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.