Well of course the muthafucka got t’ be a fuckin’ movie star, man: he had all the fuckin’ equipment. For starters, there was all that curly blond hair spilling down over that pretty pouty baby face, complete to the kind of square-jawed ‘tough’ accent the fans all wet their fuckin’ pants over (including the hint of sullen cruelty around the corners of the ripe, sensuous mouth and in the glint of the ice blue eyes). On top’a that Biff Allnuts at 19 had the kind of hard-muscled body the camera went bananas over—
—Big oblong blue-veined biceps like boulders beneath a set of shoulder caps that exist only in drawings by Tom of Finland, or Etienne. Unblemished skin the color of lightly burnished copper taut over a sculpted vee-shaped torso, inch-high pectoral slabs dotted by a pair of succulent cherry-ripe nipples surrounded by elliptical aureoles the size of silver dollars. A waist as flat and furrowed as a farmer’s field in winter.
But it was this-far-and-no-further when it came to the in-the-flesh peep show on the silver screen. The kid personally measured the epidermal distance to precisely an inch and a quarter beneath the belly button—space enough for the teenyboppers in the theaters to get at least one good blink at the vertical line of abdominal hair which seemed to support their hero’s *inny* like a golf ball on a tee.
Once in a while some of the more sharp-eyed in the audience might be quick enough to catch an even quicker glimpse of the golden-haired wisps at the upper edge of the pubic triangle, but ‘once in a while’ usually meant once in a movie. Biff was fucking fanatic when it came to keeping the gnarled curls of his fragrant cock-mane well hidden behind the low-slung Levis worn tight at the hips and ripped at the knee—
—A perfect example of the asshole’s hypocrisy. I mean, at the same time as Allnuts was showing nothing really worth seeing he was teasing the fucking shit out of everybody in the fucking theater: all y’ hadda do was take a gander at the splotched, piss and cum-stained fabric that always covered the blatant genital mound behind the Adonis’s fly to know what kind of double standard he was up there hawking.
If that’d been all, hey, the studio might’ve been willing to look the other way. But that wasn’t all. Biff turned out to be the kind of shithead who thought nothin’ of holding up the production by staying behind the locked door of his sound stage trailer doing God knows how many lines of white powder and getting his rocks off in the squishy cunt of some bimbo starlet, or two.
Far be it for Yours Fuckin’ Truly to moralize—that ain’t my style—but at the same time as the kid was doing this kind’a shit he was also goin’ around to high school assemblies making mealy-mouthed speeches about how he hoped his fans’d stay off the dope and hold off on the sex till the preacher finally gave them the “I now pronounce you.”
He was also starting to go on the political stump, palling around with the greasy Axl’s of this world and calling for “the fuckin’ homo queers” t’ go back in the closet “where they fuckin’ belong.” Government social programs were really designed by the pinko “lib-er-als” to put down “our Euro-Centric culture,” the fag-basher liked to rant, going on to complain that minorities were getting “ten times as much as they deserved.”
You know the ol’ Guns ’n Roses type routine, right?
Hey, everybody’s got a right to their fuckin’ opinion. Freedom’a speech and all that crap. When that turns into physical action, though, that’s another fuckin’ story. And the pretty-boy movie star crossed the line the other day on the set when out of a clear blue sky he jumped Mike Bock and beat the shit out of him before the grips could pull him off. Sent the poor dude to the hospital.
Who was Mike Bock and why did Allnuts wanna rearrange his face? Answer: he was one of the studio’s still photographers—the youngest, in fact, just recently hired part-time off’a his high school newspaper to take candid shots of productions in progress, including ours. A year younger than Biff and not bad looking in his own dark-haired sinewy way. Mike was friendly and nice. Everybody took to him immediately—
—Except the big shot movie star. Biff’d had this “thing” about paparazzi. He hated ’em, ever since several flash-bulbed him and that cute cunt singer he was porking last year, following them up and down the Sunset Strip (he Sean Penn’d a couple of them near Doheny; the studio had to pay big bucks to keep it hush-hush). So when Mr. Allnuts realized that Mike was taking a roll of candids through the window of his fuckin’ star-doored trailer, boom.
“Fuckin’ faggot freak!” he yelled, flying out like a witch on a fuckin’ broomstick, yanking the fuckin’ Nikkon outta Mike’s hand. Using it as a fuckin’ weapon. Bang! Bam! Pow! Boy, did Biff batter that kid, kneeing him in the fuckin’ balls and punching his lights out. “Whaddaya tryin’ t’ do, cocksucker, get a bunch’a shots of my fuckin’ straight ass t’ sell t’ the fuckin’ gay porn mags, huh? Shootin’ through the fuckin’ bathroom window while I’m takin’ a fuckin’ leak? Y’ wanna close-up of my fuckin’ big dick, is that it, you ass-lickin’ pervert?”
Shit, I’m tellin’ ya, man, Biff made the poor guy bleed like a stuck pig and that still didn’t satisfy him. Allnuts had Mike’s head by two handfuls of hair mashed into those splotched, piss and cum-stained Levis covering the blatant genital mound I was telling you about, makin’ him say muffled things like “mmmnnnppphh-gggkkk!”
“Yeah,” the teen star husked angrily, “all things come to fags who wait. Enjoy the stink’a my hot nuts, fucker. Fill your fuckin’ faggot nose with how a real straight-shooter smells right after he’s just plugged his hard ten-inch pussy-lovin’ boner in a twat’s goddam drippy snatch, yeah.”
He squatted on the young photographer’s mouth and farted and then dragged him up and rubbed his muzzle in the sweaty hair golden in the hollow of his unwashed armpit, kicking him again as he did. The camera crashed against the floor, breaking open.
“Biff, hey!” the grips rushing over said, separating them. “Enough. Chill out!”
Mike was laid out on the floor blubbering and moaning. The A.D. had the presence of mind to call an ambulance even as Allnuts, still steaming, sprinkled a bunch of hundred-dollar bills over his fallen foe before going back into his trailer, rasping.
“Consider that fuckin’ severance pay, you goddammed Peeping Tom,” he growled, slamming the door. Hurling more imprecations from within. “And I wouldn’t make a fuckin’ Federal case of it if I was you—not if you don’t want the fuckin’ world t’ know what kind’a faggot pictures you were tryin’ to take through my goddam window.
Well, maybe if that was an isolated incident it could’ve been overlooked, or excused. But it fuckin’ wasn’t and it was getting more and more obvious that something was gonna have to be done about the irresponsible young matinee idol. I mean, we were working on a $70-million dollar job here: the first Biblical epic Hollywood’d found the guts (and the financing!) to try in over 25 years. The studio couldn’t let it go down the tubes because of one stud prick no matter how popular and good-looking.
Trouble was, he had one of those iron-clad contracts and, worse, he was the main box-office draw. Allnuts couldn’t be fired and if he did walk out in a huff the whole $70 mil investment would probably be a forget it, along with the company itself. Which meant that we had no choice but to let the sonofabitch run roughshod over us: we were the fuckers over the barrel, or in it, and Biff damn well knew it.
He wasn’t gonna let us forget it, either. Like, shit, there were any number of “minor changes” he suddenly began to demand in the script, not to mention all kinds of perks on top of perks that weren’t negotiated at the time of the original—very generous!—contract. There were people who, like Mike, Biff had sudden “problems” with.
Gone. And no “thank you” or “sorry about that,” either.
“Hey,” Allnuts said when one of the crew suggested that maybe he’d be better liked if he was just a wee bit more simpatico. “I’m the guy the suckers are coming to the theaters t’ see, nobody else. So I get what I ask for.”
We ourselves were damned lucky, in fact, to get the start to even consider doing the dungeon scene scheduled for this particular morning. That was the sequence in which Marius—the name we gave to the character Biff “essayed”—breaks into the torture chamber deep under the Roman Forum to single-handedly rescue his kid brother Septimus. What Marius doesn’t know is that the whole thing is a trap designed to capture him.
Oh, Septimus is there, all right, dangling attractively bruised and sweat-smeared, only a filthy (and tres skimpy) loincloth covering the middle of his own hunky 16-year-old body. He’d been tied with rawhide thongs around the wrists to a hook in the stone ceiling overhead: the perfect bait with which Tigellinus, the evil head of Nero’s Praetorian Guard (played by the noted young character actor Dex Gentry) expects to snare the brawny protagonist.
It works: once Marius is shocked by the sight of his tortured sibling groaning in the center of the dungeon he forgets to be his naturally cautious self. He rushes to free the youthful prisoner—only to find himself surrounded by a squad of burly Praetorians snarling. Armed to the teeth.
A savage hand-to-hand erupts, ten to one (good odds for the muscular young lead in an epic like this), Marius dispatching almost all of them before the script has him overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers. At the “cut to” which ends the scene he is coshed across the back of the head by none other than the leering Tigellinus himself, Nero’s snidely snarfing henchman brutally bringing him down in an immobilized heap, unconscious. And in the middle of the first take, just before he was about to get whacked, Biff stepped out of character, saying “cut!”
“Cut?” Only the director is supposed to be able to say that on the set, but the kid was usurping that authority little by not-so-little, too, wasn’t he.
“Yeah, cut,” Allnuts reiterated, lip curled. The scene was no fuckin’ good. Now that the actor (who wasn’t going to ever give Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson a run for the Academy Award) had experienced it on its feet he could tell: “it’s no fuckin’ good and I ain’t gonna do it. Not as it’s written I ain’t.”
Pout.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“It just feels wrong”—cuz, Biff thought, it wasn’t fuckin’ necessary, “and why should I get slugged on camera, anyway? My fans ain’t gonna like that. They expect me t’ come out on top, always.”
“You do come out ‘on top’ in the end,” the beleaguered director argued. It was as if he were speaking to the wall.
“Only after I get tortured.” That was a no-no now that Allnuts was coming to realize the power he wielded over the production and even the studio itself. Biff wasn’t about to let his butch young self be stripped and spread-eagled to the corners of an uncomfortable wooden rack “just to let my fuckin’ fruit director get his Calvins all sticky.”
His fuckin’ fruit director (yeah, that’s right, Jake was gay. So fuckin’ what?) tried to reason with him on a creative basis. The purpose of the scene was to put the straining muscles on display, sure—a show of skin, especially when it was so nicely macho, was bound to up the box office take—“but the idea is also to dramatize Marius’s plight, not to mention the mores of Ancient Rome. If you aren’t captured,” Jake argued, ’how can you escape?”
“Right then ’n there, Johnny on the fuckin’ spot,” Biff extrapolated, putting on one hell of an “anger” act (if only he could be as good in from of the camera!). “Why waste time if I’m only gonna get free, anyway? I certainly ain’t gonna act in no scene that makes me look like a dumb schmuck, letting this Tiggy-linus creep slug me over the head.”
What Allnuts wanted was the total elimination of the torture sequence, period.
“The head of the fuckin’ Guard tries t’ knock me unconscious,” he decreed, the star of the picture rationalizing: his character, this dude Marius, was “too fuckin’ smart t’ be buffaloed. He ducks, he spins, he rams his fuckin’ fist in Tiggy-linus’s fuckin’ mouth and boom, he gets the fuck away. Unnastand?”
Yeah, fine, we “unnastood,” Jake calling a ten-minute break so that he and I (I’m Kincaid: I’m the screen writer) could “adjust” the scene and make the cuts.
“Awwright,” Allnuts snarfed, spiking an imaginary football in an imaginary end zone as he went back into his trailer for a quickie—another reason to arrange this latest delay—while Jake the director and Jeff the writer called Dex the actor over into the huddle. If there was going to be any change in the blocking of the scene “Tigallinus” had to be the first to know.
We were done in the ten minutes allotted.
Biff took twenty in his trailer, but what the hell—he was grudgingly pleased with the changes when he finally came out to have them explained. The whole thing would be confined to the stunt-coordination of the fight, no new dialogue (the star dug that!). Marius would pivot on his heel at the last minute, his heroic instinct sensing that danger was rising behind his back.
“That’s when you duck and dodge just like you wanted,” Jake told him, “karate-kicking Tigellinus in the balls even as you cut your brother down and carry him out, okay?”
“We’ll try it,” came the surly response. “Then I’ll let y’ know if it’s ’okay’ or not.”
“Quiet on the set,” the A.D. said through his bull horn, the buzzer sounding. The lights spiraling red over the sound stage doors. “Rolling.”
“Speed!” The sound man, tape recorder turning.
“And action,” the director ordered, film threading through the Mitchell, focused first on the teenaged Septimus dangling from the meat hook, moaning. Movement off-screen and a rack-focus to find the source: Biff as Marius sneaking into the catacomb in his Roman soldier’s outfit minus the breastplate, bared pecs tense on either side of the deeply chiseled ravine separating the escarpments at the sternum, the golden hair within the cleft fanning out just under the bracketing collarbones above. The eyes were darting, getting used to the slimy rat-infested darkness (rats to be added later, in “insert” shots).
A beat, and then the burly young hero is seen stepping bravely forward, unaware of the members of Tigellinus’s Praetorian Guard lurking in wait, ready to close the trap: the sight of what has been done to Marius’s poor brother obliterating the stud’s good sense.
“Septimus!” he cries, a reasonable reading albeit somewhat overdone. Allnuts lunging forward in character. As he does Tigellinus clangs his sword against the stones and yells:
“Now!” The guards as per both the the revisions rushed the stud-star from fight was on, swords and fists, knees muscles striated magnificently, the paps tits upstanding like the erasers pink at the ends of Number Two pencils. Real rivers of funky-smelling sweat coursed out of the tangled briar patches in his soupy young armpits as he punched, kicked, gouged and defeated his enemies two and three and even four at a lime.
The battle in the confined space continued as choreographed for at least two minutes before Dex as Tigellinus moved into position behind this seemingly invincible powerhouse, a good-sized stone in his fist. Not the styrofoam “stone” Biff expected the prop department to have provided the set. A stone stone, rock hard.
The villian’s hand went up for the intended blow.
“I see you, you bastard,” Allnuts ad-libbed, whirling, fist flying. To his astonishment Tigellinus side-stepped with equal agility, the rock swung down with all the force in the supporting actor’s own more than ample 17-inch upper arms. THWACK!!
“Ungh.” Biff could only gasp, a spray of spit flying from his mouth along with a splatter of blood from the side of his head. He careened into the wall, ricocheting. Spluttering. “What the fuck?”
“This the fuck,” Tigellinus was only too pleased to grin, stone-filled fist striking again. This time it was a vicious smash to the hero’s famous baby face, the CRUNCH!! resounding off the dungeon walls as the eyes rolled up under the fluttering lids and the mighty muscles all went limp. Marius—Biff!—went reeling into dreamland, the sword clattering uselessly out of the splayed fingers of his hand. The pillars of his legs buckled under his weight and the ruggedly virile young teen idol collapsed in a bundled heap, his immobilized arms and legs sprawled outward, helpless across the floor.
