“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.