How to Cast a Porno Film and not Get too Nervous

"You Get Talented big-name people fucking on camera and you got yourself another Gone With the Wind." This is Carl Gurevich, a man with a dream.

How I know Carl Gurevich is that I wrote a thing in the December 1972 issue of Playboy called My First Orgy, and although I said in the piece that the host of my orgy was a tall guy named Walt, that was merely my crafty way of assuring the anonymity of a short guy named Carl. How I know Carl's dream is that I seem to have become a part of it. But perhaps, as they used to say in the old days, I should begin at the beginning.

One day last year I get a phone call from Carl, whom I have not heard from since the above-mentioned orgy. Carl tells me he has decided to produce a major motion picture with talented big-name people fucking on camera and Terry Southern is going to write it for him. Carl is new to showbiz and wants advice on working with writers. What it turns out Carl wants advice about, although this does not come out during the first phone call, is how to work a production schedule around a script that has yet to be written and that is showing few signs of being done so, to say the least.

As it happens, I was one of the contributors to Oh! Calcutta!, whose creators had a dream not wholly unlike Carl's, and it occurs to me that maybe Carl could hedge his production-schedule bets with Southern by breaking the film down into bite-size Oh! Calcutta!--like segments, with Southern responsible for only one of them. Maybe Carl could assign other segments to some of the people who wrote for Oh! Calcutta! itself--Jules Feiffer, Bruce Jay Friedman, John Lennon, Samuel Beckett, that whole crowd. I tell Carl that, if he insists, I might write a segment as well.

Carl likes the idea and Southern, when he hears about it, reportedly thinks it's Ok, too. Friedman isn't available, but a wonderful short story he's written is and playwright Jack Richardson agrees to adapt it for a second segment. John Avildsen, who directed such films as Joe and Save the Tiger, has an idea he wants to develop with a writer of his named David Odel, thus making segment number three. I allow myself to be arm-twisted into writing the fourth and final segment. All four segments will have not only separate writers but separate directors and casts.

The only working production person Carl knows is a dubious-sounding character whose experience has been limited to schlock porno films. At my suggestion, Carl hires a producer friend of mine named Benni Korzen, who knows a lot about film, and my 22-year-old sister-in-law, Amy Ephron, who knows a lot about everything else. The feature is given a working title of Fourplay and we are under way.

• • •

I have written a half-hour script called Norman and the Polish Doll. It's about a guy named Norman who is kind of a klutz with ladies, who attempts to solve his libidinal problems with a life-size mechanical doll from Poland that he finds in a toy store. The doll, though gorgeous and sexy, doesn't quite work out the way he thought it would. For example, when he tries to mount it, its talking mechanism keeps repeating "I vunt a bathie," till he's forced to give it a bath and, in the bath, it starts saying it wants a rubber ducky and a meaningful relationship. Norman's mother arrives, complicating matters further, and eventually an exasperated and sexually unfulfilled Norman is forced to schlep the doll back to the toy store.

It is now early on a sunny Monday morning in late spring. With me in my midtown Manhattan apartment are my director, Bob McCarty (who also directed a feature I wrote called I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband), and my aforementioned sister-in-law, Amy. We are about to begin casting the role of the voluptuous mechanical doll. The role of Norman has already been cast--comedian Pat Paulsen read the script, agreed to play him and that was that.

Amy's function here today is that of head casting person and gynecologist's nurse. That is, she is here to underscore the fact that, although we are going to be asking some lovely young ladies to take off their clothes for us, there is going to be absolutely no hanky-panky.

I don't know about Amy, but Bob and I are incredibly nervous. We have cast things together before, although not nude ones, and I think what is making us so nervous is the conflict of, on the one hand, our dazzling horniness and, on the other hand, our equally dazzling determination to remain professional and not to do anything to indicate that looking at lovely young ladies without their clothes on is any more stimulating than, say, gargling.

Our first actress arrives. She is introduced to us in my large, sun-filled living room and is asked to sit down with us and chat. The purpose of the chat is to enable Bob to explain what the film is about and to find out if the actress has any reservations about reading without her clothes. The plan is for the actress to read three scenes from the script with her clothes on, with me doing the part of Norman. Then, if we like her reading, we will ask her to undress and read with me again. Unfortunately, Bob goes to such lengths and such euphemisms to describe the sex and nudity in the script that our hopefully smutty film sounds suspiciously like something cooked up by Doris Day's mother. And if Bob has mentioned that we might be asking the actress to take off her clothes, I have somehow missed it.

We finish our chat and the actress stands up and reads her three scenes with me and does fairly well.

"Ok," says Bob as nonchalantly as possible, "now why don't you try it without your clothes?"

The actress looks genuinely alarmed.

"Why don't I what?" she says.

"Uh, why don't you try-it-without-your-clothes?" says Bob, getting very nervous. "Listen, remember when we were talking a little while ago, I said that if we thought you were a serious prospect, we'd ask you to read a second time without your clothes?"

The actress doesn't remember, of course, because Bob had been speaking so elusively and euphemistically, and now she is saying that nobody had ever mentioned the nudity thing to her at all, not her agent, who'd sent her up to read for us, nor anybody else, and although she likes what she's read so far of the script and although she likes us personally, she's never in her life auditioned for anything nude and she is monumentally embarrassed.

Amy swears to us that she told the lady's agent the role involved nudity, and Bob and I both say in chorus that there is no point in pursuing the nudity thing, since she is so embarrassed, and it soon becomes apparent that it isn't that she doesn't want to take off her clothes for us, it's that she wants to be reassured and sort of talked into it.

Bob and I begin to reassure her and talk her into it, and the tone and the cadences of our voices and the whole thing is so much like coaxing a girl to go to bed with you in college that we are all beginning to get terribly turned on. Finally, breathless and blushing furiously, the actress says she will do it, and it really is as if she were our date and is telling us she has decided it will be all right to go all the way with us.

Bob tells her she can change in the other room if she would be more comfortable.

"Why should I?" she says, blushing even more furiously. "What have I got to change into? I mean, you're going to see everything anyway, so what's the point?"

Bob and I pretend incredible calm, but our faces are flushed and sweat is trickling down our necks. We watch without seeming to watch as the actress removes her shoes, her blouse, her blue jeans, and then, with a brave little smile, she whisks off her bra and wriggles out of her panties and there she is. She has a very cute little body--cute little breasts and a cute little bush and even a cute little bush--and she is so sweet and so embarrassed and so vulnerable-looking that it is all I can do to keep myself from hugging her hard and telling her that I really do respect her a whole lot and that I'll try to be very gentle with her.

Bob does the professional equivalent by saying with barely suppressed emotion that however well or badly she reads now, we are definitely putting her on the call-back sheet--i.e., we are definitely going to date you again.

The actress begins reading with me in this very soft trembly voice, and I keep wanting to hug her and tell her it is going to be all right. In the third scene, the doll is supposed to be in the bathtub and I, as Norman, am supposed to be rubbing her back while we speak. We sit on my living-room rug, I in my clothes and she in her nakedness, and I rub her back and have to maintain terrific concentration to keep my rubbing confined to her back and away from her sweet little breasts and tushy.

When she has finished reading and putting her clothes back on, we all have a very emotional goodbye, complete with hugs and earnest pressings of hands. It is very painful for me to see her leave, I am so knocked out by her, and my infatuation for her lasts well into the next quarter hour, when we encounter the next actress who hasn't been told about the nudity by her agent and who has to be coaxed into taking off her clothes. This actress is not quite as shy as the first one, but when she peels off her duds, she is so spectacularly beautiful that, just looking at her, I want to cry. By the time we get to the back-rubbing scene in the tub, I am tragically in love with her.

That is the way it goes all day, and the strain of falling in love so many times in so short a period wears me out. So it goes for the next two weeks. I am positively groggy from the procession of lovely young things who take off their clothes and read with me on my living-room rug and arouse my ardor. If I were not at least legally married during all of this, I might well have passed out engagement rings as if they were jujubes.

I happen to live in a row of brownstones, and my next-door neighbor is a good friend named Fred. On about the third day of auditions, Fred, who knows I am separated from my wife and dating fairly furiously, stops me on the street and demands to know why a continuing parade of beautiful girls is passing in and out of my house.

I tell him I'm helping to cast a porno film.

Fred looks at me carefully for several moments and then asks me what I'm really doing. I tell him again, but he does not seem convinced. He asks if he can drop in and watch. Bob and I have decided that, in fairness to the actresses, only the director, the writer and the casting person can be present at auditions. I explain this to Fred. Fred only pouts. Later that afternoon, Fred moseys by my house and rings the bell. He tells the production girl who answers the door that he wants to come in and chat with me, but she doesn't allow him to come upstairs to the living room where we are casting. Fred's face threatens to develop permanent pout marks.

During this two-week period, there are, unbelievably, certain appointments I've made that I am unable to cancel and that make me miss as many as half a dozen undressed honeys. One of these appointments is with the program-development people at CBS-TV, for whom I am writing a pilot for a comedy series. As is usual in such meetings, everybody shoots the shit for ten or fifteen minutes before getting down to the business at hand, but today I can't take it.

"Look," I say, "while you guys are horsing around here, I could be in my living room at this very moment, watching outrageously beautiful actresses take off their clothes and audition for a porno film."

Several network jaws hit the desk. Once they have ascertained that I am serious, they toy with the idea of having our meeting at my place, but then I tell them of the pact I have made with my director and they testily agree to hurry through our meeting and return me to the casting carpet.

Lest you think it was all wall-to-wall nakedness on my living-room rug for the whole two weeks, I hasten to point out that not all the actresses we auditioned were willing to strip for us. A few felt we were not really making a film at all and stalked out, speechless with rage. A few said we were male chauvinist pigs and declined to disrobe on political grounds. One cagey cutie said she would be glad to take off her clothes, but only after she got the part. But, we said, what if we think you're a dynamite actress and then we find out after we've hired you that your body isn't right for the part? She could show us pictures of herself, she said. No deal, we said. She left in a dark fury.

Most actresses who came to read for us were sent by reputable theatrical agents and were at least fairly good in their tryouts. But one agent, who was apparently less than reputable and who probably figured we were only looking to get laid, sent us a succession of glamorous girls unencumbered by intelligence whose readings were not to be believed. One of these lovelies, the possessor of a pair of the largest charlies I've ever seen on a regular civilian, spent a good 20 minutes in the chat part of the audition trying to determine in a sort of Method manner exactly what brand of mechanical doll we wanted her to impersonate. Did we, perhaps, want her to be a Saucy Walker doll? she said. What was that? we said. A kind of doll she'd had as a child, she said. Sure, we said, whatever. She got up and read for us and, Saucy Walker or not, the young lady was not--how to put it delicately?--impressive. Still, and despite the fact that I am not a tit man, I desperately wanted to take a gander at her jugs.

Bob merely thanked her for reading for us and told her she could go.

"Don't you want me to read without my clothes?" she said.

"No, that won't really be necessary," said Bob, bending over backward in a disgusting display of needless professionalism.

The lady walked up to Amy and whispered with her briefly before she left. When she'd gone, we asked Amy what she'd said.

"Well," said Amy, "she asked me why you didn't want her to take off her clothes. She said she'd really been looking forward to it."

Among the actresses who came to read for us were three Platonic friends I hadn't realized were on our list. Watching them undress and auditioning them nude was exciting and warmly embarrassing.

When we had seen all the actresses on our list, we began call-backs for those who had impressed us the most. We asked them in call-backs to do a number of exercises, including nude improvisations of mechanical dolls walking around a room and bumping into things. I happen to have been one of the things they kept bumping into. I didn't mind all that much.

Well into our last week, it occurred to me that we'd been working the whole time in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows and that right across the street was a large office building. I can only guess at the number of horny guys who'd been staring at us through binoculars from their darkened cubicles, watching our naked lovelies strut zombie like around my living room and trying to figure out what in the name of Christ we could possibly be up to. At times, I myself wasn't sure what we were up to, nor did I quite see why any woman in her sane mind would subject herself to the doubtlessly preposterous requests we were making. I frankly felt a little sorry for them.

• • •

One day while we are casting, I get a call from John Avildsen. He tells me he's been working on a creative device to string together our four diverse segments into a cohesive unit and he thinks he's got the answer--a sort of cinéma vérité series of scenes on video tape showing porno-film actors being interviewed and auditioned, and then a sort of porno Happening:

"I had an idea six or seven years ago," he says. "What would happen if somebody came out of a theater after seeing a film and he was confronted by an actor he'd just seen on the screen? Especially if the film was a sexual situation, a fantasy sexual situation, say, and suddenly here's the same actor outside, saying, 'Let's go someplace and you direct me in your own film, you direct me and tell me what you'd like me to do.'

"Well, we put the word out in the porno-film underground that we wanted to see some porno-film actors. We wanted people who were outgoing and not uptight and who'd work well with strangers. We saw 30 to 50 of them on Monday. (continued on page 324) How to Cast a Porno Film (continued from page 190)We interviewed them on video tape at three different stations. First was with their clothes on, a straight interview. We asked them how they got into porno films, what was the strangest thing that ever happened to them, and so on.

"The next phase of our interviews was that we asked them to take off their clothes in a very seductive manner. There was cock measuring for the men and for the ladies there was knee-spread measuring. A lot of it was to see how ridiculous you could make it and still have them go along with it. They were very suspicious of us, because this didn't seem like any porno film they had ever been involved with. But we had told them that we were video-taping the whole thing and the video-tape cameras were very visible--there wasn't any hidden-camera business and everybody knew what was going on.

"The third phase was in a large room. We had them do a number of exercises. For instance, a girl would be blindfolded and asked to feel a dozen cocks and try to identify the cock with the person."

"What did you tell them that exercise was for?" I say.

"Oh, tactile perception, I don't know. Then we asked some guys to tell us everything they knew about Watergate while they were being fondled or blown by three girls, and--"

"By, uh, three girls at a time?" I say.

"Right. And we asked them to try to keep their minds on Watergate and not get aroused."

"And were they able to do that?" I say.

"Some were. Then halfway through, I'd say, 'Now I want you to get aroused, but keep talking about Watergate.' That proved difficult. Then we did the same with a number of girls. This one girl, Tanya, who is a bald-headed lady, quite unusual, was being eaten by another girl, because she leaned more in that direction. Anyway, Tanya gave up rather quickly trying to keep her mind on Watergate. She got very distracted.

"Then we did a thing with one fellow who calls himself the top cock in the business. I asked him how long it would take him to have an orgasm. He said he didn't know. I said if the conditions were right, could he have one in two minutes? He thought he probably could. So I bet him 50 bucks that he couldn't. And I also bet the girl who was blowing him. We started and as they went to work, I did a sort of Howard Cosell on them. You know--'Are there any signs of life there now?' and 'How many seconds remain on the Scoreboard clock?' and stuff like that. I was deliberately trying to distract him and it, uh, worked. At the end of the two minutes, the girl kept right on going, though, and I suggested to her that she was on her own time.

"Another thing we did was we played Nixon's April 1973 Watergate address on video tape, on a little monitor that was right between the legs of this fellow who was screwing this girl. We started the camera very tight on Nixon's head as he was telling us about his vacation in Florida, and as we pulled back, we saw where his head was, and it was sort of a bizarre juxtaposition of symbols.

"Anyway, from that particular day's activities, we got five or six people whom I want to use in this next thing on Wednesday."

What Avildsen wants to do on Wednesday is take a video-tape camera crew to the theater where The Devil in Miss Jones is playing and have one of the actresses from the film accost patrons as they come out of the theater. She will ask them if they'd like to direct her in a porno film of their own devising and either take part in it or not, as they like. She will tell them that we've set up a video-tape studio in an apartment on the West Side with a technical crew and half a dozen professional porno-film actors standing by. To show that we are serious, she will give each of them who accepts a $50 bill. Avildsen intends to shoot as many short porno films as he can Wednesday night and he has, he says, a particular role in mind for me.

"What's that?" I ask warily.

"Well," he says, "we won't tell the porno-film actors who you are and we'll plant you inside the theater and have you get taken back to the apartment where we're making the video tapes. You go into the bedroom with one of the porno-film actresses, supposedly to make your film, and in the middle of screwing her, you stop, gaze warmly at her and say, 'Look, this is crazy, I suppose, but I think I could really care for you--how would you like to come back to Kansas City with me, where I've made a fortune in the wholesale meat business?' At which point, to show her you're on the level, you produce this $1000 bill and rip it in half and give her one of the halves, saying she'll get the other one when she shows up in Kansas City. What do you say--will you do it?"

I tell Avildsen that, first of all, I'm not sure I'm all that ready to make love to anybody on camera and, second, I'm afraid the girl might take me seriously and accept, which would be kind of cruel. I say I'm going to have to beg off, but thanks for thinking of me. He says Ok and come Wednesday and watch the festivities anyhow. I say you couldn't keep me away with attack dogs.

It's strange. Here I am, casting naked ladies in my living room and thinking I'm having a hot and naughty time. Meanwhile, Avildsen is doing stuff for the same production that makes me feel that all I've been doing is playing doctor.

• • •

Late Wednesday afternoon, Avildsen takes his camera crew and his porno-film actress down to the theater where The Devil in Miss Jones is playing, and of the 20 people they stop coming out of the theater, five of them agree to go back to the apartment--four men and a woman. Of the four guys, one is a graphics designer, one a producer of plays in Washington, D.C., one a salesman for a typography house and one a computer programmer. Nobody finds out what the woman does. All five of the new directors (as Avildsen insists on calling them) are taken by limousine to the apartment, where lights, cameras, microphones and TV monitors are already set up and where the rest of the porno-film stars (as Carl insists on calling them) are waiting.

The porno-film stars are young and, for the most part, fairly attractive. One of the men is tattooed all over his body with a series of very intricate, oddly beautiful designs. On his back is a huge, striking portrait of Jesus. One porno-film star confides to me, as we're waiting to begin, that on his nights off, he often goes to orgies. "But," he says, "if I'm working the next day, I don't come."

Avildsen seats the new directors and the porno-film stars around a low coffee table in the living room and encourages the directors to discuss their most private sex fantasies. When Avildsen hears a fantasy he thinks will make a scene, he asks the fantasizer to cast the scene from among the actors present. Then the director, the chosen actors, Avildsen and the camera crew go into one of the two bedrooms.

One bedroom is equipped with contemporary decor and a water bed. The other is done in a sort of neoharem motif, with a canopied bed decorated in striped silk. First Avildsen gets the director to brief the actors on their lines and blocking, then he gets him to give the crew instructions on lighting, miking and camera deployment. Avildsen outFunts Candid Camera host Alan Funt in mock seriousness.

When all is in readiness, the new director calls "Action," the crew begins to shoot and the porno-film stars begin to act and to have sex. When the action of the first scene has been going on for a while, Avildsen, who has been chattily advising the director throughout, says, "We only have a couple minutes of tape left on this load; is there anything you want to tell the actors?"

The director, without a moment's hesitation, says to the actors in this very matter-of-fact voice, "Ok, come."

It is a very surrealistic picture--the actors on the bed humping away, surrounded by cameramen, crew, production staff and as many onlookers as can fit into the room. Those who can't fit spill out into the hallway over the tangle of heavy-duty electrical cables and other equipment. One room down the hall has been converted into a control room. An engineer sits scanning several TV monitors from the various cameras and it is almost more interesting to watch the action from here, in long shot, medium shot and close-up, simultaneously. In the living room are several members of the crew and off-duty porno-film stars who've already grown bored with the festivities and who are sitting on the couch and chatting away as if this were just any mildly interesting cocktail party. A few feet away stands a large TV console, converted for the evening into a monitor. On its screen, a new group of porno-film stars is having sex and going largely unnoticed by the gang in the living room. An unreal scene, to say the least.

As the evening progresses, word of what we are doing here spreads throughout the city and soon the apartment is glutted with horny curiosity seekers, some of whom, after watching the sex for half an hour or so, join the bored group in the living room.

I try to stay with the action as much as possible. Every so often, Avildsen hunkers down next to where I am squatting and asks me in a whisper if I have any suggestions for him to give the new directors. I have a few. One is to have the new directors tell the actors in the style of what great European film director to play the scene. Another is, after the scene, for the director to give the actors a critique of their performances.

Of the four or five fantasies filmed, only one new director elects to get into the scene as an actor as well as a director. This is a guy named Fred, who is not to be confused with my next-door neighbor of the same name.

Director Fred describes a very poignant scene for the actors to enact for him: He comes to visit his girlfriend and finds her in bed with another guy. She sees Fred but figures he is such a loser he won't raise a fuss, which, in fact, he doesn't. He just stands and watches them till they finish, whereupon they get up and go out for pizza, leaving Fred alone. The girlfriend's girlfriend, who has observed all of the foregoing, takes pity on Fred, tries to comfort him and ends up seducing him.

Fred reveals so much of himself in his fantasy it is uncomfortable to watch. Pornographic psychodrama on video tape. I wonder if it is exploitive to have Fred do all this on camera. I wonder if it's cruel. But perhaps I'm overreacting. After all, nobody is holding a gun to Fred's head. He knows he's being filmed. Plus which, he is actually being paid $50 to hump a highly attractive actress on camera. Probably Fred is not to be pitied after all. Probably he is having the best night of his entire life.

"When the actress began to realize that she was actually going to have to screw this fellow Fred," says Avildsen, "she suggested she wasn't really a big fan of that idea, because she didn't know how she felt about screwing people who weren't in the field. At which point, Fred said, 'What field?' But it turned out she was mostly concerned about disease, and when I suggested that Fred wear a condom, that seemed to solve the problem.

"I asked Fred what style he wanted the scene acted in, as you suggested, and he said Bergman. At a certain point in the scene, Fred started screwing the actress, who was just fantastic, encouraging him and putting him at ease. Everybody in the room was very respectful of what was going on, which was a pretty bizarre thing. When Fred reached orgasm, the room was very still, and once he recovered his composure, he lifted up his head and said, 'Cut!' Which suggests that he had a lot more presence of mind than the top cock the previous Monday. Fred was concentrating not only on screwing the girl but also on his job as director of the film he was in."

I have since rerun the video tape of that moment, because it was so striking, and noted the exact dialog. Avildsen has just finished asking Fred another of his interminable questions, and Fred, who is on the brink of orgasm, replies, "I'm caught up in... I don't think I should be talking now. I think I feel myself, in some ways... coming." Fred comes, and then recovers enough composure to deliver his last line of dialog to the actress he has just made love to: "Do me a favor," he says, poignantly in character. "If tonight was just the same as all the other times, would you please not tell me?" Then, without so much as a beat, Fred turns to the camera crew and says, "Ok, cut!"

When Fred gets up and leaves the bed, people cluster around him, congratulating him on his performance as if he'd just come offstage after doing Hamlet. By the radiance in his face and the brightness in his eyes, I can see that Fred has gained more than we could possibly have taken from him. I have to smile when I contemplate the reactions of disbelief he'll get when he attempts to tell his buddies at work about this tomorrow morning.

Later in the evening, the producer from Washington gets a chance to direct a fantasy, of his, but he seems rather reticent about giving either crew or cast much direction.

"I suggested he take this one handheld camera," says Avildsen, "and shoot exactly what he wanted himself. He did. When the actors started screwing, he took his camera and went right in on the insertion and stayed pretty well riveted on that."

"How far from their crotches was he with his camera?" I ask.

"I would guess maybe a foot," says Avildsen. "He kept a very tight close-up all the time. It was suggested to him that he might tell the male actor to let him know when he was about to come, in case he wanted a come shot--there's some kind of term in the business that I can't recall for external come shots."

Evidently, no actor in a porno film ever comes anywhere except externally, where you can see it. Carl reportedly said at one point, "And now let's have a first in porno films--come inside of her." The actress, I am told, was shocked, since she was using neither pills nor a diaphragm. I ask Avildsen if this is what happened.

"That was in another scene," says Avildsen, "the one directed by the fellow with the foreign accent. Apparently, the actress playing the teenaged girl in that scene lost her concentration and left the room, leaving the girl playing her sister and the fellow from the Linda Lovelace movie in bed, screwing without either me or the director of that scene in attendance. They were forced to sort of reassess their relationship, because now it was just for themselves and they weren't acting. Carl at that point said, 'You can go ahead and go for an inside come.' They were surprised and pleased and, I understand, took it to conclusion."

Carl himself was fascinated by the evening, although he claimed not to have found it particularly erotic. In fact, quite the reverse.

"There was something so asexual about it," Carl told me later, "that I thought I never wanted to fuck again." But he was quite impressed with the professionalism of the porno-film stars. "Porno-film stars are very clubby, very affectionate," said Carl. "They find a sense of dignity in their exclusivity, in their not wanting to fuck people who aren't in the field, for instance. There was just one nonprofessional who was fucking there that night--besides Fred, I mean--a student. The porno-film stars could sense that he was nervous and they were really very sweet to him, very protective. They really took care of him."

"Everybody in general seemed to have a nice time," said Avildsen. "The new directors want to do it some more, and the actors are all anxious to do it again, too, so now all we need is the money to finance the rest of it."

I have heard that Fred was so inspired by the evening he has gone on to pursue a serious career in acting.

"I think he had once done some amateur acting or community theater or something," said Avildsen, "and maybe this awakened a new urge."

• • •

It is like going from college to kindergarten to return to the shooting of Norman and the Polish Doll.

A problem has arisen that will affect not only our film but the entire film industry and all of the entertainment and communications media as well--the Supreme Court has decided that any community can decide for itself what is obscene and what to prosecute.

Most of our investors have panicked and pulled out. Carl tells us there is still enough money for us to begin shooting Norman and the Polish Doll, but he asks that we cover ourselves by shooting alternative footage for any scenes that contain either serious nudity or profoundly smutty talk. We say Ok.

We have converted somebody's lavish Park Avenue apartment into a set and Pat Paulsen has flown in from somewhere for a week or so of shooting.

This film is not the craziest thing that Paulsen has done, not by a long shot. He has in the past gained notoriety from such ventures as waging a semiserious campaign for the Presidency and for promoting something that he calls "cranial painting," which he accomplishes by hanging upside down over several buckets of paint and dipping his head into them and onto a canvas. Paulsen is nonetheless nervous about the nudity and the randy talk in the script. When we've assured him that he won't have to appear in anything briefer than his boxer shorts, he relaxes somewhat and finally he is able to deliver even his randiest lines without wincing.

One of the randier of these occurs in a scene in which he has just staggered out of the bathtub, carrying the nude and dripping doll. Norman's mother, who believes the doll to be a real person, bursts in and exclaims: "Norman, what in God's name are you doing to that poor child?"

Paulsen as Norman replies: "She is not a poor child, she is a mechanical doll from Poland. And what I was doing with her was trying to throw her a fuck."

The sheer physical effort of carrying around an actress who is bigger than he is begins taking its toll on Paulsen on the overheated summer set. Playing the role of the doll is Deborah Loomis, an astonishingly gifted actress who had earlier confided to me her terror at the prospect of appearing naked in front of an entire cast and crew. I spent a goodly amount of time reassuring her and calming her down, and you can well imagine how dumb I felt upon learning afterward that the lady was not such a stranger to nude performing as she was letting on.

Between takes on the set, Paulsen is not too exhausted to do an almost nonstop shtick. He does exquisitely accurate impersonations of Jack Benny, John Wayne, Richard Nixon and Mortimer Snerd. He improvises a bit around Nixon making an obscene phone call. Then he tires of simple impersonations and tries Nixon doing Mortimer Snerd, John Wayne doing Jack Benny and Mortimer Snerd doing John Wayne doing Nixon.

For an exterior scene in which Paulsen attempts to get the doll into a taxicab, we have moved to the corner of 84th Street and Second Avenue. People in New York are used to seeing films being shot on the street, but still we draw a crowd. Bystanders recognize Paulsen and ask him a variety of inane questions that he responds to just as inanely, with a perfectly straight face.

"Whatever happened to the Smothers Brothers?" one woman asks.

"They're in jail for sodomy and bestiality," says Paulsen. It fazes the lady not at all.

Exercising one of the prerogatives of a writer on a low-budget film, I have written a part for myself into this scene. As Paulsen struggles to stuff the doll into the cab, I am to accost him and reminisce about a prior meeting years ago at Esalen: "I was the guy who was hung up on his cats--you were the guy with the masculinity problem, right?"

As I wait at the fringe of the crowd on the sidewalk for the signal from McCarty to make my entrance, it is hard not to listen to what the people behind me are saying. Three little boys, aged about four, are hollering "Action!" and "Take two!"--which I consider to be a disquieting degree of sophistication for preschool pups to have about showbiz. To my right, a man patiently explains to his wife, "No, Pat Paulsen doesn't pay them for this--they have to pay him." It's a safe bet that lady is the only cinema naïf in the crowd, and I find myself longing for a more innocent age.

In less than two weeks, we have wrapped shooting on Norman and most members of the production team have swung into our second segment, the Bruce Jay Friedman--Jack Richardson thing entitled Vortex. They land talented Broadway actor Jerry Orbach for the lead. Amy moves to the Vortex set to cast the girlfriends whom Orbach's character never quite scored with in the Fifties and whom he is given a magical second shot at by a fat Italian genie. Amy finds the atmosphere at Vortex auditions somewhat different from that at Norman's.

"These poor straight actresses would come in to read for us" says Amy, "and Bruce Malmuth [the director] would have them lie down on the floor. Then his friend Tony Cannon would lie down on top of them and fondle their breasts and the actresses would have to read their lines while he was molesting them."

"What were their reactions?" I say, beginning to feel fairly asinine about how delicately Bob and I had treated the ladies who'd read for Norman.

"Some of the girls were very turned off and angry," says Amy. "But some of them got very turned on and wanted to fuck Tony. The minute the girls would come in to read, Malmuth would jump up and lock the door. He was very paranoid. During the middle of a reading, he'd whisper to me, 'Are you sure the door is locked?' I didn't feel like the gynecologist's nurse the way I did with you and Bob. I just felt embarrassed."

Richardson's script called for actresses of rather curious aptitudes, and Malmuth was apparently a stickler for perfection.

"At one point, I was on the phone for five days," says Amy, "calling up agents and saying, 'Do you have any 40-year-old gymnasts who are good actresses and who'll perform nude on the rings?' Bruce refused to compromise. He wouldn't, for example, audition a 25-year-old gymnast who was a good actress and who'd perform nude on the rings. We finally ended up with Louisa Moritz. who went to a gym class for a week and that was it."

Before Vortex was finished shooting, many members of the production team were already working on the Avildsen segment, Inaugural Ball. Its plot line was classic in its simplicity:

"I had always wondered," says Avildsen, "what would happen if the daughter of the President of the United States were kidnaped and the ransom was that he and the First Lady had to fuck on TV in prime time to get her back. I asked the Fourplay people if they liked the idea and they did. So I got David Odel, who wrote Cry Uncle for me, to write the script."

It was becoming clear to me and McCarty that we were not so smart to have shot our segment first. We had dutifully skimped on production values and come in on budget. The budget for Vortex was at least 50 percent higher than ours at the outset and that of Inaugural Ball 100 percent higher, and both were climbing steadily.

You will perhaps begin to see why Inaugural Ball was becoming so expensive when I tell you that among the props in its script were a helicopter and a platoon of soldiers. Benni Korzen had sent written requests for the loan of copter and troops to a number of organizations, including the National Guard, the Coast Guard and the Pentagon.

One day Benni gets a phone call. The caller says he's calling on behalf of the Pentagon. Benni thinks it's a gag. It's not a gag, it's the Pentagon. The guy from the Pentagon says the copter is out, but the platoon of soldiers will be OK. Benni is ecstatic. He is soon to be less than ecstatic.

It seems that, along with each written request for whirlybird and troops, Benni had also sent a script. Since sending the actual script of Inaugural Ball would never have elicited so much as an expended cartridge case from the military, Benni had rounded up a number of inoffensive scripts by various authors, substituted the title page of Inaugural Ball for the existing ones and sent them out. What Benni never figured on was that every military organization that got a letter and a script would forward them to the Pentagon for approval.

Inevitably, the man from the Pentagon called Benni back. He had read all the scripts and he was so furious he could scarcely speak. He said that he was taking back his soldiers. He said that he was going to see to it that our production company was investigated by the FBI. Eventually, Avildsen did get his platoon, however. It was recruited from an American Legion post on Long Island that hadn't a clue what the picture was about and that hadn't thought to ask for a script.

To borrow a lot of furniture for the Presidential set, Benni contacted a man from the staid firm of W. & J. Sloane. The man from W. & J. Sloane asked to see a script and Benni, weary of all the tsimmes with scripts, deliberately sent him the real one, just to get the fellow's reaction.

"The guy was obviously shocked," says Benni bemusedly, "but much too up tight to admit it. He found some innocuous official reason for declining to lend us the furniture, but it was the type of conversation you might have if you walked into a room and there was this big turd lying in the middle of the floor that you couldn't mention."

The first big casting coup on Inaugural Ball was getting Barbara Harris to agree to play the First Lady. Then there was a clash between Harris and Avildsen and Harris walked off the set. I ask Avildsed about the incident. He says there was a disagreement about whether or not Harris would be permitted to wear make-up in a particular scene. Since she was supposed to have just come out of the shower at the beginning of the scene, says Avildsen, he told her she couldn't wear any make-up. Harris said she wouldn't work without make-up and, when neither of them would give in, Harris, as Variety might put it, ankled the pic.

"I hear that Barbara Harris called you a fascist pig," I say to Avildsen.

"I believe she suggested that I had a Hitler complex," he replies mildly.

Estelle Parsons was persuaded to take the role that Harris didn't. She had some reservations about the sex but agreed to join the cast when she was told that the connective thread in all four segments was political.

One of the actors who was first considered for the role of President was comedian Rodney Dangerfield. Eventually, he turned it down. I ask Carl why.

"Rodney felt that everybody liked him now," says Carl, "and so he didn't want to jeopardize that by playing the President of the United States in a film."

"You mean the nudity and the sex didn't bother him?" I say.

"Well," says Carl, "we told him that there would be inserts in close-up of someone else's cock and he thought that would be Ok, just as long as it wasn't his."

Eventually, the role went to Zero Mostel, who is an excellent actor but who is known for rather eccentric personal behavior. I have met Mostel only once, but it was enough to form an impression. We were at the wedding reception of a mutual friend and Mostel went around the room kissing everybody, man and woman, sticking his tongue in everybody's mouth. At least I think he stuck his tongue in everybody's mouth. I'd hate to think I was the only one thus honored.

I ask Avildsen if Mostel behaved himself on the set.

"He did have a proclivity to grab all the women who came within a ten-yard radius of him," says Avildsen, "but I think that's about the extent of it. Most of the women seemed to tolerate it as something that went along with the territory. But that's his nature. He's a very funny man and he likes to cause reactions in people. At the end of takes, before I called 'Cut,' he generally tried some outrageousness or other and it was usually very funny."

"Like what?" I say.

"Like putting ketchup in his Yoo Hoo and drinking it," says Avildsen.

I ask Amy what Mostel was like on the set.

"Mostel kept grabbing the breasts and asses of all the girls on the set, of course," says Amy. "He also had to have Sea Breeze poured over him by the makeup girl after every take. The minute a take was over, he'd scream, 'Where's the Sea Breeze?' "

"What's Sea Breeze?" I ask.

"It's an after-shave astringent or something. His production assistant carried a silver ice bucket filled with ice cubes and a bottle of Sea Breeze. Mostel used up two whole cases of Sea Breeze in the eight days he was shooting."

Throughout the production, one had been hearing constant rumors of how Terry Southern was having trouble completing his script, of how he was actually working on not one script but two, of how he was running up all kinds of expenses for Carl at the Drake Hotel, of how neither of his scripts was usable and, finally, of how he and Carl had had a falling out and Southern was no longer part of the production. I ask Amy, who had been involved in the whole thing from the start, what happened.

"Terry wrote two scripts," says Amy, "Slippery When Wet and Twice on Top. Slippery When Wet was a half-hour script about a lot of people fucking in a house on Long Island and making a film within a film about it. Twice on Top was a six-minute script about a girl who fucks a general and gets convicted by a judge for coming twice while she was on top. Then she gets killed. It's a lot better than it sounds.

"When they asked Terry to make the six-minute thing longer, he merely put in the fantasy inserts from the 30-minute piece that Carl and Benni had rejected, just to rip them off. I thought it was kind of a funny thing to do.

"Actually, Carl ripped Terry off as much as Terry ripped Carl off. Like, Carl continued using Terry's name to raise money a month and a half after Terry's piece wasn't going to be used. I think Terry's a nice guy. Once I left him in my apartment writing, and when I came back, he had watered and pruned all my plants and changed the Kitty Litter.

"Ultimately, you have to lock Terry in a room for five days with a typewriter to make him work, but you don't lock him in the Drake Hotel like Carl did, especially when Ringo Starr is there. Terry and Ringo are friends and they played together a lot during that five-day period when he was supposed to be writing the script.

"Rip Torn was supposed to star in Twice on Top. He was going to play the general, the judge and the executioner. He was very broke at the time, so he signed a contract with Carl that was in direct conflict with the Joey Gallo movie he was doing. When Carl found out, Rip refused to give back the $1000 that Carl had given him."

"Why did Carl give Rip Torn so much money in advance?" I ask.

"Carl thought that the way to keep everybody happy and working and interested was to keep giving them hundred-dollar bills," says Amy. " 'Cash-cash,' he kept saying, 'cash-cash.' "

Throughout the entire production, I have never discussed any of these matters with Carl. In fact, I have scarcely seen Carl at all and have spoken to him only briefly by phone. Perhaps this is why I have missed out on my share of $100 bills and cash-cash. I decide it is high time I see Carl and get his side of the Southern story, and while I'm at it, I can check if there is any loose cash-cash still lying around.

I call Carl and arrange to see him late on a Saturday afternoon. On my way over to his apartment, it strikes me that the only other time I've been there was for the orgy Ire threw for me and I wonder idly if anything on that order might await me now.

Carl, when he opens the door, is stark-naked. Since. he chooses not to comment on this fact, I don't, either. He leads the way into the living room, where I perceive that an attractive clothed lady is seated on the couch. Carl introduces me to the clothed lady and sits down next to her on the couch, still making no reference to his nakedness. I take out a pencil and a pad of paper and prepare to begin the interview.

Before I have a chance to ask the first question, Carl says to me, as if he were offering me a tray of pistachio nuts, "You want a fuck before we start?"

"Oh, not right now, thanks," I say in the same spirit. "Maybe afterward."

I have assumed Carl was kidding, but at my words, he turns to the clothed lady and says, "Ok, you can go."

The lady says goodbye and goes. I turn to Carl in disbelief.

"You mean you were serious?" I say.

"Of course," he says. "We just got through balling. I knew you were coming over in a few minutes, so I said to her, 'You want to fuck a stranger?' "

"And what did she say?" I say.

"She said it was Ok with her," says Carl.

"I see," I say, and the more I think about it, the hornier I get. "I tell you what. You think maybe you could run to the elevator and see if she's still there?"

"No," says Carl, "the moment is past."

We start the interview, with me initially somewhat distracted. Once I am able to concentrate on the task at hand, it becomes apparent to me for the first time that while we are talking, I am competing for Carl's attention with both a radio and a large color-TV set. Carl is talking to me, but he is also watching the New York Mets.

"Fuck," he says disgustedly a few minutes into the interview. "The Mets lost."

I ask naked Carl how he likes being a big-time movie producer.

"The closest thing I've ever done to producing," says Carl, watching Detroit play the White Sox, "was when I was a football coach. I'm not that brilliant. I'm a somewhat above-average intellect and the only way I can get it together as a producer is to work very hard. I don't want quiet competence from the people I work with, I want total dedication--a note of hysteria and a dedication equal to mine. Somebody has to be taking my trip if he wants to work with me, and my trip is total combat. I do very chancy things.

"For instance, I am personally the largest investor now in our film. The first investors were straight businessmen. I wasn't too involved in that at first. Then the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity came down, our investors panicked and split. It was too late to alter our production and shooting schedules, so we were really up against it. We pretty much had to start all over again from scratch. I sold my insurance business and put the money into the film."

I ask Carl for his side of the feud with Southern. At first he is reticent to say anything against Southern. He observes that Southern is very self-destructive and adds, "How can you fight a guy whose prime interest is in beating himself up?" He decides to merely outline the history of his involvement with Southern in a wholly dispassionate way.

"The way it all began," says Carl, "Terry was one of the judges of the New York Erotic Film Festival. Terry is sort of dean of the dirty. He told me he couldn't believe the amount of bad fucking and sucking he had to look at on the screen. I knew what he meant. I mean, when is the last time you got a hard-on in a movie theater, huh?"

I say I don't recall.

"Terry said we ought to make a horny film that would also be funny. I didn't know if laughter and sex were compatible. It's probably one of my personal charms that I can laugh a lot during sex, but I don't know about others. Anyway, I told Terry that if he wrote a funny horny movie, I'd produce it. In the beginning, our budget was between $6000 and $8000. Then it went to $15,000. Before I knew it, we were up to $150,000. Right now, by the way, we're somewhere around $700,000.

"Terry gave, me a script he'd done called Twice on Top. It wasn't usable. I asked him to rewrite it. Terry was in Connecticut at the time and he finally agreed to rewrite it if I would bring him and the guy he wanted to direct it, Silver Screen Productions' Bill Claxton, to New York and put them both up in a hotel so they could work together day and night. Terry is strictly 'Additional dialog by----that is, he needs other people's ideas, other people to collaborate with him in order to function.

"Anyway, I put him and Claxton into the Drake Hotel and they ran up a bill of about $2000 in five days, most of it in room service. At the end of the five days, Terry gave me the script. It was the same script that I had rejected before he went in, except he had retyped it. That bastard--maybe it's good I'm getting this out, huh?--that bastard had the balls to give me the same script I sent him in with!

"What we're talking about here," says Carl, warming to his subject, "is a literary hustle. Terry Southern is the Bobby Riggs of the literary world. Do you know he once took a party of eight into Elaine's and tried to sign my name to the bill? That guy. He hustled me into producing this movie for him in the first place, he cost me over $10,000--which is twice what the other writers got paid--and then he couldn't even deliver a shootable script."

Carl shakes his head, then adds thoughtfully: "I must admit, though, that because of Terry Southern, I've got a new career."

Yes, Carl Gurevich has a new career. And in his first movie of that career, whether or not he's got himself another Gone With the Wind, he did get talented big-name people on camera, and if they're not actually fucking, it's certainly not Carl's fault. But Fourplay is still unfinished, because Carl has temporarily run out of money. Norman and the Polish Doll is finished, as are Vortex and Inaugural Ball, but without Southern's segment, it is still not quite a complete package--Three play, if you will.

Some additional footage is needed to complete the film, some unifying element, perhaps, like the video-tape footage. The video-tape footage is a fascinating little thing in and of itself, but it doesn't quite go along with the three other segments we have shot on film. I've suggested some scenes that we could shoot to solve the problem, but right at this moment there isn't the money to do it.

"That video-tape thing we did," says Carl wistfully. "It should have worked. Did you see the footage from that first day, at the auditions of the porno-film stars?"

I say I did.

"We had one shot from behind of the little bald-headed girl giving head to somebody. All you could see were these three bald spheres. It's got to be one of the great shots on film of our time!"

• • •

Several months have passed since I wrote all of the above, and a few things have happened that I think you should know about.

Carl found a guy to put up completion money for the film, then went and had some new footage shot and incorporated into the movie. A screening of the assembled film was arranged for interested members of the production staff. Just before Bob McCarty and I left for the screening room to see it, we heard that Carl had recut Norman and the Polish Doll, despite the fact that Bob and I had finished a version that we thought everybody liked and despite the fact that both Bob and I have contracts that state that we have creative control over our segment of the film.

The screening is held in a small auditorium in the Times Square area. Present are Carl, Bob, Benni, cameraman Jeff Weinstock, coproducer David Witter and me. The film begins and it is quickly apparent to me and to Bob that it is a disaster. The new footage is of Professor Irwin Corey rambling on extraneously about pornography. It is neither very amusing nor very tasteful nor very pertinent stuff. Worst of all, Norman and the Polish Doll has been recut with all the sensitivity of a rhinoceros doing microsurgery and the Corey footage has been spliced into it with no apparent purpose except to further destroy the story line.

The screening is over. Bob and I stand up and tell Carl that he is, of course, free to do whatever he likes with the rest of his film, but he must restore Norman and the Polish Doll to the version that Bob and I had done and the Corey footage must be removed from our segment.

A phenomenal transformation takes place in Carl. He starts breathing hard, sweating profusely and shouting obscene things, first at Bob and then at me. I point out to Carl, as coolly as possible, that Bob and I have creative control over our segment and he has to abide by our decision.

It seems as good a time as any to leave, which Bob and I decide to do, whereupon Carl yells, "Nobody leaves this room," locks the door behind him and hurls his short pudgy body at me with all his might. It is true that Carl is short, but it is also true that he is a former football player and, for all his fatness, is fairly strong. His push has sent me painfully into a row of auditorium seats. I can't believe what has just happened. Neither can anybody else.

"I have four witnesses who just saw you attack me," I say. "I'd like to point out to all present that I am not descending to your level and attacking you back. You will certainly be hearing from my attorneys."

It is a ludicrous scene. I have never heard anybody in real life say either "Nobody leaves this room" or "You will certainly be hearing from my attorneys." I try once more to leave and Carl, breathing harder and sweating more than ever, shoves me into the row of seats again.

I am beginning to lose my patience. I have always passed off my colleagues' complaints about Carl's vulgarity with mild remonstrations that he was basically a good guy underneath it all and that little things like greeting people at the door naked (which turns out to be more the rule than the exception) are merely part of his earthy charm. At this particular moment, Carl's earthy charm has worn so thin as to be wholly invisible.

I tell Carl that he is in serious trouble with his shoving and that he is going to pay for this beguiling behavior. No glint of understanding penetrates his beady little eyes, and so, to spell it out for him, I reach for yet another bit of dialog I have never heard in anything but B movies. "Carl," I say, "you will never work in the film business again. You are a dead man."

It is as bad a couple of sentences as I have ever heard anybody say. Perhaps Louis B. Mayer once said such things to people and produced respectful trembling. That it is not Mayer at MGM but Greenburg in a schlocky screening room in Times Square who is now saying them should produce snorts of laughter.

Carl does not respond with snorts of laughter. Carl responds by smashing me in the eye, which almost succeeds in driving my glasses into my eye socket.

What happened after that I can't be certain. Bob and Benni tell me I punched Carl spiritedly in the face a couple of times before they separated us. All I know is that at some point I picked my badly mangled glasses off the floor, muttered some more phenomenal B-movie lines about hearing from my attorneys, about assault-and-battery charges, about Carl's not working in any area of showbiz anymore, and then I left.

I had a black eye for a week or so. I heard that Carl did, too, which pleased me immensely.

I have not been able, at this writing, to get Norman and the Polish Doll restored to any version that I could live with, nor have I been able to get Professor Corey's inanities out of my segment. It turns out that telling a writer and a director that they have creative control over their work generally means "unless nobody we meet has any ideas we like better."

What will people be seeing if they go to see Fourplay? Well, they won't be seeing talented big-name people fucking on camera. For sure, they won't be seeing Gone With the Wind.

What will ultimately happen to Four play? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.