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this film? So I saw
Liberty's Booty,
and I thought, "Oh, no, there's still room for what I want to do." I had the same experience with Bette Gordon's
Variety
[1984] and with
Broken Mirrors
.
MacDonald:
One thing that seems different about
Working Girls
is your openness about what goes on in the bedroom.
Borden:
One of the reasons I felt it was really important to go into the bedroom in
Working Girls
was to demystify what happens. So often, movies about prostitution stop before you get to see what actually goes on. In
Broken Mirrors,
all you see is the man's back approaching a woman. Then it cuts to the next scene where she looks bruised and battered, and you wonder, what on earth did he do? Vivienne didn't really deal with the act itself in
Liberty's Booty,
either.
Crimes of Passion
[1984] did a little bit, which was what I found interesting about it. That part seemed exaggerated, but real.
Klute
[1971], a tiny bit.
Sessions
[1983] with Veronica Hamill a little bit. But not enough really.
In the bedroom I wanted to focus on the economics of prostitution, as the economics work out
visually
in this ritualistic exchange of goods: the condom, the exchange of money, putting the sheets on the bed. These ritual elements also have implications for other activities that women and men engage in normally. How many times has a husband stood in a room as his wife was throwing a sheet on the bed or getting him a drink or doing something to control the mechanics of sex or birth control? I meant for the things you see in the film to have a reference to standard married life, or singles bars, to any sexual situation which involves a code whereby women are treating men in very routinized ways.
There are some things I doubt men ever see: a woman lying on the floor putting in the diaphragm or washing blood out of it. I'd always been curious about how a prostitute deals with periods. And the issue of hygiene was interesting. A prostitute is constantly washing all these men off, gargling with Listerine and brushing her teeth. Those were the things that fascinated me.
The demystification of sex was important for me in relation to the male audience. But I felt that an informative look at it would also desexualize it for the women. I wanted to show women that, no, these rituals aren't really about sex. When I was interviewing actresses, I talked to them about prostitution, and I wouldn't even give them a reading if they gave me a really judgmental answer: "How can you spread your legs for anyone but someone you love?"that kind of thing. And I made all the women go to real houses and apply for a job. They'd come to rehearsals dressed like conventional street hookers! I made them go to real places and see how people dressed. They came back very chastened, realizing that all these girls looked like their college roommates. The madams were just like the women who would hire