In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  She has a longstanding love affair with Los Angeles. “Prague has two million people. Brno has one million people. It’s an exhibition city—cars, design, a lot of people come and visit. But it’s not like L.A. When I came here, it was like, ‘Wow!’ It was everything I had heard of, a factory for dreams. And it was my dream come true. I like it here. I like the weather here. I think someday I will move here. When I think of Hollywood, I think of Sharon Stone. But I’m not telling you which Hollywood stars I want to have sex with!”

  So I asked her the million-dollar questions we all love to ask porn stars, just because they’re the ones who are supposed to know. Is she an expert on sex? And what is the secret to good sex? “No, I’m not an expert,” she giggles. “I think I have a lot of fantasies and I like to try everything. Well, not everything. Just the nice things.” And the second question? “If I tell you, it’s no more a secret,” she whispered, winking.

  “Sometimes I work with some man and I know he likes it and that’s when it’s great, when you’re not aware of the camera. I can be somewhere else, or be someone else. If you think too much, it doesn’t really work because you get too nervous. I like to talk to my partners before a scene. Sometimes if we sleep together and talk about things, I try to remember what these are and I try to use it.” Does she have real orgasms? “It depends on the scene and on the partner. When I have sex, I like to close my eyes and feel it. I like to think of things that make me horny.”

  Well, I told her, I can get horny just hearing her say that, and she cracked up. Like most seasoned veterans of the porn world, she wasn’t at all uncomfortable with being seen as a sex object. Being sexually objectified is the whole point of what she does, after all. “I don’t care what people say. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. People can think what they want and I think that usually they are jealous or something.”

  Silvia is my favorite porn star because she has the entire package—wonderful to watch on film, and wonderful in person. I found myself highly motivated to seize the celebrity photo-op, to uncover things about her private life, especially aspects of her family background which she seldom disclosed in public. Word had traveled, for instance, that she’d had a baby. “Can you believe it?!! I have never had a child!” she exclaimed. “I don’t know where they came up with this stuff. One time, I was shooting with a photographer and he was just shooting pussy. So there he was, with his camera aimed right between my legs, shooting my pussy. And he looks up and he says, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you had a baby!’ I looked at him and I said, ‘Where did you read that?!!!’”

  And then there’s always that awkward interview question: Do your parents know?

  “My mother knows about it,” she replied. “We don’t talk about this work, other than her saying, ‘Where are you staying’ and ‘Call me when you land.’ I know she doesn’t want to talk about it. She knows what I do and she respects it and she cares about me. Recently we went to Tunisia together and we rode camels, and we also went to South Africa. It was fun. My mother lives in a city of 15,000 people, a quiet and relaxing place. My mother and father never married. He lives in a different city. I visit him but we are not close. He is fine with what I do. I have two stepsisters. My family isn’t poor. All of them have houses, none of them work in factories.

  “Right now, I don’t have a boyfriend. It’s hard for me to find a boyfriend in my country, because of the kind of work I do. Many men there feel it’s fine for a woman to be in this business but once you’re with them, they want you to stop and just stay home and cook. I think a woman can be strong and also be promiscuous. I remember when I was in school, looking at my fellow students. Out of a class of thirty, twenty-five of them are now married and then divorced, with children. It’s so strange. You get a situation when the man works and makes money, and the woman stays home and has no life. I want something for the future, some guarantee, for when I am ready to have a family. I want to have children.”

  “But I also know people like to talk,” she shrugged. “Like they will tell my children, ‘Your mother, when she was young, did you know what she used to do for a living?’ I have thought about this many times. Sometimes life is so hard, and I am thinking about what is the future.”

  Which was why I was taken by surprise to hear, a year after our interview, that Silvia was about to officially retire in March 2001. She had called me when she was in L.A., right after our interview appeared in the May 2000 issue of Penthouse Variations, to say she had just seen it on the newsstand (she was on the cover too) and had bought herself a copy. I told her I had already saved a copy for her, but she said it was okay, she buys her own magazines whenever she’s in them, like any other working model. That was a first for me; I’d never had a porn star tell me she went and bought the actual magazine which had my piece on her inside. It was flattering.

  By this time, I had Silvia’s cellphone number and we talked quite frequently whenever she flew in to Los Angeles. She wouldn’t tell me herself but my sources said she made US$40,000 each trip, since she was constantly in demand for shoots and movies. (Czechs are sensitive about disclosing income, I was later given to understand when I visited Prague myself, because the tax authorities are big on collecting.) So how could she ever stop? I remember her asking me if I knew anyone who could get her work doing “straight modeling,” like bikini and lingerie work. But those gigs, I knew, were never going to pay her rates.

  “She’ll never make the kind of money she’s making now with any kind of regular, non-nude modeling,” Nic Cramer affirmed, having directed her again in the sequel Looker 2: Femme Fatale. “And I doubt she will ever really move here someday, no matter what she says. She will always make more money by coming over to work, however sporadically, since it drives up her market value.”

  All this surely factored into her decision to leave the business in 2001, though her comeback was imminent and had been heralded by intermittent newsflashes. In November 2004, for instance, a news report on AVN noted that some “lost films” of hers had been found online:

  A trilogy of previously unreleased films featuring porn legend Sylvia Saint will be available on Video-on-Demand (VoD) through AEBN, after being released on DVD exclusively by In-X-Cess in late October. The first film in the Sylvia’s Spell trilogy, Sylvia’s Spell 1, is currently available in streaming pay-per-view, rental, and download … The films were shot in 2001 but remained shelved till now. Distributor Valley Pro Video’s Frank Rizzo said the films were never released due to litigation, but the trilogy is the highest-budget production of the former Penthouse Pet’s career and the only one to be shot using film. “As far as the sex in it, you can’t beat it,” Rizzo said. “As far as we know, she has only done one girl/girl recently. Sylvia Saint gets fucked in the ass in all three of these movies.”

  Never mind that they misspelled her name (she herself spelled it Silvia), getting fucked in the ass might be the least polite yet most appropriate way of putting it, given that porn stars never really retire anyway—they’re always available on video and on the Internet, and it’s for forever. Even in the wake of Silvia’s 2001 retirement, a slew of “new” releases issued forth capitalizing on her fame. There was rough-trade gonzo fare like Dick Lovin’ Bitches Volume 3, as well as the interactive-sex DVD My Plaything: Silvia Saint (featuring “dual camera switching, mood control, male/female orgasm control and multi-positional POV sex”) and DVDs from a newly established Penthouse/Private joint venture (most notably Call Girl and Dangerous Things, both directed by Antonio Adamo). In America, features with her on both box covers and titles were swiftly issued (100% Silvia, Dreaming of Silvia, and Silvia’s Diary, to cite just a few), almost as if she never went away.

  But in May 2005, her comeback was real. She starred in Private Chateau, shot on the Costa Brava coast of Spain, a three-part “super-feature” about Dynasty-style feuds between families, released by Private Media Group and directed by the award-winning Conrad Son. Silvia wrote to her fans on her website later that same month—from N
ew Zealand, where she was working with Private again on a new film, Lady of the Rings, in which she had two lesbian scenes that could probably make Tolkien arise, and not just from the grave.

  She also wrote to clarify some nagging issues: “The year was 2000 when I finally stopped making hardcore films, and since then my life has changed quite significantly, but not very dramatically … I fell in love … I was not doing anything that would link me with the business in any way … I made a suggestion to my boyfriend, that I would really like to help with his antiques business … I immersed myself in his business, I helped him where I could, but soon I found out it was not my cup of tea … Some time after that, I really wanted to create my own webpage … which meant that I could get back to doing my own thing, collecting new material for photo shoots and videos … some interested production company contacted me, and I began working exclusively for them, we shot lesbian scenes and softcore material.

  “Then after that I made a new lesbian film for Viv Thomas called Searching For Silvia … During the last two years, I have performed exclusively in these following movies: Fetish Desires, Euro Domination #3, Action Girls … The New Year 2005 began for me on the flight to AVN Erotic Fair held in Las Vegas, USA … I had the opportunity to work exclusively with the famous Suze Randall.”

  Suze was the Penthouse photographer who’d shot her October 1998 Pet layout, which had first brought Silvia to my attention and so ineffably frazzled my synapses. Full circle, I thought.

  I haven’t had any contact with her since her previous “retirement” but I have fond memories. Like taking her back to her hotel after our 1999 interview at Yamashiro, and as I bade her goodbye she insisted, “Kiss me the European way,” on both cheeks. She was wearing a simple white, short-sleeved t-shirt and white slacks, and told me she was “a little cold.” I gently rubbed my palm on her upper left arm, just below the sleeve, and I can still recall the cool touch of her skin, slightly dry yet silky smooth. The Santa Ana winds were blowing. I could fall in love with this woman.

  Or was she so adept at the erotic arts that she could conjure pheromones at will, making me the latest in a long line of men so easily infatuated, so drawn to an obvious metaphysical conquest by Czech mate? I still don’t know. But I did know I enjoyed talking to her, especially about sex. “No, I don’t masturbate a lot,” she’d told me. “Because I have so much work, I don’t need to do it in real life. Like tomorrow, I have to a do a masturbation video and so I will be masturbating all day. I like it when I can touch myself without the director telling me what to do all the time. I like to masturbate, but sometimes I am so tired from this work that I just want to sleep.”

  “Here in L.A.,” she’d explained, “I just stay in one place and get driven around to shoot layouts and movies. I can stay two months in one place. If you have one scene in a movie, you sit in a car and you’re there and you do it and you’re done a couple of hours later. In Europe, I am flying always—to France one week, then another country the next week. Sometimes because of one scene, you have to fly to another country. Last year, I shot a film called Cockzilla, it was for Private, shot in Hungary. In an old castle, with a lot of costumes, and I played a princess. Nice story, but we shot for two weeks!

  “In America, I like Vivid. They make big movies now. They have talked with my agent many times in Las Vegas and I think they want to sign me. But they already have Dasha and Veronica, I think they are both Czech, and I think it’s because they take less money. I think for a European girl, I have a higher price.”

  Hers is an unusual profession, with unusual occupational hazards. I hope she’ll always manage to get some sleep.

  Part Three

  Naked Hollywood

  Going, Going, Gonzo!

  We live now in an age where almost anything goes, a circumstance perhaps best reflected by things like Jenna Jameson’s new Playboy TV reality show (called Jenna’s American Sex Star) and her free Podcasts for those wishing to download her new Club Jenna movies (“trailers to go,” as she herself touts them). How, one might wonder, has the fine line between truth and fiction become blurred?

  I was on a set once where a certain male actor overdosed on the infamous “date rape drug” GHB. He ran around the set totally naked and just went beserk. I was out in the hallway at the time, interviewing Nina Hartley, and when we saw this guy running out screaming gibberish, Nina and I gave one another a “What the fuck?” look, for maybe a mere two seconds, before we resumed our interview and ignored the banshee wailing down the corridor.

  We had become desensitized to madness on movie sets, though it was a lot less funny when that particular actor had to be replaced since he clearly couldn’t work that day and so Kelly Holland, the director, started calling around to find a replacement. Steven St Croix was free that day, and he looked quite smug when he arrived—hey, he was going to be getting some unexpected sex today and get paid for it too—and he was scheduled to do a scene with Inari Vachs, one of my favorite female performers. Inari had never worked with Steven before and told me she was excited about actually doing it with a complete stranger, and the bonus was that he happened to be a living legend, at least in the adult entertainment arena. (Steven told me he had tried to go “mainstream” but appearing in the odd cable movie for the likes of Disney didn’t quite pay the rent so he returned to adult, steady work being better than none at all.)

  Well, who knew if the original guy had popped Viagra before the shoot, as many of these men sometimes do, and what might that coupled with the GHB have done to his sex-addled brain? The incident reminded me of the many strange sagas that often arose at gonzo shoots, a porn genre which had existed long before today’s mainstream reality shows came to our homes, to deviously add one more item to our already bamboozled time-wasting habits.

  You see, everyone involved with porn has their favorite gonzo story. And this one, which has never been told before, is mine.

  It sounds like a flip thing to say, but the truth is I got into gonzo purely by accident. In May 1999, I received a call from Victoria “V.K.” McCarty, my editor at Penthouse Variations, assigning me to an interview with Shane. V.K. had mentioned Shane to me when we’d met in her office in New York a few months back, so I wasn’t particularly surprised. She had a real jones for Shane, and for the type of porn she specialized in. We call it “gonzo” now, but back then it didn’t really have an official name. “Handheld video hardcore” or “travelogue porn” were bandied around, basically anything where all you had was a single cameraman and a bunch of horny people who improvised both dialogue and sex in equally improvised locations.

  Porn back then was relatively innocent, if you can even imagine such a thing. Gonzo was the furthest-out that you could go, compared to today. The industry is now flooded with “wall-to-wall” porn, in which there is little or no dialogue at all and it’s just one sex scene after another, with every permutation and combination of perversity in between. We have graduated from simple things like choking and fisting to more explicitly graphic fare, like “bukkake” (one girl getting her face splattered with come from a bunch of guys standing around her) and “cream pie” (where the guys will ejaculate inside her, and we then get to see the close-up with come dripping out of her vagina) and there’s “anal cream pie” too, of course (where the come drips lovingly out of her anus).

  When did all this happen, and how did it happen? Back in early 1999, I certainly didn’t know. But I sure was going to find out.

  Sure, I told V.K., I’ll interview Shane. V.K. was also interested in all the issues surrounding Shane’s company, Shane’s World, and how she got the whole kit and caboodle going with her paramour and mentor, Seymour Butts. V.K. said she had heard a lot about Seymour, and she considered what he was doing culturally relevant enough to merit inclusion in her magazine. This was going to be my third assignment, for the “Cinema Blue” section of Penthouse Variations, which I had started writing, about the wacky world of the San Fernando Valley and its camera-wielding, carnal ca
rnival.

  There was just one small problem. I had never dealt with Shane before. Nor had I even seen any of her films.

  All I knew about her came from reading AVN and reviews of her films. And, more crucial to this narrative, I wasn’t even in Los Angeles at that time. I was in Singapore, having just returned from a two-year stint in Hong Kong and some months away from moving back to L.A.

  But I said yes to V.K., simply because I didn’t want to say no. I didn’t want to risk losing the gig. I had only penned two pieces for “Cinema Blue” at that point, and felt that I hadn’t gained V.K.’s approval yet. I had a sense of foreboding, that while V.K. probably sensed that I was up to the job, this assignment would be the acid test of my competence and, good dominatrix that she is, she wanted to see if I could accordingly rise to the occasion. Was I frightened? Yes, mildly. It was the first time I was going to interview somebody I had not only never met before but whom I actually knew next to nothing about. But I didn’t tell V.K. this.

  I played along, discussed Shane and Seymour like I was somewhat familiar with them. V.K. told me she had no objection to my interviewing someone by phone or by email, so long as the narrative could cut the expected swath through the morass of sexy details that I was to provide in spades.