Monday, October 27, 2014
Camera, part 1: Totally Fag, Dude
I'm watching a pornographic video that does absolutely nothing for me in terms of creating sexual arousal. It is a parody video, sort of, and these normally don't arouse me, but this one is special. I have watched one scene from the Batman and Robin gay porn parody, and, as I am not homosexual, it was almost doubly asexual for me, but this one is at another level. This scene depicts Harley Quinn wearing a strap on dildo and anally penetrating Robin. There is a similar video, this one somewhat more plot-driven, that involved Harley Quinn also with possibly the same strap on dildo, but possibly a different one, anally penetrating Superman. That one has Harley inform Superman, that, if he allows her to do this, she will tell him where Batman is located. The Robin video has no such narrative direction. Harley Quinn (and it's the same actress in both videos), injects Robin with something that, she says, will make him "the biggest slut in Gotham." Her delivery of this line is odd. Yes, I realize that pornography is, among other thing, very well known for having poor acting, unconvincing line delivery and all that sort of thing, but this was different. She seemed, for the most part, really committed to her character. When she delivered the line she said "This will make you the biggest slut in…Gotham." It was a weird, oddly long pause between "in" and "Gotham." It took me out of it for a moment, made me aware I was watching a film rather than entering a reality, always a big no-no in cinema, regardless of if it is an Oscar-worthy drama or a video about a mentally ill doctor in clown makeup anally penetrating a trusty sidekick. It made me wonder if the actress forgot for a moment that the scene takes place in Gotham. This took away any enjoyment I might have had as a viewer. Everybody, even people who make a real effort to know nothing about comic books, knows that Batman lives in Gotham City. How could she not? I then think about it more. Perhaps she didn't forget. Perhaps this was a character choice. Maybe Harley Quinn has various syringes, each containing a different level of slut creation. Maybe Harley Quinn, in her excitement, forgot which one this was. She has one to make someone the biggest slut in Gotham, one to make him the biggest slut in America, one to make him the biggest slut on New Earth, and so forth.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Lights
I watched cartoons constantly. It's a cliche for one to say that he was raised by television, and I don't think that's fair to say about myself, but it's hard to remember a moment in childhood that wasn't driven by cartoons in one way or another. If I wasn't watching them, I was reading comic books based upon them, and if I wasn't reading I was playing with my countless action figures representing their characters. I didn't have many friends, at least not the sort who were human beings, but the Ninja Turtles, the Ghostbusters, the Muppet Babies, Captain Planet, the Toxic Crusaders, GI Joe and, much more than any of them, The Batman was my nearest and dearest.
The day hit me like a knife. Something was going on in the news. I can't remember what it was, because I had no idea what it was. All I knew it that I was four year old almost violently addicted to cartoons, it was Saturday morning and my cartoons were not on the television, because of something happening in stupid Grownup World.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as they said on Schoolhouse Rock. And I had many action figures. Almost all the characters I had been expecting to see were represented. So I simply told my own story. A massive crossover, before I fully understood what that was, was created. And from that moment on, I wanted to direct movies. It was clear I didn't even need friends to do it.
It was pointed out to me, frequently, and by a wide variety of adults that, much like walking into Mordor, one does not simply become a filmmaker. Acting, or writing, is required first. The example presented to me was Opie. Little Ronny Howard. In the black and white images of the Andy Griffith Show, Opie looked to be about my age. I was told he was now a successful director. This made sense.
I started acting, or doing something sort of like it shortly after. Munchins, flying monkies, Tiny Tim, I was short and I was goddamn adorable. But I had little patience at the time for this standing onstage bullshit. I wanted to create things that lasted forever. I wanted to make the moving pictures.
My first real step, ignoring this performing nonsense for a moment, was to memorize every line and every frame of every movie I watched. And I did just that. At the time, the Disney Channel did not show the teen sitcoms for which it has become known, but rather classic Disney films, and films that most people think are made by Disney but really aren't, like Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Due to the fact that these were on television quite often, I was able to watch them on something of a loop. To learn them.
Not long after, my love of comic books and my love of memorizing movies intersected. The Batman animated series released a true masterpiece of a feature film, Mask Of The Phantasm. Around the same time, a little known Dark Horse comic called The Mask was adapted into a feature film starring the white guy from In Living Color, who at that moment was quickly, somewhat sneakily, becoming a movie star. In a few years, he would become The Riddler and my universe would truly collapse upon itself.
But for the moment I had video tapes of these two masks, one of the Phantasm, the other not, and I would watch these films more times in a day that actually seemed possible. I also began reading more and more comics about these characters. I actually remember where I was when Bane broke Batman. It's a distant memory, if remembered at all, by most now, as the moment has been collected in so many trade paperbacks and adapted into a very uneven film, but that moment occurred at the end of an issue. "Broken…and done," said Bane as he walked away from Batman's lifeless, seemingly dead body. It's a common punchline now that comic book constantly die and return to life, but at the time…I cried each time it seemed that Batman, Superman…they died. Multiple times, yes, and often in misleading ways that were not truly deaths at all, but to me, small bits of my soul died as those issues ended. Hell, they still do, when it happens in comics even to this day.
I read The Mask comics quite a bit as well. Of course, having seen the movie more times than I had seen any textbook at that point, I was accustomed to Stanley Ipkiss, Milo the dog and Dorian Tyrell wearing The Mask, all with greatly different results. But these comics books…SO MANY people put on The Mask. The Mask lived in us all! I even started to get into Norse mythology, somewhat, because of the scene in the film that finds Ben Stein telling Jim Carrey that Loki may be possessing him. It's been stated too many times in too many places that comic books open doors for people to learn other things. So I won't say it.
I guess I'm never happy doing anything. I was a theater kid through most of high school, but I avoided, to the best of my ability, the stereotypes that go along with it. Rather than brood and memorize Shakespeare, I ran around manically and performed "Weird Al" Yankovic songs in every variety show or what have you given by the drama department. Or just in class. Holding still was impossible. It still is. Holding still and not crying when a superhero seems to die. These activities are impossible for me.
Then the day came when the opportunity was presented, still in high school, to major in an artistic field. I chose cinema. That was the dream. But the dream puzzled many of those in charge, because I had been in so very much theater, both in school and out in various groups and so forth. But I knew film was what counted. Film was creating something that lasted forever, not just for a few months at most. I continued making movies til I graduated, at which time I was rejected from two film schools, submitting films that were strange and weirdly shot and writing an essay about why I wanted to be John Waters and Kevin Smith. I did, however, find a school that allowed film as a major without the whole business of submitting a film and writing an essay. It was simply a major. You could just start.
It was soon after just starting, however, that I realized I wasn't a filmmaker. I was a writer. I was a strangely gifted editor. But I was not a director. I would write a script and get to the location and basically say "Fuck it, do what you want, actors." This worked well, I guess, for having a lot of footage that I could turn into something later, which is what I did, but being a director with any kind of vision or goal…this was not part of who I was.
I did befriend folks, though, for whom that was a pretty big deal. So it was nice to write for them, to help edit, to be…whatever I was. Someone at the beginning and the end of whatever rainbow there was, I guess.
All through this, other than in my own and occasionally my friends' movies, I had completely abandoned acting. I didn't particularly miss the process of putting on a play, but I will confess to missing the live reactions of a crowd.
The day hit me like a knife. Something was going on in the news. I can't remember what it was, because I had no idea what it was. All I knew it that I was four year old almost violently addicted to cartoons, it was Saturday morning and my cartoons were not on the television, because of something happening in stupid Grownup World.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as they said on Schoolhouse Rock. And I had many action figures. Almost all the characters I had been expecting to see were represented. So I simply told my own story. A massive crossover, before I fully understood what that was, was created. And from that moment on, I wanted to direct movies. It was clear I didn't even need friends to do it.
It was pointed out to me, frequently, and by a wide variety of adults that, much like walking into Mordor, one does not simply become a filmmaker. Acting, or writing, is required first. The example presented to me was Opie. Little Ronny Howard. In the black and white images of the Andy Griffith Show, Opie looked to be about my age. I was told he was now a successful director. This made sense.
I started acting, or doing something sort of like it shortly after. Munchins, flying monkies, Tiny Tim, I was short and I was goddamn adorable. But I had little patience at the time for this standing onstage bullshit. I wanted to create things that lasted forever. I wanted to make the moving pictures.
My first real step, ignoring this performing nonsense for a moment, was to memorize every line and every frame of every movie I watched. And I did just that. At the time, the Disney Channel did not show the teen sitcoms for which it has become known, but rather classic Disney films, and films that most people think are made by Disney but really aren't, like Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. Due to the fact that these were on television quite often, I was able to watch them on something of a loop. To learn them.
Not long after, my love of comic books and my love of memorizing movies intersected. The Batman animated series released a true masterpiece of a feature film, Mask Of The Phantasm. Around the same time, a little known Dark Horse comic called The Mask was adapted into a feature film starring the white guy from In Living Color, who at that moment was quickly, somewhat sneakily, becoming a movie star. In a few years, he would become The Riddler and my universe would truly collapse upon itself.
But for the moment I had video tapes of these two masks, one of the Phantasm, the other not, and I would watch these films more times in a day that actually seemed possible. I also began reading more and more comics about these characters. I actually remember where I was when Bane broke Batman. It's a distant memory, if remembered at all, by most now, as the moment has been collected in so many trade paperbacks and adapted into a very uneven film, but that moment occurred at the end of an issue. "Broken…and done," said Bane as he walked away from Batman's lifeless, seemingly dead body. It's a common punchline now that comic book constantly die and return to life, but at the time…I cried each time it seemed that Batman, Superman…they died. Multiple times, yes, and often in misleading ways that were not truly deaths at all, but to me, small bits of my soul died as those issues ended. Hell, they still do, when it happens in comics even to this day.
I read The Mask comics quite a bit as well. Of course, having seen the movie more times than I had seen any textbook at that point, I was accustomed to Stanley Ipkiss, Milo the dog and Dorian Tyrell wearing The Mask, all with greatly different results. But these comics books…SO MANY people put on The Mask. The Mask lived in us all! I even started to get into Norse mythology, somewhat, because of the scene in the film that finds Ben Stein telling Jim Carrey that Loki may be possessing him. It's been stated too many times in too many places that comic books open doors for people to learn other things. So I won't say it.
I guess I'm never happy doing anything. I was a theater kid through most of high school, but I avoided, to the best of my ability, the stereotypes that go along with it. Rather than brood and memorize Shakespeare, I ran around manically and performed "Weird Al" Yankovic songs in every variety show or what have you given by the drama department. Or just in class. Holding still was impossible. It still is. Holding still and not crying when a superhero seems to die. These activities are impossible for me.
Then the day came when the opportunity was presented, still in high school, to major in an artistic field. I chose cinema. That was the dream. But the dream puzzled many of those in charge, because I had been in so very much theater, both in school and out in various groups and so forth. But I knew film was what counted. Film was creating something that lasted forever, not just for a few months at most. I continued making movies til I graduated, at which time I was rejected from two film schools, submitting films that were strange and weirdly shot and writing an essay about why I wanted to be John Waters and Kevin Smith. I did, however, find a school that allowed film as a major without the whole business of submitting a film and writing an essay. It was simply a major. You could just start.
It was soon after just starting, however, that I realized I wasn't a filmmaker. I was a writer. I was a strangely gifted editor. But I was not a director. I would write a script and get to the location and basically say "Fuck it, do what you want, actors." This worked well, I guess, for having a lot of footage that I could turn into something later, which is what I did, but being a director with any kind of vision or goal…this was not part of who I was.
I did befriend folks, though, for whom that was a pretty big deal. So it was nice to write for them, to help edit, to be…whatever I was. Someone at the beginning and the end of whatever rainbow there was, I guess.
All through this, other than in my own and occasionally my friends' movies, I had completely abandoned acting. I didn't particularly miss the process of putting on a play, but I will confess to missing the live reactions of a crowd.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
The Begininng
The 1966 version of Batman was in the front of my mind when I began composition upon what would have been, had life taken a different turn, the screenplay for this film. The reason for this, I admit, is the fact that I had just recently seen the pornographic parody of that television show for the first time. I had discovered this adult film a few years after my interest in the adult film as a genre had waned. Certainly, I still viewed porn on the internet like any other human being, but years before it had been more than that. I had a summer job, in the break between my junior and senior years of college, working as the clerk in a porn store. Of course, as you'll see if you watch this movie to the end, I can be obsessive, so as a clerk in this retail business, I developed an obsession with the history and the business of adult cinema. I collected only the films that had historical relevance for my personal collection. While in my personal life I am not a homosexual, I did pick up a copy of John Holmes's first gay film, as it spoke to a certain moment in the medium's history. Similarly, I of course used my employee discount to gain copies of Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil In Miss Jones, I also took in a copy of more recent films, such as Nurse Nancy, because it is the film that was playing when Pee-Wee Herman was arrested for publicly masturbating in a porno theater.
So I hadn't been numbed to porn in some kind of Clockwork Orange way, but I had put it in my mind in something of a different context. I had also, by the chapter in my life when this story begins, befriended a pornographic actress when she and I were both in a mental hospital, she for bipolar disorder, bulimia and alcoholism, myself for deep and serious suicidal thoughts. But that was a few years before our story begins. Everything you just heard was, really.
So, I was on the Vivid website one day, looking for the sex tape of Kendra from girls next door, when I happened upon an image. The image was pornographic in nature of course, but was fascinating for another reason: The image was of Batman having fellacio performed upon by recognizable adult entertainer Alexis Texas. What was especially moving in all the right ways about this image was the fact that this not mere generic pornographic adaptation of Batman, of no, dear viewers, this was an exact recreation of the Batman played by Adam West in the 1966 television series and the feature film of the same year upon which it was based.
I was born in 1986, twenty years after Adam West first put on the cape and cowl and three years before Michael Keaton did so. So I grew up, however much I really did grow up, obsessively watching those films and that television series. Not simply viewing them passively, creating stories in my head, occasionally even editing together the images I had seen, something I clearly never stopped doing. To me as a child, Batman was both Adam West and Michael Keaton and, a short time later, also a cartoon character voiced by Kevin Conroy. I didn't see the difference. Yes there was always talk of which of these adaptations was the most serious, the most faithful, the most whatever-the-fuck, but like Neil Gaiman before me, I saw no difference. I only saw Batman. Just as every generation has their own James Bond or their own Bob Dylan, every generation has its own Batman. I had three. But I only saw one.
It was notable at the time that Batman XXX, as I discovered the film to be called, was advertised not only on porn sites, such as the one on which I had found it, but on mainstream sites as well. I followed the news of the film closely. I recognized the mighty Evan Stone as The Riddler, of course, as I had seen him for many years in the soft core films which aired on HBO Zone late into the night.
After some time of following the news dealing with the films creation and production, I proudly walked into my former place of employment and purchased a DVD of Batman XXX. As did many people, as it turned out. It sold incredibly well for a film in a genre that most people view for free these days.
The great thing, one of the great things, about Batman XXX was not only did it, for the most part, faithfully recreate the performances of the film and television show (oddly, three of the four villains from the feature film were present, but Penguin was nowhere to be seen) while also mimicking the costumes and set design, it also worked in specific lines of dialogue from various episodes. Many pointed out what fun it was to work in a window cameo from adult legend Ron Jeremy, but nearly nobody seemed to notice that the dialogue in that scene was taken almost exactly from an actual window cameo from the series, that of Sammy Davis, Jr. So memories of the series, which never completely went away, were brought back to the very front of my brain by this work on pornography.
So it was with this vision of Batman in that place in my mind that I started writing the script for a version of what I had foolishly at one time thought was to be the film you are currently, hopefully, enjoying. I was kind of writing a non porn parody of Batman XXX, which was a porn parody of the Batman TV show, which was a parody of the character in general, and the Silver Age books and 1940s serial films in particular. It would have been a non porn parody of a porn parody of a parody. It's a shame the world will never seen that movie. A real damn shame.
So I hadn't been numbed to porn in some kind of Clockwork Orange way, but I had put it in my mind in something of a different context. I had also, by the chapter in my life when this story begins, befriended a pornographic actress when she and I were both in a mental hospital, she for bipolar disorder, bulimia and alcoholism, myself for deep and serious suicidal thoughts. But that was a few years before our story begins. Everything you just heard was, really.
So, I was on the Vivid website one day, looking for the sex tape of Kendra from girls next door, when I happened upon an image. The image was pornographic in nature of course, but was fascinating for another reason: The image was of Batman having fellacio performed upon by recognizable adult entertainer Alexis Texas. What was especially moving in all the right ways about this image was the fact that this not mere generic pornographic adaptation of Batman, of no, dear viewers, this was an exact recreation of the Batman played by Adam West in the 1966 television series and the feature film of the same year upon which it was based.
I was born in 1986, twenty years after Adam West first put on the cape and cowl and three years before Michael Keaton did so. So I grew up, however much I really did grow up, obsessively watching those films and that television series. Not simply viewing them passively, creating stories in my head, occasionally even editing together the images I had seen, something I clearly never stopped doing. To me as a child, Batman was both Adam West and Michael Keaton and, a short time later, also a cartoon character voiced by Kevin Conroy. I didn't see the difference. Yes there was always talk of which of these adaptations was the most serious, the most faithful, the most whatever-the-fuck, but like Neil Gaiman before me, I saw no difference. I only saw Batman. Just as every generation has their own James Bond or their own Bob Dylan, every generation has its own Batman. I had three. But I only saw one.
It was notable at the time that Batman XXX, as I discovered the film to be called, was advertised not only on porn sites, such as the one on which I had found it, but on mainstream sites as well. I followed the news of the film closely. I recognized the mighty Evan Stone as The Riddler, of course, as I had seen him for many years in the soft core films which aired on HBO Zone late into the night.
After some time of following the news dealing with the films creation and production, I proudly walked into my former place of employment and purchased a DVD of Batman XXX. As did many people, as it turned out. It sold incredibly well for a film in a genre that most people view for free these days.
The great thing, one of the great things, about Batman XXX was not only did it, for the most part, faithfully recreate the performances of the film and television show (oddly, three of the four villains from the feature film were present, but Penguin was nowhere to be seen) while also mimicking the costumes and set design, it also worked in specific lines of dialogue from various episodes. Many pointed out what fun it was to work in a window cameo from adult legend Ron Jeremy, but nearly nobody seemed to notice that the dialogue in that scene was taken almost exactly from an actual window cameo from the series, that of Sammy Davis, Jr. So memories of the series, which never completely went away, were brought back to the very front of my brain by this work on pornography.
So it was with this vision of Batman in that place in my mind that I started writing the script for a version of what I had foolishly at one time thought was to be the film you are currently, hopefully, enjoying. I was kind of writing a non porn parody of Batman XXX, which was a porn parody of the Batman TV show, which was a parody of the character in general, and the Silver Age books and 1940s serial films in particular. It would have been a non porn parody of a porn parody of a parody. It's a shame the world will never seen that movie. A real damn shame.
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