Real Naked Ladies.(The Talk of the Town)('Fifty Nude Women: A Musical Montage')

How do you get a bunch of normal chicks to strip and say cheese, assuming you're not a Mardi Gras regular or a Seven Sisters posture photographer? That was the dilemma facing Margot Roth, a first-time filmmaker, as she attempted to recruit participants for a documentary about naked women. Flyers, she decided: cheap, unintrusive, less pervy-seeming than taking out an ad in the Voice. And, so, in the spring of 2001, Roth papered the town:

Fashion Models: Keep Walking, We Need 50 Real Women of All Ages, Sizes, and Colors . . . Stretch Marks, Bow-Legs, Body Hair, Cellulite, Tattoos, Wrinkles, Knobby Knees, Varicose Veins, Round Bellies, Defined Muscles, Scars--Thin, Heavy, Pear-Shaped . . . All Shapes and Sizes Welcome & Needed!,

Roth's career as the Bob Guccione of bulgy everywomen arose, unlike Bob Guccione's, out of a sense of civic duty. Several months earlier, a friend of hers had begun to date "this really nice woman" whose breasts, he confessed to Roth, looked less alluring au naturel than they did encased in their customary pushup bra.

"What's wrong, are they hairy or covered in stretch marks?" Roth asked.

"No, they just hang down."

"Dude, if large breasts stand up straight they're not real!" Roth declared. "You just need to be barraged with, like, real boobs."

The next day, Roth canvassed bookstores, trying to find some sort of visual aid that would, as she put it, "desensitize" her friend to the range of mammary elasticity among the adult female H. sapiens. The art books she encountered were too stylized, the anatomy charts too clinical, the nudie mags too, well, nudie. "People shouldn't have to rent a porn video just to see bodies," Roth, who is thirty-nine, and much funnier than you would expect a consciousness-raiser to be, said recently. So she set out to make a film that would reflect the many ways that women really look, as a sort of psycho-medical resource, "something that wasn't a Playboy," she said, "that you could give to an adolescent son who was curious"--an "Our Bodies, Ourselves," minus the mirrors.