— Saturday
We spent the entire morning shooting the chessboard sequence.
Maybe it was worth it. It was the one idea of mine that Alan was unequivocally crazy about from start to finish. He just plain loved it. It’s just a quickie bit, and the cost of it was a sonofabitch. Not just in time and in amount of film expended, but costs of staging and personnel. We needed sixteen black girls, sixteen white girls, and two devils to carry the white pawn away. The white girls were all bit types who turned up at our casting call, but only two black girls appeared at the casting sessions and we had to hire the rest from a model agency that specializes in black talent, so they cost us a little more.
Staging the thing was a pain in the ass. Alan spent a couple of days scouting locations, searching the five boroughs for a huge courtyard with a checkerboard floor. Then Vinnie came up with the observation that we didn’t need a checkerboard floor, that any asshole could lay out a checkerboard floor in a few minutes with big squares of cardboard, so all we needed was a big courtyard, and that shouldn’t be too hard to find.
Then Vinnie complicated things beyond belief by insisting that Madge’s office had to overlook the courtyard. All this because we get an aerial view of the scene from Madge’s point of view. We have the loan of an apartment that is perfect for Madge’s office, and all free of charge, but it doesn’t overlook anything remotely resembling a courtyard.
Alan and I took turns pointing out that it would be child’s play to fake the shot. You have a shot of Madge and Pluto at the office window, and then you cut to an aerial shot from some other window overlooking the chessboard scene, and you’ve done it.
“But it would be so much better to see it over Madge’s shoulder,” Vinnie whined.
Repeatedly.
We finally found a way to satisfy the prick. Alan turned up an apartment complex out in Queens where we could shoot the scene, and he found a tenant there who would give us a minute’s shooting time in his apartment. We used that apartment for our aerial view of the chessboard and we shot over Madge’s shoulder. Of course the window is vastly different from the window of Madge’s office, but maybe nobody will notice in the couple of frames we’ll be using. Later, when we shoot the rest of that scene in Madge’s office, we’ll have Madge and Pluto pick up the same spots when they walk to the window.
And then, ultimately, we’ll probably throw out the shot from over Madge’s shoulder that we took today, because it won’t work, and we’ll substitute an aerial view we shot without Madge in the frame. Alan told me privately that he thinks we’ll have to do it this way, because the scenes won’t match, but that it was worth shooting that extra POV scene today because it keeps Vinnie happy. He and I do a certain number of things to keep Vinnie happy, and Vinnie and I do a certain number of things to keep Alan happy, so I suppose the two of them do a certain number of things to keep me happy.
Though I haven’t noticed any of them yet.
When I first wrote the chessboard sequence I didn’t really expect them to use it. If nothing else, I know how to count, and I know that a scene with thirty-four people in it is expensive, especially when it does nothing to advance the plot.
Also, it’s not enormously original. The idea of playing chess with human pieces, subject to death upon capture, is nothing new. Fredric Brown used it in a science fiction short story that I read ages ago, and I think some other SF writer, probably Poul Anderson, did so also. I’ll admit it hasn’t been done before in a pornographic movie, and that it’s a nice visual, but I thought Alan would want to throw it out. I included a certain number of things in the first draft for him to throw out, and while I sort of liked this one, I included it mentally in that category.
Instead he fell in love with it.
It was a bitch to stage. Vinnie brought along his sixty-four squares of black and white cardboard. Since the floor was white to begin with, we could have done fine with thirty-two black squares, but this never occurred to him. Or to anyone else, myself included, as far as that goes.
We set up the floor, and then we set up the girls. The taxi fare alone involved in transporting thirty-two young ladies from Manhattan to Queens is something to think about. We dressed our two devils in devil suits and Prussian helmets — this last was a nice idea of Alan’s — and we got everybody in place, and then we shot the scene.
It took three and a half hours.
Now isn’t that ridiculous? But that’s what happened. Things kept going wrong. Admittedly there were a lot of people out there, but only four of them had to move. The black bishop, the white pawn, and the two devils. The thirty other girls just had to stand there and look naked and stiff. The pawn had a couple of elementary lines of dialogue. The devils and the black bishop had to look stern. That was all there was to it.
Except that things kept going wrong. One problem was that the girls would keep moving, the ones who were supposed to stay still and look like statues. I could have lived with this, frankly, but Vinnie and Alan both wanted the scene just right. We really spent a lot of film retaking this crap.
Another problem was the white pawn. I picked the tallest black girl for the bishop and the smallest, youngest looking girl for the white pawn.
(And kicked myself mentally for not using that twelve-year-old nymphomaniac for the white pawn. She would have been perfect and in a part like that I think we could have gotten away with using her. As soon as I thought of it I realized the last thing to do was to mention it to Vinnie or Alan, because they would want to do it, and that would mean packing up and postponing everything for at least a day. It would have been great, though.)
The black bishop played her part very well. She’s about six feet tall and very dark-skinned, and she has elegant large uplifted breasts and a protruding behind, and her facial expression during the capture of the pawn was a study in menace. She never cracked a smile.
Which cannot be said for the white pawn, who tended to crack up in mirth when the cameras were on her. This seemed to be contagious. We wound up dropping the sound, figuring to loop it all later on. There’s only one spot where she talks into the camera, and that’s when the bishop first advances on her. Her words as she’s led off are delivered with her back to the camera, and of course her scream is completely off-camera. It took us a long time before we decided on this, however. We first went through a ton of takes with on-camera sound during which some cretinous asshole in the back broke up. We’ll loop the whole thing, and needless to say we won’t use the stupid white pawn to do the dubbing. (Sophie may do it; she does a nice little-girl voice, as I learned yesterday when she tried out some of her dialogue for her scene with me.)
Another thing that got in the way was the fact that this apartment complex where we shot everything was not unoccupied. That was another reason on-camera sound proved impossible. All it takes is one shrill housewife bellowing for her kid to kill a soundtrack.
Well, we got it done. Alan paid off the girls and we tucked them into cabs. Then we went back to Manhattan, Vinnie and Alan and Madge and Pluto and I. We blew ourselves to a two-hour lunch at Sign of the Dove. We felt we had it coming.
During lunch we remembered that we didn’t have the props for Madge’s office. This is because we hadn’t originally planned to shoot Madge’s scenes today. But because Alan gave in to Vinnie on shooting the aerial view over Madge’s shoulder, we wanted to get a little more out of Madge in return for the hundred and a half she was getting. We figured we could at least get some of her scenes with Pluto wrapped up.