Todd Verow and Charles Lum | Blow Job 2017 / 2017

blow job, the remake

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Lum (screenplay), Todd Verow and Charles Lum (directors) Blow Job 2017 / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

Filmmkers Charle Lum and Tood Verow pretend to recreate Andy Warhol’s iconic short movie, Blow Job 2017, with three or four “extras,” if you want to call them that; they’re actually three or four one-liner jokes that erase all the ironic intentions of the original 1964 version.

    Here also a black-leathered jacketed young man is backed-up against brick wall receiving fellatio. The original recipient, DeVeren Bookwalter, however, was much cuter than the long-haired and wasted looking Luc Goodhart, and Warhol’s version, running for 9 minutes, gives you a little more to chew on than the Verow/Lum shortened version of 5 minutes.

    In the 2017 rendition, however, you do get the sound of the mint-new jacket actually crackling with actor Goodhart’s ecstatic moments of enjoyment. And in this version you also can observe him catching the entire experience on his cellphone and after the event vaping—what might be described as the “real” blow job.

    For an extra buck, moreover, you can also see the split-screen or the cinemascope updates, both of which turn this previously rather innocent film—innocent since you never see anything beyond the cute boy thrashing around his face and shoulders in evident pleasure—into a true porno film. The added versions, in fact, show us that this was clearly a real act of fellatio as we observe Goodhart’s curved cock with David J. White’s tongue and lips licking and engulfing it, as well as the moment of ejaculation with white cum.

     In this “expanded” version, in fact, the film loses all its original meaning, transforming itself instead into a porn-worthy blow job, along with the inclusion of the cellphone and vape pen

evidently proving that in the 21st century we have lost our sense of irony and camp in our presentation of the literal pornographic act.

     As Luis Ranz comments on Letterboxd: “This remake sucks.”

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).