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

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.