Last week I was on the set of Will Ryder’s latest spoof, This Ain’t The Partidge Family XXX

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Years ago, back when parody was commonplace in porn, I’d get e-mails all the time from fans wondering how they could break into the extremely lucrative field of porn script writing. Here’s one e-mail I got and one suggestion I offered.

Casbah writes: Dear Gene, I know it’s too late to make this year’s AVN deadline for nominations, but I’m interested in writing and selling adult scripts that have potential for winning awards next year. But I hear something like 10,000 movies come out every year. How do you write something that hasn’t been done before? Where do you get ideas? I’d like to know. I’d also like to know how much money I could make.

Gene sez: In an industry that’s supposed to be generating $10 billion a year, the bad news for wannabe screenwriters is that most of that money is divided between two people- Paul Fishbein and Steve Hirsch. But as far as coming up with ideas for scripts that pay relatively little, you must be methodical if not a bit cynical in your approach.

Here’s one idea. Spend an afternoon of leisurely surfing on the movie channels. Listen for soundbites of dialogue, write ’em down and when you’ve got about 10 or 20 good lines, weave a script around them.

Sound too involved? Try this approach. It always works. Go to your local newsstand and grab a movie digest- the ones that feature one or two sentence summaries of films. Takes a clean sheet of paper [or a dirty one if a clean one isn’t available] and pick one summary at random and write it down.

For the sake of example I’m quoting from Satellite Direct and scanning down the plots of a bunch of Charlie Chan flicks that the Fox Movie Channel featured that month. Reason being for that, years ago I wrote a script called Pearl of the Orient, a comedy featuring a Charlie Clams character I created which was played by Vince Vouyer.

Why a Chan knockoff? Because the company wanted to do an Oriental feature and were paying big bucks for it. Something in the neighborhood of $200. Your assignment, Casbah, write me a new $200 Charlie Clams movie, and here’s how you do it. With no fuss or muss.

Take the plot from Charlie Chan at the Circus: “Chan meets murder and foul play under the big top when he takes the family to see the show.”

Now you got a core idea, but, remember, in porn any family member must be over 18 and preferably female. With a little revision, here’s what we have: “Chan meets murder and foul play under the big top when he takes his family of hot, post high school oriental daughters to see the show.”

Okay for a start, now we need a back story to add some weight to this thing. Let’s go to the next summary, Charlie Chan at the Opera: “Chan probes the murder of a diva.”

Probe is a good word, especially in porn. Now let’s put the two ideas together. “Chan probes a diva under the big top and meets murder and foul play when he takes his family of hot, post high school daughters to see the show.”

So far we’ve established the sex angle, but we need something wacky. Big Top, of course, suggests clowns and we know how successful a director like Tom Zupko has been with an off-the-wall title such as Ass Clowns. So, let’s rip Zupko off with the clown idea. But how? Let’s go on to the next plot summary for Charlie Chan at Treasure Island which reads: “Excellent tale about a blackmailing mystic at the San Francisco Exposition.”

A little creative synthesis gives us this: “Chan probes a diva under the San Francisco big top and meets murder and foul play at the hands of mystic, blackmailing clowns when he takes his family of hot, post high school daughters to see the show.”

See, now we got mystic clowns fucking the daughters, Chan fucking the diva, but cable says, whoa, we can’t have murder and foul play. What to do. Well, for 200 bucks, you don’t do much except steal another idea which we’ll take from To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar: “Three New York drag queens break down in a narrow-minded Midwestern town while driving cross-country.”

With a little invention and minor plot revision we have: “Chan probes a broken down diva under the big top in a narrow-minded Midwestern town and meets drag queen mystics who are blackmailing the clowns who are trying to fuck his hot, post high school daughters who came to see the show.”

The trick is, Casbah, do all of this in 13 to 15 pages and sholot this in a house because the $10 billion a year industry has severe budget restrictions that won’t allow you anything else. And, by the way, because it’s being shot in a house, you have to be out by 10 p.m.

Other than that, you got a potential award winner on your hands.