Pornstar

by Ian Gittler

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of Coldwater Canyon, in a nightclub on Ventura Boulevard, Jay Shanahan is already well into his next video. There’s a film crew on his set doing a “lifestyles of porn stars” documentary for the Playboy Channel. Their cameraman stands behind Shanahan’s cameraman—Jason Sullivan—and his stills guy. Shanahan’s crew is filmed as they film Jonathan Morgan having sex in a tiny dressing room behind the stage with an unknown actress. There are ten or twelve more porn actors and actresses in the front section waiting for the “club scene.” Brittany O’Connell sits at the bar, naked, chatting with a tough-looking friend who’s come to visit the set. Ali-cia Rio is putting on a Carmen Miranda outfit. Her husband, a cop, is an extra. Tony Tedeschi, the Penguin from Splatman, adjusts a bow tie. Ron Jeremy. Other faces I don’t recognize.

  Shanahan has nothing nice to say about the PT-Zen-Lee crew. At one point he uses the word “elitist.” Porn stars have been dissing one another since day one, but the rivalries between directors’ camps is new to me. Someone on Michael Zen’s set referred to Jay Shanahan as “that joker.”

  Shanahan films yet another sight gag centered around his bare ass. His sets are kind of silly, but people have a pretty good time, and Jay makes sure there’s plenty for everyone to eat. Since Easy Love began shooting actors have been missing out on meals.

  NEXT DAY. Zen’s crew has relocated to a dentist’s house in Woodland Hills, in the Valley. The dentist’s wife sunbathes nude by the pool. The directors all use this place regularly.

  It’s ten hours of bad dialogue for Leena and Asia.

  One of the PAs tells me he graduated from film school, couldn’t find work, got dumped by his girlfriend, and ended up here six months ago. He’s desperate for a connection with someone from the outside. He says he just began seeing a therapist, and I tell him that that’s a positive thing. He seems relieved. He continues hauling light stands and reflectors.

  Actors and actresses begin showing up for an orgy scene and end up spending the day by the pool, waiting around, getting to know one another. Melissa Monet arrives—she’s the girl from the scene with Joey Silvera at Tom Byron’s house. So does Lisa Ann, he first-timer from Flesh for Fantasy. A Texan named Krista. Tony Tedeschi. Alex Sanders. He sits in a corner with a Toshiba laptop, working on a treatment for his own porn video. Sanders says he regrets he’s here only to do dialogue. A new, very young-Looking hippie actor called Ian Daniels plays Nirvana riffs on an acoustic guitar. Amber Woods, an actress with cat eyes tattooed on her ass, hangs out with her boyfriend. The Boyfriend says, “We’re a perfect couple: I’m not a sexual person at all, and she likes that.”

  ORGY

  He tells Amber he’ll pick her up when the orgy is over.

  There’s one more actor hanging out, a skinny guy from New York with no immediately apparent qualifications, called Dave Dodge. Dodge stays off to himself, doesn’t aternize with the other actors at all. When it’s finally time to shoot, Dodge is paired with Amber.

  Five minutes into the scene, shot in the living room, Dodge approaches nude and lys, “Please don’t take pictures of me now. This is a difficult moment.”

  Amber doesn’t want to have sex with him and doesn’t have to. His shyness by the ool this afternoon has come back to haunt him. He returns to the uptight actress, who’s sitting on a piano bench across the room. He gets down on one knee, puts his ice between her legs. Amber stands up, walks over to the director. The scene could’ve een a break in the new actor’s career, but Zen asks him to sit it out, then Dodge is ressed and gone. The PA called Vladi looks at me, smiles, and whispers, “Hooray for Hollywood.”

  It’s a loud, lube-soaked, protracted affair. Zen doesn’t involve himself in telling the actors what to do. Instead, he steers the cameraman from coupling to coupling, decidig “instinctually” what’s worth filming and what can be left out. It’s all going on simultaneously. The initial pairings give way, in a matter of minutes, to ones resembling le flirtations that went on out by the pool this afternoon, but it all ends up jumbled gain. Ian Daniels and Tony Tedeschi have to utilize Krista, Amber, Melissa Monet, Lisa Ann, and Leena, as the girls all “do” each other as well. Asia doesn’t participate in the :gy, but her boyfriend, Bud Lee, watches from the sidelines with a big smile.

  There’s no way to be in the room and stand more than five feet away from at least couple of couples fucking. Sights, sounds, smells. The living room must be one hundred degrees.

  At one point Amber hears her boyfriend’s voice off the set, from the dining room, and kind of freaks out. He’s back early. She stands, stares past the glaring lights, searchg. She goes to find him and he calms her down again. She rejoins the group. The scene ends when the actors figure out an impossible position that connects them all in heap of sweaty flesh. There’s a lot of screaming and grunting. The girls either come, pretend to, and the guys definitely do. The whole thing has lasted an hour and a half.

  By the time Leena, Ian daniels, and Lisa Ann have had their turns in the shower, ere’s no pizza left, just empty Domino’s boxes.

  It’s past midnight. The set clears out. The cast gather their belongings and head home for the night. The “I’m not sexual at all” boyfriend leaves with two girls instead ‘one—Amber invited Melissa Monet to spend the night.

  SOUNDSTAGE IN COMPTON. THERE’S A HANDSOME GUY IN THE LOUNGE, TALL LIKE-five—in jeans, undershirt, boots, sitting at the modest buffet eating a carrot stick. I can’t recognize who he is until he says his name: Jon Dough. He’s better looking in person than on video. Jon, like Marc Wallice and Tom Byron, is a veteran actor. Only Jon seems present, not distant and aloof. He’s not like the other guys that way.

  COMPTON

  JON DOUGH

  In a matter of minutes we know a lot about each other, kind of phase out every-thing around us. We’re the same age. We’ve both been through painful breakups.

  Jon divorced his wife of five years, the porn star Deirdre Holland—or she divorced him—almost two years ago. He agrees it’s weird that that’s when I broke up with my girlfriend of five years, too. Jon blames the failure of his marriage on his drug and alcohol dependency, says he misses Deirdre, still loves her, and that he’s been sober since going into rehab shortly before she left him and moved back to Holland to live with her mother. I like hearing that he’s sober. I know that it has something to do with why we connect. Jon says looking back, seeing his behavior, he can’t even figure out how the marriage lasted as long as it did, that he was “so far gone, so out of it.”

  I suggest if he was any less out of it Deirdre might not have been able to handle that, and launch into a story about a girl with whom I had an intense rebound relationship, about how she found out her previous boyfriend—of two years—was a junkie.

  “How could she not know that,” I say, “unless she chose not to?”

  “Definitely,” Jon says.

  I keep going. The guy’s junkie distance was a barrier against the girl’s ever having to get too close, I tell Jon, and the part of her that couldn’t be close with him, with anyone, was what enabled me to open up to her. I tell Jon there was no risk of any kind of real intimacy, which is the point, that for some tragic reason intimacy is something that terrifies people like us.

  It’s my trademark sermon about emotional availability. This stuff is all new to me, and I guess I want Jon to understand where I’m at as much as I want to make him feel understood. Jon nods “yes” all the way.

  He says, “Man, you’re a cool guy. You know, you definitely know. We have to talk more.”

  It might sound silly, but the way he says it in his deep, calm voice makes me feel grounded, less alone in this world of bored, inaccessible porn people. In three years, he’s the first male star to tell me anything about his insides, to show his feelings.

  I ask him, rhetorically, why his marriage failed right when he finally began to deal with his drug problem and not in the five years before. Jon smiles in a sad, quiet way, then lets out a deep sigh. He unders
tands what I’m getting at, says that’s part of it, but Jon says it was more complicated than that, that he wasn’t ready to be close, either. He says even though he and Deirdre were supposedly only doing scenes with each other, he was sneaking off and fucking other girls in front of other cameras all along, and Deirdre knew. He says he was serious when he decided near the end to be faithful, but he never got to try that out—he has no way of knowing if he could be faithful. I tell him I know what he means.

  Eleven or twelve minutes pass. It feels longer, like the conversation takes us away. The lounge becomes hectic around us. It’s harder to talk.

  Sarah Jane Hamilton, in nurse’s uniform, stethoscope hanging from her neck, and a German actress called Lady Berlin sit nearby. Lady Berlin is in a police outfit, but with G-string, garter and stockings, pumps. It feels like a party. The caterer, Nicole London—a porn star on hiatus from doing scenes since testing positive for HIV—is setting up a Mexican spread for lunch. Even though her test result has since been proven false, Nicole hasn’t begun performing sex again. Nicole goes out with one of the PAs.

  Norma Jeane, another actress, crouches near Jon’s chair. She caresses the crotch of his pants, then pulls his dick out, strokes it. Jon has a hard-on in a second and it’s huge, kind of on a par with all the big tits around us. The other girls are amused.

  Norma Jeane stares down at what’s in her hand then into my eyes.

  “It scares me,” she whispers, then winks.

  I’m sure I blush. When she stands, so does Sarah Jane. She pulls Norma Jeane’s top down, listens to her ... tit ... with the stethoscope. Jon zips his fly, says he has to change. Lady Berlin tells Bionca that she likes black guys, but not “suave guys like Sean Michaels.” She likes “rough ones with broad shoulders and fat cocks who’ve spent time in jail.” This in her German accent.

  THE PREMISE of the movie: Jon and Norma Jeane are a married couple who have hit a plateau in their sex life. They turn to Bionca, a dominatrix/sex therapist, for guidance. She invites them to a party to loosen them up, to “initiate” them, and that party is the setting for all the sex Kelly Holland, the director, will shoot today.

  Holland gathers her cast—minus Debi Diamond, who still hasn’t arrived—on the dungeon set. She approaches me, says this scene has to feel crowded, that there aren’t enough actors, then gets to the point and asks if I’d be willing to be an extra. I don’t answer immediately, which makes me nervous.

  Jon Dough is walking around in a toga and Birkenstocks. Norma Jeane is in a black bustier and thigh-high boots. Tom Byron is wearing brown plastic chaps, a matching vest, G-string, and cowboy hat. Bionca is in a rubber outfit. Nicole London, the caterer, is in plastic panties, a black mask, topless. She sits on the throne.

  Others get involved, including Scott St. James, the stills guy. But they’re all part of it, anyway: The studio’s fiftyish carpenter/electrician has built a following doing cameos like this.

  It’s confusing—for me. It wouldn’t be for someone else. A German couple writing a book remain on the sidelines, and they’re friends of the director. Kelly Holland sees an opening in me. Maybe she noticed how I was with Norma Jeane earlier today, or maybe it’s something in my eyes. I can’t believe I’m this obvious. She holds up a leather mask, says it would completely cover my face, nearly pleads but doesn’t have to.

  I go blank, or maybe see red lights flashing—you know, warning signals. But a minute later, having received a disdainful glance from Marcy Hirsch, today’s production coordinator, as I tore my shirt off, I’m standing at the edge of the dungeon panic-stricken—more from stage fright than any sense of right and wrong—in the mask and black nylon underpants from a cardboard box full of cheap shit for extras. That’s it. The German writers stare at their American journalistic counterpart with bewildered expressions. Everything looks strange from the inside of a death mask.

  Kelly moves about the set with a video camera resting on her shoulder, tethered by electric cables to nearby monitors. It’s a weird sensation. For a couple of minutes the only people who don’t stare at me like I’m a freak are the ones on the set, the performers. Then I come to, all of a sudden, and realize I’d better avoid Kelly’s line of vision. The other extras really get into it, get physical with the girls, who let them now that the camera is running. Scott St. James tweaks Sarah Jane’s nipple. She takes his hand and puts it on her other breast, mumbling something about an infected nipple-piercing.

  Jon Dough; Tom Byron

  Kelly keeps going. I back away from the set into the darkness of the next one, pull the mask off, find my clothes, and go back dressed. I hang on the sidelines with the other outsiders, like I’m supposed to, like someone “from Rolling Stone’ is supposed to.

  Then the scene is finished—it took twenty minutes—and the cast disperses. Only Tom Byron, Sarah Jane, and Lady Berlin stay behind, to do the first real sex scene of the day.

  It starts with Tom over Sarah Jane’s lap. The nurse spanks his G-stringed ass with a hairbrush, soundly, well past its turning bright red. At one point he looks up, turns towards everyone watching the scene, and, smiling, says, “What can I say? I enjoy this.” He gets a laugh, then says, only half joking, “I’m serious,” and gets more laughs. Tom is relaxed in front of the camera, on, despite the absurd brown plastic cowboy outfit, or maybe because of it. It’s not great acting or anything, but Tom comes off like an experienced performer. He has a different, more-alive persona since Kelly Holland said “action.”

  Sarah Jane Hamilton and Tom

  The scene progresses. Lady Berlin, the cop, joins in. Both girls blow Tom, and it starts looking more like a typical sex scene. The moment where the woman was in control passed pretty quickly. Tom finishes the scene fucking Sarah Jane from behind. I can’t see what Lady Berlin is doing, exactly, but it’s secondary to the fucking. Then Tom comes and it’s over. The actors pick up their discarded clothing and head up front. Sarah Jane takes longer, can’t find her panties at first, and ends up last in line for the shower.

  Norma Jeane is on the bed in the dark bedroom set, staring up at the ceiling. Jon is on his side facing her, not quite touching her. Preparation for their scene. They were only introduced this morning.

  Nick East is in the lounge. He says, “Hi,” like a teenager, friendly, buzzed. The PAs are more casual around male actors, and a couple have already gravitated toward him.

  Marcy is going around the room handing actors model release forms. Scott St. James does ID—age verification—shots of whoever he can corner. The lounge is getting crowded. Nick slips outside.

  He’s sitting in the cab of his Toyota pickup with Rachel smoking a bowl of weed. Rachel—not her real name—is related to Marcy Hirsch. Since Marcy is Steven Hirsch’s sister, and Steven is Vivid Video’s owner, Rachel gets to PA on porn shoots during her summer vacation from college. Nick is hanging out, waiting to do his scene.

  “You can’t show that, can you?” he says as I snap him relighting up. He smiles, then blows smoke into the lens. Rachel laughs and takes the glass pipe out of Nick’s hand and tokes away.

  A silver, early-eighties Mercedes coupe swings into the lot and screeches to a stop. Not out of control, but maybe borderline, very fast.

  “That’s her, dude,” Nick says.

  DEBI DIAMOND

  Debi fumbles with the lock of the trunk. She pulls out a garment bag and heads toward the entrance of the soundstage, across the lot in our direction. She’s tall and really, really skinny. Her energy is intense, and I can’t help it—I begin snapping pictures before I even introduce myself. Debi gives me—the camera—the finger.

  “Who the fuck are yow?” she says.

  If Edward G. Robinson had been a girl from Southern California, he would’ve sounded like Debi Diamond.

  Then she smiles.

  Debi is six feet tall in black Converse high-tops. Her jeans are tight and faded, torn up and down the front. Her tiny striped T-shirt barely covers her flat chest. Debi’s bleached-blonde
hair is piled on top of her head, falling in front of her sunglasses.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  This time the drawn out, sandy growl is more of a purr. She’s still smiling. Nick tells her.

  “Sure. You can take my fuckin’ picture. But you should be a little fuckin’ cooler, y’know? You could be some lunatic stalker trying to fuck in’ kill me ... God, I’m fuckin’ horny.”

  Debi struts, bounds into the building, straight through the lounge, past everyone, and into the dressing room. She tosses her knapsack on a love seat and pulls her T-shirt down so it hangs around her waist. Debi raises a bottle of Evian high in the air for a long desperate suck of water. She unbuttons her jeans with her other hand.

  By the time the bottle swings down and the actress gasps for air, she’s surrounded. Marcy Hirsch hands her a model release form. Teri, the hair and makeup girl, is holding a hot curling iron. Bionca says, “Hey, baby,” as she slaps Debi’s butt with a black-rubber-gloved hand. They kiss with tongues. Bionca grins. She speaks Debi’s language. The two of them hiss and growl like old-time movie gangsters or cat women.

  “Change as quick as you can, honey,” Marcy interrupts. “And I need you to sign that, OK?”

  The form she handed Debi is already crumpled under the water bottle on the sofa. Marcy’s pretty blue eyes twinkle as she forces a smile, but she looks nervous, and out of place in a dressing room with half-dressed porn chicks.

  “Hurry, ‘cause we’re running behind, OK?” Marcy says.

  Debi is three hours late. Marcy eyes me uneasily then walks out.

  Debi talks nonstop, strikes poses, flexes, checks herself out in the mirror. She looks like a junkie, emaciated, and acts like she’s on speed. She’s beautiful, though, beyond harsh, and I know—instantly—that she’s someone special, different from all these other people. I keep shooting, and not because it’s what I decided my new approach should be, but because Debi is the first porn star I’ve ever met—the first star of any kind I’ve ever met—with a charisma that generates moments, images, every second. Her energy sweeps me along. After the search and the wait, Debi Diamond doesn’t disappoint.