Blue Movie (2 page)

The
soirée cinématique
was a series of typically nowhere, dumbbell stag-films—each about ten minutes long, with no plot, no sound, no credits, nothing. Ugly people in harsh, flat lighting, dominated by the same rear master-shot, or “monster-shot” as Sid kept shouting (“Hey, here comes the monster-shot! Pass the tissues!”), of some cretin’s buttocks thrusting halfheartedly into a dopey girl’s black-stockinged honey-pot—except somehow it looked more like a cesspool. The last one, however, was a cut above the others; it featured a well-known Texas stripper and was in full, if somewhat washed-out, color. The setting was a Beverly Hills swimming pool and there was even a vague attempt at plot—the sub-titles beginning: She (cheerfully): “Say, how about a dip?” He (suggestively): “I wouldn’t mind dipping into
you,
baby!” Then cut to the water where they are swimming nude. Quick cut to him sitting on the edge of the pool, and her, still in the water, head half emerged, closed-eyed, avidly sucking him.

“Hey, the water sure looks cold!” shouted Sid with a raucous belch.

He (smiling): “We’re going to have some fun, sister—now that I know how you like it!” Cut to the bedroom where he’s throwing it to her in the same old dumbbell master-shot.

B. was annoyed at the waste. “How is it possible to make an attractive girl look that bad?” Sid pretended not to understand. “Attractive? You want that broad, you got her. Hey, Eddie!” Shouting for his real or imaginary assistant, who presumably would arrange for immediate transport, head, etcetera. Teeny, sensing malaise, rushed over, beckoning Boris and Sid to follow.

Of the twelve accessible bedrooms in the house (two more were locked) six had mirrors on the ceiling above the bed, and on the walls alongside it, and four others contained video-tape cameras, concealed in the walls at strategic positions. The two rooms which did
not
have hidden cameras had a compensating feature: the mirrors alongside the bed were Duolite glass, which can be seen through from the outside—the outside in this case being the two rooms that were locked. And it was to one of these rooms that the perfect hostess led them—herself in front, absurdly wide-eyed, a finger to her lips in exaggerated caution and stealth, tiptoeing, exactly like a little girl stealing down a corridor toward the pre-dawn Christmas tree.

She carefully unlocked the door and ushered them in, gesturing silence all the while, and bade them sit in Eames chairs facing a wall-size panel of glass, which proved to be the reverse side of a two-way mirror, against the bed in the adjacent room. Next, she unlocked a control-box, and flicked a switch inside it. There, at first like a mural, then as on a Panavision screen, with deep romantic back-lighting, were Les Harrison and two identical teeny-boppers, blond, sixteen, and cute as two buttons—in a posture of love-making perhaps better diagrammed than described. Les himself was lying flat on his back while the two girls sat facing each other astride him—one, with vage covering his member, the other with vage covering his mouth—while the girls themselves, sitting upright, were locked in what appeared to be a very passionate embrace, bodies and mouths fastened together like suction-cups. A curious tableau, almost a still-life, for at the moment they scarcely moved, just sitting there, as in some kind of extraordinary exotic tea ceremony. But then, still entwined in a deep, deep, closed-eyed kiss, two blond heads as one, they slowly began to writhe . . . languorously, caressing each other, hands delicately tracing the contour of the face, neck, shoulders, breast, waist, stomach, thighs, of each, simultaneously. Because of their incredible resemblance, it was as though a girl were fondling her own image in a three-dimensional mirror. Narcissism at its nadir—and Les Harrison followed it closely in the glass . . . the same glass through which
he
was being observed by the fun trio on the opposite side. This gave rise to a weird countenance on his part, because in order to observe, and yet not falter in his tongue-in-vage work, he was obliged to cast his eyes sideways in a manner which seemed both eccentric and grotesque.

In addition to the real, live visual image before them, there was also sound amplification of what was taking place in the room . . . an amplification with such gain that the slightest move, sigh, or breath could not only be
heard,
but came across as a veritable scream of anguish or delight. One of the microphones was placed, in a unidirectional manner, at the foot and exact center of the bed, so that the actual viscosity of the thrust, the wet membrane friction of penis going in and out of mucous vage, could be heard in a way never heard before—at first even unrecognizable, but then of course, being in perfect sync and all, becoming quite unmistakable.

“Hey, that’s some
pickup,
” said Sid, never adverse to dropping a bit of expertise, “what is it, a Nagra Special?”

“Probably an A-R seventy,” said Boris, “with a booster.”

Sid nodded. “Jesus,
listen
to it! The sound of teeny-bopper pussy! There’s no other sound like it!”

Meanwhile, Teeny Marie, for her part, was far from idle. She flounced about the room, skirt raised to her waist, kicking in can-can style.

“Who wants a taste of my lamb-pit?!?” she screeched, “Who wants to dip into my fabulous honey-pot?!?”

Not getting any takers, she dropped to her knees in front of Sid, and began roughly grappling at his fly.

“Aw fer Chrissake!” he growled, pushing her away. “Lemme watch the show!”

She cleverly channeled her sideways momentum into a crotch-lunge for B.

“You’re a real doll,” he said gently, “but I think I’ll have to pass, too.”

“What a couple of wet-blanket creeps!” cried Teeny crossly, scrambling to her feet and executing a little dance of wrath. Then she seized a microphone from a wall bracket, flicked the button, and wheeling toward the glass tableau, screamed at the top of her voice: “Sock it to ’em, Les! You rat-prick fruit!”

The volume of this transmission must have been stupendous. It had the effect of a tidal wave, literally knocking the three revelers off the bed into a tangled heap on the floor. But then Les was on his feet in a trice, hopping mad and shouting furiously:

“You crazy freak-bitch! We were
coming
I tell you!
We were all coming!”

Presumably he knew that his tormentor was behind the mirror, because he stared in that direction—but he was staring at the wrong part of it, so the impression of being unobserved persisted.

“We won’t listen to that kind of talk!” shrieked Teeny, and turned off the amplification on their side, while Les covered his ears against the new blast, then began to shout (silently, for he could no longer be heard) and race about the room looking for something to hurl against the glass—but apparently the room had been designed with such contingencies in mind, for although lavishly appointed, there were literally no movable furnishings; everything was either built-in or secured to the floor. Finally he was reduced to snatching up his own shoes and flinging them ineffectually, at the wrong section of the mirror.

“Missed us, you great ninny!” Teeny cackled. “It wasn’t even close!”

By now the two nifties had gotten it slightly together and were sitting up on the floor on the far side of the bed, only their blond heads and bare shoulders visible, their lips moving at Les in some indecipherable remonstrance or perhaps simple inquiry as to what was happening.

His reply, if any, was not audible, of course, as he slumped down on the bed, a total collapse of defeat and dejection.

This seemed to tear Teeny apart.

“Oh my God,” she moaned, “what have we done to him?”

She began ripping off her clothes. “I’m coming, Les!” she cried, “I’m coming, my darling!” Then she flipped the switch on the two-way mirror, twisted the lock, and rushed madly out of the room, still tearing her garments from her and dropping them in flight.

Boris and Sid sat looking at the dark panel for a moment.

“Well, that seems to be that,” said B.

Sid grunted, and lumbered to his feet. “You know, I wouldn’t mind some of that teeny head.”

B. was thinking of something else, walked silently, while Sid continued to muse: “Wonder where the hell he found them . . . Christ, they sure are shicksa . . . probably
Swedes . . .
I hate the fucking Swedes. Except for Bergman, natch,” he added, hoping to amuse B.—who acknowledged the effort with scarcely more than a grunt.

Sid looked at him, undisturbed by his preoccupation. One thing in particular was locked in his mind concerning Boris; it was a conversation they had after the premiere of one of his movies, a movie on which Sid had been executive producer—a simple, poignant, tender, love story . . . a film which received the highest acclaim, and which was distinguished for, among other things a poetic and rather daring (for its day) bedroom two-shot. In this brief scene, the lovers, entwined in bare embrace, are visible only from the waist up. The man is lying on top, gently kissing the girl’s face, her throat, her shoulders . . . as his head moves slowly down between her breasts, the camera remains stationary, and his head gradually slides out of the frame and, presumably, down to her honey-pot, whereupon the camera moves up to her closed-eyed face and holds on her expression of mounting rapture.

Naturally, the film had been interfered with in various quarters of hinterland—including New York City. Petitions were rife, and vigilante groups active, to get “that monstrous cunnilingus episode” (as the
N.Y. Times
critic described it) out of the film.

There were abortive attempts to delete the major portion of the scene . . . with the projectionist, under union instruction, or management bribe, causing the film to jump the sprocket at the crucial point, and then rethreading several frames (two hundred feet actually) afterward.

Responsible critics, of course, were quick to seize ready cudgel in the film’s defense. The scene was lauded by the editors of
Cahiers du Cinéma
as a
“tour de force érotique”
unique in the history of contemporary film. It was described by
Sight and Sound
as “masterfully aesthetic . . . sheer poetry, and in the best possible taste.”

The critic’s use of the word “taste” in this instance had caused B. to smile. “How can he talk about
taste?”
he asked Sid (putting him on a bit), “. . . with the camera on the girl’s
face,
who knows
how
it tasted! Right, Sid?”

Understandably this had elicited the coarsest sort of rejoinder from Sid. “Huh?” not quite getting it at first, but then nodding violently, laughing, coughing, spitting, slapping his leg, urgently scratching his crotch: “Yeah, yeah, I know,
you’d
even like to show the guy
after
—pickin’ cunt-hair outta his teeth, huh? Haw, haw, haw!”

“Not necessarily,” said B., gentle and very earnest, “I would like to have followed his head, though . . . when it went down, out of the frame. I should have done that. It was a cop-out not to.”

Sid realized he was serious. “What . . . you mean, show him suckin’ her
cunt,
for Chrissake?!? Whatta you,
nuts?”

Of course this had been several years ago, six in all, and was now a part of cinematic history. In a subsequent film,
Enough Rope,
during a scene in which the voyeur-antagonist fastens his eye to a crack in the wall, while in the next room the heroine disrobes against the terrible heat of a Mexican summer afternoon, the camera (voyeur’s POV) finds occasion to linger, in a desultory, almost caressing fashion on her pubes. In commercial film prior to this, other than documentaries on nudism, a view of the pubic region—the “beaver shot” it was called—occurred only as a brief glimpse, a seven- or eight-frame cut, never in close-up, and, above all, never integrated as part of a “romantic,” or a deliberately erotic, sequence. Naturally, the studio was quick to snap its wig.

“Damn it to hell,” Les Harrison had wailed, “you’re sabotaging your whole career! And you’re taking a lot of good guys down the drain with you,” adding this last a bit piously, voice faltering, “. . . guys who were counting on this picture to get into general distribution . . . guys with families . . . kids . . . toddlers . . .”

Changed his tune, of course, when attendance pressure moved the film from the Little Carnegie to Loew’s big circuit, breaking all prev.

But last time out had been the big one:
male genitalia.
Somewhat flaccid, granted, but still there it was, right up there on the silver screen, bigger than life you might say.

That was a bit too much—even for those who had cheered him past previous milestones of cinema history. “Well,” they muttered, “this time he’s gone
too far!”

But Boris, of course, knew better. No erection, and no penetration—how to explain that little oversight to the muse of creative romance?

From his point of view, the stag movies they had just seen were more relevant, albeit unwittingly, to the crucial aesthetic issues and problems presented by the film of today, than were those of the master filmmakers, including himself. He was aware that the freedom of expression and development in cinema had always lagged behind that of literature, as, until recent years, it had lagged behind that of the theater as well. Eroticism of the most aesthetic and creatively effective nature abounded in every form of contemporary prose—why had it not been achieved, or even seriously attempted, on film? Was there something inherently alien to eroticism in the medium of film? Something too personal to share with an audience? Perhaps the only approach would be from the opposite side.

“Listen, Sid,” Boris was asking now, “those films we were looking at—do you think they could be improved?”

“Huh? ‘Improved?’ Are you
kiddin’?”
Understatement always seemed to antagonize Sid. “Christ, I seen better cunt at a senior-citizen trailer camp! Jeez, half the time I didn’t know I was watchin’ a
stag film
or a
dog-show,
for Chrissake! Ha, you bet your sweet ass they could be improved! Get some halfway decent cunt in there for openers!”