Talk:The Brown Bunny

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I deleted the whole thing about the rumors of the fake penis for three reasons: first, the actors would have commented on it by now or tried to downplay the scene with the truth (and if it was a lie it might help sell DVDs but it would also hurt reps). Secondly, I have never heard of it being fake and I am all over the IMDB boards and it is known Chloe was dating the director at the time and the film was shot with a remote camera in privacy with just the two leads. Which leads one to assume it was a real blow job. And lastly, and most importantly, since when is rumour quoting worthy of Wikipedia pages? Does the Encarta have a rumour section? No, rumours are not fact and therefore should not be included in an article, especially without ANY kind of source to back it up. This isnt Perezhilton.com

-Evan evanesp23@yahoo.com

[edit] Budget

The actual budget of the film was $400,000 the film was sold for about $4,000,000 with Sony taking most of the rights. So far the sales of DVD’s have been very good. The budget rumor of $10,000,000 was just that a rumor which was started long before the film was finished. The film in fact was made for below $500,000, which is why it qualified as a Screen Actors Guild low budget project, which is how it is listed with the union.

Can you please provide a source for this? The IMDB lists it as an estimated $10 million. --24.81.13.220 05:21, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

This is detail but was it a real one, looked very much like a plastic prosthetics to me... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hektor (talk • contribs)

There's a lot of rumors about that, perhaps enough to warrant an amendment to this article. I've heard that director Claire Denis is on record saying that's it's likely a prosthetic penis stolen from the props for Trouble Every Day, in which Gallo was the male lead. She even remarks that when she saw the scene, she recognized it as the stolen penis.
Also, judging from the linked clip, there's too many cuts and a couple of reused close-ups of Gallo. And there's no real shot of both Gallo and his penis in the same shot (there's one that comes close, but I still have reasonable doubt), only shots of Gallo looking down, Gallo and the back of Sevigny's head or kissing her while zipped up, and of course, Sevigny performing oral sex. If it's not a prosthetic penis, I could even say that they used a stunt cock for that. But my money is on a prosthetic as well. --YoungFreud 09:00, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

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Unless Gallo and/or Sevigny had enourmos paychecks I can't see how the film could have cost 10.000.000 USD. Where does this number come from? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.173.131.118 (talk • contribs)

IMDB's listing for The Brown Bunny says that it had an estimated $10 million budget. -- DImfeld 04:18, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

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I just watched... well, skimmed over the movie, just to know what all the fuss was about, and I'm amazed they managed to spend ten million USD on this film. Apart from a few minor roles and the actual race scene at the beginning I can't really see anything that would eat up that much money.

As for the sex -- there's also a (apparently simulated) threesome in a flashback, most of which is blurry. The blowjob looks pretty authentic, although the orgasm may be simulated (although Mrs Sevigny did gag a bit). I strongly doubt that penis is fake, unless the make-up crew did an excellent job -- the penis seems to be attached to the body, has the right texture (the colour looks right, the lighting bounces off the right way and the skin seems to move the right way, too) and shape (although Mr Gallo may be a bit above the US average here), and in one scene you can even see that it's attached to a scrotum (which also looks pretty realistic). Either that's the most realistically looking cock-n-balls prosthesis in the world, or it's Mr Gallo's authentic privates.

That said, the 10 million dollar budget (including happy fun time with a good-looking girl) aside, the movie may even have some artistic value. None I can appreciate, but the long real-time shots may very well be considered artistic by some (if they are not, I'd say they're incredibly bad and distracting).

I'm referring to the unrated version, by the way. As far as I know the rated version is a bit blurrier in the blowjob and condensed the motorcycle race in the beginning.

I don't think it makes much of a difference whether the blowjob was real or not, given that Gallo and Sevigny seem to want people to think it's real and they wouldn't have anything to win by pretending it is when it isn't (unless Mr Gallo has a problem with his penis or Mrs Sevigny wanted the scandal without being willing to perform on the real thing). Occam's Razor (even though, as a male, I don't like thinking about razors and genitalia in the same context) would strongly suggest it's more likely that the blowjob was real than that it wasn't. It'd make more sense for the affected to claim it was fake than to imply that it wasn't.

Either way. If you want to have your own opinion, rent, purchase or download the unrated version from a video store or any other place that has it and search the web for unsimulated blowjobs (just search for porn websites with sample clips, remember that Google has a content filter which is on by default, tho, if you're not using a more specialised search engine), fast forward to the scene (somewhere around 01:17:00 in my version) and compare. There's a lot of cuts, so you might need to use that pause button a lot and rewind, but the shots offered should provide for enough reference material.

If you've been wondering or actively searching for something like that, Mrs Sevigny is topless throughout most of the scene. I'm not sure whether that justifies the various uneventful realtime scenes the movie is mostly composed of, though. — Ashmodai 22:59, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


I think the article ought to make it a bit more clear that the version of the film screened at Cannes was not Gallo's final cut and that the cut he screened at the Toronto Film Festival is the one he approves of. The company distributing his film pressured Gallo to submit the unfinished film for Cannes in order to increase publicity. Gallo has said in at least one interview that he was very unhappy about this (I'm lazy and don't feel like looking for the reference right now). The supposed differences between the cut that appeared at Cannes and his final cut is that the film clocked in at around 2 hours, featured a different ending, and was a very low quality, grainy print. This easily explains the negative reception at Cannes; any film without a proper editing job is going to be screwed. EmileNoldeSinclair 05:18, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Prostate Hex

The citation required for the misaimed hex - prostate, not colon - is available in Roger Ebert's 'Your Movie Sucks.' The prologue to the collection discusses Brown Bunny in detail and transcribes portions of a face-to-face meeting between Ebert and Gallo. The hex is covered on pages xviii and xix of the paperback edition. I'm not adding this to the article myself because I'm not sure of the html format, but I hope someone will. 75.39.15.138 01:26, 19 October 2007 (UTC)MD

What? (Amy Lamedes (talk) 10:56, 8 December 2007 (UTC))