Hollywood Motived By Naked Greed

I’d never given much thought to lap dancing before.

Of course, it was never really a feminist issue before.

The formula used to be simple: Women with wicked ways were punished.

In the 1940 movie “Waterloo Bridge,” Vivien Leigh played a ballerina who turned to prostitution after she lost her job and thought her fiance, a British officer played by Robert Taylor, had died in the war. She was at the train station one night, looking for customers, when she saw Taylor get off a train. He was alive! Assuming that she was there to meet him (albeit tartishly dressed), he swept her back into his upper-crust world. Racked by guilt, she jumped off Waterloo Bridge.

But prostitution is now an instrument of upward mobility. Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” Melanie Griffith in “Milk Money,” Divine Brown in Hugh Grant’s ride into the Sunset - all rewarded for their sins. Roseanne, who says she did some hooking back in her housewife-cocktail waitress days, is now giving instruction to Conde Nast intellectuals.

And there are more fallen women rising. Demi Moore plays a table dancer - a step up from lap dancing - in “Striptease.” She got $12.5 million - the largest paycheck ever given to an actress - for undressing (again).

In “Jade,” written (surprise!) by Joe Eszterhas, Linda Fiorentino is a psychologist by day and hooker by night.

The NC-17 “Showgirls,” written (surprise!) by Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, is a tawdry spectacle that makes their prior collaboration, Sharon Stone ostentatiously crossing her legs in “Basic Instinct,” look like “Little Women.”

Elizabeth Berkley has graduated from after-school television to play the heroine, a prostitute who comes to Vegas and claws her way up from lap dancer to topless dancer. She learns valuable lessons, including a new way to use ice and the proper pronunciation of Versace, as she makes her picaresque way through fake breasts, fake lips, fake volcanoes, fake palm trees and fake dialogue:

Choreographer to topless dancer: “What are these, watermelons? This is a stage, babe, not a patch.”

MGM/United Artists, well aware of the movie’s likeliest audience, started running steamy ads on the sports pages.

That irritated Eszterhas, who says he has written a moral, feminist movie, and who is urging teens to use fake ID’s to get in. “The message is about a young woman who refuses to sell her soul, who refuses to sell out against the forces of corruption,” he said on the “Today” show. “It’s a spiritual message. And forgive me, but I think it’s almost a deeply religious message on a very personal level.”

The edgy Eszterhas told me that he has bought a full-page ad in Variety, an open letter to “Women” to explain that his movie “shows that dancers in Vegas are often victimized, humiliated, used, verbally and physically raped by the men who are at the power centers of that world … Society will never change if we stick our heads in the sand and pretend that abuses to women, blacks, Jews and gay people aren’t happening every day.”

He said that moviegoers who only see the nudity, perversion, sex and drugs in “Showgirls” are superficial people. “They’re like a guy who looks at a woman and all he sees is her body. He’s ignoring her character, her soul.”

Paul Verhoeven might be one of those superficial guys. The director gushed to Movieline: “I love to look at naked girls.” The publicity material for “Showgirls” does not play up the movie’s spirituality: “The concept of a naked woman dancing privately for one man alone in a room captured the filmmakers’ imaginations. Eszterhas was the first to try lap dancing.”

The screenwriter does have some backup. Unfortunately, it’s Camille Paglia, who wrote that a prostitute is “the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one.” Sydney Biddle Barrows also thinks the new Hollywood ethic is healthy: “Society has always condemned women and punished them for arousing men’s sexual urges.”

Then again, you might say that Hollywood is simply doing what it has always done: making glossy movies with nubile, semi-clothed women jiggling. Sex not only costs; it also pays. And the women like Demi Moore who are cashing in are not pandering any less than the men who are paying them.

What really arouses all these people is money.

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