WHY ARE PEOPLE SO AFRAID OF SEX: CAN A FUNNY MOVIE REALLY CAUSE A SEX DISORDER?
Yikes! Is my funny movie a sexual Typhoid Mary? I never wanted to cause a sex disorder with my future film – maybe just jostle people’s sexual rituals a bit. But traumatic reactions are multiplying like chlamydia cultures. Eight people have exhibited a strain of P.T.S.D. (I’m talking P— Traumatic Suspicion Disorder, not the garden variety P.T.S.D.), when exposed to my movie.
First, they shudder and cringe on finding out “Sex Monsoon” has some noisy platonic moments, as in “When Harry Met Sally” moments. Then they utter the classic paranoid gasp of sexual wallflowers, “ARE YOU MAKING AN ADULT FILM?” Their sex stricken eyes register a feverish mix of fear, false humor, disgust, distrust, and fascination. Yup, they’ve got P— Traumatic Suspicion Disorder, and they’ve got it bad.
How is it that my funny, heart warming, wacky, endearing, unique movie could cause such a dreadful disorder? All you funny fans would love it. It clinched a semi-finalist spot in the 2015 Bluecat Screenwriting Competition, for the love of tinsel. Any screenplay that even hints at an adult film in this respectable Tinseltown contest lands in the slush pile.
NOT AN ADULT FILM!
I don’t even get adult films. I like spirituality and feelings in my sex, with maybe some Tibetan gongs in the background. Why have a few sexual wallflowers with P.T.S.D. symptoms forced me to talk about that? My movie is not an adult film. These few stricken victims have high-jacked and violated my funny movie with their salacious suspicions!
I’m going to explain what my movie is like using a well known comic personality as a stand-in. Picture Sarah Silverman, the comic, trying to do that – by herself – without touching herself – without having waxed – and freaking out before it even starts. Then she comes out with new noisy ways to freak out about it – and remembers how hairy she is – and that she didn’t wax – which freaks her out all over again. Now is that an adult film, I ask you? No! And no, this movie is not about waxing or hairiness or Sarah Silverman. This is just an allegory.
However, this movie will draw you like a moth to a flame if you:
– Love sex
– Hate sex
– Wish you liked sex
– Are indifferent to sex
– Are afraid of sex
– Have not had sex EVER
– Have had a lot of sex
– Wish you’d had a lot of sex
– Are a regular practitioner of married once-a-week or once-a-month American sheep-like sex
– Are celibate
– Would like to laugh and cry your pants off over sex
– Would like to forget sex exists
– Would like to hear about sex like a fly on the wall
– Have never really really been any good at sex but would never admit it to anyone
I included you somewhere in there, didn’t I?
THE HARBINGER OF NON-ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
So who am I, this harbinger of non-p— entertainment? And what is this future movie that has people abuzz with P— Traumatic Suspicion Disorder? Well, it all started with a swoon.
I was innocently swooning over a handsome musician on stage at a show. You know, they do that thing where they look at a point just over your shoulder, so it looks like they’re looking at someone in the audience and you think it’s you, but they’re not looking at you. I thought he was ogling me because I had on my skin-hugging yoga pants that say ‘Juicy’ on the butt. It didn’t occur to me that I was sitting on the ‘Juicy’ part. Anyway, I got jittery and started hyper ventilating.
That’s how “Sex Monsoon” came about, only it went through a million transformations and exaggerations. The story is about an awkward, divorced librarian who suffers a ‘sex monsoon’ swoon (a loud and noisy one in the library) when she gets close to the co-worker dweeb she likes. So she dreams up a guardian angel to help her, and this angel takes her to a bar to practice on guys. But things get worse, much worse. Every sexual short circuit that can possibly happen, happens, every kind of sex monsoon mutation, until she realizes she must confront her feelings and the guy.
It’s whacked out, in a “Trainwreck” or “The Forty Year Old Virgin” kind of way. But it also has a lot of heart.
THE FUNDRAISING OF ENTERTAINMENT $1 AT A TIME
Well, now I have a crowdfunding campaign online – www.sexmonsoon.com – but before that, fund raising had been happening one dollar at a time – on the street. Even now, I still often dress in a Catwoman outfit or a colorful mask and go stand on a busy street corner to do my unique brand of standup comedy mixed with cheesy movie sales pitch and charity appeal to the heart strings, combined with just plain annoying panhandling pushiness. I go to farmers markets, festivals, anywhere there will be a crowd – an artistically leaning crowd or at least, one that wants to eat “green” (they’re more likely to be liberal and artsy).
What I do is sickening, disturbing, exhilarating, horrible, wonderful, demoralizing. And I get a stomach ache every time I do it. Once in a while, I connect with someone who gives me a few bucks and their email address. A couple of times I even got a twenty dollar bill. Sometimes, someone really gets me and what I’m doing. And if there was this one person, there are more out there. Then there were the reality show producers who were cobbling together a show called “Hey, Float Me $100K, I Wanna Make A Movie”. They wanted to put me in their show and I had to sign a contract, but nothing came of it. I guess it didn’t meet the high standards set for reality shows… I started thinking I don’t want to be a hundred years old and still trying to raise money for my movie, so now I’ve launched my crowdfunding campaign.
Who knows. Maybe this type of non adult entertainment could become a cult classic like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, where fans come to midnight runs of the movie, dressed in costumes and throwing toast or eggs or what have you. That’d be a lot of fun! Boy, that dates me!
Closing Thoughts
I’ve got a lot of kinks. I’m old enough to be a granny and I pole dance. I love to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter out of the jar (organic only please). I stand at street corners dressed like Catwoman, raising money for my film one dollar at a time. But I say write your stories. Be a force. Find a way to fund and make your movies. And if you’ve written something that gives people a little P.T.S.D. and makes them laugh, cry and get snotty-nosed at the same time, ‘cause they’re laughing so hard, more power to you – and to me – and to all of of us who tell stories.
To help fund “Sex Monsoon”, please visit www.sexmonsoon.com
Anna Maganini is an actor, writer, and filmmaker with credits on “Dexter”, “The Mentalist”, and other TV shows and indie films. She is also a TV reporter who has won two Emmy awards for reporting. She has written, directed, and starred in several shorts and is now fundraising for her first full length feature film, “Sex Monsoon”.
