Prelude to Softcore (I)
Tim Feeney

       Red Door Productions was based in an aluminum-sided warehouse built as the millennial tech boom came to an end for an internet startup whose Jhane Barnes-bedecked management had watched slack-faced as their millions dissipated in the heat of a single pitiless Wall Street afternoon while the stony foreman of their construction crew, then a week from hanging the sign over the front door, had informed the greasily clean-cut twenty-four-year-old who functioned as the startup's CFO that his checks had better've cleared the bank or he'd personally "start up" the CFO's shiny fucking earth-tone SUV and see how far it could be four-wheeled up executive rectum. Point being that Red Door had lucked into the space for cheap. They'd formerly operated out of a few rented offices and apartments and T Aukerman's ratty condo off of La Brea, but their consolidation across town in Santa Ana made them the envy of every other straight-to-cable outfit in town, most of which had their own assortments of rinky offices and apartments dotted fungally all over L.A. The interior of the warehouse had since been cordoned into a warren of offices and sets, most of them more or less permanently dressed to resemble Red Door's perennial settings—bedrooms, police precincts, showers, dim jail cells, a bar—and used in one movie after another, aiding Red Door's compulsory cost-consciousness and inducing niggling cases of déjà vu in cable TV's after-hours audience, who saw the same floor-model furniture and props and wallpaper (and actors, and plots) three or four times a night as they slalomed through the premium channels.
       T Aukerman, Red Door's soul and doyen, was meeting at Cantor's with some young Matrixy guys from Yokohama who carried themselves with the amplified hip of Eurotrash the world over and to whom he was pitching movie-investment ideas, leaving Rollin to Second Unit direct a bare-bones crew on Red Door's smaller living room set. T'd asked Rollin a week previously whether Rollin would mind heading the Second Unit while he was out at the meeting, to which Rollin had agreed, just amiably enough. Rollin walked around the set, checking the schedule he'd worked out the day before. He'd made special note that no First Unit would also be running while he directed the Second Unit, that Annie had said they'd be using the Main Unit's standard 35mm Arriflex. Rollin clutched his much-glued mug, checked the schedule, his legs brittle. The room was early-workday tense as everyone read everyone else's mood, the day not yet having eased into routine. Rollin asked Ike, perched on his work ladder, about the lights. The set dressers, one the boom-mike operator and the other a production assistant/gofer, both doubling today, pushed a sofa back and forth by inches along a wall and frowned at Annie, who stared through the 35mm's viewfinder and guided them with both hands as if parking a jet. Ike thought the lights were fine. Kelly Nacktmadchen stood with her arms folded and small-talked down at Bruce Stewart, who was sitting sidesaddle at the craft table, pumping a chrome 7-kg. dumbbell. The sound guy yawned leoninely while testing levels. 8:17 am PDT and busily quiet. Rollin wanted three scenes shot by the time T arrived at the warehouse later that morning. T'd asked him to do two. Rollin stretched a little, tapping the schedule, and asked Ike what he thought. Ike said that "Eurotrash" didn't really apply to Asians. Natasza suggested "Japrejects." Natasza was doing both makeup and wardrobe this morning and was trying to mix two colors of blush at her bureau without blowing scuds of dust all over the place. Annie held her arms up in an X over her head and called for Rollin, who came over and squinted through the viewfinder. The set dressers/boom-mike operator and gofer stood and waited, expressionless. Rollin very slowly nodded his head a couple of times and asked Annie what she thought. She said that the framing was acceptable but that "Japrejects" was pretty bad in a lot of different ways. They all settled on "Nippojunk." Rollin nodded more confidently and asked Annie to lock it in place and wait.
       Kelly laughed suddenly, high and real, and Bruce Stewart smiled and looked down at his tight bicep as his reps briefly increased to industrial quickness. Kelly wore a light yellow dress with nothing underneath—underwear leaves marks that look like unusually even burn scars on film—and as she laughed her dress swished and Bruce's eyes darted that way for a tick before returning to gaze intently at his cephalic vein. Kelly and Bruce were playing police officers in Maximum Liability and had met the day before. Bruce's age was impossible to pin down. Maybe twenty, maybe forty; his body was the sort of grim rigid of intimidating anaerobics. He'd been in nine of Red Door's movies over the past four years and Rollin knew only that his name really was Bruce Stewart. Rollin checked with the sound guy about the sound and the sound guy told Rollin to—asked Rollin to go onto the set and say a few lines of dialogue ("I don't think you should take this case, Shannon"; "Peter, don't you tell me what to do") while the sound guy held his headphones up to one ear, DJ-style, and slid a few levels up and down. Rollin kept his forehead furrowed. His heart went thud thud. The sound guy tweaked something and asked for one more line of dialogue ("You're in over head with this case, Shannon") before declaring the levels ready and asking Kelly and Bruce Stewart onto the set so that he could adjust everything all over again. Bruce clanked the dumbbell to the floor; Kelly turned her back and demurely opened the neck of her dress so Natasza could apply some powder to her chest. Kelly was co-starring in this movie, fourth billed, following a role as Background Stripper in Judicial Misconduct and a small but fairly memorable part as a corporate assassin who resorted to frequently carnal means to corner her targets in Business Assets. Rollin walked toward the craft table and asked Natasza about Kelly's shoes, whether she should have them on or off in this scene. Natasza said it was up to him. Rollin frowned and said off. Rollin asked Bruce how he was doing. Bruce said that he couldn't complain. Rollin looked him up and down and asked Natasza whether that was the same polo shirt his character had worn earlier. Natasza thought so. Rollin said okay. Ike was doing something that looked like inconspicuous tai chi. Annie leaned on the Arri and stared. Natasza finished dusting Kelly's chest and Kelly walked onto the set, fluffing her bodice. Bruce Stewart stood at a brass-plated drinks cart topped with bottles. Rollin refilled his mug at the coffee urn, looked longingly at the breakfast sundries. He studied the different varieties of doughnuts, the bagels, some salty, some plain, the two different types of cream cheese. One had pineapple. He licked his lips, turned.        "Okay. Are we good?"
       General assent: Ike shifted a baffle and said yeah, Annie gave him a thumbs-up, Natasza smiled at him. The set dressers didn't say otherwise. The sound guy looked up from his board, still holding the headphone to his ear. Kelly stood next to the prop couch, under a veneer-framed doorway that ostensibly led to a bedroom. Bruce butterflied his arms across his chest and back, standing at the drinks cart, positioned between Kelly and the camera. Rollin grabbed a clipboard with some pages of script clamped to it and took his seat next to the camera, shading his eyes from the glare of Ike's 1000-watt Arri Fresnel. The gofer stood before the camera, Arri digital clapper in hand, waiting for the word. Red Door had gotten most of its equipment when a really big crate fell off an Arri truck. Rollin rolled his head, took in the scene. Then he took in the set. Then he sat up straight and pointed while Kelly started and everyone looked at her feet.
       "Bare?" said Rollin.
       "Don't want to," said Kelly.
       Red Door's performers' nudity was contractually stipulated, a concept Aukerman had developed early in his career, after signing half a dozen actresses for Tops A-Poppin!, his early-seventies attempt at skin-intensive beach cinema, and having all of them back out of their nude scenes before any could be shot, which, T never failing to grip his brow with thumb and forefinger at this point in the story, wouldn't've been so bad if most of the rest of the movie hadn't already been completed, forcing a financially imperiled T to finish what Drive-In Splendor would later call "a blue movie in a very very light shade of blue, a sort of dusty pastel, because no one in the entire movie ever gets naked ever and even the swimsuits look lifted from a Walker Evans photo" and which saw a devastating theatrical run in Times Square before Aukerman shelved it forever, never even attempting to sell the rights to cable or the seedier video companies. Thus the contracts. Kelly Nacktmadchen's agreed to three nude scenes and up to five total minutes of skin-bared screen time, all five minutes revealing what Red Door's uncharacteristically demure lawyers referred to as "upper frontal," up to two full minutes revealing "lower rear," two scenes exposing for ninety seconds total the precious and salary-boosting "lower frontal follicular region" ("Follicular because when it comes to the lower frontal region, I'm interested only in the hair," T had explained one day. "There alone in my movies, I don't wanna see flesh. Anywhere else, flesh, I'm all eyes. Not for perverse reasons have I spent so much time thinking about this, so listen. Not entirely perverse, okay. In any case. Some of our movies are said to be softcore movies. Sometimes softcore porn. A fair enough tag, since these movies and self-stimulation are literally made for one another. Softcore movies consist of alternating segments of story and nudity, this nudity being sometimes incidental—on-camera showers and undressing are standard skin-baring devices—and sometimes a correlative of feigned sexual activities between or among a film's characters. Key word being feigned. Our actors don't actually engage in on-camera sex. Off camera, who knows. But on-camera congress is verboten in softcore. At most the performers lie naked atop one another and bounce. That's the most we want to show. Leave engorged organs to hardcore. Hardcore shows everything; hardcore'll show anything. Softcore satisfies different urges, the least remarkable one being curiosity. We're a species interested in the hidden. Go to a store and happen upon an open door to the stockroom, and no matter what's for sale on the shelves proper, you wonder what merchandise may lie just beyond your view. Merchandise made more valuable for its hiddenness. Of course. We long to discover. And flesh is the same: an urge to see nudity is an urge to discover unfamiliar flesh. We wonder what someone looks like naked as much because we can't see it as for reasons of lust. Softcore movies involve letting the viewer get a look at human stockrooms, so to speak. We reveal what's otherwise unknown, clothed. But I don't want to mislead you with the term stockroom—suggests innards, doesn't it?—because I'm very specifically talking about the epidermis here. Softcore's literally soft: it's all skin. It's all about skin. With one small exception, naturally, that being pubic hair. Softcore's raison d'être is to expose pubic hair. Specifically female pubic hair. The general perception is that softcore's fixated with breasts, and it is, it is; but breasts are finally a runner-up, an uncomplicated substitute for the half Windsor that pubic hair makes of a viewer's psyche. Did you know that no one's sure why we even have the stuff? Best guess is that it traps pheromones. Some theory. If you're close enough to a naked person to get a whiff of their pubic pheromones, something was probably gonna happen anyway. But female pubic hair's vital to our interests as softcore-moviemakers. It's the key to softcore's allure: it both hides and reveals. Men's pubic hair is not rare in softcore, but its function is much, much different. We could show men's pubes in our movies all day long, and do, but so what, and do you know why? Because it doesn't hide anything. A little spray of black n' curlies, out of which whump: penis. Unless you happen to be shall we call it underprivileged, male pubic hair does nothing to conceal the organ it surrounds. A dick's as dull as a stop sign because there's not much mystery to it. Unlike pudenda: cloaked, enigmatic. Another discrepancy between the sexes. At least we both have something down there. The genitals are literally our alpha and omega. So no wonder the fascination. And yet nothing appears more alien on a person than their genitalia. They look like a mistake. Slugs gone hirsute. Genitalia interrupt the body's aesthetic grace with a meaty lump of humanity. They're flesh chaotic. Women, in softcore, have this imperfection hidden, and men don't. The male body in softcore is preposterous. It's pretty preposterous outside of softcore, for that matter. Nothing dumber than a dong. It dangles, flops. Thus the difference between men and women. Or at least their reproductive bits. Female pubis, as depicted in softcore, gratifies the desire to see the frontier of human nakedness while simultaneously keeping it under wraps. Softcore's brilliant: it shows all and doesn't. It gratifies one desire and leaves another mouth-wateringly unfulfilled. Both of which desires are present in almost everybody. It's great. Have your cake and eat it, too: softcore's the fork and plate. The main difference between softcore and hard- is that viewers of softcore understand this need for elusiveness. They want something to remain concealed; they don't want to see the works. And I can't say I blame them. Coitus is one of the most common things in the world, but it makes for one uncommonly ugly close-up. Hardcore's obviously more about the idea than the image, because the image is horrifying. Sex looks like murder. Hardcore is obsessed with close-ups of rigid, stabbing organs—close-ups in hardcore look like angry homicide. Every orifice a wound. Mindless pleasure is visually indistinguishable from unbearable pain, it's been noted. And all that jiggling, everything jiggles. People, men, women, we all look terrible having sex. It's so, so bodily. Real sex is too real. Sex has mucus. Sex smells. Ridiculous animal pumping and pounding and groaning and everyone's expressions look gut-punched. Sex feels good until you see it. But softcore. Softcore does away with all of this. Softcore eliminates the raw biology of organs in slicked motion. Softcore gives you the illusion of sex without the mess, if you're careful with the Kleenex. Illusion, no, not even. Illusion is a product of deception, and softcore doesn't deceive. Softcore makes the viewer work. Softcore pretends, and knows it pretends, and invites the viewer to pretend with it. Hardcore thinks that it shows everything, thinks that it is, in fact, delivering the real thing. Thinks it's bringing reality to you. It doesn't dawn on hardcore that what it presents as reality simply isn't. It may be a document of something that happened in front of a camera, but it isn't real. It's probably further from reality, because it's unreal and yet assumes that its viewers believe in its realness. And maybe a lot of them do, but they're mistaken. Hardcore simply isn't the same thing as sexual intercourse. Obviously. A war movie isn't the same thing as a war. Softcore understands its own unreality, has come to grips with it. Softcore leaves something to the imagination, and the imagination is boundless. Softcore really is all about the fantasy. Reality, it turns out, is a totally different onanism"), as well as actions performed: kissing (whom, on what part of whose body, openmouthed or closed-), touching/being touched (whom/by whom, where, with what force), licking/being licked (north of the waist, south of the thighs, $100 extra per scene per nipple on the receiving end), and simulated sex itself (all positions and camera angles). Then everyone went and disregarded the specifics as soon as filming started. Red Door's directors used the contracts mainly as a guide to what performers were willing to do during the filming of a movie's sex scenes, much of which was conducted, the director calling for more arched back or kissed neck or tongued breast, faster, now slower, the performers following as instructed, attempting to generate passion while engaging in synthetic foreplay. All contracts made a point of having minimal personnel on hand when nude scenes were shot, though in Rollin's experience most nude-ready performers had done rounds on the strip-club circuit and were dauntingly comfortable when it came to showing everybody everything.
       But no one had ever mentioned feet, and Kelly Nacktmadchen's modesty apparently began at her ankles. Natasza had selected her dress from Wardrobe, but she wore her own clogs that she for whatever reason was refusing to remove for the shot:

       "Does anyone even own a brass-plated drinks cart anymore?"
       "Come on."
       "I'm just not wanting to take them off today."
       "Why not?"
       "I don't think it's right for the scene. I know Shannon, right? I'm her. She wouldn't take them off in this scene."
       "No but the soles on those things, they can't be comfortable."
       "They're not too bad."
       "Yeah but she's been wearing them all day."
       "At the office she takes them off. Like when she's sitting at her desk, she slips them off."
       "She's undercover, she doesn't"
       "She does a lot of paperwork."
       "But I mean she's gonna at least kick off her shoes when she comes home, everybody does."
       "No."
       "Yes. Why is this a problem?"
       "I don't have a problem. Why do you want me to take them off?"
       Because fetishists—and the foot fetish is the granddaddy of them all—are willing to spend serious money to engage their fetishes. If a movie can include some low-key quirk among the conventional T&A, that movie stands to generate a lot of extra business. The tightrope they walked was that if someone looking for conventional T&A thought for a second that they were in fact watching a movie geared the slightest bit strange, it would turn them away. Everyone thinks the other person's fetish is repulsive. The leather fiend thinks the crusher weird, the diaper enthusiast can't understand what's so hot about smoking; never shall the sock obsessive and the maieusiophiliac meet. Fixated on, kept private, shared with very few, a thing of shame were it known, the fetish begets loneliness. So if elements of fetish can be snuck into what by all other appearances is a regular skin flick—if, for example, there are a few scenes in which naked women show naked feet—then not only is the fetishist finding something he (it's almost always a he)'s interested in, but he feels a sense of acceptance. He's being welcomed, his peculiarity made mainstream, his isolation abated. Thus the movies sell more. Plus Aukerman had found out that one of the buyers at Showtime had a heavy jones for toe and had hinted to Rollin that Kelly Nacktmadchen's phalanges were all kinds of lovely.
       "Eww."
       "I thought you took your shoes off last time."
       "I think you've got some kind of a weird thing."
       "No I"
       "Yeah, then you wouldn't be making such a big deal."
       "It's not a big deal. I'm not making the big deal, I'm—not."
       Eyebrows high, shrugging: "I just don't wanna take them off."
       Rollin felt his tongue swell to fill his mouth and cut off speech. He palmed his forehead and stared dully at Kelly's shoes. He wondered how decisions were made regarding footwear in other movies. He thought about how great it would be if shoes did it for him, arousal-wise. Shoes, everyone wore shoes; he'd be hormonally overloaded by noon each day, unable to accommodate the stampede of sexual input. He could be an old hircine guy with a shoe fetish and spend his days on a bench being driven lustfully nuts for all that walked by, the sandals, the flip flops, the oxfords, slings, moccasins, brogues, loafers, mules, pumps, geta and zori, Adidas and Skechers, Doc M.'s and Chuck T.'s, deck shoes and basketball shoes and boots, god, just think of the boots. He raised his head. "Would you think about it?"
       Kelly bounced as if brewing a tantrum but said nothing. Bruce Stewart started butterflying again, his expression the blend of patience and not assumed by professionals during moments of professional delay. Rollin turned to Ike and told him to hold the lights, which weren't going anywhere, and stepped over to Annie and told her to stand by. She stood by. Rollin busied himself with the script pages for a minute, able to feel every sweat gland on his body. He momentarily thought that he had some sort of sixth sense by which he could render in his mind a three-dimensional image of himself by detecting the glances being covertly shot his way. He saw himself busy with the script pages. Every hair. T's line on actors who didn't follow his instructions was inflexible, he being someone who up to a certain point worked with personal quirks and mandates as if weaving them and past which point was a remorseless terminator of contracts, leaving entire casts agape as indifferent production assistants passed out bushels of pink slips and thistly reminders from the lawyers to return their props and costumes forthwith. T being someone who once fired a lead actor on Joint Venture's last day of shooting, the guy first incredulous and then screaming until also-indifferent but much burlier production assistants were called to lug him away, T then turning to a sixteen-year-old intern and telling him to get changed, he was the new lead and they had to get started on reshoots right away, the kid bounding out of his chair with a happy "Oh boy!" and soon becoming Red Door's newest and much acne'd male star, shown in Joint Venture's promo poster with a gun-toting blonde on each arm while grinning around a mouthful of orthodontia; T being someone blessed with a hostage negotiator's knack for bargaining and the ability to smell bluffs like farts in an elevator and fearlessness, T born unencumbered by fear, T's career characterized by a complete willingness to jettison everything if he couldn't get his way or if the way someone else wanted something wasn't an improvement over his own. Every nerve. Rollin decided. "It doesn't matter."
       The sound guy looked up from the console and asked him what didn't matter.
       "This. Kelly has her shoes on, shoes off. It's one little thing."
       The sound guy looked back to the board, then pressed a few buttons while asking Rollin what he meant, it's one little thing.
       "I mean this shoe detail is one little thing on a screen full of things. It's not gonna make a difference."
       The sound guy nodded and said that he still didn't understand.
       "The—no one is gonna wonder why Kelly's wearing shoes, or why she's not wearing shoes, or wonder anything about shoes at all."
       The sound guy cocked an eyebrow and asked Rollin about the fetish thing.
       "From a creative standpoint, I mean. Most folks won't even notice."
       The sound guy thought for a moment and then said something to the contrary.
       "I don't—wait, what?"
       The sound guy repeated his point using mostly different words.
       "Yeah, I can see that, but"
       The sound guy asked for no buts. He motioned Rollin in close. He appeared to listen to something through a cup of his headphones, still held up to one ear, before he said to think of it this way. He said to think of details in a movie as the blocks of stone that make up an arch.
       "Wh"
       The sound guy told Rollin to listen. He said to think of a basic round stone arch, the voussoir and the keystone, the big one wedged into the top. The weight and pressure of the keystone presses down on the voussoir, and that's what keeps them all in place, keeps the stones secure and the entire arch standing. But then the sound guy said something about what if you couldn't tell which stone was the keystone. He asked Rollin to pretend that they lived in a world in which earthbound physics didn't apply and that the keystone wasn't necessarily the big one on top, that no one could actually tell which stone was the keystone. The sound guy said so then any stone could be the stone that keeps all the others in place, and you can't tell just by looking. So then what happens if you start dicking with the arch? He asked Rollin to humor him and play along.
       "Which one's the keystone doesn't matter, because if you take out any stone the whole arch falls."
       The sound guy said that Rollin was right, in which case whichever stone Rollin had removed would be the real keystone, literally the key stone. And that back in the world of conventional physics, removing any voussoir has pretty much the same effect as removing the keystone. Take one away and the whole thing goes down. So that meant that pretty much every stone is key, doesn't it? Despite the big important one on top keeping everything in place, the one that appears more than any other to bear the load of the arch, if any single stone comes out your arch is fucked. The sound guy further said okay, imagine that Maximum Liability was that arch. Rollin's artistic vision—actually Aukerman's artistic vision, the sound guy acknowledged, hitting a couple of the console's buttons, but Rollin was directing today, not T—was the blueprint for that arch.
       "Just so you know, I can see this coming a mile"
       This detail matters. Every detail matters.
       "Right. You're right. I know."
       But forget the arch and know this: you don't have much control over those details. Moviemakers may be gods, but gods whose wishes are usually misread or ignored. You can fill your screen with things and movement, but what people will see on that screen is anyone's guess. There's no guarantee that the symbols and touchstones and significances are going to be taken as anything more than stuff in a movie. And then other things you didn't notice yourself may become the story's talismans. You think guys in the fifties making movies with giant rubber monsters knew that they were being allegorical? You think Tomoyuki Tanaka sat down one day and came up with a screaming fire-breathing dinosaur as a metaphor for Japan's post-nuke fears? Maybe he did. Or did he think it would be entertaining to make a movie with a guy in a giant-lizard costume kicking over a lot of teeny buildings? Maybe both. Interpretation, the connections made and conclusions drawn, are all beyond your creative will. Details clump together and mutate, metastasize; nymph, pupa, Emperor Tojo. The movie you're making isn't the movie anyone's going to see. Maybe that's depressing, putting so much of your own blood into the thing, and full communication still beyond your reach. Or maybe the fact that your movie can inspire so much seeing means that you've given something loved beyond your own hopes. But what I'm saying is know this: take care when you say that a detail doesn't matter. Because there's really no way in which it doesn't. The sound guy said.
       "So we make crappy gods."
       The sound guy said that was one way of looking at it, and another way is that we make the best. He slapped at his console, never breaking eye contact. Rollin was pretty sure that every black plastic button and switch and level and dial on the board had been amply fiddled by that point. Behind him Bruce Stewart was sniffing the prop bottles for real alcohol while Kelly laughed. Annie leaned on the camera with her eyes closed, her pith helmet pushed low over her face. Ike and the others were setting up a game of slaughterball for later that evening. Rollin stood in front of Kelly.
       "Hey."
       "Hey."
        ". . . : I want your shoes off."
       Kelly's lower lip drooped, the ploy-potential of which wasn't lost on Rollin, who was a little pleased to realize that a drooped lip's ploy-potential wasn't lost on him.
       "I don't want to."
       "I know, but I'm asking you to."
       "Rollin, man . . ."
       "Take your shoes off here, and you can keep them on in the fireplace scene."
       Kelly lolled her head, St. Teresa in open-heeled clogs.
       "Please?"
       Big sigh. "Oh fine. Okay."
       "Okay?"
       "Mister Aukerman better let me."
       "I'll tell him."
       "You better tell Mister Aukerman I got your word, too."
       "He won't have a problem," Rollin said.
       "Whatever," said Kelly, and a pair of clogs arced one after the other across the soundstage.
       Rollin moved to his place next to the camera as Annie woke with a start and wiped the dribble from her chin. Neither one really gaped, to their credit. The gofer stood before the camera, Arri clapper in hand, looking over his shoulder at Kelly's feet. Even Bruce Stewart had an expression on his face. The sound guy said that he was sorry and hunkered back down to his console. Rollin surveyed the space.
       "Alright, we're looking good. Looking good. Kelly, yeah, why don't you go ahead and put those back on, thanks."
       Natasza, staring floorward, handed Kelly her clogs as Kelly bounced happily.
       "Everybody ready again?" asked Rollin. "Okay—"
       "Shit," observed Ike.
       "Ready—and—"