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Okay, let's talk about the thing Shobhit and I did Saturday evening that sounds wild but really wasn't!
What sounds wild: we went to Northwest Film Forum for a theatrical screening of a feature length gay porn film from 1984. It was called
Daddy Dearest, and yes, it featured a ton of real, on-screen gay sex.
The runtime was 72 minutes. To me, that's long enough to call it "feature length." Disney released many animated features theatrically that ran 70-75 minutes, so I used that as a reference point. Who knew there was any logical way to compare a Disney Animated Feature with gay porn? Someone call Bob Iger, I'm sure he'd love this!
Here's hat really wasn't wild: the movie itself. First off, I have never been so bored watching gay porn in all my life. Nor have I nodded off so many times while watching gay porn. I literally nodded off in nearly every scene, which was quite vanilla by contemporary porn standards, and wildly repetitive. It was probably deeply stimulating to viewers in 1984, I suppose. But we are not living in 1984 now, are we?
So why the theatrical presentation, then? A very good question. There's the
40th anniversary element, I guess—although the film is copyrighted 1984. And there was a modestly academic contextualization to the screening, as it very much underscored the vast difference between porn production forty years ago, which involved staging and lighting crews, versus today which is largely DIY with mobile phone cameras. I will say this much for
Daddy Dearest: it's very artfully shot, and not just by porn standards.
The film also had some scripted lines, much of which were genuinely hilarious—another part of the "fun" of this theatrical presentation. At least three times, I laughed very hard. The thing is, while I won't say I think all the sex should have been taken out, the presentation would have been much more effective and entertaining if the sex stuff, which was unbearably dull and repetitive, had been edited down significantly, and much more focus on the cornball script aspects.
Even from a porn standpoint, though, something else really made the film less effective than it should be: no original sound was used at all. 95% of the time there was any dialogue, it was done as overdub in post (what is often referred to today as "ADR"), with any characters onscreen not even showing their faces to the camera. I can think of maybe two instances of dialogue actually matching someone's lips on camera, and even that was very obviously overdubbed later. And crucially, none of this even refers to the sex that dominates the film's runtime, during which there is no ambient sound at all—it's merely scored with an original jazz composition. The music is good, admittedly, but if I'm watching porn, I want to hear what I am actually seeing, otherwise I might as well just be listening to a podcast or something. Porn with no original sound does nothing for me.
I couldn't really tell you how much the film actually titillated anyone else in the audience, though I felt like I was the only one looking around to clock other reactions. Some people there actually seemed to watching with real intellectual engagement. That part, I
did think was kind of wild.
Shobhit did not seem to understand what the expectations were either. We had wine before we left home, and I saw him pop a pill before taking a sip from his wine glass. "Did you just take a pill?" I asked. "You do realize there won't be any sexual activity at this event, right?" I think he was a little too conditioned by things like the nude event we went to at C.C.'s a few weeks ago, which was a very different context. And as it happens, I actually went to the HUMP! film festival of local porn several years ago, so I actually have some experience with theatrical screenings of actual porn, which is a definitively nonsexual affair, setting aside what's actually onscreen.
Still, he made an inference when we got there an hour early, thinking we'd need to in order to get good seats. I found it deeply embarrassing. He asked the guy, "Where are the best seats? In the middle, or in the very back haha?"
I couldn't help but browse the many trinkets and knick knacks and brochures and pamphlets around the lobby, as a kind of evasive measure. I heard the guy say to Shobhit, "If anyone gets too excited, they will be asked to leave." Shobhit then shifted to more professional discussions of what kinds of programming they show there and if they have any connection to SAG-AFTRA.
We found seats maybe six rows from the back, in the relatively small theater, which seated something like a hundred. We were first in, but a few others came shortly after. The crowd didn't really start pouring in until maybe twenty minutes before showtime.
The guy who introduced the film before the screening started did address a few things very pertinent to what I've shared so far. The first thing he said was, "Just to make sure: you're all here to watch porn, right?" He said some previous screenings have had people leave the movie confused, clearly not understanding that this was straight up porn. "They did stay and watch the whole thing though," he said, indicating that if nothing else, even those confused didn't hate it or weren't exactly offended.
Then he addressed the other thing. "While I love public sex of all kinds," he said, "if you get excited, Steamworks is down the street." He gave a couple other examples of alternative places people could go. He then said, "We had an incident last week." Oh, interesting. Clearly that person had been asked to leave.
After the movie, there was a Q&A, which was the reason Shobhit and I chose this particular showtime—and was actually what made it even remotely interesting to me. I wasn't fully up on the context of the Q&A and assumed it had to do with the historical context of
Daddy Dearest. The guy who had introduced the film moderated, and asked questions of a guy named SeattleDad, a husky middle-aged man with a beard (all things that made him not my particular type) who, we learned during the Q&A, has had his own OnlyFans account since 2017, and has been starring in self-produced porn for twenty years.
Some of the discussion did touch on the historical context of the film we had watched, and how much porn production has changed (which is a radical amount) since 1984, and particularly after game-changers that include VHS home video, the advent of the Internet, and then porn hosting sites like OnlyFans. Particularly once questions were extended to the audience, much of the discussion centered around SeattleDad's experience with making a living at porn, particularly how he transitioned to it full-time and quit his regular day job. And by the way, I did not need to hear it from SeattleDad to know that although you can do it if, as he put it, "you put your mind do it," but it's an incredible amount of work. To me it sounds exhausting. And why make having sex itself something that is literally work? I truly don't see the appeal, but for some people, they make it work and they actually enjoy it. And I am grateful such people exist!
So: am I glad I went to this screening and Q&A? "Glad" is a strong word. I don't regret it. But the film itself was so boring so much of the time, I would not want to watch that long a porn film in a theatrical setting again. Porn is meant to be watched at home with the kind of privacy that allows for, you know, other concurrent pursuits.
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So how about the rest of my weekend? Believe it or not, that screening Saturday night was only half of the notable things that occurred that day, the first being Afternoon Tea at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel with Shobhit and Alexia—but I already posted about that specifically
yesterday, a smart move given everything else I have to cover in today's post.
The other days of my weekend very much involved Laney. On Friday we went to see
Death of a Unicorn right after I left work slightly early. We both went in with low expectations but hoping we'd still have fun. The movie kind of met those expectations, but was at least not utterly horrible, and we did indeed have fun. Whatever works!
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Sunday was more movies with Laney, this time in the Braeburn Condos theater: we watched two animated features (these ones roughly 90 minutes each),
Waltz with Bashir, a brilliant film from 2008 about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon; and
Flow, the practically perfect and objectively beautiful flood-as-metaphor film starring animals with no dialogue, which had been my #4 film from just last year, 2024.
These movies were released 16 years apart, but Laney and I agreed they made a fantastic double feature: hope, despair, and hope in the face of despair. Plus they both open with roving packs of dogs, albeit very different kinds of packs. I could go on about both films for very different reasons, but I think I can say I love them equally. The difference is that
Waltz with Bashir is a gut-punch and
Flow, while packed with animals imperiled, is utterly charming.
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Outside of all that, Shobhit and I spent the weekend binge watching shows, most specifically
The Pitt on Max, and now we're caught up on the 13 episodes that have aired and will watch the penultimate and final episodes the next two Thursdays when they air; and
Midcentury Modern on Hulu, which is old-school cornball sitcom and often
very stupid, but it's also very gay and it still consistently makes us laugh. Hulu dropped the entire 10 episodes of that one last Thursday, we we also have only two episodes left to go on that one, which I'm sure we will watch tonight.
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[posted 12:31pm]
