 I'd
never worked on a porn set before, so it was a... learning
experience.
I
showed up at 8:00 the first morning to meet the director,
Zack, and the film and video cameramen. The film lensman was
an old porn industry pro, and the video guy was a "video
artist" who was contributing his labor and the use of
his gear in exchange for a piece of the financial pie.
We
spent most of the morning going over Zack's laughable excuse
for shooting scripts and pirating a 220-volt power line (the
film cameraman turned out to be a self-trained electrician,
who was also contributing labor and gear--including an industrial-grade
power distribution panel--for equity). The "talent"
began to arrive around noon.
The
cast included several semi-stars (none of which was Ron Jeremy)
and three complete unknowns. One of them, an Anglo-Korean
girl who could neither act nor screw convincingly, was tagged
as the "star" of the single video that did, eventually,
emerge from our collective labors.
"This
guy--whom I'll call "Jim", even though his name is actually
Jaime--was sensational. Not only did he have the stamina of..well..of
a porn star, he turned out to also have the unique ability
to count his orgasm down, as if it were a rocket launch and
his jizz were the Space Shuttle."
That
exemplar of the direct-to-video porn art was to be known as
Under Cherry Moon, (in what turned out to be the vain
hope that The Rock Star Then Known As "Prince"--who
had helmed a similarly-titled and equally ill-starred effort
released earlier that year--would file suit and provide the
distributor with a little free publicity). The script for
this epic ran a good page-and-a-half and centered around the
idea that our dumpy little wanna-be would portray a gorgeous
Chinese dominatrix after whom the rest of the cast lusted
and who would finally succumb to the butt-fucking charms of
the leading man...
...but,
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The
first set of scenes we planned to shoot were set in and around
the director's hot tub, so I spent several hours rigging suitable
lights on poles, clamps and stands. Since we were going to
shoot the sex scenes (i.e.--90% of the footage) simultaneously
on both film and video, (remember, theoretically we were shooting
three movies more-or-less at once,) I had to cool the lights'
color temperature down to the range appropriate for film stock,
rather than video. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise,
both because I was able to use glass cloth to soften the natively-harsh
fresnel beams and because, on video at least, the redder light
put at least a hint of color in the fishbelly skin tones of
some of the skankier "actors."
One
problem arose almost immediately. The second of our amateur
girls--who was set to play a key role in the hot tub scenes--didn't
show up on time. There was much grave whispering among the
folks with a financial stake in the project and the director
spent the best part of an hour behind closed doors, trying
frantically to contact the missing minx and/or to arrange
a substitute for her (every other member of the cast had a
part in the hot tub scenes, so we didn't have a suitable stand-in
on hand).
Eventually,
Zack emerged from the back room to announce that the truant
babe was having "a discussion" with her boyfriend
and would be by later--and, in the meantime, we were going
to shoot chase and seduction scenes in the garden.
That's
where the third newcomer, another friend of my producer buddy,
would be introduced to the world of porn for the first time.
I'd known this guy for some time, although I can't say we
were ever very close. I knew he had a great-paying job at
the Stanford Linear Accelerator and, although I never understood
why, I also knew that he was (and still is) catnip for women,
so neither money nor horniness could explain his participation.
(In fact, he wound up donating his paycheck to charity--and
would go on to star in half-a-dozen other fuck films before
losing interest in his new hobby.)
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