In Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s Daddy Dearest (1984), a gay porno filmmaker finds happy memories of his ex bleeding into the low-budget film he’s making. Though his follow-up, the following year’s Juice, was largely spun out from a subplot excised from an early draft of the former film, it stands on its own as one of his most substantial and loving explorations of urban gay life. Tackling another form of gay erotic media that no longer exists as it once did, the film follows 48 hours in the life of Jim Bennett, an artistically-minded erotic photographer who works for the decidedly lowbrow magazine Juice. His job is on the line if he isn’t able to find a new crop of fresh faces and big dicks by the end of the weekend.
Jim’s assignment sends him off on a tour of many of Manhattan’s long-gone queer hotspots, from the Adonis Theater (once “The male showplace of the nation!” and now a Bank of America) to the Ninth Circle (the epitome of that strangest of extinct queer space: the gay steakhouse.) Much like other New York-set gay adult films from the era, like Jack Deveau’s A Night at the Adonis (1978) and Arch Brown’s The Night Before (1973), Juice depicts the city as a space for unlimited sexual possibilities and interconnected webs of spontaneous, if fleeting connections. But Bressan also incorporates a sort of “one long night” narrative into his film, not unlike Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (also released in 1985). It’s maybe a generic comparison to make, but one with an odd connection to Juice since the popular gay porn model Jeff Stone plays a beefy opera queen in Bressan’s film and one of the two leathermen whose PDA at a bar grosses Griffin Dunne out in Scorsese’s.
Though certainly more commercial than Bressan’s earlier and more overtly artistic films, like Passing Strangers (1974) and Forbidden Letters (1979), Juice is, on a purely narrative level, perhaps his most experimental work. Here, Bressan eschews the epistolaries and Old Hollywood genre pastiche of his earlier features for something much looser and complex. A big chunk of Juice’s body is consumed by a series of intercut sex scenes that take place across Manhattan in roughly real-time—it’s the only gay adult film I can think of that actually cuts away from a sex scene to show someone riding the E on his way to join in on the fun ten minutes later. This sequence, constructed from five discrete scenes, climaxes with a series of literal climaxes that are all presented one-after-another-after-another. It’s an explosion of collective sexual energy that anticipates the ending of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) by twenty years.
Shortly after completing Juice, Bressan threw himself into what turned out to be his final film, the pioneering AIDS drama Buddies (1985). It’s not known if Juice was meant to be his farewell to sex films, which he never had any shame about openly working in. But, in some ways, it does feel like it. Juice is littered with easter eggs and cameos, from a shot of his earlier film Pleasure Beach (1983) listed on the marquee of the Adonis, to a character reading an issue of the San Diego Update with Bressan’s face on the cover. Had he not gotten sick after the release of Buddies, Bressan was set to begin directing a series of low-budget, straight-to-video sex comedies for Vestron Pictures and was shopping around what was perhaps his most ambitious project to date: a comedic thriller about the closeted son of a Republican president being diagnosed with HIV titled South by Southeast. He had cowritten the script with the gay playwright and filmmaker Jerry Douglas, who was then the editor of Stallion, a gay magazine not unlike the one in Juice. In a filmography littered with fascinating what-ifs—and at least two completed, but unreleased and now lost features—Bressan’s next steps after the breakthrough of Buddies are perhaps the most tantalizing, and one of the cruelest reminders of what the AIDS epidemic took away from a queer cinema that was just beginning to cross over into the mainstream.
Juice screens tonight, December 14, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Narrow Rooms.”
See Also
