In the new film, “For a Good Time, Call . . . ,” Katie, played by Ari Graynor, is a phone-sex operator in Gramercy Park who tantalizes men with comically salacious suggestions, telling one caller to put her in a cage and another to dangle his junk in a bowl of milk.
While Katie attempts to find love with one of her freaky phone mates, the real-life woman who inspired the role got a more creative reward for her titillating talents: this film.
“For a Good Time, Call . . .” was written by former Florida State University roommates Katie Anne Naylon and Lauren Miller, based on Naylon’s stint running the phone-sex line 1-866-FSU-TITS. While Miller co-stars as Katie’s roommate who eventually joins the business (and her husband, actor Seth Rogen, makes a hilarious cameo as an airline-pilot caller), she was less tolerant of Naylon’s activities at the time.
“She did it the year before we lived together, and told me about it because she was thinking of doing it again,” says Miller. “I said, ‘Keep it quiet. Keep it in your room. I don’t wanna know about it.’ ”
But when the pair sat down three years ago to brainstorm film ideas, Naylon’s hot and sweaty phone time seemed a natural topic for a comedy. What’s stranger is that during her time as a phone-sex operator, Naylon was a virgin.
“Most of [what callers wanted] was shocking stuff, but I was a virgin, so everything shocked me. ‘From behind? All right,’ ” says Naylon, noting callers requested “a lot of S&M kind of stuff I didn’t quite understand. I didn’t know up from down. My version of dirty sex was Julia Roberts on the piano in ‘Pretty Woman.’ ”
Naylon’s phone sex work, which she calls “another crazy-Katie harebrained idea,” evolved from a combination of youthful adventurousness and basic financial need.
“I needed a job, because my student loans weren’t enough to cover everything,” she says. “I could have worked at the campus bookstore or something, but working for a phone sex line seemed funny.”
When she started her own line, she initially put flyers all over the FSU campus, but they were taken down almost immediately. Then, several better ideas took hold.
“We took them to adult stores, left them on the counters, and asked the guys to put them in people’s bags,” she says. “Then we made a Web site with girls on it who were not us, and pimped it out in AOL chat rooms.”
Given that, Naylon treated her gig as “an improv class,” feigning experience and opening her imagination to anonymous men while writing out sociology notes and watching “Dawson’s Creek” in the background.
“I had no idea whether [sex] should feel good or should hurt or anything, so I just ran with it, no matter what happened. There was no judgment from me,” says Naylon. “When things got dark and weird, I just figured, ‘At least you’re doing this on the phone, and not petrifying your real girlfriend.’ ”
While speaking sweet icky nothings to strange men seems creepy, the job can also serve as an inspiring weigh station on the road to artistic expression. Whoopi Goldberg once worked as a phone-sex operator, and has said of her time there, “You have to be a good actor.” And much of the experience in inventing characters and sexual scenarios that writer Laura Albert used to create the literary hoax JT LeRoy came from her years on the erotic line.
For 27-year-old Rebecca Memoli, her photographic project, “A Strange Intimacy,” includes re-creations of some of the odder calls she took as a phone-sex operator in Manhattan just after college.
“On one of them, a guy said that he wanted me to [pleasure] myself with a clothes iron, while in the background he was like, ‘I’m gonna f - - k this blow-dryer,” says the Bushwick-based Memoli, whose depiction of this call and others can be seen on her Web site, rebeccamemoli.com.
“You could hear this blow-dryer in the background, and he asked me what brand of iron I had to make sure I was actually using an iron. When I was re-creating the piece, I bought a blow-dryer, and I was like, how do you penetrate this thing? How do you f - - k a blow-dryer?”
Memoli got her job through Craigslist and had to take a class that included an introduction to different fetishes. “I was really bad at ‘horny housewife.’ I had no idea how to be that person,” she says. “One time, the guy was like, ‘I’m a UPS guy.’ There’s only so many package delivery puns that are provocative and not silly.”
Neighbors are another pitfall, especially if, like Naylon, you’re working near other students. “The girl next door came over and went, ‘What’s going on here? I hear a lot of moaning and groaning and sound effects, and there are no guys going in or out,’ ” says Naylon. “She was like, ‘I’m gonna tell everyone you two are lesbians unless I know what’s going on.’ So we hired the dumbass to baby-sit the phone lines.”
Given her naiveté, the job also provided a slight obstacle to Naylon when she did start having actual, not virtual, sex. “One guy I slept with said to me, ‘You know, you don’t have to talk the entire time.’ I was like, we don’t have to talk the entire time. I get it. We’re both here. I don’t need to narrate what we’re doing.”
Both Memoli and Naylon have no regrets. “Phone sex is just one way of getting a connection with someone else,” says Naylon. “Phone sex is classic. It’s here to stay.”