Bunnies & Bucks

"Does Big Love Bunny want to stick his tongue in Little Love Bunny's fuzzy?"

Little Love Bunny and Big Love Bunny are attracting hordes of dumb bunnies who pay $6 a head to watch them copúlate in the Studio North Theatre's Naked Came the Stranger.

Outside, 25 picketers gather each night, wielding "Down With Smut" placards and harsh words for Thomas Plunkett, the theater's attorney, who has successfully kept the reels rolling indoors. '"Roses to Patterson, Skunk Cabbage to Plunkett," one reads.

Inside patrons are graphically aroused by Little Love Bunny and Big Love Bunny, who vocalize each phase of foreplay, and cameras which capture each pumping or sucking motion.

The dialogue is weak, the sex scenes are long, and the plot of a middle-aged woman who will do anything to get husband-Love Bunny back is worn as thin as the print itself.

Julianne and William Blake are television talk show hosts who fornicate between scripts. They are educated. Each night they get down between stacks of hard cover books which are piled up on either side of the bed. Miraculously, the stacks never fall no matter how heavy the action gets.

He is the handsome earth type. He and his producer, Phyllis ("Little Love Bunny") take long romps in a concrete park and fall graphically in the hay. Julianne is imaginative. She masturbates outside Phyllis' door to the arousing voices of Little and Big Love Bunny. She charters an English touring bus to give her neighbor a driving blow job on Fifth Avenue. She dons a tuxedo to make it with Phyllis.

Bunny love flourishes. Phyllis falls head over tail in love with Julianne, decides this is morally wrong and moves to California. Julianne hops back in the sack with her husband, who still loves Phyllis, and sucks him off in happily wedded bliss.

Theater Manager Jim Llewellyn says he doubts the movie would be here today without Oakdand County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson's publicity campaign. Since Patterson snitched the film cannisters in late August and led an unsuccessful court battle in Ferndale District Court, the profits are soaring, the prices are higher and the patrons' numbers are swelling.

In fact, Llewellyn says the theater has not had to spend a cent lately on advertising. The court battle is carried on page one in three daily papers and featured on televised news programs.

Llewellyn, whose theater shows all types of films, says the community has a say in any film in Oakland County. If they don't patronize a film, it won't last more than a week.

Llewellyn can't speculate how long Naked Came the Stranger will last. He says it depends on the patrons.

The film is a product of a group of Newsday reporters. They each wrote a sensuous chapter describing the wedded couple's extramarital affairs. Written as a satire on pornography, the book was a best seller, and the movie seems destined to go the same way.

In fact, a Michigan State University film group has achieved phenomenal success with screenings of Naked, touting it as the film "banned in Oakland County."

Could be the film is less a satire on porno than on crusading prosecutors and the viewing public.