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| Priscilla Chase (Parker Posey) seems to have it all—the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect husband (Paul Rudd). In bed, however, sex has always left her a bit short of the finish line. When the problem drives her husband to leave her for one of his high school students (Mischa Barton), Priscilla sets out on a quest to become just as good at sex as she is at everything else in life, embarking on a wild journey that leads her into the arms of the man she least expected. A new comedy co-starring Danny DeVito and Liza Minnelli. Debut feature for director Billy Kent. |
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The Oh in Ohio
Film direction makes you a prisoner of your own imagination. I remember in film school taking my mother’s car and driving around all night looking for a mariachi band. And when we began The Oh in Ohio script it became apparent that there were thousands of details, thematic gestures and motif images I would have to bring to the screen. Of course I was no longer a one-man-band making deals out of a maroon ‘79 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I had a crack team of the most talented creative people. Yet there are some decisions that only a director can make and one of those was picking vibrators for Parker Posey's character Priscilla and Heather Graham's character Justine, the sex shop owner. At first I though it would be easy to find a funny looking vibrator, but oh no. In my commercial director past I had had to find all sorts of things: an oven to blow up, a trained cockroach, a waterfall in Hawaii during the dry season, a pigmy elephant, a monkey that could drive a Vespa. I now had to find a piece of plastic with comedic potential and it wasn't so forthcoming.
The obvious place to look was the internet, but anything slightly pornographic made my computer go crazy with a waterfall of pop up windows. Nude women from all walks of porn flitted across my screen and then crashed my old Mac. So I decided along with Martina Buckley, my production designer, and Amy Robertson, the producer, to call vibrator manufacturers. To my amazement they sent catalogs. I found myself riding the New York City subway, flying on airplanes and sitting in restaurants obsessively thumbing through hundreds of pages of plastic phalluses. Of course there is a lot of weird stuff out there—things you need to have to have a vivid imagination to use, but that was far from my mission. I needed something that would be funny.
We began shooting and the set for the vibrator store was being built, but still no funny vibrator. I was immersed in the action, the actor’s performances and bringing the scenes at hand to life. Heather Graham arrived to shoot her scenes and the final dressing for the shop was almost complete. Martina had her team unpacking boxes of vibrators, lotions and silky drawers late into the night. She dropped everything to call me. The final box sent from California had something very special in it—the Great American Challenge. Yes, it was violet and rubbery and giant and had all the makings of the ideal prop for the scene. When we placed it in the set Heather laughed out loud before we had even rolled a frame of film. I knew things where moving in the right direction.
P.S. After we wrapped all the crew took pictures of themselves with the Great American Challenge and surprised me with them in a personal book, which I have as a memento. I guess it pays to dream big.
