Streetwalker/Goddess: Loving "Crimes of Passion"

During the epic life chapter that I spent as a part-time student at Emerson College, I wrote a number of academic papers which serve not only as appreciations of my favorite films but as precursors to the screenplays I would go on to write. One such example was this favorite essay, written about the 1984 Ken Russell classic Crimes of Passion. The film was introduced to me in high school and instantly became one of my all-time favorites. After years of endlessly rewatching and introducing it to friends, I was given the chance to cement my passion for the film for one of my favorite classes in college. The class was "American Independent Cinema", with one of my favorite professors, Rachel Thibault, guiding us on a journey through many of the most important American indie film staples from Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise through Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. At that time, I was resistant to embracing the canon of films that had set Sundance on fire over the preceding twenty years. The appeal that many of the great modern American indie films had to pretentious audiences lead me to believe, foolishly, that they were all pretentious films. As a passionate film fan with an antipathy for insincere filmmaking, I vastly preferred the video store cult classics that originated from the worlds of classic porn and low-budget horror. Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion is neither pornography nor a horror movie, but it appealed to me with a colorful excitement that I usually derived from these less reputable film genres. I consider it to be the best work ever done by all involved, and it is by far one of the movies that has most influenced my pursuits as a writer.

I should note that I had never seen Lewis Milestone's Rain, Lloyd Bacon's Marked Woman, or Gary Sherman's Vice Squad until after writing this paper. Each was well worth the wait, but all would provided additional points of reference had I seen them before attempting to draw a connection between 80s politics and Crimes of Passion. I am not an academic, and at times in high school and college it was clear that I was struggling to express my creativity within the confines research assignments. As a result, many of my papers read like personal essays backed up by other people’s expert opinions…because that’s exactly what they all were. I am proud of this paper, but its being one of my personal favorites is primarily because my statements were read by the film’s screenwriter, Barry Sandler, and  I went on to form a friendship with him as a result. I am grateful not only for his friendship but for his screenplay being brilliant enough to still make me forget, after all these years, how fortunate I am to know the man who crafted such a work of art. Crimes of Passion affects me even more now, as a thirty year old, than it did in my teens and twenties. I can only begin to imagine what it will mean to me as I continue to rewatch it at every subsequent stage of my life.  

Robert E. Jeffrey

MA421E

Prof. Rachel Thibault

October 20th, 2005

                     Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion: 
                     The Politics of Female Sexuality 

America in the 1980s was a land of opportunity and a land of uniquely displayed dissent. Technology, the economy, and global communications were moving forward at an accelerated pace. Pop culture played a major role in American life, and American life played a major role in popular culture. Americans had elected the most charismatic President since John F. Kennedy, and like JFK, President Ronald Reagan teemed—only this time literally—with the presence of Hollywood royalty. Reagan’s popularity likely  fueled the proliferation of Hollywood films that applied modern technological and cultural influences to age-old screen circumstances in the pursuit of box-office millions: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tootsie, Flashdance, Top Gun, Working Girl, etc. The ensuing popularity of such a film formula no doubt further popularized Reagan’s throwback to early 20^th century values. In the wake of this societal turnaround, a film as remarkably daring and profound as Ken Russell’s 1984 “prostitution-as-reinvention” opus Crimes of Passion was prevented from making the cultural impact that it should have.  

“Ronald Reagan’s America” is one term that could be used to describe the mainstream sentiments of America in the 1980s. It was defined by the national pursuit (at least in appearance) of earlier 20^th century moral traditions, an unprecedented emphasis on power and status in terms of how the United States related to the rest of the world and how Americans related to each other, and, finally, free-wheeling capitalistic glee. All of this was overseen by an unbelievably popular and influential President who would become a Christ-figure to Conservatives and a semblance of Satan to Liberals.

Between 1981 and 1989, Reaganism sought to contain Soviet expansionism, comfort bourgeois culture, and remind the public of values that were dominant in the nation before the social disorders of the late sixties. The venerable political concept of an honorable opposition faded; to its opponents, Reaganism was a ridiculous or sinister political force.

                                                                        (Sewell xiii, xii)

“Camille Paglia’s Feminism” is one term for a distinct brand of feminist theory, popularized by the iconic Camille Paglia, the celebrated professor, academic, and author of 1991’s Sexual Personae. This brand of feminism has been championed and reviled for its emphasis on forthright sexual authority, neutralization of traditional gender-roles, and unsentimental principles of self-responsibility, perhaps at the expense of support from more popular and conventionally accepted brands of feminist thinking. In her 1993 essay collection Vamps and Tramps, Paglia’s central written piece, “No Law In The Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality”, explains her “libertarian views” (Paglia xiv) on numerous gender and sexual issues.

Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman’s advance in the political and professional world—but not at the price of special protections for women. As a Sixties libertarian, I also oppose overregulation of sexuality, which has risen to a totalitarian extreme over the past decade in America. Professional functioning in the capitalism machine—which I laud as the vehicle of women’s modern liberation—must not be confused with full human identity. Nor can office politics dictate our understanding of sexuality, which begins as a force of nature outside the social realm.

                                                            (Paglia x)

In the same essay, Camille Paglia laments the negative connotation associated with not only prostitutes but the profession of prostitution itself in America.

I respect and honor the prostitute, ruler of her sexual realm, which men must pay to enter. In reducing prostitutes to pitiable charity cases, middle-class feminists are guilty of arrogance, conceit, and prudery. “Pagan goddess!” I want to call out, as I sidle reverently by [a prostitute]. Not only are these women not victims, they are among the strongest and most formidable women on the planet. For me, they are heroines of outlaw individualism.

                                                                                    (Paglia 59)

In Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, Kathleen Turner’s central dual-role of “Joanna Crane”/“China Blue” offers a divine representation of Paglia’s whore-as-feminist-goddess, set against a Reagan-influenced landscape of materialism, hypocrisy, and conservatism—as evidenced by both the film itself and the controversy surrounding its botched 1984 release. Kathleen Turner portrays Joanna Crane, an ambitious and successful Los Angeles fashion designer so devoted to her career by day that she lives vicariously through her own creation by night, moonlighting as a Hollywood streetwalker called ‘China Blue’.  It is a tale told by Ken Russell through a dazzling palette of candy colors, quintessentially kinetic editing techniques, and a heavily synthesized, distinctly 80s-sounding Rick Wakeman score based quite intentionally on Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, “From the New World” (Hanke LaserDisc).  “Crimes” places Joanna in a scenario that finds her being forced to confront the hypocrisy of her existence and the realization of her need for romantic sexual fulfillment.  She is put through a process of playing numerous roles-within-roles: before her clients arrive, the character that is “China” suddenly takes on one of several vulnerable sexual roles (professional, virgin, bimbo, et al) and subsequently modifies her creation-within-a-creation to match her client’s fantasy. Her relationships with two such clients set into motion a chain of events that leads to her own transformation from a woman voluntarily segregating the various sides of her identity into separate lives to a woman who no longer feels the need to do so. Along the way, she is “guided” by both the dangerously obsessive Reverend Shayne (Anthony Perkins), who mirrors Joanna/China more than either persona would care to admit,  and the good natured Bobby (John Laughlin), a hapless, thirty-ish former football stud trapped in an emotionally and sexually barren marriage with his high school sweetheart, Amy (Annie Potts).

In the decade preceding the release of Crimes of Passion, the role of prostitute-as-unwitting-victim had proven a critically and commercially viable option in American cinema. In Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 drama-thriller hybrid Klute, Jane Fonda played Bree Daniels  as a beautiful but hardened woman using prostitution solely as a means to an end until her profession gives way to an obsessive sex maniac’s murderous attempts. In the end, she leaves behind spiritual numbness to embark on a journey into uncharted domestic territory with the boring but respectable title character (Donald Sutherland) who saved her life. Realizing that her chosen line of work comes with a demoralizing and ultimately fatal potential for implosion, she chooses to leave behind her risky life of self-definition for a less threatening experimentation in country subservience. Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in the film.

            In Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver, Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickle is obsessed with protecting the world-weary youth Iris, played by young Jodie Foster, from a violent pimp (Harvey Keitel), and the character is ultimately rescued from her streetwalking life and returned to the normalcy of her country family. Jodie Foster was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role. Portraying a similarly youthful but seemingly sharper prostitute did not earn television actress Donna Wilkes any awards as the title character in Robert Vincent-O’Neill’s 1984 exploitation mini-classic Angel. A low-budget rip-off of both Klute and Taxi Driver served up in campy exploitation style, Angel sold its plot in the tagline “High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night” (Parish 15). A serial killer claims the lives of several members of her extended family of runaways and transvestites, and she is ultimately ushered into the life of “a normal teenage girl” by the paternal police detective (character actor Cliff Gorman) who saves her from the killer’s grip. Released earlier the same year as Crimes of Passion by the same distributor, New World Pictures, Angel defied critical hostility to become a box office hit and an early video-store success, ultimately prompting two sequels by decade’s end. (Parish 15-16)

            Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion deals with the familiar plot device of a female prostitute stalked by an obsessed male—in fact, two of them. But in “Crimes”, the prostitute never registers much fear, for her existence is a by-night altar ego, one controlled by its daylight puppet-master, who is the same woman. Joanna’s unusual choice is not driven by money—she’s so successful at her job that a sexist male superior has her followed at night to learn of her means of being such a fashion powerhouse. But she is certainly not a prostitute out of some enslavement to sexual activity, either: at one point she reveals that she’s “never horny”. Her escapades within a colorfully sleazy hotel room that she rents by night are as theatrical as they are sexual—in fact, even more so. “One learns eventually the Freudian basis for Joanna/China Blue’s split life: only in her guise as a prostitute does she feel safe and uninhibited, free to be anyone she wishes and do whatever appeals to her” (Parish 96). “Turner's day work is photographed in a matter-of-fact way. The nighttime street scene is seen by Russell, however, as a lurid film noir world of flashing red neon signs, garter belts, squirming sadomasochists, and perverts” (Ebert RogerEbert.com).

            The notion of a life of “fantasy sex” existing for a woman, by her own terms and even in her own predestined “secret location”, would make Joanna/China quite the Camille Paglia heroine. Not only does she defy “white middle class style” and its “puritanical” origins through her duplicitous life (Paglia 59), but her habits also represent a shifting trend towards merging the worlds of sex and suburbia in the seemingly conservative 1980s. In her essay “The New Porn Wars”, Jean Bethke Elshtain elaborates on one of the two biggest impacts on sexuality in the 1980s.

Pornography has always been with us, but now it seems to be coming at us. Once the secret vice of upper-class males, porn is now a growth industry ($7 billion a year by most estimates), and clever entrepreneurs have fulfilled the classic dream of capitalist society by going from the humblest beginnings to the pinnacle of success. Porn has been democratized. The progress of pornography from shameful twilight zones in major cities to grocery-store counters in small towns is a story of the spread of an aesthetic of mechanistic and often cruel sexuality of profit and of vast social change—some would say disintegration.
                                                           (Elshtain, 70, 71)

                                                                              

            The commercial boom in pornography in the 1980s was not entirely unanticipated. In fact, couple the growth of a pornographic feature film industry throughout the 1970s and the rapid rise of technology throughout the 80s and it would seem a likely equation. But such an equation is indubitably in the shadow of a four-letter-word that emerged in the 80s and forever altered the human sexual landscape: AIDS.

The sudden rise of the incurable disease with a 100 percent mortality rate shaped how we lived and what we thought in the 80s. The disease first struck the gay male community in 1981 but was generally understood to be a nondiscriminatory plague by decade’s end. Since having sex with someone could win you a death sentence, sex in movies, on TV, in music, and in music videos became a voyeuristic substitute. Though due partially to the availability of videos for home consumption, the sale of porn videos ballooned into a multibillion-dollar business. There is not one facet of life that was unaffected by the unexpected impact of AIDS. In the 80s, the adult movie boom certainly owed a great deal to the threat of real-life sex.
                                                             (Rettenmund 3-4)

            Despite the craze for voyeuristic, in-your-own-home sexual tittilation, conservatism ruled Hollywood thinking at the time of the film’s release, and New World Pictures, the distributor of Crimes of Passion, eliminated much of what gave Crimes of Passion its dramatic and visual impact—including much of the sex itself. “The picture that emerged was far from a wholly flattering one and it is therefore not surprising that the film was greeted with a great deal of hostility upon its release“ (Hanke LVD9523). Screenwriter and producer Barry Sandler, who “wrote Crimes of Passion in response to watching the marriages and interpersonal relationships of his friends disintegrating around him” (Hanke LaserDisc), has stated that he felt the production was “victimized in 'Reagan-era America' by the Ratings Board and New World insisting on an R rating” (Hanke “Re: Re. Crimes of Passion”). Among the most damning cuts necessary to obtain an R-rating was an entire sequence involving a violent sexual ritual with a sadomasochistic police officer. It serves as the turning point for China’s character, as well as being one of the bravest, most effectively unrestrained moments in Kathleen Turner’s film career. A significant portion of the transformative sexual rites performed by the characters of Bobby and China/Joanna was omitted from their love-making scene, further dampening the characters’ arcs and thus the film’s meaning. (Russell & Sandler, IMDB).

In addition to explicit sex, though, several minutes of expository dialogue and characterization were significantly altered. Some of these cuts were made by New World, and altered the film’s honesty to such a degree that the message of the film itself was tainted—Ken Russell, in response, washed his hands of the theatrical cut (Hanke LaserDisc). Among these subtle changes to the film’s sociopolitical structure was the removal of women talking about sex—or, more explicitly, women speaking in the same sexually pervasive language as men were “allowed” to at the time of the film’s release. Dialogue plays over the opening title cards, revealing characters at a counseling session for divorcees who are confronting issues with the opposite sex. It includes an early line in which a woman responds to a man’s misogynistic joke by stating that she would “rather get fucked by a vibrator than your cock any day. It’s honest, loving, and I don’t have to make breakfast for it in the morning.” In the theatrical cut, that line was deleted, but one of two misogynistic jokes remains. Later on in the film, China’s reference to a client as “sweetdick” was overdubbed as “sweetheart”, and in another sequence, where she tells a client in her most authoritative that she is “ready for cock” in the director’s cut, the theatrical print substituted the word “cock” with “love”. When the Reverend Shayne accuses China/Joanna of sinfulness, she mockingly attacks him with a sarcastic “why don’t you fuck me, that’ll save me!”. (In the theatrical cut, the line becomes “why don’t you fix me, that’ll save me!”. (Russell & Sandler, IMDB) Perhaps attempting to edit the film to more closely match New World’s similarly themed Angel earlier in the year, what once was a woman expressing defiance, self-assurance, and a voluntary rejection of a patriarchal religious influence is quietly reworked into the suggestion of a repentant hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold—a much more appealing stereotype for the masses, and a much more bankable character for New World.

Having significantly altered a Ken Russell film to the point that Russell wanted nothing to with the finished product, New World released the film to “controversy surrounding the film’s perceived sexual excesses, which were really not that excessive in the mangled R-rated version” (Hanke LVD9523). The divisive critical response suggested that New World would perhaps have been wise to have put more faith in Russell. The theatrical version of the film did earn praise from the likes of People’s Peter Travers, who called it “one of the most funny and original movies about sex in years”, while The New York Post’s Rex Reed raved that it was “amazing, revolutionary, [and] as a frank and scalding expose of the dark side of human nature, unlike anything I’ve experienced” (Hanke LVD9523). Other critics were less kind, but made notice of the distinction between the film that they were reviewing and the film that was withheld by New World. Leonard Maltin called the theatrical cut “a watchable mess” (Maltin 297), while Roger Ebert lamented “the double standards of the movie ratings system, which prizes violence more highly than sex” and put partial blame on “New World Pictures, which was too chicken to release the movie with an X. The purpose of Crimes of Passion was apparently to explore the further shores of sexual behavior, [but] a great deal of the behavior is missing from the movie, and what is left is a steamy, bloody thriller. I’m not sure that’s what Russell had in mind. (“Crimes of Passion”, RogerEbert.com). Although the film “flopped at the box office” (Parish 96), since its success on home video in its original, uncut form, the film has gained a reputation as one of Russell’s finest works and “one of the great cult films of the 80s”. (Hanke LVD9523)

In a 1992 review of Madonna’s astonishingly successful book Sex, Camille Paglia applauded Madonna for acknowledging “the sluttishness of the fully sexual woman” in an empowered context (Paglia 369). Nearly a decade prior to that work, Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion made a similar artistic statement, but was greeted with far less commercial receptivity. It is not until the end of the film that Joanna reaches true fulfillment, symbolized by her plunging a vibrator into the Reverend Shayne’s back while he dons China’s trademark attire: platinum wig and “little blue dress”. At that moment, she is conquering not only the threat of patriarchal rigidity—as brilliantly realized in the shape of a preacher who has seemingly snapped in response to all the sex-selling on Hollywood boulevard—but also the need to escape into another character to explore her sexual fantasies. Her previous sexual encounters were performance-oriented, compensating for the lack of emotional and sexual satisfaction in Joanna that gave birth to “China Blue” in the first place. When Joanna chooses to maintain a relationship with the character of John Grady after she has abandoned her duplicitous life, it is not because he has “saved” her, physically or spiritually. Rather, it is Joanna, in her evolved state, who decides to be with him, on her terms, for as long as she feels happy. “Sluttish” or not, Joanna has become a fully sexual woman, no longer compartmentalized and completely worthy of Paglia’s “Pagan Goddess” moniker as she finally allows herself to be vulnerable in her last close-up of the film.  

WORKS CITED

Ebert, Rogert. Rev. of Crimes of Passion, dir. Ken Russell.

            Chicago Sun-Times 1 Jan. 1984: RogerEbert.com.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “The New Porn Wars”. The Eighties.

Ed. Gilbert T. Sewall. Reading, MA: Persus Books, 1997. 70-81.

Hanke, Ken. “Re: Re. Crimes of Passion.”

E-mail to the author. 10/15/2005.

Hanke, Ken. “Liner Notes”. Crimes of Passion Laserdisc Special Edition.

            Denver, CO: Luminvision Entertainment, 1995. LVD9523.

Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s 2001 Movie and Video Guide.

            New York: Signet, 2000.

Paglia, Camille. Vamps and Tramps. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Parish, James Robert. Prostitution in Hollywood Films.

            North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1992.

Rettenmund, Matthew. Totally Awesome 80s. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.

Russell, Ken, and Sandler, Barry. “Audio Commentary”.

Crimes of Passion Laserdisc Special Edition.

Denver, CO: LuminvisionEntertainment, 1995. LVD9523.

Sewall, Gilbert T. “Revisiting the 80s”. The Eighties.

            Ed. Gilbert T. Sewall. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1997, xi-xxiv.

Additional Citations Credited to

Crimes of Passion (Alternate Versions) on IMDB.com

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087100/alternateversions

My Adventures In The Oldest Profession

“High School Honor Student By Day. Hollywood Hooker By Night.” 

My parents’ worst nightmare. My greatest fantasy.

I have always loved movies about prostitutes, and have always related to them in ways that made little sense to others. Maybe it’s because I wanted to please everyone and didn’t feel that I’d done a good job unless I left a room smiling. Perhaps it’s because I felt I had to play so many different roles with so many different people in order to achieve such a goal. Whatever the reason, I definitely loved that tagline from Robert Vincent O'Neill's Angel every time I passed it in the video store. It would not be until the 2003 DVD release that I finally saw the movie and loved it. But by then I’d already formed a fantasy, based on the concept, and on the cover, and on Roger Ebert’s oft-reprinted original review. The movie lived up to that fantasy. I myself could not.

In 2000, I was working at a store that sold rare laserdiscs and DVDs. Before throwing out a batch of semi-defective laserdiscs, the owner asked me if I had ever seen the film pressed onto all of the slightly marred copies: Ken Russel’s Crimes of Passion. Then and now, I am ashamed to say I had not. It was yet another film that I had formed a video store fantasy around, and even my own version of the movie in my head that starred Andie MacDowell and Madonna and had absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the actual movie. I didn’t even know that it was about a career woman who shields herself from heartbreak by masquerading as a streetwalker named “China Blue” and engaging in outrageous encounters.  Seeing the movie was a turning point, not least of all because I better understood where my desire to be a streetwalker came from: I wanted to be wanted, but didn't want to need that.

I don’t remember when I first wanted to be a prostitute, but I do remember when I first put up an ad for myself online. I had been reading about the escort industry and looking into reviews of some of New York’s more popular male sex workers. I even befriended one through a chat room, a nurse from Maine who I could have seen myself falling in love with at the time. I was flagrantly open with friends and even family about my sex industry ambitions because I found nothing about them dishonorable. In my school of thought, being a whore is nowhere near as sinful as being a freeloader. I also felt that it would be an invaluable insight for my writing, a means of understanding some of the “fallen women” in film who had most inspired me and to get a view of life from the other side of privilege. Of course, such an endeavor has since become a stereotype for naïve young college students and overambitious journalists. I could have lost my life. I could also have gotten arrested. Between the two, I would have taken the former: death scares me way less than cops. 

The closest I came to being a male escort was the closest I came to being arrested, and so that’s why I ultimately closed up shop right before the grand opening. I put up an ad online—ahem, on an “AOL Personal Homepage” no less—and included pictures I’d taken of myself looking pouty and sweet. I don’t remember much about my description, but I do remember that my rate was $100/hr. At that time, in 2002, the going rate for male escorts was around $300/hr, so I thought that I might have a shot at establishing a good customer base thanks to being twenty years old and relatively low-priced. I was insecure about being overweight, but even so, I thought I was a bargain. After all, I ALWAYS aim to be fair. 

Rob '02: Trying to sell myself on AOL as a precocious boy next door. 

I was so proud of myself for thinking of my customers that I failed to remember prostitution is illegal in this particular country. I remembered that reality vividly when an “interested customer” called me up and seemed a little too interested in the details of my one-man business operation. So I told him I’d decided to give up being a male escort and, at that moment, I did.

Bette Davis played my favorite screen prostitute of all.

I often regretted not being brave enough to do what I wanted to do in spite of the warnings of everyone in my life and, indeed, the state and federal government of the United States of America. I can admit now that they were right and I was wrong—not because it’s bad to be a prostitute, but rather because I would have been bad at it. I had never even met a sex worker until a visit to Amsterdam in 2006 lead me to one of the most popular male brothels in the city: Singel 21. There I met one of the most interesting fellows I have ever encountered, and the one who made me realize that prostitution was not nearly as appropriate a line of work for me as I hoped it would be.

His name was Zortak, or that’s what it sounded like. Something Hungarian. He was thirty seven and a twenty seven year old Dutchman, the youngest of the employees, was shocked that I wasn’t going off with him. But I didn’t know that I had a choice. Zortak spotted me first, and I thought that it was only right that I should go with him, despite the fact that the twenty-seven year old was beautiful enough to remain in my dreams forever. 

As we enjoyed mixed drinks in the lounge together, I told Zortak that I had such tremendous respect for his profession, and that it had in fact been my dream to be a sex worker. He looked at me in stunned disbelief. I could see that he was at once confused and insulted, so I just smiled and looked at the twinkling city of Amsterdam outside. I had dreamed of being a sex doctor to beautiful male patients. But Zortak's reality was entirely scripted and rooted in money, not sexual adventure. He and his co-workers were all laughing and joking with one another in Dutch while we waited for the room to be free, and I was convinced they were making fun of me. It bothered me because I wanted to be viewed as an ally, not a john, and also because I really wished I’d learned to speak the language before I left America. For a wannabe sex worker like me, nothing could be worse than rejection by Dutch prostitutes. However, a year later, one of my friends said they were probably laughing over the only twenty-four year old in the establishment being a client.

From the moment I walked into the room and until the time I walked out of the place, I put on a show. I got to be Marilyn Chambers, and I got to give back to an experienced sex worker all of the attention and affection that he had given to countless men before me. But that was the problem, too. I was throwing off the whole transaction by playing the part of “desirable one”, and upon realizing this I had to switch gears. That’s where the guilt came in.

Spending time with a sex worker is like getting a massage or a pedicure: you can feel guilty about it, or you can enjoy it. My experience with a prostitute was a combination of the two. After our intimate encounter, we somehow got into a discussion of AIDS minutes before I left. I forget the full context, but I believe that the man who owned the brothel had inherited it from his partner, who had died of AIDS. It was an awkward intrusion of reality, one which instantly burst the fantasy bubble moments before the fantasy was complete. 

As I walked down the steps, I somehow managed to accidentally make a call on my cell phone. I looked and realized someone was on the other line, and it was my best friend’s father. My best friend, I might add, was also my first love. We had broken up six months earlier, but remained as close as ever. With that having been said, I had no intention of calling he or his parents after my evening with a sex worker. All this came about only hours after I had arrived in Amsterdam, so between jet lag, White Widow, and afterglow, my mind wasn’t absorbent enough of the details for me to recall whether my phone got an answering machine or if I actually spoke to his father that night. I’m still convinced that that gorgeous young Dutchman, who took my politeness to Zortak as a rejection, cast a spell to cause the snafu. He could only be a witch, for as I walked back to the hotel that night, his was the spell I was under. 

30 Before 30: Random Revelations About Robert

It recently occurred to me that I never properly introduced myself to anyone who might be reading. In thirty days, I’ll be thirty years old, so I have come up with thirty seemingly random yet thoroughly revealing facts about me that I thought many of you might enjoy being made aware of.

1.)  My favorite movie is Adrian Lyne's Flashdance, but I consider Irving Rapper's Now, Voyager to be the best movie ever made.

2.)  My favorite singer is Madonna, and among many other favorite musical acts are Diana Ross, ABBA, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Laura Branigan, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Def Leppard, Olivia Newton-John, Rachel Sweet, The Ramones, and Yoko Ono.  

3.)  My favorite actors are Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Montgomery Clift, Mickey Rourke, and Madonna. 

4.)  My favorite directors are Dario Argento, Paul Verhoeven, and Adrian Lyne, and among my MANY other favorites are Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, John Hughes, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Radley Metzger, David Lynch, and Jodie Foster. 

5.)  The star with whom I most identify is Marilyn Chambers.

6.) The last movie I ever saw on the big screen in the 20th century was The Talented Mr. Ripley, at Regal South Beach Stadium in MIAMI!

7.) The first movie I ever saw on the big screen in the 21st century was Scream 3, at the Loews Liberty Tree Mall Theater in Danvers, Massachusetts....formerly known as "Salem Village"! 

8.)  The first movie I EVER saw in a movie theater was Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, at the General Cinema in Framingham, Massachusetts, when I was four years old. I loved it, but only watched it once since, in 2005, so as to keep whatever faint memories linger from that day alive in my mind forever. 

9.) The first Madonna video that I ever saw was "Burning Up", in Autumn 1983, while staying at my Godmother’s house during the time my Mom and Dad were in the hospital welcoming my younger sister into the world. Thank God for my cousins’ memories of how mesmerized I was, for I don’t recall it. I can only imagine how fascinated I must have been when she looked into the camera and said “Unlike the others, I’ll do ANYTHING!” . 

10.) My proper love affair with Madonna began in the Summer of 1990 when my Dad took me to see Dick Tracy as an eight year old. When Dick Tracy asked her whose side she was on, Breathless Mahoney answered with “the same side I’m always on: mine”. I loved both Breathless Mahoney and Madonna Ciccone from that moment on. When I rented “The Immaculate Collection” on video in April 1991, the deal was officially sealed: Madonna became the dominant artistic force in my life from that day forward. 

11.) I am in a rare demographic: it was Madonna’s acting, in Dick Tracy and in her first decade of music videos, that made me a lifelong fan. I think the whole “Madonna can’t act” thing was media-created to begin with, but the release of Swept Away made me realize how effective the media has been in turning the mainstream public against her big-screen efforts. I bought tickets to two different shows of Swept Away on opening night in Boston, in a vain attempt to help both sell out. After leaving the one I actually attended, I tried to give my tickets to the next screening to a homeless man outside of the Loews Boston Common Theater on a chilly night in October 2002...and he turned down the offer! Oh well. I still think it’s a damn good performance.

12.)  I first saw Madonna live on August 7th, 2001, when The Drowned World Tour brought Madonna to the Boston Garden for her first show ever at that venue. Ten years later, I have seen her a total of nine times on four tours. 

13.) Before his death in 1998, I am honored to say that I saw Frank Sinatra four times in concert, including his last-ever Boston performance, at "The Harbor Lights" (now The Bank of America Pavilion) in early September 1994. 

14.) In June, 1981, my Sinatra-loving father made my non-fan mother see every performance by Ol’ Blue Eyes in both Atlantic City and Boston while on tour that year. Factor in those shows and I’ve "seen" Frank Sinatra in concert more times than I've seen Madonna!

15.) When I was seven, my parents took my sister and I to see Frank Sinatra perform with Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli. As a child, Liza Minnelli was the entertainer I enjoyed most on that legendary triple-bill.  

16.) Showgirls opened two days after I turned fourteen, and I used my birthday boy clout to convince my parents to go in my place see the Midnight show of the NC-17 film on its opening night at the Lincoln Center Cinema in Manhattan. They did. They even liked it: I got a full run-down of the storyline from my Mom the next day, and I distinctly recall that my Dad thought it was a better film-viewing experience than Atom Egoyan’s Exotica! I have loved Showgirls ever since, and I loved my parents even more after the massive coolness points that that night earned them in my book.  

17.) My favorite Dario Argento movie is The Stendhal Syndrome. When I met Il Maestro in May 2010, I nonetheless asked him to sign my copies of Opera and Phenomena, because A.) those two come pretty damn close to being my favorites a well and B.) all three have been equally influential on my development as a screenwriter.  

18.) The first time I was ever left home alone was in December 1991, when I watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The trailer for Basic Instinct appeared at the beginning of the tape. I was ten, and my parents were at a school conference, where their well-behaved son was being acclaimed for his solid conduct and academic performance. I know I liked seeing T2 that night, but my viewing was tainted by that trailer. I was positively overwhelmed by those few minutes of spliced gazes, beautiful faces, and old-fashioned dialogue against pounding, hypnotic music. It was another three years before I’d built up the bravado to sneak in a viewing of the full-length film against my parents’ wishes, but in the interim, I became positively obsessed with it. Suffice to say, it remains among the most influential films on my entire writing career. 

19.)  A guy once said to me "you need to come out” after I told him, at the age of 24, that I had never gone clubbing. It was odd since I’d been totally out to the world for many years. Funny, but I thought that the fact that we were about to sleep together made it pretty apparent that I wasn’t hiding from who I really was.

20.)  I once put out a cigarette on the back of my hand in a drunken state of self-despair following a failed summer romance. I was totally embarrassed by the act the next day, but I’ve comforted myself when I look at the scar by acknowledging that it might impress Mickey Rourke. 

21.) I LOVE theatrical trailers, particularly those from the early-‘70s through the late-‘90s, and my favorite of all time is the trailer for Adrian Lyne’s 9 ½ Weeks.  

22.) I have always felt an affinity with prostitutes in movies. My favorite onscreen prostitute of all is Bette Davis in Marked Woman. 

23.) The affinity I share with prostitutes in movies was best understood by one of my favorite screenwriters, Barry Sandler, and one of my favorite actresses, Kathleen Turner, in my favorite Ken Russell film: Crimes of Passion! 

24.) In April of 1994, my entire sixth grade class went to see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park, along with the entire sixth grade class of two neighboring towns. In the 7th grade, all three groups of students would go on to a regional junior high together, and that was the night we all got to “meet”. I, however, did not attend. I nixed the night at Fenway to instead go see Serial Mom with MY Mom on opening night!  I know my Mom would have enjoyed it as much as I did if the little old ladies in attendance at the 5 PM show weren’t so upset by all the violence in the new Kathleen Turner movie, thereby making her feel unnecessarily guilty for giving in to my pleas to see it. I convinced my Dad to take me to a second screening, a few weeks later, where he enjoyed it as much as the dozens of bikers who filled the theater that raucous Saturday night in Boston. 

25.) I am very close with both of my parents, as well as my one and only sister. Sometimes I prefer to think of them as friends, rather than family, because I aim to be cool, and I’m not sure how cool someone who gets along as well with his family as I do would be if I were on the outside looking in! 

26.) My favorite film genres are horror and romance. I can’t explain why, but I’m positive it has to do with my being Italian and Irish and raised in New England. 

27.) I was introduced to Bette Davis as a child by way of The Watcher in the Woods and late-night TV talk show appearances that my Dad would tape and show to me the next day; he always got a big kick out of how entertained I was by her! I was in a station wagon with a carphone when  my Dad called my Mom to deliver to me the sad news that Bette Davis had died. It was a monumental loss, but also a special moment that I shall never forget. 

28.) I have loved Diana Ross since childhood, and when I finally got to see her live on June 9th, 2010, she looked right into my eyes as she sang several of the lines from “THE BOSS”!

29.)  Like many of my idols, favorite topic could very well be sex.  Due to my prolonged romantic attachments, I’m never been quite as promiscuous as I have always wanted to be, but I still encourage the rest of the world to make as much love as humanly possible—SAFELY, of course! 

30.)  I have had and loved many pets in my lifetime. Their respective and collective impacts on my life are at the root of my belief in immortality.