Nice Day for A White Wedding: A “Marriage 2.0” Shoot Diary

How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On Pepperidge Farm Once They’ve Tried Consensual Polyamory?

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There are three types of pornographers: The ones who say, “I make masturbation material for the people who get turned on by what turns me on,” their more cocky counterparts who declare that they make masturbation material that is somehow different, edgier, more evocative of prostatic fluid than other masturbation material, and — my favorite — the ones who are quoted thusly:

The model of the adult film — the whole business and aesthetic model — is broken. What do we get from ‘Ass Masters 57’? Same formulas over and over again. We need a plan versus gimmicks. Sex tapes and porn parodies have hit their peak. ‘Fucking My Brother’s BBW Black Sister In-Law’ is not going to save the porn industry. Making a movie that you don’t want to fast-forward through and that you watch with a partner — that’s the movie that will do it. Everything else is just tired.

This sort of wild-eyed, earnest zealotry may seem hyperbolic — even insulting — to pornographers who have made comfortable livings off of the “Ass Masters” series, as well as the generations of consumers who’ve rented and re-rented the “BBW Black Sister In-Law” movies and now torrent them for free in the comfort of their stepdads’ own homes, but I not only find it charming but also in itself a sign that, as long as there are people around who say that their porn movie is revolutionary and somehow not just masturbation material, there will always be a thriving porn industry.

Because there’s a reason “Ass Masters” has just topped 2,100 episodes. I mean, it’s not grant-funded.  But there’s room for more. That’s why the porn industry depends on people like Magnus Sullivan, writer/producer of “Marriage 2.0.”

In the Spring of 2014 I was working for a company called Gamelink, editing a really good blog that hardly anyone read. It breaks my heart a little. “Naked Truth” was buried in the unnavigable reaches of an otherwise robust e-commerce site like the clitoris of my big black sister in-law is buried in her voluminous vulvular folds. If her husband had only found that elusive nubbin, Trondra wouldn’t have divorced my brother Leon.

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Anyway, “Marriage 2.0” was the side project of Sullivan, Gamelink’s co-founder, and it was to be both the vanguard of the New Pornography as well as a sweeping, erotic hark back to Golden Age porn like “The Opening of Misty Beethoven.” Did it succeed? Well, I and many other reviewers liked it, but it didn’t recoup its massive (for porn) budget of nearly $100k, it did not sweep award shows like a Wicked Pictures or Axel Braun tentpole flick, and its central theme — How To Learn To Stop Worrying And Love San Francisco-style Polyamory — did not inspire a cottage industry of porny poly-knockoffs the way “Ass Masters” begat “Anal Masters,” “Ass Scholar,” and “Asswegians: Fucking Her Scottish Ass.”

But you cannot get a better snapshot of what Sullivan and director Paul Deeb aspired to than “Marriage 2.0,” even if it was hampered by some of the same conventions the team hoped to leave behind.

Here are some impressions from the set as well as an epilogue.

Day Zero: Flight from Monogamy

I’d just broken up with someone. We’d spent the weekend together and, after the third night, I just couldn’t sleep with her anymore. She snored. It wasn’t rhythmic or comforting like little angels, either. And it was my fault. My last girlfriend had been sweet and lovely and vulnerable and sophisticated and thus hadn’t liked 80 percent of my friends. This was untenable. Plus my foot in the adult world was a constant source of worry for her. I understood. I thought: The next person I meet is gonna be a drinking, smoking badass with whom I can discuss my stuntcock duties in “Sassy McSassypants Interactive XXX.”

The woman I found was delightful in that way. I’d actually written about her on this very site. I wouldn’t have to explain my presence in this business to her or assuage her fears, because she would know there was nothing to be worried about. I pulled out my ex father in-law’s jade ashtray and watched her smoking on my balcony, one bare foot up on the ledge.

Nice,” I said.

At night she snored like, well, like — Oh My God. I felt like it would drive me Lovecraft-grade insane. Some people can handle that. I cannot. But I also wondered why I seem to bat for the fences, and expect one person to have all the answers.

I couldn’t be with someone I couldn’t actually sleep with, wonderful as she was. It was a grim but amicable leavetaking.

Despite all this, she dropped me off at the airport on my way to cover the San Francisco filming of “Marriage 2.0,” fulfilling an essential requirement of L.A. citizenship: Once every couple of months, drive someone to the airport or pick them up. If you’re lucky, it’ll be Bob Hope (LAX requires a ring). We’re still Facebook friends.

Day One: I Curtsy

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At 4 a.m. the next day, I’m picked up at the place I’m staying in Oakland — my friend, eminent porn reviewer Justin Pweasels’s house — by a dreadlocked, 250-lb. local guy named LaeCharles Lawrence. Not only is “Lae” the driver but he is a soul singer with a song in the movie’s soundtrack. When one pays Lae a compliment, this massive black man says, “I curtsy.” It’s hilarious. He doesn’t know what he’s in for this week, as he’ll be driving all the fuck around the Bay Area, in traffic, all goddamn day, and the schedule will always run late.

We head west across the Bay Bridge to the Ferry Terminal where the sun is about to rise. India Summer is there. She has become Porn’s Designated MILF but in this movie, thank God, she just plays a sexy woman who’s not 23. She is set to jog along the Embarcadero. I meet director Paul Deeb and a camera crew headed by porn veteran Alex Ladd. Deeb tells me he has curated massive art installations but Ladd has actually directed hundreds of porn movies, so Ladd’s presence on this set was a very good call. I also meet a woman named Irina, a native Latvian who goes by the handle Creamy Coconut and is a master origamist. She is the set photographer and her crush on male lead Ryan Driller will be helpful in keeping people focused when no one wants to talk about polyamory anymore.

At noon the scene is done and we go to lunch at a restaurant near the Civic Center. Lae steals a bowl because he likes it. We are waiting for India to show up; we want to place her food order so she can arrive to a prepared meal. I don’t have her number so I ask Paul for it. He will not give it to me, citing privacy issues. I do not say “But I am Gram Ponante: America’s Beloved Porn Journalist” but instead, “I don’t want to stalk her — I just don’t want her to have to wait in line.” I see his point, however. He doesn’t know me. India does not starve to death.

We travel to Ocean Beach, which seems like a lazy name. I forget that people don’t swim at the beach in San Francisco. One, they are afraid of Kaiju and two, it’s fucking cold. India and Ryan are filming some bonding scenes where they walk the blustery beach arm in arm. We fear the beach patrol breaking up the filming. There’s about seven people with various pieces of movie equipment on hand, so we look more conspicuous than a guerilla crew making a Youtube video. We don’t stay very long. I realize this is the longest time I have ever spent on a porn set without a facial popshot. I start feeling antsy that I should provide one myself.

We move on to Sausalito at 3 p.m. Two things come to mind when I hear “Sausalito.” One is a Pepperidge Farm cookie like the Milano and the other is the lounge band Bill Murray’s character encounters in “Lost in Translation.” As much as I love the Bay Area I am not well-travelled here, so I’m excited to go to a place that Sofia Coppola would name a lounge band after. The name conjures up images of key parties and women with long, elegant hands clutching snifters. Then I realize that I once had a conversation with India about the use of hands in delivering blowjobs way back in 2011. Now she has some elegant hands. Would that I could have shown Deeb this video as a Letter of Introduction, the likes of which Charles Dickens’s characters used to carry. Then he would have let me call Summer to order her damn food. But director/journalist relationships, like blowjobs, are based on trust.

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The home in Sausalito is tiny and beautiful. It’s in a little cove called Port Varda, very close to a houseboat Annie Sprinkle used to live on. The house is rented by Shannon, the makeup lady, and I would live here in a second if I were backing up Linda Ronstadt with my band, The Eagles.

Tonight’s scenes involve Princess of San Francisco, Queen of California Carol Queen as a landlord interrupting the kitchen tryst of tenants Driller and Summer. People like Queen, Penthouse’s Kelly Holland, Ernest Greene, and Nina Hartley transcend the adult industry for me. They are a bit older than I am so I lose no ego whatsoever in just listening to them fucking talk about whatever the fuck they want, as they are exponentially smarter and more articulate than I am.

During a break Carol Queen talks to me about skulls and what she used to pay in rent. None of us talks about sex, sex culture, consent, gender orientation, victimhood, shame, gaping, or affiliate programs on break at a porn shoot.

We return, and as I watch the scene drag on through the evening, everyone in the room is feeling it’s taking too long. Deeb explains what he wants, at length, and Ladd and his crew struggle to make it work. Sullivan, who is of a temperament and long-windedness similar to Deeb, is not helping. I begin to worry about the next few days, fearing that I will write off the movie in my mind.

When I watch the scene six months later, however, it is edited and scored nearly to perfection. Queen’s interruption, which I thought of as a superfluous “Hey! Look at my friends!” when it was being filmed, is now funny and sweet. A perfect cameo and one of the things that makes the movie a love letter to Liberal San Francisco.

Still, when Lae drives a group of us to our places at 1 a.m., we’re all fucking exhausted, not a little bitter, and wary of the days ahead.

Day Two: Hot Tomales

Deeb and crew outfit a sporty red roadster with a trunk-mounted camera for Ryan and India’s drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s pretty cool, especially because I know how I would have done it if this were my movie: Glued-on iPhone 5c.

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We rendezvous in Sausalito to drive north to Stinson Beach, dangerously far into Marin County. My breathing becomes labored and I start coughing up money. The crew parks and walks through a neighborhood, staggering the procession to avoid being identified as a film crew. I’ve worked in the dregs of basic cable and I’ve pulled film permits for this sort of thing before. Yes, we may have drivers and some good pro-sumer cameras and a red convertible and meals so good that crewmembers have stolen bowls, but it is still porn and personally I would have felt uncomfortable if there weren’t two or three things a day to feel clandestine about.

Jolene Parton, who’s assisting the production, and I watch Ryan and India’s characters do some Burning Man hula-hooping in order to bond. It is difficult because it’s a very windy day but also because Do People Really Hula-Hoop To Bond? I realize, too, that the script calls India’s character India but Ryan’s character something else. What are the odds that the script called for someone named India and India Summer showed up??

Actually, having read an early version of the script over the winter, I know that India’s character was written with her in mind, as she had won an AVN award for her performance in Magnus’s earlier script, “An Open Invitation.” Manuel Ferrara was to have the role that went to Ryan Driller, but Driller needn’t feel too bad, as he would win an AVN award in 2016 for his performance.

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Then we drive to a beautiful home, owned by friends of Sullivan, in beautiful Tomales Bay. There are Adirondack chairs on the lawn, facing west over an estuary. Inside the home is a tidy little kitchen and library, which also has a couple of chairs facing west, toward the windows. Some homes have views, I realize, and the chairs don’t face a television.

India and Ryan are to fuck upstairs and as she gets ready, she mists herself with some Axe Body Spray. I tell you: Axe on a beautiful brunette linen-clad woman smells amazing. I never would have thought that before, as my previous exposure to it involved roving packs of 30-year-old douchebags at The Americana in Glendale.

I opt out of watching this scene being filmed as the upstairs room is small. It’s to be a Terrence Malick-style tryst with blowing curtains. It goes long. We can hear directions being given upstairs. I’m trying to remember the last time I heard a sex scene being given more than 45 seconds of instruction. What positions? Where does the popshot go? In a boy/girl sex scene, it is usually the dude in the pairing who becomes de facto Assistant Director and moves his partner this way and that, depending on where the light will best fall on her quivering vulv. What’s taking so long?

A report filters downstairs: Deeb has told India she does not get to have an orgasm in this scene.

“This scene is not about you,” Deeb reportedly tells India.

It’s going to be that kind of porn movie!

In the library is a really nice copy of “Moby Dick.” I have been reading my own battered copy for nearly two years and, over the course of the evening, I finish reading “Moby Dick” using the nicer edition I find at the porn house in Tomales. I don’t steal the book, however.

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After the scene is done, it’s full dark. Driller, to Irina’s joy, reveals that he for many years was a camp counsellor. He points out stars and constellations in the flawless sky.

We drive back and we are more exhausted than the night before. I feel bad for LaeCharles and am glad I’m not driving. I stay awake to keep him awake. I would hate to die coming home from a porn shoot, even if I did finish “Moby Dick” there.

Day Three: Ladies Who Lunch

We meet at a restaurant called The Chop in Oakland. There India is to have a “Sex in the City” conversation with her girlfriends, including Andre Shakti. I had talked with Shakti a few weeks before for a pre-filming interview. As we all have some breakfast between shots, she tells me that I “eat like a little kid.” A few minutes later, Irina tells me that my eyes are weird. I console myself that I’ve run into a gang of female pickup artists and they are negging me.

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There is another scene shot at Driller’s studio (his character is an artist) that I excuse myself for, opting instead to work a few hours at Gamelink’s office near the Civic Center. There is to be another scene that night, but when Lae picks up our group he informs us that the crew has staged a revolt and filming is cancelled for the evening. Score. We are due at the Ferry Terminal the next morning, really early.

I go to bed at 9 p.m.

Day Four: White Wedding

At Dawn’s Crack we are again at the Ferry Terminal which, regardless of how tired everyone is, remains beautiful and iconic. I love the noirish aspects of Los Angeles, the Spanish architecture, and the lifestyle, but San Francisco just seems like a real city to me. I loved it from the first time I visited, ten years ago, and picked up a copy of Herbert “Gangs of New York” Asbury’s “The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of San Francisco’s Underworld.” I was writing a story on Kink.com and was delighted to see that the Armory was in Asbury’s book, too.

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This morning’s scene involves a jog-off between India and Dylan Ryan. I’d met Dylan years ago after she had starred in an artful lesbian movie by Maria Beatty. At the time Dylan was more angular and had a pointy haircut. Today, as the reluctant third point in the India/Ryan/Ryan triangle, her hair is longer, her body curvier, and I have to social media shame myself for allowing her to appeal to my unimaginative heteronormative cis-male standards of attractiveness. But the heart wants what it wants, say Selena Gomez and Woody Allen.

“I am calling myself out,” I say.

I regret that I am part of the problem today. I and a few other non-essential personnel keep getting in the shot and I feel like a heel. Oddly enough, I once walked into a shot directed by Manuel Ferrara on a Briana Banks Red Light District movie a decade ago. He was justifiably angry. I go away to take pictures of seagulls and think: “Whatever happened to Rita Faltoyano?”

After the filming is done I drink coffee with Alex Ladd’s crew, which includes Pride of Argentina Demian Laino. He was the boom operator on my celebrated, poignant, and groundbreaking directorial effort “The Facts of Life XXX.”

When I’m interviewing anyone (and it’s an especially useful question in the adult world) I usually ask, “What have you learned on the job that you wouldn’t have otherwise?” One of the things I’ve learned on the job in porn is that people like Ladd and Laino could be dropped into any situation and do excellent work. They don’t complain, but their hard work and overall effectiveness gives them the ability to thoughtfully suggest. Ladd and I talk about his old company, DVSX, his series “Sakura Tales,” and I reflect again that however lofty one’s erotica aspirations are, a production needs people like Ladd and Laino to actually make things happen.

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I’m of the impression at this point that Magnus should have just directed the movie and Ladd should have filmed it, using his expertise from years of adult filming. It is not that Deeb is not a good director (indeed, he will win AVN’s Best Director award for this very movie), but he is long-winded in exactly the way Magnus is. If the latter is on the set, often delivering the same speech to the cast and crew that Deeb just has, it would make sense to work smarter and ease the growing frustration of the cast and crew.

That said, I’m sure the Deeb/Sullivan duo has done many things right, nailing the arty, thoughtful, rule-bending shots they have always wanted to see in porn and just didn’t look hard enough for in the works of Alex DeRenzy. In the end, “Marriage 2.0” is still a porn movie, regardless of its big dreams, will be sold in the traditional porn channels, and must be approved by distributor/co-financier Adam & Eve, which is porn’s most conservative brand. There will be fights between San Francisco and Adam & Eve’s North Carolina office about everything from budget, elements of the script, coital pairings and their usefulness in compilations, and Dylan Ryan’s spanked red ass.

Then we all go to the Mission, where a massive media studio has been crafted out of a couple of houses in a way that is that much more intriguing considering how inconspicuous it looks from the street.

Filming today is a greenscreen flashback to the wedding of Mickey Mod and Sadie Lune. Their characters run a sex salon and are held up as the poly couple who’ve made it work.

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One of the great things about “Marriage 2.0” is that it really flies its flag. Mod is a San Francisco-based poly-in-real-life satyr and Lune is a performance artist formerly of the Bay Area but now based in Berlin. They look exactly like how their characters should look, with Lune appearing particularly regal.

For their wedding the couple is serviced by a nervous young man named Wolf Hollander and a very pinuppy voluptuary named Juniper Gold, who arrives at her nom de porn two minutes after I ask her what it is.

Gold and Hollander begin circling Mod and Lune, touching here and there. I get the sense that Hollander did not know there might be some male-male touching going on and we were all like: “This isn’t Daly City — what did you think was going to happen?”

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Looking at the naked, barefoot, newly-minted Ms. Gold I think: She could help me find the answers.

In the midst of this I duck out to do a phone interview with Ashley Fires. I briefly describe the scene going on in the other room to this woman who is a crazy, sexed up commercial porn veteran with a heart of gold and she says, “Yeah, good luck with that.”

Day Five: Consent

The great thing about Dylan Ryan’s character — she’s Ryan Driller’s secondary partner of whom primary partner India Summer is jealous — is that she breaks it off with Ryan (yes, all the Ryans of different genders are confusing) until he and India get their shit together. She’s not going to be a part of their drama. In fact she regularly goes to a dungeon to get the shit beat out of her by Christian Wilde in order to blow off steam.

Her character, along with those of Mod and Lune, really gets it right, I think, and allows “Marriage 2.0” to lay claim to something not often explored in the adult world.

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The dungeon, located on Mission Street, is quiet, brick-walled, and tastefully appointed. Wilde’s real-life partner is German, and Wilde and I speak German to each other for a short time while Dylan gets trussed up. Call me an easy stereotyper, but I feel that German-speaking people work well in BDSM situations.

The location is to host two scenes today — one with Dylan and Wilde — and one with Dylan, Ryan, and Wilde with India interrupting them in shock and sadness.

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Wilde and Dylan shoot a great scene but, as the day goes on, tension develops. It’s taking too long. At one point India (the actor, not the character) just starts directing the scene away from Deeb. These Frosted Mini-mutinies increase the next evening in the climactic sex salon scene.

Understand that most porn movies take fewer than two days to shoot. Even larger-scale productions rarely eat a week. This one will go, on an off (but mostly on) for 10 days. Performers like the Ryans, Summer, and Nina Hartley are used to getting in and out — literally — in a day. On the one hand, Summer later says, “it is great to be booked for several days on end,” but veteran porn directors are used to thinking, shooting, and preparing fast. “Marriage 2.0” for most of the cast represents a temporal disturbance and a culture clash that is no one’s fault.

That night Mickey Mod and India film a trippy freakout tryst at the Mission’s ancient Victoria Theatre, once a vaudeville circuit destination. On the theatre’s screen appears a previously-filmed segment with Nina Hartley, further weirding out her daughter.

“Marriage 2.0” is filmed all around the Bay Area, mostly outside, with about 15 very distinct locations. Even Golden Age porn didn’t cover that much territory.

By contrast, it needs to be said that for top-selling pornographic outfits like Anabolic or Lethal Hardcore, the entire location budget comprises an Ikea couch, reused at least a thousand times.

Day Six: Sadie’s Sex Salon

Much of San Francisco’s kink community turns out for what will be the climactic scene in the movie. In a rehabbed warehouse loft in the Mission there is a real-life lifestyle BDSM chef named Chris who organizes lavish dinner parties with two types of tasting menus — dead flesh and live flesh. The main cast, augmented by Sex & Feelings celebrities like Reid Mihalko, Emily Morse, and Marcia Bacynski, eats actual food, discourses thoughtfully on the subject of polyamory around the table like my family does at Thanksgiving, and ogles and squeezes (with consent, of course) the eye candy.

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So it’s in one room where the dinner party is happening but it’s over in the other room where the extras are corraled. The production has done well to feed everyone boxed meals but, over in steerage, the various gamboling sybarites often need to be told to Shut Up.

LaeCharles is slumped in a chair. I ask him how he’s doing.

“Some people need to grow the fuck up,” he says. I can’t imagine he has slept much.

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Towards the end of the night, Sadie strolls with India through the other room, inspecting the fleshly wares a la “Eyes Wide Shut.” It is here where the camera is to reveal the roiling concupiscence of the San Francisco kink community. In real life, though, this is the moment that I start breathing through my mouth, because all the cooped-up kinksters were smelling funky.

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At the end of their walk, Sadie and India arrive at a bathroom where the exquisite Beretta James and Daisy Ducati are entangled. I think: No, it’s Beretta James who can help me find the answers.

Then I think: You know what? They can all help.

I’m scheduled to fly back to L.A. the next day so I want to interview India one last time. But it’s been a very trying day. India is profoundly unhappy and begs off. Later there is a blowup on set and we worry that India will quit. At issue, always, is whether “Marriage 2.0” is a “real movie with sex” or a “hardcore movie with dialogue,” both of which are the same thing, but the attitude is different — one results in a porn movie with very little to jerk off to because all the masturbation seems to be happening behind the camera.

India does not quit. The main cast stays an extra couple of days.

Sullivan is passionate about the movie, as he should be, and throughout the production and marketing process would tell anyone that “the one thing that Hollywood cannot deliver is hardcore sex, and that is what the adult industry alone can deliver.” Meaning that, if there were only an Enlightened Pornographer with the vision and expertise to create a Hollywood-worthy movie but with hardcore sex… Per aspera ad astra.

But the only way that is attainable in our lifetimes is if a Hollywood movie is written and budgeted so that actual actors are used in a script that finds a way to break from their dialogue into porn sex with real porn actors. (I’m picturing dream sequences.)

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Even the most self-indulgent “Hey! Look at Us!” Hollywood indie (I’m thinking of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s and Alan Cumming’s 2001 “The Anniversary Party,” perhaps unfairly) has exponentially more money and creative freedom than the highest-budget porn movie. Time was always running out on “Marriage 2.0” — the actors were often booked for other jobs. Perhaps if I started a Summer Sex And Acting Camp in which adult campers paid to be shacked up for the summer and we wrote and rehearsed a porn movie that we’d submit for AVN consideration over Labor Day…

Because I am unconvinced that porn performers can’t act. Ask one to tell you why she’s late. Ask another to explain about how he showed up to work with syphilis. Ask any performer to improvise a scene involving someone who bounced a check, shamed them for their job, or got put on a personal “No” list — today’s porn stars are articulate and expressive as Hell. They, like all actors, just need a situation where they’re not constantly checking a clock.

When one is writing and casting for available talent that might very well have come from the set of “Fucking My Mother’s Best Friend 11” and will be going to the set of “Fucking My Mother’s Best Friend 12” immediately after one’s own shoot wraps, that is the norm, and that is the environment, and it is unavoidable that the dialogue is going to both read on paper and sound on screen like wooden porn pap. The essential porniness seeps into everything, and it’s the best directors who know how to work within those limitations.

Day Seven: Return to Hope (Bob Hope)

I take an Uber to the airport because BART is not running. Someone has left a hardcover copy of “Dracula” on the seat next to mine in the empty lounge. I take it like it’s someone else’s bowl. Upon my return to Burbank it’s at least 15 degrees warmer. It’s the first time I’ve really felt happy to be back in L.A. from San Francisco. Despite the beauty of Journey’s City by the Bay (I used to think Journey was from Wisconsin — I’m not kidding), I was cold and tired throughout the duration of my trip.

There is still a good deal of principal photography to get out of the way for “Marriage 2.0,” including a scene with Nina Hartley as India’s no-nonsense, sex-having, free spirit mom. Nina’s scenes are among my favorites in the movie, as she is herself a no-nonsense, sex-having Bay Area native.

I realize that I like the scenes in which people are playing more affluent versions of themselves.

The Millennium of Aftermath

Paul Deeb is not only the director but also the editor and the score’s composer. He does a masterful job in these areas. The movie wraps and Deeb edits from his houseboat docked off Jack London Square (one must be careful not to mix up the words here). The movie is not finished in time for AVN Awards eligibility (it must be available online by September 30 to be considered) but Sullivan begins showing a version of the film in January, 2015 at the XBiz 360 show. It wins an award at New York’s Cinekink and garners a great deal of praise. It is a landmark movie.

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Much of the cast and crew reunite in April, 2015 for a grand unveiling at the Victoria Theatre. Daisy Ducati is at the center of an orgy up in the balcony. Most of the cast has never seen themselves on a big screen. It’s an excellent way to tie past to present.

People close to the production say that the movie has not made its money back and a source at Adam & Eve confirms this. But that does not mean “Marriage 2.0” is not worth watching, paying for, and owning. If porn is like science fiction, saying just as much about right now as it does about the world it aspires to, there is no better portal to those worlds than “Marriage 2.0.” But you may need to watch “Ass Masters” afterward, because it’s not about you.

Marriage 2.0 trailer 1 from Pillow Book Gallery on Vimeo.

 

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Polymath — an Interview with Magnus Sullivan; Thunder from Covina — an Interview with Dylan Ryan; Madison Young’s “Layover”; Set to Screen — “The Truth About O”
See Also: “Marriage 2.0” official site

About Gram the Man 4399 Articles
Gram Ponante is America's Beloved Porn Journalist

2 Comments

  1. Wow, that was a fascinating read.

    I’m a big fan of the “golden age,” where movies were shot using locations (like the ubiquitous San Francisco, for example), because they gave the movies a certain realness that has been completely lacking since home video era got underway. I especially enjoy these movies when the performers *act*, there’s something of a story, and the rarest of all things, actual character development – it makes the sex scenes much better, in my opinion.

    While I haven’t seen Marriage 2.0 yet (or even heard of it before this article), I have to admire the ambition to make something that, on paper at least, is completely different than the same ol’ shit we, as *mainstream* consumers, are being constantly fed. I can only hope that we get some new blood in that have vision beyond “Big Asses Fucked on Couches by Black Stepfathers 4” or they like, because it’s tiring.

    (All that being said, I doubt that 90% of the current porn population could act their way out of a wet paper towel, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

  2. This is a truly bizarre concept that I’m more than excited about watching. As the commenter above state, we get used to the same old crap. No one is coming up with original ideas and it’s great to see something new and original about to hit the airwaves!

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