Blue Movie (20 page)

“Nope,” Tony shook his head sadly, “that was it.”

“Rather a sheltered existence . . . for one who hopes to capture the elusive feelings . . . fears . . . hopes of the legendary
Everyman.”

“Yeah, well, the thing is I’ve got a good imagination . . . you dig? And all I’m trying to say about using a fag sequence for the movie is that we would end up using
chick values
. . . or rather, non-gay values toward chicks. I mean, if you try to romanticize fucking a young, supple, smooth-skin boy in the ass, then what you’re really talking about is fucking a
chick.
Right?”

“In the ass?”

“Oh wow . . . in the
ass,
in the
cunt,
in the
armpit
—I mean,
someplace
. . . but it’s still a chick . . . a soft, warm, cuddly, smooth-skinned
chick
—not some
bony, hairy ass-hole!
”

Boris nodded thoughtfully. “I just wanted to give it a fair shake before we dumped it . . . you know, kick it around, run it up the pole and see if anybody salutes.”

“Or,”
said Tony, “as the great S. K. Krassman would say, ‘Stroke it a while and see if we get any jissem.’”

“Right,” said B.

Tony sighed. “And now we know.” He took a drink. “I thought I was about to get the ax.”

“And I thought you were about to walk.”

“Never, maestro.”

“Well, what we’ve got to decide is how many episodes—four of twenty-three, or five of eighteen. Now it’s going to be very tough, maybe impossible, to keep the lez and the nympho segments under twenty-five minutes each—there’s just too much happening in them—so that leaves us with forty minutes, ideally, for the rest of the picture. Okay, we’ve still got
‘Idyllic’ ‘Profane,’
and
‘Incestuous.’
I just wonder if there’s time to do all three. Now I feel pretty strongly about the
‘Profane’
one—you know, “The Nun and the Gambler,’ ‘The Priest and the Hooker,’ something along those lines—could even be
funny.
A little of the proverbial ‘comic relief,’ eh, Tone? Ha.”

“We’ll have to keep it in taste.”

“No toilet jokes about the priest.”

“Right.”

“Now let me ask you this—what about the biggie? How’s that shaping up in your great gourd? Mother-son? Father-daughter? Brother-sister? I think we’ve got to follow our most personal impulses on this one. Now tell me, had you rather fuck your
daughter,
or your
mom . . .
assuming, natch, that your mom is a trim thirty-two or thirty-three?”

“Thirty-two
or
thirty-three?
Christ, is that
possible?
I mean, how old does that make me?”

“Sixteen or seventeen.”

“Hmm,” Tony raised his brows, obviously intrigued, “a trim thirty-two or thirty-three, eh? Red hair?”

“Could be.”

“Wait a minute. I think I’ve got an idea—let’s talk about the
‘Idyllic’ . . .
you know, I said before when I was fucking Jason I’d pretend that it was his
sister?
Well, that wasn’t quite true—I mean, I’d pretend that it was
her
all right, the same girl, but I’d pretend that she was
my
sister . . . dig? See, I never
had
a sister, and I used to construct these great fantasies about having a beautiful sister and being very close, like a
twin
maybe, having this fantastic rapport with her, and then
making it.
I mean, what could be more
romantic
. . . more
idyllic?
I think I could write a
beautiful
sequence about that, B., I really do.”

“Hmm, that’s pretty wild—combining the
‘Incestuous’
and the
‘Idyllic.’
Now we’re going to run
short,
for Chrissake.”

“I can get twenty-five minutes out of that—Christ, I could get twenty-five
hours
out of it.”

“What age would they be?”

“Young,
but mature—I mean, not thirteen or fourteen, but sixteen or seventeen, maybe eighteen, old enough anyway to know what they’re doing.”

“Okay, groovy. Start writing it. How about if we get Dave and Debbie to play the kids?”

David and Deborah Roberts were actor and actress, very young and beautiful, brother and sister, siblings
extraordinaire.

“Wow . . . that’s gotta be
sen-fucking-sensational!”

The
mark-inside
was

coming up on the Rube

. . .
and that’s a rumble

nobody
can cool

Burroughs

Naked Lunch

A
NGELA
S
TERLING, LITHE
and rounded in her famous wrapper of blue brocade—a gift from Hans Heming—which she wore during most of her movie-mag interviews (hence its fame), strode across the Casbah boudoir set to where Boris and Lazlo were working out the first shot. Grips laying cable and gaffers driving nails stopped work like the freeze-frame in a movie, all heads turning as though swiveled by a single wire, every gaze riveting the fabulous face for an instant before dropping abruptly to a region below hip-line, where the blue wrapper parted with each long-limbed stride, flashing a stretch of famous bare thigh like a stabbing knife.

“We’ll open with those stock exteriors,” Boris was saying to Lazlo, “beginning with the long, wide aerial, to establish that it’s Morocco, and we’ll stay with that, down, down, down, right to this window, and then we’ll pick it up inside, dig?” With his view-finder to his eye, he backed slowly away from the window, continuing: “We’ll pick it up right here at the window, like a
perfect reverse,
and we’ll keep the camera moving at exactly the same pace that it came down, pulling back from the window very slowly, avoiding the bed for the moment, going for details of the room—exploring, lingering—and this could be quite long, because we might use it behind titles . . . then finally, of course, we end up on the bed, where they’re making love. . . .” He lowered the viewfinder, and looked at the cameraman, “And you’ve got to work out the move, Laz, so that it’s
logical
and
inevitable
we end on the bed—
not
just because there happen to be a couple of people
fucking
on it, but because the directional symmetry of the camera movement
requires
it. It’s got to be
inherent
in the move—so we better make it generally a left-right move, and vaguely clockwise . . . I think that will work. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Laz, already studying it, retracing the move Boris had indicated.

Boris turned to Angela, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching and listening in much the way she had sat on the edge of her chair at Actors Workshop.

“Sorry,” he said, taking her hand, “we were right in the middle of something.”

She smiled up at him, shaking her head, eyes glistening—her adoration radiant. “No,” she said softly, “it was wonderful—it’s such a . . .
privilege
to be, well, you know, sort of ‘behind the scenes’—I mean,
creatively,
with someone like
you.”

He smiled and sat down on the bed beside her. “Have you read the script?”

“Oh it’s
beautiful,”
she sighed. “I’m not sure I understand it, but I
do
know poetry when I see it, and I
love
poetry.”

The “script,” as he called it, was scarcely more than an outline, an incoherent mishmash of sensual scenes intercut with childhood impressions—which he and Tony had thrown together the night before, solely for her benefit.

“I thought the childhood scenes were so
marvelous,”
she exclaimed; then, with dark concern: “Do you think Jen can handle it?”

Boris patted her hand. “She’ll be perfect.” He looked at her for a long moment, head to the side, as though calculating a risk. “Tony says you’ve been talking about a
double.”

“You mean for the lovemaking scenes.”

“Hmm.”

“Well, I just naturally
assumed
. . . I mean, if they’re going to actually
make love
. . .”

He laughed in a chiding way. “But
you’ve
been studying at the
Workshop
—didn’t they even teach you how to make love?”

“Oh Boris, really,” she turned aside as if she could somehow dodge the painful remark, but then she had to face it. “You mean, when you show . . . well, show it
going in
and everything, you want me to actually be
doing
it?”

“Arabella did.”

She was very impressed.
“Arabella? Really?”

“And
Pamela Dickensen.”

She was
not
impressed. “Oh well,
Pam
. . .
she
would.” She tossed her head haughtily. “
She’s
still working for two-fifty a picture, isn’t she?
I
know, we have the same agent.”

“She wasn’t doing it for
money,
Angie,” Boris said gravely. “She did it because she
believed
in the
film.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” said Angela, her brow crinkling, “I thought they were doing the thing about
lesbians.”

“So?”

“So, where does the
lovemaking
come in?”

“They
made love, in their own way.”

“You mean
kissing
each other? Oh come
on,
Boris, there’s a big difference between
that
and being
fucked on camera!”

Just off the set, not far from where they were sitting, a curious assembly was in progress. Under the supervision of Freddie the First, about twenty-five Senegalese were being lined up and sorted about. Having been recruited by able Morty Kanowitz from the African quarter of Paris and off the streets of Morocco itself, they were of various ages and various shapes, though all of them—either by girth or by height—seemed larger than life; and, collectively and singly, they were the color of anthracite coal: the purest of black, highlighted, or so it seemed, by glints of blue.

“You’re not
anti-spade,
by any chance, are you?” asked Boris.

“Huh?” Angela, who had been staring at the milling group with a sort of dumb consternation, turned to face him again. “No, of course not.”

“Have you ever made it with a black?”

She adjusted her wrapper, so that at the part, where it had been swinging open, one side now carefully over-lapped the other. “What difference does that make?” she asked coldly.

Boris shrugged. “I was just curious.”

“Well, as it so happens, I
haven’t.
For one thing, there’s just never been any . . .
occasion.
I mean, I don’t think I even
know
any Neg—spades, blacks whatever it is you call them now.” She looked back at the assemblage. “My God, they’re really
black
though, aren’t they!?! Christ, I’ve never
seen
any like that before!”

“Does it turn you on at all?”

She looked at him again, eyes going up in a gesture of exasperation. “No,” she said evenly, “I can’t say that it does.”

“You think you’ll be able to
play
it?”

She was breathless with her reassurances. “Of
course,
darling, I’ll be able to play it! It’s just that I couldn’t actually
do
it—I mean, if I had to actually
do
it, I
wouldn’t
be able to play it. Don’t you see?”

Boris nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “Okay, we’ll try it your way.”

She squeezed his arm, beaming gratefully. “Oh thank you, Boris, you won’t regret it.”

He returned the squeeze with a smile. He had never, of course, expected her to do the full-pen scenes without a double; but, through his insistence on it, he had managed to put her on the defensive—and
that
was a score, natch.

KRASSMAN

HOTEL IMPERIAL

VADUZ, LIECHTENSTEIN

ARRIVING 1700 HOURS THURSDAY 26TH. PLEASE

HAVE SCRIPT AND SHOOTING SCHEDULE MY ROOM

PENTHOUSE SUITE HOTEL IMPERIAL BEFORE THAT TIME.

REGARDS

L. HARRISON

Sid paced up and down the office, waving the cable about frantically. “Well, boys, the shit is about to hit the fan!” He turned imploringly to Boris. “B., what the hell are we going to
do
when the Rat Prick sees what’s happening here?”

Boris sat slumped in a chair, his head resting in one hand, eyes closed. “I don’t care what you do—just keep him away from the set. I don’t want him on the set, and I don’t want him looking at any footage.”

Sid threw up his arms. “Oh sure—and just how am I going to do that?”

“By force. We’ve got two guards—hire two more.”

Sid gave a sign to Mort, who immediately left the room to take care of it.

“And listen, Sid,” Boris continued, without raising his head, “keep him away from Angie—I don’t want him fucking up her head at this point.”

Sid rolled his eyes in despair. “Oh great, ‘Keep him away from Angie,’ he says. She’s under
contract
to him, she’s in
default
of contract—Christ, that’s the first place he’ll go.”

Boris shook his head. “We’re going to have trouble with her if they start rapping—she’s shaky enough as it is.” He opened his eyes and looked up wearily at Sid. “Didn’t you see her this morning? Christ, she’s
scared shitless
of all those black cocks. A couple of times I didn’t think she was going to make it through the scene.” He stretched and yawned. “It’s very simple, Sid—just don’t let them be alone together.”

Sid became quite irate. “Then
you’re
going to have to start
fucking
her, damn it!” He paced about, wringing his hands, his face twisted with anguish and apprehension. “I mean, she’s here four or five days awready, the most beautiful girl in the world, and
nobody’s fucking her!
How do you think that makes
her
feel?!?”