Bound and gagged, Harry sees Ghislaine switching his gun (loaded with blanks) for another gun, but fails to convey the danger to Dean. As Ghislaine and the client watch and the client tapes the scene, Dean pulls the trigger and kills Harry. Harry meets "Lovely Girl," who asks him how he feels being dead. Six months later, Dean is living on the streets. Ghislaine finds him and convinces him to return to work. Reviewers agree that "Skin & Bone" is as much about Los Angeles and the film industry as it is about prostitution or even homosexuality. Writing in "Bright Lights Film Journal", critic Gary Morris suggests that the film is "inevitably set in Los Angeles, amid that city's arid strip malls, newsstands, and endless dusty streets" and he points to the significance of Ghislaine's constant movement through the city, "looking glamorous and inscrutable in her opaque sunglasses". For Anita Gates in the "New York Times", "the film's strongest message" is "a questioning of the actor's trade." For Gates, the film comes to sympathize with Harry's notion that prostitutes are in fact actors, or perhaps "vice versa": "Mr. Lewis's point seems to be that it's all the same. What's the big difference, he asks, between acting out the fantasies of one rich old man or those of a few million ticket buyers?" Lewis himself seems to give some weight to these interpretations when he describes "Skin & Bone" as being about "giving your soul away and rationalizing the loss as a bonus," and as a metaphor "for the experiences I suffered attempting to make a film at an evil film company." Lewis became interested in making a film about hustlers because (despite there being films about hustlers dating back more than three decades) he had never seen such a film. In Lewis's own words, "When I started, there were no hustler movies and now there's a whole genre." His original concept for "Skin & Bone" was that it would be a series of 70 one-minute shots. Lewis changed his mind about the concept following some improvisation with actor B. Wyatt in creating the Harry character. Much of the film was improvised. After a year of filming improvisation sessions, Lewis wrote some scripted material to provide some story structure. Shooting took several years to complete because the film was almost entirely self-financed. The film alternates between color and black and white sequences. Black and white usually denotes that the scene involves one or more of the hustlers engaged with a client, and indicates that one or more of the characters (not necessarily the client) is fantasizing.