Blue Movie

by Terry Southern

This satire of Hollywood features King B, an Oscar-winning director who's seen (and filmed) everything, Sid Krassman, a producer who's made a fortune catering to the tastes of the American public, and Angela Sterling, a misunderstood sex symbol who desperately wants to do something 'serious'.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Film, Novels, Literature, Satire, Sexuality

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Terry Southern was an American novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and satirist renowned for his sharp wit, fearless satire, and incisive observations on American life. A leading voice of the counterculture and a progenitor of New Journalism, Southern made lasting contributions to both literature and film, influencing generations of writers and filmmakers with his unique blend of surreal humor and cultural critique.
Born in Alvarado, Texas, Southern served in the U.S. Army during World War II, where he was stationed in North Africa and Italy. After the war, he studied philosophy at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago before moving to Paris in 1948 on the G.I. Bill. There, he became part of the expatriate literary scene and developed friendships with other writers and artists. It was during this period that he met Mason Hoffenberg, with whom he co-wrote the controversial erotic satire Candy, published in 1958. The novel was banned in several countries but became an underground classic, cementing Southern’s reputation as a daring literary voice.
Southern’s first novel, Flash and Filigree (1958), introduced readers to his darkly comedic style, but it was The Magic Christian (1959) that brought him broader acclaim. The book, which satirizes greed and corruption through the antics of an eccentric billionaire, exemplified Southern’s trademark irreverence and biting social commentary. He followed this with the acclaimed short story collection Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), the porn-industry parody Blue Movie (1970), and the semi-autobiographical Texas Summer (1992).
In the 1960s, Southern turned to screenwriting and quickly became one of the most sought-after writers in Hollywood. He co-wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), a black comedy about nuclear war that earned him an Academy Award nomination. His other screenwriting credits include The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), and the film adaptation of The Magic Christian (1969). His work on Easy Rider was particularly significant, as the film became a landmark of the New Hollywood era and a symbol of the American counterculture.
Southern's literary and journalistic work also found homes in major publications such as Esquire, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. His style helped pave the way for the New Journalism movement, and Tom Wolfe cited Southern as a major influence. Beyond his literary and cinematic achievements, Southern was known for his friendships with notable cultural figures, including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Despite early success, Southern struggled in his later years with financial instability and health problems. He continued to write and teach, contributing to Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s and lecturing on screenwriting at institutions like New York University and Columbia University.
Terry Southern died in New York City in 1995 of respiratory failure. Though his name is less known today than some of his contemporaries, his work remains influential. Revered for his unapologetic voice and imaginative storytelling, Southern is remembered as a fearless satirist who pushed the boundaries of both literature and film.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terry Southern has perfectly caught the zeitgeist and Blue Movie is a burlesque memorial to the sexual revolution and the entire belle rebellious époque.
There are two great postmodernistic books about the cinema world: The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West and Zeroville by Steve Erickson, and Blue Movie is situated exactly in the middle between these two and is no less great.

He smiled and sat down on the bed beside her. ‘Have you read the script?’
‘Oh it’s beautiful,’ she sighed. ‘I’m not sure I understand it, but I do know poetry when I see it, and I love poetry.’

That’s the true nature of movie stars.

Don’t you see, it’s a fantastic thing, the pure phenomenon of it—boys in bathrooms, soldiers in all the armies of the world, prisoners of every country, all in their bunks at night, masturbating, thinking of you, having wet dreams about you… men making love to their wives, their girl friends, to whores, pretending it’s you. You know how they have those statistics—like there’s a murder in the world every eight seconds, that sort of thing—well, there’s probably not one second passes, day or night, that there isn’t a gallon of sperm discharged in your honor. Spurted out with your insides as the target! Isn’t that incredible? Don’t you feel all that collective desire? All the guys in the world wanting to fuck you? I mean, wow, the vibrations must be fantastic.

That’s the true nature of the pop culture idolatry.
The dream merchants’ empire is the phoniest kingdom in the world.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading Terry Southern because Vonnegut told me to read Terry Southern. Not in a personal, over lunch conversational way, but via an interview in The Vonnegut Statement where he basically stated that Southern was an iconoclast writing in a way that he (Vonnegut) aspired to.

Somewhere in my '20s I picked up a great first edition of this book and happened to read it at exactly the right time in my life. It wasn't the first thing I read by Southern, but it was the best. This is his giant middle finger, spire tall, pointed at the entire Hollywood industry written in a way that the satire sort of drools from the dust jacket. And it works, because Southern's genius is to set the hook and then pull the Reader into ever deeper waters. A large budget Hollywood film using A-list stars to make a full blown porno? Southern knows how to make this play. If you liked the best parts of Easy Rider or Dr. Strangelove then you know he can write dialogue and scene.

I have read everything (that I am aware of) that Southern penned. He is a genius, and looks to be under-read, especially amongst my well read friends. In 2014 I plan on returning to my fave Southern books for another romp through his brilliance - won't you join me?

Thanks, Kurt, for telling me to read this guy. You are a saint.

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terry Southern’s credentials are impressive. He was a founding member of the Paris Review during his ex pat days in Paris after WWII. He wrote an iconic “Beat” novel in the ‘50s. In the 60s, he transformed Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Stangelove into one of the greatest antiwar parodies ever filmed, when Kubrick had initially imagined it as a thriller. Southern is rightly admired as a first rate satirist and a leading American writer of his generation.

Sadly, BLUE MOVIE does not measure up to his best work. The problem is simple and fundamental. It is not very funny. Instead, it is sexually explicit.

In the late 1960s, when Southern wrote BLUE MOVIE, explicit sex was new to mainstream literature in the United States. The courts had only recently struck the obscenity laws that had criminalized explicit sex since the 19th century. In its newness, explicit sex made many readers uncomfortable. It pushed boundaries. It even enjoyed a quality of protestation as it punctured long standing hypocrisies about human sexuality. In that milieu, calling a book like BLUE MOVIE a parody made some sense. It might even be fairly regarded as funny in that the resolution of the tension created by explicit sex resulted in tittering and smiles of embarrassment among audiences.

But that no longer is true. Explicit sex now is boring without a clever story and interesting characters. BLUE MOVIE features neither. It is not more than a two star read today.

[Έρση Λάβαρη · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ήταν ένα από τα πιο παραξενα βιβλία που έχω διαβάσει; Ναι.
Αλλά ήταν από τα καλύτερα πιο παράξενα βιβλία που έχω διαβάσει; Επίσης ναι.

Εν ολίγοις, τι κοινό έχουν ένας πολυβραβευμένος χολιγουντιανός σκηνοθέτης, ένας ενθουσιώδης παραγωγός αμφιλεγόμενων ταινιών, ένας παθιασμένος σεναριογράφος διεθνούς αίγλης και ο κληρονόμος της μεγαλύτερης εταιρίας κινηματογράφου της Αμερικής—αν όχι του κόσμου—στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ʼ60; Εμπλέκονται, άλλοι πρωταγωνιστικά (μάλλον αντιηρωικά) και άλλοι ανταγωνιστικά, στο γύρισμα της πιο αισθησιακής, της πιο προκλητικής, της πιο τολμηρής, της πιο χάι κλας (συγκεκαλυμμένης) ταινίας πορνό που έχει ποτέ επιχειρηθεί, συμπεριλαμβάνοντας στους τίτλους μερικά από τα πιο εντυπωσιακά και περιζήτητα ονόματα του Χόλιγουντ. Με την καταπληκτική του γλώσσα ο Τέρι Σάουθερν καταγράφει κυνικά, σατυρικά και με κλιμακούμενη υπερβολή όλα όσα μπορούν να πάνε σωστά και λάθος σε ό,τι αφορά ένα τέτοιο εγχείρημα, και σκιαγραφεί την πρωτεύουσα του κινηματογράφου ωμά, πορνοδιαστροφικά και πολύ, πολύ εντυπωσιακά.

Η πρώτη μου επαφή με τον Τέρι Σάουθερν και σίγουρα όχι η τελευταία.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tedious. Annoying.

Gave up waiting for it to make me laugh.

DNF.

[Michael Witbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terry Southern may be remembered more for his screenwriting than for his fiction, but Blue Movie has always been a sentimental favorite of mine. The story begins when a very successful and jaded Hollywood director gets the idea of making the ultimate high-class porn movie--with well-known actors, highest quality production values, and no limits on what could be shown. Somewhat to his surprise, a producer named Sid Krassman finds a way to arrange some major financing for the project. What follows is often funny but seldom very subtle. The characters are depthless caricatures bordering on stereotypes. Some of the explicit sex scenes are charming in their way but some others just go on and on in obsessive detail. (I can’t help speculating that Southern's meth use might account for some of that.) The result is a book that is embarrassing even to own. I probably got rid of my first copy partly for that reason.

Why then, when I saw it in Powell’s in the late 90’s, did I buy another one? I don’t know. Possibly because Southern is brilliantly hilarious in short bursts and, overall, the satire is so unflinching and so accurate. And in fact, Blue Movie only seems to be about sex. It’s more about depicting Hollywood culture, which Southern sees as an amalgam of sexism, racism, vulgarity, venality, and monstrous ego. When it was published in 1970, it seems that few of us were really listening. As a broader culture, did we think Southern was just kidding? Did we not want to know or did we not really care? Probably all three played a part. When I bought that new edition at Powell’s, it was as if its message had been completely forgotten. Beginning with a dedication to “the great Stanley K.” and featuring an opening quote from T. S. Eliot, it was a 70’s curiosity that came with a garish new 90’s cover, and it was published by Grove Press, which was itself a famous name long past its glory days.

So what about these days? Well, Southern’s novels are hardly well known, but in the last few years, the racist and sexist aspects of Hollywood have certainly got some widespread attention. So that’s a kind of vindication for him. As for venality, vulgarity and ego, those may hang on a little longer; they’re generally doing well in many parts of the world. Which reminds me that whatever you think of Donald Trump, one thing is certain. If he were a character in a Terry Southern novel, he’d fit right in.

[Baba · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terry Southern, the screenwriter of classic films 'Easy Rider' and 'Barbarella', puts his experience of Hollywood in the 1960s to use in this 1970 published work, that is quite dark, yet is in essence a surprisingly comedic satire on movie making. The world's greatest ever producer decides that the final frontier that needs crossing is a truly explicit 'art' movie with an A-list cast. And with actually quite clever and entertaining prose, Southern writes about what happens when the top professionals / decadents in the business get down to making essentially a pornographic movie, but with all the skill, talent, deceit, drugs etc of a mainstream movie. 5 out of 12.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not nearly as funny or as entertaining as I’d hoped. I did chuckle a few times. The gratuitous sex was fine because that’s essentially what the novel revolves around; however, the underlying messages were actually quite prescient in the current times. Racism, exploitation, interracial difficulties, incest, women’s rights, and power from the perspective of the adult film industry. On the whole just an average read though.

[Paula · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book must have lost a lot of its luster in the 40 years since original publishing. Its really trashy and offensive. That's usually how I like my comedy- but this is over the top, and not funny. It was not burnished by age

A swingin' dick with his gold chains and chest hair showing, grabbing ass and chasing "vag" might have been cool in the 70s, but not all old things will increase in value over time. This book stands the test of time more like melon rind than fine furnishings.

Gives a little reference/framing to 80+ yo Trump "grabbing by the P***" and why its even less okay than I originally thought- this book gave me a little more context than I could stand.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was way more porn with a slight tinge of humor or absurdity than satire with sexual elements. I'm guessing the marketing strategy went something like this: include as much explicit sex as can possibly fit between two covers, but give a lacsivious wink while doing it and call it a satire so intellectuals will feel okay buying it. Yes, there's a "meta" element here, consistent with the "artistry" of the porno at the center of the action, so to speak, but then the joke is on the reader, isn't it?

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Still provocative after 50 years, which means that the shady imbroglio of art and arousal has yet to be dispelled by lights, camera, action. As if the shadows are self-propagating. What do idealists mean when they speak of the aesthetic love of art or the political love of the people? I know it's sublimation, but what if it wasn't? This is by no means a rigorous attempt to do the questions of eros and poesy justice, it's no manifesto for either art or porn, but it is a titillating dose of irreverent ribaldry. Like von Trier's films, you get unmitigated smut AND intellectual fecundation.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

That's a humdinger Harvey Weinstein special, airmailed out in time for our #Metoo inspection, doubt it makes the cut, or is rather cut from reading circ. natch. Still, it quite grabs that era perps an all. And laugh.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

In light of the #metoo movement, the book reads less like satire and more of an X-ray into Hollywood’s inner dysfunction and sexism. Although the book mocks Hollywood, it also disturbingly seems to embrace its dysfunction as well. It’s hard not to feel that the porn element of the book actually exposed dynamics throughout the entire industry, which is based on exploitation, sexism, and a boys’ club mentality that differs in degree, not kind. I’m still taking in what I read. But in such an environment the book exposes that Hollywood is full of 1000s of little Weinsteins waiting in the wings for their big entrance to become sexual predator and “success” within an industry where women are thrown around like chum to massage pathetic egos.

[Bob Fingerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riotously filthy novel about making a porn flick starring A-list mainstream Hollywood talent. Though originally published in 1970, lo these many years later it still manages to have some pretty shocking stuff between its covers. One of those rare novels that had me laughing out loud. Often.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd read and enjoyed Southern's Candy while still a child--not least because it was sexy as well as funny. When Dad bought Blue Movie, I read it as well during the Christmas break from school. Older and more experienced, the parodic sex didn't hold much interest for me any more.

[Rob Rains · Rating 1 out of 5]

Total crap. There is nothing socially relevant or amusing in this book.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I read FLASH AND FILIGREE, Terry Southern’s 1958 debut novel, still in high school, mid or late-mid 90s. It may have been a bit later. I had certainly known about Southern from age thirteen, around the time I read an article in DETAILS magazine (Johnny Depp was on the cover) about William S. Burroughs, the course of my life thereby irrevocably altered. Southern and Burroughs were fairly close. Southern helped get NAKED LUNCH published, advocating for it over in gai Paris. Late 50s. I still own the same copy of the 1992 Grove Weidenfeld paperback of NAKED LUNCH I read in ’93; it has a Terry Southern blurb on the back, praising the novel for savagely eviscerating the contemporary American scene of its day. I certainly saw a number of films that Southern worked on as a writer. Who hasn’t? STRANGELOVE, EASY RIDER, BARBARELLA. I know I saw many interviews with Southern and read bits and pieces of his prose. However, the only novel of his I read back in late youth was that first one, FLASH & FILIGREE, and I remember it combining elements from Beckett and Nabakov, but also very clearly suggesting something not unlike the Shape of Things to Come (from the standpoint of '58). Though I read it a good while back, I have had repeated cause to think about FLASH AND FILIGREE since #MeToo broke two years ago this very month. You see, there is a chapter in the novel that depicts a date rape. The passage is nasty and unsettling, perhaps all the more for being played as comedy. It is common to trace the origins of the so-called Sexual Revolution to the 1960s. The transformation of the American sensibility as regards sex and sexuality coincides with the aftermath of Alfred Kinsey’s breakthrough studies and the massive generational schism that turned the 1960s into a Cultural War Zone at the level of lifestyle and politics. It has not been uncommon over the course of subsequent decades to hear jaded feminists complain that the Sexual Revolution was little more that a matter of "hip" dudes conspiring to get regularly laid. My read is, quite simply, that there is a great deal of truth to this complaint. Take the date rape in FLASH AND FILIGREE. The comedic element, as I recall it, relates to the amount of pressure a young man has to apply, cajoling and literally forcing himself upon a young woman, so that she can break through her hangups and give herself over to the experience. The implication is that young women are socialized in such a way that a certain amount of force is required so that they break out of their restrictive programming. One imagines that a lot of young women would have disagreed with this, countering that matters are hardly as simple as all that. Glib counterculture bros were no doubt liable to call such women repressed, uptight, no goddamn fun, and doubtlessly worse. I consider the date rape in FLASH AND FILIGREE worthy of consideration precisely because I see how it foresees so much of what would become the asymmetric, predatory, and often insipid sexual politics of the 1960s and beyond, especially as evidenced in the art, public statement, and shady behaviour of men younger than Mr. Southern, basically men of the subsequent generation. Southern was born in 1924. He belongs to what was often called the Greatest Generation, and this is attested to above all by the fact that he was old enough to fight in the Second World War and did so. In preparing to review his 1970 novel BLUE MOVIE, I began to consider the countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s within the context of the birth dates of a whole bunch of people. William S. Burroughs was born in 1914 and notoriously already presented as a weird old man whilst still a teenager. My grandfathers were born in 1918 and 1919 respectively, and both fought for Canada in the Second World War. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922, about two years before Terry Southern, and Allen Ginsberg in 1926, about two years after. The Beat Generation, precursor to the hippies and the Yippies, was essentially Greatest Generation. If Texan-by-birth Terry Southern was never considered an Official Beat, he was part of the general cohort. Now, take the Yippies. The main movers were Abbie Hoffman (born 1936) and Jerry Rubin (born 1938). My best friend, Paul Solomon, who died this past summer and who was about forty years older than me, was a pallbearer at Rubin’s funeral. Paul was born in December of 1940, a few days after Phil Ochs (famous protest singer and Yippie fellow traveller). Paul Solomon died in Palm Springs a couple days apart from Paul Krassner, noted counterculture satirist and Yippie fellow traveller. Krassner died not only within a week of my friend but a couple towns over in Desert Hot Springs. All these dudes were so-called Silent Generation. My parents were born in 1950, pure products of the Baby Boom, a decade after my friend; they were eighteen years old in August of 1968, when shit went completely sideways at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, leading to the insane political theatre of the trial of the Chicago Seven (Hoffman, Rubin, et al.). The Yippie guys, you will note, were generally born about a decade after the Beat guys, still a little too old to be considered products of the Baby Boom (they were born just before the Big War). It’s even a little more complicated than that. Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. Or, alternatively, Fucking, Drugs, and the Fugs. The Fugs were a very great rock band led by two brilliant poets who gleefully satirized the culture at large, got up to lots of wildness, and hung with the Yippies. The two principal Fugs were Ed Sanders, born in 1936, and Tuli Kupferberg, who was born in 1923, wedged between Kerouac and Terry Southern. Tuli made an unbilled appearance in Ginsberg’s “Howl” and some of his writing was included in a Beat Generation primer I cherished as a youngster. Okay, okay. This is an outrageously long preamble. I’m gonna try ’n' extricate myself. My best friend, Paul Solomon, 1940-2019, did a lot of soul searching right after #MeToo broke two years ago. I’ve done some personal inventory myself. And a whole lot of thinking. A lot of that thinking has been directed at the counterculture I always lionized and pertains to what I now see as a general misogyny endemic to it, though it is not a simple, cut-and-dry Boogeyman misogyny. Terry Southern’s FLASH AND FILIGREE date rape underlies so much of the Gestalt, the Yippie thing, the 60s, et cetera. Paul Krassner was a bit of a pig. So were Hoffman and Rubin. It’s not just about shady dudes, it’s about a whole compromised milieu. I look back now at Brain De Palma’s amazing counterculture comedies GREETINGS (1968) and HIGH, MOM! (1970), and though I still love them, I consider the ways in which they represent the underlying misogyny of a milieu and an (inter)generational countercultural Geist. Great artists, radicals on the cusp, remapping the cultural landscape, upending the established order to an unprecedented degree. Yes. But also … sort of … frat boys. (I note also that De Palma was born about two months before my good friend Paul Solomon.) A long preamble. But this is the sate of mind I bring to BLUE MOVIE, Southern’s exuberantly profane carnivalesque novel about the making of history’s most expensive and most doomed (fictional) stag movie. The novel starts at a party. A Hollywood party. At a “monstro hacienda.” The seventy-eight-pound four-foot-nine-inch hostess is Teeny Marie, her real given name actually Tina. Teeny lost her hair to infirmity as a child, her breasts later to cancer, a leg in an automobile accident, and her right eye during a “dart-fight” in a Soho pub. Her mouth, however, is “one hundred percent true, pure, and all her,” her lips resembling Rita Hayworth’s or maybe “a composite of Hayley Mills and Muhammad Ali.” Also in attendance at the party: 1) Sid Krassman, “a hairy, chunklike man,” professionally (if you can call it that) “a curious kind of opportunistic film producer …”; 2) Les Harrison, “handsome, forty-three-year-old vice-prez of Metropolitan pix, whose father more or less owned the studio” ... Les is often called (fittingly) the Rat-Prick; 3) Boris Adrian, only thirty-five, a noted director deep into a prolonged hiatus —“‘Boris,’ 'B.,’ ‘King B.,” as he was variously known […] the best in the biz. Of his last ten films, seven had won the Golden Lion at Cannes (sic), the Golden Palm at Venice (sic), and whatever festive and critical acclaim one might think of. Besides this they were all smash at the box.” Boris will be the prime mover, the ardent auteur, the man who finagles the others both wittingly and unwittingly into making the All Time Monstro Stag Film. Boris’s films all focus on what the director himself deems the Big Three topics, namely Death, Infinity, and the Origin of Time. Some moral simpletons in the sticks deem them no better than pornography. Boris is no longer sure he disagrees. “In the idleness of the past two years he had sat still for the showing of several so-called stag-films, and had found them so pathetically disgusting, so wholly lacking in either eroticism or conscious humor that now he occasionally wondered if this wasn’t, in a deeper sense, true of his own work.” Boris represents that younger cohort then currently taking over Hollywood. Flops like Liz Taylor in CLEOPATRA have nearly bankrupted the studios yet EASY RIDER does boffo. What the fuck, man? All bets are off. Studios are writing blank checks to crazy hippies. A new, daffy permissivity. No Man’s Land. Teeny Marie’s party features a live sex show with the audience on the other side of a two way mirror, a kind of semi-cinematograph scenario. A threesome. Two girls (teenagers) and a guys (not a teenager). The fucking is miked, amplified way loud, super high tech. Sid: “The sound of teeny-bopper pussy! There’s no other sound like it!” A certain kind of masculinity is being mocked, satirized to an extent, but you know guys talked like that in these circles. Boris pitches Sid, tells him he wants to make a genuinely beautiful and artful film depicting all manner of sex acts, raw and true, but heavy on the aesthetics, something really grand and special. Sid thinks Boris is nuts. At first. He actually comes around pretty quick, aware of the imperatives of “your ever-lovin’ audience appeal.” Sid in fact gets it all arranged, sort of sub rosa, pretty shady. He sets things up with Al Weintraub, friend of Liechtenstein’s Minister of Finance. Liechtenstein is hungry for tourism dollars. The small country will bankroll the film, to the tune of Three Mil, provided they have sole rights over exhibition, the idea being that wealthy folks will have to travel to Liechtenstein to watch the famous actors and actresses copulate in every conceivable fashion. Boris and Sid land Angela Sterling, née Helen Brown, twenty-four-year-old starlet, highest paid in the history of Hollywood, box office traction second to none. She is insecure and wants to be taken seriously. She will appear as a nympho with a yen for black guys. Cue: twenty-five very black Senegalese men. Boris and Sid also land Arabella, French film star, infamous lesbian. She is excited to relieve her childhood fling with a female cousin. She also agrees to reenact a rape at the hands of her uncle, provided they find a double for actual penetration. A celebrated screenwriter is brought in. He is “Tony Sanders, the hot-shot writer from New York.” Tony Sanders, of course, shares initials with Terry Southern. Tony comes up with the idea of combining the prospective vignettes “Idyllic” and “Incestuous,” he harbouring long-nurtured fantasies about sibling-on-sibling action. Two celebrity siblings, a brother and sister very much products of their time, prove game. Tone’s idea for “Profane”: a priest corners a young woman (existentialist) and in undressing her discovers that she is so entirely made up of prostheses and fake parts that there is in fact no actual person there. Oh, of course, Teeny Marie! The reduction of the female to component parts (with nobody really home) tells us about a particular sensibility. Et cetera, et cetera. The studio heads are hoodwinked but ultimately fly in and get wise. Things come to a head. Angela Sterling, high as a kite on designer speed, crashes hard and opts for the Big Sleep. Prize starlet no longer a going concern, the previously outraged Les Harrison and père decide that maybe Boris’s hardcore opus is their best opportunity to cash out. But not so fast! The other shoe drops, as it is destined to do. “Hollywood weirdies joined in pitched battle with the freaks from the Holy See […] the halls rang with a conglomeration of earthly obscenities and curious biblical anathema.” If there was ever any doubt, the novel asserts its status as jape by ending on a pretty darn funny punchline (in the form of read-between-the-lines news article out of Vatican City.) BLUE MOVIE is definitely a kind of frat boy comedy, characteristic of the sort of masculanist tunnel vision I addressed in my preamble, but you cannot deny that it has some teeth. There is lots of choice vernacular that grounds it in its moment. It exists perhaps somewhat prophetically before the era of sanctioned hardcore (the emergence of which is the subject of a popular ongoing HBO show of which y’all’s no doubt aware), but a year after Jess Franco’s 99 WOMEN, a film featuring rape, unsimulated sex, and a number of actors imported from Hollywood, though none of them called upon to do the nitty-gritty work. Just as with the date rape in FLASH AND FILIGREE, women are routinely exploited with great cruelty in BLUE MOVIE, consent enforced, all in the name of dark comedy and blistering satire. The experiences of these women are not acknowledged as internalized experiences of lived trauma, the real legacy of the kinds of mendacities depicted, though I don’t think there can be any doubting that Southern understands the death of the movie’s biggest star by her own hand as the consummation of a campaign of subjection engineered by loathsome men. The book represents systems and structures germane to mass-produced culture in an age experimenting sloppily with the casting aside of taboos but retaining the old systems and pathologies. It comes from and concerns itself with pervasive misogyny (oh, and racism) but there can be no denying its critical edge. When Southern, on the back of that paperback I’ve had since I was thirteen, says of NAKED LUNCH that Burroughs’ novel constitutes a “devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in American life: the abuse of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy,” I suspect he is telling us a great deal about his own M.O. as well. He presents the film bizz as literally a necrophiliac vampire. But I do have to wonder if he every did gain enough perspective to comprehend the scale of he and his friends’ complicity. It's hardly clear.

[Sophia · Rating 1 out of 5]

B.R.A.CE. 2020 Δεν μου συμβαίνει συχνά, αλλά τούτο το βιβλίο δεν θα το πρότεινα σε κάποιον ( ίσως μόνο σε κάποιον που θα τον χαρακτήριζα, εγώ προσωπικά, ως κάφρο ).
Αυτά παθαίνεις άμα πας στο παζάρι του βιβλίου, το βλέπεις, διαβάζεις το οπισθόφυλλο, το βρίσκεις ενδιαφέρον, ψηλοκοιτάς τις κριτικές βλέπεις καλό μέσο όρο, σκέφτεσαι "λες να πέτυχα διαμαντάκι;", κοστίζει και 2 ευρώ, και τελικά σου βγαίνει λιγότερο κι από κάρβουνο...

Ας πούμε ότι μπορώ να καταλάβω γιατί είχε "σουξέ" στα 70'ς και γιατί το θεωρούσε ο κόσμος χιουμοριστικό και σατιρικό τότε, αλλά πραγματικά στην σημερινή εποχή, ειδικά με το #metoo κίνημα και το τόσο political correct αδυνατώ να το καταλάβω. Ακόμα κι αν το δω σαν αναφορά στις συμπεριφορές της βιομηχανίας του Hollywood εκείνης (;) της εποχής, πάλι υπάρχει μία δυσκολία να το αποδεχτώ ως οτιδήποτε.

Θα ήθελα να είναι ένα άλλο βιβλίο...

[Thomas Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not great but not bad, a ‘State And Main’-style romp thru a touchy subject or 12. At times insightful when dealing with obvious systemic problems in the Hollywood system of past and present, and at times completely lead-brained, racist and sexist, whether it’s ’of its time’ or not. Not for the faint of heart, mostly useful in a clinical sense. Good for Terry in that he wasn’t afraid to skewer either the movie industry OR the Catholic Church. Everybody gets the crosshairs in this one. Occasionally internally chuckle-inducing but not funny as in funny haha. Wouldn’t recommend for most readers, except for completists, counter-culture nerds (Vonnegut, Bukowski, Brautigan honks, etc.), movie industry fetishists, and uh, certain kinds of sex-likers. What certain kinds of sex-likers? I’ll have to get back to you.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably the breeziest 2-star review I’ll ever give. I read this in one sitting! Some of this was entertaining but it mostly had nothing to say. Not vulgar or subversive enough to be really transgressive, and I mostly got the gist of its satire 50 pages in. Also “cooze.” Nobody ever say “cooze” ever again, please?

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Raunchy and funny as hell. They don't (can't) write em like this anymore.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an insane novel.

[Jack Herbert Christal Gattanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 out of 5 stars (Parental advisory sticker on this review)

What kind of sensibility courses through the veins of Blue Movie?

Example of some of Terry Southern's writing, explaining that which comes if actors and crew are kept in the same hotel during a film shoot:

"It is classic Hollywood protocol that the actors be quartered separately from the technicians ("apes" or "gorillas" as they are affectionately called) - allegedly in apprehension of the leading lady being gang-banged to death by a raving horde of drunken grips and gadders, thus seriously jeopardizing the pics all important completion date."

This is also the kind of scathing, take-no-prisoners sensibility that had me often laughing, loudly, while reading this book. It's got a wild motley lot of characters (actually I should say "Characters" with a capital C), including a short gal missing a leg and an eye but man what a mouth; a world-class director nick-named "King B" who wants to make the first mainstream, Hollywood produced (though funded in part by clandestine Church money) skin-flick; the famous star Angela Sterling who wants to do something serious and has even gone the route of Marilyn Monroe to go to an acting school, only to, y'know, be caught among four strapping African fellows who are 'at attention' at the bed in a scene to put it mildly; and Tony, or 'Tone', who just can't keep getting enough of coming up with new scenarios for his "script", including an incest fantasy made real - and "cool, like, dig man" - between two Hollywood teen sweethearts.

This is dangerous stuff, in other words, and I doubt I'll ever see it in many bookstores in the midwest - yes, even today, some 40 plus years since publication. Practically all of the characters are self-centered assholes, degenerates, even Boris becomes engulfed in the mania and he seems to be the sane(ish) one. This is the sort of hot-potato where you get this kind of contemplation: "Are you one-hunnert percent sure that broad is 18? I mean, I don't want to get hit with no fucking Mann Act and not even get laid! Jees!"

It's fucking crazy some of it - necrophilia and incest included. But Southern never stops to not try for a laugh, whether it's with his outrageous characters and their completely warped logic (if they aren't warped then they're doped up or just going batty like the producer Sid Krassman), or in his descriptions which can often be so funny because it's rather dead-pan descriptions of such debauchery.

I might just bump it to a 4 1/2 star rating just because it's one of the more entertaining "how to make a movie" books I've come across. Only things keeping it down are when the characters break into kinda 'too-much' imitations at times... though even here, Southern has the balls (or just ingenuity) to have a character make a Strangelove reference - this, his most infamous creation! I read it in three days and I'm glad I did, a howler, a "WTF"-er, and it is definitely not for the squeamish. Another plus is being able to deftly skewer hippie culture and the Hollywood elite, but not exactly in a way where he is saying they're evil or... ok, some of them are. Did I mention the necrophilia part?

Think wild Wolf of Wall St satire meets Ed Wood commentary (or uh Shadow of the Vampire if you need a genius director for comparison) if you need a simpler by-line.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boris Adrian, King B, the world's greatest film director, winner of all the major awards and maker of movies about only the loftiest of themes, the "Big Three" of "Death...Infinity...and the Origin of Time", decides he wants to make an artistic skin flick.

Sid Krassman is the, well, crass, foul-mouthed, stereotypical Jewish producer who arranges for the film to be shot away from the prying eyes of the Hollywood studio bosses in the tiny european principality of Liechtenstein. He also has a charming number of sobriquets for women, ranging from "great piece of ass", "cunt", or -if a young actress- "startlet cooze".

On the cover blurb a Norman Mailer quote salutes Southern for how he writes a "mean, cooly deliberate, and murderous prose". Not in this book he doesn't. Here he writes a juvenile, sweatily slipshod, and onomastic prose.

I admit, I had read this once before when I had just turned twenty and enjoyed it then, not so much in spite of its coarsenesses but because of them. Like I said, I was twenty.

But that's the trouble with a grown man writing a book like this - I fail to see how he can think other grown men could enjoy it. It's dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, who King B is clearly based on, yet he and Sid Krassman think and behave like the crudest of frat boys, not like artists trying to pay tribute to sexuality via cinema.

Typical dialogue example:

(producer asks the director if he has slept with the leading lady)
"She's lez Sid - you know that."
"She's lez, she's lez," Sid's exasperation exploded. "She's got a cunt, ain't she?!? I mean, down there between her legs, there's a hole, right?!?"

Ironically, many years after this childish catalogue of Hollywood-insider sexual fantasies inexplicably found print, Stanley Kubrick did indeed make his attempt to shoot a high brow porno movie, Eye Wide Shut.

Now that, albeit inadvertently, really was funny!

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conceived in 1970 as a work of outré fiction, Blue Movie is an exercise in sexual saturation, reaching for the outer limits of erotic imagination. Lucky for him, Terry Southern did not live to see how far his Blue Movie has been left behind by the real world of actual movie-industry creeps the book satirizes.

[Desi Kovacs · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t bother. I’ll never get those 8 hours of my life back.

[Gregor Xane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty dated, but raunchy and fun.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this mostly because I noticed that Liechtenstein was included in the list of neglected countries in the ”Around the Year in 52 Books” group map thread, with no ATY group members having reported reading a book that was set there. Liechtenstein is my favorite country in the whole world so I felt honor-bound to correct this omission. It was a bit of a challenge to find books set in Liechtenstein. There’s one about soccer (yawn) and an out-of-print folk-tale about a cow (ridiculously expensive), but most of the books I found were guidebooks (short ones, given how small the country is) or books featuring multiple micro-states rather than just Liechtenstein. This one came up when I did a search in the iBook store. It piqued my interest because the author was co-writer on the script for Dr. Strangelove, which I adore, and the premise of the book is wonderfully absurd, i.e. a satire in which an auteur who bears a striking resemblance to Stanley Kubrick decides to make an “artistic” big-budget X-rated movie featuring explicit sex scenes with big-name stars, filmed in and partly financed by the country of Liechtenstein as a way of increasing tourism. It was not as brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny as the five star reviewers would have you believe, nor was it as entirely lacking in merit as the one star reviewers would have you believe. I found it mildly entertaining, but not as good as I hoped it would be. It is designed to be offensive and is very pornographic, with blatant misogyny, racism, and homophobia. I’d advise anyone who is easily offended to stay away from this one and, if you really want to read something set in Liechtenstein, check out the one about their soccer team instead. Or see if you can find a reasonably priced copy of the folk-tale about a cow.

[Nick Padula · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda feels like if Kurt Vonnegut and Boogie Nights had a weird literary baby. It reminded me of Palahniuk’s SNUFF, and not just because they’re both satirical novels involving the porn industry! The characters and absurdist story in each had similar vibes. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as the previous three things/people I mentioned. A lot of what would have been considered shocking back in the seventies is pretty dull by today’s crazy sex standards. I was reading segments where someone back then might have exclaimed “Oh my stars! This crass literature is making me blush! I never done read nothin’ like this before, no sir!” at. My response was more like “I’m reading porn right now. Wacky porn is happening in this book right in front of me. Is this supposed to be funny? Where’s the satire? There’s way more porn than satire! I was told there’s be satire!” There was actually a little satire, but not enough!

There’s some elements of this that aged like fine rancid chunky milk. I know it’s a product of its time, but the sixties weren’t THAT long ago!

Would have loved to see what ol’ Stan Kubrick would have done if he was able to adapt this like he wanted to. It probably could have been the proto-Boogie Nights! What an interesting alternate reality that would be!

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book to like, but I suppose that's the point. Sometimes I think we have moved into a post-satire age, because so many otherwise intelligent people take offense at things that -- to me at least -- are clearly intended as sharp-edged satire. Blue Movie challenges that notion by walking the line between the kind of smut one might find in a locker room in hell and outrageous characters who, surely, cannot be taken seriously. But the attitudes under relentless attack here are a little blurry. It's not aimed at hypocritical puritans because the sex here is hideous by most civilized standards and, by the end of the book, the excess is lethal. The point seems to be that crass exploitation and commercialized eros are dehumanizing unto death but there is also a fair amount of leering and winking, inviting the reader to join the party. It's like the worst excesses of the old National Lampoon or some of the lesser shock comics of the 80s and 90s, never really very funny at all and only marginally entertaining.