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.