Opening this weekend, For A Good Time, Call… details the misadventures and eventual mutual redemption of two Manhattan sophisticates (Ari Graynor and Lauren Miller) who stumble into a phone sex dynasty. The film’s director Jamie Travis and co-author Katie Anne Naylon sat down in Seattle a few weeks ago to take our questions.
The SunBreak: So, exactly how much is the film based on those ads you always see in the back of the Village Voice?
Katie Anne Naylon: To every extent, it was based on that! The phone sex part, came from an experience I had in college wherein I applied to one of those [kinds of] of ads, because I needed a part-time job as a freshman, and I didn’t want to leave campus because parking was really difficult. Freshmen were not supposed to bring a car!
TSB: Which college was that?
Katie Anne: Florida State, and I’m sure they’re happy and excited to hear about this film… (laughs)
Jamie Travis: This is great promotion for FSU!
Katie Anne: Technically, you can’t run a business from your dorm room, but I did. I started my own phone sex hotline, and I cut out the middleman because they were paying me, I think it was a quarter a minute, and these guys [her customers] were paying three bucks a minute. So I started my own line, with a friend of mine, and therein lies the inspiration.
TSB: How extreme do these guys get? I know one former phone sex operator who I’m pretty sure has PTSD…
Katie Anne: It was very extreme. No one has asked that, so it’s good you’re asking that. This is wonderful.
Jamie: It’s hard-hitting journalism! (laughs)
Katie Anne: It really is! Because I was a virgin at the time. I was eighteen and I hadn’t even had sex, and so I thought I would be pretending I was in a hot tub that I wasn’t really in, and it wasn’t like that at all. I thought sex was like what I saw in Pretty Woman or WhenHarry Met Sally. That was my idea of sex. But it was very extreme and off-putting. It took me a few years to really get out there and explore. (laughs), and have sex, finally. I felt like the last virgin standing. I was twenty-three.
If you’re calling a phone sex line, the things that you’re interested in would probably petrify any normal girlfriend. And/or you’re very lonely and just want to chat!
TSB: Were there some of those?
Katie Anne: Totally, people who called who were just talking. My whole gag was that I wouldn’t talk about sex until they brought it up, and even then I would be like, “What, I don’t know what you mean…” (laughs) Because you want to keep them on the phone as long as possible. We would just talk about the weather in Indiana, what it’s like to drive an eighteen-wheeler…
TSB: Were there a lot of them from Indiana? A lot of truck drivers?
Katie Anne: Truck drivers were common, and a lot of traveling businessmen. Guys calling from work…
TSB: One wonders if the truckers were dialing while trucking…
Katie Anne: This was before the hands-free set, so I hope not.
Jamie: Tell him about the guy who would try to get off while you were taking his banking information.
Katie Anne: We did not have a 900 number, what we had was an 800 number and we billed by credit card. So this was the beginning of PayPal, because eBay was shooting up right at that time. So we were using PayPal with a very limited fee, and that was really our only overhead. Our dorm room was covered (laughs), and the 800 number, you’re only paying ten cents a minute, covering their long distance, so we had a ten-minute minimum, when you called we’d bill your card thirty dollars to make sure the card was valid. Every time we answered the phone, so long as we got you through the billing process, we got thirty bucks, which is great.
TSB: But some guys like to explode on take-off…
Katie Anne: Yeah, exactly! Or they didn’t have credit card numbers, they were just jerking around. (laughs)
Jamie: They just wanted to hear the voice of a lady!
Katie Anne: Yeah, they’d be like “1234 5678,” and I’m like, “That’s not a Mastercard number, sir!”
TSB: Is it possible that a man calls and thinks to himself, “Okay, I’ve got about a forty-five-second window before she gives up on me, but if I’m primed and ready to go, maybe I can take it over the threshold…”
Jamie: That man is desperate and cheap! (laughs)
Katie: No, cheap and tawdry. (laughs) We had a website with cheesy girls on it, who were not us, and I imagine that they were masturbating, getting really excited, and when they were close to climax they would call the number, hear our voices, and finish, and they’d get a freebie. I think we were just unknowingly closing the deal. But some of the other people, like I said we had that ten-minute minimum, and five minutes in their wife would walk in, and bam, they’d hang up, you’d get five minutes free. So it works out both ways.
TSB: Is this the first film for both of you?
Jamie This is my first feature film. I’ve made short films in Canada for the last ten years.
TSB: And how did you two meet?
Katie Anne: I found Jamie in the New York Times, there was a profile on him…
Jamie: It wasn’t a phone sex ad!
Katie Anne: …someone had sent me the link to it, I can’t take full credit, but I watched his films after that and really responded to them. I personally didn’t respect the short-film genre, I was like, “Why don’t you try harder? Get a better crew, someone will invest in you!” (both laugh) And also they always seemed very thinky, they were trying to teach you something, or they were so genuinely ambiguous.
When I watched Jamie’s shorts, the art design, production design, it just blew me away how they looked and felt. I’m a Wes Anderson fan, and I didn’t know that things could be even more beautiful and yet still have story. And Jamie had a dark sense of humor that came through. I was so proud of him, not knowing him. I called him up and we met over the phone, and Skype…
Jamie: It all happened through our agents, we didn’t have direct contact for a little while.
Katie Anne: And then we all got along, the leads as well…
Jamie: …and I had been reading scripts for at least five years, I’ve written everything else I’ve directed, and I was on the fence as to whether I would direct somebody else’s script. This was the first script in five years of having Hollywood representation, that I really responded to a script, really felt like it was doing something fresh, and it felt different enough from my body of work, and yet close enough, to make it interesting for me.
TSB: What else attracted you about the script?
Jamie: Honestly, the most important thing for me when I first read a script, or engage with anything in this world, is that it holds my interest. That it feels smart and fresh and interesting. I didn’t, for once, put a bookmark in at page twenty and come back to it an hour later. I read it from beginning to end, which I never do because I have a very short attention span, and then I read it again and I really had an emotional response. I laughed a lot, and I got almost teary at one point, and I…
Katie Anne: You told us you wept!
Jamie: I nearly wept. Maybe because I was so happy I finally read something that really loved, and really felt I was the right person for.
Also, I loved how female-driven it was. I’m a big fan of movies from the ‘80s and the ‘90s that feature two strong women as protagonists, and you never see that anymore.
TSB: Which are your favorites?
Jamie: Outrageous Fortune is a near-perfect movie to me The combination of Bette Midler and Shelley Long is something so important to my childhood, and probably the first time in my life that I truly became obsessed with film. I’ve seen Hello Again and Outrageous Fortune and Big Business many, many times, all in my childhood. In the ‘90s there were all these female dramas, like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Single White Female, and suddenly the number of really female stories out there became less. Then Bridesmaids, of course, made such a different for the universe of comedy. Katie can tell you about it, but Bridesmaids really paved the way for getting people interested in this film.
Katie Anne: The studio system, they try to make a business out of an art form. I think there had been some female-driven comedies that bombed, that didn’t quite work, so those were tabled and the bromances came out, and they really will just chuck a bunch of rom-coms at women, and women will go see them no matter what, because we need something to do on Friday night too. And there’s a great audience of women that go see movies. I love a good romantic comedy sometimes, but there’s a machine making them. And where is Working Girl, where is Beaches? When our script went out, all over Hollywood, people responded to it, “We love it, we could never make it, what else are you writing?”
Finally we said, let’s just take a chance on ourselves and roll the dice and see if we can’t do this. Then Bridesmaids came out gangbusters, broke open a chasm for female-driven comedies and a lot of female writers. There’s just a whole road that’s been paved, which is really great for women.