“The role,” he said, “should not be beyond the range of my competence.”
I had no quarrel with this.
“Furthermore,” he said, “I own a tuxedo.”
He went off to get the tuxedo, Alan having unnecessarily announced that he would be reimbursed for his cab fare. Alan indeed is a prince.
He was a much better emcee than the other guy would have been, and that part went smoothly enough. The way we set things up, we filmed virtually all the nonsexual aspects of the cabaret sequence yesterday. All of the audience stuff, for example. And all of the sequences before Sophie brings the various people onstage and balls them. We’ll film the fucking today, and when the film is edited a lot of the reaction shots filmed yesterday will be inserted there, so it will look as though there was a live audience for the fucking.
Vinnie hates the fact that we had to fake it. The artistic side of him objects strenuously. He’d like to be able to do long shots over the audience of the screwing.
Hell, I can see the value of that. I can also see how much more aggravating it would be to try filming hardcore scenes with a large audience. With clever intercutting, at which he is alleged to be a master — he does most of the alleging himself — I’m afraid I think anyone who sees the film will swear it was all filmed before an audience. We have bits, for example, where members of the audience stand up and head for the stage, divesting themselves of their ties en route, and inserted in the proper places it will certainly look as though these men are inflamed by what they have seen and on their way to join in on the action.
Somewhere in some draft or other of the script I noted that it might not hurt if one of the waiters looked rather like Hitler.
Or, failing that, like Luther Adler.
We ordered a batch of German Officer types through the underground equivalent of Central Casting, and a dozen of them showed up. We hired the eight that came closest to fitting the eight German uniforms Alan scrounged somewhere. Of the others, we hired a few as waiters and to otherwise supplement our coterie of unpaid audience members.
One of the guys we used as a waiter looks incredibly like Heinrich Himmler. Unfortunately, not one person in a hundred remembers what Heinrich Himmler looked like.
Nobody looked at all like Hitler.
The comedian was really awful.
Just as we had hoped. Maybe even worse than we had dared to dream.
And, wouldn’t you know it, he had enlarged and improved upon his monologue. I suppose that was inevitable. The monologue, except for a line or two, was not my handiwork. Vinnie wrote it. He said he tried to make it as bad as he possibly could, and I couldn’t argue with that. I felt he succeeded admirably. The comedian did make it even worse, though, perhaps merely by making it longer.
It was not at all hard to get shots of ineffable boredom on the faces of the members of the audience during the comedian’s monologue.
I believe I’ve mentioned Jeremy Six earlier in these pages, though perhaps not by name. He’s our piano player for the cabaret number. In real life, as we laughingly call it, Jeremy writes paperback westerns. He was a professional musician for a few years, had some sort of jazz band, and plays great whorehouse piano that frequently reminds one of Ray Charles. In return for investing a thousand dollars in this fiasco, he earned the privilege of donating his services at the piano.
He certainly looks the part, tall and lean, straight black hair, intimidating black moustache, and a wardrobe that could have been made by the best goddamned tailor in Tombstone, Arizona. Only man I’ve ever known who wears string ties.
Well, Jeremy had his hands full during Sophie’s song. He asked her what key she sang in, and she didn’t know. She had assured us all earlier that she could sing, and we were sufficiently pleased to have her for the role that we didn’t make her prove it.
Live and learn.
It isn’t so much that she has a rotten voice, although it must be admitted that she does. More to the point is that she is not up to staying with tricky melodies, and I’m afraid I should have taken that into account when I wrote “He Never Touched My Heart.”
I suppose I was indulging my own ego, and not for the first time; but what I had in mind was to write something that would fit the spot even to the point of reminding the ear of Kurt Weill. According to Jeremy, who has an ear for this sort of thing, it stops an inch this side of plagiarism, so I guess I succeeded. But those Weimar harmonies are not something Sophie can take to as a duck to water, or as a pig to shit, or whatever metaphor appeals to you.
She kept missing notes, and not just by a little bit. By an awful lot. And she could tell when she missed a note, and she would stop, and, oh, the whole thing was terrible.
We are going to have to loop her entire number, using somebody else’s voice and lip-synching in a sound studio. This, as I understand it, is an expensive process. Of course the big moviemakers do it all the time, but they are not trying to bring in a film for sixty thousand dollars.
I don’t know if the song comes off or not. It strikes me as much longer than it ought to be. It times out at a little over four minutes, which shouldn’t be so bad, but maybe it’s out of place, too much of a break in the action. I still think it’s a good song, and if we can get someone decent to dub it, maybe we’ll be all right.
We did have a few bits to make the freebie audience aware that this is a dirty movie. Vinnie wanted some intercuts of sexual activity in the audience. We set up a shot of one guy sitting watching the performance with a very bored expression on his face; then the camera dips to show a girl crouching under the table with his cock in her mouth. The female performer was hired for the occasion, the male an eager volunteer. He had a certain amount of difficulty looking bored but ultimately obliged with a charming cum-shot all over the girl’s face.
What was most interesting throughout this was the reaction, such as it was, on the part of the audience. Quite a few of them tended to look the other way. And the others were very cool about the whole thing. I had anticipated a lot of embarrassed and perhaps embarrassing wisecracks, in the manner of oafs viewing a stag film at the Legion Hall, but I can’t recall hearing any of that.
The nightclub where we shot all this is really too large. We got it free, of course, which was a powerful argument in its favor. A further argument, especially in Vinnie’s eyes, was that it gave him room for some interesting long shots and generally lent itself to the kind of gemütlich Weimar atmosphere, at least as he envisions it.
On the minus side, I think the room was too large for the audience we assembled. We tried to solve the problem by grouping people close and only using the front of the room, but whether this will fool the camera I cannot really say. I would have preferred a much smaller club into which we could have absolutely crammed our audience. I suppose it was technically easier to film the scene with all that extra space, so maybe we were better off as things stood.