We did agree that it might behoove one or the other of us to see this movie as soon as possible.
Tomorrow we get to shoot some sex stuff. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not I’m looking forward to it. On the one hand, the preceding few days have been a sort of stalling. We haven’t really filmed anything you couldn’t show to a third grade class at a convent school. At the same time, I’m a little bit apprehensive about my role in tomorrow’s proceedings. It seems as though I’m going to wind up doing a lot of the actual directing.
Vinnie himself has been working, in his subtle fashion, to give me this impression. The scene we’re filming tomorrow is the Rasputin number. Specifically we’re shooting all the action that involves Anna and Karenina, so as to avoid having to pay them for more than the day. We might have to pay them for another day’s dubbing and such, but we want to avoid more than one day’s shooting. If things go well, we may be able to finish the entire Rasputin sequence in the day. It’s all inside, and daylight’s not a factor at all.
Of course we won’t be doing the song tomorrow. Rasputin doesn’t sing.
I have had more aggravation over that fucking song than anyone should be expected to believe.
I love the song. We all have our madnesses, and as adamant as Tim is about including a sheepdog scene, that’s how I am about the fucking song. I will kill in order to have that song in the picture.
I did not write the song specifically for the picture, although it has seemed strategically wise to give Alan that impression. I wrote it a few months ago while I was driving somewhere. That’s when I usually write songs, when I’m driving, and I do it largely to keep awake. I generally forget the songs when I get wherever it is I’m driving. Some of them linger in the mind, though, and I become quite proud of them.
When I first gave Alan a draft of the screenplay, he went out of the way to praise the Rasputin song and the other one as well, “He Never Touched My Heart,” which of course I did write specifically for the film. Ever since then, though, he has been questioning the Rasputin song. Why do we need a song there, he’ll ask. How does it advance the story line?
I replied that it advanced the plot as much as having Rasputin play stinkfinger with Anna and Karenina. What did the song have to do with anything? It was topical, said I, and answered the possible charge of male chauvinism by depicting Rasputin as a male chauvinist and holding him up to ridicule. (When you are reasoning with idiots, it is permissible to use idiot reasoning; moreover, it is essential.)
Ah, said Alan, but therein lay another problem. The problem of anachronism. For, after all, the whole concept of Women’s Liberation and Male Chauvinism was unknown in Rasputin’s time! I swear he said this. And not just once. He made this point on several occasions. Some of the time I yelled at him. Other times I took the position that this anachronism would constitute a sort of inside gag for history buffs.
Then he pointed out that it would slow things down to have Rasputin pick up a balalaika and wail away for four verses in the middle of his big sex number. I felt it would give everybody a chance to heal up, but said instead that we wouldn’t have Rasputin do his thing right there but would have him record it and use it as a voiceover during the threesome with the two girls. Vinnie and I had earlier discussed the inherent problem of having something for the audience to listen to while watching people ball. You have a few obvious choices, all of them slightly bad. You can run a music track, you can leave things more or less silent, or you can encourage your performers to ad-lib enough dialogue to keep the more verbally oriented members of your audience from dozing off. Since a lot of the performers have enough trouble looking aroused without having to sound aroused as well, this last method is often done by looping moans and groans and shouts of “Stick it in deeper!” or “You sure suck like an angel!” or whatever afterward. There’s no lip-synch problem, because you do this over extreme close-ups of genitalia.
My feeling was that the song would let us get away with a nice long sex scene here between Rasputin and the two girls, and would be amusing for people amused by that sort of thing, whereas the bug-eyed porno freaks would have little trouble concentrating on the ins and outs of the sex without being distracted by my male chauvinist anthem. Alan agreed, Vinnie agreed strongly, and that seemed to be that.
The next question was, suppose our Rasputin couldn’t sing? As it turned out, he can’t. I finally assured Alan I would arrange for a tape of somebody singing the thing. I think what I’m finally going to do is sing it myself. I’ll buy an hour or two of studio time and hire a guitarist and just do it. I’m not a singer, but then I’m not a songwriter either. Or a screenwriter, or a director, or an actor, or any of these things.
Which gets us back to the question of my directing this, or being de facto director of the sex bits. I was talking to one of the camera crew today and he told me about an experience he had on Vinnie’s last picture. The script called for the female lead to get herself buggered by one of the guys. (The film was a quickie, so I doubt there was a script as such, just a very thin story line for the performers to improvise from.)
Anyway, the girl refused. So what they did was pantomime it, with the actress being taken dog-style but with her more conventional portal employed, and then they got a stand-in for buggery close-ups which would be intercut with the movie, so that the viewer would get the impression that the young lady was really being anally employed. I understand this does not happen that infrequently — they also have cum shot stand-ins, who have orgasms for stud actors who just can’t manage one more ejaculation. But the capper on this one was that the stand-in was a male. The cameraman swears to this. They used a guy who evidently had an appealing and somewhat feminine behind, and Vinnie later had to edit the film very carefully so as to avoid any frames in which the stand-in’s masculine genitalia were displayed.
The same cameraman asked me who we were going to use for the Arouser.
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Seems he has worked on films in which a certain person is employed to provide erections for male performers who are having difficulties. The usual process is to send one of the actresses into another room with the guy and give him head until he gets hard, then send him back on stage to do his number. But one producer has a girl he uses just for this purpose. She’s either camera shy or ugly, I didn’t ascertain which, but the thing is that she gives head to all these male performers but has never appeared in a film. In fact she doesn’t even sit there and watch them film. She’s in another room reading comic books or something, and when difficulties arise (in that they fail to arise), the person with the problem goes into her room and gets himself gobbled until he can do his thing for the cameras.
All this was prelude to an anecdote I’m not sure I believe. The cameraman says he was there, but people always have a tendency to attribute firsthand knowledge to stories they’ve heard third-hand themselves, so I don’t know. But I rather prefer to believe this happened, and I’m certainly not going to keep it to myself.
Seems this chick was curled up on the couch with a Wonder Woman comic or something when the door opened and a guy walked in. The guy was not an actor. He was some sort of hanger-on, the producer’s cousin or an investor or the delivery boy from the liquor store, God knows what exactly. And he was looking for the men’s room or the elevator or something, and he walks in and sees this naked girl on the couch.