"Fourplay" (A Comedy in Three Acts)

A bunch of the boys are whooping it up at Elaine's one sodden evening in early 1973, their imaginations inflamed by Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones and, to be sure, Marlon Brando's big first in Last Tango. The conversation gets around to the possibility of making what one of the conspirators now describes as "a hard-core, sophisticated, big-name, auteur-style sex movie." The big names at hand include Candy co-author Terry Southern, novelist Bruce Jay Friedman and perennial Playboy contributor Dan Greenburg, along with lesser-known Carl Gurevich, a former insurance man and semipro hedonist (also a talent scout for the Baltimore Colts, but never mind that) who was about to become executive producer of Fourplay. It may be time to mention that all are more or less charter members of Elaine's--an "in" place on Manhattan's Upper East Side, frequented by artists, writers and expatriates from the Stage Delicatessen and Sardi's.

Jump-cut a few frames. Fourplay becomes a fact, or at least a patently offensive blueprint with assured financial backing. After a few inevitable complications because that's showbiz, the nuclear task force--sworn in blood to devise a four-part sex movie--starts running into serious problems. One being simple arithmetic, since there are as yet only three parts. Then Friedman gets involved with Tony Curtis and a brand-new play called Turtlenecks, bound for Broadway but succumbing to shell shock out of town. So his movie turns into playwright Jack Richardson's adaptation of a Friedman short story, The Vortex. Greenburg's scenario shows signs of life, except that Buck Henry declines to star in Norman and the Doll, since he isn't sure it can be brought off to satisfy his own highly whimsical standards of good taste.

Southern is working and reworking a couple of scripts as if he has a demon on his tail, when someone has a flash that this lickerish quartet might be rounded out by director John Avildsen. As the man behind an irreverent sex spoof called Guess What We Learned in School Today?, followed by Joe, Cry Uncle and Save the Tiger, Avildsen is at loose ends after annulling a deal to direct Serpico, and happens to be in possession of a wild idea that gives even his closest chums the jitters. "It came to me when Johnson was President, though it's like Nixon taping a wet dream," says Avildsen today, with Inaugural Ball finally in the can, written by David Odel, starring Zero Mostel and Estelle Parsons as a U.S. President and First Lady who are challenged by their daughter's kidnapers, in lieu of ransom, to perform a lewd act on national television.

As Fourplay grows lewder, Gurevich acquires a partner in Danish-born Benni Korzen, born to the purple and able to prove it with a made-in-Denmark documentary called Private Party. According to Korzen, they are an ideal team: "I had a background in films, and Gurevich had a background in sex."

Gurevich's impressive credentials include the fact that he had been host of an orgy attended by Greenburg as basic research for Dan's first-person epic My First Orgy, published in Playboy's December 1972 issue. Quoth Gurevich: "Before I became a film producer, sex was the most important thing in my life, though I felt others took it too seriously, and believed I had an insight into sensuality that most people lack. So we started out with feverish conviction as a little $15,000 porno movie and wound up spending over $700,000 on a family sex picture."

What Korzen and Gurevich initially forget to remember is Washington, D.C., where nine distinguished members of the U.S. Supreme Court are pondering the nation's apparent passion for obscenity and pornography. The world learns, late in June, that at least five of them are pretty angry about it. Soon afterward, Carnal Knowledge is declared too raunchy for Albany, Georgia. The rest is history, but the creators of Fourplay feel history closing in on them like a hastily zipped fly.

After Buck Henry says no to Norman and the Doll, deadpan comic and 1968--1972 Presidential hopeful Pat Paulsen inherits the lead role, while comedian Rodney Dangerfield and Sylvia Miles--the first performers considered as White House occupants for Inaugural Ball--take the Fifth rather than run the risk of offending. "We were still talking about some explicit sex in the President's sequence," says Gurevich. "My hope was that we'd find talented people from Hollywood to take the next major step toward liberation. I wanted to think big--you know, Burt Reynolds balling Jane Fonda."

"We failed upward," adds Avildsen in regard to the ultimate casting coup that brought him Mostel and Parsons, as well as Laurie Heineman (Jack Lemmon's hippie pickup from Save the Tiger) to play the President's daughter.

The way things turn out, graphic sex and nudity become irrelevant if not flagrantly beyond the law as far as Inaugural Ball is concerned. In Avildsen's words: "I'm not sure the world is ready to confront Zero totally naked."

Korzen, Gurevich & Co. nevertheless leap at the chance to let Playboy photograph key sequences of Fourplay as they might have been if the Supreme Court had allowed a little more natural lubrication. Paulsen and co-star Deborah Loomis--cast as the life-sized Polish doll who is taken home from a toy store to be consumer tested by a horny schlemiel--accordingly agree to replay portions of Greenburg's scenario that director Robert McCarty has shot several ways, with a clothed, semiclothed and unclothed doll.

"There's not much of human experience I'd like to censor, except eating people alive," says Paulsen, who believes he is fully qualified as a sex symbol, having taken 69 diverse positions in the 1972 Presidential race. Still running as a dark horse, Paulsen campaigns on the college circuit, where he has been booked to deliver hundreds of lectures on astrology, sex, drugs and current affairs.

As a matter of fact, Paulsen's standard spiel for students utilizes a matched pair of Barbie and Ken dolls, which he considers important visual aids for his brand of sex education. "I undress them, removing their tiny clothes. It gets embarrassing when I put them back in their box and they start fooling around. D'you suppose this is why I was invited to do Norman and the Doll?"

If he had it to do over, Pat insists he might throw caution to the wind. "Now that I think of it, I probably should have been completely nude while humping the doll. Nobody asked me. They may have felt I'm not exciting to look at naked. Nudity doesn't bother me, and I find my own very exciting. That's why I stand in front of mirrors a lot, usually wearing a few frills. Much more provocative.

"Still, the producers of Fourplay showed some courage in going as far as they did. We were a little squeamish about the language, after the Court thing. I think we went down from three fucks to one. I left in my 'Throw her a fuck' line because I thought it was funny. I've always found sex pretty funny. I especially like that weird noise you get in your chest. Women make some pretty amusing noises, too. No one can deny that sex is a subject of growing interest, and I learned about it the American way--in the streets and gutters, where we're told it belongs."

• • •

Director Bruce Malmuth, a hip, bushy-bearded film maker who casually admits he's been to a few orgies in his time, was swept up in The Vortex after earning heavy bread from TV commercials, and expected to make a movie quite different from the one that will open this spring. "We were talking about a fuck film, with insertions and penetration shots. I wanted to be able to go all the way, if necessary, to satisfy the producers. Before the obscenity rulings, Avildsen and I went up to a live sex show on Seventh Avenue to see a girl who could blow out candles with her cunt. Afterward, I talked to her for an hour. I ended up making a triple-threat TV movie with a safe R and an X-rated version.

"Eventually, I discovered that strange things happen when you collect a bunch of people and begin to learn where everyone really is about sex. When we finally got to it, each day of shooting became like an encounter session, yet in the end you don't sacrifice acting ability for a peek at somebody's cock. Jerry Orbach had the lead, and he turned out to be pretty reserved in certain areas. I was constantly disappointed and challenged by actresses who wanted to know why they should take off their clothes if Jerry didn't. It came to be a moral problem, and I learned that my own sexuality had to be questioned in terms of being open in my contacts with women."

Orbach, star of such Broadway musical comedies as Promises, Promises, made a breakthrough in the use of four-letter words onstage when he played in Friedman's Scuba Duba. He describes himself without reservation as a maverick but is not eager to follow Lemmon, John Lennon, Burt Reynolds and Brando in the male nudity boom. "I'll stand up and match any guy if I have to prove something, but sex is funnier if you don't see it all. The only thing in Deep Throat that made me laugh was a character who asked, 'Mind if I smoke while you're eating?' When you get into full frontal nudity, though, most guys look like prisoners of war."

In The Vortex, Orbach plays a hung-up hack writer whose indulgent muse (a genie in a red bikini, drolly performed by George S. Irving of Broadway's Irene) gives him a chance to revisit the past and straighten out several bungled seductions of his youth. As elaborations on the wordiest episode of Fourplay, photographer J. Barry O'Rourke's pictures speak for themselves.

• • •

Zero Mostel, pound for pound one of the world's great funnymen, showed up for his Playboy shooting full of sight gags, double takes and liberated one-liners in defense of artistic freedom. "Censorship is insane," he declared. "When in the intercourse of human events ... isn't that what the Declaration of Independence says? Where are the broads, for Chrissake?"

The broads were an idea dreamed up by Zero in collusion with Avildsen, when both tried to imagine how Inaugural Ball might have bounced if there had been absolutely no limits to their portrait of a U.S. President as an impotent square. "Before the Court's decisions came down, we intended to have a scene in a phallus room full of model cocks," said Avildsen. "The notion of Presidential tissue stimulation, to get the Chief ready for his TV performance, had to be dropped. Actually, the way the picture is now, there's hardly a boob showing. If the Court decides what you can see, the next step is to decide what you do see, then what you must see ... it's scary."

What you see here was never a part of Fourplay but projects the Mostel-Avildsen vision of how world leaders might rally to support a Head of State whose potency, or lack of it, becomes a grave international issue. Special emissaries arrive, trained for the ticklish task of helping America's President turn on. "I wish we could have afforded such lovelies on our budget," Avildsen said wistfully.

Goggle-eyed, irrepressible as a burning tank, Mostel's quasi-official greetings to his international warm-up squad ran the gamut from "Who's larger, me or Mao?" and "I had hoped Nureyev would be with us" to "No cockee--no fuckee" or "I'm only doing this to establish Executive privilege."

For a sequence in which the President's daughter lies abed with one of her kidnapers (Joseph Palmieri), waiting to see what happens on live TV from the White House, Avildsen would have preferred to put his kidnap victim and amiable mafioso into a bathtub full of spaghetti. Since Laurie Heineman was unavailable during Playboy's shooting, an enthusiastic stand-by, actress-model Robin Leslie, joins Palmieri for an orgy of pasta, vino and violated innocence that outdoes the director's wildest dreams.

• • •

Hardest hit by the Court-ordered knockout punch to freedom of expression was Southern's segment Twice on Top, which instantly became the unfilmable film and made Fourplay a minus-one feature ironically subtitled "A Comedy in Three Parts." Unlike his writing colleagues, who tended, as a spokesman for the producers said, to become nonspecific about sex--"and then they make love" was the key cop-out phrase from the authors--Southern took hard-core to heart. Twice on Top graphically described the downfall of a sweet young thing who assumes the dominant position while balling her uncle, an Army general. Tried by a judge, she is refused absolution by a priest--though all three men imagine themselves having her in explicit sex fantasies--and is finally tied to a crucifix, gassed and beaten to death by the trio of male chauvinists wielding huge phallic balloons.

There was some residual bitterness about the cancellation of Twice on Top, particularly on the part of Rip Torn, scheduled for a triple stellar role as general, judge and priest. "Terry and I were expendable and thrown to the wolves of the U.S. Supreme Court," complained Rip. "These are essentially the same people, in positions of power, who wanted to set up a floating whorehouse for political purposes. Right-wing porno, I guess, is all right."

Be that as it may, it's obvious that the screen's loss is our readers' gain.

norman and the DollstarringPat Paulsenwith Deborah Loomis

The VortexstarringJerry Orbachwith Kathleen Joyce, Louisa Moritz, Cia Lozell

Inaugural BallstarringZero Mostelwith Estelle Parsons, Robin Leslie, Joseph Palmieri and a line-up of lovelies