Films . Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo . Details . Production Stills
Las Historias Mas Sexy del Mundo
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Ah, where to start on this...
The idea for this came from a couple of sources. Years ago I got hooked on an obscure line of sexy videos called 'Private Screenings', after having rented on a whim a hilariously stupid film called 'There's No Sex Like Snow Sex'*. It was a Bavarian sex farce taking place in the alps where all the skiing and sunshine made women drop their dirndls and tear the lederhosen off the nearest skiing instructors for some red-hot Alpine liebe. It had a scene with two people having sex in a bed careening down a ski slope (the bed was on skis, don't ask) and one scene where a guy has sex with this woman through a heart-shaped hole in a window shutter. You kind of have to see it for yourself, but being soft core and all there's not much to actually see (typical of the genre). I rented a lot of these dumb flicks obsessively whenever I spotted them in video stores. I suspect some of them may have been Jess Franco films directed under an alias, because few directors used a zoom lens that abusively. Most were hilariously dubbed, and awkwardly translated ("You cheeky bugger!"). Around this time I also watched a lot of late-night Skinemax, for obvious reasons.
Another inspiration was living in Spain as a kid. I watched countless American TV movies and shows, which were dubbed into Spanish and censored for content. Some of my early memories of TV watching were episodes of 'Charlies Angels' and the like, only with glaring jumps in plot continuity. To this day, I still remember associating implied sex scenes and revealing clothing with sudden disappearances of the protagonists, leading to a lot of 'what the fuck just happened?' moments. Also, Spain (and other Spanish-speaking countries) seemed to still enjoy the fumetti or foto-novelas as popular (and cheap) entertainment. Most Americans aren't too familiar with this art form, but the typical fumetti plot is usually romance or crime-themed, printed on cheap paper in black and white, like a comic book only with real people who speak in comic book-style bubbles. Action would be spelled out with an odd kind of onomatopoeia, i.e. 'sfrush!' for the sound of water spilling, 'tchak!' for the sound of a slap, etc. The protagonists were pretty unremarkable-looking but were credited as 'Sexy-Vedettes' and 'Super Stars'. They were also pretty much the cheapest stuff you could buy at a news stand and unsold copies invariably wound up as wrapping for food bought from street vendors. I really liked the inherent cheapness and pseudonymous aesthetic of the fumetti. A lot of saucy stuff was alluded to, i.e. the loss of virginity, drug use, etc. but precious little was ever shown. Strangely, a random 'arty', composed shot would periodically show up, which made you wonder about the production process and the solitary higher-minded soul on the staff who was doing this crap to support a family or something. Anyway, I decided to shoot stills while shooting the film, to create a fumetti of my own. You can buy it from www.planariainc.com.
Most importantly, I wanted the film to have a kind of 'other' quality, like some film salvaged from a landfill in Estonia. For the score, I used public-domain music I had been given by a friend who worked in a recording studio (who had consigned it to a dumpster). I used a technique for filming that was pretty labor intensive: I shot on reversal 16mm film, picked out the stuff I wanted, then made an internegative from that, and then made a workprint positive. Then I edited the positive on my flat bed editor (which takes up a large part of my apartment). For voices, I used actors from the local hispanic theater to do the voice over and transferred them to magnetic film stock (another space-taking device housed in my apartment). The whole process was analog. No digital anything, except for the subtitles. The voice of the gynecologist played by Ian Svenonius was actually me, by the way.
We shot on weekends mostly, with no more 'crew' than needed (typically myself and/or a camera person) with the exception of the 'Girls Vs Robot' segment and the actual Scene Creamers performance footage. For the latter two, we were helped out by Chlorofilm, a Baltimore-based production company. Check out their website at www.chlorofilm.com.
For period verisimilitude, we used clothing from Meep's, a great vintage clothing store that anyone looking for period-specific clothing should check out. Their website is www.meepsonu.com.
This film won a 2004 Rosebud award, though I was told later I was almost disqualified because several members of the jury thought the footage was actual 1970's vintage that I had pilfered and presented as my own. Now there's a compliment.
* I later found out the name of this film in German actually translates as 'When Yodeling, Itch the Leather Trousers', a better title in my opinion.