STALLION Magazine: Sexual Renaissance Man

ARTICLE BY BILL BOTTIGGI

Some writer somewhere at some point in Christopher Rage's video career dubbed the man the Master of Sleaze. Certainly it's a name with some ac­curacy, and for all of you who are familiar with any of his works you'd probably tend to agree. And while this writer/film reviewer has no bones with the description either, he'd still be inclined to add that it doesn't do total justice to the man—or his work! A more appropriate label for Rage would have to move beyond that limiting connotation. Instead let's refer to him as a Sexual Renaissance Man! Surely he's explored a great many aspects of man-to-man sex that no one else has ever dared to—certainly not so graphically or explicitly!

Regardless of one's tastes, no one would argue about Chris' being a master. He's a master editor first and foremost. Mixing images the way he does is akin to the way a master montage artist works; he builds shots slowly to create one effect and one impression.

As to being a "master of sleaze," certainly if "sleaze" is an accurate term for the contents of his flicks, then there too he's a master. Regardless of your feel­ings about the particular fetishes he gives life to via his camera, he presents those proclivities as though they were the most natural happenings in the sex­ual arena of life. He depicts what some may call "bizarre" activities in such a way that one finds oneself almost glued to the screen in fascination.

So who is this man who has the power to arouse such fantasies in the viewer? What kind of a person chooses such "perverse" subjects to shoot? You might be surprised!

For one thing the man who's made such movies as Toilets and Raunch doesn't live in some torture chamber dungeon with wail-to-wall urinals as might be expected. Instead he lives in a spacious studio loft in Manhattan's prestigious Chelsea district.

For another, the man who's shot scenes that can't even be described in this magazine has relatively unkinky tastes. As he admitted, "I've never liked cocksucking or being sucked; it's just never turned me on!' He'll even confess that some of his scenes were so difficult to film because he was having a hard time watching while he was shooting the action. Later in the editing room he said he'd even start squirming himself, and there are a couple of scenes he can no longer watch at all.

He adds however, "But I can be turned on by the fact that others are turned on by some particular act or fetish. One thing that I do receive from many of my viewers who order videos is their own fantasy suggestions. They'll plant seeds in my mind, although most of them have particular, specific scenes they want to see filmed. Their own special fantasies. But just the seed of an idea leads to my listen­ing to others who just happen to share that fetish. For one thing I'm just beginning to be aware of how many people out there are into feather and tickle torture. I knew it existed, but not to such an extent. So there are lots of things I make movies about that I'm not into at all!'
There's one area that he's not at all interested in at the present in explor­ing, and that's the bisexual experi­ence. Despite the fact that when he first entered the world of porn he wrote some twenty-odd straight pornograph­ic novels, he admits to having no in­terest in the female area of sexuality.

"I didn't even have any interest when I was writing the straight sex. I just was able to sell it. I had never even been to bed with a woman. It's funny because the first editor I ever sold to was a woman, so here I was selling sex to a woman editor and I had never had sex with a woman—ever! I hadn't seen straight videos so I didn't even have the vaguest awareness. This was in 1970 and I had seen very little. I had very lit­tle technical knowledge about female biology. It amazes me now how very lit­tle background I had and how I was able to pull it off and get it past a woman yet. I guess I just wrote around the things I really didn't know. I didn't get too specific."

He certainly gets extremely specific in his films. For the uninitiated or the squeamish, probably too much so. Hence his series of six "custom-made" tapes that focus on one special fetish and then take it to the max and beyond.

But one man's depravity might be another's heavenly delight, and it's ap­parent that someone out there wants these tapes.

For those who haven't seen a Rage video, probably the best introduction would he his I Need It Bad, which he agrees was more accessible to the general public because it was pur­posely made that way since it was meant to be distributed nationally, and he was basically limited to your stan­dard sucking and fucking fare.

That doesn't mean that it didn't still hold the traditional Rage trademark, however. There's no mistaking a Christopher Rage video!

As he'll tell you himself you'll never be fooled into thinking you're watch­ing one of your more typical gay tapes from one of the California video companies. But how does he feel personal­ly about those glamorous, high-budgeted productions that the gay L.A. producers keep churning out? And further, if someone were to offer him such a large sum to make a movie would he be willing to do it?

In his own words: "For the last year I've been shooting right here in the studio. My films are very non-Californ­ian. Don't get me wrong, they're very hot, slick and beautiful, and I very much admire them. I admire their big budgets and their beautiful technical qualities—the Matt Sterlings and the Bill Higgins and the other people who do such very beautiful work out there. It's just...I guess it has less to do with a question of taste and more to do with ability. Interest. I can't make those films; I don't know—if I wanted to...even if I wanted to. I would not—­no—that's not what my problem is. I don't think I could. And I guess it wouldn't interest me terribly."

But his films aren't exactly his fan­tasies either since he's a firm believer, that you really can't shoot your own personal fantasies. He elaborates: "Don't get me wrong. I think very little pornography is erotic. Not even my own. I don't get turned on by my films. I know too much about what happened when we made it. I know the guy who came late. I know who couldn't come. It's too engraved in my memory; I was too much a part of the entire scene. I know all the technical things that went wrong. I know that one of the per­formers was a real asshole. In other words you can never really get your fantasy on a video.

"When I get on the set or go into shoot I don't think these things out in advance. Lots of things are last-minute things. They involve the actors' spon­taneity. It's much more free-form. That's why I say I don't think I could make a film like the California films. It doesn't matter how big a budget, I just don't shoot that way."

Well, if they're not like California films in either concept or content, what are they like? How does one best describe the experience of watching a Christopher Rage tape? The word "ex­perience" isn't used lightly here either because in many of his films (if not all of them) the viewer becomes a deliberate vicarious participant. If he's not turned off by the action, then he's slow­ly lured into what's happening on screen.

Sound effects, repeated incantatory chants, instant replays, voice-overs, freeze frames, images blending, mix­ing, fading, blurring, and jump cuts are all among the repertoire of tech­niques that Rage employs to bring the viewer into the beat. Non-linear and basically non-narrative (even the sex scenes don't have a traditional begin­ning, middle and end), Chris instead evokes a mood in the viewer. When a performer orgasms the viewer hope­fully will vicariously experience that horniness as well.

When it was suggested that his videos might best be described as mood pieces, Rage was flattered.

"That's exactly how I think of them. That's what I would like them to be regarded as--something to be put on to help create a mood. I think there are people who turn off the sound and watch the picture, and people who turn off the picture and listen to the sound, and times when they're both appropriate together. And I would hope that it's a sixty-minute thing. They're not constructed as films. I'm not a moviemaker. Although I'm trying to give the movie some shape, it's not telling a story. I don't live to make por­no movies—but rather what you see on the screen—the sound tracks, the images, the things I choose to focus on. These are very much my interests.

"I think you can watch one of these things and put a story behind it. There's always an opportunity to make up your own story, but this is always one of the things I've enjoyed about pornography. What I enjoy most is the stories I tell myself. I tell a story about what I'm looking forward to, not what's imposed upon me."

But what is it that he imposes upon the viewer? Before we dissect one of his classics, mention should be made of a new series that Rage has begun, as an example. The series --totally un­planned beyond the first two--as is typical of the master—is built around Frank Vickers, a former construction worker-cum-trophy-winning body­builder-cum sex performer.

The planning of the series is a perfect demonstration of Rage at work—and the planning was minimal. Vickers Number One is just that and aptly it's named Frank Vickers Solo. While any other producer doing a solo-jerk video of sixty minutes in length would have offered up any­where from four to five guys stroking their meatsticks for you, Rage gives you an hour of one stud hunk. Don't get the impression that you have to jerk along with Vickers for an hour until you get to see him gush his spunk, because you don't. The guy comes twelve (!) times in the flick!

As Chris explains how it all hap­pened, one can substitute Vickers' name to a lesser degree, for any of his other performers. He works the same with-all of them.

"The main thing I want to find out is what do they want to do on film. I find out what makes them tick and click. With Frank Vickers—and I never believed anyone would want to see one man jerk-off on video for one solid hour—we taped so many hours to get that one hour. We had a regular shoot­ing schedule of a couple of days per week, and Frank would wear whatever he wanted to that day. He and I would create his mood from there. He decid­ed if he felt like wearing leather or a tight-hugging t-shirt. If he felt like dressing like a sailor then we worked around that. I don't work from concept to completion because I really don't have a concept in mind.

"With Street Kids I had no idea what was going to happen. I added the in­terviews later amost as an after­thought, which adds an interesting sexual pseudo-documentary quality to the flick. Sometimes I'll have the title, as with Manholes. I knew I wanted to make a movie about assplay but I really didn't know the direction it would take. My performers come to me. They tell me what they want to do, and then we go from there. People come to me to do things they can't do in movies on the West Coast. The real good sex per­formers, as far as I'm concerned, are people who really want to do some­thing. And the ones I connect to best are the ones who want to do something a little different than they can do out there—whatever that is! Chris Burns came here; Scott Taylor came here; Richard Locke came here. When they end up in New York, I end up working with them. But it's either the titles or the performers' desires that start the piece.

"With Orgy of course, I knew I wanted an orgy. We filmed all that in one night here, but I added the other footage later. It's really the editing that gives them their shape and form and any concept."

In closing, then, let's look at Orgy. For those who haven't seen it, it's a must. A best friend calls Orgy the best all-male video of all time. And while it's not the best representation of Rage's body of work in toto, it's an accurate reflection of what he does best in terms of evoking a mood on screen and hence a similar atmosphere beyond­— in the viewer's mind and crotch!

From the opening images of fist-pumping cocks spurting and spraying their cum loads all over the place, the viewer is washed in raw, male-animal imagery. Whether the action affects subliminally or quite consciously, it always teems and reeks with sheer sen­suality and sexuality. As the cum flows so do the images. He moves from a sneak-peek tease to full-blown shots of hard, bulging juice-filled cocks and hot, steamy, spread and splayed asscheeks with their wide-open-split apart puckered buttholes. In a later scene where the hero stud (if Rage's films can be said to have heros or pro­tagonists) is jerking himself off, the viewer is treated to a double image of the same scene. In the foreground we see the hunky brunet pounding his meat while in the background we have the very same image but it's magnified and amplified in size! And for a man who's not much into cocksucking, he certainly includes a lot of dick-licking and meat-eating footage.

Starring the former greats Scorpio and Daniel Holt as well as current hot numbers, Bosch Wagner and Dwan, Orgy is a hedonistic trip for those who need more than one, and a visual treat for any pornvoyeur. While the credits are rolling, as mentioned earlier, we're immediately put into this scene of a grand opera of randy men attempting to please one another and get the release each one needs as well. Shots of spurting cum drops immediately alert the viewer that he's in new ter­ritory here, and indeed he is. Almost as fast however we leave the group and move to the streets where we see our hero, the hustler, ambling down New York's city sidewalks. The camera closes in on his leather-jeans enclosed crotch, and then as if to read the viewer's mind we move indoors. Again a cut to the stud, shirtless now, a tattoo above his right nipple. Quickly the camera lowers and we see the dude with his hand stuffed down those leather pants. Then ever so slowly, still teasing us with his camera, Rage follows the action of the stud's hand as he lazily unzips his fly. Next his hand is pumping his meat and beating it royally, but still hidden under his briefs. Then just as Rage gives us a glimpse of the dickhead, the camera goes back outside -- this time to the roofs of New York.

Then with quick jump cuts between our hero on the rooftop totally clothed, and then inside semi-nude, we experi­ence the desire to see more. And just as we're mentally urging him to take it off, a voice-over quietly incants, "I've got some people cumming—cumming over—do you wanna cum?" Is it speak­ing to the characters or to the viewer—or both, of course! It's hyp­notic effect on the erection prepares the viewer for the kaleidoscopic cocks at the film's finale. The refrain is repeated until it becomes one helluva sexy and persuasive echo.

Then from boy-meets-boy to two to­gether to an ever-increasing number of guys it's like a crescendo of sexual tension as the heat builds steadily. By the time we have the gang of eight sex buddies all sucking and fucking in an orgy of ultra-orgasmic proportions, their cocks flying with their sperm spilling and spurting and spraying all over the place, the viewer will just have to shoot too, or find someone to do it with soon.

Christopher Rage's videos are an experience, and one not to miss. You may never look at an all-male video again in quite the same way.

Editor, musician, actor, performer, singer, director, cameraman, writer, producer...To sum it up succinctly, Christopher Rage is a Sexual Renais­sance Man!

Besides Orgy, the Six Custom Tapes, and Frank Vickers Solo and Worship Frank Vickers, Chris' films include: Wildside, Tramps, Fucked Up, Outrage, Manholes, and Street Kids.