{"id":574,"date":"2013-03-29T00:20:15","date_gmt":"2013-03-29T04:20:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mediafunhouse.com\/blog\/?page_id=574"},"modified":"2020-12-08T22:37:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T03:37:42","slug":"i-know-youre-watching-me-the-bizarre-world-of-rinse-dream","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mediafunhouse.com\/?page_id=574","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Know You\u2019re Watching Me\u201d: The Bizarre Visions of \u201cRinse Dream\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/a><\/a>As renegade as they\u00a0may seem to the outside world, porn films stay within a \u201ccomfort zone.\u201d Few directors strayed outside that zone as consistently and imaginatively as Stephen Sayadian, who made eight porn features under the moniker \u201cRinse Dream.\u201d Sayadian\u2019s work is provocative in the truest sense of the world: his characters explode the fourth wall by including the viewer in the action, his \u201cparty doll\u201d actresses daring<\/em> us to get off at their antics while they spout nonsense sex phrases (\u201clucky spasm,\u201d \u201cman mayo,\u201d \u201cslut slaw\u201d) and a voiceover \u2013 from the performer you\u2019re watching descend into an orgasmic frenzy onscreen \u2013 offers sardonic comments like \u201cshe\u2019s lying \u2026 lies, lies, more lies\u2026.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>The average porn fan had little patience for Sayadian\u2019s sometimes grotesque sex scenes (a girl and her jack-in-the-box, a secretary and a man dressed as a pencil). But Rinse Dream is well-beloved by movie buffs for the fact that he was the first and only porn director whose work was shown exclusively to cult and underground audiences, usually in Rocky Horror<\/em>-style witching-hour bookings. His features continue to get glowing reviews on adult movie websites and in reference \u201cguides,\u201d most especially his Caf\u00e9 Flesh<\/em> (1982), a lavishly stylized slice of arty sci-fi porn about a postnuclear world in which the people who can still have sex (\u201cSex Positives\u201d) are forced to perform in sleazy cabarets for the sad \u201cSex Negatives\u201d who\u2019ve lost the knack.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>But who is Rinse Dream\u2026.er, Stephen Sayadian exactly? He first worked in show business as a theater director with avant-garde tendencies, something that certainly defined the look of his porn. Caf\u00e9 Flesh<\/em> opens with a leering M.C. (Andrew Nichols) inviting us to watch a \u201ctableau of desire in decline, the honorable Mr. and Mrs. Sane\u2026\u201d This sequence winds up concerning a housewife getting it on with her rat milkman (don\u2019t ask), but the tableau principle harkens back to Sayadian\u2019s theatrical work, as does the incredible set design, lighting and makeup effects that appear in his features.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>Sayadian\u2019s real-life experiences in the advertising industry are reflected in his dialogue, which mocks consumer gullibility, and in a visually striking episode in his first dark-humored art-porn outing, Nighdreams<\/em> (1981). The film finds a pair of scientists monitoring the outlandish sex fantasies of a buttoned-down housewife (Dorothy Le May), who is the first in a long line of Rinse Dream characters to utter the fourth-wall bustin\u2019 line, \u201cI know you\u2019re watching me\u2026.\u201d A creepy rape fantasy that occurs midway\u00a0through is clearly modeled after the movie poster for Brian DePalma\u2019s Dressed to Kill<\/em> \u2013 which Sayadian had, coincidentally, helped to design.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a>Sayadian\u2019s final pre-porn career, directing music videos, is also echoed in Nightdreams<\/em>, in a memorable lesbian cowgirl episode. As a pair of nubile twin cowgirls come up against a horny gunslinger (LeMay) with a dildo in her holster, a killer cover of \u201cRing of Fire\u201d by the band Wall of Voodoo fills the soundtrack. The fact that the cowgirl scene and Wall of Voodoo\u2019s classic vid-clip \u201cMexican Radio\u201d have a similar setting and the same lighting is no coincidence, as Sayadian directed that music video and several others at the turn of the \u201980s.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>When it came time for Sayadian and his co-scripter Jerry Stahl (better known these days as the author of gritty tomes like the memoir Permanent Midnight<\/em>) to cash in on the surprise success of Flesh<\/em>, the pair came up with a completely wigged-out softcore update of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari <\/em>called, simply enough, Dr. Caligari<\/em> (1989). Stahl and Sayadian\u2019s dialogue is at its strangest here, with the actors delivering weird monologues about their lives before they entered into treatment with the slinky doc (played by Madeleine Reynal). What one carries away from the film despite its torrent of words, however, are demented items like a giant skin-covered door that has odd gaping wounds and a very large functioning tongue that makes one female patient very happy indeed.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>With its hypnotic syntho soundtracks, severely geometric fashions and screwy, pop culture-centric dialogue, Sayadian\u2019s work fits in snugly in with other art-school-freak creations of the new wave period in the 1970s and early \u201980s, including Devo, \u201cThe Pee-Wee Herman Show\u201d and Richard Elfman\u2019s live-action cartoon Forbidden Zone<\/em>. As integral to Sayadian\u2019s style as the tableau idea is \u2013 a frozen sexual grouping that comes to life and is explored through different camera angles \u2013 Mitchell Froom\u2019s skewed synthesizer music helps to modulate the pacing for much of Caf\u00e9 Flesh<\/em> and the other early Sayadian pics. Froom went on from these film experiments to become a highly lauded music producer and session musician, working with the likes of Paul McCartney, Sheryl Crow, Los Lobos and his wife, Suzanne Vega. Froom was also one of the few crewmembers on the films to use his real name — perhaps because his real name sounds like a pseudonym in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>Sayadian\u2019s other main collaborator, Jerry Stahl, was his writing partner for over a decade. The two went from cranking out satiric ads and articles for Hustler<\/em> to contriving what Stahl refers to as \u201cavant-garde whack\u2019n\u2019whiggle\u201d flicks in Permanent Midnight<\/em>. Sayadian\u2019s work after Stahl went off on his own \u2013 to write mainstream sitcoms like Alf<\/em> and battle his own drug abuse \u2013 was still sublimely subversive, but the early\u00a0films contain some of the most jarring images to ever appear in porn. Key among these is the comic sequence in Nightdreams<\/em> where a black dude decked out in a cardboard Cream of Wheat box (with the real logo!) receives a blowjob from a horny\u00a0housewife, while a white guy dressed as a slice of bread plays the sax (to a scratchy 78 of \u201cOld Man River\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>Sayadian returned to porn in 1991 after becoming fed up with working on mainstream TV series like Silk Stalkings<\/em> and Max Headroom<\/em>. He displays an even more defiant attitude in the six shot-on-video features that appeared from \u201991-\u201993 (Party\u00a0Doll a Go Go 1 & 2<\/em>, Nightdreams 2 & 3 <\/em>and a pair of features about the Untamed Cowgirls of the Wild West<\/em>). These half-dozen features are open acts of sabotage \u2013 Sayadian gives the average porn fan what he wants, but not in the package that he wants it in. Plots are non-existent, dialogue ranges from silly to bitchy (the always-intense Jeanna Fine comments on her own character\u2019s submissive begging: \u201cshe\u2019s saying some profound stuff. She\u2019s must\u2019ve read The Hobbit<\/em>.\u201d), sex scenes are interrupted by chicks doing the frug or the hitchhike, and, most radically, in Party Doll<\/em> each girl gets a mantra to repeat over and over as she climaxes (or watches one), the best being Bionca\u2019s manic, \u201cCalling all porn dogs \u2013 watch me work, uh-huh!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>After dismembering porn\u2019s clich\u00e9s in those features, Sayadian returned to his roots in theater and advertising. In the past few years, he has bounced back from health problems to work on a variety of projects, both in and of show business. He\u2019s currently working on a theatrical musical based on \u2013 what else? \u2013 Caf\u00e9 Flesh<\/em> that he says won\u2019t contain hardcore but will reflect the humor and surreal sensibility that made the film a cult classic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/a>The upcoming Caf\u00e9 Flesh<\/em> stage show guarantees that future \u201cRinse Dream\u201d mindfucks may on the way (this time in person!). Whatever happens, Sayadian\u2019s reputation as a radically surreal filmmaker is secure: not content to simply supply jackoff fodder, he and his partners served up some indelibly strange nightmare imagery, as well as some of the wildest camp humor to appear in any medium during the \u201980s and \u201990s. And, ironically, even though he was hellbent on subverting their \u201cbig moments\u201d in every conceivable way, soft and hardcore performers like Michelle Bauer (who starred in Flesh<\/em> under the pseudonym \u201cPia Snow\u201d), Jeanna Fine and Madison look a helluva lot better in his features than they did in films that offered no distractions whatsoever. Maybe those mantras held some magic, after all\u2026. — Ed Grant<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

(First published in\u00a0Celebrity Skin<\/em> and used with the written permission of the author and publication of first instance.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As renegade as they\u00a0may seem to the outside world, porn films stay within a \u201ccomfort zone.\u201d Few directors strayed outside that zone as consistently and imaginatively as Stephen Sayadian, who made eight porn features under the moniker \u201cRinse Dream.\u201d Sayadian\u2019s work is provocative in the truest sense of the world: his characters explode the fourth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":217,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"templates\/template-sidebar-none.php","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-574","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"kubio_ai_page_context":{"short_desc":"","purpose":"general"},"yoast_head":"\n\u201cI Know You\u2019re Watching Me\u201d: The Bizarre Visions of \u201cRinse Dream\u201d - Media Funhouse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mediafunhouse.com\/?page_id=574\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cI Know You\u2019re Watching Me\u201d: The Bizarre Visions of \u201cRinse Dream\u201d - Media Funhouse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As renegade as they\u00a0may seem to the outside world, porn films stay within a \u201ccomfort zone.\u201d Few directors strayed outside that zone as consistently and imaginatively as Stephen Sayadian, who made eight porn features under the moniker \u201cRinse Dream.\u201d Sayadian\u2019s work is provocative in the truest sense of the world: his characters explode the fourth […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/mediafunhouse.com\/?page_id=574\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Media Funhouse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ed.grant.378\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-12-09T03:37:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/mediafunhouse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Cafe-Flesh-227x300.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@mediafunhouse\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/mediafunhouse.com\\\/?page_id=574\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/mediafunhouse.com\\\/?page_id=574\",\"name\":\"\u201cI Know You\u2019re Watching Me\u201d: The Bizarre Visions of \u201cRinse Dream\u201d - 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