Who Fucked Madonna? Abel Ferrara is a director with attitude. He makes hard films, films you love to hate. His films are dirty. You often feel soiled by them. Not because they are bad films, but because they touch raw nerves. And because they are films made with passion. You know this man has got something, that he explores from one film to the next what’s bugging him. Ferrara is an independent film-maker, but he also plays with the Hollywood system. His mission is to make films, his films. Films that explore the razor edge of the seamiest sides of life, the dark sides of intimacy. Most of his films revolve around New York. Ferrara himself comes from the Bronx. He might be termed a rock-&-roll director, reflect- ed in the occasional promos he has shot, particularly Not Guilty for Keith Richards (one suspects ‘Keef’ is a pin- up in his office), and the co-writing of songs and playing guitar on some of his own soundtracks, besides his off-set enjoyment with fellow film celebs in their own rock band. Most people think that Ferrara’s debut was Driller Killer in 199, an explosive start as it became one of the first “video nasties”, with all the attendant censorship and publicity, though three years earlier there was another, Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy, a hard-core porno that is some- where between Emmanuelle and Debbie Does Dallas, but with that distinctive Ferrara style of dark filming. Those two films set the ball rolling through genres often asso- ciated with sleaze and exploitation, whether the female serial killer of Angel of Vengeance, or the pilot film for Crime Story (the best in the series), finding something of a niche in the crime/gangster/drugs world of New York lowlife, with films like Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral, The Addiction, King of New York… with Harvey Keitel and Christopher Walken as two regular travelling companions and supporters of his vision. Not that they are the only bankable stars. In Dangerous ed: “unique”. But do we really know this woman? We Game he worked with Madonna to produce a film that have seen various media and documentary roles of her brought a memorable performance from her, even if she as she climbed and clawed her way up the ladder of suc- despised the end result and complained bitterly. As with cess. One of her chosen ways was to portray different James Fox in the Roeg/Cammell filmPerformance , though women in her songs and the accompanying videos. It the finished work was not pretty, it gave Fox the status he was only natural that in time she would become a part needed to show he could go further than mainstream of the Hollywood system. Her pastiche as Monroe made films seemed to allow. Madonna’s role inDangerous Game her intentions clear. She also wanted to venture fur- is steadily making the film acquire cult status as people ther, to be more involved. She wanted her own empire. begin to perceive the mindfuck that was taking place. She was already heading a music label. Why not run a Madonna seems to have been manipulated as actress and film production company too? She liked Abel Ferrara’s for her real self throughout Dangerous Game, in a parallel films. She wanted to be part of the action. Her company, fashion to Fox with Performance. Maverick, became involved in Dangerous Game (initially In a bedroom scene in Dangerous Game where called Snake Eyes) as producers. Then the idea of a lead Madonna is filming in the film-within-the-film (called acting role was presented, not from Ferrara, but from Mother of Mirrors), she recoils on-set at the apparent pen- Harvey Keitel, who said he had worked with her before etration from behind by her fellow actor, followed by and wanted her for the role. That is how the press reads, her outbreak and clear hurt and upset. Just prior to the but perhaps it was not as clear cut as that. scene we hear the director nudge the actor to push the Afterwards, Madonna said she was proud of her role, scene hard, indicating real sexual activity is the goal to be she felt she gave a good performance. But she also felt had at this point – to gain some form of revenge, power, betrayed by Ferrara, who changed the film’s ending. “In humiliation over the woman. All very well and good. This the original film, I turn it around,” she said in one inter- is only a film. This is only illusion. But the strange thing view, meaning her character manipulates the director and about this film is whether it is or not. Because there is actor of the film-within-the-film to emerge triumphant. more at stake than meets the eye. We need to unravel “It was going to be this great thing for me. And even the scene, the film-within-the-film, the characters, the though it’s a shit movie and I hate it, I am good in it.” She actors… We need to trace the story of the film, the posi- trusted Ferrara. She felt they were both troubled by the tions of Ferrara and Madonna in this saga. Let alone same issues of their Catholicism, both working out their others, if we can. The complete picture cannot be told, senses of guilt and sin in their art. Ultimately she felt of course, not unless the participants themselves dare to Ferrara acted in bad faith and betrayed her. Her previ- reveal truthfully what really took place. ous experiences on film sets had been “soul destroying”, To pencil in a few facts. Who is Madonna? Madonna but Dangerous Game had proved an exception. “That is a singer who has risen to the top and maintained her destroyed my soul in a different way because it was such position there. She is a superstar. She has also become a violent emotional experience. But at least I felt I was a film star. And in the process she has become a very going somewhere, exploring new territory. I feel every- wealthy woman who commands excessive power and thing else I’ve done has been rather trivial.” influence. Today she is an icon. Or as one presenter stat- Future courses would be to take even more control, 9 to become involved in projects where the director’s view admit to it later, or deny it, despite the body of evidence agreed with her ideas. The course taken by many other on film, is another matter. Whether it was conscious or music stars who want to control their film career in the not is also another matter. By which I mean it wasn’t same way they do their music ones. Often with disastrous pre-planned as a strategy. It evolved and after the fact results. “I don’t have the power in the film industry that helped to shape the direction of the final film in the edit- I have in the music industry.” If one cannot take the final ing room. Nothing unusual in that approach. The confu- cut away from the director, then perhaps one has to be sion is set within a system of mirrors, as well as within the director or get close enough to be able to control the a system of films, with echoes of Orson Welles in that editing: “The director is the one in control, and every- famous mirror maze scene in The Lady from Shanghai, one else is a pawn for them. You have control over your when Rita Hayworth, Welles’ real wife, is caught in a performance when the camera is going, but you can take phallic shoot-out as her film husband, Everett Sloane, that performance in the editing room and completely fires away at the mirrors and his wife, (receiving the change the character. That’s what happened to me with same in return in this case), with the ever-present Welles Abel. Because it was an entirely different movie when I stepping aside as actor and director and abandoning her made it – it was such a great feminist statement and she in reflections and crashing glass, destroying the glamour was so victorious at the end. I loved this character.” of the film star in an unsavoury death rather than dying While Madonna was blasting Ferrara and calling him in the arms of her lover. From damsel in distress to a “scumbag” before the film was properly released, he femme fatale to the inevitable corpse on the floor while was to offer his viewpoint later in “a tough guy act” to Welles himself walks away, through the turnstile of the another critic: “She’s a fuckin’ jerk… Like we sit around crazy house and into real life once more. The intimate taking out the best scenes in the movie to spite her. You nature of film-making has occasioned a string of such know how paranoid you gotta be to fuckin say something games that people play on- and off-sets as relationships like that?” spiral in and out of control, particularly beneath the That is why it seems that the pivotal point or “water- glare of Hollywood arc lights. The biography shelves are shed moment” (to use Madonna terminology) in that filled with these exposés. film (and in fact in her subsequent film career direc- So what should make this pivotal assault anything tion, if not more) rested on that moment of penetra- worth contemplating with Madonna, give or take one or tion, that act of transgression when her co-star, James two of the niceties and crudities involved in the process Russo, forces himself on Madonna, the implication in of its execution? And, surely, shouldn’t Madonna expect the film-within-the-film being that Russo fucks her for such a course? real instead of acting out a fuck, though the suggestion She has mainly created this world in which we see her.