George Kuchar | Hold Me While I’m Naked / 1966

a life worth living

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Kuchar (screenwriter and director) Hold Me While I’m Naked / 1966

 

The 15 minute short film by George Kuchar titled Hold Me While I’m Naked, as he himself describes it, “was supposed to be about a mother and a daughter vying for the affections of the same man. Then the star got sick, so I decided to make a picture about a filmmaker who couldn’t make a movie, and that would be me.”

    We might describe this film, accordingly, as the story of a gay man’s fantasy of a Hollywood heterosexual love story that he could neither inhabit nor actually film, given his lack of finances, expertise, and comprehension of the world he desired. And as such, it is so painfully close to an autobiographical tale that it almost hurts to watch it; yet because of that very straight-forward telling, the absurd romance of the storyteller/filmmaker, and his very inability to actually make such a story, the work shifts momentarily into a campy production that finally reveals itself to be deeply profound.

    In some respects, this work parallels a movie such as Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953)—the major difference being that Ed Wood was a complete naïf without any talent while George and his twin brother Mike, both gay men, were incredibly aware of the art they were imitating, and given their total lack of finances for actors, costumes, music, and all the other elements of great filmmaking, were incredibly talented, nonetheless, at creating the illusion of Hollywood glamour, stripping it of nearly all of its outer shell of slickness to reveal, somewhat like Nicolas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and even Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the real feelings, societal hypocrisy, and delusions of that lay beneath. As James Stoller, writing in The Village Voice, expressed it in a far more poetic manner: "This film could cheer an arthritic gorilla, and audiences, apparently sensitized by its blithely accurate representation of feelings few among them can have escaped, rise from their general stupor to cheer it back."

    As critic Ed Halter reminds us, “By the time George Kuchar completed Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966) at the tender age of 23, he was already a celebrated director with more than 17 films under his belt, all made with his fraternal twin, Mike. The siblings had launched their heretofore conjoined career eight years earlier, making their first films by borrowing their aunt’s 8mm home-movie camera and their mother’s nightgown, and later perfected how to shoot and edit through scrutinizing the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, and Roger Corman at local movie theaters. Bearing titles like The Naked and the Nude (1957), Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof (1961), and Lust For Ecstasy (1963), the Kuchars’ luridly colorful micro-melodramas circulated in the amateur film clubs of their day, where the Bronx teens had been enthusiastic participants.”

    By 1965, Mike has just finished filming his first solo, a science-fiction parody titled Sins of the Felshapoids, leaving George to film by himself. Hold Me became as Halter sees it, a kind of “a lament of artistic isolation.”

     The film begins with Philip (played by George), a young man of no great beauty determined to make low-budget skin flicks with little but an overactive imagination. As if he were directing an Italian drama equal to the work of Fellini or Rosselli, he orders his star (Donna Kerness), dressed in an asparagus-green dress that looks somewhat like a prom-gown, to rush in hysterics out of a tenement building and make her way across a large brown-bricked wall. At the end of the street stands a young handsome boy, watching. For what purpose the director has sent her on her frenzied run, we never discern, but it certainly appears dramatic, and her demeanor is that of a traumatized movie star having discovered perhaps that her lover has been unfaithful or that he has just been killed, or…whatever other scenario which we might conjure up. 

    Back inside, the filmmaker attempts a love scene played out on the floor between our actress and a handsome male which Philip attempts to capture through a stained glass window, perhaps combining a bit of sanctity with his depiction of sin. But her bra seems for too prosaic for the scene, and he asks her to remove it, as he makes a second shoot of her naked body being kissed.

     But our temperamental star has now reached her limits. As Philip packs up, telling the couple what to expect for the next day’s shoot, the couple continue to make love, she finally breaking off when Philip has left, complaining to her co-star that she is “sick and tired of being naked in almost every scene.”

     Our nerdy hero now makes his way home, stopping by the way to use his camera as he films himself gently interacting with a small bird who not only hops upon his finger, but lets him kiss it.

    As Halter perceptively argues, what in 1996 critic Jack Stevenson struggled to describe as a “house-of-mirrors close-up,” was actually something close to what today we would describe as a selfie shot, “achieved more than forty years before Instagram.”

     Back at home, Philip receives a phone call telling him that his actor has quit. With no large salary, contracts, or studio commitment hanging over the relationship, there is little he can do but hang up the phone and stand looking out the window in absolute sorrow.

     He sadly beds down, in an almost horror-film like vignette, with both female and male mannequins, after painting the female’s lips bright red.

     Yet even then he cannot stop imagining what he might have filmed. And the next morning, he calls another actress and her boyfriend (who appears to be the young man standing at the end of the block in the first scene), but she is similarly disinterested.

     The love scene he conjures up between the two of them, however, becomes the passionate fantasy that he hoped to play out in his film, the two of them moving to the shower fully dressed, her terre verte colored halter slipping under the male’s grip to reveal one of her breasts.

     Philip strips and takes a long shower of despair; as he imagines the other couple passionately making love in the shower, he spins about in drag, draped in a red dress, finally beating his head against the wall in sorrow for the impossibility of realizing his dreams.

     His mother calls into him to “Get out, for Christ’s sake! You’ve been in there an hour!” She herself wants to finish up and leave the house.

     He moves to the table, a man still living at home with a mother in control of his life, as she serves him up a plate of badly burned toast and beets. Looking straight at the camera he comments, in utter sincerity belying a deep despair: “There’s a lotta things in life worth living for. Isn’t there?”

     There is no one there to hold him while he’s naked.

     As critic Ken Kellman observed of the film, it is: "a very direct and subtle, very sad and funny look at nothing more or less than sexual frustration and aloneness. In its economy and cogency of imaging, Hold Me surpasses any of Kuchar's previous work. The odd blend of Hollywood glamour and drama with all-too-real life creates and inspires counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality."

      This oddly poignant film was voted number 52 in the Village Voice’s Critic’s Poll of 100 Best Films of the 20th Century.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).