— Monday
You can call me Star.
We filmed my scene today, right on schedule.
I’ll tell you, I don’t much feel like writing about it. But I can’t see a way to dodge the issue. It’s not unlikely that you’ve been looking forward to reading about it, just as I’ve spent the past few weeks looking forward, albeit nervously, to filming it.
Well.
First we assembled in Central Park, at one of the playgrounds. Sophie’s makeup was better than I’d expected. She had her hair in pigtails and had painted red spots on her cheeks, and she was cuddling a Raggedy Ann doll, and she got on one of the swings, and the whole outdoor sequence went almost exactly as it appears in the manuscript. It was very easy to film. We got virtually all of it on the first take, as she and I both had our lines down perfectly.
I, too, was in makeup, which consisted mostly of rubbing gray crud into my hair and beard and wearing a pair of owlish granny glasses, through which, their lenses being clear, I could perceive virtually nothing. I did little things like walking hunched over, and I tried to talk in a cracked old man’s voice (or in an old man’s cracked voice, but maybe I got it right the first time around).
Then we came back here to my apartment where I removed my trousers and shorts and attached the cut-down trouser legs to my calves. We started the scene and shot it as written, and in that order.
Everybody was very calm about everything. It was a very bloodless procedure. I had been certain that, at the very least, one or the other of us would break up laughing. This didn’t happen. I browsed over Sophie’s charms and spoke my wretched dialogue and finally got down to business, gobbling away at her newly shaven box.
Actually, I suppose I didn’t have to eat her very much if I didn’t want to. Cunnilingus is difficult to film effectively, especially when the performer is heavily bearded, and all I really had to do was stay in position while Sophie read out her lines and delivered the appropriate grunts and groans.
But I’ve always been somewhat inclined toward the naturalistic theory of theater. If you put a desk on a stage you have things in the drawers even if they are not going to be opened. That kind of thing.
Besides, I couldn’t really imagine being in a scene like this and not doing it legit. So I did what I was supposed to do, and Sophie stayed with her lines very well, and faked her orgasm in semi-song, and that was that.
Was it exciting?
No, frankly. Not in a sexual sense, at any rate. It was exciting as an experience in the way that any experience would have to be exciting after such a prolonged buildup. But in terms of sex it was all quite mechanical.
Then it was her turn to return the favor. I opened my raincoat and exposed myself in the traditional flasher’s manner, and we read our lines, and she went down on me.
My chief fear, that I would be unable to achieve an erection, happily failed to materialize. Sophie, let it be said, is very capable at fellatio.
Getting erect and getting off, however, proved to be two different things. When Vinnie had as much footage as he wanted he stopped the camera and asked me how I was coming along.
“I’m not approaching anything,” I said.
Sophie asked if there was anything in particular she could do.
“What you’re doing’s fine,” I said, in one of the year’s more impressive understatements. “Maybe if you do a little more of the same.”
“Sure.”
She did a little more of the same, without the camera this time, and there are a lot worse ways to spend a Monday afternoon, by George, but I still wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Maybe if we screwed a little,” I suggested.
“Sure, why not?”
So we did, and there was nothing wrong with that either, until finally there was that little quiver in the innermost self that lets one know that orgasm is just around the corner.
“Orgasm,” I said, “is just around the corner.”
We returned to Position One and she resumed doing as she had been doing, and I read my requisite lines, and we went around the aforementioned corner.
After the scene was completed, Sophie and I got to talking. “You were real good,” she said. “Like when I pretended to come, you know, I almost came.”
“You could hang around for a while,” I suggested.
“That might be cool. Do you have anything to smoke?”
“Yeah. Somewhere.”
“Why not?”
So we stayed around when the other jokers packed up and went home. Then I insisted we take all the pictures of naked children off the walls. She found my insistence on this point amusing, I think, but she went along with it. Then she got her makeup off and unbraided her pigtails while I washed the gray gunk out of my hair and beard.
“If you’re gonna wait for me to grow my fur back,” she said, “we’ll be a long time waiting.”
“I’m not a fanatic,” I assured her.
I put a couple of records on and we smoked an illicit herb and talked for a while, and then we went to bed.
But that wasn’t part of the movie, and I feel under no obligation whatsoever to tell you anything about it.
— Tuesday
There’s still quite a bit of work that remains to be done on the movie. Some continuity still to shoot, some looping of dialogue, and then of course Vinnie’s arduous task of editing the mess. But I think my role in the venture is over and done with, and I am very certain my role as diarist has come to its conclusion. Nothing that remains to be done would be of much interest to you, Gentle Reader.
It’s been fun for me, and I hope it’s been a little fun for you. There were nights, I must say, when the last thing on earth I yearned to do was sit down at this typewriter and commit my thoughts to paper. In retrospect, though, I think it probably helped me keep my perspective on the whole affair, insofar as I did keep it.
Well, enough said. You read the book; now go out and see the movie.
An Interview
JWW: Well, I suppose we open with the standard question.
SOPHIE: Which is?
JWW: Well, how did a crummy lady like you get into a good-looking business like this?
SOPHIE: How did a... oh, I get it. Well, as to how I got into the business, I didn’t get into it the way so many other people do. For example, I never played one-reelers or loops. I never had bit parts.
JWW: You were always a star.
SOPHIE: Not exactly, but pretty close. In a couple of pictures I played the second female lead, in others I had the lead. So what it amounts to is I always had a major part and these were all major films, full-length films shot for theatrical release.
JWW: I see.
SOPHIE: So I came into the business as an actress rather than someone who was just willing to fuck in front of a camera.
JWW: You had had previous acting experience?
SOPHIE: Oh, definitely. A lot of amateur work, some off-Broadway stuff, basically showcase stuff. Also a couple of appearances on television. Mostly walk-ons, but I had five lines in one episode of As The World Turns, for example. And I’ve studied acting, I’ve taken courses. I think I told you about that.