Blue Movie (3 page)

“Okay, what else?”

“Huh? Whatta you mean ‘what else’? What else is there?”

“Well, that’s what I’m talking about,” said Boris, “the
totality
of it, not just how the
girl
looks—that’s only one aspect . . . besides, the redhead wasn’t bad, you know, she could have been very effective; she was wasted, totally wasted.”

Sid could bear it no longer—he flung his cigarette over the balcony, and struck his fist against his palm in a gesture of complete and bitter defeat.
“Jesus fucking Christ, B.!”
he said between clenched teeth, “here you are with everything in the
world
going for you, and you worrying about making some dumb broad hooker look good in a dirty movie! Whatta you,
nuts?!?”

That’s how frustrated and impatient he had become with Boris. During the past two years he had approached him with any number of lucrative, if not exactly original, film properties and ideas—ideas which seemed uniquely suited to the genius and prestige of the master . . . without whom, forget it. One of his so-called
“boss
projects,” for instance, had been a monumental “fictional documentary,” entitled
Whores of the World
—a twenty-hour, ten-part film, to be shot in every capital and metropolis of both hemispheres. “Talk about your everlovin’ audience-appeal,” Sid had exclaimed repeatedly, “this baby’s got it
all! Sex, travel, human interest!
Christ, we’ll give ’em so much fuckin’ human interest, it’ll be comin’ out their ass-hole!” He claimed to have researched the project thoroughly, “. . . at considerable personal expense,” he would always add, paving the way for a handsome reimbursement out of the first front money that might come to hand. The way he envisioned it, the entire series of ten feature-length flicks would take two years to shoot. “Now get this,” he said softly, with a dark glance around the room, as though he were about to divulge the World War III invasion date, “by the time we get into release, each of the hooker scenes will have changed—new broads, new prices, etcetera and we can start all over again! Like the old ‘Follies’ pix!
Whores of the World—1968! Whores of the World
—
1969!
It’ll become a fuckin’
institution,
for Chrissake!”

And for a while the notion had actually seemed to interest B., but when finally pressed by a desperate, overextended Sid (“I got ’im, I got ’im, I got the King B.!” he had told the studio with tremendous glee and what proved to be typical exaggeration), he declined. “I don’t think whores interest me very much,” he had to admit, almost wistfully, “I don’t think I understand them.”

“So well go for the
pathos,”
pleaded Sid urgently, “Christ, we’ll have the fuckin’ pathos comin’ out their ass-holes!”

But B. shook his head. “I have a hunch that whores are all alike,” he said, with a little smile that seemed especially for Sid, and momentarily depressed him no end. But Sid was nothing if not boss resilient, so he was quick to bounce back with additional “winners.”

But as yet they hadn’t been for B.; he was after something else, something more . . .
ambitious,
if that was the word—and tonight he thought he’d found out what it was.

“You know what I’d like to do?” he said with studied deliberation, while he and Sid lolled, smoking pot, on the moon-washed, wave-lapping terrace of Teeny Marie’s monstro hacienda, and through the candlelight and the fragrance of pine and gardenia, the chicks floated or flounced by, in minis and micros, in leopard leotards, in bikinis and hot-pants peek-a-boos—all looking to get discovered, or otherwise straight, if only for the moment. “I’d like to make one of those.” He nodded toward the projection room. “One of those stag films.”

Sid stared at him for a moment, then looked at the cold roach of cigarette between his fingers. “This pot is better than I thought,” he said, flipping it away. “You wantta make one of those, huh?”

Boris nodded.

“Yeah, well, that figures,” said Sid with painful irony, “the best director in the world wants to make a stag film. That’s great. Yeah, that’s very amusing. I mean, that’s really hilarious, ain’t it? Hah-hah-hah . . .” converting his forced laugh into a sound of sick retching.

Boris simply stared ahead, expressionless, into the endless Pacific night of stars and dark waters, his head somewhere else.

“I ran into Joey Schwartzman today,” said Sid, with what now sounded like cold hatred, “. . . he told me how you blew the Metro deal.” A deal, it should be noted, which Sid himself had proposed and would have participated in.

From a farther room, and drifting past, came the incredible wailing lament of the extraordinary
Plastic Ono.
Boris said nothing, didn’t appear to have heard, nodded benignly in time to the sound.

“Okay,” said Sid, emboldened by drug to self-expression, “okay, okay, you’re a
saint!
You’re a motherfuckin’, insane
saint!
You turn down a
ten-million-dollar picture
—
Dante’s Inferno,
and that’s one helluva property, you know that, don’t you?—you turned it down, and the next day you’re talking about making a
stag film!
That’s very amusing, that’s very cute. Another chapter in the legend . . .
The Legend of King B.!
—could be a title, right?”

Through drug and adrenaline, Sid had worked himself into a state of vehemently righteous indignation. He coughed, searched his pockets for a cigarette, tamped it with great vigor against the onyx tabletop between them, cleared his throat, and was about to speak again, but was circumvented by the sudden appearance of their gay hostess, cavorting right up to their faces, swirling the raised skirts of her new costume—featuring several crinoline petticoats—in haughty can-can fashion, flashing black lace panties and one spoke-like stretch of ivory thigh, screeching: “Anyone for
box lunch?!?”

Sid chortled lustily: “Whatta you got in it—
dried shrimp?
Haw-haw-haw!” slapping his leg, coughing and spitting, while she flounced on and away in her mad dervish.

“I’ve got to find out,” B. said, having barely noticed her flashing pass, “how
far
you can take the aesthetically erotic—at what point, if any, it gets to be such a personal thing that it becomes meaningless.”

“I got news for you,” said Sid, firm and terse, “they been doing it for years—‘
underground movies’
they’re called, ever hear of ’em? Andy Warhol? They show
everything—
beaver, cock, the whole store! It’s a fucking
industry,
for Chrissake!”

Boris sighed, shaking his head. “They don’t show
anything”
he said softly, even sadly, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you. They haven’t
started
to show anything. No
erection,
no
penetration . . . nothing.
And besides that, they’re
Mickey Mouse . . . amateurish,
just like the stuff we were looking at tonight—bad acting, bad lighting, bad camera, bad everything. At least in the stag films you actually see them
fucking
. . . in the underground movies, it’s only
represented, suggested
—erection and penetration are never shown. So the underground films don’t even count. But what I want to know is, why are the others ones—the stag films—always so ridiculous? Why isn’t it possible to make one that’s really
good
—you know, one that’s genuinely erotic and beautiful.” This said with an ingenuousness not to be denied.

Despite the pot, Sid’s years as a yes-man had given him a quick automatic nod in certain serious circumstances, which he now recognized as prevailing. “Yeah, yeah,” he said expectantly, but obviously confounded.

“I mean,” said Boris, “suppose the film were made under
studio
conditions—feature-length, color, beautiful actors, great lighting, strong plot . . . how would it look then?”

“Christ, I can’t imagine,” admitted Sid.

“Neither can I,” said Boris, and after a pause, “I just wonder if it’s possible.”

Sid, now taking it all as a perfectly absurd joke on himself—the joke of Life—didn’t care much anymore. “Possible? Sure. You gotta camera? You can start shooting tomorrow. You can use, uh, let’s see . . . you can use Teeny as the lead, and you can use
me . . .
we’ll both work on deferment, haw-haw . . .” He laid his head down laughing—crying really, morosely, thinking about the waste of it, B.’s turning down the Metro deal, “. . . you’ve really gone round the fuckin’ bend this time, you know that?” Saying this through a hairy-arm-covered sob as Teeny arrived with Les’s previous mini-skirt starlet in tow.

“Gotta live one for you, boys,” she screamed. “Last one out is a hole in the ass!” And she began grappling at Sid’s fly.

“Aw for Chrissake,” he said in mock anger, feigning karate chops at her hand, “lemme work it up first!”

“But she likes you simply for what you
are,
Sid,” explained Teeny with an extravagant expression of outraged innocence, “a short, fat, hairy, simpleminded . . .
kike creep!”

Sid closed his eyes, in a gesture of exasperated, weary tolerance. “Oh, that’s great,” he said, “that’s all I need right now, some kind of racial . . . racial
allusion—
is that what you call it,
‘racial allusion’?”

“Actually,” Teeny went on, glittering toward B., “she’s really interested in Mr. King Fruit here,” pressing the cutie-pie starlet into him, “she said she’d be pleased to suck his thing. Correct, Miss Pilgrim?”

“Oh Teeny, really!” the darling girl gushed, “you’re just too awful!”

“Well, anyway,” said Teeny, suddenly bored, “here she is—Miss Penny Pilgrim, if you can believe that. And she wants to be in the movies. So go ahead boys—
fuck her brains out!”
She cackled and gave the girl a playful—not entirely playful—push into their midst, then flounced away.

Sid made elaborate motions of brushing spilled drink and ash off his front. “Jesus Christ, I’m sopping!” he said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry” said the girl, trying to help him, leaning over in such a way that her extremely brief mini revealed the back of bare brown legs and a precious, perfectly rounded derrière, gift-wrapped, as it were, in panties of ice-blue trimmed with white. Boris fingered the edge of lace then patted her bottom. The girl didn’t change her position immediately, just turned her head toward him and smiled sweetly.

“You have a very cute bottom,” said B.

“Why thank you, sir.” And she straightened, turning to him, and did a little girl’s curtsy. She looked about sixteen, all dimples, thighs, and pert little breasts, with short, fluffy honey-colored hair and a very sweet smile.

“Yeah, how’d you like to be in a stag film?” said Sid gruffly.

“I’d like to be in one of Mister Boris Adrian’s films,” she said, still looking at B. with something close to adoration, “I’d like that more than anything in the world.”

Boris smiled and took her hand.

“You’re very pretty, darling. What’s your name?”

“Penny. Penny Pilgrim. I’ve seen every single one of your pictures, and I think you’re the greatest director in the world.”

“Wait’ll you see his new stag film,” said Sid, “with Taylor and Burton. Terrific. We got a little distribution problem though—the projector won’t fit in the sewer.”

“How did you like the movies?” Boris asked, gently pulling her down into a chair beside them, where she sat now, properly, all little-girl goodness, feet and knees together, hands clutched in her lap, just at the hem of her panty-line mini. She made a cute but definite expression of distaste. “Gosh, I thought they were just
awful.
I couldn’t take it after the first two—I went outside. I think most of the girls did . . . except for, you know, a few,” adding this in sotto voice with an uneasy look around the terrace, since Teeny had been cackling and whistling throughout, shouting “Sock it to me, baby!”

“Yeah,” said Sid dryly, “well, you see, that’s what
we’re
up against in this new project of ours—
instant audience alienation.
It’s sort of a new gimmick. Something like what was in the mind of the kamikazes.”

Neither Boris nor the girl paid any attention to Sid’s remark.

“Was there
any
scene,” asked B., “that, you know,
interested
you?”

The obvious sincerity of his question, along with her avid desire to please, made the girl take it very seriously. She thought about it for a moment, her brow crinkling cutely as she did.

“No,” she finally admitted, “there honestly wasn’t—unless it was when she was making up . . . in the first one, when she was sitting at the mirror, putting on her lipstick . . . just before, well, just before what happened . . . happened.”

She said it with exactly the right combination of coyness and a self-deprecating smile, as though to acknowledge an awareness of the possibility, in their eyes, of her own provincial ignorance—though preferably innocence, natch.

“I don’t think that coon had a real cock,” said Sid, “I think it was a strap-on.”

They both continued to ignore him.

“Have you
ever
seen anything in a movie,” Boris pursued it, “that sort of turned you on?”

Now the girl, wanting more than anything simply to be liked, and yet not be thought of as just another “dumb little broad,” was really pressed.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, still smiling, of course, but her smile nervous now. “I mean, gosh, I
love
love scenes, I mean, you know, in the movies, but these were just so . . .
awful.”

“Yes, but what if they were beautiful?”

“Huh?” Her great fawn eyes widened a little more.

“What if the film were done with good actors, beautiful costumes? All very romantic. What if it were the work . . . of an artist?”

“He means maniac,” explained Sid.

“And had a three-million-dollar budget?” Boris continued. “How do you think it would look then?” he insisted of the girl.