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Vicky and Charlie, twenty-somethings, one the son of a vicar, the other the daughter of a much loved Radio 4 and Times columnist, friends for years but never boyfriend/girlfriend, decide to make a hardcore porn movie. Vicky and Charlie are best friends who used to co-review hardcore porn movies. After a year of fat lechers, bored hookers and clunky dialogue, they said, "Hang on, we could make a better film than this ourselves." What was to stop them? Only their conservative families, stammering English reserve, and total lack of experience. They set off at once. This is the extraordinary and hilarious story of their journey from a sofa in North London, through the heart of the sex industry in California, to their own film set in Amsterdam. What happens when a 'nice girl' falls in love with a rent-boy, and a vicar's son attempts to film a gang-bang? Vicky and Charlie learned to see the world through new eyes, and the sex-workers learned how to play cribbage. And together they produced perhaps the most baffling skinflick in history.
Publisher : Harpercollins MD (January 1, 2003)
Language : English
Paperback : 370 pages
ISBN-10 : 1841154377
ISBN-13 : 978-1841154374
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.08 x 0.92 x 7.76 inches
Reviewer: Rob Hardy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Friends Find Adventures in the Porn Trade
Review: What are we to make of pornography? Or, if you are Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton, how are we to make pornography? Well, first you have to know your subject. Vicky and Charlie are best friends from Oxford days, and landed the tandem job of reviewing pornographic films for the London periodical _The Erotic Review_. Hard at work on the sofa, sipping tea and munching cookies while the tape of _Rocco's Anal Ski Vacation_ spooled out, they found a contradiction compared to how such a film is usually viewed: they were paying attention to the dialogue and plot, and fast forwarding through the sex scenes. They were both professional writers, and they convinced themselves that they could do the job better than in any film they had critiqued. They didn't know anything about making movies, and they didn't know anything about making porn, but they knew what they liked. However, what would family, friends, and hypothetical future spouses think? That was a worry. "Then again, it might be fun. And you only get one life. So what the hell - let's go ahead and ruin it."The adventures of Vicky and Charlie as they carried out this task are delightfully told in _Once More, With Feeling: How We Tried to Make the Greatest Porn Film Ever_ (Fourth Estate), a hilarious memoir that is explicit but also humane and endearing. Those likely to be offended by the subject matter won't find much to enjoy here, but only the naughtiest of that group will be opening these pages. (But we should not make assumptions about who fits into this category. Charlie's father, for instance is a vicar, and one evening while Reverend Skelton was looking for his seed catalogue to read in bed, the bomb was dropped as to what Charlie had been spending the previous months doing. "Goodness me," he replied, "I hope it'll earn you some money. Have you seen my Sutton's catalogue? I had it a minute ago.") For the rest of us, this is an amiable, brightly told, jocular, and surprisingly wholesome account by two friends who know how to amuse themselves and the reader.After forming the goal of making such a film, the next step was to get a book deal, not a movie deal. This is just the thing for comic writers, just like travel writers. Put the tyros into a strange new world and let them write all about it. Fourth Estate invested wisely. The money commenced outflow on a trip to Las Vegas to write the script; "Porn needs to be written in a porny place." They booked into the Excalibur Hotel, with its theme of Merrie Olde England, and cooked up their plot. But it is in seeking inspiration at the pyramidal Luxor Hotel that they find a villain while they take a 3D amusement ride "chased round the pyramids by the evil Dr Reginald Osiris in the sort of flying car that was very popular in 3000 BC." Dr Osiris became the evil uncle of the plot of Vicky and Charlie's movie, a plot full of nefarious, bumbling, or beneficent uncles who are complicating the lives of a boy and girl twin who had grown up in a forest idyll. "Our first plot idea: perky twins venture forth into a dark and ugly world. Two innocents entering a world of sin." (Students of literature: note symbolism.) While Vicky was ill with heatstroke, Charlie wrote the script (earning Vicky's displeasure at his presumption) for _Dr Reginald Osiris and the Dildo of Krun-Ra_, which mercifully earned the final title of _The Naughty Twins_.The next stop was Los Angeles, because they had no idea what they were doing and needed to consult with the real professionals in the business. Surely they met the best of them. They tell of assertive, confident porn actors, powerful women, and friendly, solicitous directors who inspired the novice pornographers with a high sense of purpose. They pose, but do not explicitly answer the big question of whether all humanity is demeaned by the very existence of pornography; but to the question of whether all its practitioners are exploited and made unhappy, the answer is a certain no. "It certainly is that way in some quarters (every business certainly is that way in some quarters), but it _doesn't have to be_." The film _Boogie Nights_, with its surprising theme of porn as an endeavor by a film crew that becomes a family, seems not to have been an exaggeration. "We have learned a lot in LA about respect and kindness, and treating people right."Finally to Amsterdam for the completion of the project. "Our plan was to walk into a big, respectable porn talent agency, flick through the books, and audition the best actors we could afford." Nice plan. No such agency, even in Amsterdam where all sorts of sex for hire are legal, proves easily forthcoming, and when one does, Charley and especially Vicky are appalled that it is bilking its talent (and they do something about it). The participants turn out to be generally more interested in the lark of the endeavor rather than the pay. Their stars include a computer salesman, a dyslexic who has to have his lines written out phonetically and held on cue cards, a gay stud who runs his own floral greeting card business, a German dominatrix who is a drug counselor by day, and an illegal immigrant getting by doing sensual massage. Costuming, finding locations, and the actual filming all come with funny anecdotes, but Vicky has crisis in which she worries that "we're paying these poor needy people a small amount to make idiots of themselves in a glorified fourth-form play." Charlie replies that selling talent for money is called capitalism, "And we're not making Marxist porn here. (We did toy with the idea of making a porn version of _Das Kapital_, but then we thought, 'Nah, that's been done to death.')." The necessary compromises are realistically resolved and the filmmaking family stays happy. The film was intended to include many standard scenes, including the "airlock" (you will have to read the book), and even a boy-on-boy scene, which is a no-no in standard porn films. The girl-on-girl scene, which conversely seems to be mandatory, was "...beautifully showcased in a lesbian bath romp. When the girls have done enough soaping, sucking, and writhing, Charlie calls out, 'That's plenty - if you could just have an orgasm now, please!', and Vicky quietly wonders how many times he's said that to women before."It might be fun, but it is no turn on. "What we've found already is that it is a psychological impossibility to worry about camera angles, and who 's shooting what close-up, and be turned on at the same time. The sex is a job of work. Nothing more. Two bodies bumping." In a hilarious review of their own film at the end of the book, the former porn reviewers and now porn makers, admit that this is indeed the best porn film that they have ever seen, even though "... the directors have evidently opted for visual interest over the traditional porn principle of one long, single shot for ease of onanistic concentration." It is the last porn review they will write; "We don't need to watch other people's porn anymore." It is a fitting full circle for a couple of remarkable friends, and points out what is the best part of the book, a celebration of the friendship Vicky and Charlie share. They have never been lovers. They like being foils to each other. "Virtually all Vicky's boyfriends have been Catholic. 'And there could be no greater condemnation,' shouts Charlie, 'of the Roman Church." Vicky wonders what life would be like if she had married Charlie ("I was scared; he was shy; we each assumed the other wasn't very keen, and I went out with Jason instead."), and what will happen if he does marry and "... then we can't go skipping off to America together. I can't ring him at 3 a.m. from a cupboard because I've had an existential crisis at a party." Making the film together only confirms "... that our sexual psyches do not fit together... We are exactly the kind of people who might have got married and been dissatisfied with each other and ultimately unhappy. If only everybody could make porn as a form of pre-marital counseling. Perhaps through some kind of grant scheme from the Arts Council...?" Smart and funny, Vicky and Charlie make a gallant pair within the porn cinema business, and their book is a delight.
Reviewer: old engineer
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: medium writing
Review: Kind of boring
Reviewer: Harriet Gorbeck
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is an awesome book, so funny and insightful, made me get a bit of a girl crush on Victoria Coren. I think itâs a must read!
Reviewer: Oscar
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Two friends who had been reviewing ponographic movies decided that most were very poor. They decided to make one themselves - an entertaining idea, but I my interest flagged after a while. It is a pity we cannot view the finished product!
Reviewer: T. Edwards
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great fun - shows the pitfalls of 'erotic' film production as well as giving an interesting overview of the industry. At times laugh out loud in the authors' naivety.
Reviewer: John
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: So funny.. I couldn't stop laughing ... yet the book shows there is a serious, almost poignant side to making blue movies. Not as easy to do as what you might think.
Reviewer: niceguy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Very funny but also thoughtful. I only wish it came with a copy of the movie!