In fact, it’s possible that what I don’t like about the lamp is that Alan loves it.
We had to shoot the lamp today, since Sophie carries it from the auction gallery through the streets to her apartment. I suggested she carry it wrapped, so that we would leave ourselves room to change our minds later on, but I was outvoted. This made the filming process a little more interesting, as people on the street tended to stare at this old oil lamp with a cock attached to it.
I would only have bought us a day anyway. Tomorrow we do interior stuff at Alan’s apartment, and the lamp will be prominently on display throughout, from the opening shot of her placing it on a shelf to the closing shot of her chucking it in the garbage.
I didn’t have a hell of a lot to do today. A week of days like this one would be a long one. In a way I’m very much looking forward to the sex scenes. In another way I’m not.
We did one thing right today, anyway. When Vinnie worked up the shooting schedule, he remembered that Sophie would have a major makeup change. In the precredit sequence, she’s made up as an old bag. In the rest of the stuff she’s her natural self. So we put her into makeup at the beginning and did all the precredit exterior shots at once before bringing her back to youthfulness and shooting the rest of the stuff.
This makeup switching is a pain in the ass. And we’re not done with it. The problem, of course, is going to be getting it the same each time. A lot of the age is done with acting, and Sophie is surprisingly good at that. She lets her shoulders slump, rolls her hip when she strides, etc. She also pads herself around the chest and middle to suggest a more mature figure.
The makeup doesn’t really make her look fifty, but it helps. I won’t know how well it works until I see some film, which will be after we’re done.
It would be nice to do all the old stuff at once, so that we don’t have to redo Sophie each time. But that would mean moving around too much geographically. For instance, tomorrow we’ll shoot stuff at Alan’s apartment, both before and after our girl’s transformation. And some other day we’ll shoot the singles’ bar scene, in which Pluto transforms her from an old bag to a young knockout. It’s a shame, but there’s really no way around it.
There will be one other transformation, the flashback sequence in which Sophie is magically turned twelve years old again. That will be my turn in the barrel, my dramatic debut as the Dirty Old Man. But we’ll only have to do the makeup once. That will be the last day of shooting, for reasons I won’t go into just yet, if you don’t mind, and we’ll shoot the outdoor and the indoor one after the other.
Which reminds me. When Pluto read those ten pages of script the first day, we rapped about the difference between doing a hardcore scene and simply being in a hardcore picture. He said he probably wouldn’t do a hardcore scene (assuming he would be capable of it, which he suspected he would not). He said he wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t want to ball someone on camera but that was his immediate reaction. On the other hand, he had no compunctions about appearing in the film in the Pluto role.
In this connection I mentioned that I was going to be playing a sexually active role in the film, and told him what the role was. The Dirty Old Man scene, of course, was in the first ten pages of script, so he was familiar with it.
“God,” he said, “even in films like this you can’t get away from typecasting.”
— Friday
The Irving character was Vinnie’s idea, and Vinnie wrote most of Irving’s dialogue. From the beginning, Vinnie has worried that the script is going to play too short. He certainly knows more than I do about timing a script, but I think he’s crazy. I gave it a rough reading for timing a while ago and it came out to almost two hours. What we want is somewhere between eighty and ninety minutes. It’s possible that I’m expecting the sex scenes to run longer than they ultimately will.
In any case, Vinnie would rather come in long than short which makes excellent sense, as it’s easier to cut than to stretch. There’s another reason for this. Vinnie wants to be able to edit a soft-core version of the film for markets where hardcore films can’t be shown. Drive-ins, for instance. You just can’t show hardcore movies at drive-ins or passersby will start driving into one another.
(Incidentally, Alan was telling me that this is changing. He read in one of the trades that some farsighted exhibitor in, I think, western Pennsylvania is enclosing his drive-in theater with a huge wall so that he can show hardcore films there. That’s enterprise, all right. Though I can’t understand why anyone would want to watch a hardcore film at a drive-in. If that’s where your interests lie, isn’t it just as easy to watch the people in the other cars? What you lose in professionalism you surely make up in spontaneity and enthusiasm.)
This idea of cutting a soft-core version is not without merit, though, and something I would never have thought of. So in this sense Vinnie is perfectly right. By making sure we have as much extrasexual material as possible, and by cutting out the cock-and-cunt shots from the sex scenes, we can produce something that will be, while obviously X-rated, safe from censorship in those areas where an all out hardcore film can’t play.
Which brings us back to Irving.
The main trouble with Irving is the character who plays him. I met him for the first time today and my immediate reaction was a delighted one. He looks the part to perfection. A real foxy grandpa-type, fifty-five or sixty, a dealer in rare coins and stamps, snow white hair, waxed moustache, hell, the son of a bitch is the perfect Irving.
The son of a bitch is not the perfect actor, however.
Not even close.
He’s a backer, with a thou or two invested in the film, and he’s very happy to supply his acting services free of charge, which certainly makes him a bargain. But he made a perfect hash out of today’s shooting. He came along with his own wardrobe, with costume changes for each appearance, and he was as eager as could be, and he had his lines committed to memory perfectly, and then we tried a run-through of the first scene, where he meets Sophie in the hallway, and I realized we were in for trouble. I caught a glimpse of Pluto’s face when Irving said his lines. He looked as though he had just swallowed a bad oyster.
This first discovery, that Irving couldn’t act, led in short order to a second discovery.
Vinnie can’t direct.
Let me qualify that because it’s unfair. As far as framing a scene and seeing things with the eye of a camera, Vinnie seems to be something of a genius. I’ll know more about this when we see some film, but for the time being I’m willing to believe he’s brilliant.
The other job of a director, though, is to get actors to give the best possible performance. And in this area Vinnie doesn’t know what to do. He could tell Irving was going over like a landmine, everybody could tell that, but he didn’t know how to change things.
In fact, he didn’t even know how to try. I see this, incidentally, as a potential obstacle of major importance, and it’s going to be particularly problematic in the sex scenes. Vinnie has already confessed to me that he has a lot of trouble with sex scenes, and that strikes me as an odd admission to come from the lips of a porno director. That was his main reason for naming me Assistant Director. He wants someone else to tell the girl to brush her hair out of the way so the camera can see her giving head.
(My favorite porno cliché, that one. I can’t remember ever seeing a film in which at least one chick doesn’t spend a lot of time carefully moving her hair aside so we can all see her lips working. Maybe we can hire a Second Assistant Director to stand just off camera holding the girl’s hair back.)