by Gerrie Lim
Well, illusion was their business and I could play the game too. Whenever I went on-set to cover a shoot, I would always carry a little blue notebook, the flip-open-and-jot variety; I must have intuited that I would need to record the usable factoid or quotable quote whenever I least expected it, since my tape recorder would be deployed only for actual interviews. I could flip open to any one of them at random today, to cast my mind adrift again to another situation from another time.
I now have many of these little blue notebooks to refer back to. Before each shoot, I would annotate the pertinent information for my own reference. Here’s one of them:
Naked Hollywood #5 “Twisted”
Starring Gwen Summers, Dru Berrymore, T.J. Hart
Naked Hollywood #6 “Money Can Buy Anything”
Starring John Decker, Dale DaBone, Inari Vachs, Dillon
Day
Call Time: 8 am. Both films being shot back-to-back.
Director: Kelly Holland
6/19—1051A North Cole, Hollywood
(corner of Cole and Santa Monica)
Left of Studio space across from Gold’s Gym
6/20—TBA
6/21—Studio 5533,
5533 Satsuma Avenue, North Hollywood
(Fashion-fetish show)
6/20, 6/21 and/or 6/22—interview Nina Hartley
Here’s another one, less cryptic and infinitely funnier, documenting a shoot in elliptical fashion, written so that I would easily remember it later when penning the actual piece:
Metro Shoot, “Black Widow”
June 26, 2001
Bel-Air, California
Directed by Mike Quasar (a.k.a Quaserman)
Stills by Michael Bruno
Girl/Girl—Sisterhood/bonding scene.
Chandler plays “Nancy Pollard”
Stevie plays “Cindy Smith”
Quasarman: “You have to do this inane dialogue, after wbich you sample each other vaginas. I’ll be in the bathroom, feverishly masturbating.”
Stevie is to “cascade across the room.” Stevie and Chandler kiss after dialogue. “Oh good, I’m going to cascade over and get a vibrator.”
Metro publicist Harry Weiss: “Plot, what plot? Puh-leeze, we’re just smut peddlers!”
Mike Adams, producer: “It’s just porno, you know.”
Chandler: “Is it Miss or Mrs Smith?”
Quasarman: “It doesn’t matter. The home viewers are going to fast-forward through this scene until they see your breasts.”
Green wall, beige carpeting, tan-brown couch, faux-Renoir on wall above them.
Stevie walks in with two wine glasses and keeps dripping water. “Lick it up like a good little whore,” says Mike Adams.
A glass table is moved alongside Chandler, a purple vibrator on it.
Quasarman: “Do you like the economy with which I am shooting dialogue now? I realized editing my own stuff that 90 percent of what I shoot, I never use.”
Quasarman does his own videography when he directs. “Okay you guys are kissing and it’s all about vagina. Lots of nice softcore in the beginning, before you get down to jamming things into each others’ colon.”
Chandler wears red velvet top, grey skirt, black heels.
Stevie begins by getting between Chandler’s legs and eats her. As Chandler luxuriates, her grey skirt is pulled up.
Chandler is completely naked. Stevie wears a red dress pulled down to her midriff, to expose her breasts, back and butt. Her vagina is in my line of sight. She has an all-over tan, contrasts with Chandler’s pale, sallow skin.
Stevie has only been in the biz since last October, she has done only five girl/girl scenes before.
Quasarman crouches three feet away, shooting close-ups of Chandler’s pussy being eaten, then moves behind Stevie to get POV shot of her butt with cheeks open, vulva exposed. He keeps pulling Stevie’s dress up further, to get more of her naked butt.
Chandler starts whimpering, and moaning softly, and then her cellphone rings. Next to Mike Adams, who doesn’t know how to turn it off. Chandler has to teach him how to turn it off. She apologizes to the crew and we’re all laughing. Stevie pauses, lifts her head off Chandler’s crotch.
Quasarman moves camera high, shoots from above, swoops down to capture Chandler’s near-orgasmic frenzy. Then accidentally kicks Stevie in the foot. They have to stop.
Quasarman: “I was so close to shooting a sex scene and the moment has passed from me.”
Cut to stills. Chandler stares off into the middle distance, absent-mindedly, with a blissful smile, as Stevie eats her, and the still cameraman shoots.
Quasarman starts singing some power ballad.
Chandler: “Is that Winger or Warrant? I know it’s one of those long-haired gay boy bands.”
Quasarman: “Witty Banter is my cousin. We had a band called The Banter Brothers. And we had a hit called ‘Shuckin’ Oysters’.”
Chandler: “I need candy chews. They make gummy vibrators.”
Stevie comes back. Quasarman: “Ok, she’s back and she’ll be licking your vagina now.”
Stevie’s chewing candy too. Quasarman calls for the C-light. Stevie kisses and pulls, puckers lips on Chandler’s vulva opening, pulls skin back, inserts index finger into Chandler’s vagina and plays with it, exploring. Moments earlier, she’d told me she’d done only five girl/girl scenes and had trouble finding other girls’ clits. “Mine sticks out so it’s easy to find my own. But it’s hard sometimes to find the other girls’—some of them look at me and ask if I’ve ever done it before!”
1.35 pm—Endless index-finger probing. Chandler goes, “Ahh,” whimpers softly, mewing like a cat.
Chandler has her legs lifted high in the air. She hangs on to the heel of her shoes, then props up on both elbows, palms on the undersides of her calves, so that her open thighs are clearly seen.
Quasarman: “We can swap now. Switcheroo, and swap the shuckin’”
Chandler pulls Stevie’s dress down. Then Stevie steps out of it and reclines on the couch. Chandler leans in between her legs and starts chewing on her pussy.
Stevie uses her bare feet to play with Chandler’s butt while she’s being eaten. Chandler uses both hands and spreads her thighs wide open and eats.
Stevie now has both legs in the air, and she arches her back. “Oh gosh, yes, mmmm, yes.”
The line is very nice. Visual juxtaposition of her brunette and Chandler’s blond hair. She pulls on Chandler’s hair as Chandler uses her mouth on Stevie’s erect nipples. Chandler masturbates Stevie with her hand between her legs.
Chandler stops suddenly. She picks her teeth—she pulls pubic hair from between her teeth!
“I hate it when that happens,” she says. “That’s why I like a girl who’s shaved.”
In between takes, I chatted with Chandler. She’s a blue-eyed blonde, five feet three inches, 110 pounds, a nice 34B-23-24, and has a readily identifiable diamond-shaped tattoo etched around her navel. On one occasion, we sat by the pool and she was completely naked, one of those girls who liked to walk around on set totally nude, oblivious to the fact that everyone around her was fully clothed. Later, we sat inside her car and talked while smoking a joint together.
Chandler was born in Seattle but grew up in Florida, where she’d started out as a stripper. Her parents divorced when she was six. She had, as she put it, “the typical porn star background, I was really bitter and decided to be rebellious, I got into a lot of trouble and was grounded most of my childhood, so my only social life was sneaking out a night. And, of course when you’re sneaking out at night, the people you’re hanging out with aren’t usually the best sort of friends to be with.”
Inspired by seeing other feature dancers like Teri Weigel and Janine Lindemulder, porn stars who made their real money on the dance floor, she moved to Los Angeles and met producer Patrick Collins, signing a contract with his company Elegant Angel. “The money was a big bonus surprise,” she said, and started work under the name Chandler Ste
ele; she’d entered the business with her real-life husband, Christian Steele, by screwing him in amateur porn videos. When they parted ways, she dropped the last name. “He had a really small penis, he could never get it hard,” she told me, laughing. “It’s not a lie, everybody knows it. I met him on ecstasy, and so, I mean, anything felt good at the time.”
“The small penis thing isn’t a big deal,” she added. “I’ve had sex with guys that had small penises, and also with guys who were average and also guys who are really super-big. And sometimes the guys that are smaller actually feel better.” In conversation, she is actually a lot quieter and often given to pregnant pauses and abject modesty whenever she is complimented on her very taut and toned, athletic-looking body. She told me she enjoyed mountain-biking and snowboarding, and showed me her scars, one attained from impulsively riding a dune buggy over a cliff. Her favorite exercise, however, is masturbation.
“All day!” she replied, when I asked her how often she self-pleasured. “Oh my God, that’s so bad. My hands are always down my pants. It doesn’t matter where I’m at. And I don’t know that I do it. They just go down my pants. My friends are always going, ‘Get your hands out of your pants,’ and I don’t realize it. I keep a bottle of lube in my car, and a little vibrator. When I’m at home, I’m constantly going off to my bedroom to play with my toys!
“It’s the weirdest thing. When I do it, I fantasize about guys. It’s never about girls. And the guys never fuck me. I only fantasize about them eating my pussy. I fantasize about dirty, dirty, dirty things and coming really hard, that’s the way I like it. I get myself off. I learned about sex by watching porn and reading dirty magazines. I ended up finding a porno when I was babysitting this girl. The house had a stack of movies and I grabbed the one that was up the highest, I figured that would be the scariest movie, and it turned out to be a porno. Babylon Pink, directed by Henri Pachard, the first one I ever saw, made in 1974, the year that I was born. I remember I was so turned on by it. Even at that very young age, I wanted to be the girl in the movie.
“I think that this was meant to be. Completely and totally. There is nothing else in the world, there is no other job for me. I really enjoy being bad. Not in a bad way but in a good way, and it just makes it become a little more dirty, and it turns me on. I’ve been doing this for five years but I just now, about two weeks ago, decided this is what I’m going to do, that I can go the distance. I was thinking and meditating, and came to the conclusion that this is definitely the right career for me. A lot of girls walk around going, ‘I fucking hate my job, I don’t want to do this anymore,’ and I say if you don’t like it then fucking go elsewhere. I love my job. I’ve discovered I’m a raging nympho and a chronic masturbator, mostly because I don’t have sex much outside the business, which makes it better for work.”
Does sex on camera ever get old? “For a little while, it started to, when I was just doing girls. I love girls and I love fucking girls. But most of the girls in the business suck at it. And girls bore me. I just want to fuck ’em. I don’t want conversation. I have a guy’s mentality, I guess, when it comes to sex. Personally, myself, if I’m watching a porno to get off, I’d rather watch a comp tape, where it’s just sex and there’s no talking. I don’t like a lot of dialogue.”
I would run into Chandler again in February 2001, on the set of a Jill Kelly produced film, directed by Michael Zen, called Perfect Pink #7: Sink the Pink, which featured her in an all-girl feast of muff-diving and rug-munching. However, that orgy wasn’t the most memorable scene for me. The one that really, truly, sent me featured a dark-haired frisky pixie from Salt Lake City, Utah, named Belladonna, now a legendary director in her own right but then an ingénue just called Bella.
She exhibited the least inhibition of any porn star I’d met. And she was actually the daughter of a Mormon bishop, which threw me for a loop.
In her dressing room before her scene, she made no bones right away about her penchant for raunchy rough sex: “I want every hole in my body filled. I just did a movie for Anabolic called Five on One, in which I did five guys all at once.” The scene she was about to do, then, was a mere walk in the park. She would be having sex with only two guys, Bobby Vitale and Pat Myne, and it would end with a d.p. (double penetration).
I covered the shoot for the very hardcore Fox magazine, and here’s how that scene appeared in its August 2001 issue:
Bella plays a nude model who seduces a photographer and his pal. She sucks and fucks them on a gray bench surrounded by pink balloons. (The color pink is a central theme in Jill’s films.) Here’s a girl who knows her Kegel exercises; Bella barely breaks a sweat while the two studs plunge their penises inside her until both men were dripping. Bobby Vitale, in particular, seems to have quite a thing for Bella and she reciprocates, and the two of them really go to town. Poor Pat Myne gets nominal attention and resembles a stage prop, as Jill Kelly herself looks on. She smiles and turns to me, as Bobby and Bella grope each other frantically. “They’re in love,” Jill says with a sigh. “Porno love.”
I suppose it must be nice to be that young and that fresh, to be filled to the brim with exuberance and propelled by manifest destiny to display yourself so openly. The business never seemed to attract enough of them, and they usually stayed a few years before vanishing into obscurity. In September 2003, I watched Sunset Thomas starring in Café Flesh 3, directed by Antonio Passolini, who had written and produced the Michael Ninn classics Latex and Shock, and had also directed the previous Café Flesh 2 sequel to the cult classic. I really went because I hadn’t seen Sunset do her thing live before, but my big surprise was discovering an amazing new girl named Aria. She had been in the business for three years but had lately changed her name. Formerly billed as Marie Silva, she was twenty-six years old, and she would eventually retire from the business in May 2005.
Here was what I wrote in my notebook, scrawled during breaks in shooting:
LFP Studios
20932 Osborne, Chatsworth
(Off De Soto, south of Nordhoff)
Studio #1—Cafe Flesh #3
Antonio Passolini, director
Kelly Holland, Jake Jacobs, cinematographers
Patti Rhodes, production manager
Scene started before I arrived, day 2 of 3-day shoot
First 2 days at LFP, third day at a meat-packing plant in downtown L.A.
Apparently, they’d started shooting at 10.30 am. When I got to the set, Patti Rhodes told me to wait outside the studio until there was a break. I finally went in and saw Kelly looking very pensive. She told me: “Wait over at craft services, things are kind of tense on the set right now.”
I couldn’t understand what was going on.
I saw Joel Lawrence on a bed, jerking himself off lazily just to keep himself hard. Behind the bed, I saw a barrier, behind which a naked couple was kissing. Unknown to me at the time, this was Aria trying to keep Kurt Lockwood stimulated.
I went outside and talked to the crew. The grip truck guy was loading equipment onto his truck. He said one of the male talent had never done features before, only gonzo, and he didn’t understand the stop/start nature of feature shoots. They were having some real problems with this guy.
When they broke again, I was hanging out in the craft services room, and Aria comes out to get an ice cream. She walked in totally naked. She saw a couple of guys staring at her—the male talent for the next scene, actually—and she says, “Don’t worry, guys, I’m just more comfortable in the nude.”
I talked to her in the hallway. She told me Kurt Lockwood, whom she had just fucked, had double-booked. He had another shoot to go to at 1 pm, and he wanted to get done with this scene. “He should know better than to double-book when you’re doing a feature. I’ve worked with him before and he’s been fine till now. I don’t know why he’s doing this. The scene was fine but he had a lot of attitude, and was taking it out on Kelly, which is unprofessional.”
She also told someone that she bad been sick all
morning. Woke up with 100-plus degree temperature and took eight Advils. And yet she was still working. True enough, she went in right after the break and did a d.p. and I interviewed her after that and she seemed back to normal. The sex had cured her fever!
Anyway, they broke for lunch after that and it was all anyone could talk about. How Kurt had thrown a tantrum on set and wanted things done his way. He had told the director, Antonio Passolini, that he wanted to “go to sex now or I go home.”
Antonio: “So I told him, we are not going to go to sex now. We have two more scenes to shoot before we go to sex. And I guess he didn’t understand that.”
Kelly: “He was flipping out and yelling, and I have never ever seen a male talent flip out like that before. And then, when we did the d.p. he lost wood and started getting mad and really lost it. I’ve seen that before. Usually when that happens, the guy who’s lost wood blames the girl. But this time, he blamed me!”
Kelly and Antonio agreed that they would spread the word to other people not to hire this guy.
During the post-mortem, I took the opportunity to sneak off and do a one-on-one interview with Aria. Lovely girl, one of the most amazing girls I’ve ever interviewed. It’s very rare that I get turned on when I’m doing an interview but I did. She wasn’t wearing panties and sat on the couch—we shared a couch in the LFP front room/reception area, which was deserted. She put her legs up so I could see her bare crotch. She had no problem with it, and told me she never wears underwear when she wears skirts. She was wearing a white t-shirt and a denim-blue skirt—VERY short.
The interview is on tape. Her big thrill and major reason for doing porn: “It’s not the money. I can make money doing other things. It’s the thought of thousands of guys jacking off at home to my videos.”