Naked Behind the Scenes: The Making of Lyra and Bon-Bon's "Prench Art Film"
For weeks, when their last year of high school didn't keep them too busy, Bon-Bon and Lyra had been co-writing, co-directing, co-acting, and co-shooting scenes to make a movie. Finally, Lyra had stayed up half the night at her computer, assembling the pieces. But before she had a chance to watch the final results of her work, she fell asleep. She only awoke when Bon-Bon stopped by the next morning.
***
Lyra squealed, "I can hardly wait to see the whole thing from start to finish!"
"Me too!" Bon-Bon reached an arm around her girlfriend as they sat together on a couch. "Do you want to do the honors?"
"Let's press the play button together, at the same time. One...two...three!"
On a wide screen television, a title appeared.
SCANDAL AT THE SEEDFIELD CUP
An Artistic Documentary
About Chess
and About Life
Co-Written and Co-Directed By
Lyra Heartstrings and Bon-Bon Bonneville
Starring
Bon-Bon Bonneville as...
Magnus Cartson (Defending World Chess Champion)
Tournament Officials #3, #5, and #6.
Lyra Heartstrings as...
Hors Nieponne (The Challenger)
Tournament Officials #1, #2, and #4.
Friend of Magnus Cartson ("Mr. Blonde Beard")
A film based on real events
With some creative liberties
The first scene opened with Lyra and Bon-Bon facing each other across a table (and still wearing clothes.) Lyra reached out and moved a bishop.
Bon-Bon scowled. "What an INTERESTING move. I'd say that in this entire game so far, you've displayed a very sophisticated style."
"Thank you!" Lyra smirked.
"More sophisticated than you've ever played before. I would say...it's like playing someone else. Or someTHING else."
"Are you accusing me of cheating?" Lyra shouted. "Maybe you just aren't as good as you think you are. Maybe you're a has-been! Maybe you suck!"
The camera cut to another person, who was Bon-Bon wearing slacks and a men's dress shirt with a false mustache. "I've been conferring with the other tournament judges, and in our opinion, both of you have made serious mistakes during this game. Perhaps, lost in your worries about someone cheating or being accused of cheating, you BOTH suck. Have either of you thought about THAT?"
The film showed short clips in succession of Lyra and Bon-Bon in different character disguises, agreeing with the first official. Finally, Tournament Official #6 (Bon-Bon wearing a red wig and matching pantsuit) set up a chessboard and moved pieces around in a rapid recreation of the game, explaining..."In conclusion, both of you have become a disgrace to the game of chess, and you should find a way to resolve this issue."
The shot cut back to Lyra and Bon-Bon scowling at each other across the table. Lyra shouted, "Fine! You think I'm using a chess computer hidden in my clothes to cheat? I'll prove you wrong! I'll play a game of chess COMPLETELY NAKED! Then people will know I'M the honest player here!"
"Oh yeah?" Bon-Bon said. "I can play just as naked as you can! No computers, no clothes, no nothing! Just pure human brainpower!"
"So it's agreed!" With a smug grin, Lyra reached out and shook Bon-Bon's hand. "Let's declare this match a draw, and play the rest of our matches in the nude!"
"Don't forget barefoot too!" Bon-Bon growled. "I don't want you hiding any MIT-style tiny computers in your shoes, or even in your socks."
"Agreed! We'll play the entire game showing EVERYTHING from the tops of our heads to the tips of our little toesies." The handshake finally ended, and the two competitors stomped away in opposite directions.
***
Sitting on a barstool, Bon-Bon said, "I'm worried."
Wearing a blonde false beard and a hideously striped sweater, Lyra sitting next to her said, "About what?"
"You know Hors and I are going to play the rest of our matches in this tournament completely naked, right?"
"Well...yes. It's weird, but if that's what you think you have to do to defend the game's honor..."
"It's not just about honor. It's about...I'm afraid Hors's toes might be too cute."
"What?"
"What if she's so extra-cute without any clothes on that she distracts me? And then I make a terrible, terrible mistake?"
"What, like kissing her?"
"Would that be a mistake? I'm not even sure. What I meant was, what if I have trouble playing the right CHESS moves, because I'm thinking about how adorable she is."
Blonde-bearded Lyra nodded. "But you know, TWO can play that game. Take off all your clothes, so you can practice looking really cute naked."
"What a great idea!" Bon-Bon cried out. "Thank you! You're the best friend a merciless chess competitor ever had."
"I know," bearded Lyra said. "Now stop thanking me and start stripping!"
***
Lyra (no beard or mustache or wig, just Lyra) faced herself in a full-length mirror. She made faces at herself, and tried to pose seductively. "I just have to hope this works." She started to pull her shirt off, over her head. Her other clothes joined her shirt on the floor.
***
The next morning
The two contenders started playing a game of chess...completely naked. A variety of shots, ranging from close-ups to wide angle, gave different perspectives on the game, on the competitors...and on the multiple flavors of tension that filled the air.
***
"Oops," Lyra said. "I dropped a piece." She bent over to pick it up, sticking her behind directly in Bon-Bon's blushing face.
"Damn it," Bon-Bon muttered to herself. "Do I even have a chance? My only option is to OH WOW WHAT A CUTE BUTT."
***
Lyra smiled playfully. She said, "Magnus? Is it true that most Europeans can speak several foreign languages?"
"Yes," Bon-Bon agreed. "Our education is superior to most Americans' in that regard. Sucks to be you."
Lyra replied in Prench, ""
"What?" Bon-Bon whispered, too softly for her words to be clearly audible in the soundtrack. "None of this is in the script!"
Lyra's foot nudged Bon-Bon's under the table, out of shot. ""
Bon-Bon stammered, "Je ne...je ne pense pas...um..."
"Ha!" Lyra giggled. "NOW who's the smart one, Magnus? You're just a foolish Eurosnob who's in over his head!" She moved a knight.
***
Bon-Bon stared fixedly at the board, sweat dripping down her face. She growled, "Using your...cuteness and sex appeal to get me all confused while I'm trying to play chess...that should be illegal!"
Lyra smirked, and leaned back in her chair. "Chess was invented in ancient India, as a game of strategy based on war. But ANOTHER game that is like la guerre...is the game of love. It is said, 'All is fair in love and war.' Is not LOVE the ultimate game, with the best rewards and the most satisfaction for all players? Chess is for fools!" Lyra swept the pieces off the board. "Also, we both already know how this chess game would have ended, and you were about to resign."
"That's true." Bon-Bon blushed, her face reddened by Lyra's toes stroking her beneath the table in a sensitive place (still out of shot.) "Ok, I resign. But on ONE condition."
"What condition is that?" Lyra fluttered her eyelashes.
Bon-Bon flipped the entire table over sideways, and leaped forward out of her chair. "Show me what you meant just now, with your words about love being better than war."
"Gladly!" Lyra pulled Bon-Bon down on top of her, into a full body embrace.
The scene faded to black.
The End
***
"That was...even better than I expected," said Bon-Bon, still snuggling Lyra on the couch. "But we need a PG rating to get it into the film festival, and this isn't even close. Sure, in SOME of the nude shots we got the camera angles right, so even though you can see we're naked, you can't really see our nipples or any of our other naughty bits. But in the other shots...we're talking a soft R rating at least."
Lyra said, "I can fix that! I downloaded an 'auto-censor' video editing filter. It can strategically blur or even crop so you can't quite see our bodies' naughty parts. Once we've run the video through the filter, our 'artistic documentary' will be PG style instead of R. No problem!"
***
A half hour later, Lyra whined, "Why isn't the auto-censor filter working? On most of the shots, it's leaving our naughty bits IN! Our movie has more boobs than a La Leche League meeting! And I don't think we even have TIME to properly reshoot all those scenes."
Bon-Bon glanced down at her phone. "Now we have another problem, too."
"What's that?"
"The AV Club just texted me. They say they're getting a lot more submissions for the CHS Film Festival than they expected, so they can only give our movie a seven minute time slot."
"Seven minutes? They can't DO that to us! We've made a seventy-three minute piece of ART. Telling us to cut it to seven minutes...that's a CRIME. It's oppression by government authority, is what it is!"
"Well..." Bon-Bon said. "Since we can't use a lot of our footage anyway, because the auto-censoring isn't working..."
"Of course!" Lyra exclaimed. "All we have to do is put together exactly seven minutes of the footage we CAN use, to make a completely new film! Before the deadline."
"Exactly!" Bon-Bon agreed.
Lyra groaned. "I was being sarcastic. We can't do that. Once we take out the segments of our film that show even a little TOO MUCH of our anatomy, and cut even more to reach a total runtime of only seven minutes, important parts of the dialog and plot will be gone. Our movie would become...an incoherent little pile of nonsense."
Bon-Bon grinned at Lyra. "As SOMEONE insisted on SHOWING me while we were filming the nude chess game...everything sounds artsier in Prench. All we have to do is take some of the nude chess playing shots that didn't quite include our naughty bits, kind of...um...stick the footage together in some kind of sequence...and then we can do a last minute dub in Prench to make it sound sophisticated. You're wonderful at this stuff, Lyra. I KNOW you can make it work."
Lyra shrugged. "We can try."
"We'd better try it fast. We've only got an hour and a half left, before the new submission deadline."
***
Bon-Bon grumbled, "For something that was edited into incoherence on very short notice, was rejected for near-continual PG-rated teenage semi-nudity, and had all its dialog improvised in a foreign language at the last minute, it was a really good movie! Truly a piece of art. I can't believe the Canterlot High School Film Festival wouldn't show it."
Lyra sighed. "What can I say? If only there was an audience somewhere that LIKED stories about people taking off all their clothes and playing naked chess."
Bon-Bon nodded. "Maybe in some kind of crazy parallel world or alternate universe, something like that could even be possible."
"Oh!" Lyra said. "Of course!"
"Huh?"
"Let's find out what kind of high school film festivals they have on the other side of the Mirror Portal, in Equestria!"
Author's Note
In our real world, so far as I know, most of the events depicted in Lyra and Bon-Bon's 'Director's Cut' did not happen, especially not between two famous chess grandmasters.
EileenSaysHi's "Prench Art Film" (link) also helped inspire my unofficial but authorized prequel.
