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Anyway, they got in position and played around for awhile. That position, incidentally, man and woman both seated and both facing the same direction, is one which I suspect is spreading all over the country largely as a result of porn films. It is a standard in the industry because it affords maximum visibility. You can see the penis sliding in and out, you can see the vagina, you can see the girl’s breasts, you can see the faces of both partners, and you don’t have to see a lot of pimples on a lot of asses. I am sure the country is full of a lot of couples who have tried that position primarily because they’ve seen it in so many movies. Once again, Life imitates Art.

We moved through a nice little catalog of positions. Every now and then we would cue the girls to go into the throes of orgasm, and they would oblige. Once one of them obliged without being told, giving a very engaging and evidently very real orgasm. The rest of the time they were real pros and stayed with the script. Eventually Vinnie had as much film as he needed and asked Rasputin if he felt like coming.

He said he had been feeling like coming for quite a while now, and would be delighted to. The script called for both girls to do an oral number on Rasputin and share the fruits of their labors. Vinnie had them work up to it, then cut the camera while they continued. Rasputin was prepared to give him a cue when he was within seconds of release. The girls did their number very convincingly, and it’s a shame we picked that moment to save film, because they gave out with some of their best fellatory techniques. Then, after we had instructed Rasputin to make a lot of noise at the critical moment, and to please not get so far carried away that he lost his Russian accent, he announced that the moment was indeed at hand.

It went beautifully. He ejaculated magnificently into one mouth, and the girls passed his gift back and forth, and we got as much film as we wanted, and Vinnie yelled, “Cut,” and one of the girls got up and ran into the corner and vomited.

I wish we had filmed that, too.

Back when we were in script conferences, and when Vinnie and I were going through general discussions of what would or would not work in the film, he wanted my opinion on the extreme close-ups that have become such a cliché in porn films. “Nothing turns me off like a urethra covering an entire thirty-foot screen,” he said. “I hate those fucking close-ups. But what do I know? I mean, I’ve seen so many of the damned things, and they don’t excite me sexually in the first place, so maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?”

I said I didn’t much like them either, but that I didn’t really know what our average customer felt about it. Maybe people wouldn’t get off unless they were able to zoom in on genitalia. Maybe they would feel it wasn’t really hardcore unless they could see the world’s largest mouth around the world’s hugest glans.

“Alan talks a lot about the female audience,” I said. “Not that there’s much of one, but I somehow can’t believe the women who do go to pornographic films want to see genitalia that close. It doesn’t seem to mesh with what we’re told about female sexual response.”

We kicked it around a lot. Then one night I was with a girl who enjoyed porno movies and said so. She has seen Throat three times. And she did have a few things to say about how movies pander to the male audience, as if Alan had written some of her lines for her. (Nevertheless, she was very specific about how Throat in particular degraded women and pandered to the male audience, and that didn’t keep her from seeing it three times, so the hell with her.)

I tried out our discussion about close-ups. “God, of course I like the extreme close-ups,” she said. “You wouldn’t possibly have a good movie without them.”

I told Vinnie about this the following day. “I guess we zoom,” he said. “You know something? I don’t know a single goddamned thing about women.”

The exchange between Sophie and Rasputin contains a lot of lines I am not responsible for. I would keep throwing them away and Vinnie would keep putting them in. At one point Rasputin has to say something along the lines of, “Think only in distinct shapes and in the primary colors.”

When it became obvious that Vinnie thought that line was right up there with Give me liberty or give me death, I gave up and left it alone. But I got enormous satisfaction out of the way Rasputin fucked up that line this evening, over and over and over. He just could not get it right. It wasn’t even a question of his giving the line a bad reading. There is, after all, no way to give it a good reading. But ol’ Rasputin couldn’t get his mouth around the words. He kept putting them in the wrong order, or stumbling on them, or otherwise messing it up to hell and gone. After wasting a certain amount of film, we made him do it over and over until he got it right four times in a row. Then we filmed it and he got it.

Afterward Vinnie came over to me. He said, “You bastard, I still think it’s a good line.”

“Why am I a bastard? I didn’t even laugh.”

“I know. But I could tell you wanted to!”

I had dinner tonight with a girl I went with briefly about six years ago. I had told her about the film the last time I saw her, two or three weeks back, and this evening she was full of questions about it. I told her a lot about what we had been doing and she asked if she could come watch the rest of the shooting after dinner.

There’s a rule about no non-film people on the set, but it’s not that strictly adhered to. We’ve had people around from time to time, and today Alan brought a girl around, so I figured what the hell. I wanted to oblige her, and also I was interested to see what her reaction would be.

She was a model of decorum, stayed off to one side, didn’t get into any raps with anybody, and generally managed to blend with the furniture. Afterward we went out and did a little semi-serious drinking at Downey’s.

She said, “I can’t imagine what it’s like. I wanted to see this to get some idea what it’s like for the people involved, the actors and actresses, and I saw, and I still don’t know. I cannot imagine myself doing that.”

“Have you ever considered it?”

“No. But I’ve thought about it. I’ve seen a few films, primarily out of curiosity, I don’t really dig them. And my reaction always has been a lot of wondering what it was like and how people could go through with it.”

“Have you ever done any swinging?”

“You mean group sex? No. I’ve thought about it, and it’s something I probably could go through with if the situation was right. Nothing structured or planned, but if there were a small group of people with good heads and everybody just sort of winged it and it got to be a group sex scene, I can imagine myself participating in it and enjoying it. But not this. For one thing, it’s fake sex. It’s a terrible fraud.”

“To the extent that all acting is fake.”

“I suppose so, but, oh, maybe it’s that I don’t think sex is something that ought to be faked. I don’t know exactly what I mean. I could just never do that. It’s not the idea of exposure, the idea that the whole world could see me going down on somebody. In a sense there’s something exciting about that. The exhibitionism of it. Like if somebody without my knowledge took movies of me balling someone, I’m sure I would be angry, but it would also be a little exciting. But to perform like that, to do an act without feeling it, or to try to force yourself to feel it, God. Not for me.

“Haven’t you ever faked an orgasm, love?”