Pornstar

Pornstar 1: The Script

It wasn't my idea. I wish I could pretend it was, but it wasn't. In fact, I wasn't even really paying attention when it came up. I was sitting at the keyboard, trying to find something interesting to write about the last interschool football game (I don't get off on football).

There had been a craze that term for passing around porn videos. Several people had been working evenings in a video store, and slipping the porn out with them, and it got passed around... pretty much everybody had watched some. I certainly had. Paul and Lillith - no, of course her name wasn't really Lillith, don't be silly - were sitting somewhere behind me, over by the window, and I'd sort of heard that they were talking about the porn stuff and how unbelievably bad it was; but hey, we had a paper to get out, and somebody had to write it. When I say it was a paper, it was only a school paper... but I sort of had ambitions back then to be a journalist, and I thought it would look good on my resume.

Anyway, there I was trying to get the paper together and there they were pretty much just hanging out and that was sort of normal.

"Hey, look, there's Nancy... isn't she hot..."

There are some keywords that kick your brain into gear, even when you're seriously not paying attention. Nancy was hot, a fact which tended to sort of obsess my idler moments. Not that (outside idle moments) I actually had anything to do with her, of course - I'd have been way too shy...

"... how about she's tied over..."

"...an old sawhorse..."

"...OK, I guess..."

"...and then you've got this belt thing..."

"...no, a whip..."

"...OK, and you're whipping her..."

"Guys," I said, "guys, what is this?"

"Well, hey," said Paul, "this porn stuff, it's so much crap..."

"...but all these people are making all this cash out of it" said Lillith, "we were kind of thinking why couldn't we...?"

"Guys," I said, "come on."

"No," said Paul, "seriously, all you need is a half-way decent video camera..."

"...which we could borrow from media studies..."

"...and some hot girls..."

"Yeah, and like they're queueing up, are they?"

They both turned on me.

"Don't be such a wet blanket, Kyle," said Lillith.

"Hey, man," said Paul, "even if we don't make any money, this is going to get me seriously laid."

"Oh, you're like the leading man, are you? And Lillith's the front of the queue?"

"Oh, hey, no," said Lill, "I'll do the continuity and the wardrobe, but I'm not getting fucked on camera - no way, man!"

"Well, there you go," say I, "who you going to get?"

"Well, there's Jenny, she's hot..."

"I bet you she's a fucking virgin!"

"Yeah, well, maybe... there's Mandy - she's no virgin..." Paul had split up with Mandy - or the other way around, I wasn't sure - a couple of months before. I didn't see that as very likely. "...Sure you won't do it, Lill? oh, well... and hey, you got to admit Nancy Kilkenny would sell videos like they were going out of fashion..."

"And, like, she's going to agree, hey? And Big Dan the cow pie man is going to let her?"

We talked about it maybe ten minutes more, and we ended up with the general concensus that I was a wet blanket, and pissed on all their great ideas... and then, well, then, nothing might have happened, if it wasn't for Mrs Price and English.

Teachers are, lets face it, sort of old, or at least, sort of older, but Mrs Price was not so much older in a headspace sort of way. Like, I could talk to her and it was like on the same wavelength. She also looked - and dressed - a lot better than you'd think a teacher ought to. But that wasn't the point, at least not then. The point was that Mrs Price took us for English, and Paul and me and Lill - because we did the paper and had been in the school play - were sort of some ways her star pupils. And the day after we'd been talking in the paper office about the porn film thing, we were all in English with a whole bunch of other kids who were in that class with us, and she gave us all an exercise. In groups, she said. We had to write a script for a short film. In groups, and it was obvious that we - me and Paul and Lill - were a group, because we always were. And we had to write the script for 'a film that people would want to watch'.

OK, so what actually happened was my aunt died. My mom's family kind of don't much like to have too much to do with us so I scarcely really knew her, so it wasn't like big grief or anything. But, whatever, I had to go out east to the funeral, so I wasn't there for the script writing sessions - the first time I saw it was the day before we had to present it to the class.

And, hey, it was good - honestly it was good. You could tell it was Lillith's story, all gothic and night and witches and sort of dream stuff; but you could tell that Paul had written most of it. Paul can really write, when he gets off his lazy backside. It had a good plot, so that everything that happened fitted in and kind of made sense and seemed pretty much inevitable. You could, in a weird way, believe it, even though you could also believe that it was a kind of dark wet dream. It had pace, and dialogue, and wit, and drama, and shape - I really liked it as a piece of fiction.

But what it had most of was sex. Lots of sex. The lead guy got it on with five different women in what was like thirty minutes worth of script. And the sex was well hot, too...

"You're never going to read this out in front of the class!"

"No, schmuck, you are..."

"You have to be..!"

"Well," said Lillith, "we're supposed to be a group, and we've done the hard stuff..."

When we'd done King Lear for the school play last winter I'd done the Fool, which is quite a big part, and I'd sort of got into the performance thing. I mean, like, I'm pretty tongue tied mostly with people I don't know that well, and sort of hang in the background most of the time. But I can sort of put a mask on - not a real mask, but - and go out and do the thing, and I even really enjoy it. I'm not saying I'm an actor or anything, just I can sort of put on the mask. And, like, presenting this thing to the class was just such a big - such a big thing - that the only way I could do it was sort of make it a performance thing. Of course I didn't have to read out the whole script, there wouldn't have been time in class for all the groups to read their whole scripts - so I just had to give a synopsis and read a key scene. And I was up third and I did it, and I don't really remember that much about doing it. I do remember there'd been some polite clapping for the people who were up before me, and there was some clapping for the person who was up after me, but I don't remember any clapping when I'd done my bit, but hey, I did it, and I sat down.

At the end of the class Mrs Price said she'd been planning to do a show of hands for the best script at the end, but seeing 'some of the material' she'd decided to do a secret ballot, we were all to write the name of the best script on a piece of paper and drop it in the wastebin on our way out, and she'd tell us which script was the best next lesson.

We were hanging out in the paper office, like we did in those days, and the others were taking the piss out of me about how I'd read the sex scene, when Mrs Price walked in. There was, like, this silence in the room. "So whose idea was this?" she said. We sort of explained about the porn videos, and how bad they were, and how we had sort of thought we could do better, and... "And you had to do it in my class?" We sort of explained about the script thing, and how she'd said it had to be something people would want to watch, and...

"You know," she said, "you guys really messed up. I had it planned that instead of doing a play this year we'd do a film, and we'd do a film from the best script I got. And, you know, yours is the best script - it's far and away the best written, and the best plotted. It got the most votes. You're right, people would want to watch it - I'd want to watch it. But."

Nobody looked at anyone.

"We can't make this. I'd get sacked, and I'd never get another job. You'd all get expelled. We cannot make this. And none of the other scripts were really up to it. We just cannot make this."

There was a silence. She looked around at us.

"You actually wanted to, didn't you?"

Paul jumped in and said how cool it would be, and Lill said that it would be great experience, and I... well, hey, they're my friends, aren't they? I wasn't going to make it seem I wasn't really in the thing.

After she had gone we sat without saying anything for a long time. I mean, we all wanted to make a film. I really love doing camera stuff, and Lill was really into the costumes and props and production stuff, and Paul.. well, I've said Paul could write. We'd talked about it lots. The porn film thing... well, hey, that was just a sort of idle idea. A film was the thing. Any film. And we could have done it. We could have done it on school time with all the kit and support and stuff. And we'd blown it. And man, did we feel low.

The next English class was worse. She'd printed off all the scripts - not just ours - for everyone, and had a discussion about them in the class. She didn't say anything about what she thought. She just asked. And she didn't, like, concentrate on our one. It was just that everyone kept coming back to it - not, like, directly, but... there were lots of sort of titters, and allusions, and trying to be smart. People were embarrassed to have to talk about it, but they sort of wanted to talk about it.

Then suddenly there was this big discussion about the climax scene, where this really gross, hideous, witch creature turns into this really hot girl while she's being, like, done, and Lill was talking about how she thought the costume would work, with like layers of dressing gown things in sackcloth and wool and silk and lace and chiffon and a wind machine going and suddenly I was talking about how you'd rig pieces of really thin fishing line so that the crew could pull back the layers one by one like they're blowing away and how you'd light it and like about keeping the exposure value on the the skin as the lights came up and softening the focus so it's like she's glowing and how you could do it in one shot and then Nancy - Nancy! - was joining in and talking about how the actors would have move so that the costume could fall away sort of naturally without you being able to see that they were getting around the fishing line things, and Jenny was saying she didn't think that would work and wouldn't it be better to shoot the scene backwards like you'd do a bit of humping and then stop and put one layer on and do a bit more and stop and put another layer on and I - I said no, because I could see it in all this one long take where the camera started really quite far back in the trees and it's all still night time and really harsh black and white with no colour and the focus is really sharp and the shapes are all angular and then the camera gradually spirals smoothly in as the light that's supposed to be the dawn comes up and coming right around them and it ends up in the view point of the guy looking right down onto the woman's face and chest and she's all soft and rounded and golden and glowing and there's like flowers behind her head...

At the end of the class Mrs Price went round everybody one by one collecting in the scripts, and asking which script would make the best film. At first people were sort of embarrassed but then Nancy said (she was like glowing like a stop sign) really clear that she thought ours was way the best and she'd really like to see it, and then other people joined in and somehow it was quite a kick to hear everyone in the class saying we'd done good (even though I knew I really hadn't done any of it) because mostly they just think we're a bit nerdy and strange.

Afterwards we sat around in the news office talking in a sort of slightly elegiac way about the script, about its reception, about how great it might have been if... sort of quiet and sad and sort of proud, in an odd way. And then we mooched out, and I headed off for my cleaning job. As I walked through the park, I heard a voice call my name, which doesn't happen that often to me. I looked over and there was Mrs Price, sitting on a bench. I went over and said Good Afternoon, all polite. She told me to sit down. She asked me what I thought about the script, now. Would I really have liked to make it? Without thinking, I said I would. She asked me why, and I talked to her about the shots, about the framing, about the bits that would be difficult to film and what I thought we could do about it, about how you could make the hole in the wall scene really funny - about how porn films weren't successfully funny, but this one could be - about how I thought the climax shot would be really moving...

"As well as sexy?"

Well yes, I said, that as well. It wouldn't work unless it was all really sexy - you had to believe in the sex, you had to be involved in the sex - but how I thought it could do more than just that.

We sat for a while and watched kids playing in the play park.

"Would you want to act in it?"

Well, maybe I might be an extra or have a bit part but the stuff I really wanted to do was the filming - the actual camera work...

"not the sex?"

I shook my head. I looked at the ground. I told her I wouldn't be any good at it because I'd never actually done it, and anyway I didn't think we'd get any women signed up if they knew I was doing that. It's not like I'm big or hunky or good looking or athletic or any of that stuff women go for. Not that I thought we'd get any women signed up anyway, not really, but we'd have more chance with Paul because he'd got the looks. And anyway he was up for it and it was really his bag and...

We sat for a while and watched kids playing in the play park.

"OK," said Mrs Price. "This conversation never happened, all right?"

I said all right. I expected her to get up and walk away, but she didn't.

"This is what we're going to do. You can go back and tell the others that we're going to make your film. But there are conditions."

We had to rewrite the script so that there was no explicit sex in it. She would organise use of school facilities for most of the filming. We would make the expurgated film and it would be part of our credit for our matriculation. But...

But. If we could find women who were prepared to do the sex scenes, we could do a different cut of the film with the sex scenes in, provided that she could plausibly deny knowing about it and none of the sex stuff was actually on school premises. And...

And if we wanted, she would take the witch queen role, provided all the witches got to wear masks all the time and didn't take them off even for sex. I said no, we couldn't do that, because I needed Nancy's face for the climax shot. I said it without thinking. I said Nancy. I blushed.

"You think she'll do it?"

I shook my head, eyes on my shoes.

"OK, then here's the deal. You persuade her, and I'll make the rest happen."

I looked straight up at her. "I could never..."

"You do it, and I'll make the rest happen. OK?"

Of course, she didn't think I would.

Of course, I didn't think I could.

Rewriting the script didn't take long, and it got better. I really took a hand in it, too, and I think my bits were good. It wasn't just that we rewrote the film so that it worked as an action film with implied sex - we also rewrote the sex scenes so that with them slotted in it was better, too - both sexier and more involving. We presented the cut version back to the class and pretty much everyone liked it. Then Mrs Price said about really making it and put up a list of jobs. I was pleased to see I was already written in as camera and post-production. Lill was in as props and costumes. Mrs Price had written herself in as continuity, production and 'extra'. By the end of the class people had pencilled themselves in against all the things they wanted to do, and after school Mrs Price came into the news room with the list. We started sorting out who would do what, and pretty soon it got down to the female roles. Mrs Price suggested Nancy for the crone role, all cool and matter of fact. Paul said no, because she'd never be up for the sex scenes. What sex scenes? asked Mrs Price, all cool and bland.

We looked at each other. No-one spoke. The way I understood it Paul really wanted to do the sex scenes because he wanted to get to lay the girls. By this time I really wanted to do the sex scenes because I had all the camera work set up in my head, and I wanted to make it work. I got it that Lill really wanted to do the sex scenes, but I didn't know why - some vicarious thing, or maybe she fancied girls? I didn't know. Lill never seemed to have a boyfriend. She was a people watcher - I was too, and sometimes we'd sit at the news office window and look at the people go by outside and talk about them - but I hadn't really got a feel about her that way. She was sort of odd around the place anyway with her black clothes and witchy stuff, and there didn't seem to be anyone she was really interested in. Paul had made a couple of passes at her (of course), and she hadn't taken offence or anything but she definitely didn't swing his way. We looked at each other. No-one spoke.

Mrs Price said "there's a bench in the park where I sometimes have a sit on my way home from work - Kyle knows where."

And then she went on coolly to discuss storyboarding as if nothing had happened. About ten minutes later she left. We hung about for another five minutes and then wandered out into the park.

"OK, look," she said. "There's ground rules. There have to be ground rules. I really could get sacked or prosecuted over this. Nobody - nobody - talks about the sex scenes on school premises. No script or storyboard or tape cartridge or anything related to a sex scene ever gets taken on to school premises, and if there's anything there - even an early draft - you get it out of there tonight. OK?"

We all said OK.

"OK, I don't even want to be seen talking to you all like this, and I don't want you coming to my house. Up in the woods on the south side of prospect hill there's an old barn set back into an abandoned quarry with some loose boxes in it - do you know where I mean?"

Paul did.

"OK, we'll meet there on Saturday afternoon at 2 o'clock - if there's anything to talk about."

Paul wanted to know what she meant about if there was anything to talk about.

"Well, look, there's no point in shooting just one sex scene. We could cut one sex scene and not lose the point, but we can't cut four. I'll do the witch queen role " - she was looking directly at Paul - "including the sex, provided you guys get at least two other women in the class signed up to do sex scenes."

Paul started talking about who we could sign up and somehow I wasn't really listening, I was thinking about...

Mrs Price voice cut back into my thoughts. "No, Nancy is doing the crone role. Kyle thinks she's right for it and I agree with him."

"But she'll never agree" said Paul.

"Kyle's going to get her to agree..."

"Better if I ask her."

"No, Paul, this is between Kyle and me. He's going to ask her, and he's going to persuade her, and if he doesn't he doesn't get to shoot his climax scene. It's his call."