Blue Movie (29 page)

“Gosh,” she exclaimed in wide-eyed surprise, though not without interest, “you mean he’s really going to (gulp)
screw me? Davey?
”

“Big deal, huh, Sis?” Dave stretched lazily. “We’d have to cool it with Trix though—might put her pretty uptight.”

“Trix?
Good grief, what about
Mother?!?”

“No, what we’d do,” Boris explained, “we’d say it was
inserts—
I mean, the actual lovemaking shots—we’d say we used doubles there.”

She looked from one man to another, cute, puzzled: “Well, can’t we just
do
it that way?”

Boris shook his head. “Somehow it doesn’t have the same overall quality—it doesn’t have the
aesthetic tone.
It seems false.”

“Also,” Tony added, “with doubles, you can’t
pan—
you have to cut away each time.”

“Dig?” asked her brother.

Still wide-eyed, she nodded at each of them to show understanding. “I guess so. I mean Mother’s going to have conniptions about this whole thing anyway . . . no matter
how
we do it.”

“Not when you get an
Oscar
for it, Debbie,” suggested Tone.

She clapped her hands, then gripped Dave’s arm, beaming with delight. “Oh, wouldn’t that be just too
terrif!
”

So, by mid-morning, they were shooting Debbie undressing (“First things first, eh, B.?” Tone had quipped) in the foreground, while her brother knelt, his back to camera (and to Debbie) building the fire.

“Gosh, even my
underclothes
are wet,” went the line, when she was down to her white panties and bra.

“Well, take ’em off,” he said, “you don’t want to catch
pneumonia,
” and, as he reached his hand over his shoulder behind him, he added teasingly, “Don’t worry, I won’t look.”

“Silly,” she said, laughing, and handed him the small garments, which he held up in front of him for a second—first, the bra, stretched horizontally between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and he gave a mock wolf-whistle; then, the panties, holding them the same way. “Hey, you can see the fire right through them! Ha, bet those sure keep you warm, all right!”

“You
nut,
” she said, and laughed again, while he arranged them alongside her other clothes on the firescreen, and she enveloped herself in one of the blankets, and sat down beside him, shaking her hair loose and leaning toward the fire to dry it.

“Now, your turn,” he said, getting up to stand behind her and take off his clothes, handing them to her one at a time, while she accepted them, hand back over shoulder, just as he had done, then draped them across the other end of the fire-screen.

“Wow,” Tony whispered to Boris, even before Debbie stepped out of her panties, “she must have one of the cutest asses in the industry.”

Boris nodded accord. “Nice little knockers, too.”

“Perfect
little knockers,” Tony agreed. “You know anyone who’s fucked her?”

Boris, squinting through his view-finder, muttered halfheartedly, “Oh . . . one or two, I guess . . . maybe three.”

“Yeah, what’d they say?”

“Great,” said Boris.

“I’m hip it is,” said Tony, not taking his eyes off it. “Did they say it was
freaky?”

“Freaky?”
Boris shrugged. “No,” he said, absorbed in the view-finder still to his eye, “just your average . . .
nice, wet, tight, hot, cheer-leading, baton-twirling, teenage American pussy.
Ha, how does
that
grab you, Tone?”

“Dig
it,” said Tone, grooved by the image, “can’t beat that!”

However, while Boris and Tone were thus engaged in innocent badinage, sinister things were afoot in another quarter of the town—penthouse-time, Hotel Imperial—where the resourceful Lynx Letterman was presiding over an exclusive, audience-of-two-
soirée
-
cinégraphique
—projecting color slides onto a screen in the darkened room . . . slides he maintained were single frames of 35-mm. motion-picture film, snipped from the work-print of Angela’s sequence in
The Faces of Love.

The audience was composed of C.D. and Les Harrison, and the slides were, in fact, exactly what Lynx had represented them to be, featuring, as they did, Angela in every conceivable situation—indeed, “position”—of stardom compromise.

Old C.D. was sobbing quite openly, while the vindicated Les attempted to share the grief, tears streaming down his upturned face, one arm around his dad, occasionally gripping his shoulder, whimpering and wincing as he did, in some curious (perhaps due to his recent M-run) Pavlovian-like
reversal,
as though each grip of reassurance on dad’s shoulder was an
injection
of recognition and security into his own. Finally the old man actually pulled away, as if wanting to do his thing alone—or, quite possibly, out of sheer annoyance.

In any case, when the lights went up, it was
Les,
presumably anticipating an emotional finale from dad, and wishing to prolong their shared experience, who forced his own grief to a crescendo, burst into tears anew, and groped blindly for his father’s shoulder, as though at last they would weep together and be the closer for it . . . or, at least in terms of corporate structure.

But the only effect it appeared to have on C.D. was one of embarrassment—an embarrassment which then seemed to call forth a certain inner strength, or dignity
—iron-in-the-soul
style—from the old man.

“Get hold of yourself, boy!” he admonished, shaking his son with one hand, wiping tears from his own cheek with the other. “Do you really think that this . . . this little
nobody
. . . is going to make
one iota
of difference to the profit-and-loss sheet of Metropolitan Pictures?!? One year from now?!? Two at the most? With all the . . .” he fumbled a bit, clearly improvising, “the . . .
new stuff
that’s coming up—new
ideas,
new
material,
new
faces
. . . the era of the super-star is
over,
son . . . the economics of film-making today simply are
not
compatible with budget allocations of exorbitant fees for the actors.” He grasped his son’s shoulder, Caesar style. “It’s a
responsibility,
. . .
a responsibility
we have to the
stockholders.”
And then, in a tender fatherly way, he handed him his handkerchief. “Here, son,” he said softly.

“Thanks, Dad,” said Leg, equally soft, touching the handkerchief gingerly to his eyes, then unfolding it and blowing his nose—an action which caused C.D. to grimace in annoyance. “Goddamn it, boy, that
one’s hundred-year-old Irish linen!”
He snatched it from him. “You just don’t have any sense of
style,
that’s the goddamn trouble with you!” He looked at the disarrayed handkerchief, shaking his head in concern, then crumpled it and stuffed it into his side coat-pocket.

“Sorry, Dad,” Les mumbled, eyes averted, going the full S/M route now.

The old man coughed and chortled, slapping Les on the back reassuringly. “Well, what the Sam Hill, son—it’s only
money.
Just like that little
nobody, no-talent, no-heart, sleep-anywhere tramp of an extra, Angela Sterling
. . . only money.” He wagged his head sadly, put his arm over his son’s shoulder, and continued in tones of fatherly confidence, “Well, that’s
not
what makes this old world go around, my boy . . .” and he looked up to Lynx Letterman—he who had been sitting there, eyes without expression, waiting with reptile patience—“Right, Lynx? I mean, no offense, I’m sorry to have to say those things about the girl, I know you were very close, but—” He broke off, shrugged, eyes filling with tears again, “What else can we do?”

Lynx coughed, cleared his throat, waited a second, and made his pitch: “What you can do, Mr. Harrison, I’ll tell you what you can do. You
and
your son—as vice-president in charge of production—what you
can
do, and what you
should
do, and
must
do . . . out of respect for the vast majority of the Metro
stockholders
who have
trusted
you, and who have put their
confidence
in you both—
you and your son
—what you must do now is
repay that confidence!
And by that I mean that we—that is to say,
you
and
Les
—have got to persuade
Angie to kill the picture
. . . I mean, I found out she hasn’t
signed
yet . . . no contract . . . no release . . .
nothing
—just a lousy letter of agreement that wouldn’t hold up in a Tijuana post office.”

As Lynx spoke, his listeners’ eyes began to clear, then to harden, with remarkable similarity.

“If you show her these
pictures,
” he continued, indicating the slides in a gesture of distaste, “and if you
tell
her that she will be absolutely
destroyed
by this film, that you will
personally
see to it that she
never works again,
and that what’s more you are suing her for
twelve million dollars.
Well, if
you
do that, and then I say it’s all true . . . I’ll just bet my sweet ass she
walks.”

“I
’VE BEEN THINKING
about that
‘Profane’
sequence,” Tony was saying to Boris at lunch. “You remember you mentioned ‘a nun and a gambler,’ or ‘a hooker and a priest’? Well, dig—suppose we go the priest route . . . but instead of a
hooker,
the chick is some kind of
nut—
I mean, not just
sexually,
but like
physically weird,
and he
still
wants to fuck her. But we don’t know that yet, right? I mean, it could open in a very conventional way—church, Sunday morning, he’s in the pulpit, doing his thing, she’s third-row center, digging him over her hymn book—but
demurely,
because she’s boss
respectable, wholesome, clean
. . . knee-length dress, white gloves, Easter bonnet, beige pumps, seamless stockings, the full fifties schmear, right? Padded-bra and garterbelt time right? Quarter pound of deodorant and six ounces of Listerine . . . very
clean
woman . . . ‘Mrs. Midwest Front Porch Swing,’ toast of the Great Silent Majority, queen of artifice. Okay, he’s got eyes . . . goes over to her place after church . . . for a little ‘spiritual counseling,’ right? . . . makes his move, shoots his best shot—I thought that might be a fun title, incidentally—
His Sunday Shot,
ha. Anyway, he gives her a big, wet, soul, tongue kiss—and, because she responds so warmly, he takes the liberty of forcing her hand down to grasp his divine joint, which he had had the presumption to expose during the soul kiss. Naturally, our heroine is plenty keen for some of this hot Presbyterian cock straight from the pulpit, but
not
before she had taught him the fundamental precepts of
existentialism,
you dig? So with ‘Preacher Malone’—I thought we might actually get Lips to play it—trousers off now, his rude donkey-cock extended grotesquely in front of him, chasing our heroine about the room, grabbing at her—and during this, by the way, there occurs what you might call a ‘running dialogue,’ right? Ha. Anyway, so she’s telling him about the ‘historical irresponsibility of the Church,’ and how the ‘concept of
faith
has merely served as a convenient receptacle for Man wishing to shirk his own responsibilities to Man,’ and so on, you know, lay out the whole Jean-Paul store . . . and all the time she’s telling him this, he’s in what you might call ‘hot pursuit,’ trying to nail her, finally getting all her clothes off—you know, all the weird American middle-class
harness
stuff—so then he thinks he’s got her, but on the next grab, part of her
body
comes off . . . like a wig, or a leg, or a breast—”

“It’s
fantass,
” said B. “And I know exactly who to play it.”

“I’m hip,” said Tone, “but dig—so then it gets really
weird,
like
surrealistic,
where it turns out that
everything
about her is false. Even her
cunt
is false—she has a
false cunt.
So in other words, this gradual dismantling finally reduces her to
absolutely nothing—
like, in the end there’s
nothing REAL left of her to fuck.
So he puts back on
his
white collar—and his trousers—and goes home.”

“All a dream?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s
heavy,
Tone.”

“Well, that’s what you
pay
old Tone for, eh? Heh-heh.”

“Heavy . . . but not very
erotic,
Tone.”

“I thought you wanted some comic relief here.”

“Yeah, but . . . couldn’t she suck his cock or something? I mean, aside from the funny parts?”

“‘Suck his cock’!?! Christ, man, there’s so much
cocksucking
going on already in the picture that it’s liable to get blasted as some kind of weird
fag-cocksuck
film or something.”

“Okay, not suck his cock, but . . .
something.
I mean, we can’t just suddenly do some kind of . . .
Three Stooges
bit right in the middle of the picture.”

Tone was irate. “
‘Three Stooges’?!? Are you kidding?
That’s
Beckett,
for Chrissake!”

“Okay, okay, but we’ve got to have
something
. . . less
esoteric . . . less high brow
. . . something people can relate to.”

“How about that ‘anal-tongue’ bit you mentioned?”

“Hmm . . . wait, I know what we’ll do—we’ll let
her
think of something when she gets here.”