Beneath, Between, Behind the Scenes: The Sex Workers
M. Francis Enright is a filmmaker. His first short film, LIFE, was accepted into zero of the 23 festivals to which it was submitted. His second short film, The Comic, was nominated for Best Dark Comedy at the Georgia Comedy Film Festival. His third short film, Say Your Name, won Best Drama and Best Director at the Top Shorts Films Festival and was selected for the 2024 Boston International Film Festival.
The producer Jay and I went on a location scout for a short at a Motel 6 in Yonkers, NY. We would be shooting a scene in one of the rooms and a very brief one in the parking lot.
The Motel 6 is a pretty sleazy place where people live long term and sex workers do their thing. There was a sign in the lobby about sex trafficking and what to look for and a hotline to call if one suspected that there was in fact sex trafficking going on.
I wonder if anyone has ever called that number and who answered. And if anything was done.
When we shot there, we saw women, young and not so young, sitting outside of their rooms, looking at their phones. Periodically, a man would arrive and they would go into the room.
There were these three people, two guys in their early twenties and a woman in her thirties. They would come out of the room, smoke a joint, one of them would go to the vending machine. They seemed vaguely interested in our shoot.
Then they would go back in the room. There didn’t seem to be anything sexual about it. They were just there. People have to be somewhere. I wondered what they did during the week or maybe that was it.
At one point, we saw a man in a car shouting at one of the women. She was angry and crying but eventually she got into the car and they drove off. The consensus among the crew was that the guy in the car was her pimp and maybe her boyfriend. Those relationships can be layered.
I wondered about their lives, how they kept going.
I remember hearing a podcast about Gary Ridgeway, a serial killer who murdered around forty prostitutes in the Tacoma, WA area over a period of twenty years. He preyed on prostitutes because he felt like no one would care about them enough to really investigate their murders.
One of the detectives, a woman, knew one of the murdered women. She was raising two kids. Sex work was the only way she could earn money to support them.
At least she thought that. Maybe she had been raised to think that; that the only thing of value she had to offer was her body.
There have been some changes in attitudes towards sex work and the women who do it, but many stigmas still exist. Many of the men who use sex workers hate the women. They see them as trash. And some of them just hate women in general.
Many women feel the same way.
A crew member told me that one of the ladies, a very beautiful young woman, approached and asked her about being an extra in the film. I said sure, if she wants. I would have paid her maybe fifty dollars.
Later we saw her sitting outside of her room and then going inside with a guy.
I have no idea what I could have done to help her. Come live with me? Pay for her to go to school? Become a dental hygienist? A doctor? A lawyer?
She might not feel like she deserves anything better. She might have been told from a young age that this is what she has to offer.
Or maybe not. I should not presume anything about her. I don’t know her, her circumstances, what she thinks about herself. That is the trap that many do-gooders fall into. And they are also excuses for not helping people. Oh, they want to live on the street. They wouldn’t accept the help. They are too broken.
Bullshit excuses.
The ladies are just trying to survive. Like everyone else. Some are raising kids. Some have dreams and goals. Some don’t. Like everyone else. Circumstances have brought them to the Motel 6 in Yonkers, NY..
We all end up somewhere.
