see RASPUTIN balling his brains out.)

SOPHIE

I just thought for a moment there... I thought you moved.

164. More sexual this and that. Then the penultimate sex shot SOPHIE on her back at the edge of the bed, her feet hanging over. RASPUTIN standing between her legs and screwing. The camera undercranks so that they are balling in fast motion. In and out a mile a minute.

165. Close on SOPHIE’S face.

SOPHIE

(She is bored to tears. Nothing’s going to happen and she knows it. Not only won’t she be able to get it off, she couldn’t even get it on.) Oh, my God.

166. Close on RASPUTIN’S face. He is a man thirteen point six seven inches from death. Dark circles under his eyes, sweat, a load of fresh gray hair.

167. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

When am I going to see some of this super-duper screwing I’ve heard so much about?

168. Two-shot, still fast motion.

SOPHIE

Pluto, this is impossible. Pluto, he could fuck me for another six months and all I’d get is seasick. Pluto, dammit, get me the hell outta here!!! (We hear the finger snap, and SOPHIE vanishes, and we stay on RASPUTIN, still grinding, as he comes to the realization that there’s no longer a woman under him, and he begins to collapse as we) FADE TO BLACK. CUT TO:

169. Interior of SOPHIE’S apartment. PLUTO and SOPHIE are side by side on the couch, both looking dejected. She’s naked.

SOPHIE

You could have snapped my clothes back while you were at it.

PLUTO

I figured you wanted out of there in a hurry.

SOPHIE

I wanted him out of me in a hurry, that’s for sure.

PLUTO

Did nothing for you, huh?

SOPHIE

Let’s just say that he didn’t live up to my expectations. (She gets up, still totally nude; heads toward the bar.) God, I need a drink.

PLUTO

The work of an instant. (Snaps fingers, etc. SOPHIE has a drink in her hand.)

SOPHIE

Pluto, how in the hell do you do that? (A knock on the door.)

SOPHIE

Oh, my God, what a sense of timing. (Heads toward door. Stops, realizing she is naked.) Pluto, clothing, quick.

170. SOPHIE, POV PLUTO. Pluto snaps his fingers. Sophie is in a clown suit.

SOPHIE

Pluto! (He snaps his fingers again, she is in more appropriate clothing. She goes to the door.)

SOPHIE

(Opening the door.) What do you...?

IRVING

(With a bigger gift than before.) Sophie, what do you... Sophie???? (Takes glasses off, cleans them, puts them back on.)

171. SOPHIE POV IRVING.

SOPHIE

(Remembering she is young.) Irving, I can’t go into this now, let’s just...

172. Close on IRVING POV SOPHIE.

IRVING

...I don’t believe... what, what... How did... (etc.)

SOPHIE

(OC) Irving, will you please go back to your apartment and take your pulse. I’ll tell you about this later.

173. Two-shot favoring SOPHIE.

IRVING

(Stammering throughout before this, but now really nineteenth-century lecherous.) Drink some absinthe and listen to my Paul Whiteman records. Read some Fanny Hill...

SOPHIE

(Closing door.) Really pulling out all the stops, eh, Irving? Look, there’s no time...

174. Really close on IRVING, POV SOPHIE.

IRVING

...just you and me...

175. Same as 162.

SOPHIE

Later, Irving, later, we’ll curl up in your Morris chair and take each other’s blood pressure.

IRVING

(As door closes.) Oooooh, oooooh, ooooh...

176. Two-shot of PLUTO and SOPHIE. SOPHIE walks back to the bar to pick up her drink. She takes a sip.

PLUTO

(Examines fingers.) I’m getting a callus on my thumb.

177. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Guess where I’m getting a callus, honey. Gee, Pluto, I’m not asking for too much, am I? I don’t expect orange lightning and bells ringing in my head. I’m not the woman from La Mancha dreaming the impossible dream. I’m not the girl from Ipanema. I’m not the little old lady from Pasadena. I’m not even Linda Lovelace, for Christ’s sake. All I’ve ever wanted is one normal, healthy, run-of-the-mill, usual, ordinary, everyday type of orgasm.

178. Two-shot.

PLUTO

Vaginal or clitoral?

SOPHIE

Vaginal, clitoral, rectal, underwater, I don’t really give a damn.

PLUTO

Now Sophie, you know I’ll help you all I can. Your agreement with the firm entitles you to whatever setups you want.

179. Close-up of SOPHIE. Nodding, drinking.

180. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

...and you have to make do with whatever you think up. There is a bit of latitude in the terms of the contract itself, and I’ll always help all I can.

181. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

(She finishes her drink and puts it down.) Why Pluto, honey, that’s really very considerate of you. (Pause two beats.) Whhooooopppeeeee! (Runs to PLUTO and jumps on his lap. Puts her arms around him.) What about a little this and that, these and those?

182. Closer shot of the two of them.

PLUTO

(Flustered but gradually regaining his professionalism.) Look, Sophie. (He stands up and she stands with him. The camera reframes for a wider shot.) I deeply respect you as a human being but I’m here on a mission as a representative of the firm. (SOPHIE lets go of him, shrugs her shoulders and goes back to the bar.) Some of us observe and others participate.

183. Another two-shot.

SOPHIE

(She is pouring a drink, and speaks with her head turned over her shoulder.) Well, whatever the case, Rasputin was an absolute zero.

184. Close on PLUTO.

PLUTO

You know, you need more than an ordinary man.

SOPHIE

You’re telling me.

PLUTO

No, I mean it. You know, nonstop, enormous, the whole thing.

SOPHIE

I thought Rasputin.

185. Medium close-up PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

...a real stallion, a thoroughbred...

186. Close on SOPHIE. She’s getting into it, too, now.

SOPHIE

...doesn’t know when to stop, in and up to the goddamned end...

187. Close on PLUTO.

PLUTO

...a sure thing, an absolute winner...

188. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

...the ultimate stud...

189. Close on PLUTO’S fingers and SNAP.

190. Close-up of a horse’s cock. Camera holds for a second, then pulls back to show the horse in a stall. Hanging from the stall is a sign which says “MAN O WAR.” Hold this for two beats.

191. Close on SOPHIE. Look of absolute disbelief changing rapidly to disgust.

SOPHIE

Pluto!!!!!

192. Close-up of a roaring fire. Pull back to reveal MADGE’S office. She is on the chaise in her usual getup. She has a look of disgust like SOPHIE’S in the last sequence. PLUTO is pacing around a lot. She is reading PLUTO’S report. She puts it down and draws on her cigarette holder.

MADGE

A real stallion, a thoroughbred.

PLUTO

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

193. Another two-shot, this one favoring MADGE.

MADGE

Pluto, the road to Heaven is paved with good intentions. (Pause one beat.) Well, Rasputin seemed like a good idea as well.

PLUTO

A complete disaster. A sexual Edsel. He ran her up his flagpole and nobody saluted.

MADGE

You know, I suspect that no man is going to be able to satisfy her.

PLUTO

That’s why I opted for the horse. I thought.

194. Close on MADGE.

MADGE

For brute force and endurance you can’t top Rasputin. For seduction, Casanova is in like Flynn. For whips and chains, the Marquis is unparalleled. And unperpendiculared as well. But no particular...

195. PLUTO POV MADGE, pacing and nodding.

MADGE

...man will make any difference here. What she needs is a new role for herself, the fulfillment of a fantasy she never even knew she had. (Closes eyes.) I see Germany. A few years ago. In Berlin.

196. PLUTO, POV MADGE.

PLUTO

(Surprised.) You mean like Nazis? God knows we’ve got enough of them...

197. Two-shot favoring MADGE.

MADGE

We’ve got them coming out of the woodwork. We never get any requests for them, but we’ve got a ton of them. But nobody living or dead would want to ball one of them, and I’ll tell you why. (She stands up and, after the music cue, sings.)

Hitler had only one big ball.

Goering had two but they were small.

Himmler had something similar and

Goebbels had no balls at all.

PLUTO

Hey, I like that. It’s catchy. (He joins her as they do a second chorus, and then a third chorus in which their voices are joined by as many voices as you can find. During all of this, you throw in a chunk of stock footage of storm troopers goosestepping, newsreel clips of Hitler, etc. with the voices singing over this dreck. Then as the song ends we are back in MADGE’S office where she and PLUTO are singing their brains out, doing a little goosestepping themselves. The song ends and MADGE flops back on the chaise. PLUTO plops into a chair. They are both laughing and out of breath.)

MADGE

(Panting a little.) Before the Nazis... the Weimar Republic... Cabaret... Decadence...

198. Interior of an ice cream parlor. Shot begins on an enormous ice cream concoction, six hundred scoops of every flavor except uranium. Pull back to see PLUTO eating this mess. He and SOPHIE are sitting in a booth. This is a two-shot.

SOPHIE

I’m sorry, Pluto, but you didn’t see the way that horse was looking at me.

PLUTO

I saw the way you looked at him.

SOPHIE

Well, he reminded me of something.

199. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

The Shetland pony? The time the platform broke?

200. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Jesus, don’t remind me. No, I was thinking that I balled a guy once on horseback.

201. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

(Interested.) Oh?

202. SOPHIE POV PLUTO.

SOPHIE

In the winter...

203. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

(Shivering.) Oh.

204. SOPHIE POV PLUTO.

SOPHIE

...in Florida...

205. PLUTO POV SOPHIE, still eating, happier.

PLUTO

Oh.

SOPHIE

He was a jockey at Hialeah. He had crabs.

PLUTO

Oh.

SOPHIE

He also had penicillin.

PLUTO

(Brightening.) Oh.

SOPHIE

Which has no effect on crabs.

PLUTO

(Unbrightening.) Oh, right. No help there.

206. SOPHIE POV PLUTO. She is smoking a cigarette now.

SOPHIE

None whatsoever. So I went home and passed them on to my third husband. That’s how he died.

207. PLUTO POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

Crabs’ll get you every time.

208. Two-shot.

SOPHIE

Eat you alive. DISSOLVE:

209. Same place, but we DISSOLVE to a shot of an over-stuffed ashtray. SOPHIE’S hand appears and stubs out a cigarette. Pullback and we see that PLUTO still has about half his ice cream. We are in a two-shot.

PLUTO

...before the Nazis, see. The Weimar Republic. Cabaret... Lotte Lenya... Kurt Weill... Liza Minelli... decadence...

SOPHIE

And at the center of it—

PLUTO

At the center of everything, you.

SOPHIE

What the hell, I’m game. I haven’t been back to show business since the number with the pony, but I’m still a trouper at heart. Let’s go. (PLUTO eats ice cream.)

SOPHIE

What are we waiting for, Pluto?

PLUTO

Just a few more bites—

SOPHIE

What is it with you and ice cream, anyway?

PLUTO

Well, it’s hard to get back home. You know, doesn’t keep well. One of the benefits of business travel is—

SOPHIE

(Cutting in, impatient.) Pluto— (He manages one massive spoonful, snaps fingers, etc.)

210. Interior of a nightclub. The place is loaded with smoke. There is a bar at the rear and tables toward the front where there is a stage. The whole place has a bluish cast to it. Subdued lighting throughout. Each table has a red candle burning on it. There are lights in different colors on the walls. General hubbub, occasional almost recognizable words, etc. The first shot is on the bar where we see a beer mug get filled with draft and then get its head knocked off. The camera follows it down the length of the bar where it is finally grabbed and a woman takes a drink of it. There is a comedian on the stage, stand-up monologue type. The audience is the most blasé in the universe. He (the comedian) gets no applause, no laughter, only hostile stares from those who even bother to acknowledge his existence. This is a montage sequence.

COMEDIAN

(Mit German accent.) Funny thing happened to me in the theater last night. The guy next to me was masturbating. “Ignore him,” my friend says to me. So I said to him, “I can’t, he’s using my hand.” (Waits in vain for a laugh.) But seriously, folks, it’s really a pleasure for me to be here tonight. There’s no audience like a Berlin audience. Always laughing and happy. I mean, who ever saw a sour Kraut? (Waits in vain for a laugh.) Moving right along, this guy came up to me tonight and said to me, “Hey, mister, you want to get screwed?” So I said, “Yeah.” So he said, “Here, cash my check.” (Waits in vain for a laugh.) But really, folks, when I left here last night there’s this drunk outside the club. He hails a cab and leans over to the driver and asks him. These are all real conversations I’m reporting to you, folks. So this guy leans over to the driver and asks him, he asks him, “Hey, you got room in that cab for three kegs of beer?” So the driver says, “Sure.” So the guy leans in back and goes (Imitates guy throwing up disgustingly.) See what he did, he leaned into the cab and... (Trails off, still waiting for a laugh.) Well, I want to thank you all, folks, for being such a wonderful audience. You know, like Lady Godiva said when she got off her horse, “I come to my clothes.” You know, Lady Godiva was — Ha ha ha, okay, goodnight everybody, and God bless. (Throughout this dreck we have a montage of the totally bored audience. If one waiter happens to look like Hitler, that would be a nice touch. Now the EMCEE comes out, very bouncy.)

EMCEE

Isn’t he something, ladies and gentlemen? That was Crazy Otto, ladies and gentlemen, and let’s give him another great big hand. (Waits in vain for applause.) So it goes. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a special Berlin welcome for the little girl you’ve all been waiting for, the star of our show, fresh from her engagement at the Scheisskopf Room of the exclusive Club Gotterdammerung, and now appearing live on our stage, that little bundle of dynamite, that vun-derbar Wehrmacht— (Fanfare.) Sophie!!! (A warm follow spot picks up.)

SOPHIE

Leg at the split of the curtain. She comes on stage dressed right out of Cabaret, decadent make-up, etc. We see her, but what we hear is the audience suddenly beginning to pay attention. We have a shot of everybody staring at her, and then we close on her as she belts her big number. SONG: HE NEVER TOUCHED MY HEART

SOPHIE

My first man was a doctor

His bedside manner was keen

His diagnosis cured my thrombosis

And straightened out my spleen

The way he wielded his scalpel

Just tore my tissues apart

But all his pretty pills failed to cure my ills.

He never touched my heart

CHORUS

He was a good man, he was a true man.

A master of the lover’s art

He touched all the right buttons

But he never touched my heart

SOPHIE

My second man was a lawyer—

His piercing skill was just grand

Like Perry Mason he won each case in the

Highest court in the land

He cross-examined me closely

God, the fellow was smart

But all his winning wit didn’t help a bit—

He never touched my heart

CHORUS

(Repeat first CHORUS lines.)

SOPHIE

My third man was a policeman

The protector of Central Park

He walked the border of law and order

And kept me safe after dark.

The way he handled his nightstick

Filled me with awe from the start

But badge and gun and stick couldn’t turn

the trick. He never touched my heart

CHORUS

(Repeat first CHORUS lines.)

SOPHIE

My fourth man and my fifth man

Were not worth calling back

One sold insurance but lacked endurance

The other pushed a hack

I’ve had a lot of men since then

From Burt Reynolds to Jean-Paul Sartre

But they don’t do a thing, bells refuse to ring

They never touch my heart

CHORUS

They were good men, they were true men, Masters of the lover’s arts

SOPHIE

They touched all the right buttons But they never touched my heart

Now I don’t give up so easy I’m always ready to try

I’ll stop my bitching and keep on pitching

’til I find that special guy

I know he’s waiting there somewhere

To upset my applecart

A magic new man, a superhuman

A man to touch my heart

CHORUS

He’ll be a good man, he’ll be a true man

A master of the lover’s art

But if he makes me believe that he needs me...

He just might touch my heart.

The audience loves the song all the way through and goes crazy at the end. SOPHIE vamps a guy in the audience and he does a double take. He is embarrassed, like when you were a kid and the magician called you to be a volunteer on stage. He gets up there finally and she begins to open his pants, etc.

FIRST STOOGE

Ach, my dear, I am a married man!

SOPHIE

Well, I’m no virgin myself, honey.

FIRST STOOGE

But what will I tell my wife?

SOPHIE

(Mit German accent.) Tell her you were only following orders. (That’s enough for him, and away they go. They wind up in some fantastic number and there is tremendous applause — throughout these sex scenes we intercut shots of the absorbed and appreciative audience. Then SOPHIE picks another volunteer from the audience, a painted-up doll whom we, having seen the script, know to be a TRANSVESTITE. SOPHIE and the TRANSVESTITE exchange a long groping kiss while the FIRST STOOGE stands behind the TRANSVESTITE and plays with his breasts and ass, etc.

SOPHIE

It’s funny, liebchen. I don’t usually turn on to girls.

TRANSVESTITE

Neither do I, doll.

SOPHIE

But there’s something about you that gets to me...

TRANSVESTITE

Maybe it’s... this!

And the TV lifts his skirt to display his cock, which gets wild applause from the audience, delight from SOPHIE, and the proper sort of shocked dismay from the FIRST STOOGE. They get into another delicious sexual number with the TV and the FIRST STOOGE both socking it to SOPHIE, the TV wearing as much drag as possible, just exposing his cock. Fantastic trio number and more applause. Then she gets three more guys on stage and they wind up in the flying wedge, which will not be described until we have confirmation of our international copyrights. Intercut shots of audience reaction throughout. The sequence winds up with all five guys coming in the aforementioned flying wedge. They’re destroyed, and we have a shot of the whole audience rising in a body and moving toward the stage, and SOPHIE hasn’t made it and isn’t going to, and she reacts in alarm to these dozens of potential fuckers approaching her, and

SOPHIE

Pluto, um (Snap of fingers and away we go.)

Bit: The PIANO PLAYER who has accompanied her song also stays at the piano during the sex number, and plays various shit for us. We intercut shots of him at the piano, playing away but looking with longing at SOPHIE. Finally he can’t stand it, and leaps from the piano, tears off his clothes, and heads for the sex pile-up, and we have a shot of a player piano tinkling away without him.

211. Human chessboard. Start shot on a girl from above. A tight shot and pullback to reveal the entire thing. This can be staged anywhere we can get a floor with a large checkerboard pattern. There are sixteen white pieces and sixteen black pieces and they are just that — sixteen white girls and sixteen black girls occupying various squares on the board. We have a short montage among the girls. They all have worried expressions on their faces.

212. Same scene viewed from behind a window looking down on the chessboard. It is the interior of MADGE’S office and MADGE is looking down, studying the board. PLUTO is standing next to her. MADGE has a telephone in her hand. She has a public address mike in her other hand. She speaks into the mike and the telephone.

MADGE

Bishop...

213. Shot of girl’s face on the board. MADGE’S voice is very boomy.

MADGE

...takes pawn.

214. Shot of MADGE’S face through the window from the chessboard side of the window. A zoom in to her face. She is smiling sardonically.

215. Shot of the board POV MADGE. We see the BLACK BISHOP advancing on a WHITE PAWN.

216. Shot of the WHITE PAWN POV BLACK BISHOP.

217. Shot of the WHITE PAWN cowering on her square. Look of terror on her face. She is shaking her head and silently mouthing the words “no, no, no...” Then—

WHITE PAWN

No, no, please, not me...

218. Short montage of the other pieces on the board. Facial close-ups. The black pieces are happy, the white pieces are sad. All are watching the WHITE PAWN.

219. Wider shot of the BLACK BISHOP reaching the WHITE PAWN.

220. Shot through the girls on the square and we see two guys with horns, tails, tridents, red body-stockings advancing also to the square. They lead the WHITE PAWN off. Dragging her and pulling her.

221. Close on the face of the WHITE PAWN as she is led off.

222. Overhead shot. Pullback to get MADGE and PLUTO in the frame.

223. Wider two-shot of PLUTO and MADGE. We can no longer see the board but the positions of MADGE and PLUTO are unchanged. There is a long horrible scream ending in death. MADGE and PLUTO turn from the window. She’s got the phone in her hand and she looks sorry-about-that about the girl’s death.

MADGE

(To PLUTO.) So it goes. The breaks of the game. (Into phone.) I’ve got business, Gabriel. I’ll get back to you. (Hangs up phone.)

224. Another two-shot. MADGE folds into the chaise and proceeds to light another cigarette.

MADGE

Quite a pair of lungs on that girl.

PLUTO

I noticed.

MADGE

(Puff, puff.) I mean the lungs she was screaming with. Well, all in a day’s work. The cabaret number fell flat, huh?

PLUTO

You might say that.

225. PLUTO POV MADGE. He’s gotten up and is pacing again.

PLUTO

It was Rasputin all over again. She was into it a little more, but the outcome was no different. (Beat.) I’m almost afraid to tell you what she wants now.

226. Close on MADGE.

MADGE

A Roman orgy.

227. Two-shot.

PLUTO

How did you...?

MADGE

Pluto, honey, when you’ve been in this business...

228. Close on MADGE.

MADGE

...as long as I have, you’ll learn to recognize a pattern. They always want a Roman orgy sooner or later. They start drooling at the mention of grapes. For a while we could at least talk the liberals out of it, but ever since they settled that strike in California...

229. Reaction shot of PLUTO. He’s amazed.

230. Wider shot of MADGE.

MADGE

...it’s business as usual. You can’t have an orgy without grapes, you know. You can have all the orgies in the world without iceberg lettuce.

231. Two-shot.

PLUTO

I tried to talk her out of it. I really did.

MADGE

You know what it costs to put an orgy together. You got any idea of the red tape involved? You have to damned near choreograph the whole number.

PLUTO

Well, you know how much paperwork this means for me.

MADGE

Yeah.

PLUTO

She insists on it.

MADGE

Yeah.

PLUTO

Says she’s got three wishes and this is her last wish and she’s wishing for an orgy and if we don’t like it we can go fuck ourselves.

MADGE

Oh, yeah? Well, then that’s what she gets, bless her. Go do what you have to do, Pluto.

PLUTO

Yeah. (Snaps fingers, etc.)

232. Exterior on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. PLUTO and SOPHIE are walking down the street. There is music in the background which is similar to the opening music.

PLUTO

So an orgy it is. Things are almost all arranged.

SOPHIE

It’s the only answer. It’s got to be the only answer.

PLUTO

Well, I’ll say this, what you’re getting is unique.

SOPHIE

What!!!!!

PLUTO

UNIQUE. I said it will be unique.

SOPHIE

Oh, I thought you said I was getting a eunuch.

233. Close on PLUTO as he hears this line. He winces from the pun.

234. Two-shot of PLUTO and SOPHIE. They have come to the curb and are waiting for the light to change. The guy next to PLUTO is impatient. He keeps waiting for the light to change. He keeps tapping his foot.

235. Close on PLUTO noticing the guy and then looking down to see the tapping foot.

PLUTO

You’ll make it this time, don’t worry.

236. Close on tapping foot.

237. Same as 226. PLUTO snaps his fingers.

PLUTO

You’ve got the whole firm behind you.

238. Close on SOPHIE looking over at PLUTO.

SOPHIE

That’s a comforting thought.

239. Close on tapping foot, only now it’s tapping in dogshit.

240. Close on guy’s face as he looks disgustedly down at his foot.

241. Shot of the man doing the New York Stomp — i.e., scraping the shit off his foot, from behind and between SOPHIE and PLUTO.

SOPHIE

You devil, you.

242. Close-up PLUTO, proud.

PLUTO

One likes to keep in practice.

243. Long shot from across the street to show PLUTO and SOPHIE stepping off the curb and walking toward the camera. He has taken SOPHIE’S hand and they are talking as they walk. We do not hear them because the traffic sounds and voice fade as we bring up the music.

244. We begin a short montage sequence as, at this point, the music comes on full. We follow with exteriors of PLUTO and SOPHIE walking back to the apartment building where SOPHIE lives.

245. Long shot down the hall of the apartment building. An up shot. PLUTO and SOPHIE are walking away from the camera toward her apartment door at the end of the hall. As SOPHIE passes by IRVING’S door, (PLUTO has already passed) we zoom in to get tight on IRVING’S arm coming out of his doorway and grabbing SOPHIE’S arm.

246. Two-shot as IRVING becomes visible.

SOPHIE

What the... Oh my God, Irving, don’t you get tired of watching through your keyhole?

IRVING

(He has a handful of money.) Look, Sophie, look what I have for you. You and me and my French post cards. All with English subtitles... (Sees PLUTO.) Sophie, who’s that? There’s not someone else, is there?

SOPHIE

(Pushing him back in his apartment.) No, no, Irving...

247. IRVING POV SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

(OC)... he’s just to warm me up for you. But, now I...

IRVING

(The door is closing.) Yeah, yeah, yeah, and after that just you and me.

SOPHIE

...on your davenport, Irving...

248. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

...going all the way. DISSOLVE:

249. Interior of SOPHIE’S apartment. She and PLUTO are sitting on the couch. PLUTO has his bowl of ice cream and SOPHIE has a drink. As the scene opens, PLUTO gets up and, with his ice cream, walks from the couch to the shelves of erotica on the other side of the apartment

PLUTO

You know, Sophie, I’ve been thinking...

SOPHIE

That’s a novelty.

PLUTO

Your fantasy life...

SOPHIE

What about it?

PLUTO

Too much of it.

SOPHIE

Oh, come on.

PLUTO

(Gestures.) All these books...

250. PLUTO in medium shot POV SOPHIE.

PLUTO

All these paintings, these statuettes.

251. Series of jump cuts of PLUTO in various erotic and ridiculous poses.

252. Same as 250.

PLUTO

You know, real sex could never match what’s in your head.

253. Two-shot favoring SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Look, Pluto, I know you’re thinking of me, but this one will do it. I just know it. Really.

PLUTO

I hope so.

254. The Roman Orgy. We open with MADGE at a table in a room other than the one used for the orgy scene itself. There is an enormous bowl of grapes in front of her and she’s glowering at it. A slave in a toga comes and takes the bowl away, and she glowers at where it was, then turns to look at the rest of the table. The camera shows us that it is the world’s longest table, filled with bowls of grapes. More slaves appear and take bowl after bowl away. MADGE continues to look singularly unhappy.

255. The orgy room itself. Close on SOPHIE’S face as someone feeds her a grape. Then the camera moves back to show her reclining on a chaise lounge with a nude slave girl kneeling beside her, feeding her more grapes, while a huge slave fans her. PLUTO is standing beside the couch wearing his usual straight clothes.

256. A montage of shots, close-ups of everyone in the world eating grapes. There will, throughout the orgy sequence, be an absolute minimum of wide or establishing shots to prevent the viewer from getting a good sense of geographic orientation. By staying in close on the various bits and pieces we create the illusion that this is being filmed in something the size of the coliseum. It is best if the viewer not tip to the fact that it is actually being filmed in something the size of a telephone booth. After the grape sequence, we begin to pick up shots of sexual activity. This sexual element develops gradually to convey the sense of an orgiastic atmosphere building spontaneously. The sex will be incredibly perverse, a Cook’s Tour of Krafft-Ebing. Everything will be intercut with everything else, along with plenty of reaction shots from SOPHIE as she walks around and almost but not quite joins in on the fun and games. In a sense, the scene is not specifically a turn-on. We will by now have reached the point in the film where the viewer is no longer receptive to erotic stimulation, so that it is more important for the sex scenes to be visually interesting than erotic per se. At the same time, this is the scene that will generate tremendous word-of-mouth publicity. “There’s this incredible orgy scene and you wouldn’t believe what they show, a girl nailed to a cross, a guy lying in a bathtub while girls piss on him, a girl being eaten out by an Old English sheepdog, a couple screwing and a guy standing next to them and masturbating on them, etc.” This will be the scene that pulls them into the theatres, but it will be anti-erotic in that it’s turning SOPHIE off and we communicate as much to the viewer. Thus, it’s erotic more in anticipation and in retrospect than in actuality. SOPHIE’S attitude as it evolves is not that this is a lousy orgy, but that’s everything she ever hoped for and fantasized about, and that it still doesn’t do anything for her. She’s not even moved to participate.

257. The final montage — the ultimate cum montage. Everybody comes. Everybody. It’s just one spurting penis after another in close-up, intercut with shots of SOPHIE’S face. Cum, face, cum, face, ad nauseam. One might legitimately call this the climax of the film.

258. Two-shot, PLUTO and SOPHIE, favoring SOPHIE. She’s disillusioned and he’s sympathetic. She runs toward him and he puts his arm very gently around her shoulders.

SOPHIE

Pluto, take me home.

259. Interior of SOPHIE’S apartment. Start the sequence again on a close-up of PLUTO’S dish of ice cream. Pull back to reveal a two-shot. SOPHIE is over by her sexual this and thats and looking at them with noticeably less enthusiasm than she did in the beginning of the film.

PLUTO

Maybe you should have given it a try.

SOPHIE

No way, Pluto. Everything I saw just turned me off more than ever. I’d seen it all before in different forms. I don’t remember who was the noblest Roman of them all, but he was nowhere to be seen.

260. Close on PLUTO.

PLUTO

If you knew what it took to put that orgy together. That was a big-budget operation, Sophie. The paperwork alone...

SOPHIE

(OC) I appreciate that, Pluto.

261. Two-shot.

PLUTO

I mean it was a hell of a show to close in New Haven.

SOPHIE

It was a flop. You can’t put the blame on the audience.

PLUTO

I guess not (Sighs.) Well, I have to hand it to you, Sophie, you did it.

SOPHIE

Did it? The whole point is I didn’t do it.

262. Close on PLUTO.

PLUTO

You beat the devil. (Beat.) You signed away your soul, put it on the line and we had to renege on the deal, (As quoting.) “In the event of nonperformance by the assignee, all rights conveyed in this agreement revert permanently to the assignor.” In other words...

263. Close on SOPHIE.

PLUTO

(OC)... you’re out of it. You can call your soul your own again.

SOPHIE

...I could have done that to begin with.

264. Two-shot.

PLUTO

True.

SOPHIE

So I’m right back at square one. (She thinks and then reacts.) Hey, wait a minute, Pluto, I won’t buy that.

PLUTO

You ought to be happy. You had a couple of laughs, a few good scenes, and it didn’t cost you a cent. You...

265. Close on SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

You think I’m going to let your firm weasel out on this? You think I’m going to settle for being a broken-down old slob again with my tits hanging down to my knees? (Towering over him, shaking a finger in his face.) No way, buster. You go home and read that contract over a little more closely. Fine print and all.

PLUTO

(Backing off.) I think I’ll have to, uh, consult a higher authority on this.

266. SOPHIE POV PLUTO.

SOPHIE

(Is advancing on him, and he just manages to snap his fingers and disappear before she reaches him. We hold on SOPHIE. Her arm drops to her side. Her shoulders slump again and the emotion that she has been feeling leaves her. She seems the same way she did in the beginning of the scene. She walks out of frame and comes back dragging a large plastic garbage can. She picks a sexual artifact off the shelf, shakes her head at it, and shitcans it. She dumps a few more of them in the can and we slowly) DISSOLVE:

267. Interior of PLUTO’S office, a tiny, airless cubicle the size of a broom closet. There is a framed picture of the devil on the wall with a sign underneath saying “the boss.” The shot starts on a small sign on the front of his desk: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps.” PLUTO is sitting at the desk, using one finger to type out a form on a prehistoric typewriter. The phone rings, he answers it.

PLUTO

Yes?

MADGE’S VOICE

Legal’s due for a roasting.

PLUTO

You mean...

MADGE’S VOICE

We’re locked in. I went all the way to the top on this. (PLUTO glances at the picture of the devil.) He wasn’t happy at being disturbed, but the orders were clear.

PLUTO

And?

MADGE’S VOICE

Basically, whatever Sophie wants, Sophie gets.

PLUTO

(Awed.) Carte blanche?

MADGE’S VOICE

Not to mention Diner’s Club and American Express. An absolute blank check.

PLUTO

And when she wants something, and then it doesn’t work.

MADGE’S VOICE

You give her something else.

PLUTO

This could go on forever. And this case has already lasted forever. Can’t they bring in somebody else?

MADGE’S VOICE

You’re it, kiddo.

PLUTO

(Whining a little.) But I’ve got a vacation coming up next month. I’m booked into the Limbo Hilton for three weeks. I’ll lose my deposit.

MADGE’S VOICE

So it goes.

PLUTO

But that’s Hell!

MADGE’S VOICE

So what else is new?

268. Interior of SOPHIE’S apartment. It has been transformed. All the erotic crud is gone and there are pastoral things all over. Landscapes, statuettes of dogs, etc. SOPHIE is in a chair watching television, ideally the Dating Game or something like that. PLUTO appears in his usual fashion. We start our shot on one of the new-type figurines. We pull back to reveal the scene over the sounds from the TV.

PLUTO

Quite a change.

SOPHIE

You know, Pluto, I’ve just about had it with the sudden appearances.

PLUTO

Do you expect me to walk back and forth between here and Hell?

SOPHIE

You’d get mugged. But you could pop up in the hallway and knock on the door like a normal human being.

PLUTO

I’ll try it that way next time. Because it looks as though we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.

269. Two-shot favoring SOPHIE. She never takes her eyes off the tube.

SOPHIE

You mean I win?

PLUTO

I don’t know what’s winning and what’s losing. As far as you’re concerned that is. All I really know is that I lose.

SOPHIE

How?

PLUTO

(Bitterly.) I have to stay on your case until it’s resolved to your satisfaction. For however long it takes. If it takes a thousand years, then that’s how I spend my time for the next thousand years.

SOPHIE

Oh, you poor guy!

PLUTO

(Bitterness softened by her sympathy.) Yeah, well, at least I’ll have my fill of ice cream.

SOPHIE

(Moving toward kitchen.) Want some now?

PLUTO

I seem to have lost my taste for it.

270. PLUTO POV SOPHIE. He walks back to the couch and sits down, the camera follows and reframes another two-shot at this point.

PLUTO

Sophie, can I give you a suggestion as a friend? I’ve got, an ulterior motive, but I’d make the same suggestion anyway. Why not let them tear up the contract? You know, I couldn’t tell you this in advance, but Hell is no paradise. Why not get your soul back?

SOPHIE

(Thoughtfully.) I’ve almost been thinking that way myself, honey. (Sits down next to him.) I’ve been going through some changes lately.

PLUTO

It shows. (Gestures around the apartment.) (There is a knock on the door.)

SOPHIE

That must be Irving. Oh, why doesn’t he grow up? (She opens the door.)

271. Two-shot favoring IRVING.

IRVING

Sophie my little dove... (He has the Mona Lisa in his hand.) Let’s be naughty.

SOPHIE

Irving, Irving, don’t you realize it’s not that important?

IRVING

...you and me...

SOPHIE

(Gently pushing him out.) Irving, when was the last time you called your grandchildren, your great grandchildren?

272. SOPHIE POV IRVING.

SOPHIE

Oh, Irving, appreciate the warmth of family.

IRVING

Sophie, what’s the matter? Why don’t...

273. Two-shot favoring SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

(Closing the door.) Call them long distance, Irving. Charge it to my phone.

274. Two-shot favoring PLUTO.

PLUTO

You know, I think the place looks one hundred percent better like this.

SOPHIE

(Going back to the TV.) So do I. I got rid of everything. You should have seen me shlepping garbage out of here.

PLUTO

I could have done all that with a snap of my fingers.

SOPHIE

Yeah, but you weren’t here. And I couldn’t summon you, because that lamp was one of the first things to go.

PLUTO

(Reflectively.) I never liked it

SOPHIE

Neither did I. (Beat.)

275. Close-up SOPHIE.

SOPHIE

Pluto? I think you’re sweet to suggest that I give up the whole thing. But I can’t quit now. I have to make another stab at it.

276. Two-shot.

PLUTO

Even if it costs you your soul?

SOPHIE

Even if it costs me my soul.

PLUTO

Anything special in mind?

SOPHIE

Uh-huh. I want the Boss.

PLUTO

(Uncertain.) The Boss?

SOPHIE

The Man Downstairs. The Evil One. Satan, Mephistopheles, whatever you call him.

PLUTO

I generally call him Sir. But—

277. SOPHIE POV PLUTO. (Medium with a slow zoom to end the shot tight on her face at the end of the dialogue in the scene.)

SOPHIE

You promised me, Pluto. You said anyone in Hell. And I think that’s still his address.

PLUTO

Yes, but—

SOPHIE

Then that’s what I want.

PLUTO

Sophie, honey, are you absolutely sure? (Close on her face for a beat, then she nods yes.)

278. A void. There is a bed and that’s all. It is bathed in soft red light There is smoke coming up from the sides. A door opens and shuts with a heavy resounding, echoing sound. Footsteps. SOPHIE is waiting on the bed. We never see Satan... which saves hiring anybody to play him. We get SOPHIE’S awe at the sight of him. Everything is found out through SOPHIE’S reaction. The whole scene is done through a series of dissolving images and a really worked over, dubbed, echoed, and redubbed and reechoed sound track. The whole sequence lasts about two minutes. SOPHIE says or mouths or breathes “Oh, oh, oh,” then later as she really gets into it “Yes, yes, yes.” She says “God” about a hundred times. Then “Love” five times. And then in one shot she has a look of absolutely beatific angelic beauty on her face. She has had an orgasm, or is having one, and doesn’t make a sound except to breathe heavily. At this moment, in this shot, the light starts to yellow up and a glow appears around SOPHIE’S head which is in close-up. We begin a pullback to show that she is in a white robe, with wings, halo, harp, the whole number. She is on a cloud, or a damn good facsimile of one, as good as the budget will allow. Probably use dry ice on the same set as the devil’s bed. She plays the song and softly sings the music to “HE NEVER TOUCHED MY HEART.”

MADGE’S VOICE

(Telephone.) Never lost one before, huh?

PLUTO’S VOICE

(Telephone.) Never.

MADGE’S VOICE

It happens every once in a while.

PLUTO’S VOICE

He touched her heart.

MADGE’S VOICE

And that was what she always wanted. I’ll tell you something — she was a bad candidate for us from the beginning. She wasn’t really hunting the big O.

PLUTO’S VOICE

She sure talked a good game.

MADGE’S VOICE

That was all on the surface. She was tough and brassy and full of piss and vinegar but she was no sinner. It took the Evil One to give her an orgasm, and she turned him around and made a love experience out of it.

PLUTO’S VOICE

And went straight to Cloud Nine.

MADGE’S VOICE

That’s the name of the game.

PLUTO’S VOICE

So she balled the devil and beat the devil. (Beat.) Well, I blew that assignment. The Boss did, too, in a manner of speaking, but you know who they’ll tie the can to. (Beat.) I should feel rotten about it, but somehow I don’t.

MADGE’S VOICE

(Very gently.) Of course you don’t. You were half in love with her yourself, weren’t you, baby?

PLUTO’S VOICE

(After a beat.) Love? (Two beats, then brusquely.) That’s not my department.

ROLL CREDITS OVER SOPHIE AND MUSIC. FADE OUT AND END.

A Diary

— Tuesday

Picture this: We’re in the back room of a two-room suite on the eighth and last floor of a hotel on 46th Street between 8th and 9th. You wouldn’t dream this hotel owned a two-room suite. You’d say, charitably, that it had seen better days, only I’m not sure it had. I think it was always a fleabag. But here we are, because Alan is tight with the owner, or the manager, or the owner-manager, or something, and we’re getting a special rate. It can’t be too special; the regular rate shouldn’t be more than a couple of dollars a day.

We’re in this room, the three of us and this girl. The three of us consist of Alan the Producer, Vinnie the Director, and Me the Screenwriter. Alan the Producer is about forty-two. It would not hurt him to take off ten or fifteen pounds, and the facial expression he usually wears suggests that he knows this, but that he has too many other things to worry about. Things of cosmic significance. One of these things is the possibility of growing a beard. Alan the Producer is always clean shaven, always immaculately clean shaven, but in the two months I’ve known him he has mentioned to me perhaps two dozen times that he is thinking of growing a beard.

Vinnie the Director is twenty-seven. He is a Boy Genius who wears blue jeans and flowered shirts. The jeans are always the same pair. The shirts never seem to repeat. He always leaves the top three shirt buttons open. God knows why. Vinnie the Director doesn’t say much. He’s basically visual rather than verbal, which probably makes him sensational behind the camera. He has directed and edited six pornographic movies in his young life. Which puts him six up on Alan the Producer, who has not, to my knowledge, produced anything.

Let me amend that. Two nights ago the three of us went out to dinner, and Alan produced a credit card.

Me the Screenwriter you’ll learn more of than you care to in the pages to follow. Anyway, I don’t have a speaking part in the scene which you are about to eavesdrop on. I’m just sort of there, a silent presence, an eminence bleu.

That leaves The Girl. I don’t remember her name. I don’t, to be honest, precisely remember what she looks like. She was around twenty and moderately attractive. Light brown hair, I think. No interesting scars or anything like that.

The girl is standing there. Alan is on the couch with his feet up and Vinnie is sitting backward on a straight chair, straddling it. I’m sitting on a similar chair, but in a more orthodox fashion.

ALAN: Uh, let’s see. First I want to be sure you understand what sort of movie, the kind of project, we’re involved in here.

GIRL: I was told a porno film.

ALAN: That’s right.

GIRL: Well, that’s cool.

VINNIE: It’s hardcore.

GIRL: Hardcore, right, I was told that.

ALAN: Actually there’s hardcore and there’s hard core, I think we all understand that. We’re trying to make a particular statement in this film, and we feel the demographics of the market are such that a film can be hardcore and can still be a genuine aesthetic experience filmically.

GIRL: Well, yeah, sure.

VINNIE: Maybe a bit.

ALAN: Right, I was thinking along those lines. Now looking at you, getting the impression you would project on film, I can see, I can more or less sense, that we could use you in a particular scene. You have a special quality, a sort of fusion of innocence and experience that would come across beautifully. I want to emphasize, though, that it’s not a large part.

GIRL: How many days?

VINNIE: A day’s shooting. Maybe an hour’s work but you’d be paid for the day.

GIRL: What do you pay?

VINNIE: Hundred a day.

GIRL: Well, that’s cool.

ALAN: There’s one thing, though. Now I gather you’ve done similar films before.

GIRL: Yeah, a couple. No speaking parts yet but I was in a few things. You know, what you’d call an extra in fucking and sucking scenes.

ALAN: I see.

GIRL: You maybe saw me in Water Bed Lovers. I had a couple good scenes in that one.

ALAN: I see. Well, the thing is, being no stranger to the industry, you probably know that there are often certain things one person will do and another one won’t. It’s a question of personal feelings, of personal sensibilities.

GIRL: I don’t do anal.

ALAN: In this case that’s not a—

GIRL: Not from inhibitions but because I can’t handle it. Like it’s painful.

ALAN: Well, that wouldn’t be a factor here. Well, to put it in perspective, there’s a Roman Orgy scene I would want to use you in. Your role—

GIRL: Yeah, they do a lot of the Roman Orgy scenes. I was in one of them as a matter of fact, I forget the name of the film.

ALAN: Your role, uh, the question is whether you would have any objection to a scene with a dog.

GIRL: A dog?

ALAN: An Old English sheepdog. What the script calls for, the dog would go down on you.

GIRL: Would I eat the dog or anything?

ALAN: No, it would just be the dog eating you. You wouldn’t have to worry about being bitten or anything. The dog is well trained.

VINNIE: The dog’s a trouper.

GIRL: Well, uh. Would the dog also fuck me or is this just an eating scene?

ALAN: Strictly an eating scene. The dog—

GIRL: Because, well, I would probably do it, I don’t know, but I never did and—

ALAN: No, that definitely wouldn’t enter into it. As a matter of fact, the dog’s a female.

GIRL: It’s a female dog?

ALAN: That’s right.

GIRL: You know, that’s really far out. But sure, I could handle it Why not?

What am I doing here?

I mean, is this why I went to college? Is this why I set out to master the techniques of the writing profession? Is it even why I learned to type? So that I can sit in a hotel for cockroaches while some brainless twit decides whether or not she cares to play a scene in which a female Old English sheepdog performs cunnilingus upon her? A scene that I, God forgive me, actually sat down a couple of weeks ago and wrote?

What am I doing here?

Okay. I’ll tell you what I’m doing here.

I am functioning as a sort of ex officio assistant director on a film tentatively entitled Different Strokes. I am going to play one of the secondary roles in the film, that of the Dirty Old Man. I have done what is officially known as a rewrite on the film, in that there was an original script which I for the most part tore up and threw out. And I am at the same time writing a production diary of the two or three weeks which will be spent producing this epic.

The main reason I am doing this production diary is that some very good friends at Dell read the screenplay, liked it, and agreed that a book consisting of the screenplay and a diary recounting production experiences might constitute a book which a lot of people might want to read. And the existence of such a book, on the other hand, would constitute a hell of a lot of free publicity for the film.

If the film does well, I will make some money. (If it does poorly, I will make zilch; they are paying me off in a percentage of profits.) So I have an incentive for writing this production diary, but now that I’m sitting down and starting to do it, I find another incentive.

Namely that I am involved in something obviously insane, patently insane, and I would like to try to keep a relatively sane record of it as it unfolds. I can’t count on my conversations with Alan the Producer or Vinnie the Director to keep my head straight. They are both out of their minds.

Hence this diary. I am starting it today, which is a Tuesday, and I will be writing it for about two weeks, and I will try to use that stretch of time and space to convey to you (and perhaps to myself as well) what the experience of making a pornographic movie is like.

I won’t be getting particularly technical. It might be possible to write a book that would enable the reader to make his own movie after reading it. But I’m afraid I couldn’t write such a book even if I were so inclined. I don’t know a hell of a lot about cameras and film. I’m hoping to learn a little about the subject that, after all, is one of my motives for going through all this.

I will also, in the course of this diary, discuss some of the preproduction experiences of the past couple of months, feeding them in as they seem appropriate. My present game plan, subject to change, without notice, is as follows: I will spend a couple of hours every night typing away furiously before going to bed, and I will write whatever comes to mind at the time. And, because I’m doing this for your benefit as well as my own, I’ll try to limit myself to material that will be informative or entertaining or, with luck, both.

Which brings us to the point that this is a sort of bastard diary. A pure diary is a monologue, or perhaps one could better call it a dialogue of the writer with himself. But this is a diary undertaken with the understanding that it is to be published, a diary written specifically to be published.

I suspect this is both good and bad. Diaries written for the writer alone can be more completely honest. No doubt I’ll have thoughts and observations over the next couple of weeks that I will be disinclined to share with you, and I will therefore fail to commit them to print. On the other hand, I’ve never had the temperament of a true diarist. So, if this diary were not going to be published, I would not be writing it at all.

Enough. Let us return to that grotty hotel room.

What we were doing today, from nine in the morning until almost six this afternoon, is called Casting. Alan had inserted notices in a couple of theatrical trade papers announcing an open casting call for Different Strokes which he described as an erotic film. He did not say it was hardcore. He implied this, however, by not saying it was soft-core. Of the people who turned up, I would estimate that nine out of ten took it for granted that it was to be hardcore, and most of the rest figured this was a strong probability.

I would never have believed so many people would show up. I can’t say how many did appear, because we didn’t see all of them. The front room, where they were supposed to wait, filled up early on. They were spilling over into the hallway, and I’m sure a hell of a lot of hopeful thespians took a look at the waiting line and went away. I do know that we saw well over two hundred people in the course of the day.

In many instances all we did was see them; one look and we knew we didn’t need them for anything. I understand some of the homeliest girls in the world try to enter beauty contests. I don’t know why this happens, but I do know some of the world’s ugliest people showed up today (mostly in the morning, true early birds who caught no worms this time around). These were people we wouldn’t even use as extras in the crowd scenes. Alan just gave them a very professional, “Sorry, nothing for you today,” and pointed them back out again. None of them seemed surprised. I guess they get used to it, or else they are awed in the presence of a genuine movie producer. I wouldn’t quite call Alan that yet, but he knows the moves well enough to fake out people who don’t know him.

I guess the casting process went pretty well. We have most of the roles nailed down, and tomorrow’s casting session should wrap it all up. One good thing is that we had most of the hard parts cast in advance. Our lead signed for the thing three weeks ago. The two nonsexual male roles, Irving and Pluto, were nailed down almost as long ago.

(A word of explanation. A nonsexual role, in this context, doesn’t mean a eunuch. It means no fucking. There’s also a nonsexual female role, Madge, and we signed that the day before yesterday after Alan shadowboxed with this woman he’s known for weeks. Her name is Gertrude and she’s been in a lot of Russ Meyer type tit-and-ass movies over the years. She’s physically perfect for the part, and in a sense it was written for her; Alan wanted to use her and I thought up the character of Madge based on his description of Gertrude. For weeks she sat around trying to decide whether she would be compromising her professional reputation by appearing in an out-and-out fuck-suck movie, even if she were not doing any of the fucking and/or sucking. Her decision was favorable. I think a guarantee of four days shooting at a hundred and a half per diem had something to do with this.)

We also had cast those parts that are to be played by friends, backers of the film, and assorted agreeable hangers on. These are mostly nonsexual: the auctioneer’s a backer, the piano player’s a writer friend of mine, and a variety of friends and backers have already agreed to drop around for the crowd scenes. But there have also been two sexual volunteers: me for the Dirty Old Man, and a girl Alan knows who wants to be in the orgy scene because she always wanted to be in a porno film.

We also precast Rasputin, which is generally acknowledged to be the most physically demanding role. I haven’t met the guy who’s playing the part, but I’ve seen him in a couple of films. He seems to be capable of rising to the occasion with ease, and that in turn seems to be the major criterion for evaluating male performers in fuck films, that and the possession of a large penis.

Because the property of Instant Erection is the name of the game, the same male performers tend to appear over and over in these films. I don’t know whether this is good or not. There was an argument over looking for a New Face (or new something else) but we decided to stick with the tried and true. Our Rasputin is called Joe, and I can hardly wait to meet him and start feeling inferior.

Who did we cast today? Anna and Karenina, first of all, and I’ll be damned if they don’t look like sisters, both of them slim and blonde and rather toothsome. I’m not sure they can read lines, but neither am I sure that it matters. I don’t know their names, so I think I’ll just call them Anna and Karenina henceforth. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll do that with all the actors and actresses. It will save us all a lot of aggravation.

Both Anna and Karenina auditioned nude, incidentally. And no, not everyone was asked to strip. Most were not, including a few whom we hired. Except for a major role, it doesn’t matter too much what a body looks like, as long as it’s within certain limits. You can tell enough about a girl’s figure with her clothes on to know if she can stand around and look tolerable in something like the chessboard scene, for instance.

But Anna and Karenina are going to get a lot of close-ups, so we had to know what they looked like. They look pretty good, as a matter of fact. I have the sinking feeling, truth to tell, that they look a damn sight better than our leading lady, Sophie. I don’t know if this is awful or not. The important thing is that Sophie ought to be able to act. She has a hell of a demanding part considering the medium. She has to range in age from around twelve to around fifty with a stopover around twenty-two. Sophie herself will not see twenty-two again, and I doubt that we are going to hide this from the camera. I’d guess she’s twenty-seven or thereabouts, which ain’t old, but oh, I don’t know.

I wonder if it matters. Linda Lovelace is not the most stunningly beautiful girl who ever copped a joint on the silver screen. Or the most talented actress. Her claim to fame is the capacity to swallow the top spire of the Chrysler Building and give every appearance of enjoying it.

Speaking of which, three different girls in the course of today’s casting session announced that they were able to give deep throat, and all three offered a demonstration. One was a beast. The other two were attractive enough. However, the script just doesn’t call for any sword swallowing. As far as the offer of a demonstration, I don t think any of us were remotely tempted. I know I wasn’t.

Nor was I tempted in any respect. I think the majority of the girls who turned up today would have happily put out for a part, possibly with the rationale that putting out constitutes a logical form of audition for a porn flick. As perhaps it does. But there was something enormously off-putting about the whole idea of the cattle call casting procedure.

I want to explain this properly. It would be inaccurate to say that the entire day was a sexual turnoff, and that thoughts of getting laid never entered my mind. They did, now and then, though not with any of the girls who stripped; by making their nakedness so public a matter they kept me from responding. A couple of times a girl happened by who had some quality I found personally appealing, and it crossed my mind that, after all, sex is good clean fun, and this would be a nice person to have fun with. As far as that goes, there was a cloud of low-grade horniness overhanging the whole mood of the day.

But the idea of doing something about it, no. No.

— Wednesday

The show is cast I think.

It’s hard to tell. We are going to need a certain number of clothed extras, for example. We pay twenty bucks a day for clothed extras, but not if we can avoid it. We can avoid it by using friends or friends of friends, and the word is that it is very easy to get such people, because almost everybody would love to be in a movie once in the course of his life.

(That was my own thought originally. I wanted to be the Auctioneer, partly because I’ve always had a Walter Mitty-type desire to be an auctioneer, and I had that in mind when I wrote that scene. Then, when I conceived the Dirty Old Man scene, I realized that far greater than the ego trip of conducting an auction was the ego trip of being in a porno movie and fucking on camera. I am beginning to come down with a cross between stage fright and bridegroom’s nerves on this subject.)

The thing is, Can you count on these freebie extras to turn up? The answer is, Who knows? I don’t think there’s a precedent. Porno films never have crowd scenes, because they haven’t cared to achieve the production values we’re aiming for in this opus of ours.

But hell, the cabaret scene has to have a hundred people in it in order to work, and we have to shoot it in the middle of the afternoon when the bar we’re using is not open for business, or more likely in the morning and afternoon, and how do we get all our promised freebie extras to leave their offices and play Hollywood? Vinnie insists it’s no problem; if you suddenly need extras, if you have to fill in with paid talent, you can fill a house in an hour with a couple of phone calls. I wish I was convinced he was right.

We filled most of the blanks today. We got a rotten comic to play the rotten comic, which I think is terrific. We’ve been having virtually every male who came in give us a reading of that unspeakable monologue, and at three-thirty this afternoon we hit a guy who was far and away the worst of them all, so we gave him the job immediately. The schmuck is so excited he’s talking about remaking his whole act around the concept of being a rotten comic with a bad Cherman accent. Well, he’s got the qualifications. His Cherman accent sucks, and he’s as rotten a comic as you can get.

We also got the transvestite. We began getting people today who were applying for specific roles. What happened was that people who came around yesterday left with some information as to what parts we were looking to fill, and they told their friends, and this worked to everybody’s advantage.

The transvestite was tentatively cast yesterday, but our boy (or girl) made us recast it. He was brilliant. He evidently knew the whole bit from the script, because he showed up in full drag, and really did look like a girl. I must admit that I had a psychic twinge when I saw him. I didn’t go so far as to think it was a guy in drag, but about a second before he exposed himself and flashed his cock at us I knew he was going to do it.

And he sure did. Just lifted up his skirt and there it was. Not erect, in case you wondered.

What we wondered was, Could he get it erect long enough to stick it in Sophie? He insists that’s no problem. He’s completely bisexual, he says, and thinks of himself as a bisexual female, insofar as he defines himself at all. He asked if we had a picture of Sophie. Vinnie dug out a still and the transvestite said he could get a hard-on just looking at her adorable picture. I don’t know if he could have, or if he did, for that matter; he had lowered his skirt by this point. We decided to take his word for it. We signed him and we sent him away and we sat around feeling vaguely uncomfortable.

Later Vinnie said, “I might try it with somebody like that. I just might. I never did. Gay scene never appealed to me, but you know, you get curious, you wonder what it would be like if you tried it, even though you don’t want to try it anyway. Somebody like that, though, I don’t know. I can see myself trying it out just for the hell of it I don’t especially want to, but I can see where, you know, where I might.”

That’s the longest statement I’ve ever heard him make.

Oh, before I forget, we got a chick in there today who I swear was no more than twelve years old. No hyperbole. Eleven or twelve, no more. Or maybe she’s fourteen and looks ridiculously young for her age. That’s faintly possible.

She walked in and we looked at her and looked at each other and each of us waited for one of the others to tell her we weren’t planning a remake of Little Miss Marker. Obviously she thought it was a call for a legit picture. Finally I blurted out something about this being an adult movie, and she said, “Oh, I know all about that. I’ll do anything. I fuck and suck, I do gay scenes, animals, anything.” In this little girl voice, with these little girl innocent eyes, the whole number.

Swore she was eighteen and had a birth certificate to prove it. I had a look at it, and it looked genuine enough. That is, it looked to be a genuine birth certificate. It’s possible to carry around someone else’s birth certificate. A few years back, my cousin Jim’s baptismal certificate enabled me to be a fifteen-year-old barfly back in Rhinebeck.

I’ll tell you. If that birth certificate had said seventeen, I might have believed it was hers, and I might have voted to use her, figuring one year ain’t really gonna hang statutory rape on anybody. But there was no way that birth certificate could fit that girl.

We sent her home in a nice way, took her name and number and all. After she left we spent some more time staring at each other.

Then Alan said, “The flashback sequence. The Dirty Old Man.”

I glared at him.

“Now I admit she doesn’t look like Sophie, Jack. You’d know right away it was another actress playing Sophie as a child.”

“Nice of you to admit it,” I said.

“But that’s a common theatrical convention. And if we used her...”

“If we used her you could get somebody else to play the Dirty Old Man,” I said. “If we used her you couldn’t sell this fucking film anywhere, because you would get busted to hell and gone for it. Even if she turned out to be legitimately eighteen you’d get busted because it would turn out to be a criminal offense to have sex with anybody who looks that young whether she really is or not.”

“I know, but—”

“The whole thing that makes the flashback scene work is that you know the child is being played by a much older actress. You have to know that or the scene becomes perverted.”

“It’s already perverted,” Vinnie said. He didn’t sound as though he was condemning it. No value judgment, just a matter of definition.

“By letting Sophie play herself, it’s less perverted,” I went on. “Because nobody on earth is going to believe she’s twelve years old.” My most heroic understatement in months, that one. “And that takes the curse off it and makes it humorous, and the Dirty Old Man becomes good clean fun. But if you used this girl...”

Alan agreed with me. We knocked it around some more and decided it would probably be an impossible chance even to have her in the movie in a wholly nonsexual capacity. One of us, I can’t remember who, suggested her as a playmate of Sophie’s, out of the picture before the DOM appears, but even that seemed too risky.

So we dropped the subject. But thinking back on that whole number now, something comes clear to me that I hadn’t realized at the time. And it explains why we had to go to great lengths to talk ourselves out of using the girl.

We didn’t want to use her in the picture in the first place.

But all three of us wanted to screw her.

Not because she looked twelve years old. But because she was twelve years old, as we all firmly believed. And not just because she was twelve years old, but because she was a twelve-year-old girl who talked blithely about fucking and sucking on camera, and who would be delighted to ball a sheep or a cockroach or do anything, anything at all. That combination of innocent youth and utter polymorphous perversion is distressingly compelling.

This realization does not make me happy in the least.

I think we had as many hopefuls today as yesterday, although we went through them a good deal faster.

For Christ’s sake, why?

What’s in it for them? Not very much in the way of financial reward, certainly. We buy most of this flesh (and that’s what we’re buying, like it or not) for a hundred bucks a day. Sometimes we go a little higher, but not often. That’s the going rate, and while our budget is high for a porn flick, the extra dough is going into production values, not into sharing the wealth with the acting talent.

Now a hundred a day is a lot for these people, but a hundred a day is not much at all if you’re prepared to fuck in order to earn it. Girls as attractive as these can earn that much money in a massage parlor in a couple of hours. Five twenty-dollar blow jobs gives them a hundred bucks, and their intimacy is limited to five men, and it’s not spread out on a thirty-foot screen for the world and Mom and Dad to see.

Admittedly some of them can rationalize the impersonal but friendly sex of filmmaking while they would not be able to similarly rationalize the commercial, even hostile sex of prostitution. But even so, it’s not as if working these movies is lucrative in comparison to honest work. If you’re a principal, maybe, you’ll get ten days’ work and put a thousand dollars away. But most of these kids are going to get a day’s work and make a hot hundred out of the entire film.

What’s the point?

Do some of them honestly think it’s a way to break into Show Biz? I suppose some of them delude themselves this way. La Lovelace, after all, did become a celebrity on the basis of one film. (Deep Throat wasn’t her first film, more like her umpteenth, but that one film made her reputation.) Still, I think it’s fairly obvious that the porn field is not going to spawn many more celebrities, and even Lovelace hasn’t achieved a career, just a certain measure of notoriety.

I’m willing to believe that having made porn films will not actively injure an actress’s chances in legitimate show business, as it would have a few years ago. That’s providing the mood of the country doesn’t swing back in the other direction, always a risky assumption. But I am not willing to believe that porn flick credits will do any good, either.

Certainly not if your acting consists of performing sex acts. Pluto, our one “real” actor, might conceivably get work on the basis of his performance in Different Strokes. But he never shows the world his schwantz or fondles a tit or anything. He acts.

Whole thing puzzles me. I’m sure exhibitionism plays a part, but hell, that’s not the whole thing. Well, I’ll be in close proximity to a batch of these damsels in the next couple weeks. Might be I’ll learn something.

I mentioned this point to Alan. I won’t bother putting his theory down. It was a sophomoric load of bullshit. Vinnie was more direct.

“They’re animals, Jack. That’s all. They’re bored, they got nothing to do, they like to fuck, somebody pays them to do it and it’s a kicky thing to do, so why not? A hundred dollars means they can put a little cocaine on top of the usual grass, and coke’s too expensive otherwise, so it’s cool. They’re a bunch of fucking animals and that’s what you got to work with in this business. You write lines for them, I direct them, and we can both of us imagine what it’d be like if we had actors to play with instead of these animals.”

For all I know that’s as good an answer as any.

Tomorrow we start shooting. I find this very hard to believe. I don’t think I ever really believed this picture would happen, which may partially explain my original enthusiasm for the role of the Dirty Old Man.

Yet the whole thing seems a little more real tonight The casting is done, and I never really believed we would have it wrapped up in the two days allotted for it. And tomorrow we are actually going to put film in a camera and point it at people and expose it. Exteriors, if it’s nice weather. Inside scenes with Pluto and Sophie if it isn’t. Vinnie has it all scheduled.

Just had a call from Tim Benton wanting to know how casting went. I gave him a progress report and then he got to the question that was really on his mind. Had we nailed down someone for the sheepdog scene?

I’m coming to realize that a pornographic movie brings everybody’s special madness to the surface. Tim’s mania relates to his idiot sheepdog. He lives up in Connecticut and raises them, carts them around to dog shows and wins blue ribbons and accumulates points toward championships. I suppose everybody should have a hobby. Can’t say I care for the breed myself, all that hair over their eyes, that lumbering gait, the way their mouths are always wet and dirty. Anyway, Tim is completely wrapped up in these dogs. He gets upwards of three hundred dollars a puppy and they run around eight pups to a litter, so I guess he must be doing something right.

It’s Tim’s fault I’m involved in all of this. I’ve known him since college, play poker with him once a week. He knew Alan the Producer, who approached him some months ago to see if he wanted to invest in a porno movie. Tim began syndicating some investment shares, brought up the question at the game, got a lot of interest. I said I’d like to look at the script.

Why did I ever say a thing like that?

The script turned out to be, according to Alan, “a little rough.” He didn’t know the half of it. I think it was Alan himself who came up with the basic notion, a fusion of the Aladdin and Faust myths with a woman selling her soul to the Devil in return for sexual fulfillment. Alan then hired some alleged writer and gave him something like twenty-four dollars in beads to do a screenplay. The writer stole the few old jokes he remembered, threw in the worst dialogue in history, handed back a thirty-page partial script, and went away. He was absolutely right to go away.

Then Vinnie took this piece of garbage and added some ideas, of his own. What I wound up looking at was the basic frame of our shooting script, the opening auction sequence, a couple of scenes between Pluto and Sophie, an endless Rasputin scene, a vague sketch for a cabaret number, and half a page of notes on the orgy scene. There was also an absolutely hideous ending in which Pluto winds up balling Sophie with the stipulation that she not look at his sex organ, and he gets her off, and at the end she peeks at his organ and we see he’s been fucking her with the Washington Monument. This last was Alan’s idea, which is probably why he loved it.

I kept most of the structure because it seemed easier than thinking up something new and equally rotten, spent a while refitting the bones of this skeleton, then wrote the thing. And rewrote it, and rewrote it again, and participated in fourteen thousand script conferences with Alan and Vinnie.

There have been problems. Two problems, basically. One of them is Alan and the other one is Vinnie.

Alan has two major ideas about this movie. He talks about both of them all the time when he’s out raising money, which is most of the time. I don’t know whether he believes them or he thinks they make a good sales pitch. I think he probably believes them by now; most good salesmen fall for their own pitches sooner or later.

The first premise is that the successful porno flick of the future has to offer more than sex. The production values have to be good. The acting has to be superior. The script has to be professional. Obviously sex will remain the force which pulls people into the theater, and which pegs a ticket at five dollars instead of two and a half, but there has to be more supplementary entertainment value if a film is going to go over in a big way. Thus we’re budgeted at sixty thou instead of the fifteen or twenty that most of these grind-and-grunt operas come in at, and thus we’ve spent time on the script.

I have no trouble with this first premise. It’s the second one that annihilates me, and this is the one close to Alan’s heart.

He thinks these films have to appeal to a female audience. He thinks it’s very essential that they not alienate women, that they not cast women in a subservient role, that they not exploit women. He firmly believes, and has made known his belief in all fourteen thousand of our script conferences, that if we make a film that shows women in a light they can identify with, they will all come to see our fuckie-suckie movie.

I think he’s insane.

At the present time, because of the enormous influence of the New Morality, the liberating sexual effects of the Women’s Movement, and, for all I know, the sunspot cycle, we have finally reached a point where women are willing to see porno movies. As a result, they now constitute approximately one percent of the audience for these films.

So if you make a movie which appeals to women, and it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, doubling the female membership of your audience, you’ve turned one percent into two percent. And those other ninety-eight percent of your audience are a bunch of men who couldn’t care less whether this film is going to get a Nihil Obstat from the National Organization of Women. They want to go into a theater and see something that will give them a couple of chuckles and a hard-on.

I’ve explained this to Alan around fourteen thousand times and he always winds up agreeing with me. Which proves very little, because Alan always agrees with the person he talked to last.

He’s afraid the script as it presently stands degrades Sophie and makes a loser out of her. I do not know why; he’s about as articulate as Vinnie in explaining subtleties like this. He doesn’t like the ending, the Satan scene, because he thinks it shows up Sophie as a loser. On that basis I added the voiceover exchange between Madge and Pluto at the end, where they come out and explain that she’s a winner. They aren’t explaining to the audience. I figure the audience already realized this. They’re explaining to Alan.

That’s how Alan is a problem. Vinnie is a problem because he made an attempt at rewriting that first script, and he is head over heels in love with every cumbersome line he committed to paper. I keep taking them out and he keeps putting them back in. Also, he’s evidently a maniac for camera angles. The script we’ve got now specifies every viewpoint shift, every cut, everything. He even got me to the point where I was doing that. Now, I can’t believe the pros do it this way. I’ve seen enough Hollywood film scripts to know they don’t. Of course they shoot scenes from every angle and work it all out in the editing room, which we can’t afford to do, but even so, you can’t specify your cutting that completely in advance, can you? And our dialogue scenes never stay in two-shot for more than half a sentence. It has to cost a ton to do that much backing and filling.

At one point I said something like, “Look, let us face facts. No matter what we do with this picture, they are not about to show it at Cannes.”

Vinnie looked owlishly at me. “Don’t be too sure of that,” he said. And grinned to show it was a gag, but it wasn’t. He was kidding on the square. He really wants to make a pornographic movie they can show at Cannes.

Everybody’s crazy.

I completely lost track of Tim Benton, didn’t I? It’s late, and my mind seems to be wandering, which ought to be legitimate in a diary. Well, let’s get back to Tim.

I wondered why he was all that interested in this project. Money, of course; he can probably stand to make a hefty profit if the film goes as we hope it will. And the usual desire which probably motivates most of the backers to be on the inside of something very outré. But I figured that, given the nature of the film, most of the backers would have some kind of sexual motive. They might not want to get laid in the course of it. I’m sure plenty of them do, but they’d want to watch the filming, or rub elbows (at the very least) with the stars. Some of them want to be in the movie. Almost all of them want to be in crowd scenes.

Tim wants his dog to be in a movie.

I doubt he had this idea in the beginning. But when we were brainstorming the orgy sequence I mentioned something about how we ought to have some kind of an animal act in there, and he volunteered one of his sheepdogs. I began to see that he was doing more than volunteering. He was actively campaigning for the dog’s inclusion. A couple of times he called me, primarily to make sure that I was including the sheepdog, that the latest script conference had not transformed his pet into “the dog on the cutting room floor,” etc.

He really wants his mutt to eat out some poor girl in living color.

I assured him we got the girl cast. I told him how she didn’t object to the sheepdog, or even to the sex of the sheepdog. He asked what the girl looked like. I pretended to remember and described her as most attractive.

“Hey,” I said, “I was thinking. I mean, we told the kid that the dog was trained, she wouldn’t bite, no trouble. Like automatically to put her at ease. But, uh, is that the truth? The dog won’t get carried away and get rough, will she?”

What he said was, “She never has yet.”

I’m sure he was kidding.

— Thursday

Beautiful weather, which improved everybody’s spirits. Bad weather would not have been ruinous, as we had contingency plans. Either way we’re going to film some minor scenes featuring either Sophie and Pluto or Sophie alone. But, because we had good weather today, we are more flexible; we can shoot the indoor stuff some other time, and we got a lot of the outdoor stuff in the can today.

I wonder if it’s any good.

The economics of filmmaking make it a confusing business for anyone with a direct turn of mind. I’m used to writing things, and my usual procedure, not an uncommon one in the field, is to begin at the beginning and carry on gamely to the end. Same went for writing the script of Different Strokes. There was a certain amount of backing and filling, what with the endless revisions, but it was basically a fairly straightforward process.

Not so with filmmaking. It’s more like working a crossword puzzle, doing a little work in this corner, then moving over here and penciling in a few definitions, and working your way around in this fashion until, hopefully, you’ve filled in all the spaces.

If I were making a film, my inclination would be to shoot the first scene, then the second scene, and so forth and so on. That would be my inclination, but of course I would know better than to follow it. You simply can’t. You have to schedule things so that you make the most economical use possible of actors, crew and equipment, and so that you manage to get anything wrapped up in the shortest possible number of days.

So today we shot a lot of outdoor stuff of Sophie and Pluto. We did the latter portion of the precredit sequence, from Sophie’s emergence from the auction gallery to her entering her apartment building. (We’re using Alan’s building, using Alan’s apartment for Sophie’s. And we used Alan’s very own doorman for the crotch-shot shtick. He doesn’t know it’s a porno flick, or that the camera winking his way was actually zooming in on his crotch. I think Alan gave him a couple of bucks.)

It seemed to me that Vinnie shot a ton of film for the montage of Sophie walking around. That’s all going to amount to maybe fifteen seconds of screen time. But I gather he wants an awful lot of cuts so that he can stop frame on different scenes for the credits. I suppose he knows what he’s doing.

We shot Sophie emerging from the Savoy Galleries on East 52nd Street. We’ll be filming the actual auction scene in one of the downtown galleries on University Place where the owner is tight with one of our backers, and we originally planned to shoot exteriors there, but Vinnie reasoned that we ought to get our outside shots at the Savoy rather than chase downtown and back.

We also did the exterior montage of Sophie and Pluto making the nightlife scene. I’m getting out of order here; we did that last of all, just before we called it a night. We would drive a couple of blocks in a caravan of two cars and the camera crew’s truck, unpack our equipment, and set up a shot of Pluto holding a taxi door for Sophie, leading her across to Thursday’s or Maxwell’s Plum or whatever, then pack up and go away again. We showed them going in and out of places. When all this is cut and spliced it will suggest they’re having a night on the town. But it’s hard to believe it’s gonna work when you’re there watching it.

Pluto’s going to be very damned good. I think he’s having fun with the whole affair. I was a little apprehensive about how he was going to get along with Sophie, and it’s possible there will be problems when they do scenes that call for more interaction. The outdoor stuff was all silent. Well, they would deliver lines, but we didn’t bother recording them. Afterward we’ll get them into a sound studio and have them loop the out-of-doors dialogue. That’s a movie biz term meaning you lip-synch stuff that is not worth the trouble of recording out of doors. I just learned the term today, and I’m delighted at this opportunity to show it off.

Now might be a good time to say a few words about Pluto, especially in view of the fact that there’s not much I feel like saying about today’s shooting. It was all fairly interesting to me, but I can’t see how it would be too interesting to read about. We might as well have been filming a documentary on jaywalking for all the sexiness of today’s schedule.

It’s hard to keep calling Pluto Pluto because I know him well under another name, the one he was born with. I’ve known him for years, although not intimately. He’s been a professional stage actor for maybe fifteen years, ever since he got out of college, and on the basis of his vocational experience I have decided that, if I ever have a kid who wants to become a professional stage actor, I am going to throw acid in his face and treat him to a correspondence course in television repair.

Pluto is out of work maybe two-thirds of the time in a good year. Not because he’s incompetent but because that’s the nature of the business. And when he does work he doesn’t really make much more money than when he doesn’t. The closest he’s come to real success was a couple of years ago when he took over the lead in an off-Broadway hit. He was in the show for a couple of months. It represented the fruits of a dozen years of struggle. All his friends came to see him.

He took home something like eighty-three bucks a week for his pains.

Incredible, isn’t it? When you’re an actor, the difference between working and not working is that you have a little less time at your disposal when you’re working. And not much more money.

I wrote the part of Pluto with him in mind. At the time I didn’t know whether he would want to do it or not, but I kept hearing him speaking the lines in my mind and that’s always good; it’s easier to keep any character’s lines consistent if you can hear a well-defined voice speaking them in your head. The concept of the Pluto character as a nonsexual role was a nice one. Alan’s, I believe. He felt it was important to have some competent acting in the production, and that we would have a much easier time of finding competent actors if they did not have to be competent studs as well.

From my point of view, the nonsexual actors were a big help. The Madge-Pluto scenes in particular were a joy to write, since I was able to assume that the two of them would be able to read their lines with some flair. Elsewhere it was necessary to make the dialogue as actor-proof as possible. If you’ve seen even a few hardcore films, you know what the average level of acting is like. You can’t write lines that depend upon subtle timing or clever inflection for some twit who couldn’t get a walk-on with the Paper Bag Players of East Jesus, Kansas.

We signed Pluto a month ago. Vinnie and Alan took my word for it that he would be perfect. Then I called him up and made an appointment to see him.

He lives in the Village. I trotted down there, script in hand, and accepted a drink. We small talked for a minute or two. Then I rather lurchingly explained that I was involved in, uh, well, the production of, uh, a hardcore film, and that there was a nonscrewing part that was just right for him, that it had, in fact, been written with him in mind, and that, uh, well, would he mind having a look at it?

He read maybe ten pages of script and looked up. “Do I have to read any more of this?”

“Well...”

“I mean, is it necessary?”

I took this to mean that he thought the script sucked, that nothing would persuade him to lower himself to this filth, and that he thought very little of me for wasting his time.

“Because there’s no point in reading it now,” he went on. “Of course I’ll do it. Christ, a hundred dollars a day. How many days’ work do you think it’ll amount to?”

“Around a week,” I said. “I think.”

“Incredible,” he said. “A hundred dollars a day. Do I have to audition for it?”

“You just did. Successfully.”

“The director?”

“He relies on my judgment.”

He filled our glasses. “I suppose I should think about the implications of appearing in a pornographic movie,” he said. “But fuck that. For a hundred dollars a day I would screw a chimpanzee in the Felt Forum. For a hundred dollars a day I would bite the heads off chickens. You know that story, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“About the guy in the carnival, they call them geeks, and this geek, his shtick is to put a live rat between two slices of rye bread.”

“I know the story.”

“So you’re shooting this when?” I told him. “And that’s it? I’ve got the part just like that?”

I went over and picked up his phone. I called Alan. “My guy just gave me a reading on the Pluto role,” I said. “He’s slightly perfect and he likes the script.” (I took the opportunity to invent a few things he liked about the script. Around about this time I was picking up support wherever possible. Nothing helped Alan find an opinion like the opinion of somebody else, and I needed all the help I could get to circumvent his ideas for changes. Alan, my manicurist loves the Rasputin song. Alan, the Chicken Delight delivery boy read the cabaret scene and laughed his head off. Alan, the blind beggar who works 7th Avenue in the Forties thinks the Satan ending is both philosophically sound and artistically effective.)

“Then he’ll do it?”

Alan sounded hooked, which made me decide to push. I said, “The only hassle is money. I told him one and a quarter and a guarantee of five days, and he thought one-fifty and a guarantee of seven days sounded more like it. Now I think he may be fairly flexible but I don’t want to lose him. How much room do I have to play with?”

Pluto’s getting one-forty a day, six days guaranteed.

He has a nice quality on the basis of what we shot today, which isn’t much of a basis. There’s something vaguely evocative of Bogart in his manner. I know he played the Bogart character in a couple of road company productions of Play it Again, Sam. I think I suggested he lean that way in his scenes without getting into actual imitation.

I wonder how the interplay of him and Sophie will come across on the screen. He has a lot more presence than she does, but that won’t necessarily mean that he’ll make her look ineffective. As far as his effect on her performance, it could go either way. She might feel outclassed and respond by tightening up, or she might give a better performance than usual because she’s stimulated by his professionalism.

Oh, for Christ’s sake.

I’m beginning to feel like Vinnie. After all, what the hell difference does it make? Nobody is going to give a damn if Sophie reads her lines imaginatively. I told Vinnie they aren’t going to show this at Cannes. It’s something I’d better not let myself forget.

You really shouldn’t lose sight of what it is you’re creating, whether it’s a porno film or anything else. There’s a line, I think I heard it attributed to Billy Wilder, to the effect that nobody ever turned to his friend and said, “Hey, let’s go down to the Criterion; there’s a film there that came in at fifty thou under budget.” Well, nobody ever paid five bucks to sit in a smelly grind house because he heard the leading lady studied under Lee Strasberg.

Nevertheless, there’s a certain amount of doublethink necessary if you’re going to do a good job. On the one hand you have to realize the basic nature of your product, because if you don’t you’ll wind up failing to emphasize what has to be emphasized. On the other hand, you have to aspire to something better than the market demands, you have to come very close to believing that a special exercise of craft and artistry is necessary, or you’ll produce a poorer film than you would otherwise.

A question of balance, I guess. When we tend to slide through things, I’ll remind myself that it wasn’t our purpose to produce a run-of-the-mill fuck film, that we wanted to take some steps to transcend the limitations of the genre. And when I find myself getting a little on the artsy-fartsy side, I’ll force myself to remember that this is, in the final analysis, a film in which a girl is going to get her box eaten by a pedigreed Old English sheepdog.

Won’t Mother be proud. My Son the Filmmaker.

One thing that’s very odd, and is going to continue to be odd, is this finger-snapping business of Pluto’s. It should work well enough in the finished film, because we’ll have special effects edited in: the puff of smoke, the explosion, whatever. But we have to shoot without all that, naturally, and that makes it slightly weird. Pluto snaps his fingers, and nothing happens, and Sophie has to react as if something has happened.

That only really entered into one scene in today’s shooting. It’s the outdoor sequence in which Sophie and Pluto spot a guy waiting for the light to change, and the guy is tapping his foot, and Pluto snaps his fingers, and magically a pile of doggie-do materializes under the guy’s foot, and he taps his foot in it, and gets disgusted and wipes his foot off vigorously.

That’s one of Vinnie’s notions and I didn’t even try to talk him out of it because I decided I liked it. We shot it today with Alan the Producer as the man who steps in shit. Alan had not intended to be in the picture, aside from occupying space in a couple of crowd scenes, but I suggested him for this role. I said it could be his trademark, like Hitchcock. In every picture he makes, I suggested, Alan could step in shit.

First we did the footage with Sophie and Pluto from a couple of angles, Pluto’s facial takes, his finger-snap, the reactions and nods of satisfaction. Then we set up on Alan, first tapping on the sidewalk, then tapping in dogshit. He actually suggested that we go to one of those Broadway novelty shops and buy one of those plastic dog turds. Vinnie and I both screamed at him that the scene demanded realism.

I was deputized to find the dog crap. This was not hard. You can’t walk a block in Manhattan without finding enough to fertilize the Sahara. I entered into the spirit of the thing and came back with a mountain of the stuff, evidently the product of several different dogs. Several different large dogs. We got Alan back in position, placed the mountain of crap, and filmed it.

Don’t you know, he needed two takes? The dumb son of a bitch tapped very tentatively the first time around, as if he knew the crap was there. Vinnie called him on this and we made him do it over, and this time he did literally what he has been doing figuratively all his life, and as usual he did not come up smelling like a rose.

He gave a very authentic performance scraping his shoe on the curb, let me tell you. Long after the camera stopped rolling he was still scraping like a maniac.

We shot this on the corner of Lex and 62nd or 63rd around three-thirty in the afternoon. The street was not very crowded but a batch of Bloomingdale’s shoppers stood around watching. I think the bit will be very nice on the screen, but I’d much rather have a film of the whole overview, all those people with shopping bags watching earnestly as Our Hero steps in it. I’d really like that.

I’m not too happy with the objet d’art.

It’s a vaguely Aladdin-type lamp that Alan picked up somewhere, with a clay penis grafted onto it, and it looks dopey. I still think we would be better off getting a cherub and dramatically increasing the size of its phallus, but Alan is very keen on the lamp. He doesn’t want anyone to miss the mythic implications. Also, he went out and bought the lamp. That’s one real problem in any collective effort, the ego factor; whenever anybody here comes up with an idea, they fall in love with it. I’m sure I do the same thing myself.

In fact, it’s possible that what I don’t like about the lamp is that Alan loves it.

We had to shoot the lamp today, since Sophie carries it from the auction gallery through the streets to her apartment. I suggested she carry it wrapped, so that we would leave ourselves room to change our minds later on, but I was outvoted. This made the filming process a little more interesting, as people on the street tended to stare at this old oil lamp with a cock attached to it.

I would only have bought us a day anyway. Tomorrow we do interior stuff at Alan’s apartment, and the lamp will be prominently on display throughout, from the opening shot of her placing it on a shelf to the closing shot of her chucking it in the garbage.

I didn’t have a hell of a lot to do today. A week of days like this one would be a long one. In a way I’m very much looking forward to the sex scenes. In another way I’m not.

We did one thing right today, anyway. When Vinnie worked up the shooting schedule, he remembered that Sophie would have a major makeup change. In the precredit sequence, she’s made up as an old bag. In the rest of the stuff she’s her natural self. So we put her into makeup at the beginning and did all the precredit exterior shots at once before bringing her back to youthfulness and shooting the rest of the stuff.

This makeup switching is a pain in the ass. And we’re not done with it. The problem, of course, is going to be getting it the same each time. A lot of the age is done with acting, and Sophie is surprisingly good at that. She lets her shoulders slump, rolls her hip when she strides, etc. She also pads herself around the chest and middle to suggest a more mature figure.

The makeup doesn’t really make her look fifty, but it helps. I won’t know how well it works until I see some film, which will be after we’re done.

It would be nice to do all the old stuff at once, so that we don’t have to redo Sophie each time. But that would mean moving around too much geographically. For instance, tomorrow we’ll shoot stuff at Alan’s apartment, both before and after our girl’s transformation. And some other day we’ll shoot the singles’ bar scene, in which Pluto transforms her from an old bag to a young knockout. It’s a shame, but there’s really no way around it.

There will be one other transformation, the flashback sequence in which Sophie is magically turned twelve years old again. That will be my turn in the barrel, my dramatic debut as the Dirty Old Man. But we’ll only have to do the makeup once. That will be the last day of shooting, for reasons I won’t go into just yet, if you don’t mind, and we’ll shoot the outdoor and the indoor one after the other.

Which reminds me. When Pluto read those ten pages of script the first day, we rapped about the difference between doing a hardcore scene and simply being in a hardcore picture. He said he probably wouldn’t do a hardcore scene (assuming he would be capable of it, which he suspected he would not). He said he wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t want to ball someone on camera but that was his immediate reaction. On the other hand, he had no compunctions about appearing in the film in the Pluto role.

In this connection I mentioned that I was going to be playing a sexually active role in the film, and told him what the role was. The Dirty Old Man scene, of course, was in the first ten pages of script, so he was familiar with it.

“God,” he said, “even in films like this you can’t get away from typecasting.”

— Friday

The Irving character was Vinnie’s idea, and Vinnie wrote most of Irving’s dialogue. From the beginning, Vinnie has worried that the script is going to play too short. He certainly knows more than I do about timing a script, but I think he’s crazy. I gave it a rough reading for timing a while ago and it came out to almost two hours. What we want is somewhere between eighty and ninety minutes. It’s possible that I’m expecting the sex scenes to run longer than they ultimately will.

In any case, Vinnie would rather come in long than short which makes excellent sense, as it’s easier to cut than to stretch. There’s another reason for this. Vinnie wants to be able to edit a soft-core version of the film for markets where hardcore films can’t be shown. Drive-ins, for instance. You just can’t show hardcore movies at drive-ins or passersby will start driving into one another.

(Incidentally, Alan was telling me that this is changing. He read in one of the trades that some farsighted exhibitor in, I think, western Pennsylvania is enclosing his drive-in theater with a huge wall so that he can show hardcore films there. That’s enterprise, all right. Though I can’t understand why anyone would want to watch a hardcore film at a drive-in. If that’s where your interests lie, isn’t it just as easy to watch the people in the other cars? What you lose in professionalism you surely make up in spontaneity and enthusiasm.)

This idea of cutting a soft-core version is not without merit, though, and something I would never have thought of. So in this sense Vinnie is perfectly right. By making sure we have as much extrasexual material as possible, and by cutting out the cock-and-cunt shots from the sex scenes, we can produce something that will be, while obviously X-rated, safe from censorship in those areas where an all out hardcore film can’t play.

Which brings us back to Irving.

The main trouble with Irving is the character who plays him. I met him for the first time today and my immediate reaction was a delighted one. He looks the part to perfection. A real foxy grandpa-type, fifty-five or sixty, a dealer in rare coins and stamps, snow white hair, waxed moustache, hell, the son of a bitch is the perfect Irving.

The son of a bitch is not the perfect actor, however.

Not even close.

He’s a backer, with a thou or two invested in the film, and he’s very happy to supply his acting services free of charge, which certainly makes him a bargain. But he made a perfect hash out of today’s shooting. He came along with his own wardrobe, with costume changes for each appearance, and he was as eager as could be, and he had his lines committed to memory perfectly, and then we tried a run-through of the first scene, where he meets Sophie in the hallway, and I realized we were in for trouble. I caught a glimpse of Pluto’s face when Irving said his lines. He looked as though he had just swallowed a bad oyster.

This first discovery, that Irving couldn’t act, led in short order to a second discovery.

Vinnie can’t direct.

Let me qualify that because it’s unfair. As far as framing a scene and seeing things with the eye of a camera, Vinnie seems to be something of a genius. I’ll know more about this when we see some film, but for the time being I’m willing to believe he’s brilliant.

The other job of a director, though, is to get actors to give the best possible performance. And in this area Vinnie doesn’t know what to do. He could tell Irving was going over like a landmine, everybody could tell that, but he didn’t know how to change things.

In fact, he didn’t even know how to try. I see this, incidentally, as a potential obstacle of major importance, and it’s going to be particularly problematic in the sex scenes. Vinnie has already confessed to me that he has a lot of trouble with sex scenes, and that strikes me as an odd admission to come from the lips of a porno director. That was his main reason for naming me Assistant Director. He wants someone else to tell the girl to brush her hair out of the way so the camera can see her giving head.

(My favorite porno cliché, that one. I can’t remember ever seeing a film in which at least one chick doesn’t spend a lot of time carefully moving her hair aside so we can all see her lips working. Maybe we can hire a Second Assistant Director to stand just off camera holding the girl’s hair back.)

The thing with Vinnie is that sex embarrasses him. Sex that involves him, that is. Maybe just sex that involves him verbally; I have no reason to suspect his sex life is other than normal, and I believe he has a girl currently living with him.

Well, he tried to talk to Irving. His directorial method consisted of telling Irving haltingly that perhaps Irving wasn’t reading his lines with expression. We tried it again, and Irving sounded as though he was a kid in second grade who had been told to read with expression. It certainly sounded as though he was reading, by George. He had everything memorized, but if you closed your eyes you could just see him holding the book in front of him.

I went over and whispered to Pluto, who suggested that maybe it didn’t matter.

“Maybe nothing matters,” I said, “but I think we have to pretend otherwise.”

“He’s a complete lecher, Jack. And I know he’s really dying to screw what’s-her-name, Sophie. And he opens his mouth and you lose all of that.”

“I know.”

I went over and talked with Irving, who was very distressed that he seemed to be giving everybody the shivering shits with his debut. I hit at the point that he had to be natural, just be himself, blah blah blah, and so help me God, he nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, and grinned a lecherous grin, and his eyes sparkled. Then we all moved on inside to try out one of the bits that go on inside the apartment, although that was not something we could film yet because we had Sophie in her Old Lady makeup, but just trying it on for size figuring that Irving might be less uptight in the apartment than in the hallway, and he fucked it up the same as ever.

Time was beginning to be a factor. Irving had taken the morning off for the filming but he had to be somewhere at twelve-thirty. Also, we wanted to have the afternoon for the other scenes at the apartment. Vinnie was talking to me about bringing Irving back and shooting his scenes at night, or possibly recruiting another Irving, which he didn’t really want to do because this Irving was so perfect physically, and also because this would hurt Irving’s feelings and that bothered Vinnie. He’s too softhearted to be a director, I think.

Meanwhile, Sophie was whispering to Alan, who nodded. Then she asked all of us except Irving to clear out. She said he was uptight acting in front of other people, but that if the two of them could go over their lines privately she was sure it would work out all right. I figured that made as much sense as anything else, which was not saying a hell of a lot for it, but what the hell. We all filed out, camera crew, Vinnie, Pluto, Alan, script girl, and me.

In the hallway, Alan told us what was up.

“Her idea,” he said. “Sophie. She’s going to fuck him.”

“Huh.”

“He’s hot as hell for her, but he gets nervous about it and he can’t get it across. So she’s going to go through a couple of lines with him and then she’s going to ask him does he want to fuck her. And they’ll make it, and it ought to relax him.”

“But it’s a nonsexual part,” Pluto said.

“Well, we’re not gonna film it. She’ll throw him a quickie and it should relax him.”

“Or give him a coronary.”

Alan’s face fell. He hadn’t thought of that.

What can I tell you?

It worked.

We stood around in the corridor having an inane conversation for about fifteen minutes. Then Sophie opened the door, grinning like the cat that swallowed the cream, and I use the image advisedly. She assured us Irving had a better grip on the part now, and I’d just as soon leave that one on the plate, friends, but she turned out to be right. We shot all his scenes one right after the other. He had the script down pat which hadn’t been the problem originally and he also emerged as a sly, droll, lecherous old cocker. He’s not going to get a Best Supporting Actor nomination out of it, nothing like that, but he did a damned good job and made it all work on the first take.

Go figure it out. In the beginning he couldn’t act horny because he was horny. Then Sophie did her number to dehorn him, and thus prepared, he was able to act.

He’s a lovely foil for Sophie. Dammit, I find myself admitting that Vinnie was right about the Irving character. His scenes are useful.

They’re good for a couple of reasons, including one I should have appreciated before. Namely that it is going to provide some nice balance to have Sophie shown as the object of someone else’s unfulfilled desires in addition to having ungratified desires of her own.

But one I couldn’t have foreseen is that our Sophie is at her best in scenes when she’s putting somebody down. She’s very effective in this capacity, which bodes well for the rest of the picture, as she gets to put people down a lot. I was worried, for example, that she might have trouble with the Rasputin scene. She has to deliver a lot of lines without being impossibly off-putting as a castrating bitch. I didn’t know how well she would be able to handle this. Now I feel a little more confident.

I didn’t care for her quite as much in her scenes with Pluto. It will be interesting to see how those look. He does overshadow her, no way around it, but he also carries her to an extent. In their first scene together, after his appearance when she goes down on the lamp, there’s the bit where he explains the terms of the contract to her. I thought she was very wooden in it. I would have liked to go for another take on it, but everybody else seemed happy, so I decided to keep my mouth shut. Probably just as well.

There was one scene where you really believed she was an actress. It’s a solo number. She’s in the apartment after the failure of the orgy scene, going through everything, throwing all her sexual artifacts in the garbage. There’s a really subtle play of emotions on her face. She shows it all — defeat, nostalgia, everything. I just hope Vinnie got in close on her at the right moments. She went through it several times so we could cover it from different angles and she was really good all the way through.

She may not be a bad actress. She’s best at reacting. She moves well and uses her face nicely. I wish she used her voice as well as she uses the rest of herself.

People pick strange times to get inhibited. For example, the most interesting thing that happened all day was her bit with Irving, balling him while we all waited outside. Afterward, the incident was not discussed in her presence, not before Irving left and not afterward either. We all knew she had made it with him, and she knew we knew, yet nobody said word one about it. We did talk about how Irving performed better, and recognized without voicing it that she had been responsible for his sudden emergence as a dramatic talent, but that was as far as it went.

Pluto and I had dinner together. He told me a lot of stories about show business types who have to have sex before they go on. One very famous singer has a call girl appear in his dressing room before he goes on. He gives her a couple of bills to fellate him before the performance. They don’t clear the dressing room or anything. He’ll sit around on the couch, maybe talking on the phone, maybe not, maybe having a drink, and his agent’s there, or some of his buddies, and the girl’s on her knees giving him head. He doesn’t even make her take off her clothes. She blows him until he comes, and then one of his flunkies gives her whatever the price is and she goes away, and he goes on stage and sings torch songs.

Well, people with artistic temperament need special consideration. And writers are no exception. I’ve got a lady friend coming over tonight to help me rehearse my scene for the film. We’re going to do it without dialogue, just so I can get the moves down pat. We may have to have quite a few takes before we get it right, too.

— Saturday

We spent the entire morning shooting the chessboard sequence.

Maybe it was worth it. It was the one idea of mine that Alan was unequivocally crazy about from start to finish. He just plain loved it. It’s just a quickie bit, and the cost of it was a sonofabitch. Not just in time and in amount of film expended, but costs of staging and personnel. We needed sixteen black girls, sixteen white girls, and two devils to carry the white pawn away. The white girls were all bit types who turned up at our casting call, but only two black girls appeared at the casting sessions and we had to hire the rest from a model agency that specializes in black talent, so they cost us a little more.

Staging the thing was a pain in the ass. Alan spent a couple of days scouting locations, searching the five boroughs for a huge courtyard with a checkerboard floor. Then Vinnie came up with the observation that we didn’t need a checkerboard floor, that any asshole could lay out a checkerboard floor in a few minutes with big squares of cardboard, so all we needed was a big courtyard, and that shouldn’t be too hard to find.

Then Vinnie complicated things beyond belief by insisting that Madge’s office had to overlook the courtyard. All this because we get an aerial view of the scene from Madge’s point of view. We have the loan of an apartment that is perfect for Madge’s office, and all free of charge, but it doesn’t overlook anything remotely resembling a courtyard.

Alan and I took turns pointing out that it would be child’s play to fake the shot. You have a shot of Madge and Pluto at the office window, and then you cut to an aerial shot from some other window overlooking the chessboard scene, and you’ve done it.

“But it would be so much better to see it over Madge’s shoulder,” Vinnie whined.

Repeatedly.

We finally found a way to satisfy the prick. Alan turned up an apartment complex out in Queens where we could shoot the scene, and he found a tenant there who would give us a minute’s shooting time in his apartment. We used that apartment for our aerial view of the chessboard and we shot over Madge’s shoulder. Of course the window is vastly different from the window of Madge’s office, but maybe nobody will notice in the couple of frames we’ll be using. Later, when we shoot the rest of that scene in Madge’s office, we’ll have Madge and Pluto pick up the same spots when they walk to the window.

And then, ultimately, we’ll probably throw out the shot from over Madge’s shoulder that we took today, because it won’t work, and we’ll substitute an aerial view we shot without Madge in the frame. Alan told me privately that he thinks we’ll have to do it this way, because the scenes won’t match, but that it was worth shooting that extra POV scene today because it keeps Vinnie happy. He and I do a certain number of things to keep Vinnie happy, and Vinnie and I do a certain number of things to keep Alan happy, so I suppose the two of them do a certain number of things to keep me happy.

Though I haven’t noticed any of them yet.

When I first wrote the chessboard sequence I didn’t really expect them to use it. If nothing else, I know how to count, and I know that a scene with thirty-four people in it is expensive, especially when it does nothing to advance the plot.

Also, it’s not enormously original. The idea of playing chess with human pieces, subject to death upon capture, is nothing new. Fredric Brown used it in a science fiction short story that I read ages ago, and I think some other SF writer, probably Poul Anderson, did so also. I’ll admit it hasn’t been done before in a pornographic movie, and that it’s a nice visual, but I thought Alan would want to throw it out. I included a certain number of things in the first draft for him to throw out, and while I sort of liked this one, I included it mentally in that category.

Instead he fell in love with it.

It was a bitch to stage. Vinnie brought along his sixty-four squares of black and white cardboard. Since the floor was white to begin with, we could have done fine with thirty-two black squares, but this never occurred to him. Or to anyone else, myself included, as far as that goes.

We set up the floor, and then we set up the girls. The taxi fare alone involved in transporting thirty-two young ladies from Manhattan to Queens is something to think about. We dressed our two devils in devil suits and Prussian helmets — this last was a nice idea of Alan’s — and we got everybody in place, and then we shot the scene.

It took three and a half hours.

Now isn’t that ridiculous? But that’s what happened. Things kept going wrong. Admittedly there were a lot of people out there, but only four of them had to move. The black bishop, the white pawn, and the two devils. The thirty other girls just had to stand there and look naked and stiff. The pawn had a couple of elementary lines of dialogue. The devils and the black bishop had to look stern. That was all there was to it.

Except that things kept going wrong. One problem was that the girls would keep moving, the ones who were supposed to stay still and look like statues. I could have lived with this, frankly, but Vinnie and Alan both wanted the scene just right. We really spent a lot of film retaking this crap.

Another problem was the white pawn. I picked the tallest black girl for the bishop and the smallest, youngest looking girl for the white pawn.

(And kicked myself mentally for not using that twelve-year-old nymphomaniac for the white pawn. She would have been perfect and in a part like that I think we could have gotten away with using her. As soon as I thought of it I realized the last thing to do was to mention it to Vinnie or Alan, because they would want to do it, and that would mean packing up and postponing everything for at least a day. It would have been great, though.)

The black bishop played her part very well. She’s about six feet tall and very dark-skinned, and she has elegant large uplifted breasts and a protruding behind, and her facial expression during the capture of the pawn was a study in menace. She never cracked a smile.

Which cannot be said for the white pawn, who tended to crack up in mirth when the cameras were on her. This seemed to be contagious. We wound up dropping the sound, figuring to loop it all later on. There’s only one spot where she talks into the camera, and that’s when the bishop first advances on her. Her words as she’s led off are delivered with her back to the camera, and of course her scream is completely off-camera. It took us a long time before we decided on this, however. We first went through a ton of takes with on-camera sound during which some cretinous asshole in the back broke up. We’ll loop the whole thing, and needless to say we won’t use the stupid white pawn to do the dubbing. (Sophie may do it; she does a nice little-girl voice, as I learned yesterday when she tried out some of her dialogue for her scene with me.)

Another thing that got in the way was the fact that this apartment complex where we shot everything was not unoccupied. That was another reason on-camera sound proved impossible. All it takes is one shrill housewife bellowing for her kid to kill a soundtrack.

Well, we got it done. Alan paid off the girls and we tucked them into cabs. Then we went back to Manhattan, Vinnie and Alan and Madge and Pluto and I. We blew ourselves to a two-hour lunch at Sign of the Dove. We felt we had it coming.

During lunch we remembered that we didn’t have the props for Madge’s office. This is because we hadn’t originally planned to shoot Madge’s scenes today. But because Alan gave in to Vinnie on shooting the aerial view over Madge’s shoulder, we wanted to get a little more out of Madge in return for the hundred and a half she was getting. We figured we could at least get some of her scenes with Pluto wrapped up.

So after lunch the rest of them went up to the apartment while I ran over to the Pleasure Chest.

There are two Pleasure Chests, one in the Village and the other in the East Fifties, but they both amount to the same thing. They are sex stores. They sell creams to heighten excitement, ointments to delay orgasm, dildoes and French ticklers and masturbatory aids and God knows what else. A lot of the sexual arcana we used to establish Alan’s apartment as Sophie’s apartment came from there. Vibrators, sex toys, all sorts of silly dreck.

But what these stores sell the most of is sadomasochistic paraphernalia. This isn’t because such a high percentage of their customers are into torture and bondage, but because other forms of sexual activity don’t really require very much in the way of gadgetry.

S-and-M aficionados, however, are very prop oriented. They are also likely to have a special affinity for leather. As a result, perhaps two-thirds of the store’s inventory was given over to whips and chains and anklets and wristlets and cock rings and God knows what else.

One thing I had never realized before was how expensive all of this gear was. I have been in the shop before but never paid all that much attention to the S-and-M displays.

(Not that I’m putting it down. A friend and I have discovered that light restraint is a pleasant enough way to pass a lazy Sunday afternoon, offering as it does an interesting change of pace and an opportunity to act out a lot of one’s subliminal impulses. But we’ve always made do with dog collars and binder’s twine, and it was somewhat jarring to see wristlets going for ten dollars a copy and whips for similarly exorbitant prices. I just can’t appreciate the intrinsic superiority of a ten-dollar wristlet to a forty-nine cent dog collar. The fault is probably mine. That, no doubt, is the difference between a dabbler and a devotee.)

In any event, I saw right off that I could easily squander a couple hundred dollars of the production company’s money on props. I stood there picking and choosing, trying to economize, and realizing that they were all waiting for me and that I was wasting time as well as money. Then I asked myself what Alan would do, and that was the right move. By thinking like a producer I managed to save us a nice piece of change.

I got hold of the manager and explained I wanted the props for just a couple of days. Just as he was starting to say they didn’t do rentals, I sidestepped him and suggested that he loan us the gear free of charge, in return for which we would give him a credit in the titles. “Properties and special consideration courtesy of the Pleasure Chest.”

It got him where he lived, by God. He took time to insist that the credit line specify the Pleasure Chest of New York, as there were other stores similarly named elsewhere, with whom he had no connection.

No problem there, I assured him. Then it occurred to him that he was perhaps being hustled. How did he know who I was? How did he know I would bring the shit back when I was done with it?

I told him to write it all up as a sale and I would give him a check, but that I wanted him to note on the receipt his willingness to take back for full refund any merchandise returned in good order within seven days of purchase. I figured we would probably shoot all the scenes in Madge’s office within two days at the outside, but I wanted to give us room if we needed retakes.

And I had an ulterior motive on top of that. I figured my little friend and I could determine whether there is in fact any intrinsic difference between a ten-dollar wristlet and a forty-nine cent dog collar.

Once we came to agreement, which did not take long, the manager went out of his way to be helpful. He brought out special stuff from the back room, torture devices far too hideous to describe. Since they were costing us nothing, and since they would turn Madge’s office into a veritable chamber of horrors, I saw no reason to turn anything down. Then he wrote up the bill of sale and it came to $539.73, tax included.

Swear to God.

He agreed to hold my check for the week, which was just as well, because that’s more than I’ve got in my account. Then he had one of his assistants drive me to our location in the store’s half-ton panel truck. I could never have shlepped all that crap in and out of a cab. As a matter of fact, it took two people to carry the Iron Maiden around.

Alan started to throw a fit, talking about costs. “Why, you must have spent two hundred dollars on all this shit!” Which shows what he knows about the current market price of sadomasochistic paraphernalia.

I told him the bottom line figure and watched the color leave his face. It was an alarming sight, so I cut it short by explaining that it was costing us nothing.

“That’s my boy,” he kept saying. I thought he was going to kiss me.

Madge and Pluto played together just the way we had all thought they would. Which is to say that they were perfect. They both had all morning to get to know each other and to establish the characterizations they would bring to their roles. They were both on hand during the entire chessboard fiasco, with nothing to do outside of that one framing shot, and they evidently hit it off fairly well.

I have a sort of hunch that Madge and Pluto may share a mattress together before this film is over and done with. I can’t say whether this notion generates from the rapport they seem to have or from the poetic beauty of a romance blooming between the film’s two leading nonsexual performers. She’s maybe ten years older than he is, but her body has certainly borne the years well. One of the bits filmed today, where she shrugs off her shapeless bathrobe and gears up in studded leather belts and such, should warm the cockles (among other things) of any devout masochist, and if that masochist has a healthy Oedipal fixation blooming in his soul, he may well go through the ceiling.

I mentioned my notion to Vinnie just to have something to say. Vinnie and I don’t have that much to say to each other. He said he thought Pluto was married.

I admitted this was so.

“Well, he wouldn’t cheat on his wife,” said Vinnie the Director. “I mean, be serious, will you?”

“Just a little joke,” I said, and walked quickly away.

Here we are making this film, arranging people who’ve never met before in weird sexual postures and taking pictures of them, and Vinnie can’t believe that one of our number would be physically unfaithful to his wife.

Would you mind being eaten by a sheepdog, my dear? Does it matter to you if it’s a male or female sheepdog?

Christ.

I just got a very nervous telephone call from a very nervous Alan the Producer. It seems he just got a call from a comparably nervous backer who read him a review from, I think, Variety. It seems somebody just released our film.

It is called something like Mrs. Jones Meets The Devil. It concerns some woman who dies without losing her virginity, and protests the injustice of this, and the Devil agrees and lets her return to earth to sample sexual pleasure before spending eternity in Hell.

According to Alan, this means we’re dead. I told him that, while the news does not exactly thrill me, neither does it make me puke. We will be sued, says Alan, for plagiarism. To this I replied that I found it highly unlikely that one producer of porno films would sue another producer of porno films for plagiarism. Also, from what he’s told me of the plot (which may be garbled, having gone through so many repetitions) we are less likely to be sued by these people than, say, by Goethe. We’re spinning off the Faust legend.

Anyway, who cares?

Alan does, I’m afraid. He asked me if I thought it would be possible to rewrite the script and remove all of the Devil aspects. I told him that would leave us with the Rasputin scene and a few hundred feet of footage showing Sophie walking around various exteriors. He laughed apologetically and said he was just kidding, which I’ll reserve judgment on, thanks just the same.

We did agree that it might behoove one or the other of us to see this movie as soon as possible.

Tomorrow we get to shoot some sex stuff. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not I’m looking forward to it. On the one hand, the preceding few days have been a sort of stalling. We haven’t really filmed anything you couldn’t show to a third grade class at a convent school. At the same time, I’m a little bit apprehensive about my role in tomorrow’s proceedings. It seems as though I’m going to wind up doing a lot of the actual directing.

Vinnie himself has been working, in his subtle fashion, to give me this impression. The scene we’re filming tomorrow is the Rasputin number. Specifically we’re shooting all the action that involves Anna and Karenina, so as to avoid having to pay them for more than the day. We might have to pay them for another day’s dubbing and such, but we want to avoid more than one day’s shooting. If things go well, we may be able to finish the entire Rasputin sequence in the day. It’s all inside, and daylight’s not a factor at all.

Of course we won’t be doing the song tomorrow. Rasputin doesn’t sing.

I have had more aggravation over that fucking song than anyone should be expected to believe.

I love the song. We all have our madnesses, and as adamant as Tim is about including a sheepdog scene, that’s how I am about the fucking song. I will kill in order to have that song in the picture.

I did not write the song specifically for the picture, although it has seemed strategically wise to give Alan that impression. I wrote it a few months ago while I was driving somewhere. That’s when I usually write songs, when I’m driving, and I do it largely to keep awake. I generally forget the songs when I get wherever it is I’m driving. Some of them linger in the mind, though, and I become quite proud of them.

When I first gave Alan a draft of the screenplay, he went out of the way to praise the Rasputin song and the other one as well, “He Never Touched My Heart,” which of course I did write specifically for the film. Ever since then, though, he has been questioning the Rasputin song. Why do we need a song there, he’ll ask. How does it advance the story line?

I replied that it advanced the plot as much as having Rasputin play stinkfinger with Anna and Karenina. What did the song have to do with anything? It was topical, said I, and answered the possible charge of male chauvinism by depicting Rasputin as a male chauvinist and holding him up to ridicule. (When you are reasoning with idiots, it is permissible to use idiot reasoning; moreover, it is essential.)

Ah, said Alan, but therein lay another problem. The problem of anachronism. For, after all, the whole concept of Women’s Liberation and Male Chauvinism was unknown in Rasputin’s time! I swear he said this. And not just once. He made this point on several occasions. Some of the time I yelled at him. Other times I took the position that this anachronism would constitute a sort of inside gag for history buffs.

Then he pointed out that it would slow things down to have Rasputin pick up a balalaika and wail away for four verses in the middle of his big sex number. I felt it would give everybody a chance to heal up, but said instead that we wouldn’t have Rasputin do his thing right there but would have him record it and use it as a voiceover during the threesome with the two girls. Vinnie and I had earlier discussed the inherent problem of having something for the audience to listen to while watching people ball. You have a few obvious choices, all of them slightly bad. You can run a music track, you can leave things more or less silent, or you can encourage your performers to ad-lib enough dialogue to keep the more verbally oriented members of your audience from dozing off. Since a lot of the performers have enough trouble looking aroused without having to sound aroused as well, this last method is often done by looping moans and groans and shouts of “Stick it in deeper!” or “You sure suck like an angel!” or whatever afterward. There’s no lip-synch problem, because you do this over extreme close-ups of genitalia.

My feeling was that the song would let us get away with a nice long sex scene here between Rasputin and the two girls, and would be amusing for people amused by that sort of thing, whereas the bug-eyed porno freaks would have little trouble concentrating on the ins and outs of the sex without being distracted by my male chauvinist anthem. Alan agreed, Vinnie agreed strongly, and that seemed to be that.

The next question was, suppose our Rasputin couldn’t sing? As it turned out, he can’t. I finally assured Alan I would arrange for a tape of somebody singing the thing. I think what I’m finally going to do is sing it myself. I’ll buy an hour or two of studio time and hire a guitarist and just do it. I’m not a singer, but then I’m not a songwriter either. Or a screenwriter, or a director, or an actor, or any of these things.

Which gets us back to the question of my directing this, or being de facto director of the sex bits. I was talking to one of the camera crew today and he told me about an experience he had on Vinnie’s last picture. The script called for the female lead to get herself buggered by one of the guys. (The film was a quickie, so I doubt there was a script as such, just a very thin story line for the performers to improvise from.)

Anyway, the girl refused. So what they did was pantomime it, with the actress being taken dog-style but with her more conventional portal employed, and then they got a stand-in for buggery close-ups which would be intercut with the movie, so that the viewer would get the impression that the young lady was really being anally employed. I understand this does not happen that infrequently — they also have cum shot stand-ins, who have orgasms for stud actors who just can’t manage one more ejaculation. But the capper on this one was that the stand-in was a male. The cameraman swears to this. They used a guy who evidently had an appealing and somewhat feminine behind, and Vinnie later had to edit the film very carefully so as to avoid any frames in which the stand-in’s masculine genitalia were displayed.

The same cameraman asked me who we were going to use for the Arouser.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Seems he has worked on films in which a certain person is employed to provide erections for male performers who are having difficulties. The usual process is to send one of the actresses into another room with the guy and give him head until he gets hard, then send him back on stage to do his number. But one producer has a girl he uses just for this purpose. She’s either camera shy or ugly, I didn’t ascertain which, but the thing is that she gives head to all these male performers but has never appeared in a film. In fact she doesn’t even sit there and watch them film. She’s in another room reading comic books or something, and when difficulties arise (in that they fail to arise), the person with the problem goes into her room and gets himself gobbled until he can do his thing for the cameras.

All this was prelude to an anecdote I’m not sure I believe. The cameraman says he was there, but people always have a tendency to attribute firsthand knowledge to stories they’ve heard third-hand themselves, so I don’t know. But I rather prefer to believe this happened, and I’m certainly not going to keep it to myself.

Seems this chick was curled up on the couch with a Wonder Woman comic or something when the door opened and a guy walked in. The guy was not an actor. He was some sort of hanger-on, the producer’s cousin or an investor or the delivery boy from the liquor store, God knows what exactly. And he was looking for the men’s room or the elevator or something, and he walks in and sees this naked girl on the couch.

“Hi,” she says. “Well, take off your clothes.”

“Huh?”

“Take off your clothes, silly, and I’ll give you some head.”

“You’ll, uh, give me some head?”

“Sure,” she says. “After all, that’s what I’m here for.”

Well, the clown is not going to question this too closely, naturally enough, so he shucks his clothes and sets himself down on the couch and our girl goes into her act. And, perhaps because the circumstances are slightly bizarre, it takes quite a while for anything to happen. Which makes sense from the girl’s point of view; she’s used to cases in which desperate measures have to be taken, and occasionally labors for close to an hour to achieve the desired angle of perpendicularity. Anyway, after fifteen minutes or so during which the guy keeps praying that, if this is a dream, he won’t wake up, she finally manages to give him an erection.

At which point she removes her mouth and says, “Well, that ought to hold you. See you.”

GUY: Whattaya, crazy or something?

GIRL: Go on, they’re waiting for you.

GUY: You can’t leave me like this. Look, you want to fuck or whatever you want, I don’t care, but you gotta get me off!

GIRL: Get you off?

Whereupon she explains, whereupon he explains, whereupon he says that, since he’s not an actor, and since she has provoked this undeniable excitement within him, the least she can do is carry him the rest of the way to orgasm. Whereupon she in turn asks him what the hell kind of a girl he thinks she is, anyway.

The rest of their dialogue is presumably unrecorded. The cameraman says he heard that the girl did finally get the guy off, if that matters.

In any case, we don’t have an Arouser, at least not as far as I know. It would be a great credit line, though. ”Sexual Excitation by Suzy Slutt.”

And one envisions Sophie accepting her Oscar and making her speech: “And last but not least I want to thank all the little people who worked so hard behind the scenes to make the picture a success. The wardrobe man. The script girl. And Suzy Slutt, who made my leading man a tower of strength.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love Hollywood.

— Sunday

This is Rasputin’s fourth feature length film. He broke into the business on the West Coast where he made a lot of short films for quickie outfits who make those two-hundred-foot jobs for private parties and like that.

It’s been widely assumed that the availability of hardcore features at theaters across the nation would put an end to the private stag film business. I’ve lately learned that this has not happened at all. The private customers may go to theaters to see the features but still want films for private viewing. And even in this day and age there are people who will not go to the theaters.

Rasputin used to get fifty bucks for a day’s work, which might amount to half a dozen films or more, depending on how the producer wound up cutting the things together. There was no acting required in the quickies, just sexual ability, which Rasputin has in abundance. His penis is larger than average, although he’s not in the same league with that California porno star with a thirteen-inch prong. More importantly, he erects easily and maintains an erection as long as he wants.

And sometimes longer.

“There are guys who can come on cue, you know, but I can’t do that. In a way I’m sort of glad I can’t. To me, sex is a very enjoyable thing. You don’t get rich in this business, so if I didn’t enjoy the sexual part of it, well, I guess I’d find something else to do. But I do enjoy it. And an orgasm is a very pleasurable thing, that’s what it is, sheer pleasure, and to be able to turn it on and off like a faucet, I don’t like the idea of it. I mean, when I come, I want it to be because I’m so excited that I would have trouble not coming.

“Not that I would really have trouble, because that’s something I learned a long time ago, like before I first made a film. To be able to hold back an orgasm anytime I want to. It’s a question of training your mind and your body. Not by doing sums in your head or anything like that, but by concentrating on those muscles and concentrating on your mental attitude and just being, oh, stronger than your sexual impulses. Mind over matter, I guess you could call it

“The way I learned this, originally, it was behind some grass. I used to smoke like a fiend. Get up in the morning and light up a joint. This, to me, is a sickness. I’m serious about this. I don’t put down marijuana. I still smoke, oh, say once a week. I’ll get high. No more than that, and I kind of dig it, but to smoke constantly and go through life being stoned, that has to be sick.

“Like for example I dig Italian food. I’m a freak for any kind of pasta, and I like a glass of wine with it. Or maybe one or two glasses of wine before I go to bed. Outside of that I’m not a drinker. I never drink hard booze, but I don’t put down drinking, except that anybody who’s drunk all the time, day in and day out, he’s a sick person doing bad things to his body and his head. Same way with grass, using it moderately is one thing and going wild is another.

“Behind grass, though, I found I could gain control over my sexual responses. It was like I was curling up inside my penis and looking out through the end of it. I’m not good at describing this. What it added up to, I learned to be able to hold back, but I didn’t ever learn to come on cue, and I’m glad. The actors who can, well, they are certainly easy for a director to work with, they save a lot of everybody’s time, but I wouldn’t be in a rush to change places with them.”

He’s a pleasant enough sort of a guy, Rasputin is. He got into the films because he always liked to screw and thought it would be groovy to be paid for it. He never worried about who might see him in the films or what they might think of him.

“I’m not close to my family. My mother’s dead, I haven’t seen my father in some years. As far as somebody I know seeing me in a film, it never bothered me at the time because these films weren’t being shown where anybody would see them. Then after you make a few, you know, and you get accustomed to people watching you having sex, and the camera going and everything and them telling you to do this and do that, shit, you couldn’t care less who sees the film afterward. As far as how I feel now, well, everybody I hang with knows I make films, and a lot of them are into the same thing, and it’s really no sweat... As a matter of fact, it’s a very good image as far as women are concerned. When they know that you make fuck films professionally, whether they ever saw one of the films or not, they know you are built well and know your way around, and they also know what they’re getting into if they go out with you. And there’s a curiosity factor, too. Maybe there are some girls who avoid you because of doing this for a living, but there are other girls who specifically want to ball you because you do this thing.

“As far as being an actor, I mean as a permanent thing, I have to say I don’t know. I really don’t know. I can’t kid myself about acting talent. I’m not saying there are no talented actors making sex films. I could name you a lot of them, genuinely talented people. But I don’t kid myself. My talent, if I have a talent, is a sex talent and not a dramatic talent. I think I’m reasonably at ease in front of a camera, but that’s not all it takes.

“I seriously doubt I could make it in films other than sex films. And I don’t believe there’s a future in this. You hear a lot of talk about how ultimately Hollywood is going to be making big budget porno films, and you hear how this person or that person is going to climb to stardom on the strength of their roles in porno, and I don’t buy any of that. I think the people who say that are just telling themselves stories.

“But I figure I’m young, I’m single, I’m enjoying myself, so I might as well do this as anything else. I only had a high school education and I’m not qualified for anything good in the way of a job. Eventually maybe I’ll get into producing films, or maybe I’ll find some kind of a business opportunity in some other field, but for the time being I get paid to screw, and that’s the American dream, right?”

We filmed part of the American dream today. We didn’t get started until a little after noon, perhaps because Sunday morning is a sacrilegious time to be filming a fuck film, perhaps because everybody got stoned last night. We set up in an artist’s loft in SoHo on Prince Street. The set was just about right once we had thrown some cheap sheepskin rugs all over the floor and bed. The artist, a friend of a friend of Vinnie’s, let us use the place in return for our setting up a water bed there and leaving it for him when we’re finished. We got one for around seventy bucks installed, so the price is right. The loft itself has a nice monastic feel to it.

We began by dressing the scene with chicken bones. Alan brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we all wolfed down enough of it to create a realistic pile of bones. Then we piled the rest on a plate for Rasputin to gnaw on later.

Vinnie got an inspiration a little later, but I’ll mention it now while we’re on the subject of the chicken. There’s the bit where Sophie, unseen, masturbates with the chicken leg, which Rasputin subsequently devours. Vinnie thought of a way to show this. He attached some wires to the chicken leg and filmed it rising magically off the pile of food, then bobbing up and down as if manipulated by Sophie’s invisible hand in and out of Sophie’s equally invisible whatsit. He swears this will look very effective after he has edited it. It didn’t look very effective to me, but I’m willing to believe it will be better on film than it was in the flesh.

Rasputin doesn’t fancy himself an actor. I think, though, that he may be better than he realizes. He was nicely cast for the role in terms of looks. We dolled him up in a full beard, and whoever chose the beard found one that fit his face nicely enough. His monk’s robe looked pretty good, too, and he’s got a high cheek-boned face and rather piercing eyes that fit the character decently.

At the beginning he was less than sensational. We open with him on his knees, evidently praying, and then you find out that while he’s praying he’s also playing with himself. Well, when we rehearsed his dialogue he kept playing it comic, very comic, and it was awful. Vinnie was rather bad at explaining why it was awful.

I took Rasputin aside and said the problem was he was playing it for laughs. He gave me a funny look and said he had understood that the scene was supposed to be comic, that his role was supposed to be comic. Yes, I said, but the way to get that effect was to do it absolutely straight. Because the concept was ridiculous and the dialogue absurd, the straighter he played it the funnier it would be.

Once he took it from that slant, he was quite good. I’ve never liked the way they’ve played comic characters in porn films. The shrink in Deep Throat, for example, goes through all this comic opera shtick, this Borscht Belt mad-scientist accent, and I think that diminishes the comic possibilities of the scene. If Harry Reems had delivered essentially the same lines with utter deadpan sincerity, the scene would have played funnier.

Not that I wouldn’t be delighted to settle for their box office grosses.

When we came to the entrance of Anna and Karenina, we had the same problem; Rasputin forgot this new principle of the acting trade and began camping it up again. I got him to do it straight, and I really think the shot of him walking straight into the camera with his eyes glaring hypnotically will be a good one. We got all their dialogue scenes shot and reshot, and then we got down to business.

Well, we’ll have a lot of footage to sing I Am A Male Chauvinist over.

It was a strange experience. I have watched people copulate before, I’ve been to group sex scenes of one sort or another, and while I’ve occasionally found the experience faintly off-putting, I’ve never been particularly unnerved or embarrassed by it. Like all of these things, perhaps the most surprising element is the short amount of time it takes almost everyone to become quite blasé about the whole thing.

We went rather quickly through the early stuff specified in the script, including all the dialogue parts where Rasputin plays with them and has them diddle each other. Then they went into what you might call an improvisation. One of the girls sat on the waterbed with her legs wide, the other girl knelt in front of her and began gobbling away, and Rasputin played the role of Canine Lover. We stayed with that for a while, shooting from various angles, exhorting the girls to moan and groan a lot, and then both girls faked gigantic orgasms and collapsed in what we hope is a convincing manner.

The idea was for Rasputin to seemingly fuck these girls half to death before they can finally induce an orgasm out of him; then Sophie later turns the tables on him by screwing him brainless without getting him off. (I have found, by the way, that every night when I recap more of the plot of this epic in this here diary, I am less and less delighted with having become involved in all this shit in the first place. It keeps sounding progressively dumber.) Anyway, this requires lots of positions, lots of fake orgasms, and lots of shots of Rasputin, cock still magically erect, and proud of it.

After the first fake orgasm, Vinnie nudged me. “Tell ’em to do something different,” he muttered.

“Do something different,” I told them.

“No, no,” he said. Tell ’em what you want ’em to do, for Chrissake.”

“What do I want them to do?”

He closed his eyes. “You gotta direct this part. You gotta handle specifying the sex.”

“What should I specify? I mean do you have anything in mind?”

“Use your imagination. For starters, oh, have Rasputin sitting with what’s-her-name astride, you know, but she’s facing the same direction he is, toward the camera, and then the other one, she can suck his balls and lick him and maybe play with his asshole or something like that.”

“That’s original as hell,” I said.

“You got some better idea, we’ll go with it.”

I arranged them in the position described above. Rasputin sat back and one of the girls, I can’t remember which is which, and believe me, it doesn’t matter, sat down on him and engulfed his chief dramatic talent with her own. Then, for the hell of it, I gave the other girl a couple of lines to ad-lib. I had her say something about how mighty Rasputin will split her sister in half like a ripe melon, and then I had the sister say she could feel his penis all the way up to her throat.

(A digression, if you don’t mind. A friend of mine writes movies out in Hollywood. Real movies. One time he was the writer on location, which meant he stayed with the picture while they went out in the desert and shot it, in case they needed any line changes. He was sleeping late one morning when there was a knock on his motel room door. It was a gopher from the lot. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Sigafoos, but they need a line. In the scene where Newman drops the frammis and Kennedy picks it up and hands it back to him, they want Newman to thank him, and so they need a line, and they asked me to ask you.” My friend scratched his head and said, “Have Newman say ‘Thanks.’ The gopher wrote this down and went away and my friend went back to sleep. That’s why they needed a writer on location. They needed me there this afternoon so that I could tell these three people how to fuck and what to mutter at each other while they did it.)

Anyway, they got in position and played around for awhile. That position, incidentally, man and woman both seated and both facing the same direction, is one which I suspect is spreading all over the country largely as a result of porn films. It is a standard in the industry because it affords maximum visibility. You can see the penis sliding in and out, you can see the vagina, you can see the girl’s breasts, you can see the faces of both partners, and you don’t have to see a lot of pimples on a lot of asses. I am sure the country is full of a lot of couples who have tried that position primarily because they’ve seen it in so many movies. Once again, Life imitates Art.

We moved through a nice little catalog of positions. Every now and then we would cue the girls to go into the throes of orgasm, and they would oblige. Once one of them obliged without being told, giving a very engaging and evidently very real orgasm. The rest of the time they were real pros and stayed with the script. Eventually Vinnie had as much film as he needed and asked Rasputin if he felt like coming.

He said he had been feeling like coming for quite a while now, and would be delighted to. The script called for both girls to do an oral number on Rasputin and share the fruits of their labors. Vinnie had them work up to it, then cut the camera while they continued. Rasputin was prepared to give him a cue when he was within seconds of release. The girls did their number very convincingly, and it’s a shame we picked that moment to save film, because they gave out with some of their best fellatory techniques. Then, after we had instructed Rasputin to make a lot of noise at the critical moment, and to please not get so far carried away that he lost his Russian accent, he announced that the moment was indeed at hand.

It went beautifully. He ejaculated magnificently into one mouth, and the girls passed his gift back and forth, and we got as much film as we wanted, and Vinnie yelled, “Cut,” and one of the girls got up and ran into the corner and vomited.

I wish we had filmed that, too.

Back when we were in script conferences, and when Vinnie and I were going through general discussions of what would or would not work in the film, he wanted my opinion on the extreme close-ups that have become such a cliché in porn films. “Nothing turns me off like a urethra covering an entire thirty-foot screen,” he said. “I hate those fucking close-ups. But what do I know? I mean, I’ve seen so many of the damned things, and they don’t excite me sexually in the first place, so maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?”

I said I didn’t much like them either, but that I didn’t really know what our average customer felt about it. Maybe people wouldn’t get off unless they were able to zoom in on genitalia. Maybe they would feel it wasn’t really hardcore unless they could see the world’s largest mouth around the world’s hugest glans.

“Alan talks a lot about the female audience,” I said. “Not that there’s much of one, but I somehow can’t believe the women who do go to pornographic films want to see genitalia that close. It doesn’t seem to mesh with what we’re told about female sexual response.”

We kicked it around a lot. Then one night I was with a girl who enjoyed porno movies and said so. She has seen Throat three times. And she did have a few things to say about how movies pander to the male audience, as if Alan had written some of her lines for her. (Nevertheless, she was very specific about how Throat in particular degraded women and pandered to the male audience, and that didn’t keep her from seeing it three times, so the hell with her.)

I tried out our discussion about close-ups. “God, of course I like the extreme close-ups,” she said. “You wouldn’t possibly have a good movie without them.”

I told Vinnie about this the following day. “I guess we zoom,” he said. “You know something? I don’t know a single goddamned thing about women.”

The exchange between Sophie and Rasputin contains a lot of lines I am not responsible for. I would keep throwing them away and Vinnie would keep putting them in. At one point Rasputin has to say something along the lines of, “Think only in distinct shapes and in the primary colors.”

When it became obvious that Vinnie thought that line was right up there with Give me liberty or give me death, I gave up and left it alone. But I got enormous satisfaction out of the way Rasputin fucked up that line this evening, over and over and over. He just could not get it right. It wasn’t even a question of his giving the line a bad reading. There is, after all, no way to give it a good reading. But ol’ Rasputin couldn’t get his mouth around the words. He kept putting them in the wrong order, or stumbling on them, or otherwise messing it up to hell and gone. After wasting a certain amount of film, we made him do it over and over until he got it right four times in a row. Then we filmed it and he got it.

Afterward Vinnie came over to me. He said, “You bastard, I still think it’s a good line.”

“Why am I a bastard? I didn’t even laugh.”

“I know. But I could tell you wanted to!”

I had dinner tonight with a girl I went with briefly about six years ago. I had told her about the film the last time I saw her, two or three weeks back, and this evening she was full of questions about it. I told her a lot about what we had been doing and she asked if she could come watch the rest of the shooting after dinner.

There’s a rule about no non-film people on the set, but it’s not that strictly adhered to. We’ve had people around from time to time, and today Alan brought a girl around, so I figured what the hell. I wanted to oblige her, and also I was interested to see what her reaction would be.

She was a model of decorum, stayed off to one side, didn’t get into any raps with anybody, and generally managed to blend with the furniture. Afterward we went out and did a little semi-serious drinking at Downey’s.

She said, “I can’t imagine what it’s like. I wanted to see this to get some idea what it’s like for the people involved, the actors and actresses, and I saw, and I still don’t know. I cannot imagine myself doing that.”

“Have you ever considered it?”

“No. But I’ve thought about it. I’ve seen a few films, primarily out of curiosity, I don’t really dig them. And my reaction always has been a lot of wondering what it was like and how people could go through with it.”

“Have you ever done any swinging?”

“You mean group sex? No. I’ve thought about it, and it’s something I probably could go through with if the situation was right. Nothing structured or planned, but if there were a small group of people with good heads and everybody just sort of winged it and it got to be a group sex scene, I can imagine myself participating in it and enjoying it. But not this. For one thing, it’s fake sex. It’s a terrible fraud.”

“To the extent that all acting is fake.”

“I suppose so, but, oh, maybe it’s that I don’t think sex is something that ought to be faked. I don’t know exactly what I mean. I could just never do that. It’s not the idea of exposure, the idea that the whole world could see me going down on somebody. In a sense there’s something exciting about that. The exhibitionism of it. Like if somebody without my knowledge took movies of me balling someone, I’m sure I would be angry, but it would also be a little exciting. But to perform like that, to do an act without feeling it, or to try to force yourself to feel it, God. Not for me.

“Haven’t you ever faked an orgasm, love?”

She looked at me over the tops of her glasses. She drawled, “Why, dahhhling, I’ve never had to.”

The shooting itself went pretty well, I guess. How can you tell?

In terms of quantity, we did better than I really thought we would do. We got virtually all of the Rasputin scene in the can. There’s a little left to finish up tomorrow. Rasputin’s final ejaculation, for one. But we’re done with Anna and Karenina. Alan gave the two of them a ride home. I suspect an ulterior motive.

Sophie was pretty good. Not as good as she thinks she was — I’m beginning to dislike that girl — but better than we thought she would be. Better than I thought she would be, anyway.

There were some funny things that happened, some funny lines exchanged, but it’s now after two in the morning and, truth to tell, your boy JWW has bloody well had it. If I wrote anything else right now it would be my own philosophical musings on the effects of pornography on the fabric of society, and I am a little too tired to express them all that cogently at the moment.

— Monday

We wrapped up the Rasputin scene this morning in an hour.

We could have finished it last night except for a problem. The script calls for Sophie to disappear in a finger-snap, while ol’ Rasputin is grinding away. He flashes a baffled expression, still grinding, and ejaculates in the middle of the air, then collapses in a puddle.

This would have been easier to achieve were Rasputin capable of ejaculating on cue; but as he mentioned and I reported earlier, dear friends, he does not possess that talent. And, since Rasputin was not all that highly primed for orgasm, having had a couple already by then, he was none too sanguine about being able to spew forth without anything to spew forth into.

So we shot the finale this morning. Sophie and Rasputin got into position and fucked furiously, and then Sophie delivered her line to Pluto asking him to get her the hell away from here, or words to that effect, and then we stopped while Rasputin hunched there on his knees manfully refraining from orgasm.

Sophie scurried out of the way, and Rasputin got into the same position and made a brief flurry of pelvic thrusts in the middle of the air. After a few seconds of this he wrapped his hand around his cock and commenced jerking himself off manfully, as he and Vinnie had arranged. These manual frames would of course be cut from the final film if only to protect Rasputin’s Box Office Image. Then, when he had frigged himself to the point where orgasm was inevitable, he unhanded himself, returned to mock-coital position, and spewed his seed all over the ratty sheepskins.

When the film is edited, it will look as though Sophie disappears in a puff of smoke, as though Rasputin continues to screw where she has lately been, and as though he comes spontaneously from this surge of air-fucking.

At least we hope it will work that way.

Or they do. Because I don’t really give a damn.

I took the afternoon off. After we finished the Rasputin sequence I announced that I was taking the rest of the day off. Alan said that was impossible, and Vinnie said they needed me, and I said the hell they did, in the first place, and in the second place I didn’t care. I reminded them that somebody had to see the picture Alan was afraid of plagiarizing, and I told them I had an appointment to talk to Dell about the way the production diary was going, and I said that, in any event, they were just shooting some minor scenes and could certainly shoot them without me.

They acquiesced, which is just as well, because I was already on my way out the door.

The business about having an appointment with Dell was a lie. The business about seeing the movie may have been a lie. I’m going to go out for dinner in a few minutes, and afterward I may run down to Times Square and look at the picture. Its title is The Devil In Miss Jones, incidentally, not what I called it earlier.

I spent the afternoon sitting around and reading and drinking iced tea. And having some thoughts about this project in particular and porn in general.

Which I will now share with you. Unless wiser editorial heads prevail, that is, in which case we’ll chop out this heavy section of the diary and confine ourselves to all the cute and cunning little things that happened in the course of manufacturing this epic.

It’s strange. I have always taken it as a fundamental postulate that censorship sucks. The broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution has seemed to me absolutely essential to the functioning of a free society. Any man ought to be able to write anything at all, and any other man ought to have the option of reading it or not, as he chooses.

I have not ceased to believe this, and doubt that I ever will.

Nor have I ceased to believe in the social utility of pornography. The arguments against it, whether expressed rationally or in the lunatic style of censorship’s more vocal advocates, have never impressed me. Pornography does not make streets unsafe, does not inspire sex crime, does not corrupt the young. On the contrary, insofar as it has any function at all, I would suspect its function is valuable.

I don’t go all the way and accept the premise that pornography prevents sex crimes, that a pervert who might otherwise commit rape can sublimate his desires by watching a fuck film. I just don’t think this is true. Rapes are evidently committed by persons whose sexual orientation is such that they prefer to take by force. The proportion of compulsive rapists who have other sexual outlets available to them would tend to confirm this. The example of Denmark, in which sex crimes diminished when pornography was legalized, is less impressive when the facts are scrutinized. The dropoff consisted almost entirely of a decline in certain offenses that were no longer classified as crimes, and thus did not figure in the statistical picture. By extension, the easiest way to effect a decline in reported rapes is to make rape legal; then no one will bother reporting it.

I’m not even impressed by arguments that pornography will have a deleterious effect upon children. I don’t think this is so. On the contrary, I think pornography is probably one of the most useful media for the sexual education of the young. Children have an intense need to know, to see, to understand, and I would think that the opportunity to watch a movie of people fucking would constitute a more meaningful educational experience than is afforded by sex education classes or pamphlets from Planned Parenthood. This is not to disparage the latter, only to point up the potential utility of the former.

I saw a G-rated picture a while ago in which one of the good guys chops off the hand of one of the bad guys. Blood everywhere, the whole number. I would think that would be far more likely to warp the psyche of a child (assuming anything will) than a picture in which a couple of congenial people make love. It is perhaps a prejudice of mine, but I believe wholeheartedly that a gun is infinitely more obscene than a penis, and murder a far more antisocial act than copulation.

These arguments on behalf of pornography are nothing new, neither to me nor to you. I have embraced this pro-porn position for a long time. I still embrace it.

So?

So I find myself wondering about some of the other effects of pornography. Effects not upon the reader or viewer, that is to say, but upon society as a whole. And, even more, the effects upon the creators of pornography.

When an advocate of pornography spends enough time wandering around the Times Square area, he can very easily come away from the experience with the unsettled feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. It is rather difficult to walk past porno store after porno store, peep show after peep show, theater after theater, massage parlor after massage parlor, and still regard this not as urban blight but as the radiant bloom of a healthy society.

One may argue that moral judgments against pornography are unwarranted. Yet one may still feel free to render aesthetic judgment. And it is hard to deny that this stuff is garbage. Our film, which presumably attempts to be more amusing and more literate than the rest, is nevertheless garbage at heart. The genre is basically a garbage genre. Pornography, after all, has the key purpose of sexual excitation. If it doesn’t turn you on, it is not doing what it is supposed to do.

This is not to say that this purpose is bad. But it is to say that it severely limits pornography’s artistic potential.

Thus the pornography industry gives rise to a situation in which a great many people spend their lives creating garbage for a considerably greater number of people to spend part of their lives watching. It is hard not to conclude that both groups are wasting their time.

(One must keep a sense of proportion. The same charge could be leveled against Daytime Television, for example, whereas few people have advocated banning Let’s Make A Deal. That something constitutes a social blight does not mean it ought to be prohibited by law. It need only be deplored.)

The other reservation I have about pornography, and one which has had more personal impact of late, has to do with its effects upon its creators. And here I have to distinguish between writers of pornographic novels (or film scripts, for that matter) and active performers. One could argue that those who create from a distance have their souls deadened by their work, but I’m afraid I don’t believe it. I know too many successful writers who got their start grinding out sex books, too many successful photographers who started on cheesecake and porn, to buy this line of reasoning. If a man starts writing pornography and goes on forever writing pornography, I would be more likely to believe that he had a dead soul to begin with.

I’m thinking more of the actors and actresses who make movies like this one. They remind me more than anything else of the girls who work in massage parlors, and, like those girls, represent the darker side of the New Morality.

Because they are sexual psychopaths, in the sense that Robert Lindner foresaw the coming age as the Age of the Psychopath. They do not feel anything. They engage publicly in intimacy. They perform sexual acts for distinctly nonsexual purposes.

It is commonplace to regard them as exploited by the owners of massage parlors, by the makers of films. Exploited in the way that more orthodox prostitutes are exploited by their pimps. If this were so it would be a grievous fault, to be sure, but I think their exploitation is a far more serious matter. They are exploited by themselves.

Perhaps none of this matters. It is always a mistake to look at a trend and assume it will continue in its present direction. Human affairs do run in cycles. Hegel’s view of synthesis and antithesis still holds, although his premise that all this is in aid of something is harder to accept.

One considers again the Scandinavian example. The ultimate effect of the availability of pornography appears to be a speedy saturation; the audience eventually tires of watching people fuck.

So I still do not believe that the situation calls for censorship.

It merely calls for despair.

It is now late at night, some hours after I concluded the observations above. I just read them over and find them an accurate enough exposition of my feelings, however pompously expressed. The diary is indeed a fascinating art form, and could well be a more useful vehicle for analysis than the game Freudians play.

I did wind up seeing The Devil In Miss Jones, and wonder now whether my feelings about it are as they might have been had I not prefaced seeing the movie with the foregoing reflections on pornography. It is an exceedingly well made movie. You may well have seen it by now, but I’ll summarize the plot anyway. A woman kills herself and winds up at the gate of Hell. She protests that she has led a blameless life, has never committed a sin, and that it is utterly unfair for her to be sentenced to Hell in light of her past record. The gatekeeper replies that it is indeed a shame, but that suicide is the ultimate mortal sin and there is no reprieve possible. He agrees, though, that she should at least have the opportunity to experience the pleasures of the flesh before being shuttered off to spend Eternity in the Netherworld.

With that premise established, she goes through the usual gamut. She learns to enjoy the application of a penis to her three obvious orifices. She participates in a lesbian sequence and in two threesomes, one with another woman and a man, one with two men and herself. In the former she and the other girl mutually fellate their male partner and exchange his semen in a scene disconcertingly reminiscent of what we filmed yesterday with Rasputin and Anna and Karenina; in the latter there is a lovely sandwich sequence in which she is penetrated simultaneously in anus and vagina. There is also an almost endless sequence in which she masturbates in a bathtub with a stream of water.

The film ends with her in Hell, sharing a cell with a lunatic. All she wants is for him to fuck her because she can’t get off by herself (although she was doing pretty well in the bathtub) and all he wants is for her to shut up, because if you’re very quiet, you can occasionally hear a fly buzzing around.

The film’s excellences are several. It is very well photographed, first of all. More important, it has a female lead who can really act convincingly. She talks during the sex scenes, really talks, and by God you believe that she’s into what she’s doing. She is by no means the most strikingly attractive woman ever to show her ass to the camera, and she’s a little long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but she is a convincing actress and the first one I’ve ever seen in a porn flick.

In spite of all this, and in spite of the fact that the script throughout is at worst written in English and at its best moderately intelligent, there is something very wrong with the film.

It ain’t erotic.

To be sure, this is at least in part a subjective judgment. A wholly objective judgment on a film’s erotic effect is beyond my province. Eroticism is, if not in the eye of the beholder, certainly in another organ. The mere fact that I did not respond erotically to the escapades of Miss Jones does not preclude the possibility of such a response on the part of other viewers of the film, especially in view of the fact that porno films rarely move me much anymore, and that hardly any film could have created much of a stirring in my loins given the mood I was in all day.

It’s my guess, though, that hardly anyone is going to find this film erotic, excepting of course those yoyos who get a reflexive hard-on every time somebody flashes a tit at them. And it’s almost as though the film’s intent is anti-erotic.

Consider the opening. Miss Jones gets into a bathtub and cuts her wrists. She takes a long time doing this, and the blood wells up so convincingly I was willing to believe she really did cut them. I figured they shot this scene after they shot the rest of the film, and the actress obligingly gave her all for the film by bleeding to death. It was that realistic.

And, unless you’re a necrophiliac, that doesn’t turn you on; all it turns is your stomach. Not only does it not turn you on but it turns you off to the point where it is very hard for you to get in a sexy mood in any of the sequences that follow.

The rest of the film was also anti-erotic, although I am not entirely certain why. Maybe because the film never communicated a feeling of fun. Pleasure, perhaps, but not fun. Maybe it was too artsy craftsy. Maybe it was too pretentious. I’m not exactly certain why, but I know one good defense for this film would be that it does not appeal to the prurient interest. And that, as I see it, is its chief flaw. Because a porn movie that does not appeal to the prurient interest must be adjudged a failure. That, after all, is what pornography is for; without it, its d’être has no raison.

I just called Alan to tell him essentially what I wrote above, much abbreviated, and reassure him that we have nothing to worry about. I suggested we simply avoid emphasizing any of the Devil aspects in the film’s title. We still aren’t set on a title, incidentally. My suggestion is Different Strokes, perhaps because I’ve wanted to use that on a book for so long, and with so little success. Dell seems to like the title; at least they can live with it. Vinnie doesn’t care what we call it. Alan doesn’t hate it, but neither does he love it, and he keeps coming up with ideas of his own. Fortunately they are all so terrible that it’s easy to talk him out of them.

I have to report my conversation with Alan after that. I didn’t tape it obviously, but it went very much like this:

JWW: Say, whatever happened with Anna and Karenina?

ALAN: What do you mean?

JWW: Well, the other night you wandered away with one of them on each of your arms, ostensibly to drop them at their doors, which I somehow don’t believe for a moment.

ALAN: Is that right.

JWW: I thought perhaps you might like to tell me what happened afterward. I’m like this at movies, the final curtain comes down and I can’t help wondering whether or not they live happily ever after.

ALAN: I’m not sure it’s any of your business.

JWW: Well, it is, in a way. You know the production diary I’m writing.

ALAN: Jesus Christ, fella. You’re not putting me in any fucking book.

JWW: Oh, of course not.

ALAN: Then what are you talking about?

JWW: Let me put it this way. You know, I’ve got to have interesting things happen in the diary. To keep the reader awake. It can’t just be we-shot-this-today-and-it-took-seven-takes and like that. It has to be sexy and interesting and all the rest of that shit.

ALAN: I’m hip. So?

JWW: So when you walked away with Frick and Frack, it occurred to me that we could include a cutesy bit of one of the backers walking away with the two of them and trying to get something going.

ALAN: Which backer? Those guys...

JWW: Oh, come on. No real backer, some figment of my endless imagination.

ALAN: I see.

JWW: So?

ALAN: So what?

JWW: So what happened?

ALAN: Can’t you get that out of your imagination, too?

JWW: Probably, but I’d rather it be consistent with reality if it’s just as easy. It’ll give some insight into the girls, see, and I think it might work better than if I just wing the whole thing. Of course if you’re embarrassed...

ALAN: Why in the fuck should I be embarrassed?

JWW: Well, some people are uptight about sex.

ALAN: Are you kidding? Me uptight about sex? Be sensible, man.

JWW: Well.

ALAN: Oh, fuck it. All right I offered the two of them a ride home, and not because I’m running a taxi service. I got very horny watching them do their thing. Didn’t you?

JWW: Yeah.

ALAN: They’re both so young and cunty. And it wasn’t hard to think of things I wanted to do with them. Not after spending the whole day watching them do things. Plus I always wanted two girls at once.

JWW: You never did that before?

ALAN: Only with hookers. Hookers are the worst thing in the fucking world, man. You can work out your fantasies with them, and ultimately all you accomplish is you lose the fantasy, because it’s all basically unreal.

JWW: I know what you mean.

ALAN: So we got in the car and I told them I had some really good grass at my place and did they want to come up and smoke? Do you smoke?

JWW: Once in a great while.

ALAN: I think you told me that once before. I only smoke with chicks around. I don’t get anything out of it. Do you know what I mean? I always pretend to be high but I never feel a goddamned thing.

JWW: There’s lot of people like that.

ALAN: You, for instance?

JWW: No, I invariably get stoned. That’s what I don’t like about it.

ALAN: I’m not sure I follow that.

JWW: It’s not important. You invited them to smoke.

ALAN: Right, and they said fine. You have to have grass around for the chicks, you know. It makes you socially acceptable. If you ask them to come up and fuck, you’re a dirty old man. If you ask them to smoke they know it means to fuck but you become acceptable as a member of the younger generation. They knew what I wanted, for Christ’s sake. But we all went up to my place and got stoned, or rather they did and I faked it.

JWW: Uh-huh.

ALAN: I showed them all the props for Sophie’s apartment, which they thought were interesting. All that movie-biz glamour, you know. Then we started fooling around, you know. I’d make out a little with one of them and a little with the other, and then I said how about getting it together and doing that scene, and I’d pretend to be Rasputin.

JWW: Uh-huh.

ALAN: It seemed as good an approach as any.

JWW: Very original, I’d call it.

ALAN: Fuck off. One of them, I can’t remember which one, damn it I mean I can but I can’t remember which is Anna and which is Karenina. You and your names.

JWW: Nobody can remember which is which.

ALAN: The one I’m talking about is the one who vomited. After the blowjob sequence.

JWW: I know which one you mean.

ALAN: She said she never made it with girls except in front of the camera. They got into this long stoned discussion and she decided she would like to try it not in front of a camera to find out where her head was really at on the subject.

JWW: I’ll bet she used those very words.

ALAN: Huh?

JWW: Nothing.

ALAN: So that’s about it. We made it for a couple of hours. They’re very good.

JWW: I got that impression.

ALAN: It turned out the other one liked it with chicks even without a camera. She said now she’s going to have to have some time to figure out the meaning of it.

JWW: The best of British luck to her.

ALAN: So what else can I tell you? Positions? Forget it, man.

JWW: Okay.

ALAN: I came three times, if that’s something you want to put in your book.

JWW: That’s not bad at your age.

ALAN: You prick, I’m not all that much older than you are.

JWW: Hell, it’s pretty good at my age, too.

ALAN: They got me so fucking hot I thought I was going to die from it.

JWW: Better than with hookers?

ALAN: Of course. The attitude is different, you know? Not their attitude necessarily, but your own feelings, the way you feel about it. Paying for it ruins it.

JWW: It’s good these ladies were doing it for love.

ALAN: Listen, I didn’t promise them anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.

JWW: That’s not what I was getting at.

ALAN: Then I’m not sure I follow you.

JWW: Nothing to follow. If I sound sarcastic it’s probably because I’m a little envious. You had a better time last night than I did.

ALAN: I’ve got their phone numbers, if you’re interested.

JWW: I don’t think so but I appreciate it.

ALAN: Well, is that enough for your fucking production diary?

JWW: I guess so.

ALAN: Just don’t use my name, remember. All of this happened to some backer who doesn’t exist. Don’t forget it.

JWW: Oh, for Christ’s sake, Alan. What kind of a guy do you think I am?

ALAN: I was just emphasizing.

JWW: Well, it’s not necessary. I mean, in a business like this, we have to trust each other. Right?

ALAN: Damn straight.

I think I mentioned earlier that I doubted the creation of pornographic films had a particularly bad effect upon the people who worked behind the scenes. After that conversation, though, I’m not so sure about it. My participation in this venture does not seem to have improved my character much.

Well, I never said I was a nice person.

— Tuesday

Today was fun.

Maybe I got things out of my system yesterday. I don’t know. But just now I reread yesterday’s entry and there’s the odd feeling that it was written by somebody else. I feel very lighthearted about pornography, and perhaps a little lightheaded in the bargain.

Today’s filming amounted to a lot of running around. First we assembled our caravan and drove up into Rockland County where Alan’s stockbroker lives. Alan’s stockbroker is around forty, much given to conservative business suits and radical politics. He makes a great point of letting you know casually that William Kunstler is a friend of his. I don’t know how radical politics mixes with commuting to Wall Street and lording it in Rockland County, but that’s his problem.

I’ll tell you, though, he’ll never be my stockbroker, assuming I’ll ever have need of one in the first place. This pillar of the community has invested two thousand dollars of his own money in Different Strokes. If he throws his own bread down rat holes with such joie de vivre, I can just imagine what stocks he touts his clients on.

The reason we were out there is the guy keeps horses. Three of them. One would have been enough, but what the hell.

What nobody bothered to determine in advance was if one of the horses was a stallion. Luck was in our corner today, boys and girls. Or in our stall, or something, because one of the rough beasts was indeed a male, and an unaltered male at that. I suppose we could have made do with a gelding, but there is no way on earth to film the Man o’ War scene with a mare. The close-up of the horse’s genitalia would not be all that effective with a mare.

We had our usual crew plus Vinnie and Alan and Sophie and Pluto. The scene will take way under a minute of film time but it took all morning with the commuting there and back. Well, that’s what we call production values, that’s why we’re spending three times what most porn producers spend. That’s what’s gonna bring ’em into the theaters, by God. “Harry, let’s go see Different Strokes. They got this dynamite close-up of a horse’s cock.” Sure thing, boys.

The scene went briskly enough. Everybody was in a good humor. Pluto had been telling road company stories on the way out, and all of this left Sophie with the happy feeling of really being in show business, so she did her bit better than anybody had hoped. It’s not much, just a facial reaction, but how she reacts determines whether the scene is a cheap sight gag or genuinely amusing.

Speaking of genuinely amusing, there was a moment that convulsed us. We had this enormous swaybacked stallion posed in his box stall, perhaps taking a little pride in the fact that we had fastened a nameplate overhead proclaiming him to be Man o’ War. (He wasn’t even the same color as Big Red, but what the hell. I wonder, incidentally, if we shouldn’t have changed the script to call the horse Secretariat, in the interest of being up-to-date and all. But it didn’t seem worth getting a new sign made.)

Anyway, here we had this horse standing there, and we filmed everything but the horse cock extreme close-up, or ECU as we say in the movie biz. Then somebody, I think one of the crew, asked how we were going to get the horse to have a hard-on. The theory seemed to be that an erect horse cock would be more dramatically effective than a limp horse cock.

Somebody asked Stanley the Stockbroker if he happened to have a mare in heat on the premises. He didn’t, nor did he know where he could find one.

“But he gets erections all the time,” Stanley said. “You just look at him and he’ll get it up.”

“We’ve been looking at him for twenty minutes,” Alan said, “and it hasn’t had any effect on him.”

“Well, maybe we could stimulate him,” somebody said.

Sophie said, “It’s bad enough when actors have this problem. I’m not giving no head to no horse.”

“If you do, I’ll film it,” Vinnie said.

“It wouldn’t fit in the picture,” Alan said.

“It’d fit in some picture,” Vinnie said.

“Some picture,” somebody said, with a slightly different inflection.

“Hey, Sophie,” somebody said, “show him your tits.”

“Be serious,” Sophie said.

“Then sing ‘Melancholy Baby.’”

“Sophie, why don’t you just jerk him off a little?”

“Why don’t you jerk yourself off, schmuck?”

“I’m serious.”

“What are you, crazy? I’m not getting in there with him. I’m terrified of horses.”

“He’s a very gentle horse,” Stanley the Stockbroker said.

“Go on, Sophie.”

“Listen, smartass, go in there and jerk him off yourself.”

“Are you kidding? I’m a male.”

“So?”

“Well, I happen to be straight.”

“Maybe the horse is a fag.”

Stanley defended the horse, saying he was a proven sire. Everybody was pretty sick of Stanley by now. People suggested showing dirty pictures to the horse or blowing in his ear. There was a lot of speculation as to what sort of picture might have an aphrodisiacal effect upon a horse. There was precious little agreement on the subject.

We might still be there, but evidently our conversation got to the horse and his penis emerged in a most miraculous way. It very nearly touched the floor of the stall. Somebody caught it with a camera.

“Hey, wait a minute,” somebody said as we were going. “We turned the mother on, it’s only right that we get him off.”

“I don’t fuck horses,” Sophie said majestically. “I’m a Star.”

We had some coffee. Stanley the Stockbroker kept coming on to Sophie, giving her tips on the market. He must have a wife but she didn’t put in an appearance. We told Stanley to be sure to show up tomorrow for the cabaret sequence. He said he didn’t know if he could make it but he would try. We told him to bring anybody he could find. He promised he would.

Then back to the city.

During the afternoon we shot the ice cream parlor sequence. I kept being reminded of that Alka-Seltzer commercial, the one with the spicy meatball. With various retakes and shooting from other angles and having to diminish the level of ice cream in the bowl, Pluto was starting to turn green from all the goddamned ice cream he was ingesting.

There were a lot of people around. We filmed in an ice cream place in the Village. I guess this is the first interesting thing that ever happened there because the owner is already overflowing with plans to paper the walls with blowups of the scene and proclaim to the world that Different Strokes was filmed there. I don’t know why that should bring people in off the street for a dish of pistachio ice cream, but then I’m not the world’s best intuitive businessman. At any rate, we got a hell of a lot of cooperation.

It’s interesting to watch people react to filmmaking. It took a while to shoot that scene, but nobody left in its course. Everybody seemed to find the whole process fascinating. I guess film is still a very mysterious and glamorous thing to most people. The studios may have fallen apart, the star system may indeed be dead and gone, but the melody lingers on. Film seems to have a reality for the multitudes that reality itself lacks.

Damn, Wells, don’t that sound profound! I wonder does it mean anything...

We shot the scene in Pluto’s office over at Dell, where they had an office that was small and cheerless enough. It’s basically a storage room but we unstored some cartons and moved in a desk and piled tons of garbage on it. The problem was getting a telephone. There was no phone in the room, and the suggestion that we rip somebody else’s phone out of the wall and put it back when we were done with it was not well received. A couple of blocks away there’s a firm that sells telephones, so we borrowed one from them and took it back when we were done. They let us use it free in return for a credit line which I don’t think we are going to give them. I can see doing it for the Pleasure Chest, but wasting a credit line to save having to spend ten dollars on a telephone is a little ridiculous.

Dell just moved into new offices a few months ago, and one of the editors said it was a shame we hadn’t been able to film the scene before the move. “My office was smaller than this,” he said, “and windowless, and more cluttered, and there was a phone in it. I couldn’t always find it but I would hear it ringing and rummage around for it. It had more of a feeling of Hell, too. This place is Hell, too, but you have to spend a lot of time here before you realize it.”

The Dell people all promised to show for the cabaret scene tomorrow.

Alan came up with a fairly good idea. We’ve got all these people set for the cabaret sequence tomorrow, all these bodies for the audience, and he suggested we try to do the auction sequence at the same time while we have all those bodies on tap. The only problem is time. The cabaret sequence is, in many respects, the hardest one to film. There’s a lot happening and for it to work there has to be a lot of cutting back and forth between the stage and the audience reactions. He and Vinnie went into a huddle to discuss it. What we did agree was that we would certainly do the cabaret stuff first, because an audience is more important there than in the auction sequence. We can just pull in people off the streets for the auction bit, as all you have to see is their backs anyway.

This evening we shot my favorite scene, the singles bar shtick in which Pluto transforms Sophie into a giant stuffed panda, among other things, and finally into her young and beautiful self. We filmed it at an East Side place, one of the ones we see them entering in the outdoor series in which they do the town. We already filmed them entering and leaving the goddamned place, so now we were ready to show what happened in between.

This necessitated Sophie’s return to old-lady makeup, and there was a certain amount of concern that she didn’t look exactly the way she had looked previously. I couldn’t see any difference. I suppose we should have shot a Polaroid of her before for comparison. This is something nobody thought of at the time, of course. And another of the many things I have learned in the course of filming this work of art.

The scene was slow to film because of all the changes. The special effects were hardly difficult. The touch of a Yakima Canutt was not required, that is to say. Pluto would snap his fingers, we would cut, then Sophie would leave the chair and we would substitute the panda bear, and so on and so forth for quite a while.

One element that slowed things up was the other people in the bar. They had come there to drink and chase pussy, and they were not as cooperative as the yoyos at the ice cream parlor. Their cooperation was particularly needed, too, in that we used a lot of long shots during the transformation routine. Our solution, finally, was to film the whole thing silent and dub crowd noises in later, as some wiseass always spoke up at the wrong moment when we tried to do it all at once.

I did a little ad-libbing of my own. The bartender is a huge spade with a shaved head and a gold earring, that number, and I couldn’t see passing him up. He thought it would be sensational to be in a film, so he’s one of the things Sophie is transformed into and out of in the middle of the sequence. Since he also shows up in his official capacity as bartender, it should make for an interesting bit.

We cleverly waited until the bar closed to finish the scene, because we didn’t dare have Sophie emerge young and beautiful and stark naked in the midst of that crowd of horny superannuated preppies. Not unless we were willing to improvise a gangbang sequence, which is what might well have happened. Incidentally, nobody but the owner, who okayed all this because he has money in the film, knows that the picture is pornographic. We explained it was an underground film full of symbolism and Satanism and like that. God knows what they thought of it all.

Sometime after three they closed the club and Sophie bared her bod for all to see. Then Pluto snapped his fingers and we cut and she put on her young-style clothes and we filmed some more, and finally we were all done, thank the Great God Jehovah, and I came back here and wrote this.

The fucking sun is coming up and I’m still sitting here typing. I’m going to have about two hours sleep before it’s time to face the cameras again. I’d love to take the day off, but it promises to be the most hectic day of all, and I have to be there.

— Wednesday

Sorry, folks. I can’t hack it.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted before, which is interesting in view of the fact that I don’t really have to do very much. In my official capacity as Class Historian, all I really do is sit around and suggest things every now and then, a dream of a job if there ever was one.

But it’s late and I’ve been going all day on very little in the way of sleep, and it has been one hell of a day, and much as I would like to write about it, I can’t. Not now.

We’ve agreed to cancel tomorrow morning’s shooting in the interest of group morale. I’m going to bed now, and I’ll try to get up tomorrow morning in time to chronicle today’s activities. Believe me, gang, I’m not a shirker. I recognize my responsibilities to you all.

When this picture is done I’m going to sling a movie camera over my shoulder and start walking. When I reach a place where people stare at me and ask me what the hell I’m carrying around, there shall I build my house.

— Thursday Morning

True to his word, the Valiant Screenwriter arose, showered, shaved, drank a cup of instant coffee, and did sit himself down at his Faithful Typewriter.

As you may have gathered, yesterday was a ball-breaker. It started off rotten when the Master of Ceremonies failed to make his appearance. It’s not a hard part, nor is it a very large part, but the cabaret scene is in trouble without it. We hired this son of a bitch because he gave us a fairly decent reading and he owned a tuxedo. We called the number he gave us and some girl emerged from a sound sleep long enough to tell us he was out of town for the week. May he be planted upside down in the ground like a turnip while maggots eat his brains, and may the moths do perverted things to his tuxedo. We had a whole contingent of backers and people from Dell and friends and friends of friends all assembled, and we were trying to decide who of their number could fill the breach, without much enthusiasm for our range of possibles, when Pluto, who had just come down to the set for the hell of it, came to the rescue. He asked if it might not be consistent to have him involved in the cabaret sequence, much as Madge is present at the preparations for the orgy. I said it would indeed be consistent, and he said would it not make eminent good sense were he to be the Master of Ceremonies.

“The role,” he said, “should not be beyond the range of my competence.”

I had no quarrel with this.

“Furthermore,” he said, “I own a tuxedo.”

He went off to get the tuxedo, Alan having unnecessarily announced that he would be reimbursed for his cab fare. Alan indeed is a prince.

He was a much better emcee than the other guy would have been, and that part went smoothly enough. The way we set things up, we filmed virtually all the nonsexual aspects of the cabaret sequence yesterday. All of the audience stuff, for example. And all of the sequences before Sophie brings the various people onstage and balls them. We’ll film the fucking today, and when the film is edited a lot of the reaction shots filmed yesterday will be inserted there, so it will look as though there was a live audience for the fucking.

Vinnie hates the fact that we had to fake it. The artistic side of him objects strenuously. He’d like to be able to do long shots over the audience of the screwing.

Hell, I can see the value of that. I can also see how much more aggravating it would be to try filming hardcore scenes with a large audience. With clever intercutting, at which he is alleged to be a master — he does most of the alleging himself — I’m afraid I think anyone who sees the film will swear it was all filmed before an audience. We have bits, for example, where members of the audience stand up and head for the stage, divesting themselves of their ties en route, and inserted in the proper places it will certainly look as though these men are inflamed by what they have seen and on their way to join in on the action.

Somewhere in some draft or other of the script I noted that it might not hurt if one of the waiters looked rather like Hitler.

Or, failing that, like Luther Adler.

We ordered a batch of German Officer types through the underground equivalent of Central Casting, and a dozen of them showed up. We hired the eight that came closest to fitting the eight German uniforms Alan scrounged somewhere. Of the others, we hired a few as waiters and to otherwise supplement our coterie of unpaid audience members.

One of the guys we used as a waiter looks incredibly like Heinrich Himmler. Unfortunately, not one person in a hundred remembers what Heinrich Himmler looked like.

Nobody looked at all like Hitler.

The comedian was really awful.

Just as we had hoped. Maybe even worse than we had dared to dream.

And, wouldn’t you know it, he had enlarged and improved upon his monologue. I suppose that was inevitable. The monologue, except for a line or two, was not my handiwork. Vinnie wrote it. He said he tried to make it as bad as he possibly could, and I couldn’t argue with that. I felt he succeeded admirably. The comedian did make it even worse, though, perhaps merely by making it longer.

It was not at all hard to get shots of ineffable boredom on the faces of the members of the audience during the comedian’s monologue.

I believe I’ve mentioned Jeremy Six earlier in these pages, though perhaps not by name. He’s our piano player for the cabaret number. In real life, as we laughingly call it, Jeremy writes paperback westerns. He was a professional musician for a few years, had some sort of jazz band, and plays great whorehouse piano that frequently reminds one of Ray Charles. In return for investing a thousand dollars in this fiasco, he earned the privilege of donating his services at the piano.

He certainly looks the part, tall and lean, straight black hair, intimidating black moustache, and a wardrobe that could have been made by the best goddamned tailor in Tombstone, Arizona. Only man I’ve ever known who wears string ties.

Well, Jeremy had his hands full during Sophie’s song. He asked her what key she sang in, and she didn’t know. She had assured us all earlier that she could sing, and we were sufficiently pleased to have her for the role that we didn’t make her prove it.

Live and learn.

It isn’t so much that she has a rotten voice, although it must be admitted that she does. More to the point is that she is not up to staying with tricky melodies, and I’m afraid I should have taken that into account when I wrote “He Never Touched My Heart.”

I suppose I was indulging my own ego, and not for the first time; but what I had in mind was to write something that would fit the spot even to the point of reminding the ear of Kurt Weill. According to Jeremy, who has an ear for this sort of thing, it stops an inch this side of plagiarism, so I guess I succeeded. But those Weimar harmonies are not something Sophie can take to as a duck to water, or as a pig to shit, or whatever metaphor appeals to you.

She kept missing notes, and not just by a little bit. By an awful lot. And she could tell when she missed a note, and she would stop, and, oh, the whole thing was terrible.

We are going to have to loop her entire number, using somebody else’s voice and lip-synching in a sound studio. This, as I understand it, is an expensive process. Of course the big moviemakers do it all the time, but they are not trying to bring in a film for sixty thousand dollars.

I don’t know if the song comes off or not. It strikes me as much longer than it ought to be. It times out at a little over four minutes, which shouldn’t be so bad, but maybe it’s out of place, too much of a break in the action. I still think it’s a good song, and if we can get someone decent to dub it, maybe we’ll be all right.

We did have a few bits to make the freebie audience aware that this is a dirty movie. Vinnie wanted some intercuts of sexual activity in the audience. We set up a shot of one guy sitting watching the performance with a very bored expression on his face; then the camera dips to show a girl crouching under the table with his cock in her mouth. The female performer was hired for the occasion, the male an eager volunteer. He had a certain amount of difficulty looking bored but ultimately obliged with a charming cum-shot all over the girl’s face.

What was most interesting throughout this was the reaction, such as it was, on the part of the audience. Quite a few of them tended to look the other way. And the others were very cool about the whole thing. I had anticipated a lot of embarrassed and perhaps embarrassing wisecracks, in the manner of oafs viewing a stag film at the Legion Hall, but I can’t recall hearing any of that.

The nightclub where we shot all this is really too large. We got it free, of course, which was a powerful argument in its favor. A further argument, especially in Vinnie’s eyes, was that it gave him room for some interesting long shots and generally lent itself to the kind of gemütlich Weimar atmosphere, at least as he envisions it.

On the minus side, I think the room was too large for the audience we assembled. We tried to solve the problem by grouping people close and only using the front of the room, but whether this will fool the camera I cannot really say. I would have preferred a much smaller club into which we could have absolutely crammed our audience. I suppose it was technically easier to film the scene with all that extra space, so maybe we were better off as things stood.

The problem is that we have to do our shooting during the day, as the club has to function as a nightclub by night.

We didn’t get to do the auction scene yesterday, even though we had the crowd on hand. It just took too damned long to shoot the cabaret stuff.

I was talking with Pluto during a lull. He finds the whole experience of making this film more than a little disconcerting, and he had some interesting things to say.

“The money’s nice. There’s no question but that the money’s nice, and it’s especially pleasant to get paid in cash after each day’s work.

“It’s also a nice ego thing. Being the Old Pro in an essentially amateur production.

“But it’s hard to decide how I feel about the whole thing. I don’t know why it should be. I’ve never had any strong negative feelings about pornography. I don’t go to films often, but I’ve seen a few of them. My wife and I have gone a couple of times. Once I remember we were both just very turned off by the whole thing. Another time we had the opposite reaction. Left the theater, didn’t say a word, ran home and balled each other’s brains out. I suppose anything that makes a man and his wife want to fuck each other can’t be all bad.

“I feel sorry for the people who play the sexual roles, though. I don’t know why. They’re not slaves, for Christ’s sake. They obviously enjoy what they’re doing. Otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.

“I find Sophie very difficult to figure out. She takes herself very seriously as an actress, you know. She hasn’t just done porn, either. She was telling me about a few things she did off-Broadway, and I think she said she had a walk-on in a TV soaper, and she’s had small parts in a couple of commercials. She was never a success but she did get some work legitimately before she ever got into porn.

“It’s a funny thing. I’m very glad I don’t have to do anything sexual in the film, and at the same time I sort of feel that I’m not getting the total experience of being in the movie because my part is wholly nonsexual. I don’t want to ball anybody in front of a camera. I don’t want to ball Sophie on or off-camera, as far as that goes. Nothing against her, but after watching her do it for the camera, it’s just impossible for me to take her seriously on a sexual level.

“Still in all, there’s this feeling of being left out. I can’t exactly explain it.”

He asked me how I felt about the prospect of doing my Dirty Old Man scene with Sophie.

“I liked the idea very much at the beginning,” I said. “I wrote the part for myself with that in mind. None of that flashback sequence existed in the original script. I’m not sure why I wanted to do it. Ego, I guess. And the desire for a new experience. I do a lot of idiotic things out of the desire for a new experience.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Uh-huh. Also, frankly, I thought of it as a potential kick. Partly the kick of acting, of being on a screen, sex or no sex. And partly a sexual kick. I suppose everybody has a slight streak of exhibitionism in his makeup. I can’t imagine myself as a flasher, showing my cock to little girls in public places, but I can see where it might be kicky to see yourself balling somebody in living color on a thirty-foot screen.”

“But you don’t like the idea as much now.”

“No,” I admitted. “I don’t. I’m still looking forward to it in a way, but less than before. I’m beginning to be a little apprehensive.”

“Worried about being impotent, I suppose.”

“Not worried, exactly. I more or less take it for granted that I’ll have a certain amount of difficulty. Frankly, that isn’t so appalling a prospect. I’m probably no more secure in my masculinity than the next neurotic, but I can’t honestly regard the ability to summon up an erection in absurd circumstances as that accurate an index of masculinity in the first place.”

“No argument there.”

“I have to tell you one thing. The more I see Sophie balling other people, the less alluring the prospect of going down on her becomes.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “The script calls for you to muff her, and then she gives you head.”

“Yes, that’s the immortal plot line.”

“I can see where you might begin to have reservations.”

“Well, you need reservations,” I said. “That woman is one of the most popular eating places in town. You can hardly get a table without reservations.”

“Why didn’t you set things up so as to shoot your scene first? Or wouldn’t that have made any difference?”

“I don’t know if it would have or not. But we couldn’t do it that way. See, she’s going to shave her beaver for the sequence to coincide with the twelve-year-old image we’re trying to project.”

“Oh.”

“She’s really dedicated.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So we have to do that scene last, because it’ll take her weeks to grow back a full-fledged merkin.”

“Uh-huh. Jack? When we were in college, you know, trying to guess what turns our lives would take, did you ever happen to think?”

“No,” I told him. “No, it never entered my mind.”

To be honest, the prospect of paying oral homage to Sophie does not turn my stomach. I’m sure the girl bathes between engagements. It’s just that I can’t see the scene as something that is going to turn me on.

Perhaps the extraordinary thing is that I could originally. I should have been able to guess that this would not turn out to be exciting.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned my introduction to Sophie. It’s probably worth a few lines.

Alan knew her, and Vinnie had worked with her on a picture, and she was thus up for the lead. Both Alan and Vinnie thought I ought to have a look at her on the screen, so that I could offer an opinion on her suitability for the role and also so that I could more effectively create dialogue for her. I already had the feeling that Alan was determined to cast her for the part and that my opinion did not matter a whole hell of a lot, but if I came back and reported she was a completely untalented actress and a beast in the bargain, it might have had some effect. I didn’t honestly think watching her cop some actor’s joint would improve my ability to fashion dialogue for her to speak when her mouth was not otherwise employed, but what the hell, it was an excuse to go see a dirty picture, so I went.

I don’t remember the name of the first film I saw her in. I was not wildly impressed. She was attractive enough but not devastating, and as far as acting, it was impossible to tell whether she could act or not. When I got back from the movie, I called Vinnie and said about as much to him.

“But what did you think of her as an actress?” he wanted to know.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” I said. “If she hates to suck, then she’s a hell of an actress. That’s about as much as I can say on the subject.”

About a week later Alan called to report that they were screening Sophie’s latest release in a private screening room on Broadway in the Fifties. He wanted me to go see the film to get a further impression of her talents. She would be attending, he added, and I could meet her and discuss the script with her.

So I went. I introduced myself to her before we saw the movie, and we chatted about nothing terribly vital, and then we went into the projection room with about fifty other people and I sat next to her while we all watched the film. It was better photographed than her other epic and she came across as more attractive, even if she still didn’t set the screen on fire.

What was weird about it is that here I was sitting next to this girl I had just met, and we were both of us watching her up there on the screen while she had sex with everything but a camel. And she sat next to me and behaved like the perfect audience, laughing at the parts that were evidently supposed to be funny, nodding in recognition as various scenes unfolded.

Then the two of us congratulated the film’s director and went down the block to a coffee shop. She talked about her acting career and what sort of future she saw for herself. She dropped names like Stanislavski a lot.

I remember the first time I saw pornographic films. It was at the annual stag of a lodge in Rhinebeck. It was open to the public. You paid three dollars, got all the ham sandwiches and beer you could engulf, watched the movies, and shot crap or played cards. I was back in town on semester break, I was in I guess my second year at Fordham at the time, so I went with a couple of buddies.

There was a rumor that an unnamed guy was bringing films in color and sound. It turned out that they had this rumor every year, and never in the history of the place had they had anything but grainy silent black-and-white eight-millimeter stuff. The rumor always persisted. I think it was a tradition or something.

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.

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 banks 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.

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 where 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.

And I think I’d better.

Let me begin by telling you, Gentle Reader, that the book you just read, the script and production diary of the 1970s film Different Strokes, is nothing but a pack of lies. No such film was ever produced, and all the engaging characters, the acts they perform and the sparkling conversations they conduct, are wholly fictitious, the products of the fertile if warped imagination of one person.

Uh, that would be me.

I could leave it at that, but in this instance there’s a story that goes with it, and it’s arguably as good as the one you just read. Maybe better.

In the early 70s I was living with my three daughters and my then-wife in a Revolutionary-era farmhouse on fourteen rolling acres in New Jersey, just across the river from New Hope, Pennsylvania. I had a pied-a-terre in New York as well; I came to town once a week to play cards, see friends, and get into trouble, and spent longer stretches at the apartment when I had a book to write.

A founding member of our weekly poker game, and a friend since college, was Jim Fenton. He’d gone the corporate route, and worked for years for either American Can or Continental Can; later he moved to Pepsico, spent most of his time in the Far East, and stayed there after he left Pepsi’s employ. (I’ve tried without success to track him; Google’s no help, throwing up endless references to a prominent English poet with the same name. If anyone reads this and knows how to reach Antioch’s Jim Fenton, please let me know.)

This was around the time when films like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were appearing in theaters all over America. The flickering black-and-white images of Elks Club smokers were going mainstream, with good production values and big audiences. And Jim reported that a guy he knew, a businessman kind of a guy, wanted to make a porn film with a real script and a good cast and wide distribution. The guy, whom I’ll call Vincent Riordan, had already hooked up with a director, whom I’ll call Claude Borgward, and the next thing they needed was a writer. Would I be interested?

I met with Riordan and Borgward, and we worked out some sort of a deal. If I remember correctly (and I don’t see why I should) I was to get $1000 for writing the script, plus “points” in the production; if it made money, I’d make money.

Jim would get points, too, in return for raising money for the production. I have no idea what its putative budget may have been, but I know Jim was selling shares for $1000 apiece, and several people at Dell wanted in.

Yes, that would be Dell Books. My publishers.

Here’s how that happened. While I wasn’t going to be getting much actual cash for my efforts, and while I didn’t have a lot of faith that my points were going to make me rich, I saw an opportunity for some subsidiary income. As John Warren Wells, the name I intended to use on the script, I had published several books with Dell, including The Wife-Swap Report, Wide Open: The New Marriage, Three is not a Crowd, Sex Without Strings, and Beyond Group Sex. So why not sell Dell on the idea of publishing the script, along with a production diary from the film, interviews with the leading actors, and a few stills from the film itself, carefully chosen to slip past the censors?

I sat down with Bill Grose, my editor at Dell, and pitched the proposal. He loved it, and brought in Peggy Roth, and before I knew it they’d both expressed eagerness not only to publish the book but to invest in the production. I know Bill and Peggy both bought shares, and I believe there were a couple of other investors at Dell as well. I gave all the checks to Jim Fenton, and he tucked them into an escrow account.

And my agent made my deal with Dell. We signed a contract, and I was to get an advance of $7500 for writing the book. (Plus royalties, to go with my points in the film. Right.)

I had a couple of meetings with the two principals. I didn’t really get to know Vincent Riordan, who struck me as rather a slick character, but saw more of Claude Borgward, who in fact played a couple of times in our weekly poker game. On the first such occasion, he volunteered to host the game, and we played at a long refectory table in his Upper West Side apartment, in a room lined with bookcases. He had a pet margay, a small wildcat rather like an ocelot, and the creature hung out on the bookshelves and prowled around gazing balefully down upon the table.

This was unsettling, and made no less so by the room’s all-pervasive pong. One’s nostrils left one in no doubt that one was in the presence of a wild denizen of the jungle. So that was the last time we had the game at Claude’s place. But the next week we played at somebody else’s apartment, and Claude came, and we realized we’d been remiss in assessing blame for the stench. It wasn’t the margay that ponged. It was Claude.

Never mind. Somehow, at home or in the city, I got a screenplay written, and I believe it was pretty much the version you just read.

Then came the most singular experience of all. The casting session.

“We think we’ve found our leading lady,” Riordan told me. (Or maybe it was Borgward.) “She’s made a batch of films, and we think she’s really good. So we’d like to know what you think.”

“What I think?”

“There’s going to be a private screening of a rough cut of her latest movie. It hasn’t been released yet, but you can go to the screening. And you’ll meet her, and you’ll see her work, and we’d like to know what you think.”

They showed the film at a small midtown screening room, and of course I attended, along with maybe two dozen other people. I sat on one side of a young woman named Andrea True, who was in fact the film’s star, and on her other side was a friend of hers, a guy in the business in one capacity or another.

The word surreal gets bandied about a good deal, but I’d be hard put to find a better use for it. I was sitting next to this attractive young woman while we both watched her perform sexually on a huge screen with every imaginable partner short of barnyard animals. And throughout it all she supplied a running commentary, delivered to the friend on her other side: “Oh, that came out better than I thought it would... I never thought he’d wind up using that shot... it’s awful the way the camera shows every blemish...”

Afterward the three of us went out for a bite. I seem to remember that we went to Wienerwald, but that seems too good to be true. I remember that she drank apple juice, and talked about Stanislavski and the Method.

The next day one of them called me, Borgward or Riordan. Well? What did I think? Very personable young lady, I allowed. Attractive, pleasant. Yeah, yeah, but what did I think of her as an actress?

“Well, that’s hard to say,” I said. “It depends on elements I have no way of knowing.”

Huh?

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “If she doesn’t enjoy performing fellatio, then she’s the best actress since Sarah Bernhardt.”

Somewhere along the line, everything seemed to stall out.

I don’t know what went wrong, and didn’t spend enough time with Borgward or Riordan to watch the wheels coming off, but it became evident after a while that nothing much was happening, and Jim Fenton smelled a rat. It was time to turn over the escrow account to Riordan, and he didn’t think this was a good idea; instead, he returned everybody’s investment in full.

This was fairly remarkable. Nobody I knew, and certainly none of the folks at Dell, had broken open the kid’s piggy bank in order to buy a share in Different Strokes, nor had they expected much of a return, if any, on their investment. While they’d hoped to attend a premiere and know that they’d played a small part in everything they saw up there on the screen, the fact that they got their money back was more than enough to make them happy.

I remember sitting in Bill Grose’s office. He’d just received his refund, and agreed that we all owed thanks to Jim Fenton, for his watchdog role. But he’d rather looked forward to the movie.

“No more than I,” I said. “And what really hurts is that it scuttles our book deal.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d so looked forward to publishing that book.”

And our eyes met, and I wouldn’t be surprised if little light bulbs formed in the air above our heads.

“You know,” one of us said, “just because there’s not going to be a movie—”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean there can’t be a book,” said the other.

“Of course we’ll have to forget about the stills. If there’s no movie, there won’t be stills.”

“No.”

“Or photos of the actors.”

“Or that. Of course that makes the book less expensive to produce.”

“There’s that. And the production diary doesn’t have to be limited by what really happened. It can be a much better story if it isn’t tied down by facts.”

And so I finished the book. Did I make any changes in the screenplay? I have no idea, but my guess is that I used it exactly as I’d written it. Then, of course, I had to write the production diary, but that was easy enough. It was fiction, and I’d been writing fiction for years. I liked fiction. You weren’t tied down by facts.

By the time the book came out, sometime in 1974, I had separated from my wife and moved to another apartment in New York, on West 58th Street. I don’t recall the book’s having any impact on my life or anybody else’s. It didn’t sell enough copies to go into a second printing, and by then I had less interest in John Warren Wells. I’d decided to stop writing books under that name, and pretty much forgot about that whole aspect of my career. And probably hoped the rest of the world would be equally forgetful.

Late last year I had occasion to remember Andrea True when her obituary appeared in the New York Times. Sometime in 1975, a curious set of circumstances led her into a singing career, and she had several hit records under the same name she’s used as a porn star. (Her birth name was Andrea Marie Truden.) Her story’s interesting enough to commend to your attention, but too long to recount here; the Wikipedia article is well worth a look.

She was 68 and living in New York when she died of heart failure in November of 2011.

Lawrence Block

New York City, 2012

Content

John Warren Wells
Different Strokes: Or, How I Wrote, Directed and Starred in an X-rated Movie

Introduction A Word From John Warren Wells

A Screenplay

A Diary

An Interview

Afterword