She was somewhere near the Bergman section, or maybe it was in the Cs.
Writer-actress Marianna Palka was in the West Los Angeles video store CineFile looking for a movie to watch when she started to wonder about the odd etiquette of certain people behind the counter and the slightly off-balance conversations she would have with them while renting movies. In particular, she mused on what the dynamic would be like when a young, single woman rented erotic films from the stereotypically dorky and chatty male clerks.
"I got the idea for that scene and then built the film in my mind as I was driving home," Palka, 27, said recently while sitting for an interview in the back of the store, surrounded by racks of videos.
From that idea emerged "Good Dick," playing at the Landmark Nuart theater in West Los Angeles. Written by, directed by, produced by and starring Palka, the film had its premiere earlier this year as part of the narrative competition at the Sundance Film Festival.
When a lonely young woman (Palka) is engaged by a sad-sack video store clerk (Jason Ritter) while renting heaps of erotica, she initially rebuffs him. Slowly, she warms to his attention. The film features some outrageously frank talk about sex and porn while remaining endearingly chaste in what it actually shows transpiring between its young couple falling in love.
"While I was writing I was asking myself questions I wanted to answer by making the film," said the Scottish-born Palka. "Right now, it seems it's difficult to see anything sexy that's also real, it's all so plastic. I really wanted to illustrate a real relationship between two people that had nothing to do with that and was really about these questions I had: What's sexy? What is sex without love? What is sex with love? How healing is sex?"
Palka's partner on screen is her off-screen boyfriend of nine years: Jason Ritter, son of the late actor John Ritter and also a producer on "Good Dick." After the pair met producers Cora Olson and Jennifer Dubin, the film moved closer to becoming a reality. Shooting on digital video in fall 2006, the filmmakers had to stretch their meager budget of around $200,000 with resourcefulness.
Palka wrote not only with certain performers in mind but also with locations known, casting an eye on the slightly bland, easily overlooked workaday corners of West Los Angeles. Ritter's brother and grandmother appear in the film, and there are cameos by Ron Howard's daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, Dirty Sexy Money's" Seth Gabel, Elisabeth and Katherine Waterston and Charles Durning as video customers. Besides CineFile, the production also shot scenes in the apartment Palka and Ritter still share.
