Scoopy,

I read with interest the copy on Performance, by Carausius.  My Hollywood friends say these things happen more often than we know. Regardless of how often they happen, when the subject comes up, the most popular subjects for gossip in the industry are these four:

 

1.            The Mickster and his squeeze at the time, Carre Otis, in Wild Orchid.  This is the big one.  According to witnesses the two simply got it on.  They have also said that it went on for a long time, to the point that crew members got tired of watching and walked away, one by one.  This version of the event has endured the test of time.  I’ve read that both Mickey Rourke and Carre Otis have acknowledged it.  The gossipers give all this a 99% chance of being true.

 

2.            Kim Basinger and Eric Baldwin in The Getaway.  They were a new couple at the time and crew members have said that the two got in on in the famous scene.  It looks like he was close to down on her in the released version and, it is said, when she reaches back in the scene to replace the exited member, it really happened.  Maybe not.  The gossipers give this one a 70%.

 

3.             Anne Heche and Joan Chen in Wild Side.  During the filming, it is said, the ladies did more with their hands, etc., than the director asked for.  It looks real.  This is given around an 80% chance of being true.

 

4.             Then there is Monster’s Ball.  Some awfully good acting in this if the deed wasn’t being done.  It may be just rumor that Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton got it on.  Your choice, but the wags like it.

 

This brings up a related subject.  What happens to outtakes from close, but not quite, explicit nudity?

 I remember in the late sixties, or maybe it was early seventies, there was some scandal about directors showing, at private parties, revealing outtakes of big name actresses.  (They were actresses in those days, not actors.)  Directors were even accused of not quite getting the vase of flowers or the stair railing in quite the right place on purpose so that they would have something unusual for their private collections. 

For example:  What happened to the outtakes of Katherine Ross from They Only Kill Their Masters?  In one scene, she rises from the bed nude, walks the full length of the bed, dragging a sheet.  The sheet is clasped in front of her, drags loosely down her side and behind her, revealing a bare back, her lumbar and the start of her butt.  It had to be just right and they must have finally gotten it right after several takes.  What happened to the outtakes?  They were surely viewed in the dailies, and then what? 

The sixties scandal was quickly quieted by the industry.  It’s hard to imagine Hollywood not wanting publicity, but the one bit of infamy they don’t want is headlines about non-professionalism.  The act of showing unusual film at private soirees must have violated several guild by-laws to say nothing of a few right to privacy laws and actors’ contracts.  In any event, the matter was settled quickly without much publicity.  And the directors responsible were probably shunned for some time or at least mistrusted. 

As in the aftermath of most scandals, I’m guessing a lot of steps have been taken to ensure integrity. 

Which begs the question:  What is happening to today’s outtakes?  Is there a set procedure, or is it just huckelty buck?  I would suppose that by now those things are tightly supervised, but by whom?  Anyone know?  Maybe a representative of the actor involved?  Anyone else?  If the rep is there, I’m guessing the director would have to give up all the rejected film to the rep or whomever.  Then what do they do with it?  How is the star, and/or others, sure the bunch of celluloid contains all the throwaways?  After all, it won’t be decided what’s to be used in the film until the principal editing some weeks after shooting.  It’s going to pass through a lot of hands. 

Wow, what a black market possibility here, already done to some degree, of course.  In any case, I’m sure there are little private collections here and there.  The stars themselves probably have a treasure trove of their own stuff.  How would you like to see Nicole Kidman’s collection? 

Silver Dollar Sam

Le Pornographe (2001):

This is the story of Jacques, once the world's greatest pornographer, but retired for two decades and living idly off the income of his architect wife. Suddenly he needs money again, so he decides to go back into the porno biz. Sadly, the industry has passed him by. He intends to make a neo-realistic porn film with muted moaning, no blatant dirty talk, no fingernail polish, and no lurid close-ups. His producer watches a few minutes of the porno film being created, studies the elderly director's lack of involvement, then takes over the direction himself.

Jacques then quits, of course, and bemoans the fact that an industry which once represented rebellion and artistic freedom to him and his friends has degenerated to the point of cookie-cooker commercialization. That's only the beginning of his troubles. His son walked out of his life when he found out about the whole pornography thing, and they are trying to reconcile. Jacques is not doing especially well with his son, and he also manages to alienate his faithful wife and to push away his loyal best friend as well, finally choosing to spend his time in a room alone, writing down his thoughts and navel-gazing about his insignificant place in a vast and meaningless universe, until madness completely overtakes him.

So Le Pornographe is basically Boogie Nights, as reimagined by Dostoevsky and directed by Ingmar Bergman. People staring off into the middle distance. People sitting silently with shoulders hunched in defeat. Somber classical music. One stagy tableaux after another.

I suppose that in addition to being about the way pornography has changed since the idealistic seventies, Le Pornographe is also about the changes in the French film industry, and films in general since that ambitious and individualistic era. Not to mention sex, personal craftsmanship, rock and roll, politics, the environment and anything else you would care to append to the metaphor.

Unlike Boogie Nights, The Pornographer does include explicit sex. In the scene where the producer takes over the sex film's direction from Jacques, we see a porn actress on the receiving end of some thrusting from a well-endowed fellow, and then accepting the traditional faceful of happy juice. The porn actress in the film-within-a-film is played by a real porn actress named Ovidie. Although the film shows penetration, there are no good looks at any of Ovidie's naughty bits except during the ol' in-out.

 

Ovidie

No Small Affair (1984):

Brainscan and Tuna disagreed strongly on No Small Affair. Tuna rather liked it, while Brainscan took a major dump on its face. It seems to me that this film is too inconsequential to spend much time on, but I thought it was decent. The great weakness of the film is that it's a romance in which the relationship of the two partners is utterly unconvincing. (Not to mention statutory rape, but they ignored such details back in the 80s.) That fact alone should render the film unwatchable, but it really doesn't. No Small Affair actually a decent way to pass the time if you like adolescent angst movies. If you don't like such movies, you should not make any effort to see it, but if someone forces you to sit through it, it probably won't be as bad an experience for you as it was for Brainscan ...

unless ...

 ... you are allergic to one or both of the two things that could irritate the hell out of you.

1. Jon Cryer. In general, I sympathize full well with what Brainscan wrote about Cryer, the perennially unfunny Matthew Broderick impersonator, but Cryer didn't bother me in this film. I'd say this is his most engaging performance. Cryer's biggest problem has always been that he tries too hard to be funny, and that can be painful to watch, but in this film he just sort of blended into the woodwork, played his part, trusted the material, and let the director focus on the better elements of the film.

2. Elevator music. Chrissy Faith provided some excellent saloon singing as Demi Moore's voice double. There are a lot of mellow "easy listening" vocals in this movie ("My Funny Valentine," e.g.). I mean a lot. Many minutes. Songs sung all the way through. The movie will therefore grate on you if you are one of the many who hate elevator-in-waiting music. Again, this didn't bother me. I liked Chrissy's vocals. There are also the inevitable musical montages, but I fast-forwarded through them.

The director of this film was Jerry Schatzberg, who was much better known for seventies-era dramas replete with social consciousness, like Scarecrow and Panic in Needle Park. There must be an interesting story behind his migration from serious Pacino films to fluff like this, but I don't know it. Maybe he was just leaving the narrow current of the seventies and swimming out into the open sea of the eighties, like the rest of us.

Overall, I have to side with Tuna in this debate. I have no enthusiasm for this minor movie, but watching it wasn't an awful way to pass the time.

Judith Baldwin
Demi Moore

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"Frankie and Johnnie ... Were Lovers" (1975)

I am sure all of your are familiar with the song, Frankie and Johnnie. Perhaps you don't know the story behind it. Frankie caught her pimp, Albert, cheating on her with Alice Bligh, and blew him away. The song grew up amongst the working girls in New Orleans. A record producer from Tin Pan Alley heard it, cleaned up the lyrics, changed Albert to Johhnie, and got rich from it. An example of the original lyrics will give you the flavor of the song.

Frankie stood up in the courtroom Said I ain't tellin' no sass I didn't shoot Albert in the first degree I shot him in his big black ass. He was my man, God Damn his soul.

This film is a retelling of the story, but, rather than moving more towards the source material, it went the other direction, turning Frankie (Rene Bond) into a famous singer, Albert into a wannabe race car designer, and Alice (Cyndee Summers) into her best friend. Johnnie meets a tragic end, but not in a very believable way. Much of the film is flashback, making it sometimes hard to follow. It wasn't hard to follow the frequent full frontal and rear nudity from Rene Bond and Cyndee Summers.

6 IMDb readers have this at 6.9, rather high for an exploitation film. The transfer is amazingly good for a film of this age. This is Bond in her prime. Be sure to notice the extreme 70s eye makeup. I was not able to tell for sure of Bond did her own singing. IF you enjoy exploitation, you will want to see this one. C+.

Cyndee Summers
Rene Bond

Here is a sneak preview of more scenes from "Havoc". Here we have Anne Hathaway and Bijou Phillips topless! Look for it on DVD November 29!