Dave chats to artist and filmmaker Arthur Egeli, whose arthouse triumph led to an opportunity he wasn’t necessarily expecting…

“All I wanted to do was buy every copy and put them in the dumpster.”

Everyone needs to make a living. In the case of Arthur Egeli, that was in the art world. A third generation painter, his grandfather, Bjorn Egeli, painted official portraits of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. Egeli Jr. studied at the Cape School of Art in Provincetown, which, in turn, sparked a genuine affection for the Massachusetts resort town and inspired his first feature, The Art of Passion (1995). Winner of the Jury Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival, this thoughtful romance was met with praise – but it failed to give the aspiring filmmaker the immediate career boost he’d hoped for.

“I was still on a high after finishing The Art of Passion,” says Egeli. “And I was sure that if I hadn’t arrived already, then I would soon! However, my day job was painting, and that was only just starting to get traction. Therefore my choices were limited, and when my friend, [production executive] Ray Cecire, recommended me for a job I felt obliged to take it.”

“I went into the production company office and they gave me the script to read. I took it away, went outside the building – which I believe was the one from Die Hard (1988) – and sat reading it.”

“It wasn’t that great to say the least. I stared into space for a little while, and asked myself if this is the best I could do or just the best script I could get? Apparently it was the latter.”

Critical success or not, the release of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995) put stripper films back on the menu. Like any good B-movie mogul – vis-à-vis the Jim Wynorski-produced Stripshow (1995) (aka ‘Midnight Tease 2’) and Roger Corman’s Stripteaser (1995) – money-man Marc Greenberg was quick to react. Since the dawn of the ‘90s, Greenberg had piggybacked on the demand for video erotica. The producer might not have had genre kings like Jag Mundhra or Gregory Dark at his disposal, but the prolific mini-mogul still managed to rack up a slate of quality smut like Indecent Behavior (1993) and Smooth Operator (1995).  

LAP DANCER (1995) certainly doesn’t reach those heights.

Penned by D. Alvero [1] and Michael Paul Girard – the latter of whom wrote and directed Bikini Med School (1994) and Bikini House Calls (1996) either side of this – it focuses on the trials and tribulations of Natalie Baker (Elizabeth Wagner). Passed over for a promotion at work, and permanently in hock to her affluent boyfriend, Jim (Steve Kesmodel), a chance meeting with an old friend (Lynn Wolf) introduces her to a vacant position at the Hollywood Glitterdome. A seedy strip joint with a loyal clientele of flush Asian businessmen, what begins as the perfect opportunity for Natalie to get herself straight soon descends into a fight for her personal safety.

Lap Dancer is a solid piece of work in terms of style and performances, especially from ‘Wagner’.

“I seem to remember that was not her real name,” reveals the director.

Egeli clearly knows how to structure a scene, and there’s flair to some of the club material. The letdown is the script, which is awkwardly paced, chock-full of clunky lines (“If we lose this job I’ll rip your tits off with my bare claws”), and saddled with the most perfunctory of endings.

“I thought I could make some semblance of an ‘artsy’ film,” muses Egeli, “But I was working in the wrong direction. After my first day of filming, the executives complained I didn’t use enough film. A few days later they complained I was using too much.”

“I remember working so hard on that film – all night shoots for two weeks – drawing my own storyboards and carefully planning the shots and completely staying on schedule. But at the time, I don’t think they liked me. Well, they didn’t offer me another one to do [laughs]!”

Lap Dancer landed in the U.K. on 12th March 1996, courtesy of Marquee Pictures. Boasting the tagline “These Showgirls Really Perform!”, the VHS was cannily positioned between Showgirls’ big screen run on 12th January and home video bow on 15th July. American audiences, meanwhile, had to wait until 7th August for the film’s PPV debut, and then another year before it hit stores, distributors York Home Video making the bizarre decision to retitle it ‘Friction’.

They did, though, give it a sexy red cassette tape. So there is that.

[1] Plagued by addiction issues, Alvero was stabbed to death on his thirty-ninth birthday in Tijuana, Mexico in 2004.