She looked at me over the tops of her glasses. She drawled, “Why, dahhhling, I’ve never had to.”
The shooting itself went pretty well, I guess. How can you tell?
In terms of quantity, we did better than I really thought we would do. We got virtually all of the Rasputin scene in the can. There’s a little left to finish up tomorrow. Rasputin’s final ejaculation, for one. But we’re done with Anna and Karenina. Alan gave the two of them a ride home. I suspect an ulterior motive.
Sophie was pretty good. Not as good as she thinks she was — I’m beginning to dislike that girl — but better than we thought she would be. Better than I thought she would be, anyway.
There were some funny things that happened, some funny lines exchanged, but it’s now after two in the morning and, truth to tell, your boy JWW has bloody well had it. If I wrote anything else right now it would be my own philosophical musings on the effects of pornography on the fabric of society, and I am a little too tired to express them all that cogently at the moment.
— Monday
We wrapped up the Rasputin scene this morning in an hour.
We could have finished it last night except for a problem. The script calls for Sophie to disappear in a finger-snap, while ol’ Rasputin is grinding away. He flashes a baffled expression, still grinding, and ejaculates in the middle of the air, then collapses in a puddle.
This would have been easier to achieve were Rasputin capable of ejaculating on cue; but as he mentioned and I reported earlier, dear friends, he does not possess that talent. And, since Rasputin was not all that highly primed for orgasm, having had a couple already by then, he was none too sanguine about being able to spew forth without anything to spew forth into.
So we shot the finale this morning. Sophie and Rasputin got into position and fucked furiously, and then Sophie delivered her line to Pluto asking him to get her the hell away from here, or words to that effect, and then we stopped while Rasputin hunched there on his knees manfully refraining from orgasm.
Sophie scurried out of the way, and Rasputin got into the same position and made a brief flurry of pelvic thrusts in the middle of the air. After a few seconds of this he wrapped his hand around his cock and commenced jerking himself off manfully, as he and Vinnie had arranged. These manual frames would of course be cut from the final film if only to protect Rasputin’s Box Office Image. Then, when he had frigged himself to the point where orgasm was inevitable, he unhanded himself, returned to mock-coital position, and spewed his seed all over the ratty sheepskins.
When the film is edited, it will look as though Sophie disappears in a puff of smoke, as though Rasputin continues to screw where she has lately been, and as though he comes spontaneously from this surge of air-fucking.
At least we hope it will work that way.
Or they do. Because I don’t really give a damn.
I took the afternoon off. After we finished the Rasputin sequence I announced that I was taking the rest of the day off. Alan said that was impossible, and Vinnie said they needed me, and I said the hell they did, in the first place, and in the second place I didn’t care. I reminded them that somebody had to see the picture Alan was afraid of plagiarizing, and I told them I had an appointment to talk to Dell about the way the production diary was going, and I said that, in any event, they were just shooting some minor scenes and could certainly shoot them without me.
They acquiesced, which is just as well, because I was already on my way out the door.
The business about having an appointment with Dell was a lie. The business about seeing the movie may have been a lie. I’m going to go out for dinner in a few minutes, and afterward I may run down to Times Square and look at the picture. Its title is The Devil In Miss Jones, incidentally, not what I called it earlier.
I spent the afternoon sitting around and reading and drinking iced tea. And having some thoughts about this project in particular and porn in general.
Which I will now share with you. Unless wiser editorial heads prevail, that is, in which case we’ll chop out this heavy section of the diary and confine ourselves to all the cute and cunning little things that happened in the course of manufacturing this epic.
It’s strange. I have always taken it as a fundamental postulate that censorship sucks. The broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution has seemed to me absolutely essential to the functioning of a free society. Any man ought to be able to write anything at all, and any other man ought to have the option of reading it or not, as he chooses.
I have not ceased to believe this, and doubt that I ever will.
Nor have I ceased to believe in the social utility of pornography. The arguments against it, whether expressed rationally or in the lunatic style of censorship’s more vocal advocates, have never impressed me. Pornography does not make streets unsafe, does not inspire sex crime, does not corrupt the young. On the contrary, insofar as it has any function at all, I would suspect its function is valuable.
I don’t go all the way and accept the premise that pornography prevents sex crimes, that a pervert who might otherwise commit rape can sublimate his desires by watching a fuck film. I just don’t think this is true. Rapes are evidently committed by persons whose sexual orientation is such that they prefer to take by force. The proportion of compulsive rapists who have other sexual outlets available to them would tend to confirm this. The example of Denmark, in which sex crimes diminished when pornography was legalized, is less impressive when the facts are scrutinized. The dropoff consisted almost entirely of a decline in certain offenses that were no longer classified as crimes, and thus did not figure in the statistical picture. By extension, the easiest way to effect a decline in reported rapes is to make rape legal; then no one will bother reporting it.
I’m not even impressed by arguments that pornography will have a deleterious effect upon children. I don’t think this is so. On the contrary, I think pornography is probably one of the most useful media for the sexual education of the young. Children have an intense need to know, to see, to understand, and I would think that the opportunity to watch a movie of people fucking would constitute a more meaningful educational experience than is afforded by sex education classes or pamphlets from Planned Parenthood. This is not to disparage the latter, only to point up the potential utility of the former.
I saw a G-rated picture a while ago in which one of the good guys chops off the hand of one of the bad guys. Blood everywhere, the whole number. I would think that would be far more likely to warp the psyche of a child (assuming anything will) than a picture in which a couple of congenial people make love. It is perhaps a prejudice of mine, but I believe wholeheartedly that a gun is infinitely more obscene than a penis, and murder a far more antisocial act than copulation.
These arguments on behalf of pornography are nothing new, neither to me nor to you. I have embraced this pro-porn position for a long time. I still embrace it.
So?
So I find myself wondering about some of the other effects of pornography. Effects not upon the reader or viewer, that is to say, but upon society as a whole. And, even more, the effects upon the creators of pornography.
When an advocate of pornography spends enough time wandering around the Times Square area, he can very easily come away from the experience with the unsettled feeling of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. It is rather difficult to walk past porno store after porno store, peep show after peep show, theater after theater, massage parlor after massage parlor, and still regard this not as urban blight but as the radiant bloom of a healthy society.