grand deception
by
Douglas Messerli
Christopher Langdon (screenplay), Gregory Cooke (Director) $30 / 1999
$30 begins in a dark car with neon lights reflecting upon it, as if we were about to engage with a contemporary noir. A father (Greg Itzin) and his son Scott (Erik MacArthur) sit in the front seat, the boy—seemingly having lost his ability even to speak—appears to be terrified, his dad waking him back into reality. “Scotty, you haven’t heard a word I said. ...Just a second ago you looked like NASA sent your brain to Mars.”
The boy stutteringly demurs.
“Quit looking so nervous. It’s not that
big a deal,” pronounces his father, asking him if he still has the $30, and
telling him he’ll be back in an hour to pick him up. He starts up the car and
drives off.
For a moment he have no clue about what
mission his father has sent him on for that apparently terrifying sixty minute
adventure. He climbs the stairs of some unrecognizable structure and stands for
a moment outside a door, attempting to regain his composure, whispering to
himself “Don’t be such a pussy Scott.” He knocks.
When he opens the door, we hear a voice “Be
out in a moment,” a woman named Emily soon after appearing, switching off the
television set and sitting on edge of the bed. Suddenly we are able to put the
entire scene in context. The location is a motel room, and she (Sara Gilbert), evidently
is a prostitute not so many years older than he is,
but looking far more agèd and bedraggled, as if her profession has already worn
her out. They talk for a moment, the preliminaries established, including the
payment, his name, and his request that she turn off the lights. She has a
couple of house rules: “There’s no biting unless it’s gentle; and there’s no
really weird stuff; no anal, no rough stuff, no hitting, and..oh you can cum on
my face but just watch my eyes ‘cause I just got new contacts.” So much for the
illusion of romance.
A few minutes later they are standing
downstairs by the motel pool, Scott drinking a soda, and explaining the circumstances,
that his father has made the appointment as a birthday gift. Even the
prostitute is a bit startled: “The guy who arranged this is your Dad? God, it’s
kind of...pushy.” “No shit,” the kid agrees.
Eventually returning to the room, Scott
suddenly comes alive. “You must think I’m a total retard. See, the reason I
couldn’t do it in there is I really, really like this girl, and it’s not you,
it’s me.”
The aware viewer almost anticipates her
next question: “What’s his name?”
The
boy is taken aback. “Who?”
“The
guy you like at school.”
After a long and awkward pause, he blurts
out, “Fred. His name’s Fred,” still amazed and a bit troubled by her perspicacity.
She
pretends to have a special "vibes" about gay men, always being able to tell, and
Scott is still just innocent enough to believe her. But in that moment alone
the two hit it off and spend the rest of the hour they have left sharing conversation
with one another.
By the time he hears his father’s car
returning, they have become friends of sorts. And when the “pushy father”
approaches the room, the hooker begins to moan, finally Scott joining in, giving
proof to the fact that they are in the midst of sensational sex. Before he
leaves, she gives him a small cupcake as a birthday treat.
When the father honks the horn, Scott leaving,
Michele (which we discover is her real name) leans over the balcony, the father
calling out, “Heh, how was my boy.”
“Oh,
he’s not a boy mister. He’s a man.”
As the final few scenes shows Scott and
Fred dancing on the beach at sunset, the car pulls off with the two men in it. Together
Michele and Scott have pulled off a “grand deception”—grand not just because
they have fooled the elder, but because Scott has fooled himself that he can
keep the fact of his sexuality hidden.
Yet, we know some day soon he will have to suffer the truth, no matter
where that lands him. The writer of this work, Christopher Landon—the son of the
TV Bonanza star Michael Langdon— who, when he finally revealed that he
was gay, realized that given the continued homophobia in Hollywood and the film
industry, he was putting his career in jeopardy. As with so many figures
straight and gay who portrayed or wrote about gay characters, his then budding
writing and directorial efforts temporarily suffered. As he notes, "I was the flavor of the month, and then
I was quickly dismissed. I reached a point in my career when I couldn't get a
meeting anywhere." But he later came back to write and direct a series of
successful commercial blockbusters, including Disturbia (2007) and the found-footage
films, two through four of Paranormal Activity.
The movie on the TV when Scott enters the motel room was a clip from Little House on the Prairie, one of whose leads was Melissa Gilbert, the sister of Sara, director and actor Gregory Cooke’s choice to play the prostitute in this short film.
Los
Angeles, January 22, 2001
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2001).
Cameron Thrower
(screenplay and director) Pretty Boy / 2015
The
price of sending a son off to a prostitute to transform him from a young
budding homosexual into a strapping straight man has gone up enormously from
1999. The $30 of Gregory Cooke’s visit now runs to several hundred dollars, and
if the son and the whore get hungry it costs even more; and in this case the
son—evidently of a wealthy father who has sent him off to a private school
where the family lives at quite a distance from cheap motel where he, Sean
James Collins (Nick Eversman) has been hooked up with the prostitute Katie
Bloom (Rebekah Tripp)—is willing to pay even more if the hooker is simply
willing to let him stay on without having sex.
If Katie seems tough and even mean in the
first, she like the proverbial whore, has a heart of platinum, and when the
18-year old kid gets an opportunity to tell his story, revealing the bullying
he’s been receiving at school and the verbal abuse of his well-intentioned but
homophobic father (Jon Briddell), she’s willing to punish him by forcing him to
sleep in the car while she and Sean sit in the bedroom celebrating his birthday
with a pumpkin muffin and a long—for the film’s sake perhaps a little too
long—chat about their lives.
While we learn in Cameron Thrower's 2015 film Pretty Boy that poor “pretty boy” Sean suffers the slings and arrows of peer mockery and the rejection—temporary we can imagine—of his father, Katie has it even harder, forced to prostitute herself to pay for her son’s upbringing by a mother who won’t even talk to her, coincidentally also on the child’s birthday, on the phone. Even shopping at the local stop-and-shop mart becomes an obstacle course of disapproving women who themselves look like rejects of whatever urban society has clawed its way to status in this suburban Los Angeles outpost.
In order to survive Katie has created a
tough veneer of slick-backed hair, heavy lipstick, high-heeled shoes and, even
more importantly, an ever-ready outsider irony she delivers like she were a
campion dart player. Describing the boy’s father, Katie observes: “It must be
exhausting trying to fix something that's not broken.” When she visits the
father sheltered four hours in his automobile to demand the money for dinner
treats, he pleading with her to help his son become a heterosexual, she snaps
back: “What am I? Some fairy fucking God-hooker?”—a line that could as well
have been spoken by a drag queen, dredged up from the depths of all outsider
and queer sardonicism.
At the supermarket stop she asks him to
pick out a muffin, Sean choosing pumpkin, and she responding, “Do you really
like pumpkin?” Sean answers, “Yes, I’ve always loved pumpkin.” If the script
uses this occasion as an instance of good-will mentoring—Katie insisting that
if he likes pumpkin he should never allow anyone to dissuade him or demand that
he like something else—a problem from which this 31 minute short suffers
overall, we also recognize that the boy needs a mother, his own having died
when he was young. And there are plenty of nicely honest moments that
writer/director Thrower has tossed into his script that do nothing but reveal
character and help his work establish credibility.
By film’s end the boy is ready to demand
his father recognize him for who he is. But Katie, whose mother won’t even let
her wish happy birthday to her son, has no other recourse but the tears she
sheds to help her move back to her battlefield of motel beds. She refuses her
equivalent of the inflated $30 dollar’s on the boys pillow as he sleeps.
Los Angeles, September 25, 2021
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (September 2021).
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