Then the two of us congratulated the film’s director and went down the block to a coffee shop. She talked about her acting career and what sort of future she saw for herself. She dropped names like Stanislavski a lot.
I remember the first time I saw pornographic films. It was at the annual stag of a lodge in Rhinebeck. It was open to the public. You paid three dollars, got all the ham sandwiches and beer you could engulf, watched the movies, and shot crap or played cards. I was back in town on semester break, I was in I guess my second year at Fordham at the time, so I went with a couple of buddies.
There was a rumor that an unnamed guy was bringing films in color and sound. It turned out that they had this rumor every year, and never in the history of the place had they had anything but grainy silent black-and-white eight-millimeter stuff. The rumor always persisted. I think it was a tradition or something.
There were, as best I recall, about half a dozen films. Fairly ordinary stuff, I guess. The guys in the back of the room kept coming up with stale gags. One moment that will never recede from my memory was when a film opened featuring two purported lesbians. This went very much against the grain of the audience. “Get those two goddamned queers off the screen! Get rid of those perverts!” Actually, I thought at the time that the two girls came closer to spontaneity than any of the other performers.
I didn’t experience any physical arousal during the night’s entertainment. I found it very interesting to watch the films and would have watched dozens more had they been available, but that was the extent of my response. I lost a few dollars shooting craps and won them back playing a local variant of blackjack, and I drank a lot of beer and went home and astonished myself by masturbating four times in less than an hour. I guess the films had a delayed effect or something.
I wonder if they still show films at those stags. Nowadays anybody can see well-made porn with color and sound, and I suppose it’s been a good many years since any yokel talked back to a lesbian sequence.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
— Thursday Night
It’s been another long day, but a lot less taxing than yesterday. I think it was the crowd that made it such a drag yesterday, the sheer number of people around. I just reread what I wrote this morning and I don’t think it comes across just how wearying the whole thing was. Well, I guess you had to be there.
Today we filmed the sexual parts, the more overtly sexual parts, of the cabaret sequence. I think it went fairly well, but I have to admit that I’ve reached a point where I can’t tell what’s good and what isn’t.
In the world of Real Films, a world which I’m afraid we have not penetrated in this piece of crap we’re filming, they have what are called rushes or dailies, or so I’m told. Which is to say that everything shot during a day is printed immediately so that you can look at them before the next day’s shooting. It’s all completely unedited, but if you know how to watch film you can see whether you got what you wanted.
We can’t afford to do that. So we are consequently at a point where we have filmed most of the movie, more than half of it anyway, and we don’t know what any of it looks like. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody, and I guess there’s no reason why it should, because if we find out we don’t much like the way something turned out, there is precious little we can do about it. We’re not about to re-shoot anything. We’re too tightly budgeted to do that. All we can do is get the film in the can as quickly as possible and pray it turns into something when it’s printed and when Vinnie is done editing it.
We had a truly inspired ad-lib moment.
Jeremy, bless his heart, was plunking furiously away at the piano throughout the onstage balling scene. The script called for occasional cuts of him getting more and more aroused as he played, removing his string tie, opening his shirt, and finally getting up from the piano and starting to strip.
I thought he was really acting beautifully. He sure looked aroused, all right. And finally, sure enough, he got up from the piano with a wild light dancing in his eyes, and he took his shirt off, and he took his pants off, and he kicked his shoes off and he pulled his underwear off, and he left his socks on, and he went over and pulled the transvestite out of the way and threw Sophie a wholly unexpected fuck.
Vinnie had the presence of mind to get all of this on film, including, he told me, an ECU of Sophie’s utterly astonished face.
After the scene reached its (and Jeremy’s) climax, he got to his feet with a dazed look in his eyes. Then he began to blush, whereupon everybody began to laugh; whereupon he grabbed up his clothes and bolted backstage.
He emerged a few minutes later, wearing his clothes and what is frequently described as a shit-eating grin, a term the derivation of which has never been clarified for me. He seemed at once proud and embarrassed over what he had just so impulsively done.
I let him know that his moment of glory had all been immortalized on film.
“Oh, Christ,” he said.
“You didn’t notice the camera was grinding away?”
“I was too busy grinding away myself to notice anything. What an incredible turn on.”
“You hadn’t planned it?”
“Not exactly. I thought about it. I must admit that I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to go through with it. But it wasn’t a question of nerve. Nerve never entered into it. I just got, uh, carried away.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t suppose they’ll use that scene.”
“The hell they won’t.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the most spontaneous and authentic act we’ve filmed to date. You can’t expect us to throw it all away, can you?”
“Uh,” he said. “I don’t know how my wife is going to feel about this.”
His wife’s an actress. I mentioned this to him. “Just tell her you were acting,” I suggested. “Your approach to the characterization was essentially a Method approach and you got excessively involved in the role.”
“Sure.”
“Tell her the reason you were so excited was you imagined it was her while you were balling Sophie.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, I suppose I could talk Vinnie out of showing you actually fucking her.”
“Could you?” He thought it over. “Oh, the hell with it,” he decided. “Leave it in.”
“You positive?”
“Yeah, why not? Fifty years from now I can run the film and remember when I used to be potent.”
We had to scrap the player piano shtick. In the script, when Jeremy gets up from the piano and stalks toward Sophie we didn’t know he’d do more than stalk toward her. There’s a shot of the piano, a player piano, still playing madly away after he has left it. Since we didn’t have a player piano, and since the only one we were able to find was not a look-a-like for our regular piano, we decided to throw it out. Someone pointed out that, while it might be a cute sight gag, it was also on the corny side, and I was forced to agree.
Jeremy’s number was certainly the high point of things. It was all anybody could talk about for the rest of the day. It seemed to remind everybody of a story.
The guy who plays the role we call First Stooge in the script has worked in a batch of these films. He told a story about an actor he knew out on the West Coast with an erection machine. I’ve seen them advertised in places like Screw but never thought they really worked. Apparently they work for some people. What they are, essentially, is a vacuum pump arrangement. A plastic sphere goes around the penis and then the air is pumped out. The vacuum thus created causes blood to flow to the organ, which manifests itself as an erection.