Pornstar

by Ian Gittler

  There’s a problem with the camera. A minute turns to five. Joey gets annoyed.

  “C’mon Ron, let’s do it.”

  He looks around the room like he thinks the crew is all amateurs. Melissa has Joey’s dick in her hand. She strokes it, casually, oblivious to the commotion around the camcorder. They get it running.

  Joey and Melissa fuck for the next twenty minutes, trying a series of positions. The bedroom is sweltering. Two hot lights are burning, one set up on each side of the bed, as well as two stands with umbrellas and strobe heads for stills. Joey suggests an ending.

  “How about if I fuck her tits and come on her around here,” he says to Ron, gesturing with a circular motion above Melissa’s neck and chin. Her head is hanging off the edge of the bed.

  “That’s great, Joey. Do it whenever you’re ready,” Ron says.

  “Is there any lube? I need lube,” Joey says.

  The PA hands Joey the Astroglide. Joey spritzes Melissa’s cleavage. He straddles her chest. She squeezes her tits tightly around his dick. Three or four minutes later:

  “Here it is, Ron,” he says.

  Joey huffs and grunts.

  “Do it, kid,” Ron says.

  Joey does it just like he said he would. His body is shiny from sweat. Melissa’s chest is shiny from Astroglide and Joey’s come. They lie in each other’s arms while the crew packs.

  JOEY COMES DOWNSTAIRS after a shower.

  Melissa approaches him.

  “I just wanted to say thanks,” she says, “and also to ask you how I did. Y’know, see if you have any suggestions.”

  Joey blushes.

  “God, you were great, really. Thank you. Just do what you’re doing ... don’t change anything at all.”

  Melissa hugs him, thanks him again, then leaves.

  Tom Byron sits next to Joey.

  “Tommy, that girl just asked me for tips. She was so hot, y’know? What could I tell her? Nothing,” Joey says.

  “Tell her to be herself,” Tom says. “If that’s possible.”

  “These new girls are so great until they start doing things how they think they’re supposed to,” Joey says. “God, I hope she doesn’t get her tits done.”

  “She will,” Tom says.

  I ask Joey who he thinks I should shoot.

  “Man, Rocco definitely. Do you know him? He’s phenomenal. He’s a true star. He won’t be back in town for a while. Do you know Patrick Collins? He’s a must. I mean Patrick is larger than life. There has to be a shot of Patrick in your book. I’ll hook you up with Patrick, no problem. Y’know, if he’s into it.”

  “What about female stars?” I say.

  “I don’t know, man ... I mean I couldn’t really say, y’know?”

  “Are you friends with—”

  Joey cuts me off.

  “I just try to, y’know, I don’t push it with the girls. I mean I really respect them, so I try to just give them space, y’know? I don’t really pursue them—outside of work. I guess it’s kind of a delicate thing. But Patrick—he’s a guy you should meet.”

  A FORTY-FIVE-MINUTE DRIVE FROM HOLLYWOOD INTO THE VALLEY. A QUIET STREET with modest homes. A brown horse grazes in the front yard of one, a dusty tractor is retired behind the toolshed of another. The family that lives on the corner might have a teenage son; there’s a red Trans Am on blocks in the driveway.

  Nikki Sinn and her boyfriend, Ron Sullivan, live on this street. Their home is modest too, though the living room has recently been refurnished with a couple of slick, black leather sofas. A thirty-six-inch TV sits in a corner. A copy of Helmut Newton’s Sleepless Nights rests on a large glass coffee table. The room is neat, almost sterile.

  Off the kitchen there’s a glassed-in extension. This is Ron’s office. X-Rated Critics Organization plaques and Adult Video News trophies—porn’s Oscars—line the win dowsill, framed photos show him at different stages in his career. A poster of Nikki, nude, hangs above a small bookshelf with forty or fifty of the tapes Ron has directed over two decades working in the business. From behind his desk there’s a clear view of their swimming pool. Nikki is younger than Ron, by fifteen or twenty years. She’s tall, big boned. She wears black to match her elaborately set jet-black hair. She drives a white Corvette with plates that read SINN. Nikki had trouble with one of her implants, and it had to be removed. Until she sees her plastic surgeon in Palm Springs next month, she’s reticent about revealing her grossly imbalanced breasts.

  Nikki apologizes about a room off the hall that leads to the bedroom. She’s embarrassed. It’s supposed to be her dressing room. In sharp contrast to the rest of the house, it’s a complete ‘wall to wall mess, literally a foot deep with dildos, fan-club flyers, broken-framed baby pictures, lacy underwear, boxes of thigh-high boots and stiletto-heeled shoes. The closets are so full that the sliding doors won’t shut. A dress hangs on the frame of the window blinds. Rather than attempt to clear a spot in front of the dresser mirror, Nikki does her makeup in the hallway bathroom.

  Nikki has a warm smile, and it’s warmest when Ron gets home from work, from his office at Caballero Video. They invite me to stay for dinner. Ron offers to go do the shopping and leaves again.

  Nikki dresses. She wants to straighten up the spotless kitchen before Ron returns, so she sits me down in the living room to watch a rough cut of the next feature to be released with her face on the box cover.

  “It’s pretty cool. I want you to see the DP. Steve Hatcher, me, and a new guy. Do you know Steve? He’s great. It’s really fun working with him.”

  As Nikki wipes down the sparkling-blue metallic Formica counter along the sink, the glow of the large-screen TV fills the dark living room.

  The tape is lit harshly. Large skin areas—Nikki’s bottom, Hatcher’s chest—are over-exposed, blown out. There’s no music. The three actors are having sex on a bed. The room is so unremarkable that it must’ve been built, cheaply, in a soundstage.

  The action progresses quickly to Nikki’s double penetration, her DP. The new actor’s face is obscured. Nikki is on top of him. Hatcher is standing at the side of the bed, entering her anally.

  When the back door opens and Ron enters the room, the actors’ midsections are filling up the entire screen. He stands behind the sofa I’m sitting on. Ron has a resonant Lee Marvin drawl and a square jaw. His haircut and faded tattoos are leftovers from a stint in the military. The next shot is a close-up of Nikki staring into the lens, moaning.

  “My girl is really something else,” he says, smiling, then heads for the kitchen and grabs a beer.

  Nikki prepares the meal. Ron brought back a deep-dish pizza from one of the chains. Nikki chops up fresh mushrooms and peppers. She adds those, then covers it all with grated mozzarella and puts the pie back in the oven for a few more minutes. There’s a liter of Pepsi on the table.

  Nikki straddles a high chair at the counter and looks admiringly—respectfully—at Ron as he talks about his life and the industry. Ron started out in Greenwich Village in the late sixties, when a career as a legitimate actor refused to take off. It was porn or carpentry. Ron’s son Jason, from one of a series of failed marriages, is among the busiest cameramen in the porn business today. Ron says that that makes him proud. When he pauses, Nikki tells a little bit of her story.

  “I guess I realized pretty recently that I was sexually abused. Y’know, the memories are starting to come back.”

  Since coming to the conclusion that all these porn girls must’ve been victims of childhood sexual abuse, since accepting that, all the “nos” in response to the abuse question have miraculously turned into “yesses,” like the actresses can tell I’m ready to hear it. Nikki says from the time she was three to six and a half, her family traveled with the circus.

  “So I don’t really have a clear idea who it was that did the abusing.”

  Ron continues from there with his own diagnosis.

  “Everyone in this business has some kind of damaged psyche—-no kid dreams of growi
ng up and working in porn, for God’s sake—but this business, the world of porn, is a place where a lot of damaged souls can coexist, prosper, and find some sense of community they weren’t able to bring to their lives before.”

  Nikki smiles at Ron. She likes her boyfriend’s way with words.

  Then she says, “Once, I was doing a scene with two guys. It was building up to a DP. Ron was the director and Jason—his son—was the cameraman. That was kind of strange.”

  ARROW STUDIOS IS A RUN-DOWN SOUNDSTAGE IN THE VALLEY. TODAY’S EIGHT ACTORS and actresses share a seven-by-ten-foot dressing/makeup room. Most of the cast is the same as yesterday, but there are additions: Alicia Rio, an actress who Jonathan Morgan, an actor, quickly points out used to be his girlfriend, and Tom Byron. Tom’s long hair is being sprayed silver-gray. He’s playing a sorcerer. Today Tom will have sex with Ariana, a tattooed actress whose husband dropped her off at the set. Napoleon, a midget, has a speaking part. He won’t perform sex anymore. “It began fucking with my head,” he says.

  The studio is busy. While Jay Shanahan’s crew lights the next scene, Steve Drake, a porn actor who’s begun directing his own videos, confers with Arrow’s master carpenter about the sets for his shoot tomorrow. The skinny black carpenter looks familiar. Drake leaves, then Ron Jeremy arrives. He’s in baggy shorts, Air Jordans, and a Mötley

  Nikki Sinn and Ron Sullivan at home in the Valley.

  Crüe T-shirt. The actor is trying to get a check out of Shanahan. Shanahan gets annoyed. He’s able to convince Ron that the check will be cut by someone else, and eventually Ron leaves. The carpenter nods and says, “Hey, man,” but I still can’t place him.

  “He was in all those Porky’s movies,” Melanie Moore says.

  It comes back in a flood of late-night HBO memories.

  Bud Lee, the ex-husband and ex-manager of a porn star named Hyapatia Lee, arrives through the dressing room. Lee is a big, tall guy, maybe forty-two or -three, with long gray hair and a mischievous glint in his eye. He’s looking for a bag he forgot on the set yesterday. He introduces himself, then extends an invitation to the set of a movie he’s producing for Vivid Video. Tomorrow they’re shooting at “the last house Orson Welles ever lived in.”

  It’s three in the afternoon. Billy Rocket, a PA and aspiring porn actor, opens a bottle of rum and passes out Styrofoam cups to crew and cast members in the lounge. He and Melanie get serious when they see a camera. “You can’t show that,” Melanie says.

  Tom seems to have fun with the acting part of his scene, the dialogue, then acts bored by the sex.

  THE HOUSE AT FRANKLIN and Stanley, at the base of the Hollywood Hills, is beautiful. Easy Love is a “big-budget” production—sixteen-millimeter film; “period” wardrobe. The director, Michael Zen, takes himself very seriously, like a Beat-era fey Shakespearean drama coach. Easy Love will take seven days to make, not one or two like one of Shanahan’s videos.

  The stars are girls I’ve never heard of. One named Leena, another—Bud Lee’s girlfriend—called Asia Carrera. The male lead is Stephen St. Croix. St. Croix hands out a “straight acting” business card with a picture of him wearing an unbuttoned vest and khaki shorts, sitting in front of a cheesy studio backdrop. The card says he’s “Benjamin Banks.”

  Paul Thomas sits in the shadows of a canopied deck on the second floor. He’s interviewing Jason Sullivan, who must’ve been shooting out at Arrow for Shanahan until three this morning. Sullivan is a potential cameraman for PT’s next film. Bud Lee, as producer, answers to PT, too. Downstairs, Bud sits at a large oak dining-room table, poring over a four-foot-wide chart—the shooting schedule and scene-by-scene production budget for their next film. Lee is proud that the chart resembles ones used “to make real movies.”

  These guys see themselves as the link between porn and the mainstream. Among people in the porn business, the fact that PT is planning to direct an R-rated feature, his first, is a very big thing. PT leaves once the meeting with Jason Sullivan is over, offering me one of his not-unfriendly “who are you and why are you here?” expressions as he goes.

  The premise for Easy Love: Asia Carrera watches old romance movies on television. Late one night, fed up with her own unromantic love life, she wishes she could switch places with Leena, who plays the golden-era silver-screen goddess. Leena—responding from inside the TV set—agrees to do it. Leena is sick and tired of love scenes that end before she actually gets fucked.

  Although PT isn’t directing this one, the crew is composed of the same guys who were on the set of Sleeping Beauties two years ago.

  ORSON WELLES’S HOUSE

  The PAs, two in their early twenties and one, a Bosnian called Vladi who looks older, take their orders from Ron Vogel, the stills photographer. The house is a difficult location, with a lot of equipment being moved up and down narrow stairways and into tight bedrooms. The lighting makes the rooms superhot, and the day lasts a long time.

  The screenwriter is Raven Touchstone, a woman in her forties wearing big sunglasses. She says she’s written hundreds of porn screenplays. Touchstone is taking behind the-scenes pictures, too. Her work is unremarkable, verging on snapshot photography, but there is one interesting picture in her portfolio. It’s of an actress holding her open script, casually discussing her dialogue with a director (not shown) while a sweaty actor whose face is obscured waits—still inside the actress from behind—to continue fucking. The actress is Debi Diamond.

  “Debi’s great,” Touchstone says, like someone on a fashion shoot might talk about a famous model. And of course, like everyone else I’ve asked, Raven Touchstone has no idea how to find Debi.

  A sexy makeup artist who refuses to be photographed (“I’ve done all that already”) blends away Leena’s tan lines for the last scene, sex with Stephen St. Croix.

  Touchstone says Leena is the industry’s big new star. Leena doesn’t mind being photographed having her makeup done, undressed, whatever. Her boyfriend, a struggling rock musician called Jimmy Swan, hangs out until it’s time for his girlfriend’s scene, then leaves before it begins.

  Leena likes attention. She acts like a star, kind of affected—like how she thinks a star should act. But she seems normal, no apparent eccentricity, which under these circumstances, on the set of a porn movie, seems oddly dull, like Raven Touchstone and her pictures. No perspective.

  Savannah. Madison. Jamie Summers. Even Dominique Simone. Definitely April Rayne. Those girls all had something, a quality of self-invention that can’t be premeditated. It made them seem authentically starlike, more so than anything they could do—did do—to act like stars. Maybe it’s because my perspective has changed, but that quality is missing on the set of Easy Love and has been missing on every set I’ve visited in the weeks since returning to Los Angeles.

  But Leena is hot. Bruce Springsteen once said he performs for the one person in each audience who’s never heard him before. I’ve never heard Leena moan and shout before. She snarls, grits her teeth, continues passionately straight through nonshooting intervals while the techs switch camera angles or adjust lights. She performs for me. Everyone else in the room has seen it a million times.

  St. Croix has a perplexed—but satisfied—grin. He’s game. When Leena urges him to push into her ass—this wasn’t planned as an anal scene—the actor doesn’t hesitate. They go like that for a while, but Michael Zen needs more straight intercourse. St. Croix pulls out. The recent Baywatch extra has no problem with being photographed washing his unflagging erection with a bar of Ivory in the marble bathroom sink. Back in the bedroom St. Croix and Leena finish their scene with his come on her face. It’s almost ten o’clock.

  There’s one more shot to do tonight. Leena has to float on the surface of the lima bean—shaped swimming pool in full costume, like she’s drowned. It takes forty minutes to light it and five to shoot it, then the crew begins to break down for the night.

  Top row, from left: Arrow Studios; Napoleon; Ron’s son, cameraman Jason Sullivan. Bottom
row, from left: Sex in Orson Welles’s bedroom; Kaitlyn Ashley; Kaitlyn shortly before shooting.

  Opposite: Starlet Lisa Ann takes a break during the first scene of her career; it’s TT Boy’s second scene in an hour. From the edge of the gazebo, techs point out the Batcave from the sixties TV show, as if to prove that landmark and what the porn crew is doing here are all part of the same thing, all connected. Show business.

  Top row, from left: Leena at home in Laurel Canyon; Janet Jacme at home in North Hollywood; Asia Carrera during a break at Trach Tech Visuals. Bottom row, from left: Jay Shanahan in another cameo; Lisa Ann and actor Jonathan Morgan; starlets flirting off camera.

  Opposite: Despondent over being paired in an orgy scene with an unknown actor she’s uncomfortable with, Amber Woods, one of many girls with an on-again, off-again relationship to porn, hears her boyfriend’s voice—he’s arrived early to pick her up—and searches past the hot lights for his face, and comfort.

  Rebecca Bardoux’s gear; Michael Zen’s crew; Bardoux making her way to the stage at Bob’s Classy Lady, a strip club in the Valley.

  Michael Zen apologizes for his grim demeanor throughout the course of the day, explaining, unexpectedly, that he’s “waiting to pass a stone.” It’s dark by the pool, so Zen doesn’t notice me cringe.

  “I hope you’ll join us again tomorrow,” he says.

  NEXT DAY. Asia Carrera has very reluctant sex in Orson Welles’s bedroom with an unknown actor called Guy Da Silva. Her boyfriend, Bud Lee, sits downstairs with his budget during that scene. Asia makes Guy stop every two or three thrusts, and literally never makes eye contact with him. She gives Michael Zen just enough for the director to edit together later. Kaitlyn Ashley, another new girl—“a trouper” as one tech puts it—joins them in the end to get Guy off. Asia isn’t on camera for the last ten minutes of the scene. Kaitlyn’s husband, Jay, waits for her on the large deck outside the bedroom, under an umbrella. It’s a porn social scene out there; actors, visitors. Jay is a porn actor too, but today he’s just hanging out, schmoozing, while his wife works.