You never forget your first visit to Café Flesh. Mine took place in June 1986: it was a month before my 15th birthday and I was spending Saturday afternoon, as I often did, at the notorious Scala cinema in tawdry, pre-gentrified King’s Cross. I don’t know which staff member thought it appropriate to allow an acne-peppered child in to see the post-apocalyptic sex fantasy Café Flesh – in a double-bill with the equally explicit hardcore horror-comedy Thundercrack! – but I’m glad they did.
When I emerged blinking into the early evening sunlight, I had witnessed sights that few 14-year-olds could have imagined. The movie is set in a desolate future where “the Nuclear Kiss” has left 99% of the population unable to enjoy intimacy without becoming nauseous. These are the Sex Negatives. The remaining 1%, known as Sex Positives, are forced to perform for the chaste, dead-eyed masses. They grind away joylessly on stage to a jazzy but sinister electronic score by Mitchell Froom, who went on to be a producer for Paul McCartney, Crowded House and Suzanne Vega (to whom he was briefly married).
The film’s on-stage performances, featuring real sex, play like radioactive mutations of porn cliche. A bored housewife has sex with a milkman, except that here he is dressed as a rat, complete with snout and obscenely swishing tail. In another scene, a secretary is mounted on the desk by her boss, who happens to have a giant yellow pencil in place of a head. Debbie Does Dallas this is not. A twisted masterpiece it may well be.
Porn audiences in the US loathed the film during its initial run in 1982. But once it transferred a year later to the midnight movie circuit – the same place that had made hits of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead – it really found its people. Hunter S Thompson loved it, as did Frank Zappa. It later influenced the artist Dinos Chapman and the horror maestro Rob Zombie. Vera Drew, award-winning director of The People’s Joker, recently confessed: “I will be rewatching this movie (and probably ripping it off) for the rest of my life.” Who can blame her? The film’s production design is slick and debased, gleaming and corroded, wreathed in smoke and style. It blends a 1980s ad-agency gloss with 1950s Americana, as well as an atmosphere of nuclear dread applicable to both decades.
With the movie about to re-emerge in a new restored print, I email its director Stephen Sayadian. To avoid potential prosecution, he was listed in the credits of Café Flesh as Rinse Dream, a pseudonym suggested by his co-writer, Jerry Stahl, who is billed as Herbert W Day (the name of Stahl’s most despised primary school teacher). Sayadian, now 71, is amused to learn that I witnessed his warped vision at such a tender age. “Next to you, I’m a passenger on the Good Ship Lollipop,” he says.
The allusion to Shirley Temple and the golden age of Hollywood is typical of him. When we connect via video call a few days later, the director, who sports a crown of wild silver hair, is speaking from the office in his Chicago home; the walls around him are papered with a floor-to-ceiling collage, painstakingly applied by hand, of cultural icons dating back to the silent film era. Café Flesh pays homage to Guys and Dolls, Cabaret and the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon. “The structure of pornography is the same as the old musicals,” Sayadian says. “You’d have scenes punctuated by musical numbers that weren’t necessarily related: it was Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show.” Nothing like the one in Café Flesh, that’s for sure.
Stahl, who went on to write for TV series such as Moonlighting and the alien sitcom ALF, and later had his Hollywood addiction memoir Permanent Midnight adapted into a film starring Ben Stiller, has described Café Flesh as a “fuck you” to pornography. Sayadian saw it more as a cinematic calling card: a chance to parlay his reputation as a supreme visual stylist into a film career.
Since the mid-1970s, Sayadian had worked at the counter-cultural porn magazine Hustler, where the owner Larry Flynt gave him carte blanche to create elaborate spoof ads. Among his best was the savage, double-page big-tobacco parody showing a hospital ward full of Marlboro cowboys in iron lungs, or the witty Dunkin’ Dildos, in which sex toys were laid out like doughnuts.
After leaving Hustler, setting up his own studio and designing posters for movies including The Fog and Dressed to Kill, Sayadian was offered the chance by a porn company to move into film-making. His first effort, the stylishly kinky Nightdreams, was financed with the loose change from peep shows; its entire $60,000 budget came in the form of socks full of quarters. Café Flesh was more ambitious. Shot over 10 days for $90,000 – paper money, this time – it allowed Sayadian’s imagination full reign.
What did the porn performers think of his outlandish ideas, such as the pencil-headed boss and the rodent milkman? “This was all so new to them, they couldn’t believe it,” he laughs. His technique of cutting abruptly from fully clothed wide shots to explicit closeups was also unconventional. “I wanted to get the sex over with as quickly as possible. Whenever the actors got passionate, I’d stop the take and start again. I thought: if this is a future where they’re being forced to do it, maybe they wouldn’t enjoy it any more.” That’s the one thing he would change about the film if he could. “I’d make it more erotic. Those scenes are really a trudge to get through.”
Jane Giles, who co-directed last year’s hit documentary Scala!!!, begs to differ. She saw Café Flesh as an audience member, then became the Scala’s programmer in 1988 and helped make it one of the cinema’s most frequently screened films. “After that first run in 1986, it was withdrawn from exhibition because local councils were getting queasy about showing films that didn’t have BBFC certificates,” she recalls. “Then when Camden council agreed for the first time in years to let the Scala show it again, there were queues around the block. I think it’s a really sexy film. There’s one character who’s a newcomer to sex. She’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is great!’ That was how I felt as a horny teenager. You discover sex and you think, ‘I want to keep doing this for ever!’”
When the film’s financiers saw what Sayadian had made, they were aghast. “They hadn’t read the script,” he says. “My favourite comment was: ‘It’s like you took a perfect pair of breasts and wrapped them in a barbed wire bra.’” Café Flesh lasted less than a week at California’s Pussycat chain of adult cinemas before being pulled. “The movie theatres were asking: ‘What did you do to us?’ Customers were demanding their money back.”
Perhaps they took umbrage at their on-screen portrayal. Every sex scene includes cutaways to the crowd of pallid Sex Negatives gawping at pleasures they can no longer experience first-hand. It’s quite the buzz-kill. “Some of those extras came from scouring methadone clinics,” he says. “We’d drag people up to my studio and pay them $30 for 30 seconds’ filming.”
As well as serving as a commentary on porn and voyeurism, Café Flesh distils the obsessions of its era, from 1950s nostalgia (seen in other 1980s films such as Blue Velvet, Parents and Back to the Future) to nuclear terror and Aids. “When Jerry and I began writing the script, the word ‘Aids’ didn’t exist,” says Sayadian. “Then people started talking about a ‘gay plague’. I knew this was an infection everyone was going to be vulnerable to, and I saw how it could work as part of the film. I even wanted to include a boy-boy scene but that was a no-no in heterosexual porn. The other one back then was African American performers. The racism, sexism and homophobia was really something. Porn is the most conservative business I was ever in.”
The revelation for me seeing Café Flesh again for the first time in nearly 40 years is that it isn’t a porn film at all. As Danny Peary, author of the Cult Movies books, has written: “It is the rare XXX-rated film where graphic sex is not gratuitous, but necessary to the plot.” In that way, it feels perfectly in tune with the modern explicitness of Stranger By the Lake, Théo & Hugo and the cheerfully transgressive work of Bruce LaBruce. Giles is glad to see the film back again but hesitates when I ask how she thinks it will go down with audiences today. “I’m sure they’ll be surprised by all the big hairy muffs,” she says.
Café Flesh is screening at the ICA cinema, London, on 29 March.
Source: theguardian.com
