The Old Boxoroonie

By Martha Duffy

BLUE MOVIE by Jerry Southern. 287 pages. World. $6.95.

This is Terry Southern's first novel in eleven years, and the news is that he has given up hard-core scatology. Blue Movie has but a single passing reference to excrement, and only one physical freak. Instead, the author is content to employ his demonic imagination on an almost routine device for writing a pornbook: the step-by-step story of filming the most elaborate stag flick in history.

The Faces of Love, the movie's demure title, is the brainchild of bored Boris Adrian, a film maker in the tradition of Chaplin and Fellini whose previous efforts have exhausted the topics of Death, Infinity and the origin of Time. "What I want to know," asks Boris, "is why are stag films always so ridiculous? Suppose the film were made under studio conditions -- feature-length, color, beautiful actors, great lighting. How would it look then?"

"Christ, I can't imagine," says his friend, Producer Sid Krassman. But soon Sid has wrung three million out of the tourist-starved principality of Liechtenstein to help finance the monstrosity and assured the rest by signing up Angela Sterling, "the highest-paid darling of the silver screen -- nailing a cool one and a quarter big ones per pic, plus ten percent of the boxoroonie, going in."

Loosed among the grips and rushes, the author of The Magic Christian and Candy is like a mad puppeteer. The actors whom he manipulates are like the wooden dolls that sometimes illustrate staid sex manuals -- except that in Southern's handling there are seldom only two dolls per frame.

The book's best sections deal with Hollywood. Southern's sideswipes are nearly as crude as his characters and just as exuberant. His ear for trade talk is perfect. The book bristles with monstros, nifties and thesps used, but never overused, at moments of shattering incongruity. Though he really has no new targets, Southern can skewer venality-- as Producer Sid would put it-- seven ways to Sunday.

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