are cases where a woman has gone too far with a man: he's bought her a million things, and she's made out with him, and she realizes, ''I don't want to be with this person,' but it's too late. It's either a fight or she goes along with it.
You obviously know a great deal about prostitution. How did you learn so much?
I was interested in prostitution theoretically. And then I found I knew more and more women who worked. I encountered women who knew I was interested, and I got brought to these different houses and hung out with them. The result was that I had to transform my way of seeing prostitution. It hit really close to home. These were women within the art world, and there are so many, you can't even imagine. I'm sure you've known women who've worked in the sex industry at one time or another.
So what happened is that the minute I went from theory to actual practice, I saw that the women who do prostitution are people who are like me in absolutely every other way. I knew I had to use what I was discovering. I just didn't know how. I've been frustrated with all the documentaries I've seen on prostitution because they never go far enough.
Have you seen Vivienne Dick's
[1980]? In some ways her film gives me the same sense of prostitution as
does.
Oh, yeah. It's funny because some of the people in her film were people I knew. She actually did her film about one of the same places that I did
about. I was writing my script at about the same time she was doing that movie. The two films share some thingsespecially the sense of prostitution going on downtown in the art world and being very accessible. The problem with Vivienne's film is that it's hard to separate what her vision of prostitution is from these women just hanging around in messy lofts and carrying on about one thing or another. And since there's zero production quality in her film, it was kind of hard to locate the women within any class framework. I was really anxious to see her film. When other people are working in the same area as I am, I always wonder, does this mean I don't have to do
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this film? So I saw
and I thought, 'Oh, no, there's still room for what I want to do.' I had the same experience with Bette Gordon's
[1984] and with
.
One thing that seems different about
is your openness about what goes on in the bedroom.
One of the reasons I felt it was really important to go into the bedroom in
was to demystify what happens. So often, movies about prostitution stop before you get to see what actually goes on. In
all you see is the man's back approaching a woman. Then it cuts to the next scene where she looks bruised and battered, and you wonder, what on earth did he do? Vivienne didn't really deal with the act itself in
either.
[1984] did a little bit, which was what I found interesting about it. That part seemed exaggerated, but real.
[1971], a tiny bit.
[1983] with Veronica Hamill a little bit. But not enough really.
In the bedroom I wanted to focus on the economics of prostitution, as the economics work out
in this ritualistic exchange of goods: the condom, the exchange of money, putting the sheets on the bed. These ritual elements also have implications for other activities that women and men engage in normally. How many times has a husband stood in a room as his wife was throwing a sheet on the bed or getting him a drink or doing something to control the mechanics of sex or birth control? I meant for the things you see in the film to have a reference to standard married life, or singles bars, to any sexual situation which involves a code whereby women are treating men in very routinized ways.
There are some things I doubt men ever see: a woman lying on the floor putting in the diaphragm or washing blood out of it. I'd always been curious about how a prostitute deals with periods. And the issue of hygiene was interesting. A prostitute is constantly washing all these men off, gargling with Listerine and brushing her teeth. Those were the things that fascinated me.
The demystification of sex was important for me in relation to the male audience. But I felt that an informative look at it would also desexualize it for the women. I wanted to show women that, no, these rituals aren't really about sex. When I was interviewing actresses, I talked to them about prostitution, and I wouldn't even give them a reading if they gave me a really judgmental answer: 'How can you spread your legs for anyone but someone you love?'that kind of thing. And I made all the women go to real houses and apply for a job. They'd come to rehearsals dressed like conventional street hookers! I made them go to real places and see how people dressed. They came back very chastened, realizing that all these girls looked like their college roommates. The madams were just like the women who would hire
