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.