Behind the Scenes, on the Making of “Bound”
“I Was Sex Consultant to the Stars” — but so much more
I’ve given a lot of tips to people about their love life over the years— but I can’t say I’ve ever had the chance to watch and see if they actually followed my instructions to the letter.
That’s what I found so satisfying about getting a job as a sex consultant on a big fancy movie- for once I got to ensure that all those techniques I raved about, my emphasis on the perfect caress- were played out to my most exacting standards. Yeah, it was sweet alright- I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with handing out free, (not to mention unverified), bedroom advice ever again.
This story is from Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World.
Note: Much has changed since the late 90s, but I’m running this story as originally written.
Some of the folks mentioned are no longer with us, like my lover Honey Lee Cottrell.
The film became a classic. Everyone involved with it, their careers went in wild new directions.
The Wachowski siblings came out, individually, as transgender women, in the early 00s, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski. They’ve inspired so many.
I hope you follow all of us; it was a special crew!
I was the “technical consultant” to the only movie last year to pass the critics’ wet test: BOUND, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. It is first-time feature from the writer/director Wachowski siblings, a film noir thriller about a pair of lesbian lovers who try to double cross the mob.
What was so technical about this movie? There’s a lot of fingernail-hanging suspense and violence— and I’m the kind of girl who can’t even handle the build-up of a surprise birthday cake. No, my expertise is on how our butch/femme heroines, Corky (a James Dean look-alike recently paroled) and luscious Violet (a curvy mobster mistress) become lovers in the first place.
It all started about two years ago with a modest little fan letter. I got a package from Larry and Andy, attached to a script, saying that they loved my writing, like my early bible on dyke fun and frolic, “Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World”. They said they would be honored if I would consider making a cameo appearance in their new film.
“That’s nice,” I thought, and not to sound like a spoiled brat, but this invitation didn’t electrify me. It seems everybody is making their own movie today-including myself, who has made my own no-production-value porn videos with similarly untrained girlfriends.
I get asked all the time to pull my dress up over my head on camera, write dialog for some experimental video poem, lend out my thigh-high leather boots for a colleague’s dominatrix documentary. I applaud all my friends’ virtuosity and gung-ho spirit, but making a movie, is hard work and I was becoming more discriminating all the time.
Here’s what was intriguing: the letterhead didn’t sport the Wachowskis’ name , it was embossed: “Dino De Laurentis Studios,” and that was quite a calling card. DeLaurentis is a major producer— the man behind the original “Dune.” I decided to postpone loading the dishwasher and sat down with the script.
I didn’t budge for the next hour except to scream between pages when I thought I was going to lose it from this roller coaster of a story. At every moment you were sure our gals were going to be caught in the most grisly wringer, something unpredictable would happen to land them in yet another diabolical set-up. The action was razor tight, the characters were whispering in my ears. This was fantastic writing. There was only one thing missing.
I wrote back to the sibs:
“Your script is outstanding. I ‘d be delighted to play your bar girl cameo. But if you don’t think I’m too presumptuous, could I be your lesbian-sex consultant? I notice that whenever the two lovers fall into an embrace, it doesn’t say exactly what happens next. On behalf of every movie-goer who can’t live through another syr- upy, cornball lesbian love scene, could I please, please ,please give you my words of advice on what two women like this would do in bed together?”
They said yes. They may have even said, “Yahoo.”
I met Larry and his (then)wife, Thea, at a Holiday Inn a few weeks later, and they were so down-to -earth, the opposite of every Hollywood bullshit artist I’d encountered in the past, that I had a good feeling about our collaboration. They weren’t kidding about knowing my stuff. They could quote my own prose right back to my face. I knew they saw the dykes in their movie as having the kind of sassy, let’s-get-down-to-it sensibility that I’ve always written about.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the catalog of lesbian films over the years. Most of them, like “Personal Best,” or “Desert Hearts,” concern a tender coming-out story, shyly romantic, erotically timid. I’m known to be shy and sentimental myself, but lesbian life does not begin and end with baby powder foreplay.
When you think about it, most people’s ultimate sexual experience doesn’t occur the first time between the sheets. As you gain more experience about who you are, and what you like, your sex life improves drastically. So why are Hollywood lesbians always portrayed in their diaper stage? I longed for characters who knew what they wanted and were hungry for more. I wanted to get beyond dewy girlishness and into some pussy power.
First, I sent Larry and Andy a picture from the cover of the book I was working on, “Nothing But the Girl,” about lesbian erotic photography.
When I first met Gina, I carried the same picture in my hand: a beautiful butch woman sitting a la Rodin’s “Thinker”, tattooed and muscled with a cowlick like Elvis’, but with all the shadows and soft curves of a woman’s figure. The model’s name was Ronny, but when I sent the picture to the filmmaker’s, I said, “This is your Corky.”
Corky’s character is a revelation in Hollywood cinema, because it is the first time since the days of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo that female masculinity has been eroticized. Usually when we see a woman who looks like a “dyke’ , a mannish woman, she’s the psychopath, the social misfit , the pathetic creepy person who there’s no hope left for. She’s the prison warden, the weird jock, the brutal nurse, the fucked-up punk. When have we seen a gorgeous woman of our generation on screen who moved like Jimmy Dean, sulked like a young Brando, drew a bead on you like Eastwood?
Corky had to be the kind of woman that everyone in the theater would be dying to go to bed with, and she had to do it without acting the least bit like a girly-girl.
Violet, on the other hand, couldn’t just be any straight girl on the drift. She had to be a femme queen, as calculating and sensual as a cat; a woman who’s lost a bit of her soul fucking men for money, but who knows exactly what kind of touch she needs to find redemption.
Most of all, and this was the part that cracked the cliché about dangerous femme fatales— she had to be a dangerous femme you could count on— whether it was getting you off or getting you out of a jam.
The Wachowskis had the character and dialog ready to roll in their script, it was just a matter of how to keep that feeling going in the sex scenes. And, given the infantile nature of American censorship, how much could we show on screen before we got our hand slapped by the producers? It was a frightening prospect.
I sent the brothers a couple of X-rated film clips of lesbian sex I turned to for inspiration. One was a shower scene from Robert McCallum’s “3 AM,” a golden oldie of the porn world that makes every audience who’s ever seen it dead silent with awe. The other piece I told them about was an art world video I’d acted in for a friend, called “Kathy,” by Cecilia Dougherty. I loved the sex scenes in these movies and I had some ideas about how to shoot the same sort of thing for an R-rating.
There were two main ideas on my mind. One, unlike most Hollywood lesbian scenarios, this movie shoudn’t insinuate oral sex— that’s not the kind of characters we were looking at. BOUND is about getting inside someone very fast, trusting them with everything-these women had to be fucking each other. Penetration was the act we wanted to imply. Yet obviously we weren’t going to get away with gynecological or hardcore shots in a movie that was headed for America’s shopping malls.
You and I know that there are thousands of Hollywood heterosexual movies where we easily imagine the male and female lovers having intercourse— everything from “Here to Eternity” to whatever Michael Douglas’ latest vehicle is. So how do you imply lesbians having “intercourse”?
My idea, inspired from the “Kathy” footage, was that we show a woman’s legs, straining and squeezing, and that we see that her lover’s forearm between her thighs. We dwell on that arm for a moment, moving back and forth in a fucking rhythm, looking sure, steady and unrelenting.
Then, instead of following her arm all the way up to her lover’s pussy, we would cut to her stomach, fluttering like a little butterfly in that spasm we all recognize as orgasm. I loved the idea of eroticizing a woman’s belly like that. A lot of men making sex movies try to show a woman’s sexual pleasure by focusing the lens on her cleavage. Maybe that’s what they’re looking at, but hey, there’s a lot more going on!
The other key idea was to eroticize the women’s hands whenever they were flirting or making love with each other. “A lesbian’s hands are her cock, they’re the hard-on of the movie, that ‘s what you want to follow,” I said, like some veteran pornographer.
When I see Corky’s hands on screen, I want to imagine how they would feel inside me. They’re the metaphorical substitute for the genital shots that you won’t be showing.
I went through my whole little consulting session alternating between glee and dread. I had lived through one big-budget film consulting experience before that had burned me like a marshmallow on a stick.
In the late 80s, I got approached by a dapper man from southern California who asked me if I thought that there was a film market for a woman’s erotic point of view.
Uh, yeah, as I matter of fact I do. I wouldn’t even have a career if it wasn’t for all the incredible women who’ve come out of the woodwork to write their own erotic stories, make their own movies, sex toys, and social lives that incorporate their genuine de- sires. I don’t KNOW a single woman who isn’t disappointed with the way female sexuality is portrayed in television, women’s magazines, and studio movies. It’s garbage and it’s insulting.
So I ended up writing the dialog for a script with a woman director I admired, Lizzie Borden, and I loved working with the actors during that shoot. But once I was off the scene, the producer took the movie and got rid of every element that made him personally uncomfortable— and there went the movie’s promise.
I introduced the film during its premiere at a Seattle film fest, and had to face an angry audience who felt like I’d personally let them down, that if this was women’s erotica, then it was a major sell-out. I wanted to wear one of those buttons that say, “ I just work here”.
I agreed with everyone’s criticism. Why no male nudity? Why all the coy lesbian pattycake and avoidance of any man to man eroticism, when it was clearly in the script’s intentions? Why all the gender clichés?
Up until that point I had the Good Coozie-Keeping Seal of integrity on all my writings and projects and the moment I signed up with a conventional studio, my reputation was trash. What a nightmare.
I felt like Larry, Andy and I were on the same wavelength, but I wasn’t going to be around when the producer, his bean-counters and lawyers got their hands on it. This movie was going to seen by every lesbian and lesbian-lover I knew, and they would roast me on a spit if it was anything less than authentic.
Most Bound fans I meet, ask me about the actresses in this story, not the directors. Before this experience, I think I’d have done the same. When you see someone on screen blowing your mind, thrilling you with their charisma and sexiness, you feel like all your thanks and identification should rest at their feet. The Wachowskis didn’t look like a couple of glamorous dykes, but believe me, the characters you saw up there come straight from their groovy imaginations and fertile libidos, with a little inspiration from me and probably a lot of other artists and lovers they’ve admired over the years. Their actresses mirrored them, not the other way around.
I was apprehensive to meet Gina Gershon, her role was the one I was worried about. Every actress is trained to play a whore/ mistress/siren, the physical outline of Jennifer’s character. But what women in Hollywood play a sexy butch, a bulldagger you’d like to get to know inside and out?
Gina came up to meet me in San Francisco before the shoot started. It was a relief to see her in person from the moment she walked up and grabbed my hand. She was physically right for the part, she could play dark and handsome and brooding, no problem.
I blurted out, “I hope you don’t think this is some granola-chewing, birkenstock-wearing lesbo girl on the page here,” and she laughed out loud. Gina was already on the right track, thinking about the most erotically romantic and compelling male icons in movie history to draw her machisma from. She wasn’t a dyke in her personal life, but she had been around the block. That ‘s what I wanted. It wouldn’t have done anybody a favor to have a genuine panty-tested lesbian if she had been a Pollyanna or a prude.
Most importantly, Gina was an experienced actress. She loves to take a character on in all of its manifestations. I gave her some books, and directions to the sleaziest, sweatiest lesbian club night I could think of. She was set.
My last gift to cinematic realism was just before my trip down to L.A. to shoot my cameo scene. I play a fetching babe in a dive that Corky tries unsuccessfully to pick up. My big line is “Hello,” but I look like a fox.
Anyway, I knew the bar scene would be stocked with extras to make it look like a happening place. And if the studio was sending over extras from a typical Hollywood casting agency. Oh no, please don’t send in the clowns! Los Angeles is such a closet case town. Women are so uptight about their femininity there- as a na- tive, I can tell you it’s the plastic surgery and dieting capital of the world—that it would be hard to find extras who looked like liberated dykes.
I called Larry again and asked if they could find it within their budget to let me bring down a handful of authentic babes from San Francisco who would make our set really look a lesbian joint, not a juice bar. They said yes— thank you Daddy! We spent all day shooting that scene, but it looked just right in the fi- nal cut.
The first time I saw the movie was in front of 1,500 delirious women and a couple hundred very curious men. I arranged for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, to host the premier of the movie in the world-famous Castro theater: a grandiose art deco movie house that still has an organist rising out of the pit pounding the keys with, “San Francisco, Open your Golden Gates.” You really feel like putting on your opera gloves and rais- ing a glass of champagne before you enter the theater, it’s such a romantic and glorious blast from the past.
Larry, Andy, their wives Thea and Alisa, assisant Phil, Gina, the film’s editor and our illustrious extras arrived to the entrance in a white limousine. I was squeezing Larry’s and Andy’s palms so tight they’re lucky to still be able to hold a pen.
Everyone in the house had heard that I was the “sex consultant.” I think they imagined that meant I stood over Gina and Jennifer with a riding crop, snapping, “Deeper, Harder, A Little to the Left!”
The festival director introduced our small mob onto the stage, and I put on my most radiant smarty-pants smile. Some idiot from the festival’s sponsoring advertisers got up to plug why “Everyone should buy a Suburu.” He was filled with all that new gay marketing crapola, and told the packed house with utter seriousness that the new Suburu was the “top choice among today’s lesbian car shoppers.”
I thought I was going to lose my mind with such tackiness before our beautiful film’s debut. As soon as he walked off the stage, I grabbed the mike, and said, “I don’t know about you, but most lesbians I know are still taking the BUS.”
The crowd went crazy (was that our first standing ovation?)— and every single moment after was like a dream come true.
The movie looked like butter, the actors were on fire, the audience picked up every erotic cue and innuendo, they screamed just like I had a year ago in my kitchen turning the pages. When the end came, they exploded in a orgy of gratitude. I thought we were going be carried out on the crowd’s shoulders, I had women coming up to me crying,, “ Thank you, thank you!”
Larry and Andy said they made up their minds to never watch the movie again after that Castro premiere, and they’ve stuck to their decision. They said it couldn’t get any better, so let it be the finest and last memory of the audience who completely and utterly “got it.”
I’m more of a glutton, I’m afraid. When the movie finally opened in my home town , I took nine different field trips with my friends. I watched it with my dad, I watched it with my daughter’s grade school teacher and her husband. I watched it with my ex-girlfriends, who I must say provided as much of my consulting wisdom as anything else you could mention.
I’m so filled with gay-fucking-pride, I’m ready to burst. But here’s the thing, see, I’m bisexual— and I think those romantic scenes in Hollywood boy-girl epics— they’re tired. Snore. Give me a call, boys. I know there ‘s a thousand directors with a healthy budget in Hollywood right now, ready to shoot their much-anticipated sex scene and dreading every moment of it. I ‘ll make you feel a whole lot better, Mx. Director. This will be the part of your movie that folks will talk about forever. You don’t even have to give me a cameo.