Many years ago, back when cable television was just a baby, I worked for a small film company, headquartered in Beverly Hills. My initial assignment was to work on 4 direct-to-cable films that were, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. We shot each film in about a week. It was total guerrilla film making – stealing shots without proper permits, unknown actors, cheap stock, no unions and everyone did everything and made very little money. I started out in accounting and ended up producing the last film, mostly because I was willing to work 22 hour days.

As an aside, and you’ll eventually see that this fact (sorta) fits in, one of the films starred Harry Reems, the star, along with Linda Lovelace, of the infamous porn masterwork Deep Throat.

Anyway, after the 4 films were in the can and I’d slept for several days straight, my boss offered me another job: to edit a full-out porn film called Insatiable, also starring Linda Lovelace, from the XXX rating it was, to a soft-porn film, by cutting out all the XXX parts.

Because I wanted to learn about editing, and because I was a broke freelancer who needed to make the rent, I accepted the job. My workplace was a very plush office on the 18th floor of a building on Rodeo Drive. I was armed with a remote control, a film version of Insatiable with a counter running across the bottom, counting off each second of film, and a notebook. I had to watch each second of film, and mark off the numbers of each scene that got too porny. You know, the money shots.

This was not elegant editing. This was chopping up film in chunks with no eye to continuity, sound, music, or anything else one normally considers while editing. I was simply taking out the schtupping.

I wasn’t a connoisseur of XXX films. I was in my early 20s, in fact, and had limited exposure to the infinite varieties and creative ways boinking could be filmed. By the end of the project, it was doubtful I ever wanted to have sex again, let alone find anything remotely sexy about porn at all. The film, when it was cut, was more of a short than a feature, which they fixed by slowing down the scenes that remained. Including the sound effects and music. It was a very, very bad film. I cannot stress this enough. However, it paid the bills, and I learned how not to edit a film.

(I would, in later years, have to edit for reals, and knowing what not to do was actually helpful).

Anyway….

Fast forward a bunch of years. I was more in the mainstream of filmmaking by then. Real movies with budgets and stuff. My friends at the time were all connected in some way to the film world, too. A bunch of us were also seriously, SERIOUSLY, into playing charades. You know charades, right? Everyone knows charades. But we played death-match charades. No one actually died, but the atmosphere was tense and cutthroat. I was uber competitive, and damn good, if I do say so myself.

We would gather, like 10 of us at a time, at someone’s house. We all brought food and drink, and then we would be charade gladiators, giving no mercy, expecting none in return.

The game became kind of known in the community, and more people started showing up. Friends of friends. A hell of a lot of them were actors, which gave them an edge, because they were used to making complete fools of themselves in front of large groups of people. Soon, so many joined us we had to find big houses with big living rooms to accommodate the teams.

So….

One night, we were playing in our typical manner. There were a lot of people there I didn’t know. People you, if you were watching TV or going to movies back then, would have recognized. People I may have wanted to work with in some capacity. The other team was up. A nice actor who played a friendly young doctor on a hit series faced our team. He did the old-timey movie thing with his hands that let us know he was giving us a movie title, then did another very familiar gesture with just one hand that let us know it was porn. Then he held up one finger – a one word title.

Before that lone finger even had a chance to come down, I had shouted, “Insatiable!”

Silence from the room. Everyone was staring at the weird chick who clearly knew her porn flicks. I then said (and god, I remember it so well) “What? I worked on it.”

A lot more silence. A lot more staring. It took me a minute to realize they misunderstood. But when I tried to explain that I hadn’t been in the damn thing, there was too much laughing at me for anyone to have heard.

A poignant moment, yes. One that was, throughout my career in film, brought up at horribly embarrassing times by people I’d forgotten were there. All brought on by the innocent news announcement from TVSquad.com that Starz (a cable network) is picking up the rights to the book Insatiable by Gael Greene. About being a food critic. Not that other thing.<

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