The Coen brothers movie inspired by a visit to a sex museum: “We’ll show you the machine”
Creative inspiration can strike anyone at any time, and it can come from anywhere, and it’s not even all that surprising that a key plot point in a Coen brothers movie came from a trip to a sex museum.
After all, Joel and Ethan have two of Hollywood’s most fertile imaginations, and their scripts don’t always originate through conventional means. Not many people could combine The Odyssey with The Wizard of Oz and have O Brother, Where Art Thou? emerge on the other side, but they did.
The Big Lebowski originated from Jeff Dowd, someone they’d met while trying to secure distribution for their first feature, Blood Simple, Fargo sold itself as based on a true story despite being anything but, and A Serious Man was derived from a childhood memory about a mysterious rabbi they’d once encountered.
In a way, it makes sense that arguably the most overtly ridiculous entry in the Coens’ filmography would have suitably ridiculous origins, with the siblings claiming that Burn After Reading was their attempt to emulate the stylish, kinetic, and high-octane work of Tony Scott, albeit if it was made by incompetents.
The farcical black comedy finds Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and his preposterous hairdo stumbling upon the confidential files of John Malkovich’s beleaguered CIA agent, launching an ill-judged blackmail and extortion scheme that draws George Clooney’s increasingly paranoid US Marshal into its orbit.
One of the picture’s most outlandish elements is the mysterious contraption that Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer is constructing in his basement, which turns out to be a motion-operated dildo chair. How did the Coens come up with such an elaborate device? The answer is two-fold, and equally bizarre.
On the set of Blood Simple, one of the grips told them the story about how he planned to order a similar item from the pages of a magazine, but after deciding that it was too expensive, he built one himself. Using that as the seed of the idea, their imaginations sparked during some downtime in the ‘Big Apple’.
“One was a machine I saw that a key grip made once,” Joel explained. “The other was a machine that is in the Museum of Sex, in New York City. “We actually at one point said to George, ‘We’ll show you the machine if you want, it’s down at 23rd Street and Madison. George said, ‘That’s all I need, is to be seen coming out of the Museum of Sex with you two guys.'”
Clooney opted not to do the research first-hand, instead trusting the Coens to provide his character with a structurally sound and fit-for-purpose dildo chair. They succeeded on that front, and it just goes to show that questionable anecdotes relayed by crew members in the early 1980s can come in handy two decades later.
