It’s easy to forget, as we roll our way back to the 1950s here in the US, that birth control pills weren’t widely available to single women until 1972.
The fight and fortitude it took to make that happen is mind-blowing, especially when you realize that a quicker, surer, simpler road to guaranteed birth control would have been to allow all women to tour Plato’s Retreat shortly after closing.
The survival of our species would have been at risk.
It was now very early 1980, and Plato’s had just moved to a warehouse location on West 34th street, close to where the Javits Center is now. One would enter through the metal doors and proceed down a long, carpeted hall, past the coat room. The hall opened onto a large room with various staged sections: The hot tub area, the stage area, the mattress area, the lounge chairs area and so on. There were some walls partitioning even more places for orgy rooms, S&M rooms etc, and each location was delineated by steps, or some sort of gaudy carpeting or paint, or bars. There was a lot of black and pink.
There were also dirty glasses everywhere. There were ashtrays overflowing, and cigarette butts on the floor. The floors themselves, where they weren’t carpeted, were sticky. Where they were carpeted the floors held an aroma probably not experienced since the London cholera outbreak of 1854. Sweat, bodily fluids, more bodily fluids, spilled cocktails, futile cleaning solutions, and the faint hint of amyl nitrate swirled together into a thick miasma. A drunk, coked-up, horny, disco-fueled office worker or celebrity, entranced by the flashing lights and loud, thumping music, might have found it all very alluring.
A sober, sleepy person getting paid to show up at 4:30 am with the cleaning crew and deal with addicted sex workers, porn stars, and film extras did not.
For those just tuning in, I was now gainfully employed, earning $750 a week under the table as a—I’m really trying not to say Jack of all trades here, but as a person taking care of all the many jobs that needed taking care of that did not fall under any of the standard filmmaking job descriptions.
Occasionally I’d handle a job that should have been covered by a skilled professional, because they weren’t always available.
On one occasion, for instance, they were doing a long shot of the room. In a hot tub in the background was a white woman with red hair, a white man with a beard, and a black man with short hair, all eagerly going at it together. The director shouted “Cut!” and the threesome, after a minute or two, proceeded to climb out of the tub.
“Where are you going? You need to stay there. We need to do another take.”
“But we’re done,” said the woman.
The white man continued to walk away. The black man and the woman stood, arguing with the director.
Only the director had clothes on.
“You,” he said to me, calling me out from behind the crew, “Do something.”
Now, there is a job in film called a script supervisor, and that person’s role is to make sure everything in each shot is exactly the same every time, to oversee continuity of scene, costume, and set, so that the editors can do their jobs when the time comes. It won’t do to have our hero walking across the room, a threesome engaged in hanky-panky in the background one second, and then a suddenly-empty hot tub the next.
But the script supervisor had slammed out the previous day when one of the primary actresses had shown up a couple of hours late, covered in bruises and track marks, and the director had told the script supervisor to replace her.
“Find any other woman and put her in a brown wig.”
The director had then chosen a woman probably fifteen pounds heavier and a foot shorter and told the script supervisor to “make it work.”
Apparently I was now a script supervisor.
I called out to the walking-away white guy and asked him to come back. I explained to the three of them that we were making a movie. They knew this - they’d signed waivers and lined up to be extras, begging to be picked.
How, they wanted to know, were they supposed to go back into the hot tub when they were done?
I guess, I said, you’ll need to… act.
The black guy nodded.
“Hi,” he said to the woman. “I’m Ron.”
Introductions were made all around, which seemed polite seeing as they’d be spending a little time together, and then I had to go as I got an urgent call to take the Fluffer his coffee.
Crises like this were common throughout the days, and between them, and during takes, I’d sit in the coat room, near the entrance door and out of sight of the action, and knit.
I knit quite a lot back then, knocking out sweaters on circular needles in soft, plushy yarns that I carried around in a rattan basket/bag thing that closed at the top. My wallet, cigarettes and keys lay at the bottom of the bag, the balls of yarn at the top. I took it with me everywhere, and to the set was no exception.
The coat check room had a tall stool in it, and I was sitting on the stool, the basket on the floor beside me, knitting a really nice blue and green sweater body when the doors to Plato’s Retreat flew open violently. The glaring morning sun burned light into the hall.
About a dozen policemen came rushing in and past me down the hall, barging into the big room, interrupting filming.
The screaming started immediately.
I could hear things crashing, cries, “Let go of me!” from various voices. I heard authoritative shouting and panicked shouting. Naked people were running by toward the front doors, cops catching them as they fled, shoving them back toward the big room.
I sat still, knitting needles in hand, unmoving.
A sergeant walked past the coatroom door, and then I saw his heel stop. He walked backwards a few steps. He stopped in front of the door and looked at me.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Somebody’s got to put clothes on these people,” I said.
He looked at me for a beat.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
I picked up my bag and did just that.
Turns out nobody had thought to get the permits required to shoot a porn movie. Which I assume means the wrong hands had been greased, or under-greased.
Either way, that was the end of Around the World. The girls never got to see London, Paris and Rome. I never got that last week’s paycheck. The Fluffer did all that for nothing.1
It was now 39 years later.
“Why don’t we all start by telling the group something interesting about ourselves,” said our host at the positive reinforcement animal behavior meeting, enthusiastically regaling us with a tale of immolating a cow’s hind end.
In the name of unity.
Since posting part one last week, a couple of people who were at the meeting have said they’d forgotten about, or didn’t remember the story about the cow.
But they all said they remembered the time I worked in porn.
There is a veterinarian out there who owes me big time.
This was long, so I’ll skip the tea this week.
I heard they made a “director’s cut” out of the movie with some additional warehouse footage shot somewhere else and a modified script, so I like to think his work wasn’t all in vain.
"Someone's got to put clothes on these people." Best response ever. I hope the sergeant appreciated your ingenious pragmatism.
I have been waiting all week for part 2. Loved it!