Contents

Features
Confessions of an Amateur Pornographer
Porn Pet Peeves
Last Gasps of the Dying
Becoming XXX
Interview
Interview with a Stripper
Opinion
Jed Sanders, America's Favorite
Literary "Pullout"
The Danny Letters
Science
The Media is the Mess
Ultimate Sex Links
If Life Were Like Porn
Technology
NewsBot
Lifestyle
The Spawning Pigdog
In the Thick of Things
Music
Portishead
Random Shit

Where'd you learn to shake that booty?IndentI'd never worked on a porn set before, so it was a... learning experience.
IndentI 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.
IndentWe 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.
IndentThe 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."

IndentThat 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...
Indent...but, I'm getting ahead of myself.
IndentThe 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."
IndentOne 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).
IndentEventually, 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.
IndentThat'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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