Casting non-porn actors in an art movie full of fucking

‘Shortbus’ Cast Didn’t Study for This in Acting Class -- by FRANK BRUNI

IN the crazy and no doubt kinky history of casting calls, there have surely been few like the one for “Shortbus.” It was all about sex, but not because the actors were coming on to the director. And not because the director was looking for big-name hotties to lure audiences into theaters. He wanted people whose sexual histories and hangups might become fodder for the screenplay. He wanted erotically adventurous recruits for an expedition to what he saw as an unexplored confluence of drama, comedy and unblinking pornography.

And so, on a Web site for what he cryptically called “the sex film project,” the director, John Cameron Mitchell , solicited videotapes “of no longer than 10 minutes of you, the actor, talking about a true-life sexual experience that was very important to you.” Any actor averse to having sex on camera, he added, need not apply.

Raphael Barker applied. On his tape he reminisced about a school trip to Spain when he was 12, and about an older boy there who taught him to masturbate. Sook-Yin Lee applied. On her tape she talked about her struggle to become comfortable enough in her own body to experience sexual pleasure.

For them and the other half dozen other people cast in principal roles in the movie (which opens in New York on Oct. 4), the audition tapes were only the beginning of an odyssey that got no more ordinary — and no less risqué — after that.

The unusual process occasionally blurred the line between reality and illusion. During improvisation workshops and rehearsals with Mr. Mitchell, the writer, director and star of the movie “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” actors drew on aspects of their own lives to create their characters. Ms. Lee, for example, plays a woman searching for her first orgasm.

While Mr. Mitchell is credited with the final screenplay for “Shortbus,” the cast shares credit with him for the story. From the beginning, he said in a recent interview, “I realized that for the actors not to feel exposed, they would have to be co-creators with me of the piece. So that dictated how we were going to make it.”

To overcome their inhibitions, they at one point found themselves playing a 100-person game of Spin the Bottle, replete with special tools to determine where, in a circle that large, the bottle was pointing. “We had a T-square and a tape measure,” said Mr. Mitchell, who has a choirboy’s face, a librarian’s voice and a twinkle that suggests all the mischief just under the surface.

Much later on, when rehearsing a nude scene, Ms. Lee made a special request: “How about everybody in the room has to take their clothes off?” Mr. Mitchell, a cameraman and a few others obligingly stripped, and then they all got on with their work.

Although it has the style, pacing, oddball characters and unknown cast of many low-budget independent movies, “Shortbus,” which is unrated, has sex scenes as graphic as those in a hard-core skin flick. That ensures it will be kept out of most theaters, but it also ensures attention that most films made on such a modest budget (about $2 million) could not achieve.

In a montage sequence at the very start of the film, one character presses yoga-like contortions into the service of solitary fellatio. Another is whipped by a dominatrix. And Ms. Lee and Mr. Barker, playing a married couple, avail themselves of just about every piece of furniture in their characters’ home, including the piano, during a furious erotic marathon.

Mr. Mitchell, who obviously understands why there’s so much buzz around the movie, chose a telling metaphor to explain the front-loading of so much explicit sex.

“I wanted to break the audience’s hymen,” he said. That mission accomplished, he and “Shortbus” widen their focus, using less provocative situations to contemplate sex as prison and as pardon, as barrier and as bridge.

Mr. Mitchell said sex was a way to look at characters’ longings “They’re trying desperately to connect,” he explained, making the inspiration for “Shortbus” sound like E. M. Forster by way of Marilyn Chambers. Perhaps he should have titled it “A Passage to Orgasm.”

Its characters orbit around a weekly Manhattan salon and sex party called Shortbus, named for the vehicle that ferries special-ed children to school. Ms. Lee’s character, a couples counselor named Sofia, is brought to the party by two gay men, clients of hers who become the sponsors of her quest for sexual fulfillment. The two men meanwhile are searching for a third man to join them in bed and lend spark to their cooling relationship.

The salon in the movie has faint echoes of Shortbus, a monthly dance party that Mr. Mitchell used to organize at West 8th, a Greenwich Village club that has since closed, and of events at other Manhattan bars and clubs that he and people in his downtown demimonde frequented. Some of those people have parts in “Shortbus.”

Justin Bond, better known as the feminine half of the satiric cabaret act Kiki & Herb, plays the wry host of the salon, who looks out upon the free spirits at lusty play and tells Sofia, “It’s just like the 60’s, only with less hope.” The performers Dirty Martini and the Wau Wau Sisters also make appearances in the movie, which Mr. Bond said he came to regard as “a gorgeous little time capsule.”

The mingling of real and celluloid worlds didn’t end there. In the movie the two gay characters trying to arrange a three-way have the same name, Jamie, though one of them goes by James as a way to get a little separation. Meanwhile the actors who play those characters — Paul Dawson and P J DeBoy — are in a long-term romantic relationship and are both named Paul, though Mr. DeBoy has stopped going by that first name. He wanted a little separation, primarily from a cousin who is also an actor, also named Paul DeBoy, and also did “full-frontal nudity,” in a John Waters movie, P J said. He added, “Runs in the family, I guess.” James and Jamie have a locket with their childhood pictures, just like Paul and PJ do. And Mr. Dawson’s character videotapes odd, intimate parts of his life, much as the actor documents his own life in journals and photographs.

BACK in 2003, on the Web site that solicited the videotapes, Mr. Mitchell warned, “We won’t know anything specific about the story until we find the actors.” But he outlined a general goal and tone. “In traditional Hollywood terms,” he wrote, “this film would have the kind of humor and emotion of a film like ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ but with much more explicit sex.” He went on to say that lead actors must “have a sexual rapport with another suitable actor.”

How would he be able to determine that? After narrowing a pool of 500 applicants down to 40 finalists, he gathered them in Manhattan, put them in a theater on the Lower East Side and showed them one another’s tapes. Using scorecards they graded each actor on a scale of 1 to 4, with higher marks indicating a stronger likelihood of wanting to have sex with the person, Mr. Mitchell said.

Jay Brannan, who plays the man who becomes the gay couple’s needed spark, remembered looking to his side and seeing that the actor next to him wasn’t being as generous with ratings as he was. “I started feeling a little slutty and I downgraded everybody,” he said. But as best he could recall, he gave high marks to Mr. Dawson and Mr. DeBoy, as they did to him. And thus a cinematic three-way was born.

A few months later the main players converged, day and night, in a loft on the Lower East Side that Mr. Mitchell rented. They played board games. They watched movies — by John Cassavetes , by Robert Altman — that had the kind of improvisatory, naturalistic feel he wanted to give his project. Outside the loft they played Whiffle ball and even bowled. Mr. Mitchell was trying to get them to relax around — and trust — one another.

He got them to improvise conversations: between a phone sex operator and a caller; between a massage therapist and a client. But it wasn’t until the fifth week, he said, that he coaxed them toward more explicitly sexual improvisations. Mr. DeBoy and Mr. Dawson — the real-life couple on a path to being a reel-life couple — were among the first to go there. “It was a little nerve-wracking for all of us,” Mr. Mitchell said. “At first I wanted to watch it through a video camera, to have a barrier. Then I found myself yawning.”

Over the next two years, as he wangled money for the film from friends and supporters, including the musician Moby, actors drifted into and out of other commitments and improv sessions alternated with long breaks. “John would bookmark the best improvisations and then go away and create a script,” Ms. Lee said. “We were giving him the raw material, and he would go away and connect a story.”

Improvising the role of a woman telling her husband she’d been faking orgasms, Ms. Lee first tried saying it was another woman who’d been doing so. That made it into the screenplay. Mr. Brannan, Mr. DeBoy and Mr. Dawson were asked to chart the awkward last steps by which a three-way might gel. As they did so, they said, there was unexpected laughter and even an oddly timed song. Those details too made their way into “Shortbus.”

Along the way the actors, none of whom came from the world of pornography, tried not to panic about how much of themselves they were literally poised to expose. Some of them were scared: about shooting their sex scenes, which were filmed without any tricks or body doubles; about having friends or relatives eventually see the results.

Mr. Brannan, who said he grew up among conservative Baptists in Texas, nervously noted that while the shooting perhaps required only fleeting stretches of courage, the final product “is going to last forever.” Mr. Dawson said he wanted his relatives in North Carolina to see it, but added, “I just wouldn’t want to be in the room with them.”

Ms. Lee seemed to be the most unsettled of the group. After just a few minutes of talking about her experience, she asked to take a break, in order to steady herself. “There’s this assumption that everybody’s really cool about their bodies,” she said. “I’m not. I’m as repressed as you are, maybe even more so.”

She said she grew up devoutly Roman Catholic in Vancouver. She now lives in Toronto and is the host of an irreverent public radio program. Her bosses, she said, initially discouraged her from being in the movie. But she knew Mr. Mitchell, so she forged ahead, even though it meant that naked rehearsal. Even though it meant that marathon with Mr. Barker. Even though it meant masturbating in full view of camera.

She said she has forbidden relatives to see the movie. When a colleague at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation congratulated her on the film and told her he couldn’t wait to see it, she said, “I was like: Gulp! No! There’s a moratorium.”

Mr. Brannon said he was nervous about shooting a sex scene with two people who really are a couple. “I had just met both of them and didn’t know how comfortable they were or whether one of them was more comfortable than the other,” he said.

Mr. Dawson chimed in: “Which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect to go through if you have a three-way with a couple,” drawing attention to another way in which “Shortbus” was shaped by the life circumstances of the actors on board.

Shaped, but not determined. When Mr. DeBoy and Mr. Dawson were asked about the terms of their own relationship, Mr. DeBoy said, “We have a different set of ethics than the characters.” The two are so reluctant to be mistaken for their characters — who for all the resemblances are, in the end, fictional creations — that it was only late in an hourlong interview that they hesitantly admitted to their own romantic involvement.

The sex that cast members had in the service of the movie seemed to stay in that context; intimate scenes didn’t appear to complicate relationships among the cast members. And Mr. Mitchell asked as much of himself as he did of his cast. For a scene that shows writhing bodies in a sort of sexual mosh pit, he jumped into the fray. Showing outtakes of that scene on a television set in his West Village apartment, he took note of the extras. “I knew some of these people,” he said against a backdrop of moans. “Some were friends of friends.”

He drew on friends for the principal cast as well. He has known Mr. Bond for about a decade. Both of them used to drop by an apartment in the Village where Mr. DeBoy held casual parties. The three saw one another regularly at a local restaurant, the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, where Mr. Bond performed an early version of the Kiki & Herb act. And Mr. Bond once judged a certain aspect of Mr. Dawson’s physiognomy during a contest at a gay bar in the East Village.

On top of all of the other odd aspects of its evolution, “Shortbus” represented a reunion and collaboration of fringe artists moving closer to the mainstream. Kiki & Herb, for example, recently appeared on Broadway.

As for the film? It showed out of competition — but to rapt interest — at the most glamorous film festival of them all. “At Cannes, we had a 10-minute standing ovation,” Mr. Bond said. “We were all standing there bawling.”