Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Include frequent CLOSE-UPS of the WARDEN’S LABIAL KEY RING — a double-strand gold coil pierced through her upper left labium — dangling from which are the front and back door keys to her condo, the ignition and trunk keys to her Mazda RX-7 rotary twin turbo, the key to a summer house in Belmar, New Jersey, that she shares with two other wardens and the director of a juvenile detention center, and mailbox and safe-deposit-box keys.

Anyone who’s seen the infamous video of Richard Speck — pendulous, hormone-spawned breasts swaying back and forth, snorting coke, threshing hundred-dollar bills and getting a blow job from one of his degenerate jailhouse paramours — has to be astonished by the capacity of human beings to enjoy themselves in seemingly infernal circumstances. This is not to say that it would be appropriate in this movie to feature a mass murderer sporting a pair of mutant tits, snorting coke as he’s fellated by transvestite convicts. (This isn’t Joyce Carol Oates, for god’s sake.) I’m just trying to locate a certain cinematic tone .

In a recent issue of Harper’s Bazaar , Liz Tilberis writes in her “Editors Note”: “In an issue like this, it becomes clear that we at Bazaar set almost unreachably high standards for ourselves. There may be times when we present images and ideas that you are not instantly comfortable with; the idea isn’t to shock, but to bring you along with us to the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts.”

With this scene, you want to position yourself — in terms of cinematic tone — somewhere between the Speck video and Harper’s Bazaar . As Tilberis says, you want to “set almost unreachably high standards” for yourself. And if a 13-year-old boy, whose father has just survived execution by lethal injection, going down on a warden whose car keys are jingling from a ring in her pussy lips, as she attempts to end a siege by Jheri-Curled homicidal maniacs with ice-picks pressed into the temples of their hostages, as Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti sing “White Riot” isn’t “the cutting edge of fashion, photography, design, and the arts,” then I don’t what is.

Tilberis goes on to say: “I liked wearing pastels this summer, and at long last I’ve had it with black. Brown seems a good way to go instead. Beyond that, I’m thinking it’s just a matter of choosing a bag and a pair of shoes or boots to go with everything.”

Yes. Totally.

Pledge of Integrity

If the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award selection committee is leaning toward giving me the award, but some members are vacillating, and if the only thing holding these members back from unequivocal support for me are qualms about the CUNNILINGUS SCENE, I will remove the scene in its entirety and I pledge never to bring up the subject again.

Up until this point, I’ve scrupulously refrained from making any appeals that smacked of self-pity, pathos, or groveling. But at this time I wish to make an additional pledge: Because my father has been effectively exiled thanks to his NJSDE sentence, my mentally infirm and alcoholic mothers financial well-being is in, like, grave jeopardy. If you, the selection committee, choose to award me the $250,000-a-year prize (this sum to be bestowed annually for the entirety of the winner’s life), I solemnly promise to issue my mother a small and time-limited monthly stipend until she is able to get on her own feet. (I say small and time-limited —I’m thinking of something in the neighborhood of $300 a month until she secures employment, up to a maximum of six months — because I don’t wish to rob my mother of her self-esteem by plunging her into an interminable cycle of dependence and shiftlessness. I love and respect my mother far too much to do that to her.)

Financing Suggestion

If your producers are depending on rich Persian Gulf backers for financing, keep in mind that most financiers arrive with a long list of prohibitions necessary to make any work palatable back home. (A three-and-a-half-hour cunnilingus scene between a drugged adolescent and a 36-year-old female prison warden will probably not be acceptable in a country where it’s considered blasphemous to simply show an unmarried man and woman alone in a room together.) There’s also the MPAA ratings problem back home to consider. And you may be thinking Palme d’Or at Cannes. And what about the possibility that the movie might someday be selected by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for recognition and preservation?

Don’t despair.

You can delete the footage for general release — I know, I know, it’s a very cool scene — but you can always restore it, in toto, for the deluxe letterboxed director’s-cut laser disc.

And none of this precludes you from simultaneously releasing a straight-to-video The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr. (Hard-Core Mix) , which would be just the CUNNILINGUS SCENE. No establishing zoom from the KH-12 photoreconnaissance satellite, no Contraband Control Room, no “Gravy” trip, no white Burgundy, no fiberoptic lapping slurry or endoscopic pull-back shot, no instant Spätzle or in-line nunchakus, and none of what follows. Just 210 commercial-free minutes of nonstop cunnilingus and music.

There are only two substantive exchanges of dialogue in the CUNNILINGUS SCENE.

In one, after MARK peeks at his Tag Heuer and whines about how he won’t be able to get to the library in time to plagiarize a screenplay, the WARDEN advises him to concoct a script “out of this,” suggesting that, as soon as he gets home, he type out everything that happened — i.e., everything that’s transpired between the two of them in the WARDEN’S office — and simply reformat it into a screenplay.

I’ve decided not to incorporate this dialogue into the screenplay. This colloquy between the WARDEN and MARK in which they discuss how to turn their encounter into a screenplay is essentially an ad hoc story conference and putting a story conference into this movie just seems too “inside Hollywood,” too “fashionably self-reflexive,” for me. Would Steven Spielberg’s The Harelip of B’nai Jeshurun be the whimsical delight it is if in the middle of the movie he’d inserted an animated rendition of the development meeting at which Katzenberg first suggested a DreamWorks answer to Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame? No, that would have ruined the whole spirit of the movie. Same here.

The other exchange occurs during a momentary respite, when MARK asks the WARDEN a provocative question concerning fitness tapes.

I include this conversation in its entirety because I feel that it enables the audience, for the first time, to fully appreciate the WARDEN’S erudition, and I think there should be some erudition in this movie, which, in its unflinching verisimilitude, has been so raw and dankly self-abasing. Also, this dialogue provides a necessary segue into the elusive and fleetingly beautiful FUCK scene.

INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE

CLOSE SHOT of MARK

MARK

(Picks a hair from his tongue and scrutinizes

it between his fingers, like Edison assaying a

test filament for his lightbulb prototype.

Then, looking up at the WARDEN)

You recently published a monograph in the prison staff newsletter on the evolution of narrative in exercise videos, and in it, you argue that early exercise videos like Buns of Steel, Kathy Smith’s Aerobox Workout with Michael Olajide, Jr., Your Personal Best Workout with Elle Macpherson , etc., were morphologically equivalent to early pornography, and that with the later introduction of narrative elements associated with the conventional film — e.g., plot and character development, measured pace, laboriously constructed scenes, the story arc with its conflict and resolution, etc. — the exercise video is no longer disparaged as a marginal, “specialty” category, but is now critically regarded as a valid genre. Do you think that with its new-found respectability, the exercise video has sacrificed the totally monomaniacal narcissism that made it such a galvanizing form when it first came out, and what do you think are, like, the most intense scenes in the neo-narrative exercise video today? And I have a follow-up question.