Acting Out

Camera in close. A buttock. Male. Naked. What have we here? Waiters, nude from navel down, serving at an elegant fête champêtre. "My fantasy is ... the women are all eating salad and they use--uh, a certain kind of salad dressing. Can I say this? Well, they use fresh semen as their salad dressing. They have to dispense it themselves from the waiters." Clap! Fantasy number 15. The Great Lettuce Scene. Camera, action. Cut! Cut! The narrator explains, voice-over: Unfortunately, "Don Farrar from Omaha ... found it too difficult to contain his excitement until the proper course and prematurely seasoned the ladies' soup." I'll never pour roquefort over my endive again.

You and your fantasy on film

You are invited to participate as an on-screen star in one of the most revolutionary films ever to be shown. This new motion picture will be about the sexual fantasies of everyday people and will star the very people whose fantasies are chosen.

That ad yanked in about 1000 responses from bashful America-out-there. And not just from New York or Los Angeles, cities that moon you at the airport. Omaha, Seattle, Akron. Akron. In Akron, I thought, they got their sex out of a Spencer Gifts catalog, U. P. S. prepaid, along with the nudie soap cake and the how-dry-I-am bourbon pourer. Carl Gurevich and Ralph Rosenblum, who co-directed Acting Out, had to interview around 600 fantasts--in person and by long distance in what became, naturally, some rather obscene phone calling. "The thing that killed me," Gurevich says, "was that they'd resist for maybe 15 seconds, then it would come out. 'I wanna screw five women at once--and at the moment of orgasm, see, we're covered with a giant banana malted.' Or whatever. You name it." I'm not all overcome with surprise. Today you meet someone first time at a cocktail party, and right away he tells you he's been having it off with the grandparents and two Dobermans. There is just one taboo left. Never ask what they're earning. You'll get a wet dry martini in the blazer vest pocket. That sort of question is impertinent, even lewd.

Gurevich and Rosenblum inspire confidence; confidences. They're professional, serious. Five minutes and I'd tell them my best mattress dream, if it hadn't already been optioned by Cement and Tile Grout Digest. Rosenblum, who is film editor for a certain W. Allen, won the British Academy Award with Annie Hall. He is bearded, gentle, understanding; someone I'd send to talk a manic depressive off the Brooklyn Bridge. Gurevich is all T-shirt: amusing, bluff, the sort of man you might associate with back-hoes and asphalt. An ex-football player, just slightly stomach-important, as if he'd been in set position, waiting for the center snap, since 1953. About five years ago, he worked on Foreplay with Zero Mostel and Pat Paulsen. It was a whimsical sex flick: For contrast, Gurevich thought to intercut starker, unrehearsed action. "I got the idea on Thursday and did it on Monday. We waited outside a movie theater and asked people if they'd like to act out their sexual fantasies on film. We filled a couple of limousines in an hour." This clay footage didn't mesh with Fore-play, but the idea for Acting Out had been stuck like a pimiento in Gurevich's consciousness.

Consider it: 600 middle-American sex-fantasy interviews--most of them boring as a weevil.

Gurevich says, "We tried to keep the certified crazies out. There was one man who wanted to be a butterfly and land on a flower-woman or something. Anyhow, gold-lamé pollen was supposed to float down when they came."

Rosenblum reminds him, "Don't forget the karate champ. He kept yelling 'Hai! Aaaarg! Yeegahhh!' and talking about long spears and knives and disembowelment. For some reason, we didn't use him."

Prelim interview sessions were filmed in the same small room. First Gurevich and Rosenblum would snap off a Polaroid. (It's tough to tell your fantasts apart, especially when 500 or so are about as memorable as the Rutherford B. Hayes Administration.) Then each interviewee signed a "pretty heavy" release. I bet; probably it gave G & R perpetual rights to his subconscious. Gurevich got cunning after a while: He always had one woman present. It balanced their ticket, had a laxative effect on the psyche. These interviews, many of which are preserved in Acting Out, will fascinate you. Face is at an angle. Eyes cut the camera dead; they flick up, around; maybe imagination is on a cue card someplace. Then freakish things happen in the larynx. It will purse up, get gumball-hard. Voices drop, become husky, slow, in a kind of Mercedes McCambridge possession: This is not me talking. Now they look out at us. The sly, scheming hidden self has begun to speak. It's eerie.

"There were three men for every woman," Gurevich estimated. "Fantasy is more important for men. They need it to perform. The most common male fantasy was group sex--it got tedious. You know, making it with a white, a black and an in-between. (continued on page 218)ACTING OUT(continued from page 187) The really imaginative ones would add a Korean or a Japanese."

Proportionately, G & R weeded in more female scenarios than male. So the film came out about even. This, I suspect, was done at least partly to attract the Cosmo film audience. Rosenblum: "Female fantasies were more interesting. The most common ones were some sort of bondage-rape thing and nonobserved public sex. Like getting laid standing up in a crowded elevator or in an invisible bubble in Central Park. Also, both men and women wanted to make love with an alien. I don't mean a wetback. Problem is, if it's an alien from outer space, you have to question his or her sexual identity."

Well, the whole thing got put through a colander or something and 19 "representative" head treks were scummed off. G & R then had to sign up their resident company of porn actors--four female, three male--all with experience in improvisation; which, for porn actors, meant that they could talk without becoming impotent. There was to be no rehearsal, no script. Actor or actors would meet with the fantast and go at it hammer and dongs: a one-day stand. This caused noticeable confusion and letdown. The porn stars weren't center-cut meat; moreover, they didn't look like Suzy in first grade or whomever. Modest sets, built about as expensively as an Our Gang tree house, were not quite up to what the spendthrift mind, that follower of Cecil B. De Mille, could construct. Still, this budget spontaneity did produce sequences of terrific sexual tension. One man, his mind obviously not within the foul lines, had the following whim: to drive his fist up a woman's--how shall I put it?--up her process of elimination. "I'm trying for width, not depth," he told Gurevich reassuringly. The actress will go into this cold; and dry. You see surprise, then horror, skirmish with professional pride across her face. Suddenly, he begins to hit with ad-lib savageness. A moment of unnerving reality. Gurevich's camera is not explicit in the physical sense. But fear and insanity, bare-ass, can be X-rated enough.

There were 33 feet of film shot to every one foot used; G & R's cutting-room floor must be near its ceiling by now. "We let a fatigue factor create easiness. We kept the cameras on so people wouldn't feel they had to perform on cue. But you'd be surprised how quickly they lost the camera and just did their thing." And Gurevich's own fantasy? "My fantasy is the film." Come on; didn't he want to do anything? "Listen, if I owned a restaurant, would I eat there?"

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Put your hands down; I can guess the question. Is it fulfilling to do home movies of your head? Uh, yes and no and maybe. About one third of the participants were enraptured by the experience. About one third were unsure. About one third were totally chopped up. And here, I suggest, we have to make a useful distinction, a distinction that G & R, apparently, did not perceive. There are fantasies and there are commonplace, scratch-my-scab lusts. For convenience, I will define fantasy as an innate, idiosyncratic, surreal and somewhat structured minidrama. Now, group one--those who were left in transports of raunch--did not, by my standard, achieve the fantastic. For example: (A) One 63-year-old civil servant opted for straight sex with any warm young thing. (B) One man had a gang-bang in mind for his wife (by the New York Jets--she had to settle for three men from G & R's specialty team). (C) Her opposite number was a black kid who wanted to bang a female gang. Hell, if these are mature fantasies, there isn't man- or woman jack of us who hasn't had them. They're not idiosyncratic or personal at all; they're in the public domain--you don't even have to pay a royalty. Nor are they surreal. If I wanna play piston and cylinder with three women, all I have to do is pick up the classified section of Screw, rip off eight tens and make an appointment with my clap doctor in advance. What keeps me from doing that is impecuniousness, not impossibility. These are naïve and uninteresting Thwarted Desires; no more than that. In general, those who acted out a T. D., with scant personal revelation beyond the odd patch of bare skin, were quite happy. And why not? They got all-expense-paid lays.

Fantasy has form and pacing, like a Harry Langdon routine. This requires practice, practice, practice, as even masturbation needs timing and rehearsal. We're all better at it now--aren't we?--than we were in high school. Climaxes are built to. With this difference: If you blow a line in fantasy, you can start over again--stop/go, forward/back, Joe Paterno reviewing one of his game films. Furthermore, there is no unpleasant consequence. No one ever got crabs from a fantasy; no one ever asked himself, "Was it good for me, too, dear?" Most important, though: In fantasy, we can manipulate not just how we feel but how the other person or persons feel. This is crucial. Say your fantasy is to rape Aunt Alice--you control your emotions (power, lust) and, inevitably, you control her emotions (fear, humiliation) as well. Remember, a fantast is all the characters in his playlet at once: seducer and seduced, doctor and patient, S and M. I don't want to upset you, but the mind, even your mind, is a notorious cross dresser.

But when fantast steps onto the film set, that inner discipline will be abrogated; gone. Rude shocks hit. The actress playing Aunt Alice has one breast no bigger than a cyst; she smells from old daiquiris; she doesn't scream on cue. Structure and pacing won't line up against the cross hairs. Also, anticipation--which has ever been more arousing than climax--is dashed off; first draft only, no returning to the good parts for a fresh start. And, worse yet, you can't get your clam knife into Aunt Alice's head: You can't be her. In Acting Out, the single spectacular success story was that of a man who wanted to couple with himself. ("I love how I move. I love the way I talk. I would love to make love to myself even as a man. But if I could transform myself into a woman--oh, that would be good. The two sides of me. I'm the best fuck I'll ever have. Don't you see it? And on top of that, I have perfect teeth.") Probably, he'd sleep in twin beds, too. But you have it right there: the duality (or multiplicity) that's characteristic of fantasy. All G & R had to do was slip Mr. Self five or six mirrors and a cheap wig. He started., like Mae West's friend, without them. Truth is: He and himself had been in a solid ménage à deux since childhood. At least he didn't have to worry about getting cuckolded.

But the rest was, as my mother would say, pretty much like Niagara Falls: a bride's second straight disappointment. For instance: Terri King hoped to flipside sexually--female--male--so that she could blue-ball her gay boyfriend. Dulls-borough, U. S. A.: The actor didn't resemble Mr. Fruit; she was not a persuasive male. This reaction would predominate whenever there were private events, dark and eccentric secrets, involved. The most baroque fantasy--nude-man-meets-wedding-gowned-woman-in-church-kisses-chases-rapes-her-cut-fishes-her-dead-out-of-lake-cut-puts-gown-on-and-(gasp)-prays-in-church-himself (note interchangeability again)--well, a case of hepatitis at a blood bank would've gone over with more panache. "I couldn't rape you--because you put up so much screaming. You were so believable that it isn't in me to rape at that point. I became an actor doing my own fantasy." The truth will make you soft. There's no place for Stanislavsky in a dream.

Or plot and tempo get refractory; out of hand, hands. Marcia Blau had been pushing her crocus up with a play-doctor scene: Silent noncommittal men would examine Marcia on some escapeless emergency-room table. Yet, when done live, this menhandling chased her into a rabbit panic: Fantasies don't come with Blue Cross coverage. "It was asexual. Acting out a fantasy is not the same as having one. And having people be harsh in fantasy is actually soft and sensuous. The difference between keeping it in my head and doing it was that no one could be what I imagined him to be." What she imagined him ... Marcia was herself and an entire staff of doctors. In fantasy, she could supervise her complete physical. There was no unexpected cold-finger probe.

And some pipe dreams in the film wouldn't do a thing for your pipe or mine: They're just plain goofy. Take the Feather Man. He had that fat flatus of an idea: to humiliate men wearing Puritan dress in the Salem town square circa 1675. How? Oh, he'd tickle their tines with his feather until--bone-bent with horniness--they ejaculated, one, two, three, four, like the Rockettes. Strike out; complete whiff. Nobody told him that, his ingrown brain aside, few people are tickled pink, let alone lust red, by that scenario. The Feather Man is bitter, irate; also shamed. You can be a pervert, a creep in this society--that sort of lifestyle might even headline the National Enquirer. But to be absurd, that's embarrassing. "I'm very disappointed. I think you should have gotten people who were turned on by this. I think that was your job, I told you my fantasy." Turned on by a feather. You could thumb through Headlock Ellis from now to Botswana before you came across that one.

The most moving fantasy is joint. Husband and wife in a male-domination scene, one that they had obviously rehearsed for years out of town before, so to speak, mounting it on Broadway. He (with evident manhood problems) would be made erect by a stern mistress/nurse type. In this case, through the long relationship, they could interface roles empathetically: control each other, control pacing and plot line. Not acted out for the first time, by any means: They had acted it out often enough before--which, I think, is inconsistent with the parameters that Gurevich had set up. Nonetheless, on camera, he can't get it hard. Desperate, terribly abashed, he signals Cut! "I felt that I had something to prove. I've pimped in every whorehouse--Vietnam, Moscow, Madrid. Take it for what it's worth. Believe it or not, that's God's honest truth." You have to feel for the guy. And his missus will. On screen, she is edging toward tears. Whether from sympathy or exasperation, I leave up to you.

And, under each lech wish--like a gorilla wearing a gorilla suit--is the grand fantasy: I can put you in films, sweetheart. Exhibitionism. One transvestite (femme, please) man and one svelte black woman (who simply wanted to be the main distraction at a chic ball) were ecstatic when they saw their altered egos by projector light. Exhibitionism was sufficient for them: They got a rush from the rushes, from style and ambience. But exhibitionism applies in every case. The most common damp dream--remember?--was nonobserved public sex. Acting Out is that, with a fillip. In the theater, they'll watch people watch them: the sort of voyeurism you get when you spy another eyeball peeping back at you through a keyhole. It excites. And, gosh, who wouldn't want to play the Trans-Lux East? Even with an idiotic feather in one hand.

Acting Out is instructive, genial, full of double-take events. But it could have been a more significant film. The premise is valid, the approach not exploitative. But because G & R didn't, or wouldn't, define fantasy in some consistent manner, we're left with a sweet-bread-and-chocolate-mousse salad. The exhibitionists, the opportunistic sybarites, the T. D. performers upstage, out-frame those few who risked exposing abscess-tender parts of their psyche.

But the evidence that arrives from those few is painful, graphic. Imagination can't survive a biopsy: The brain is your most erogenous zone. Erogenous for its privacy and silent depth. We talk a lot about coming out of the closet. No; light is often overrated. Delicious things, the truffles of the mind, grow best in a dark, moist place.

"Rosenblum: 'Both men and women wanted to make love with an alien. I don't mean a wetback.' ".