Chapter 10

“Shocking news out of Sundance today: the indie project that two-time Academy Award-winner Corinne DeLoie directed and starred in, with her longtime friend Mattson Childers, contains a scene of explicit, unsimulated sexual activity...”

“So, apparently Corinne DeLoie is a hypocrite, right? She didn’t want to take her clothes off for Conrad Brauer’s project, citing her no-nudity clause in her contract, but then she goes and has actual Mattson Childers on film in one of his projects? Someone needs to have a conversation with Ms. DeLoie about this.”

“I think she only went in this direction because every project she had been signed up to work on got pulled out from underneath her by friends of that CPOC Brauer.”

“CPOC? What does that mean?”

“Complete Piece Of Crap. As I was saying, I think that she decided to do this because it was the only project she could get to work on, and having sex with Childers, her longtime friend, was probably the price of admission to the project.”

“So you think she was coerced into it?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I guess it is hard to imagine her being forced into anything by Childers, right? I have to wonder if we will ever find out exactly why she did this.”

“Well, I think she is going to be on The Ellen Show later this week. So we will have to wait and see if she talks about this project then.”

“I want you to help me welcome Corinne DeLoie to the show!” Ellen said with a big smile.

The audience cheered loudly as she walked out of the backstage area, and she waved on her way to the chairs at the interview area. She sat down as the audience continued to cheer loudly. Most of them were cheering, anyway. A few seemed to be less than impressed with her, she realized. Well, that’s the way it is. Her new normal. She smiled anyways. She was happy to finally be on The Ellen Show.

“Welcome! Glad you are finally here!”

“I’m happy to be here at last, Ellen.”

“Oh, that’s okay, you can call me Ellen.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Ellen. My bad.” She smiled at the silly joke.

“So, I was speaking with you backstage about what topics are off limits, and you said everything was on the table. Are you really comfortable with where the conversation could go?”

“You know, Ellen – oops, sorry, Ellen “(she reached over and put her hand on Ellen’s arm, and Ellen laughed)” – I have to say that nothing is off limits. You want to know about my sex life? My relationship with my egg-doner mother? Feel free.”

“Okay, let’s talk about your sex life.” Ellen said with a smile.

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

Ellen turned serious. The discussion in the green room had covered this. Corinne had said she was sick of dealing with Hollywood hypocrites, and the movie was her goodbye and ‘kiss my ass’ final statement. As a result, she no longer cared about appropriate behavior, or keeping up appearances, or anything else that polite society was supposed to do.

“Well, first of all, when I watched the movie, (which, I have to tell you was an amazing work), it seemed that that was the first time you’d ever had intercourse. Is that correct?”

“Yes. That was the first time I’d ever had sex with anyone. I mean, everyone masturbates, right? Don’t answer that if you don’t want to.” The audience laughed, but the sound was somewhat strained, as if the audience was uncomfortable with what was being said. Which, Corinne thought to herself, was almost certainly true. People didn’t talk about sex in American society and culture.

Ellen had come out before the show taping began to tell the audience that the topic of the day was going to be controversial and explicit. The audience had then been given the option to leave at that point, but for the most part everyone had stayed.

Then, Corinne had given permission for the audience to watch a special screening of the film before she came on the show. A few more had left, but for the most part, everyone had stayed to see the interview. That was something that she didn’t expect. What she also didn’t expect was the warm welcome that most of the audience had given her, especially after they saw her lose her virginity on film.

“So, even though I had dealt with my own hormonal urges by myself, I had never availed myself of all those ‘wonderful’ young men and their ‘wonderful’ anatomical features of which I had apparently availed myself previously.” The audience tittered at that.

Ellen smiled as well. “So, you kept yourself to yourself. I can understand that.”

“Right.” Corinne smiled back.

“So, what was your reasoning behind making ‘A Love Timeless?’ What were you pursuing in doing this?”

“Well, I think everyone knows about what happened between Conrad Brauer and myself, right? He tried to force me to do a simulated sex scene with the male lead on his film. And, afterwards, I spoke with him, Carl, the other actor I mean, about the situation. He gave me permission to tell you this, by the way. He told me that Brauer told him I had agreed to actually have sex with him on film, to ‘make the scene more believable.’ That was what Brauer told Carl that I had said.”

Ellen interrupted. “Wait, you are saying that Brauer told Carl Enders that you were willing to actually have sex during the filming of the movie?”

“Yes! He totally flat out told that to Carl. He said that Brauer told him that since I had been sleeping with almost everyone I ever made a movie with in the past and virtually everyone else that even winked in my direction, that this was not a big deal, especially for a project that I believe in.”

“Wow. It’s nice to know that he will be spending at least a few more years as a guest of the California State Prison system for what he did to you.” The screen behind the setting they were in changed from the usual scenic background to a collage of photos that were various close-up views of Corinne’s battered and bruised face, along with two black eyes, and redness and swelling everywhere.

This was something else Corinne had approved and even requested. There were still holdouts that said what happened to Corinne at Brauer’s hands wasn’t that bad, that she had been exaggerating what had been done to her. The photo the audience was now gasping about had been taken when the physical evidence of her beating was at its most obvious.

But what most haunted the audience, besides the barely recognizable visage of one of the most beautiful, popular and well-known actresses of recent times, was her eyes. She was looking at the camera, and one could tell that she was in both physical pain and severe emotional distress. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

That picture was then set side-by-side with a police evidence photo of Conrad Brauer’s face taken at the same duration after the fight. The damage was far worse.

His jaw was broken, and had been wired shut to get it to heal. His nose was also smashed. He had a broken left orbital bone around the eye, his left cheek bone was also shattered, and both his eyes were black and swollen nearly shut. He looked like someone had hit him with a brick or something equally hard.

While the response to Corinne’s picture had been one of shocked gasps and intakes of breath, the picture of her assailant was met with grim rumblings of discontent. Then someone started clapping, and it quickly spread to the entire audience. And before it ended, everyone in the entirely female audience was on their feet clapping and yelling and cheering in support of the young prodigy.

Ellen looked at her audience in pride and joy then looked at Corinne. She had her hands over her face in what Ellen at first thought was embarrassment. But that was banished as Ellen realized that the younger woman was sobbing uncontrollably, with tears pouring down her face.

Ellen pushed herself out of her chair and closed the distance to her young guest, pulling Corinne into a huge hug and comforting her. She then turned to face the camera.

“We will take a commercial break. Be back after this.”

The commercials came and went, and when the show returned, Corinne was sitting back in her seat, and Ellen had returned to her own. Corinne had regained her composure, but had a tissue box on the side table next to her chair. She was holding one and touching it to her eye, but she was smiling.

“Okay, let’s change the subject a bit. We know that you refused to do a simulated sex scene for Brauer’s film, and you have never done even partial nudity in any of the movies you have been in. Some of them have had nudity and sex scenes in them. Yet, you now turn around and do this movie, which shows the Full Monty and everything that comes next. Some people are going to have a difficulty reconciling those two things. I know you wanted a chance to address this. How should people look at this?”

Corinne took a deep breath, and hoped that her explanation would be accepted.

“I previously refused to take my clothing off because I didn’t want people to be focused on my breasts or my other bits that people would be staring at or worse on the Internet, and I wanted to be taken seriously as an actor.

“The thing is, friends of Conrad Brauer have been blackballing me. I have had four projects pulled away, and my agency has been unable to get any interest in anyone working with me again. In short, I am being retired as an actress, and not by choice.

“Then this screenplay came up. It was actually on someone’s desk when I visited, and I took the chance to read through it. Later when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to work again, I decided that if I was going to go out, I wanted to go out on my terms. It was not much of a choice after that.

“Hollywood and especially the ratings people in this country have it all wrong. Sociologists have determined that if you make violence in movies more accessible to teens and adults than making sex accessible by setting the ratings for violent movies low and setting ratings for movies with sex high, you end up with violence in society. When it is the other way around, with movies with sex rated lower and violent movies set to seventeen or eighteen and above, you have a society that is less violent.

“You also, because of more liberal and realistic attitudes towards sex, sex education, and birth control, those societies have lower levels of teen sexual activity, teens wait longer to start having sex, and there are way fewer numbers of teen pregnancy because fewer kids have sex and fewer kids have unprotected sex.”

“Wait, so you are saying that kids who are exposed to sex at a younger age in media will not have sex? Doesn’t that fly in the face of conventional knowledge?”

“Well, European movie ratings boards restrict violence in movies to older kids, while allowing movies with generally non-violent sexual depictions to be shown to kids about fourteen or so. European societies generally have less teen violence, and less teen unplanned pregnancy. Kids there also wait to start having sex when they are older – on average seventeen or so, if I remember correctly.

“Here in the USA, with the MPAA making violent content available and restricting sexual content, we have a more violent society, and kids have lots more questions about sex that generally don’t get answered, leaving them to their own resources. So they experiment on their own, and generally make poor, uninformed choices. And we have what we have here now. Violence is used to solve problems, and kids have a lot of sex where their parents are not available to support them and help them make good decisions.”