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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
As I prepare to audition for the new X-rated film project by "Hedwig" creator John Cameron Mitchell, I'm left to wonder: Will he think I have the whole package? Part 1 in a series.
Mar 13, 2003 | Episode 1: The Steps to Pornassus
The first thing to know about me and my audition for John Cameron Mitchell's sex film project is that I am not an actor. I'm not exactly a writer, either, although I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of a million words over the last nine years. I even had a literary agent, one of the best in the business. She didn't quite manage to sell my first book, or to like any of my others, and last year I found myself delisted by her agency after submitting an experimental narrative about an affair I had with a married couple, my age, who resembled my parents.
Since then I've been doing some photography, along with some floral installations in the rent-controlled Victorian flat I share with three others in San Francisco, and holding down a job that qualifies only under the broadest definition of writing. In other words, I'm one of those people in what Hedwig would describe as their late early thirties who have not quite decided what they are going to be when they grow up. I am sufficiently panicked about that fact, and enough of a supplicant to the American cinematic cult, to have submitted an audition tape for Mitchell's online cattle call to star in a legitimate movie with hardcore sex.
Whether a world roiled with holy war and nuclear lust needs such a thing right now is up for debate. The filmmakers seem quite sure it's essential. "Why can't there be a movie that tells a strong story, is full of humor and pathos, is packed with powerful performances, and features a lot of explicit sex -- hard-ons, cum and all?" they ask on the project's Web site. "We, as filmmakers, respect and love the complexity of sex and we feel it's been cinematically hijacked by people who don't."
Having concluded that such established thespians as Tom Cruise and J.Lo are unlikely to enlist in such an endeavor and that they (along with their agents and managers and publicists) are chief among the alleged cinematic hijackers, the filmmakers turned to that perpetually erupting font of hard-ons, cum and all, otherwise known as the World Wide Web. Interested parties were asked to submit a 10-minute videotape in which they described a real-life sexual experience. After viewing 400 entries, the filmmakers invited 17 New Yorkers and 17 out-of-towners, including me, for callbacks this week.
I'm a California boy, born and raised and returned to San Francisco, but my parents are native Brooklynites, so I have a lot of extended family in the area. I also lived in New York for three years in my early 20s, studying violin at Juilliard, where I first met Albert Fuller, the harpsichordist and early music evangelist. Albert helped me understand how the path to the sex film project audition could be plotted along the seemingly desultory series of events that have unfolded over the past six years: first having to quit playing the violin because of a repetitive strain injury; then returning to San Francisco, where I took a few evening classes at the American Conservatory Theater and performed a few times at a midnight drag cabaret; meeting the parent-doubles and writing my book about our affair (the subject of my 10-minute audition video); and being sufficiently bored and idle one afternoon a few years back to make an erotic video of myself shaving my own head (the audition tape's grand finale).
"Honey," Albert said. "It's the gradus ad Parnassum--" He trailed off knowingly.
Smoke curled up into the stark beams of white light bearing down on his white bar, across from which I had heard Albert refer to the steps to Parnassus many times. Unfortunately, I was usually too altered by the time he brought them up, including this time, to remember exactly what they signified. So I asked.
