THE STREETS: A Factual Portrait of Six Prostitutes as ToM in Their Own Words

Soon to be a major motion picture. Maybe. Scenario: A young real-estate man decides he really wants to be a writer. His first book will be the life stories of prostitutes. He approaches a working girl. Her pimp attacks him and smashes his tape recorder. He runs for his life, leaps into a police car and scares the cops out of their blues. They nearly arrest him, but Anally let him go with a stern warning. Undaunted, he continues his research, paying 153 prostitutes for their services and stories, to learn little more than that 139 were abused as children. He then decides he must befriend the girls, really get to know them. He also decides he will share his book royalties with them as well as money from the movie he is certain will be made. Soon he is doing coke with a few, temporarily sharing his apartment with one and her pimp, and Finally getting the material he wants. Cut to the working girls. Among them: Jessie, a nice Orthodox Jewish girl from the suburbs who got involved with a black pimp, married another one, ran a whorehouse for a pimp who got murdered and was briefly the mistress of a wall-heeled cocaine dealer. She now has a child and is out of the business. Try Lattice, a black girl from Massachussetts, who was raped by her stepfather when she was 12, became a ""hoe"" (prostitute) at 15 because she fell in love with a pimp who brought her to New York. She then fell in love with another pimp who takes all her money and tells her they will both retire to a life of ease in ten years. Tasha, on the other hand, has always ""renegaded"" (worked without a pimp). Of middle-class Guyanan background, she fulfills the wild--and often degrading--sexual fantasies of an established clientele of primarily professional men. A movie producer has also fulfilled one of Zausner's fantasies by picking up the book on option. It's unlikely to win an Oscar, but the script sizzles when the girls take over.