Every time I watch a porno—whether it’s Lesbians in the Produce Section or Cheerleader Tryouts with Coach Lester—I start critiquing the plot, the acting, and even the lighting. Why doesn’t, I ask myself, a real director make a porno, a real director with trained thespians and a script from a literary talent; but not just a porno—a smut flick, an all-out fuckfest?!
Terry Southern, author of classic satires like The Magic Christian and Candy—a fuckfest in its own right—asked that same question. He asked it to Stanley Kubrick, who he collaborated with on Dr. Strangelove, writing lines like, “You can’t fight in here; this is the war room!”
Kubrick wasn’t down because his wife said, “If you do this, I’ll never speak to you again.” But Southern had a vision, a vision of cinema’s biggest stars fucking like animals for the masses on the Big Screen! And if Kubrick wouldn’t make it, he’d write a novel about Kubrick making it. That novel became a reality in 1970: Blue Movie, dedicated to “the great Stanley K,” was published.
King B is Kubrick’s doppelganger in Blue Movie, and the mainstream smut film he attempts to make is called The Faces of Love. Tony Sanders, the film’s screenwriter and Southern’s own hot-shot, speed-freak doppelganger describes it as episodic with stories about the different kinds of love: Idyllic, Profane, Lesbian, Incestuous, Sadism, Masochism, and Nymphomania.
“We’ve got an opportunity here, and a responsibility, to lay it all down,” says King B, “and I just don’t think we should blow it.” And Southern, like his fictionalization of Kubrick does with The Faces of Love, uses Blue Movie as an opportunity to lay it all down. He uses it to get revenge against the Hollywood system that screwed him harder than all the screwing in King B’s film combined.
Equally outrageous and hilarious, Blue Movie portrays the Hollywood system as a farce run by corpse-fuckers. It’s both entertaining and enlightening, and it also has some great scenes with Teeny Marie, a limbless midget who hops around yelling, “Put the wood to me!” and asking, “Who wants a taste of my lamb-pit?!?”
Terry Southern’s Blue Movie—read it, love it.
