Once on this island: My This Aint Gilligan’s Island XXX journal

July 14: 11 a.m.

Dear Log, I am going to the set of This Ain’t Gilligan’s Island XXX today. I read in Variety that the 21-page script, credited to Roger Krypton, was actually ghost-written by a Hustler insider. That would be like finding out the script for “The English Patient” was written by Harvey Weinstein! This is very exciting.

11:15

Jack Lawrence is in the makeup room. He’s playing the Professor. This is excellent casting; Lawrence even has a white shirt. He introduces me to someone I already know as “the guy who invented the lifts in Marcus London’s shoes.” Everyone smiles.

What can I say? “I’m also a Scientologist.”

I pick up a script from a stack in a Kinko’s box. They went for the expensive paper. The plot goes thusly: Porn director Rob Naughty arrives on Gilligan’s Island to shoot a movie with his cast and crew. They are surprised to find Gilligan and the gang there. The porn performers and the castaways go at each other while Naughty secretly films, having convinced Gilligan et al that he will rescue them.

I ask Lawrence what his character will be doing in the script.

“I haven’t read it yet,” he says. That guy is Method all the way.

11:30

Regan Reese gets out of makeup. She’s playing Alexxxy, the adult film actress who blows Gilligan. The Behind the Scenes photographer keeps looking at me. She looks sort of familiar. It is Ryan Keely, nude model and porn lesbian! She used to be known as Maria Menendez, production assistant whom everyone wanted to see do porn but who always said she wasn’t interested. I finally recognize her.

She approaches Regan Reese, who is like a concentrated dollop of tattooed lust, and says, “I have to motorboat you” and proceeds to put her face between Reese’s breasts and shake her head around.

Women get away with murder in this business. Murder.

Noon

Ryder Skye, playing Ginger, is reading “True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor” by David Mamet. I rifle through the Gilligan script and do not find the following:

GINGER
Gilligan. The fuck? The fuck, Gilligan. Get the fucking coconuts.

GILLIGAN
The coconuts, I –

GINGER
The fucking coconuts, you Fuck. Climb the tree. Get the coconuts. The milk. The milk in them. What I’m saying is that the milk in them is what we need.

GILLIGAN
The coconuts

GINGER
The milk in the coconuts, you Fuck, Gilligan.

Regardless, Skye, more than anyone in the cast, really makes an effort to channel her character from the series. Everybody says so.

1 p.m.

It is Darryl Hanah’s 36th birthday. Hanah, playing Mrs. Howell, really lends credence to the suggestion that women get hornier after 30. She spends most of the time in the green room with a little vibrator.

“My grandmother said, ‘Just wait ’til you’re sixty,'” she said.

Hanah just entered the adult business when she was 33 and she has shot movies on each of her birthdays since. She gets mostly MILF roles, and thinks that is missing the point.

“You’re either barely legal or you’re a MILF,” she said, “with nothing in between.”

Playing Mr. Howell is 53-year-old Dick Nasty, a British gentleman who, until a day or so ago, had a sex scene in the movie but it was written out. Now he has to watch as Rod Fontana, playing the Skipper, nails his wife.

“You could just go in there with the old script and pretend you never got the revised version,” I suggested. “You could say they never couriered the purple pages to you.”

With a wry Hollywood insider wit like that I should be Perez Hilton.

12:15

Kristin Spillers, delightful Hustler marketing functionary, breaks down the difference between all the recent TV show porn parodies.

“If it starts with ‘This Ain’t the…,’ it’s a Hustler title,” she says. “If it starts with ‘Not the…,” it’s an XPlay/Jeff Mullen title that he gives us to distribute.”

Porn has always relied on loose to looser adaptations of mainstream successes, but the person to thank or blame for the recent flood of projects is Jeff Mullen who, after making four “Britney Rears” movies, followed them up with “Not the Bradys XXX” last year.

So far there have been two “Not the Bradys” movies, a “Get Smartass” that was just shot by “Gov Lov” director Stuart Canterbury and fast-tracked for release in August, “This Ain’t the Munsters XXX,” directed by Gilligan‘s Anton Slayer, “Not Bewitched XXX,” and “This Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX” which Mullen directed as a hireling of Hustler. In addition, Mullen has developed porn spoofs of “The Love Boat,” “Three’s Company,” and “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.”

Of the latter, Mullen said, “Mr. Rogers will be teaching sweet young girls about pulling down their pants and exploring their ‘dirty areas.'”

So, you know, there’s a lot at stake.

1 p.m.

The cast assembles for photos. At first I think it’s weird that there are extra people on Gilligan’s Island, like the visiting porn crew, but the TV show always had guests, especially the TV movies that followed the show’s cancellation. In fact, a member of the cast of This Ain’t Gilligan’s Island XXX has a relative who worked in production of two of the Gilligan TV movies.

“He worked on the one with the Harlem Globetrotters and on Rescue from Gilligan’s Island,” the cast member said, but preferred I not link them because “my career can hurt his career.”

This is sad, and is unfortunately the way things are. My relatives would also be scandalized if the press knew they were related to America’s Beloved Porn Journalist, as they are the Saudi royal family.

Director Anton Slayer and veteran Hustler photographer Matti Klatt arrange the castaways for the boxcover photo, which is to be sexy but non-nude. I ask for thirty seconds while Klatt changes memory cards and ask the cast to act as if the Skipper is the lone defender of morals on the island.

1:30 p.m.

Ryder Skye has to put makeup on her tattoos because Ginger wouldn’t have them. That’s her Mamet training.

3 p.m.

I see this sign

…and ask Spillers if I will get one.

“Maybe next time,” she says.

It is because I don’t have my own clothing line. I just know it.

4 p.m.

Jack Lawrence introduces me to Evan Stone as “the guy who invented the lifts in Marcus London’s shoes.”

5 p.m.

Craft services on the set today include lots of snacks. Pizza is delivered later on, but for now I eat some licorice and a box of cheddar cheese noodles. I know at the outset that if it smells this way going in, well … Lucky the warehouse is being sold, is all I’m saying.

7 p.m.

Poor goddamn Mr. Howell. Poor Dick Nasty. At first he thought he had a sex scene and then he didn’t. His character is reduced to watching the skipper, Rod Fontana, bang his wife. Hanah can really teach these younger women about exhibitionism.

8 p.m.

Sindee Jennings wasn’t supposed to play Mary Ann. Until yesterday the role belonged to Penny Flame. But I understand Flame did not get her STD test out of the way in time, so Jennings was called and she had recently dyed her hair black. Sindee is from Abilene, a very dusty town. I imagine this is why Jennings can squirt whole buildings d0own.

“Are you squirting in your scene today?” I ask.

“Nope. That would be extra,” she says.

Before Cytherea made squirting a marketable niche, performers and their agents didn’t charge extra for it, and now the more financially savvy ones do.

8:30

Tony Rosano plays Gilligan. He has brought a guitar to the set and is playing Rush songs – really well. He’s not one of those guys who demands you listen to him noodle, either, which is almost as bad as the party guest who tells you about his home brewery. Instead, Rosano just plays quietly. Cool dude.

9 p.m.

It’s getting late. I don’t usually stay so late on set but I haven’t been to one in a long time, and this movie is different in that it has an ensemble cast with four women who don’t each fit into the porn cookie cutter mold. Director Anton Slayer comes into the green room. He looks tired.

“What’s that smell?” he asks.

“Cheddar cheese noodles,” a few of us say.

“You’re going to go into the kitchen at 1 a.m. and look for the cheddar cheese noodles but there won’t be any, because I’ll be driving home and eating them in my car,” I say.

“If I’m still here at 1:30,” he says, “shoot me in the head.”

He’s there until 2 a.m.

10 p.m.

There is fucking being filmed somewhere in the building, but it’s time to go. Outside I join a cigarette smoker whose mother would be offended to read her daughter smoked, so she will go nameless on this family website. There is a rustling in the dumpster next to us and a man in a miner’s helmet with a light on the top of it emerges. It’s dark, so we only see the light.

“You’ve been getting rid of a lot of good empties,” he says, going down the list of what prices California pays for its redeemables. Things are tough all over. His dog, Harley, waits nearby. The man, who identifies himself as Major, tells the following joke:

“What are a woman’s four favorite animals? A jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bedroom,” (and I can’t remember the other two). UPDATE: check the comments for the answer.

July 15, 10 a.m.

Sindee Jennings is here early, even though she was one of the last to leave. Today she has two scenes, one with Voodoo, who has also dyed his hair black (or let it grow back black) since the last time I saw him, and one with Ginger and Gilligan. Of all the scenes I imagine viewers of the original series wanted to see, a Gilligan/Ginger/Mary Ann three-way would be it.

11 a.m.

Ryder Skye shows up next. Even dressed casually she looks much more glamorous than the wholesome newcomer I met a year ago. I wonder if I, too, appear wordly and sophisticated to people who thought I was a simple bumpkin in 2007. So much has changed since I’ve become a Scientologist.

Noon

Anton Slayer has worked in the adult business for 21 years, sometimes using different directing names in order to not glut a company’s release schedule with the same name. He estimates he directs 48 movies a year, some that are bigger features like this but most of which are smaller gonzo titles.

“This is a bigger movie,” he is saying. “The set ran about $12k and the cast was about $18k, so right there you have the whole budget for most movies, and we haven’t even gotten to the crew.”

I ask if he ever pays out of pocket for incidentals. We’re talking about his secret for keeping a job in a bad economy, because I know a lot of people on both sides of the Hollywood sign who do not work as steadily.

“Every now and then I pay out of pocket,” he says. “But I know I’m going to make it up down the road, so I’m not going to go to a company with a small bill and demand they pay it. Because there’s always some guy from Florida who, because he has a Handicam, is suddenly a director.”

2 p.m.

Jack Lawrence has driven to work the past two days in a modified 1965 Shelby Daytona coupe. “It would get up to 140 degrees in there until I put the air conditioner in,” he said, explaining, before I told him I didn’t understand a goddamn thing he said, the various things he’s done to improve the car.

“It’s not exactly street legal,” he said, but when cops stop him, it’s to take a picture of the car.

2:30

Evan Stone, whose character is the production assistant for the porn company, has a scene with Ginger in her hut. The way Nick Manning has created an internationally recognized brand by screaming “Dropping Loads!” at the end of each scene, Stone, when he is playing a particularly ha,mmy character, pinches the head of his penis while delivering dialogue. He was doing this now.

I got kicked out when I did this at Krispy Kreme. Evan Stone gets away with murder. Murder.

3 p.m.

Ryan Keely tells me that a photographer from another publication grabbed her ass.

“I took him into the green room and told him it was not cool,” she said.

“Glad he didn’t motorboat you.”

3:30

I’m a fan of Kenny DeMartines, who is Hustler’s production coordinator and who builds the sets for the movies. He has been cleaning out the studio for the past several months and is always pleasantly surprised when a new movie is booked for the space, which you can buy for $3.8 million. I tell him about Major and Harley, and the fact that I couldn’t see Major’s face.

“It’s amazing what that guy can fit on his bike,” DeMartines says.

This is a relief. I expected DeMartines to say, “You know why you couldn’t see Major’s face? He’s been dead for twenty years.”

4 p.m.

I had spent a couple of days on set and I was not paying attention to the rest of my vast media empire. This Ain’t Gilligan’s Island XXX was like a tropical vacation for me, in which naked beach nymphs brought me Twizzlers, I heard “YYZ” on an acoustic guitar, and MILFs chatted amiably while their nether parts vibrated. In fact, it was more like Brigadoon or Camelot, those places that only appear once in an age. Don’t tell Jeff Mullen.

So how does Hustler get away with these parodies without getting sued?

Jeff Thill, Hustler’s director of Video Operations, points to the company’s long paper trail.

“Not only do we put ‘Not the’ and ‘This Ain’t The’ in the title, but we also stamp ‘This is a parody’ on the box, the inserts, and on the DVD itself,” he said. “Plus, it’s not really worth it for the owner of the original to file suit against a porn company.

“Finally, remember that Larry Flynt set a huge legal precedent about what constitutes a parody.”

This Ain’t the Bradys XXX is slated for release in March, 2009.

“We don’t want to glut the market,” Thill said.

Previously: Not the Bradys XXX; Twilight of the Hustler Studio; Ask a porn guy – Jack Lawrence and Breaking Into Porn; Ryder Skye and Roxy Deville menage to redeem Sex and the City; Squirting and self-censorship
See also: Hustler