Paul Cowan's inouisitive eye: war games porn stars and the Ghosts of Westray - cinematographer - Interview

TAKE ONE, May, 2002 by Maurie Alioff

Looking back at what was clearly an intense encounter with L.A.'s porn freaks, Cowan brings up his contradictory feelings. After a shoot, he would get fed up and return to Montreal, "but I was always glad to get back out again." Interestingly, making the picture echoes the cycles of boredom and excitement many porn viewers know well Moreover the process of filming Give Me Your Soul was a unique challenge. "You get a lot of people coming on to you," Cowan recalls. "These are 100 percent full-blown exhibitionists, and it becomes easy, in a sense because they'll do anything you want them to do." Although tempted to stage whatever poped into his head herefrained "because that would violate every thing that a documentary's all about. That became a rule with me I didn't ask anybody to do anything."

The principal characters in Give Me Your Soul are "Papa Bear" Margold, a 52-year-old former porn star who runs a support group for people in the business "Katie June" an eager starlet whose mom, Dolly fully supports her daughter's plans to fuck for bucks the sensitivel J.D. Ram, who died ignominiously, and the legendary Luke Ford. The latter is a thirty something journalist who until recently ran a porn scene Web site that combined muckraking exposes, extensive bios of stars and what www.wired.com calls" melancholic, angst-filled ruminations on living in the conflicting realms of smut and Sinai.' The son of an Australian evangelist, Ford is a covert to Orthodox Judaism, who say wired.com, has sold the Web site and plans to devote his journalistic skills to covering the Middle-East conflict from Jerusalem.

The antithesis of Not a Love Story, the NFB's long-ago foray into pornography, Cowan's documentary avoids simplistic moral abstractions. Although Bill Margold "Katie June" and Luke Ford live of smut they are not reduced to moustache-twirling misogynists, wretched sex slaves or harlots desperately seeking feminist redemption. The movie also suggests that while these people can be seen as an oddly childlike family, vipers lurk behind the seemingly placid fucking and filming that goes on in airy homes 30 minutes from Universal City. For all their cool professionalism, some of the actors still die of AIDS of from addictions that led them into the industry. In the documentary's most haunting imagines. Dolly attend her daughter's first day as a hard-core actor and as we hear copulatory groans emanating from a couch in the distance the camera pulls back into an indifferent, deserted patio.

Like The Kid Who Couldn't Miss, Cowan's Westray concerns people who get chewed up and spat out by ruthless, powerful men; like Give Me Your Soul, it's about literally dying for work. The troubling movie immerses the viewer in the horror and tragic loss endured by people in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, after a 1992 coal--mine explosion that killed 26 men. Despite a history of mining disasters that plagued the region for almost 200 years, fast operators managed to open its last and most dangerous coal seam, insisting that new technologies would make it safe. In reality, the now defunct mining operation had no time for standard precautions, its inspectors ignored danger signs, and potential whistle--blowers were told, "Take your fucking lunch can and you fly the fuck underground or you go home." At the end of a 1995 inquiry, the presiding judge called the Westray story one of "omissions, mistakes, incompetence, apathy, stupidity and neglect."