Different Strokes: How I (Gulp!) Wrote, Directed, and Starred in an X-rated Movie (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  “But that’s a common theatrical convention. And if we used her . . .”

  “If we used her you could get somebody else to play the Dirty Old Man,” I said. “If we used her you couldn’t sell this fucking film anywhere, because you would get busted to hell and gone for it. Even if she turned out to be legitimately eighteen you’d get busted because it would turn out to be a criminal offense to have sex with anybody who looks that young whether she really is or not.”

  “I know, but—”

  “The whole thing that makes the flashback scene work is that you know the child is being played by a much older actress. You have to know that or the scene becomes perverted.”

  “It’s already perverted,” Vinnie said. He didn’t sound as though he was condemning it. No value judgment, just a matter of definition.

  “By letting Sophie play herself, it’s less perverted,” I went on. “Because nobody on earth is going to believe she’s twelve years old.” My most heroic understatement in months, that one. “And that takes the curse off it and makes it humorous, and the Dirty Old Man becomes good clean fun. But if you used this girl . . .”

  Alan agreed with me. We knocked it around some more and decided it would probably be an impossible chance even to have her in the movie in a wholly nonsexual capacity. One of us, I can’t remember who, suggested her as a playmate of Sophie’s, out of the picture before the DOM appears, but even that seemed too risky.

  So we dropped the subject. But thinking back on that whole number now, something comes clear to me that I hadn’t realized at the time. And it explains why we had to go to great lengths to talk ourselves out of using the girl.

  We didn’t want to use her in the picture in the first place.

  But all three of us wanted to screw her.

  Not because she looked twelve years old. But because she was twelve years old, as we all firmly believed. And not just because she was twelve years old, but because she was a twelve-year-old girl who talked blithely about fucking and sucking on camera, and who would be delighted to ball a sheep or a cockroach or do anything, anything at all. That combination of innocent youth and utter polymorphous perversion is distressingly compelling.

  This realization does not make me happy in the least.

  • • •

  I think we had as many hopefuls today as yesterday, although we went through them a good deal faster.

  For Christ’s sake, why?

  What’s in it for them? Not very much in the way of financial reward, certainly. We buy most of this flesh (and that’s what we’re buying, like it or not) for a hundred bucks a day. Sometimes we go a little higher, but not often. That’s the going rate, and while our budget is high for a porn flick, the extra dough is going into production values, not into sharing the wealth with the acting talent.

  Now a hundred a day is a lot for these people, but a hundred a day is not much at all if you’re prepared to fuck in order to earn it. Girls as attractive as these can earn that much money in a massage parlor in a couple of hours. Five twenty-dollar blow jobs gives them a hundred bucks, and their intimacy is limited to five men, and it’s not spread out on a thirty-foot screen for the world and Mom and Dad to see.

  Admittedly some of them can rationalize the impersonal but friendly sex of filmmaking while they would not be able to similarly rationalize the commercial, even hostile sex of prostitution. But even so, it’s not as if working these movies is lucrative in comparison to honest work. If you’re a principal, maybe, you’ll get ten days’ work and put a thousand dollars away. But most of these kids are going to get a day’s work and make a hot hundred out of the entire film.

  What’s the point?

  Do some of them honestly think it’s a way to break into Show Biz? I suppose some of them delude themselves this way. La Lovelace, after all, did become a celebrity on the basis of one film. (Deep Throat wasn’t her first film, more like her umpteenth, but that one film made her reputation.) Still, I think it’s fairly obvious that the porn field is not going to spawn many more celebrities, and even Lovelace hasn’t achieved a career, just a certain measure of notoriety.

  I’m willing to believe that having made porn films will not actively injure an actress’s chances in legitimate show business, as it would have a few years ago. That’s providing the mood of the country doesn’t swing back in the other direction, always a risky assumption. But I am not willing to believe that porn flick credits will do any good, either.

  Certainly not if your acting consists of performing sex acts. Pluto, our one “real” actor, might conceivably get work on the basis of his performance in Different Strokes. But he never shows the world his schwantz or fondles a tit or anything. He acts.

  Whole thing puzzles me. I’m sure exhibitionism plays a part, but hell, that’s not the whole thing. Well, I’ll be in close proximity to a batch of these damsels in the next couple weeks. Might be I’ll learn something.

  I mentioned this point to Alan. I won’t bother putting his theory down. It was a sophomoric load of bullshit. Vinnie was more direct.

  “They’re animals, Jack. That’s all. They’re bored, they got nothing to do, they like to fuck, somebody pays them to do it and it’s a kicky thing to do, so why not? A hundred dollars means they can put a little cocaine on top of the usual grass, and coke’s too expensive otherwise, so it’s cool. They’re a bunch of fucking animals and that’s what you got to work with in this business. You write lines for them, I direct them, and we can both of us imagine what it’d be like if we had actors to play with instead of these animals.”

  For all I know that’s as good an answer as any.

  • • •

  Tomorrow we start shooting. I find this very hard to believe. I don’t think I ever really believed this picture would happen, which may partially explain my original enthusiasm for the role of the Dirty Old Man.

  Yet the whole thing seems a little more real tonight The casting is done, and I never really believed we would have it wrapped up in the two days allotted for it. And tomorrow we are actually going to put film in a camera and point it at people and expose it. Exteriors, if it’s nice weather. Inside scenes with Pluto and Sophie if it isn’t. Vinnie has it all scheduled.

  • • •

  Just had a call from Tim Benton wanting to know how casting went. I gave him a progress report and then he got to the question that was really on his mind. Had we nailed down someone for the sheepdog scene?

  I’m coming to realize that a pornographic movie brings everybody’s special madness to the surface. Tim’s mania relates to his idiot sheepdog. He lives up in Connecticut and raises them, carts them around to dog shows and wins blue ribbons and accumulates points toward championships. I suppose everybody should have a hobby. Can’t say I care for the breed myself, all that hair over their eyes, that lumbering gait, the way their mouths are always wet and dirty. Anyway, Tim is completely wrapped up in these dogs. He gets upwards of three hundred dollars a puppy and they run around eight pups to a litter, so I guess he must be doing something right.

  It’s Tim’s fault I’m involved in all of this. I’ve known him since college, play poker with him once a week. He knew Alan the Producer, who approached him some months ago to see if he wanted to invest in a porno movie. Tim began syndicating some investment shares, brought up the question at the game, got a lot of interest. I said I’d like to look at the script.

  Why did I ever say a thing like that?

  The script turned out to be, according to Alan, “a little rough.” He didn’t know the half of it. I think it was Alan himself who came up with the basic notion, a fusion of the Aladdin and Faust myths with a woman selling her soul to the Devil in return for sexual fulfillment. Alan then hired some alleged writer and gave him something like twenty-four dollars in beads to do a screenplay. The writer stole the few old jokes he remembered, threw in the worst dialogue in history, handed back a thirty-page partial script, and went away. He was absolutely right to go away.

  Th
en Vinnie took this piece of garbage and added some ideas, of his own. What I wound up looking at was the basic frame of our shooting script, the opening auction sequence, a couple of scenes between Pluto and Sophie, an endless Rasputin scene, a vague sketch for a cabaret number, and half a page of notes on the orgy scene. There was also an absolutely hideous ending in which Pluto winds up balling Sophie with the stipulation that she not look at his sex organ, and he gets her off, and at the end she peeks at his organ and we see he’s been fucking her with the Washington Monument. This last was Alan’s idea, which is probably why he loved it.

  I kept most of the structure because it seemed easier than thinking up something new and equally rotten, spent a while refitting the bones of this skeleton, then wrote the thing. And rewrote it, and rewrote it again, and participated in fourteen thousand script conferences with Alan and Vinnie.

  There have been problems. Two problems, basically. One of them is Alan and the other one is Vinnie.

  Alan has two major ideas about this movie. He talks about both of them all the time when he’s out raising money, which is most of the time. I don’t know whether he believes them or he thinks they make a good sales pitch. I think he probably believes them by now; most good salesmen fall for their own pitches sooner or later.

  The first premise is that the successful porno flick of the future has to offer more than sex. The production values have to be good. The acting has to be superior. The script has to be professional. Obviously sex will remain the force which pulls people into the theater, and which pegs a ticket at five dollars instead of two and a half, but there has to be more supplementary entertainment value if a film is going to go over in a big way. Thus we’re budgeted at sixty thou instead of the fifteen or twenty that most of these grind-and-grunt operas come in at, and thus we’ve spent time on the script.

  I have no trouble with this first premise. It’s the second one that annihilates me, and this is the one close to Alan’s heart.

  He thinks these films have to appeal to a female audience. He thinks it’s very essential that they not alienate women, that they not cast women in a subservient role, that they not exploit women. He firmly believes, and has made known his belief in all fourteen thousand of our script conferences, that if we make a film that shows women in a light they can identify with, they will all come to see our fuckie-suckie movie.

  I think he’s insane.

  At the present time, because of the enormous influence of the New Morality, the liberating sexual effects of the Women’s Movement, and, for all I know, the sunspot cycle, we have finally reached a point where women are willing to see porno movies. As a result, they now constitute approximately one percent of the audience for these films.

  So if you make a movie which appeals to women, and it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, doubling the female membership of your audience, you’ve turned one percent into two percent. And those other ninety-eight percent of your audience are a bunch of men who couldn’t care less whether this film is going to get a Nihil Obstat from the National Organization of Women. They want to go into a theater and see something that will give them a couple of chuckles and a hard-on.

  I’ve explained this to Alan around fourteen thousand times and he always winds up agreeing with me. Which proves very little, because Alan always agrees with the person he talked to last.

  He’s afraid the script as it presently stands degrades Sophie and makes a loser out of her. I do not know why; he’s about as articulate as Vinnie in explaining subtleties like this. He doesn’t like the ending, the Satan scene, because he thinks it shows up Sophie as a loser. On that basis I added the voiceover exchange between Madge and Pluto at the end, where they come out and explain that she’s a winner. They aren’t explaining to the audience. I figure the audience already realized this. They’re explaining to Alan.

  That’s how Alan is a problem. Vinnie is a problem because he made an attempt at rewriting that first script, and he is head over heels in love with every cumbersome line he committed to paper. I keep taking them out and he keeps putting them back in. Also, he’s evidently a maniac for camera angles. The script we’ve got now specifies every viewpoint shift, every cut, everything. He even got me to the point where I was doing that. Now, I can’t believe the pros do it this way. I’ve seen enough Hollywood film scripts to know they don’t. Of course they shoot scenes from every angle and work it all out in the editing room, which we can’t afford to do, but even so, you can’t specify your cutting that completely in advance, can you? And our dialogue scenes never stay in two-shot for more than half a sentence. It has to cost a ton to do that much backing and filling.

  At one point I said something like, “Look, let us face facts. No matter what we do with this picture, they are not about to show it at Cannes.”

  Vinnie looked owlishly at me. “Don’t be too sure of that,” he said. And grinned to show it was a gag, but it wasn’t. He was kidding on the square. He really wants to make a pornographic movie they can show at Cannes.

  Everybody’s crazy.

  • • •

  I completely lost track of Tim Benton, didn’t I? It’s late, and my mind seems to be wandering, which ought to be legitimate in a diary. Well, let’s get back to Tim.

  I wondered why he was all that interested in this project. Money, of course; he can probably stand to make a hefty profit if the film goes as we hope it will. And the usual desire which probably motivates most of the backers to be on the inside of something very outré. But I figured that, given the nature of the film, most of the backers would have some kind of sexual motive. They might not want to get laid in the course of it. I’m sure plenty of them do, but they’d want to watch the filming, or rub elbows (at the very least) with the stars. Some of them want to be in the movie. Almost all of them want to be in crowd scenes.

  Tim wants his dog to be in a movie.

  I doubt he had this idea in the beginning. But when we were brainstorming the orgy sequence I mentioned something about how we ought to have some kind of an animal act in there, and he volunteered one of his sheepdogs. I began to see that he was doing more than volunteering. He was actively campaigning for the dog’s inclusion. A couple of times he called me, primarily to make sure that I was including the sheepdog, that the latest script conference had not transformed his pet into “the dog on the cutting room floor,” etc.

  He really wants his mutt to eat out some poor girl in living color.

  I assured him we got the girl cast. I told him how she didn’t object to the sheepdog, or even to the sex of the sheepdog. He asked what the girl looked like. I pretended to remember and described her as most attractive.

  “Hey,” I said, “I was thinking. I mean, we told the kid that the dog was trained, she wouldn’t bite, no trouble. Like automatically to put her at ease. But, uh, is that the truth? The dog won’t get carried away and get rough, will she?”

  What he said was, “She never has yet.”

  I’m sure he was kidding.

  —Thursday

  Beautiful weather, which improved everybody’s spirits. Bad weather would not have been ruinous, as we had contingency plans. Either way we’re going to film some minor scenes featuring either Sophie and Pluto or Sophie alone. But, because we had good weather today, we are more flexible; we can shoot the indoor stuff some other time, and we got a lot of the outdoor stuff in the can today.

  I wonder if it’s any good.

  The economics of filmmaking make it a confusing business for anyone with a direct turn of mind. I’m used to writing things, and my usual procedure, not an uncommon one in the field, is to begin at the beginning and carry on gamely to the end. Same went for writing the script of Different Strokes. There was a certain amount of backing and filling, what with the endless revisions, but it was basically a fairly straightforward process.

  Not so with filmmaking. It’s more like working a crossword puzzle, doing a little work in this corner, then moving over here and penciling in a few definitions
, and working your way around in this fashion until, hopefully, you’ve filled in all the spaces.

  • • •

  If I were making a film, my inclination would be to shoot the first scene, then the second scene, and so forth and so on. That would be my inclination, but of course I would know better than to follow it. You simply can’t. You have to schedule things so that you make the most economical use possible of actors, crew and equipment, and so that you manage to get anything wrapped up in the shortest possible number of days.

  So today we shot a lot of outdoor stuff of Sophie and Pluto. We did the latter portion of the precredit sequence, from Sophie’s emergence from the auction gallery to her entering her apartment building. (We’re using Alan’s building, using Alan’s apartment for Sophie’s. And we used Alan’s very own doorman for the crotch-shot shtick. He doesn’t know it’s a porno flick, or that the camera winking his way was actually zooming in on his crotch. I think Alan gave him a couple of bucks.)

  It seemed to me that Vinnie shot a ton of film for the montage of Sophie walking around. That’s all going to amount to maybe fifteen seconds of screen time. But I gather he wants an awful lot of cuts so that he can stop frame on different scenes for the credits. I suppose he knows what he’s doing.

  We shot Sophie emerging from the Savoy Galleries on East 52nd Street. We’ll be filming the actual auction scene in one of the downtown galleries on University Place where the owner is tight with one of our backers, and we originally planned to shoot exteriors there, but Vinnie reasoned that we ought to get our outside shots at the Savoy rather than chase downtown and back.

  We also did the exterior montage of Sophie and Pluto making the nightlife scene. I’m getting out of order here; we did that last of all, just before we called it a night. We would drive a couple of blocks in a caravan of two cars and the camera crew’s truck, unpack our equipment, and set up a shot of Pluto holding a taxi door for Sophie, leading her across to Thursday’s or Maxwell’s Plum or whatever, then pack up and go away again. We showed them going in and out of places. When all this is cut and spliced it will suggest they’re having a night on the town. But it’s hard to believe it’s gonna work when you’re there watching it.