100 GIRLS is my funny portrait of everything I love about woman.

"I think men are clowns compared to women.  Take a look.  God didn't lend his artistry to guys.  Take the penis for instance, it looks like God had some extra skin left over when he was making the elbow and decided to slap it in our groins."

100 GIRLS is my comedy of how men are hooked on woman.

"Women have tractor beams that pull us in with their honesty, understanding and nurture... while men turn on their anti-intimacy force field which is powered by sarcasm, humor and aversion."

100 GIRLS is a smart comedy that sets out to compare the many differences between women and men -- most of them are funny, a few are sad.

More specifically, 100 GIRLS searches for "the horror" at the core of every manÕs relationship with a woman.

I like stories in which premise, structure, and visuals illustrate the idea of the film. 100 GIRLS does this. In the story, our romantic hero, Matthew (played by Jonathan Tucker), gets stuck in a dorm elevator with a girl during a blackout. He talks to her all night. He falls in love with her even though he's never seen her face. In the morning when the power is restored, he discovers the girl is gone. The only thing he knows about his mystery girl is that she is one of 100 girls in an all-girls dorm affectionately known as the "Virgin Vault."  Our hero sets out on a semester long journey to find his true love amongst a hundred feminine suspects. The opening and the climax even involves the hero standing in front of dozens of windows filled with girls.  The premise, the structure, and visuals feed the main issue of the story.  One guy and how he deals with women.  He's literally surrounded by them.

Matthew encounters five main romantic suspects -- each a different type:  The uber-girl next door.  The art school slut who oozes sex more than a sponge contraceptive.  The beautiful girl who looms as a titan in Matt's masturbatory dreams.  The ugly girl who men stay away from as if she has the Ebola virus.  The feminist girl who makes Matt feet like he's the amalgamation of a weiner and pussy -- "the wussy."  They each represent a different side of womanhood. It  is important that each of these girls transcend their type as Matthew himself begins to see beyond their type.  The script helps this idea by giving each girl something to reveal.  The girl next door is not really the girl next door. The art school slut is more artist than slut, and she shouldn't be used as a man's "sexual training wheels."  The beautiful girl loses her looks and likes it.  The ugly girl gets a chance to be sexy.  And the feminist learns to like something about men.  Each one of these characters has their own three part arc.  As we track Matthew's story, we will track their stories.  All five suspects change by the end of the story.  It requires careful casting to create this range of women or as Matthew calls it..."A Whitman Sampler of girls."

I am tired of the way all films approach love and sex.  Most films are never specific and realistic.  This film is very frank about its talk about sex.  When Matthew makes love to a girl in the film, he doesn't get to make cinema love where the guy just slides in between her legs like a hot knife through butter... he makes the kind of love where the couple laugh together when their bodies make that farting noise when air gets trapped between their skin.

At first glance, the sexual frankness in 100 GIRLS may just seem exploitative, but it's meant to be crude sexual poetry much in the way Henry Miller writes.  There's even a reference to this when Matthew forges a friendship with the studious but ugly girl, Dora. They read Henry Miller together ... "Your Sylvestor. Yes, he can build a fire, but I know how to inflame you. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent..."  The film's originality will come from its frankness.  The sex talk will be explicit, but the visuals of sex will not be.  The visuals will be shot artfully and will not show everything.  It's important that this film be sexually honest, but not exploitative. We're going for Henry Miller not "Hannah Does Her Sisters."

I am also weary of the way films look.  It's all just master shot and coverage.  Film language is so flexible but most filmmakers never go for it.  As we go through life, there are two movies playing before our eyes.  The physical world we see and the psychological world going on in our minds.  We see two images simultaneously. When someone tells us a story, we see our friend talking but at the same time we see the person's story in our head.  I want to make films that capture this duality.  In many places in 100 GIRLS, we get glimpses of what is going on inside Matthew's mind.  They're not meant to be big psychological sequences ... they are meant to be eye candy that are funny or sometimes poignant glimpses of what's going on inside the hero's head.  This filmic style shows the way we all see the dual images of the physical world and the mental world simultaneously.

My favorite example of how this works in 100 GIRLS is when Matthew meets the ugly girl who never has plans on a Saturday Night.  He thinks "When you're not good looking, you become a failure by default. People treat you like you have the Ebola virus."  For a moment, we will see Matthew dressed in a HAZARDOUS MATERIALS SUIT like Dustin Hoffman wore in OUTBREAK.  Matthew explains further regarding ugly people. "People don't want to get near you because they think what you have is contagious."  The image of Matthew walking past the girl in a Haz-Mat suit is both surreal and funny, but it is also sad because it is really the way people treat ugly people.  It's an image that says so much in such a short time.  And it's great cinema.  It's like accessible Fellini. 

Since I've begun to discuss the visual nature of the film, I'll jot down a few notes.  The film will be shot with long lenses which gives a classy, selective focus look.  It will not be shot with wide lenses like most comedies.  Control of the color palette is important.  The film has a very tight arena -- The boy's dorm.  The girls dorm.  And the plaza in between.  Each character's dorm room is a subworld and a reflection of their character.  Picture the extreme in color exemplified by the girl that loves purple -- purple clothes, purple nail color, purple walls.  Then picture the room devoid of color.  The art school slut is dressed in black clothes and her dorm room walls are a texture of black and white ink drawings.  I would like the college we choose to have old, ivy covered brick buildings so the feel of the film is timeless.

I could go on about the visuals, but I'll stop at this:  When I wrote the script, I could only write a scene if it totally delighted me.  Every scene has something I love or something that makes me chuckle.  Most films are constructed with here's the expository scene (boring) and now here's a set piece which is the cool scene mixed among standard scenes.  I can't do that.  I have to be totally psyched about every scene I write.  Instead of writing that the character is sad, I write "my spirits crashed like a Karmic Hindenberg."  Whether you like it or not, every line is cared for with this much attention. I will treat the visuals the same way.  Every scene has a visual angle.  Even in the blackout, there is a visual angle. Matthew describes how "our tongues tangled and our hands began displaying their incredible night vision"... the film then shows silhouetted hands and body parts to simulate the "night vision."

100 GIRLS is unique in that it takes the dramatic structure of a mystery and mixes it with the elements of the romantic comedy.  Matthew is the detective.  Instead of solving a murder, he's trying to find the mystery girl that ran off and killed their love.  In the detective film, there are, of course, suspects. In 100 GIRLS, there are many romantic suspects.  The mystery film always has the detective investigating all levels of the social strata from the rich to the poor.  In this film, the hero searches the female strata from beautiful to the unattractive.  Good mystery films usually have the detective solving the mystery but also solving something about their own psyche and their own guilt.  In 100 GIRLS, Matthew solves a mystery about himself and why he has "a romantic retardation" with women.  100 GIRLS bends the genre of the mystery and the romantic comedy. That's what makes it original. And that's another reason why I don't compare 100 GIRLS to other films.

As I began with... I love women. I can't imagine anything more fun than making a film with a hundred of them.  Men are funny about women. I have to believe that one man surrounded  by a hundred girls will be very funny.
 

Michael Davis
Writer/Director "100 Girls"