Monday, May 16, 2005

Pornography is in the eye of the beholder

One of my mates back in Melbourne has a large pornography collection; another wanted some dubs. So one Sunday afternoon in 1993, Heino, Garry and I were bored. We decided to put together a tape for our mate. A very special tape!

We spent a couple of hours going through the collection, looking for just the right tape to start with, and we found it! Like a lot of that kind of film there's an attempt at a connecting story. After all, what can you do to make an hour of sex videos interesting? Not much! In this case the connecting story was of a scantily clad damsel in the role of fortune teller with a crystal ball in which she could tell the future prospects of each suplicant stud. She had some silly dialog and the camera would then zoom in on the crystal ball, fading into the sex scene. At the end of each episode the camera would zoom out and we'd get the next silly prophecy. Perfect!

With a bit of frame matching it was pretty easy to transform the hour of tape into 10 minutes. Camera would zoom in on the crystal ball and then zoom out again; with nary a body part to be seen!

10 minutes wasn't quite enough so we added some more footage of a nature I'm not going to detail here. Just think pistons and you're on the right track!

So then we added a soundtrack. Our mate hates the music of Philip Glass and I happen to think his music is wonderful. So we added a Philip Glass soundtrack! Almost done! What was needed was some sound effects. Aha! Sandpaper! Do I really need to detail what sorts of scenes we used that sound effect on? I thought not!

So now we had about 10 minutes of teasing followed by 45 minutes of more substantial fare. A soundtrack to make our mate grind his teeth and sound effects to make him cringe! All we needed was a fitting finale! And what more fitting than to cut, at the climax of the last scene, to a shot of the three of us waving at the camera and saying 'Surprise!!!'?

Surely one of the more unusual pornographic films ever assembled! I wish we'd kept a copy!

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