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Art, heart and porn -- screenwriter and celebrated director Wash West by Benjamin Scuglia Wash West fell into the porn industry in the mid-1990's by way of Leeds, England and the boho-starving artist circuit between New York City and New Orleans. While in the Big Sleazy, West filmed Squishy Does Porno, a cinematic experiment that combines wonky visuals, bared flesh and a decidedly non-linear narrative. It's an experience best enjoyed while under the influence. Once he landed in Los Angeles, West's early porno flicks shocked the complacent video industry with their robust visual style and Squishy-like off-kilter sensibility. As he grows more confident as a filmmaker, West has learned to combine story with visuals in an attempt to get under your skin rather than in your face. 2001 saw the successful release of West's first fully narrative (read: no rim jobs or cumshots) feature, The Fluffer. Written and co-directed with his boyfriend, Richard Glatzer (director of the 1993 feature Grief), The Fluffer is a dark, obsessive love story centered on the porno industry (natch). It allowed West the opportunity to apply the skills he's learned filming blowjobs and buttfucking to an actual film with professional actors. "You can definitely see a learning process if you look," he says of his career progression to date. "From Plugged In (BIG Entertainment, 1996) through Naked Highway (BIG, 1997), Animus (All Worlds Video, 1999) and Technical Ecstasy (Men of Odyssey, 1999) you can see that I've been learning as I went along. I've tried different things with different movies, and inevitably it all went into The Fluffer.
Well, when I first started, I was just really jumping into the deep end. I didn't know about how to construct a scene. I didn't know when a close-up would have impact, or when to hold back or how to move a camera. So if you look at my early videos, they're cut like a soap opera -- well, a pretty freaky soap opera -- but they're very basic, starting with a wide shot [and cutting to a close-up]. As I got more confident with the camera -- I think you can see this in Naked Highway -- I tried to have every shot reinforce what was going on in the story. The kind of filmmaking I admire from other people is when there's a perfect link between the story and the visuals, when the cameras or the lights are doing something that boosts the narrative.
The scene that immediately springs to mind is the one where J.T. Sloan plays a traffic cop who stops the two runaways -- Jim Buck and Joey Violence -- and it's sort of a classic suspense set-up. I established that Joey Violence is hiding in the back of the car, voyeuristically watching the scene as it unfolds, which adds a suspenseful element to the sex, you know? When will the third party come into play? When we shot the blowjob (between Buck and Sloan), which is very highly charged, we shot it deliberately like NYPD Blue, very flashy and fast-moving, and very quickly edited. We had Joey Violence in the back of the car, and then we also had the gun on the top of the car. The cop had taken it out of his belt so that Jim Buck wouldn't get at it while he was giving the cop a blowjob. I tried to keep the audience aware of all these things during the sex, so that by the end of the scene when Joey gets hold of the gun and pulls it on the cop, it's all been perfectly set up.
What I'm learning more and more about is the function of plot. Most people think It's kind of like one of those '50s movies where the suspense is always about [whether] these two people are going to get together at the end of the movie. But what I've found to be most successful in my porn is holding off -- Jim Buck and Joey Violence are really the central story in Naked Highway, but they don't have sex until you've been with them for an hour or so of screen time, during which they've been having sex with other people. So it builds up [anticipation] with the audience, you know? So often porn will have no suspense because the people meet and five seconds later they're dropping their pants. There's no anticipation. I think it's great if you can introduce some elements earlier in another scene and play a tantalization trick with the audience.
What a lot of directors usually do is have a lot of dialogue that leads up to one scene rather than fragmenting the story throughout the whole movie.
Just have someone flip through the gay yellow pages to order a pizza in the scene before, so everyone thinks, "Ah, the pizza's on the way!"
That was Naked Highway again. I riffed on just about every classic porn set-up, from the plumber to cops to rednecks. Anything that was a trope of the porn genre I think I've had a go at.
What I'm always interested in is the story part -- that's what excites me. When I'm planning a movie I don't think, "Oh, I'll get a great shot of a cock going up an ass" because that's obvious. I'm thinking, "I think I can create a power dynamic that leads to this particular situation where they have sex. And what if they fall in love? What if there's some kind of crime element involved?" So I'm always more interested in the story. I think in my early movies, I felt, if you don't like it you can fast-forward through it. Porn is different from mainstream cinema in that it's edited twice -- it's edited once by the editor, and again by the viewer with their fast-forward button. So I saw no reason why you couldn't have quite a lengthy, developed story since people spend so much time fast-forwarding anyway. But what I did eventually get into [exploring] was the idea of having a story that people didn't have to fast-forward through. I think closest I've come to that is Gluttony [The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony is a porn twist on The Portrait of Dorian Gray and was so acclaimed it is being re-released by All Worlds Video as The Porno Portrait of Dorian Gray. A porn re-release is extraordinarily rare. The film also swept the 2002 GayVN awards -- taking top honors for Best Director, Best Editing, Best Gay Video, Best Screenplay and Best Videography!] I made that video after The Fluffer, where I worked with Geraldine Peroni, who was Oscar-nominated for Altman's The Player. She did the final editing polish on our movie. She was so meticulous about keeping the pace and the rhythm of the thing going. And even if I lost what I thought was a great little joke or a great line, if it benefited the whole [movie], then it was worth it.
Yes. As a filmmaker you get to be in love with every line in the script, and there are certain filmmakers who I think would benefit from a really vigorous edit on their movies. There are a lot of movies that are way too long. I've seen a lot of films that were two-and-a-half hours that would make a really great 90-minute movie. Editors always want to make things shorter. Always! They always want to cut more and more and more. So when I got to do Gluttony I was feeling very disciplined and I worked with Andrew Rosen at All Worlds on the edit for about five weeks, just cutting down and chiseling away, making one thing pop off the next thing. I honestly don't think there's a slow moment in the 80 minutes of the movie. And for porn it's a short movie. It probably could have been 100 minutes but we wanted it to move at a clip. That's something I picked up from Geri.
I have a few ideas that I want to make into porn movies this year. But, you know, I do my own cinematography and part of me thinks, "Oh, do I have to crawl under there again?" [laughs] I want to go at it energized, not thinking, "here we go again." One idea I have is called Porn Academy for All Worlds Video where the fresh young recruits learn about how to be a porno star from the masters. It's a good, fun idea. But then I also have this idea for a more serious project. With The Fluffer we didn't want to make a crossover, porn-to-mainstream movie...
Right. But we didn't want to have explicit sex in there, because we felt it would limit the [potential] audience. And we also felt that everyone's obsession with Johnny Rebel in The Fluffer isn't about his penis or his asshole, it's really about his aura. That's where we wanted to shift the focus. But after seeing how The Fluffer played to audiences I did realize there's room in the marketplace for a really good narrative feature with sex scenes in it at the appropriate places. Not the five-sex-scenes porno standard, but instead sex that is really organic to the narrative.
A lot of the Dogme films have sex in them. Certainly Patrice Chereau's Intimacy has sex, and Catherine Breillat's Romance. But they had what I thought was unsatisfying sex scenes. It was just there to be daring.
Yeah. But what I'd like to do it take that a little further and have two versions: a cinema version would satisfy an audience narratively and have some explicit scenes, and then a "home" version would have more developed sex scenes that would allow you to explore your fantasies. But what that relies on more than anything is the cast. I'd have to find fantastic actors who are also willing to get their meat and potatoes out. [laughs] In The Fluffer we built up this mythology around Johnny Rebel, and people are always asking if those videos are real.
Content and design © Nightcharm, Inc. Accompanying photos © 2002 Wash West.
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that plot is the story, but is also what the audience wants to happen. In The Fluffer you want to see what happens to these two main characters -- are they going to get together?
