In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  How did I meet her? Nic introduced me to a delightfully chummy English director named Frank Thring. He had directed her first film, Lee Nover: The Search for the Perfect Breasts, and then remained her local guide and father confessor, whenever work took her to Southern California. Frank told me she’d be in Los Angeles soon and would set me up with her hotel number and I could take it from there.

  “She’s extremely beautiful,” he told me. “You don’t usually walk into castings every day and see girls of that quality willing to do porno, though I wish to God you did. She was fresh and new and willing to take it up the butt. One of the striking things about Silvia is that she’s always been very good from day one. She gives a hundred and one percent, and every guy who works with her really feels that this woman, for thirty or forty minutes or what have you, is literally in love with him.

  “But she’s very professional off-camera. If any of the performers make a pass at her after work, she gets quite offended. She’ll be in bed by nine o’clock at night and read a book instead of going out partying like the other girls. She’ll put the light out and go to sleep like a sweet innocent little virgin, and then she’ll give you an incredible sex scene the next morning!”

  Frank had a theory about Silvia. “Her father dropped out of her life when she was quite young, and she was brought up by her mother. And it’s very interesting psychologically, because she actually likes a strong male figure in her life. She likes a boyfriend who can dominate her, she quite likes her bottom smacked during sex, that kind of thing. I think that psychologically, she still yearns for that strong male figure.”

  I was intrigued by this, since I’d always found dominant women attractive. Silvia never gave me the impression of being submissive at all. Freud could have a field day with us.

  I wanted to see how deceptive appearances could be, so I called the number Frank gave me. She was there. She always stayed at the same hotel in Los Angeles, in a US$300-a-night suite. Her voice was a velvety mezzo-soprano burr of Czech consonants, but her English was quite good. We made the appointment.

  When I went to the hotel, however, she didn’t show up, and I waited two hours before giving up. Later she called, apologizing profusely; she said the shoot had gone late and she hadn’t taken my phone number with her. But she said she really wanted to do the interview—it was going to be a profile of her for Penthouse Variations, after all, and she was very much part of the Penthouse family—so we rescheduled. It was almost midnight, definitely past her innocent-virgin bedtime.

  And so came October 5, 1999, auspiciously also the sixty-third birthday of her country’s famous quasi-rock star president Vaclav Havel, and she kept her word. I drove her to Yamashiro, an elegant Japanese aerie nestled high in the Hollywood hills, on Sycamore Avenue near the fabled Magic Castle. We chatted for the next few hours, over Pellegrino water and a white Zinfandel from Berenger, since she wanted a California wine.

  My first surprise was her admission that she isn’t a natural blond. “No, my hair is a little bit darker, like dark honey. I colored it long before I even started in this business in 1996.” She weighed 112 pounds, stood five feet six, and before she got into porn she spoke only Czech and Russian. She looked bigger-boned than I’d expected, her complexion a creamy pink-white, her skin smooth to the touch, still the fantasy goddess I had envisioned. She was wearing a new perfume by Jean-Paul Gaultier. The warm late summer breeze caressed her flaxen tresses, worn just past her shoulders.

  She had a baby-faced look, with those wide Slavic cheekbones that I’d always been a sucker for. When she smiled, her teeth were immaculately white. I’d seen what her mouth could do, but now she was only talking. “I mean, yes, I love sex. If you didn’t you couldn’t do it. But I cannot say that I will do everything that any producer likes. I like normal sex, girl/girl or boy/girl, I don’t like some of the real hardcore like gangbangs or other nasty things. I have never done a gangbang. I have done it with three boys but not a gangbang, because my agent says it’s not good for my image. Now if they ask me, I always say I will do two boys only and no more, nothing nasty. Gangbangs are not my style and I won’t do it for any amount of money. Once you start, it’s hard to get other jobs.”

  Yes, Virginia, there is an unspoken hierarchy even in porn. Girls who go the hard and nasty route, performing in gangbangs, tend to stay entrenched in B-grade purgatory and seldom find their careers ascending further (like Annabel Chong, she of the most famous gangbang ever; she’d told me about how hard it was to get work despite her mainstream fame). It’s funny to note, of course, and more poignant when I get to hear it from someone like Silvia, who is patently A-list and determined to stay so. Blowjob videos are perfectly fine and very much de rigueur, however, even if like Silvia you end up on the cover of a compilation like California Cocksuckers #5, in which she is seen on the box cover, looking devilishly seductive with a glint in her eye, in extreme close-up with a very large penis in her mouth. I had my copy of it with me, and showed it to her.

  “Oh my God, what is this?!!!” she squealed, giggling in half-embarrassed horror. “My goodness, these pictures!” She obviously hadn’t seen it before. I seized the moment and also showed her the latest December 1999 issue of Genesis magazine. She was on the cover (“Silvia Saint Cums Wet & Wild!”) and the eight-page photo spread inside featured full-color shots of her in fully spread-wide genitalia regalia. We poured through the layout and examined her nakedness, as if we were appraising a Picasso. “Earl Miller shot that. We did that at his house,” she recalled.

  “Some fans, they bring so many things for me to sign,” she sighed. “Some of them make me sign their entire collections of my photos. One man from Japan, I recognize him, he comes every year and brings me so many pictures to sign. Some men bring nasty pictures like close-ups of my pussy, and I sign like this—” She put one palm on the photo of her open vagina to hide it, pantomiming autograph-signing. And giggled again.

  I sensed she was comfortable with me. Well, how could one not be? I had already seen her completely naked and in such explicit sleight of posture. However, she was somewhat embarrassed when I gave her some of the new box covers to keep—she pointedly refused to take California Cocksuckers #5, with a little wave as if to say, “Uh, thanks but you can keep it.” But Crazy From the Heat, she wanted to keep that one.

  That’s the one that ends with her doing a three-way, where she gets thoroughly reamed by Evan Stone and J.J. Michaels, shot once again by Jack Remy and directed by Michael Raven. I tell her it’s one of my favorites of hers, along with the opening tryst in another Michael Raven opus, Dream Master, a fetish scene in which a young man in leather and chains played by Eric Masterson ravishes her while she’s gussied up in a kinky red and black corset. He finishes by ejaculating on her black vinyl boots. “I’ve worked with that boy before, and I remember he likes the smell of feet,” she recalled. “Nothing makes him harder than feet. You see how many types of people are in the business?”

  Yes indeed, different strokes for different folks. I would see her again in two more Nic Cramer/Jack Remy films, both made in early 2000—Skin Deep (the fictional name of an outcall agency owned and operated by Silvia, who played both madam and escort) and Sex Deluxe (in which she had anonymous sex in a movie theatre with two strangers, played by Jay Ashley and Pat Myne, while sitting between the two studs, stroking and blowing and fucking both). She also had no problems appearing in gonzo fare, like the unscripted Pick Up Lines #40, where she poses pretty-girl bikini style for “photographer” Jake Steed, a well-hung black stud, before undressing and dominating him completely with a slurpy blowjob before riding him cowgirl and finishing off with anal, literally tiring the poor guy out.

  I told her I’d seen him usually in the driver’s seat, endlessly working girls over, but in that case he was completely outclassed. “Was I dominant? That was my role,” she recalled. “He’s such a skinny guy and I guess he was tired. I tried. I’ve worked with a lot of black guys and it’s no different. I think i
t makes for good contrast.” She paused and rubbed her arms, indicating her skin color. “I try to be in control and sometimes I like being dominant. But it’s hard because some men don’t like it. Many feelings come into it.”

  She was still very enthusiastic about porn, though, especially after what she considered her crowning achievement, The Uranus Experiment, a three-part sci-fi fornication fest (now available in a three-disc box set) produced by Private Media, the European company known for its consistent combination of high-octane sex and lovely continental babes.

  The Uranus Experiment, made for US$750,000, featured a crew of American and Russian astronauts on an interstellar mission to “learn how the absence of gravity affects human sexuality, male sperm production and the accompanying female reaction to it.” Silvia played cosmonaut Helena Sidorenko and engaged in space hijinks with two foxy Hungarian porn stars, Wanda Curtis (as Helena Vashinski) and Christina Dark (as Dr. Olga Wiborova), and it also featured Silvia as the lucky recipient of the “first cumshot in zero gravity” (as Private’s press release bragged), filmed in a “special aircraft flying at 35,000 feet.” In actuality, the plane flew at 11,000 feet and went into a steep dive to create the momentary illusion of weightlessness, enough for actor Nick Lang to do his thing with Silvia.

  “I had sex on a plane!” Silvia gushed. “When this boy came, he blew in the air and it was fantastic. It was only a couple of seconds but he came and he really shot it, and it looked like it was all floating in the air. Fantastic! I saw it on DVD!”

  Director John Millerman, who also wrote the script, can be seen putting his cast through their paces in the additional behind-the-scenes featurette, The Making of The Uranus Experiment, interspersing footage shot at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Housto with sex scenes shot in Barcelona, Budapest, and Lanzarote. Millerman also achieved something most porn directors would die for: mainstream recognition; The Uranus Experiment Part 2 was actually nominated for a Nebula Award, the science fiction world’s highest accolade, for “Best Script” in 2000 alongside other high-profile nominees like The Matrix and The Sixth Sense.

  In an interview with the space technology site Space.com, Ann Crispin, vice-president of the nominating association, the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), acknowledged that her board was “not happy” with the choice but its writers “thought it would be ‘fun’ to put a hardcore porn film on the ballot … Not my idea of a joke, but perhaps I’m humor-impaired.”

  AVN, in its reviews of the three separate films, disparaged the Private publicity claims as baseless—“the ‘zero-g’ footage is all earthbound” and “what’s left is scene after scene of pretty people having sex on sci-fi-ish sets … the coitus always feels a bit stagy.” It did, however, commend the final orgy in Part 3, one of my own personal favorite group sex scenes: “You can’t beat the concluding cluster fuck for sheer aesthetics—the Continental honeys are all gorgeous, each is vigorously cornholed by a buffed-out Euro-stud or two, and copious cum geysers announce when the scene is through.”

  Silvia, unfortunately, did not appear in that last scene. But what matter? At last count from her official website (www.clubsilviasaint.net), she had been in 416 films (on video and DVD, including compilations and box sets), notwithstanding a period of temporary retirement, during which she switched gears to help her boyfriend and his antiques business. It didn’t last, and she returned to porn.

  So how did this all happen to a once-shy, 36-24-34 former model, born on February 12, 1976, in Kyjov, in what was then called Czechoslovakia? As we sipped Zinfandel and contemplated the lights of Hollywood below, Silvia took me down her memory lane. Whenever she laughed, she shook her blond tresses but would quickly fix me a hard gaze in the eyes, a knowing look. “I feel nice that I can be sexy for somebody, that I can be an ideal, or a dream, or a fantasy. It makes me feel like a woman.”

  That was her prevailing thought when she walked into a modeling agency, after having worked as a hotel manager and then a secretary. “When I was growing up, I never thought I would be in this kind of business. My girlfriend introduced me to a photographer in the city where I live, Brno, and I was at first hesitant. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to try nothing like this.’ She said I should do some lingerie and bikini shots, not just nudes. I kept his card and half a year later I called him and he told me to come to his studio for a photo shoot. So I went there and he said, ‘I believe you have a nice body. I don’t even need to see the test shots. So, come back tomorrow and we’ll start work!’

  “That’s how it started. I worked for him every day and we went to Germany and Austria. I did a lot of calendars. Before this, I had a boyfriend who wanted to shoot me privately, for his own collection, and I did some of those. Posing in the bedroom, little bit naked, it was all very sweet. I was very shy at the time and would never have done anything of the likes of Penthouse or videos. But I tried to be professional about it. We would look at magazines like Penthouse and I would say, ‘Oh, this is nice. This girl is so beautiful,’ and he would ask if he could shoot pictures of me like that. So, we did.” But it was in Prague where she went to model, that things changed dramatically. “For the first six months, I didn’t even do any girl/girl shots, just single girl layouts of just me. Some lingerie and some nudes. But I got to meet other models in Prague and we talked a lot about being in this business. They always told me there was ‘something more than this’ but they never told me exactly what that ‘something’ was!

  “One day, I went with a girlfriend. We drove to Prague for a casting session for a porn movie. I was so nervous because I had never done it before and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to move or how I should come, and I had to learn about lights and cameras. But I knew that I liked sex and I could travel and make a lot of money this way. Now, I’ve been in the business four years and I’ve been to a lot of places and met a lot of people. I like it. It’s nice.”

  But what about the mechanics of on-camera sex, with all she’s learned about those cameras and lights? “If there are a lot of people there and I know that some of them are just there because they want to see some sex, then it makes me a little nervous. When it’s a small crew, and there is a partner I know and I like him, then I enjoy it. When I get a partner I don’t like, I do it just to do it. Working with somebody you’ve never been with before can be strange. If you’ve met them socially before and we’ve flirted at a party or something, it’s good. And if you’ve gotten to actually talk with them, it’s even better.”

  We looked again at the Genesis layout and not one blush crossed her smooth pink cheeks as she turned the pages. She posed by a pool of water in a rock grotto, completely naked, her body oiled and gleaming, her defiant gaze only conveying one thought: “Do you want to me fuck me?” Two pages over and she has arched her back and spread her thighs, two fingers of one hand purposefully pulling back her vulva. Unlike some models, she said, she made a point of always studying her magazine layouts “to see how I move, how I use certain positions, how my face looks from certain angles. But movies, no. I think it’s because I know what went on, from being involved in the production, so I don’t need to see the final product. I know there are cuts and there are edits, but I can imagine it. It’s enough that I do this work. I don’t need to see the movies themselves.”

  Did she have memories of difficult shoots, the kind that time hasn’t quite erased? “Yes, I have shot in the snow,” she recalled. “One time, I was in France shooting a movie with the director Christoph Clark and I was playing the part of a spy in a James Bond type of movie. I was outside and I had to have sex in a mini-dress, and that was too much. There was too much snow and it was freezing. He wanted to do take after take and I started to get angry. It always depends on what the producers want, whether you’re going to be outside and naked for half a day or just a couple of minutes. That time, I was really shaking. And some directors, they want to do comedy. Like Marc Dorcel. I like him but he likes doing a
lot of comedy. We shoot five hours of comedy and one hour of sex! And they want me to speak French! I keep telling him most people who watch it are going to use the remote.”

  When it comes to sex, there are two areas she excelled in, and her fans never use the remote. “Cocksucking? I only don’t like it when the boy comes in my eyes. It’s so painful. When it gets on my face or my mouth or on my breasts, I like it. I know it makes for a good effect on video. But sometimes it gets in my hair and ruins my make-up, and I hate it. And then I have to wash it off with the make-up! Sometimes, a boy will go, ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ and I will say, ‘You should try getting this on your face, you don’t know what it’s like!’ One time I said, ‘You need a big black man to come on your face, then you’ll know how it is!’ I try to make it fun. If it’s too serious, it’s no good.”

  And the other area? “Sometimes I can say I like anal. It depends on the partner. If I have a partner who is not respectful, it gets very hard sometimes. Usually I will talk with whoever I’m working with, to find out what he likes, what he wants and doesn’t want, what is good and not good. I always say to them, ‘Be for me nice now, ya, please?’ Some of the new guys don’t care. They just want to be seen as the best and they don’t care if I’m in pain or not. If the guy gets too rough, I will tell him so he will understand. I try to work with people I know who are really professional.”

  Perhaps it was because we were doing the interview for a Penthouse publication in America, but she made a point of telling me she preferred to work here in California. The European way of doing porn is very different because they like to shoot endless amounts of hard sex. I knew an American cinematographer who went to work for Private and he told me they would often shoot sex for six hours straight. The American style puts a lot into preproduction and the editing process, and there are continual breaks in action, lots of stopping and starting again, lot of camera and lighting changes, lots of time to rest. And she gets to go to places like Hawaii, which she said was “the best place to have sex, I was there three years ago and I thought it was fantastic, when you’re working and you’re being showered by this tropical hot rain. And the smell in the air is so clean, it’s like paradise.”