The Hunt for Ginger Quail: Revisiting "Fast Sofa"

Owing to my foreign spawning and nurturement, my picture of Southern California was partially painted by movies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Repo Man,” “Swingers,” and “Heat,” each featuring (I realized later) small groups of lonely people moving across a sun-blighted landscape. The characters often mistook pleasure for happiness, and the physical distances of California seemed as vast as the emotional and class divisions between its residents.

And, in an area full of transients, I found upon moving here that there is nothing more fascinating than a native Angeleno.

That is why I appreciated the book “Fast Sofa,” written by Bruce Craven and published in 1993. It’s a time capsule of early Generation X culture in post-punk, pre-Internet Los Angeles where characters seemed adrift. Where do you drive when, for so many people, the road ends in L.A. County?

The hero of “Fast Sofa” is Rick Jeffers, a 25-year-old metalhead pot smoker obsessed with comics, broadcast television, late Led Zeppelin, and early Metallica. Unlike his flesh and blood SoCal contemporary Quentin Tarantino, Jeffers didn’t have the resources to turn his pop culture sensibility into cash.

Tamara, Jeffers’ long-suffering girlfriend, finally cheats on him when she discovers that he has hooked up with porn star Ginger Quail. And this drives Jeffers to go on a road trip, leaving Burbank on the hundred-mile desert trek to Palm Springs.

“Ginger Quail was one-hundred percent based on Ginger Lynn,” Craven said. “I thought Ginger Lynn captured the perfect mix of beauty, danger, and some tragedy.”

“Fast Sofa” was made into a movie starring Jake Busey as Rick, Natasha Lyonne, Crispin Glover, and Jennifer Tilly in 2001, and featured a cameo by one Ron Jeremy who, as Ron Jeremy Hyatt, was also the adult industry consultant for the movie.

“I did that for a lot of mainstream movies,” Jeremy said, “but I really liked working with Salomé (Breziner, the movie’s director).”

In fact, if you think pornology is only a recent sweeps week phenomenon, look at how many “Inside Porn”-type documentaries Jeremy has appeared in, including his consultant roles in movies like “9 And 1/2 Weeks” (1986) and “Boogie Nights” (1997).

By the time John Holmes died of AIDS in 1988, Ron Jeremy had become for outsiders the face of the adult industry. Jeremy and Holmes weren’t great friends, but they respected each other, and it must have been a curious honor for Jeremy to be painted with the same brush as Holmes.

“When I was writing ‘Fast Sofa,'” Craven said, “my friend in New York City was crashing on my sofa while he worked sound on a porn movie in Queens. The porn actress was annoyed with Ron and said, ‘You’re a life-support system for your cock!’ This line, of course, went right on the typewriter.”

The “life support system” line had been leveled at Holmes since the 70’s, allegedly first uttered by either Annette Haven or “Aunt Peg”‘s Juliet Anderson, and has passed into common usage. After “Fast Sofa,” Rose McGowan got to say it in 1994’s “Doom Generation.”

“Don’t knock it,” Jeremy said of his penis. “Or do knock it. It’s made me a lot of money.”

“When the movie was trying to find funding and Ron was given the book by Pauly Shore, Ron thought the author was ‘in the industry,'” Craven said. “At the screening, I introduced Ron to my parents. My dad didn’t let on until later that he recognized Ron.”

Quail is played in the movie by Jennifer Tilly, a perfect choice for her juiciness, accessibility, and substance abuse. Julie Delpy and supermodel/actress Shalom Harlow were also considered for Ginger. As Ginger’s evil porn producer/pimp, Eric Roberts is also well cast.

Asia Carrera played Tilly’s body double for Ginger’s nude scenes. “I had to get naked in a room with her first to get her approval, and we both turned red,” said Carrera.

“When Jennifer Tilly agreed to do the role, the whole movie came together,” Craven said. “People wanted to work with her. I thought she did an exceptional job. She captured the dark side of the lifestyle, the damaged, defensive side. She also brought power to the dynamic with Rick; you could see that he was just a passing toy to her, but that she felt some conflict, if only for a moment, over it.”

Craven started writing “Fast Sofa” in 1989, it was published in 1993, and the movie came out nine years later. Both the book and the movie were compared to Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero” in that each dealt with disaffected young Angelenos. But the Ellis work is like a MySpace page by comparison; the reader empathizes with and roots for Jeffers even though Rick is the author of his own misery. With “Less Than Zero”‘s Clay, the reader just wants him to grow the fuck up.

Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” was published in 1957, but Kerouac wrote it several years earlier. He said in interviews that the world he wrote about in 1951 was not the same as the one into which the classic road trip novel was published. I asked Craven if the Los Angeles of his novel was different from the one of the movie, and what he thinks about the world of his book now.

“That world did look wild back then and, from the people I know closely involved with it was wild,” Craven said. “But it does look almost innocent from our vantage point in 2009.”

Craven grew up in Burbank and returned to the area after several adventures, including a two-year stint as a bartender at the Cherry Tavern in the East Village (“where the top seller is still a Tijuana Special: a shot of dirt and a Tecate,” he said, “and some of my Replacements CDs are still in the jukebox 13 years later”).

“When I started the book I was completely broke and stayed broke for some time,” he said. “I wrote drafts of the book on typewriter, then on computers I rented, then ran out of money and rewrote it on typewriters, mainly in a non-air-conditioned apartment in New York City. I used to tell myself I should just get into making porn films and it’d be a better way to make a living than writing.”

Is the porn star of twenty years ago the same as she is today?

“There was a moment in the late 1990s when the women in the all-nude strip bars suddenly became beautiful and it became clear that something had changed in the way women were perceiving the adult industry,” Craven said. “It became a way to make money and have freedom and not [be] a badge of perpetual dishonor. This is likely somewhat flawed thinking in the long-term, but both Rick Jeffers and Ginger Quail would have agreed.”

On the way to Palm Springs to visit Ginger, Rick picks up Jules, an autistic birdwatcher played in the movie by Crispin Glover. They get into trouble in San Bernardino and even more in Palm Springs. But what seems like hijinks is all deadly serious, especially the final encounter with Ginger and the return to an uncertain future in Los Angeles.

While “Fast Sofa” should be read as carefully as the Thomas Guide by any transplanted Los Angeles resident, the movie took a long time to make.

“Salomé Breziner caught the anger of the novel and the script, which I co-wrote with Peter Chase,” Craven said, “(and she) carried the project for a long time and made it happen, with the work of the producer Steven Wolfe and the executive producers, including Michael Heuser. Both Jake and Crispin hung around for years, being told they wouldn’t get the parts, but staying available. It felt like everyone on the set was there because the material resonated with them, and I’m sure this was true, as it couldn’t have just been for the paychecks.”

The paychecks also seem incidental to Ginger Quail, who treats her hookups the same way.

“It would have been hard to predict the commercial possibilities of porn, but it did cross my mind back then,” Craven said. “I never would have predicted the way people would have rushed to be performers in adult films, but I think at a certain moment in one’s life it probably feels ‘honest.'”

Today Craven lives near Palm Springs and is shopping his new novel, “Sweet Ride,” set in New York City in a period from the late 1990s until just after 9/11.

“‘Sweet Ride’ is also a time capsule with similar themes to ‘Fast Sofa’ but without the explicit porn conceit,” he said.

Rick can be a douche. Did Craven stay close to home when envisioning his protagonist?

“The Natasha Lyonne/”Tamara” scene where she is making [Rick] a tuna-sandwich and he confesses to sleeping with Ginger was something close to my own experience with a woman I cared for deeply,” Craven said. “That attempt to explain how you broke her trust and try to put it into words that fall painfully short.

“I was on set when Natasha and Jake did that scene and it was a powerful moment for me to watch. Right after the novel was published, I did find women that read the “Fast Sofa” novel and then wanted to stay far away from me because they assumed I was Rick.”

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Nick Manning dreams of Dean Moriarty; Being there – “We Did Porn”; John Holmes book also measured in inches
See also: Watch “Fast Sofa” on Hulu, Buy Bruce Craven’s “Fast Sofa“