E-Mail This Article to a Friend Attack of the B-movie director (continued)

"When Gabe started telling me about this My Little Pony thing, I could not stop laughing my head off," recalls Lynch. "And I was like, ‘We must do that.’ " The B-movie’s working title was Trouble in Rainbow Valley. But soon after Boyer — a hobbyist filmmaker who also works part-time at the Coolidge Corner Theatre — wrote 75 pages of the script, he quit. "He couldn’t finish it. He was like, ‘I’m doing evil to humanity’," Lynch says.

"I did get a little self-conscious after a few weeks," admits Boyer. "I suddenly had qualms of conscience. It might have been that I didn’t know where I was going [with the story], but it might have been this moral issue that I had to work out."

Lynch doesn’t mind if people think Pony Trouble is twisted. Michael Pope, the experimental director of the performance-art/indie-film/musical project Neovoxer, who also did the Dresden Dolls’ first video, called Lynch "sick in the head." One of the cast members, Sarah Perlstein, showed the demo to comedian Jonathan Katz, who is said to have pronounced it stupid. "It is stupid," says Lynch. "It’s indefensible. It’s a comedy. Comedies are supposed to be funny above all else, [above] all sanity or restraint."

Skinny, with high cheekbones, pale skin, and a curly mop of reddish-orange ringlets, Lynch speaks in a languid rhythm, even when he claims to be stressed — about the only thing convincingly Mormon (his native faith) about him. He’s self-aware enough to realize that Pony Trouble is entirely silly and wholly gratuitous, but he delights in the absurdity, the madness of it all. "Warren is a man of many layers," says Melinda Frye, who stars in Pony Trouble as Cindy. "He’s a case of still waters run deep. He’s a nice guy, but he’s not the kind of person that you feel like you know as soon as you meet him. He has a lot of mystery. He’s intelligent and creative, but he’s definitely marching to the beat of his own drummer."

ON THE FIRST night of production this past August, Lynch had arranged to film in an artist acquaintance’s South End home. The apartment complex had a hallway perfect for the demo’s first scene, in which the two toy-company documentarians arrive at Cindy’s home to find her panting lustfully at the door in black lacy lingerie. Bob and Dave understand immediately that Cindy is a seductive vamp. What they don’t realize is that she’s a different sort of man-eater.

It was 8:30 p.m. and the actors were already 30 minutes late. So while Lynch and co-director Wautaull waited for the leads to show, they discussed Pony Trouble. Wautaull, a film student with long silky hair and thick black eyeliner, shared her conceptual take on the story. "It’s really a meditation on the psychological space between sanity and insanity," the MassArt sophomore explained. "On the one hand, they’re sick and deranged. On the other hand, they’re in their own whole world where they have these Pony values. And who’s to say that’s wrong?"

"Don’t they take psychedelic substances?" said Taylor Syn, a skinny kid who occasionally held the boom mike for the production.

"Yeah, weed potion. And another does ecstasy," noted Wautaull. "But it isn’t the drugs that brought them there."

Then Melinda Frye, the 24-year-old cast as Cindy, exploded through the door. With light blond hair and thin eyebrows, she was wearing red Chuck Taylors, a strapless white dress patterned with red cherries, and a pink knitted shawl. Perky, sweet, and effusive, she chattered in a high-pitched voice like a wind-up doll on trucker speed.

This was Frye’s first introduction to Wautaull. "You really are the perfect Cindy," said Wautaull eyeing her up and down, in disbelief. "I don’t think we could have dreamed of someone better."

"Thank you," said Frye breathlessly. "Thank you!" She plopped down on the couch and unpacked a plastic bag of My Little Pony swag: noisemakers, party paper cups, and a pink tin. Carefully lifting the tin’s lid, as if it were Pandora’s box, Frye removed her costume for the night’s scene: a black bra with pink bows and a black lacy garter belt with a dismembered pink Pony head dangling off one side. "I thought it needed a little something extra," she gushed, showing off the headless horse.

Frye, Lynch later explained, was a shoo-in for the lead role. A Florida native who moved to Massachusetts over a year ago, Frye found Lynch’s casting post on Craig’s List. About 17 women tried out for the starring role, an audition that required ad-libbing dialogue with ponies. "Even saying that it’s a movie about My Little Pony and cannibalism, there were still a bunch of actresses that were like, ‘I’m not going to be in this,’ once they read the script." Many were put off not by the flesh eating or the parading around in underwear, but by the prospect of making out with women. "There was like one [semi-] famous actress in Baywatch or something [who auditioned]. She was like, ‘I’ll do it, but only if I don’t have to kiss any girls.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, there’s girl-kissing in it.’"

Frye didn’t have a problem with a lesbian kiss. "I just think it’s acting," she says. A part-time nanny and a seminarian at Andover Newton Theological Graduate School, where she’s studying to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, Frye thinks Pony Trouble is "very funny." She showed it to both her employer and her own family. Asked how she reconciles taking the part of Cindy — a drug-addled, sexually promiscuous cannibal — with her ministerial calling, she responds, "I would definitely be up-front and unapologetic about it. I’m not afraid to talk about sexuality and violence. These things happen." She adds, "I can understand why people would be offended. I wouldn’t want children to see it. Pony Trouble is not for everyone."

Since COMPLETING the first reel and sending the written synopsis to schlockmeister extraordinaire Lloyd Kaufman, head of Troma Studios (producer of The Toxic Avenger movies), in hopes that he’ll take an interest, Lynch and Wautaull have resumed filming the rest of the script. Two weekends ago, on Lynch’s 30th birthday, they gallivanted in the woods near Fresh Pond to film one of the live-action role-playing scenes, featuring two actresses cavorting around in papier-mâché pony heads.

Three days after that session, Hasbro sent Lynch a certified letter, insisting that he remove all copyrighted material from the picture. This wasn’t completely unexpected. All along, Lynch maintained that if he were threatened with lawsuits, "we’d just change all the names and do it in a way that doesn’t show products, that doesn’t break any rules." One cast member suggested they just call the toy company Hasblow.

But Lynch isn’t deterred. At the moment, he’s changed the name of the "Hasbro-like" corporate giant to "Megatoy" and the contest is now called "Why I love the Pony Game." "The story was always about players of a fictional role-playing game based on My Little Pony, just now it’s also based on Care Bears, Rainbow Brite, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Thundercats," says Lynch, explaining the revisions. As he’s said before, "My intention was never really to poke fun at Hasbro or My Little Pony as such, but rather at our twisted, escapist consumer culture. And I think the new version reflects that more."

But there is something particularly funny about the My Little Pony aspect of the film. As Lynch himself said a while back, "A friend says the whole concept of My Little Pony is twisted anyway. After all, they’re children’s toys with makeup, porn-star names, and tattoos on their asses."

See the Pony Trouble demo online at http://www.daisycutter.com/media/ponytrouble-demo.wmv. Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com