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Aristocrat of the Erotic (part two)

CORLISS: Both The Dirty Girls and The Alley Cats were written by Peter Fernandez.

METZGER: He had acted in Hollywood - he was one of the Amboy Dukes in City across the River, Tony Curtis' first picture - and later he was a dubbing actor, and later still a dubbing writer. I was a dubbing director. I asked him if he'd be interested in doing The Dirty Girls with me, and he came up with some cute ideas - mostly on the backs of matchbook covers in the studio. You tend to repeat successes, consciously or not, and so after The Dirty Girls he wrote my next picture, The Alley Cats.

CORLISS: For your next two pictures - Carmen, Baby and Therese and Isabelle - you used Jesse Vogel for the screenplay.

METZGER: He had dubbed Sexus and Erotic Touch of Hot Skin. Vogel and I also worked on the adaptation of a Henry Miller book. We put in a lot of work, did a lot of research, and at the last minute they refused to sell it to us. That was a very big blow. An even bigger blow was that the book was called Quiet Days in Clichy. I don't want to comment on the picture, but it's not the approach I would have taken. Vogel also started a script for Camille 2000 but we disagreed and I got somebody else.

CORLISS: The sex scenes in Carmen, Baby were suggestive. perhaps even discreet, rather than explicit. I once suggested in print that there was so little nudity in your films because your actresses look so sexy with their clothes on that it's almost redundant for them to disrobe. I suspect, though, that you had other reasons for approaching your sex scenes in this way.

METZGER: Well, sometimes it's a question of what you want in a scene, and sometimes it's what you can get from an actress. In Carmen, Baby there was a very famous sex star, Barbara Valentine, who had just had a baby, and her breasts were so out of proportion to the rest of her that I felt they were better dressed than undressed. And Uta Levka, as Carmen, also had a figure that was shown to better advantage with a bra and a dress.

CORLISS: So you cast actresses with their clothes on!

METZGER: Yes, generally you do. And if you get serious about them, then you ask for a further audition!

CORLISS: There's a preoccupation in Carmen, Baby with mis-en-scene, the moving camera, which finds its fullest, most fulsome expression in Therese and Isabelle.

METZGER: Well some of the stuff is created in the cutting room, like the "bottle dance" in Carmen, Baby. That was a triumph of editorial eroticism! Believe me, she didn't do that much. I wasn't really aware of using the moving camera so much until Vince Canby mentioned my obsession with lateral camera movements. That's one of the problems with making erotic films: you don't get much criticism. If they write about you at all, it's usually to say, "Aaah, it's just a sexy picture". Or "it's not sexy."

CORLISS: Are the tracking shots a conscious hommage to Max Ophuls?

METZGER: An awful lot of people mention Max Ophuls. To me, that's the ultimate compliment, because I've seen a lot of his pictures, and I adore him. I don't mean to sound low-brow, but there's another director who brilliantly mastered that technique, and that was John Farrow. He did a picture called China that has the most fabulous shots I've ever seen. And, of course, the opening of Touch of Evil is the ultimate.

CORLISS: Even if it's not a conscious tip of the hat, it is a conscious decision on your part to move the camera during a sex scene, and not cut it up.

METZGER: It all depends. In the Carmen, Baby, scene where they make love behind the colored bottles, the whole point was not to break it up - you went from color to color. Or in The Lickerish Quartet, when the boy and girl are on the grass: we were trying to get a pristine Garden of Eden atmosphere, and a cut would have been jarring. But in the library scene of The Lickerish Quartet, you have a lot of cuts. It was an older man with a young girl, and the cutting helped suggest the effort and the spirit in the spine of the scene. I try not to work from a chart; the scene itself will tell you what kind of treatment you should give it.

CORLISS: The use of the long take and the moving camera can make a sex scene much more erotic than a lot of cuts.

METZGER: It allows a freer build on the part of the audience. I mean, you build a scene, but that's no guarantee that the audience is going to be with you. I think it's easier for them to enter the scene, and stay with it, with the moving camera. Also, your decor usually has a reason, and you want to explore it.

CORLISS: The futuristic decor was certainly important in Camille 2000 - sort of Marienbad 1984.

METZGER: I was very lucky to have Enrico Sabbatini as my designer on Camille 2000. We tried to give Camille a very dead milieu. Nothing around her lived. She was always dressed in either white or black, and the decor of her room was filled with unreal things - plastic, phosphorescent stuff.

CORLISS: Your preoccupation with decor of a different sort in Therese and Isabelle amounted almost to a flora fetish.

METZGER: Well, that old monastery - which we used as the girls' Iycee - was such a trip! I was always concerned about capturing the feel of that place, what I felt at the time. It was absolutely breathtaking. One of the responsibilities you have is to put what you see into the film can.

CORLISS: Essy Persson's performance in Therese was remarkably good.

METZGER: She's an extraordinary talent, and I'm very sorry that she retired right after Therese. She was really hurt by the reviews. Now, I don't think that hard work should get you very far - you have to do more than that - but she led the life of a nun during that picture! Every word she spoke to Isabelle is in that film - otherwise she spoke to no one, lived like an absolute recluse. She thought of herself as a girl who got famous showing her tits, and doing a lot of fuck movies. And now she had a real part. We all felt a responsibility to Violette Leduc's very sensitive, very personal memoir; and we didn't want to be charged with making money by exploiting deviant behavior. But the only thing the New York daily critics said was that Essy Persson was too old - not was she good, was she bad - and that her body wasn't very good. It wasn't until the movie had been out for six months or so that Visconti saw it and loved it, and Dwight Macdonald liked it, and Brooks Atkinson said nice things about it. By that time, you didn't need it. Still, the picture made a fortune - almost as much as Carmen, Baby, our biggest grosser.

CORLISS: I think of The Lickerish Quartet as being your most personal film - with its shifting between illusion and reality, between softcore and hardcore eroticism, between actor as person and actor as role player.

METZGER: It's certainly my most personal film, unquestionably. And as such, I don't think I'm the person to say what the result was. The result has to speak for itself. We had some problems with the supposedly hardcore footage; the stag film-within-a-film because Hans Jura photographed it. It looked too beautiful; it looked like Therese and Isabelle. We had to dupe it about six times before it looked crude and ugly enough for a stag film. And this is a fundamental principle of hardcore: you have to go to a hardcore picture with the feeling that you're doing something illegal. When you say hardcore looks lousy, what you really mean is it looks illegal. If the film is too well produced, you lose that marvelous quality. Although Deep Throat - with very meat and potatoes color, very straight shots - may start a trend toward better production values. If "law and order" doesn't turn things around.

CORLISS: Did the climate of repression, which you suspect may be imminent, have anything to do with your making Little Mother?

METZGER: Not really. I wanted to make a picture in a non-erotic climate.

CORLISS: Little Mother does have erotic scenes, but some of them end abruptly. Did you trim these to get an R rating?

METZGER: Uh. . . yes.

CORLISS: What kind of mood do you try to create on the set when you're filming an erotic scene? Do you throw out all the technicians you don't need?

METZGER: I have a horror of big crews. I don't like a lot of movement around; that's why I don't fly on 747's. For Therese and Isabelle, we closed the set. We had the lighting cameraman, the operator - although in a lot of the love scenes I do the operating, because the framing is very critical, and there's no way someone can tell you exactly what he sees through the camera - one technician for light changes, and someone to push the doily. We finished shooting the bedroom scenes in Therese in three days. But I didn't tell anybody we were finished for the next two weeks, and everybody thought we were shooting love scenes. That was the only way I could justify to the union people that they weren't needed around the set.

So you do try to chase everybody out. But then I did that when Camille had to die in the oxygen tent. It just intensifies the concentration. But that only works for the first couple of shots - that an actor is uncomfortable - because you've got so many shots, so much to worry about, that you don't have time to be concerned with anything superficial. If you work with a long lens, your movement is so critical. And as for lighting, you can look very acceptable in one light, and then you can move, literally, three inches, and look like the Wolf Man with three noses on your face. So for the actor to concentrate on that, plus whatever movements, it's so critical that they really don't have time to be concerned with other things. You're really looking for other values.

CORLISS: So the actors don't really get erotically involved in such a scene.

METZGER: I can't think of a situation . . . perhaps the boy and girl in The Lickerish Quartet were erotically involved "in the field" but I was so far away, I couldn't really tell.

CORLISS: You choreograph all the actors' movements?

METZGER: Yes, usually I do. You try to do whatever is comfortable for the actor. Usually the love scenes are done in the middle of shooting, so you should have a pretty good idea what movement is good for the actor, and what is bad. And you use sort of a professional blackmail. "If you're not committed to a love scene", I tell the actor, "it's going to look terribly vulgar, terribly funny, laughable. If you don't have a total response, it's going to look bad". One thing I admired about Essy Persson in Therese I thought she did the love scenes exquisitely, but she didn't do them any better or worse than she did any other scene in the picture. She didn't say, "Well, it's a fuck scene, so we'll get through it", or "I gotta make it the best scene in the movie". Her concentration was the same throughout the picture. And that's all I ask of the actors.

CORLISS: Of course. the actors know they're going to have to do a love scene.

METZGER: I tend to overstate it to them. I ask for that visa that Peter Lorre had in Casablanca, where you could go anywhere and do anything - papers that can't be rescinded. I say to the actor, "If you trust me, let's just do it." I have some sort of sketches for the erotic scenes in my mind, but you can't get the choreography down until you get to know your actors. You can't tell them at the beginning what you yourself don't know. So you need their trust.

CORLISS: Have you thought of doing hard-core scenes in an erotic framework?

METZGER: Well, the picture I just finished, Score, culminates in a double seduction - one swinging, sort of bisexual couple seducing a younger, more innocent, latent couple - which we did in a kind of parallel way. And, as it was shot in 1972, I was able to take the scenes further than I ever have before, because there's this muscle of Puritanism which is just relaxing - like the girl's muscle in Deep Throat! - there seems to be a general relaxation of muscles in '72! And so the stuff goes into a category - I don't know what name you'd give it, but I think it is beyond soft core. How much of it remains, how much can be seen in the final film - well, that remains to be seen, because we're in the editing stage now.

CORLISS: Originally Score was an off Broadway play. How did the climax play on the stage?

METZGER: There's a black-out when the couples decide to do it. That was a kind of "Hollywood" resolution to a shocking situation. To sit and see, five feet away from you, a woman seducing a young girl and a man seducing another man simultaneously in two different rooms, and going from one to the other within the dialogue, was in and of itself very, very shocking. I saw it twice, and you could hear people's pulses, there was such a tension in the room. But at the moment it happens, the lights go out and everyone yells "Bingo!" We used "Bingo" as more of a springboard. You're able to do more things in film; you have many more devices. It all finally resolves itself, but in the non- Jane Withers idiom. It's not just: "well, we all had that mad weekend, and now let's thank God our lives are straightened so we can all watch Robert Young on TV."

CORLISS: In the humor and the situation, it sounds a little like Virginia Woolf, but with the sex up front instead of off stage.

METZGER: No, it's done a little lighter, like the sophisticated comedy of the Thirties. You might say it's Private Lives with what they really had in mind.

CORLISS: Do you think American actors would be more willing to do hard sex scenes than would Europeans because its more a part of their film vocabulary?

METZGER: It's not just their film vocabulary, it's a part of the atmosphere in which they live. And I might add, the actors are four of the most exquisitely beautiful people I've ever worked with. It was very difficult to get a bad shot of any of them.

Metzger on Porn

CORLISS: Tuli Kupferberg- poet, actor, and Fug- said that there were two points to be made against pornography: that it exploited the actors, and that it aroused feelings in the audience that could not be immediately satisfied.

METZGER: Well, I don't know how you exploit an actor, any more than you exploit a girl by having her as a model in a fashion show.

CORLISS: Isn't there something more direct in one actor fucking another?

METZGER: I don't see it exploiting actors, unless you're not honest with them. If he's talking about beaver films, or loops, perhaps there's some merit to the comment. When I talk pornography, I mean very explicit sex within a narrative framework. As for the second part, when you see pornography, you can't do anything about it at the time, but you certainly can at some not too distant time from your exposure to the film - we hope.

CORLISS: There are some people who might find our conversation, and perhaps your films, irredeemably sexist - using women as luscious objects to be fondled or abused by men in the theater or on the screen.

METZGER: Well, the men in my films are sex objects too.

CORLISS: Yes, and much less attention is paid them. But for a film to be erotic to a male audience, it has to concentrate on the woman.

METZGER: Yes, it's generally done from the male point of view.

CORLISS: Male superior?

METZGER: No, I don't think that's true at all. In a successful erotic sequence, the man is terribly vulnerable and defenceless - certainly in the scenes I've done. His complete dependence on the female, at the mercy of her opinion, her behavior, is a fairly accurate reflection of the sex act. How can you be superior in such a state of vulnerability?

CORLISS: Let's say that women tend to be degraded much less in your films.

METZGER: I don't think they're degraded at all. Half the scenes, they get on top!

CORLISS: What might be called the obligatory shot in a Metzger picture is a closeup of the heroine simulating orgasm as the man performs cunnilingus. In hardcore. it s usually the reverse.

METZGER: The only example of that in one of our pictures was The Dirty Girls, where the prostitute is in a commercial situation. But there the motive wasn't commercial. The woman was expressing her gratitude to the man - a little like the Anatole France story, "The Juggler of Our Lady." Where the juggler in front of the icon can only juggle, the only thing she can do is give him the best lay he's ever had. Mind you, I'm not saying I'm not a male chauvinist pig. I'm not saying I am, either.

CORLISS: The sex movie audience is predominantly, most exclusively, male. Do you want women to see and be turned on by your movies, as well as men?

METZGER: Yes, that's the intention. Except for a few of the softcores - Butterfly, for example, we've never had an overwhelmingly successful "briefcase" picture. Of course, there's the question of milieu. I go to the fights from time to time, and you get a very specific audience. And then I went to see "the" fight - Ali and Frasier - and I saw people you'd never see at an average fight. But they'd go to that fight, because there was an atmosphere they could be comfortable in.

CORLISS: I guess you'd like to make "the" movie, to attract both men and women.

METZGER: Well, of course, when you make a film, you want it to reach the widest audience. We've always gone for a mixed audience. We don't do the negative kind of sex, the American Legion kind of sex. That's another part of the forest, and a part that's probably on the decline. I think the primitive loops are only interesting from an historical point of view.

CORLISS: In a general audience sex movie, it seems, you can have man/woman sex scenes and woman/woman, but not man/man.

METZGER: People would accept mixed scenes, and they'd accept female homosexuality, but they don't seem ready to accept male homosexuality.

CORLISS People meaning "men".

METZGER: No, I mean the broad, film going public.

CORLISS: You don't think women would be turned on by male sex.

METZGER: Well, I don't think they have been. But then I don't think we've ever had the test. I think Score may be the test. That was part of the challenge - to create a gay sex scene that can turn on a general audience.

CORLISS: Do you think that the new hardcore audience is the old softcore audience finally getting what it always wanted? Or is there a section of the old Audubon audience that feels left out?

METZGER: I think both are probably true. The hardcore audience certainly wasn't manufactured. They obviously came from somewhere, and we assume they came from the softcore market. But audience response to a good erotic movie is still very, very strong. I'm not sure that hardcore isn't more in the "carnival" area, where you see stunts. I don't mean this as a put-down of hardcore, because I love it. Part of one's filmgoing should certainly include hardcore pornography, when it's done even reasonably well. But I think hardcore is designed less to turn you on and more to shock. I don't think it works you up.

CORLISS: It must work some people up. I don't think the hardcore regulars go to be shocked.

METZGER: Well, it's very difficult to assign a motive to each of the two hundred thousand or so people who go to see a movie. What I'm trying to say is that the softcore arousal film, the turn-on movie, has always been with us, and will always be with us.

CORLISS: But ten years ago, softcore was the limit of what you could see in a theater.

METZGER: It's a little like the children in Pinocchio, when they were given a chance to enter a world where they could break windows and smoke cigars until they got sick. We know that, if they hadn't turned into donkeys, they'd have lost interest in a day or two. The population can't even maintain interest in the War. In the span of my filmgoing experience in New York State, you couldn't have a character who committed suicide; you couldn't have sin without punishment. And here we are in hardcore exhibition. So naturally there's an intoxication with this freedom, there's an excitement at this moment. And I'm not putting it down; I share that excitement. But it's not yet part of the general film vocabulary. In a year or two it may be. If hardcore is permitted to continue - and we certainly hope it will, it's certainly kicky - you may hear people saying, "Do you think we'll ever again have a picture as crude as Mona?" Then, it will have been absorbed into the vocabulary. And you'll judge hardcore the same way as anything else: is it well-made or isn't it?

CORLISS: Do you foresee governmental repression of hardcore?

METZGER: Sure, it's an election year. Any politician can get his picture in the papers if he takes a stand on pornography. If you're running for office, it's a very good way to get exposure, which is really what your problem is. After an election, the attacks tend to die down very quickly, because politicians don't have to merchandise themselves as much. But now we've seen the government begin to move in one direction - back to prior censorship. There's a referendum on the November ballot in California. And I think the Supreme Court, in its present frame of mind, might slap down hardcore. I think the government might even be looking for such a case now.

There is nothing we're doing today that hasn't been done for three thousand years. It's just that it used to be restricted to a specific segment of society - the ruling class. There was always a lot of pornography in monasteries. We're doing today what they used to do in monasteries - but in the mass population, where it cannot be controlled by the ruling class. Time magazine went on for years about how terrible erotic movies were: that if your teenage daughter goes to see The Lickerish Quartet, or Carmen, Baby, she'll be hooked on heroin and pregnant within three weeks. Today, of course, Time magazine prints bare breasts; some day they'll print pornography. What they really. meant to say is: "It's terrible to print nude pictures - unless we do it." When the Daily News has very detailed rape cases, that's OK - as long as you don't advertise your detailed rape case on their entertainment page. They want to keep it for themselves - in their own, powerful hands.

If repression sets in, I think we'll have something like the old rating system. The rating system didn't really have anything to do with classifying pictures; it was an effort to contain sensational product within the major companies. Independent pictures, with the same content, were rated much more severely. If the current progression continues, I think you'll have it back in the hands of the majors. They'll dispense the erotic motion picture themselves, by the rules. It all comes back to Frank Morgan in The Wizard of 0z. He said to Ray Bolger,"You don't need a brain. You've always had a brain. What you need is a diploma." Well, we'll have the brains, but they'll have the diplomas. And you'll be back to the Gilda situation. That's a very dirty movie. It's a great movie. It's a real turn-on. You want to grab the first ass you see when you walk out of the theater. But that'll be OK, because the Gildas will have the diplomas - and the Carmens and Camilles won't.

Radley Metger interviewed by Richard Corliss