“But I figure I’m young, I’m single, I’m enjoying myself, so I might as well do this as anything else. I only had a high school education and I’m not qualified for anything good in the way of a job. Eventually maybe I’ll get into producing films, or maybe I’ll find some kind of a business opportunity in some other field, but for the time being I get paid to screw, and that’s the American dream, right?”
We filmed part of the American dream today. We didn’t get started until a little after noon, perhaps because Sunday morning is a sacrilegious time to be filming a fuck film, perhaps because everybody got stoned last night. We set up in an artist’s loft in SoHo on Prince Street. The set was just about right once we had thrown some cheap sheepskin rugs all over the floor and bed. The artist, a friend of a friend of Vinnie’s, let us use the place in return for our setting up a water bed there and leaving it for him when we’re finished. We got one for around seventy bucks installed, so the price is right. The loft itself has a nice monastic feel to it.
We began by dressing the scene with chicken bones. Alan brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we all wolfed down enough of it to create a realistic pile of bones. Then we piled the rest on a plate for Rasputin to gnaw on later.
Vinnie got an inspiration a little later, but I’ll mention it now while we’re on the subject of the chicken. There’s the bit where Sophie, unseen, masturbates with the chicken leg, which Rasputin subsequently devours. Vinnie thought of a way to show this. He attached some wires to the chicken leg and filmed it rising magically off the pile of food, then bobbing up and down as if manipulated by Sophie’s invisible hand in and out of Sophie’s equally invisible whatsit. He swears this will look very effective after he has edited it. It didn’t look very effective to me, but I’m willing to believe it will be better on film than it was in the flesh.
Rasputin doesn’t fancy himself an actor. I think, though, that he may be better than he realizes. He was nicely cast for the role in terms of looks. We dolled him up in a full beard, and whoever chose the beard found one that fit his face nicely enough. His monk’s robe looked pretty good, too, and he’s got a high cheek-boned face and rather piercing eyes that fit the character decently.
At the beginning he was less than sensational. We open with him on his knees, evidently praying, and then you find out that while he’s praying he’s also playing with himself. Well, when we rehearsed his dialogue he kept playing it comic, very comic, and it was awful. Vinnie was rather bad at explaining why it was awful.
I took Rasputin aside and said the problem was he was playing it for laughs. He gave me a funny look and said he had understood that the scene was supposed to be comic, that his role was supposed to be comic. Yes, I said, but the way to get that effect was to do it absolutely straight. Because the concept was ridiculous and the dialogue absurd, the straighter he played it the funnier it would be.
Once he took it from that slant, he was quite good. I’ve never liked the way they’ve played comic characters in porn films. The shrink in Deep Throat, for example, goes through all this comic opera shtick, this Borscht Belt mad-scientist accent, and I think that diminishes the comic possibilities of the scene. If Harry Reems had delivered essentially the same lines with utter deadpan sincerity, the scene would have played funnier.
Not that I wouldn’t be delighted to settle for their box office grosses.
When we came to the entrance of Anna and Karenina, we had the same problem; Rasputin forgot this new principle of the acting trade and began camping it up again. I got him to do it straight, and I really think the shot of him walking straight into the camera with his eyes glaring hypnotically will be a good one. We got all their dialogue scenes shot and reshot, and then we got down to business.
Well, we’ll have a lot of footage to sing I Am A Male Chauvinist over.
It was a strange experience. I have watched people copulate before, I’ve been to group sex scenes of one sort or another, and while I’ve occasionally found the experience faintly off-putting, I’ve never been particularly unnerved or embarrassed by it. Like all of these things, perhaps the most surprising element is the short amount of time it takes almost everyone to become quite blasé about the whole thing.
We went rather quickly through the early stuff specified in the script, including all the dialogue parts where Rasputin plays with them and has them diddle each other. Then they went into what you might call an improvisation. One of the girls sat on the waterbed with her legs wide, the other girl knelt in front of her and began gobbling away, and Rasputin played the role of Canine Lover. We stayed with that for a while, shooting from various angles, exhorting the girls to moan and groan a lot, and then both girls faked gigantic orgasms and collapsed in what we hope is a convincing manner.
The idea was for Rasputin to seemingly fuck these girls half to death before they can finally induce an orgasm out of him; then Sophie later turns the tables on him by screwing him brainless without getting him off. (I have found, by the way, that every night when I recap more of the plot of this epic in this here diary, I am less and less delighted with having become involved in all this shit in the first place. It keeps sounding progressively dumber.) Anyway, this requires lots of positions, lots of fake orgasms, and lots of shots of Rasputin, cock still magically erect, and proud of it.
After the first fake orgasm, Vinnie nudged me. “Tell ’em to do something different,” he muttered.
“Do something different,” I told them.
“No, no,” he said. Tell ’em what you want ’em to do, for Chrissake.”
“What do I want them to do?”
He closed his eyes. “You gotta direct this part. You gotta handle specifying the sex.”
“What should I specify? I mean do you have anything in mind?”
“Use your imagination. For starters, oh, have Rasputin sitting with what’s-her-name astride, you know, but she’s facing the same direction he is, toward the camera, and then the other one, she can suck his balls and lick him and maybe play with his asshole or something like that.”
“That’s original as hell,” I said.
“You got some better idea, we’ll go with it.”
I arranged them in the position described above. Rasputin sat back and one of the girls, I can’t remember which is which, and believe me, it doesn’t matter, sat down on him and engulfed his chief dramatic talent with her own. Then, for the hell of it, I gave the other girl a couple of lines to ad-lib. I had her say something about how mighty Rasputin will split her sister in half like a ripe melon, and then I had the sister say she could feel his penis all the way up to her throat.
(A digression, if you don’t mind. A friend of mine writes movies out in Hollywood. Real movies. One time he was the writer on location, which meant he stayed with the picture while they went out in the desert and shot it, in case they needed any line changes. He was sleeping late one morning when there was a knock on his motel room door. It was a gopher from the lot. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Sigafoos, but they need a line. In the scene where Newman drops the frammis and Kennedy picks it up and hands it back to him, they want Newman to thank him, and so they need a line, and they asked me to ask you.” My friend scratched his head and said, “Have Newman say ‘Thanks.’ The gopher wrote this down and went away and my friend went back to sleep. That’s why they needed a writer on location. They needed me there this afternoon so that I could tell these three people how to fuck and what to mutter at each other while they did it.)