E-Mail This Article to a Friend Naked lunch (continued)

Q: Do you think sex addiction is liberating?

A: The ad campaign for the movie that I suggested was "Can tolerance go too far?" That is the question here. And I don’t know the answer. I’m obviously on the side of the sex addicts, but at the same time I don’t, you know — "adult babies"? Maybe, maybe they should be stopped. Not stopped, but I would be uptight if I had a child and someone told me they were an adult baby. I’m not joining an adult-baby march this week. My editor would say to me, "I think you’re a really big Ethel [the leader of the neuters in the movie]." But I’m not. I’m not a neuter. I’m not either, completely. But in this movie, it’s extremes. Like everybody has to be one or the other. You can’t take the middle road in this neighborhood.

Q: Bill Clinton, is he a ...?

A: He’s a sex addict. I mean, you could name any politician, you could name anybody and I could tell you if they are.

Q: George Bush?

A: A neuter. And his wife is a neuter, but his children are sex addicts.

Q: I thought he had a reputation as kind of like a ...

A: He’s an enforced neuter — well, he got hit in the head and he got sober, and then he’s a neuter. I think drunk, he’d be a sex addict.

Q: He’d be a better president, too, I think.

A: Oh, all presidents are better when they get laid. That’s why I so miss Clinton. He was my favorite president ever. And I don’t care what happened, what he did. Presidents should get blowjobs — maybe they’d be less aggressive and have a better understanding of the country. I mean, the people that run drug-treatment centers, the best ones are all ex-junkies. You have to be one to know it.

Q: Is that true of filmmakers too?

A: Certainly everything that happens in your life, even the bad experiences — you’re lucky enough in this job, you can use them. Where if you work in an office, sometimes the bad things that happen to you, you can’t turn into comedy. It’s a good thing about this job.

Q: So you can redeem misery.

A: Well, you can make misery funny. You can turn it around. I mean, I’m sure real sex addicts have ruined their lives by compulsive sexual behavior. And I see some of these things. I’m just so glad I don’t have that.

Q: Wilt Chamberlain supposedly had sex with 17,000 women and was still the NBA’s highest scorer.

A: I know. But did he count? I mean, I guess he was a sex addict. But what interests me — what kind of sex did he have 17,000 times? Was it varied or the same? Because most sex addicts do one thing. They pick one thing and that’s all they do. That’s what I find kind of comical, in a way. But it’s easy, maybe, if you find that one thing and that’s all you like. Are you disappointed? Can you be stood up, can you be hurt? I don’t know. And I also in this movie had to be responsible. There’s no unsafe kind of sex in this. There’s no real sex.

Q: I learned a lot of new terms, though. Like the real meaning of the "hokey pokey."

A: I’m so upset. My parents are coming to the premiere. I get along great with my parents. [He’s] 86, my father, and my mother’s 80, and she mentioned recently to me that they really like doing the hokey pokey.

Q: Well, you can explain it to them. I’m sure you’ve had to do a lot of explaining over the years.

A: My parents, they don’t want to know. They don’t ask. I promise you they will not ask a follow-up question about this movie.

Q: They’ve seen all your movies?

A: No, they haven’t seen Pink Flamingos, ever, but why make them? I mean, they know about it. They paid for it. And I paid them back. With interest. An A&E biography is coming out on me, and my father found the receipt from when I paid him back. Like the little paperwork we had. It was touching to me; I didn’t know that.

It was about $12,000, which today would be about $75,000. Everybody always looks back and says, "God, do you ever long for the days when you had tiny budgets?" No. But still, that was the most money I ever had at the time. I had about $5000 to make Multiple Maniacs. It felt like it was really a big deal, to me, having $12,000.

Q: Let’s get back to the hokey pokey. You did research for this movie?

A: We’ve been playing that game for years, like, you know what this means, you know what this means? Like a lifelong project, in a way, because I’d always heard of these things. They’re all real. I didn’t make any of them up. Like splashing. I have a magazine ... some English magazine. I held it up on The Tonight Show and they were so happy. This is before I even made this movie, a couple of years ago. It shows girls with pies in their faces. And I don’t get it, because it’s about humiliation of a woman and her power over you. The British ones call each other muckers, and there are all these porn videos of this. They show a woman in a dress-for-success suit and running shoes, you know that look, and she’s sitting on a pie. Uncomfortably, on a pie. Or like, with food dribbled on her, or mud. They like mud a lot.

Q: And I thought it was only me.

A: Splashing. I’m trying to think if I ever had that in any of my other movies. I mean, everyone’s done a little bit of splashing — I mean, like, of food — in some way. I’m not going to get personal, but it is peculiar.

Q: What’s the bear thing? I don’t get it.

A: I personally think that it’s, for people my age, some way to make you feel erotic as you’re getting older. I guess it’s an anti-the-gym look. But I don’t know. It’s still a little confusing to me, too.