“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.