“Try not to hate the world as it goes about its business; remember: it’s you who is the freak.”
When I first moved to Los Angeles from Bogue Chitto and got a job (five years ago next month) at AVN, I remember sitting in my Hollywood apartment watching one of the 60 or so porn movies it was my job to review each month before going out with a friend visiting from back home.
There were some gunshots outside and soon police converged on the area and helicopters descended. It didn’t faze me, but my friend said, “If I told anyone from back home that I sat on a couch watching porn with another guy while helicopters buzzed around the window, they wouldn’t believe me.”
This is the feeling I got from watching Paul Sapiano’s jokey, observant, and sometimes poignant snapshot of millennial hipster Hollywood, The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting Down.
Read more after the gap.
A humorous etiquette guide to being 21 to (at most) 34 in Hollywood (and nowhere else), The Boys And Girls Guide follows a talented ensemble cast through hookups, drug deals, party and club crashing, and the bleary morning after, from which the quote at the top of the article is taken.
Not a porn movie, though there is a smattering of boobs, each in oddly non-sexual situations, the Guide nevertheless presents scenarios familiar to Porn’s own parallel party circuit, in which a little cocaine opens many doors, Costco vodka in a Grey Goose bottle is never discovered (because all vodka is the same), Mr. Belding shows up, “fauxmosexuals” fool few, bouncers are judged by their accumulation of hot dogs, and people have enough money for bottle service but not for cab fare.
A slick and and well-produced movie with some excellent performances (I’ll single out Dominique Purdy with his bit on Dionne Warwick’s cell-phone), The Boys And Girls Guide is solidly a movie euphemistically described as a “love letter”, meaning you won’t get it unless you’ve lived it. In that way the movie is also like a documentary, except with tips on how to do “titty bumps” rather than Alan Alda talking about the Serengeti.
Shot in and around Hollywood, particularly the Cahuenga club corridor, this movie could be pitched like Swingers with Dirty Vegas standing in for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy meets Slackers with better clothes and L.A. standing in for Austin, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (The BBC version).
Unlike its decades-old predecessors, however, this Guide‘s hipness and narcissism leaves just a little room for sadness, as if the whole process of getting down leaves those attempting it a little empty.
Previously: Barely Legal: Generations; Young Hollywood; Gia Paloma’s fan letter
See also: The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting Down
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