Day One: Hollywood
Across the street from the chrysanthemum warehouse where the Dutch starlet Terri Summers is about to get what’s coming on her is the casting studio of a man who once played the voice of Papa Smurf. How do I know? Gram knows™ .
Summers is in a large room of the the warehouse building, tape over the windows and the smell of flowers in the air, shooting the first scene from Smash Picture’s sports/gangbang picture Six in Me.
Six in Me is what is described in the biz as a “gonzo”: there’s a story, but there isn’t a script. A “feature” has a script and, usually, a bigger budget. Companies spend up to $1000 on porn scripts, depending on how far removed from the actual purpose of a porn movie the producers want the film to be.
That doesn’t mean that the cast is going to improvise like Miles Davis or Nichols & May; it’s just that the dialogue isn’t really important. Still, some great improvised dialogue comes out of this gonzo, as you’ll see.
There are three vignettes in Six, all revolving around a woman being fucked in a sports setting. Today, Terri Summers is a basketball cheerleader who takes on (six) members of the team. Tomorrow, Jayna Oso is the soccer coach’s daughter who is initiated by (six) black soccer players. The following day, Lauren Phoenix has sweet science with (six) boxers.
Director Mike Metropolis and Scott, his crew of one, have arranged a scene where Summers handles the basketball players (all white guys, none particularly tall) on a bench. There is a Go Smash! banner in the background, some balloons, a basketball, and a basketball net. It is my impression that the basketball net was there before.
The talent knows what to do and Metropolis spends very little time stopping and starting the camera. He moves in and out, zooming in on the parts most likely to need emphasis. In the two days I watch him work, it becomes clear that he is a craftsman. He lets the cast do what they want and he gives direction where necessary. Most of the time, he moves more than they do. Gonzos are about high-yield porn, and Metropolis didn’t waste any time on slow establishing shots.
I haven’t been on a porn set in a year, so I don’t know a lot of the cast. Brian Surewood is one of the basketball players and a very nice guy. He’s a little older and tends to dress like a biker dude, as much as one can when naked, which means he wears a bandanna. He brings his dog to sets. The dog is a good dog, and doesn’t really pay attention to its master getting a dutch treat on the faux baskletball court.
I wasn’t there for the scene where Summers’ cheerleader assents to being manhandled by the bonsai basketball team. I don’t know how she got herself in that situation. Does it really matter to you? Much is written about the lameness of pornish premises, and people like me are often guilty of pointing it out, time and again. The story I tell myself is that this was a cheerleader who wanted to have sex with six men.
So she does. Summers is very cute and she speaks in Spanish to one of her co-stars. At the occasional breaks she is chatty while the rest of the cast stands around, keeping ready. After the bench scene, which stops for a moment because Summers chokes (“I just need a little water,”), she jerks off the remaining teammates, who provide the triumphant shot.
Summers is covered in semen. We do not shake hands. After showering in a little room off to the side, she tells me about her website (she says she designed and maintains it herself), her trilingual talents, and her preparation for this, her first gangbang.
“I was a little worried this morning,” she said, “but I got over it.”
It is estimated by people who actually sat down and thought about it that the number of people who’ve had sex on film as part of what is now known as the adult industry numbers in the millions. These are people who pay taxes proportionately with everyone else in the country, who shop in the same supermarkets I do, who come over my house to watch movies and have barbecues, and who fly home for Christmas to unsuspecting families. They’re normal.
Still, Terri still smells a little like semen to me. I can’t shake the feeling. This occurs to me as I write the words, “she can speak three languages and I can hardly speak my own.”
Day Two: Kanan Road
Most people I know who rent their houses out to porn shoots make a couple of thousand bucks under the table.
I am not hinting that this is the case with the Kanan Road house, which I realize as I drive up that I have seen it dozens of times. I’m not hinting that the owner of the house is making money illegally; I am saying that this is a good way to make money.
All the doors are locked so I get into the house via the garage (I have a journalism degree). The main entryway is gorgeous: shiny black marble floors and an elegant stairway, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows. Naturally I wonder where the sex is happening, because I’m alone.
I worry that I’m in the wrong mansion. Having seen the place before and knowing it as a “porn house”, though, I modify my worry to: “I’m here on the wrong day.” This is a very present threat, because just the week before I’d shown up in the driveway of a house off Mulholland where the shoot had been cancelled. The owners of the house could come home and very legitimately shoot me as a trespasser.
I make my way to the rear of the house and I see that the action is going on outside. I then see the lady of the house, who is watching the filming through windows just on the inside. She’s in her late fifties and looks like she’s seen it all before. She’s a little pissed that I’m there, though. Later in the day I watch her pester Metropolis about cigarette butts left around the shooting area, and hint that “the production went longer than we contracted today, didn’t it?”
She says, “They’re through there.”
And indeed they are. Today the diminutive Jayna Oso is getting the brunt of the soccer team. For props, there is a soccer net and some balloons. Also, a bench. I ask crew guy Scott what the story is. How did these soccer players negotiate the gangbang of the oach’s daughter? Surely the coach won’t be happy if he finds out?
“She must have taken a wrong turn,” he says.
Scott and Mike work together a lot. Scott has a theatre degree in stage design. If Mike, as the director, is also the cameraman, Scott needs to handle the lighting and the boom. We do not see the boom once in any of Scott’s work. That is a porn reality that does not include him.
Today’s male talent is all black. There is an issue with “popping” on cue. The conversation is a lot livelier. The guys egg each other on. Oso, however, doesn’t seem as into it as Summers. Probably because it’s chilly for California today, and maybe because the yard, while at a remove from the road, could still be seen from the horse farm across the valley or the deck of the house next door, with binoculars. I can dig it.
Today’s is a tougher shoot, and Metropolis is a little frustrated. A crow alights on a bit of functional sculpture by the pool, which is wedged into the hillside. Down below, horses whinny. “Can somebody – ” he says, meaning Scott – “move these balloons?” They keep blowing into the shot.
Cuntre Pipes is there. He shows up at Porn Star Karaoke now and then. He is the cousin of Wesley Pipes. It is obvious where Wesley got his porn name, but I think Cuntre should just stick with the first name, because the last name only makes sense for his cousin. But what the hell do I know about porn names? “Gram”? “Ponante”?
Cuntre, pronounced like “- My ‘Tis of Thee” but with finality and confidence in the first syllable, is a nice guy. At one point he says to Oso, “I like fucking you.”
Oso says, “Thank you!”
Metropolis mixes it up with positions and order of ejaculation. He tells me that, basically, he films when a performer is “ready to go”.
Oso gets up. “Stop a second,” she says, “I’ve got you in my eye.” A towel is procured.
The fucking continues. Metropolis asks Oso, “And you’re sure you won’t do a creampie?”
A creampie is what most people do anyway. It is an internal ejaculation (I’m not talking about a Tantric one). It is not delivered onto the face, into the eye, or roped like an alpine bridge across the heaving bosoms of one’s partner. Oso was being asked if she would allow her castmates to come in her.
“I’m sure,” she says.
The last guy lets go. Oso, like Summers before her and presumably Lauren Phoenix will be tomorrow, is carried in victory to an interview area, where she stands in the center of the guys who provided the “Six in” to her “me”.
“Better get out before Coach shows up,” one of the guys ad-libs.
If this had been an actual gangbang of an actual soccer coach’s daughter, I think, the social conditions that would have needed to coalesce for the young woman to willingly take on these six men would have resulted, again I’m just assuming, in her dad’s being angry with her rather than with “his” team. It’s a sad hypocrisy.
Luckily, though, I actually heard Oso ask for it. “Yeah. Fuck me,” she said several times.
To fuck on film and to do it in a way that appears engaging (and, as Julianne Moore’s character in The Big Lebowski said, “zesty”) takes real talent. Oso, Summers, and Phoenix have outlasted most of their starlet peers, most of whom shoot a few scenes and leave the business. Staying in the industry more than a year is statistically very difficult, as a lot of the market favors “new girls”.
AVN, an adult industry trade publication and award-granting entity based in the railroad track section of Chatsworth, this year awarded Phoenix its Female Performer of the Year trophy.
Oso and Summers and their 12 friends deliver great performances. I am not able to get to the Lauren Phoenix shoot, and I regret it. It is in a gym in the City of El Segundo. I like when porn is shot in real places.
I hope “Six in Me” turns into a series so viewers can be treated to hot sex on luges, on the bocce court, or at a Scrabble tournament. I hope Lauren Phoenix wins more awards. I hope Terri Summers learns Latin, too. I hope Jayna Oso never feels pressured into doing creampies.
Most of all, though, I hope the Coach doesn’t show up.
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