Naked on the Internet

August 31, 2006

Naked on the Internet - interviewing women for my book
I’m in the process of writing a book about female sexuality and the internet, including chapters on dating/hooking up; sex blogging; sex worker advertising and networking; wives and girlfriends of partners who indulge in sexual activities online; sexual health and online support communities; and technology that enables physical sexual encounters. If you participate in any of these activities and would like to be interviewed, please email me!

Posted by Dacia at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

Debunking bad porno

Now, I’m not exactly an authority (seriously, kids, stop sending those emails – I won’t be much use reviewing your script or giving you advice on your movie), but I’ve learned a lot of shit about porno over the past few months. I’m not gonna act like a big know-it-all, but there are lots of things that people complain about in porn that I understand a lot better now. Let me break some of this down for you.

“There should be more/better plot in porno” - Here’s the thing - I made a feature, which means that there is plot. I would definitely make one again, but there is a balance to be reached. On the first day of filming, we shot Trixie and Tucker’s scene, which had dialogue from three people: Trixie, Tucker and Simone (our leading lady researcher/voyeur). The dialogue took goddamn forever to film (well, not really on real film set terms) - we did a few takes of the scene, and then did it over and over again with closeups on each person, medium shots, lots and lots of footage. By the end of the dialogue portion I could see how bored everone had gotten, and I realized that for the other scenes, instead of shooting endless dialogue, we had to get to the fucking more quickly, or not shoot the dialogue immediately before the sex scene. So my point is - time is money. Shooting elements of plot like dialogue take a lot of time/money, which you really could be spending on fucking, which is why people buy porno anyway. So the thing about this complaint is that while I do understand that some people want more story, really, you don’t want whtyou think you want - feature movies are harder/more expensive to deal with and the acting skills of porno performers and give-a-shitness of the directors is probably always going ot be sub par. Mostly, it boils down to money, though.

“I am tired of the pornula - blow job, 3-4 positions, facial” - I agree, this is retarded and formulaic, and there is no reason for it except lack of sexual and filmic creativity. One of the excuses for the pornula is that sometimes, when there isn’t a whole lot of chemistry between performers, the director has to map out the sex, and they don’t think of anything wildly different because everyone wants to get through the scene with a minimum of discomfort. The only good reason for some of the positions that show up in porn is that they are photogenic. A lot of sex positions aren’t. Also, porno is fantasy, and you have to admit that piledriver is a badass position that makes you realize why porn perfomers are professionals.

“There are too many blowjobs, not enough cunnilingus” - From the perspective of female friendly porn, I understand this complaint. However, though its partly a male-centered thing, this is also another film thing - blow jobs just look beter on film, because the cock is all out there and shit. The debate about cunnilingus rages on - should we shoot cunnilingus so you can see the pussy or shoot it so the lady gets off (and you probably won’t see the pussy, becase someone’s face will be up in it)? An ongoing dilemma.

“I want to see real female orgasms” - I’m totally down with this. However, real male orgasms are - according to the pornula at least - necessary. And though there is the FIP (fake internal pop), usually its unacceptable to fake a male orgasm. Getting the cumshot often takes a while and is stressful for everyone (well, depending on how the director manages his or her set), and to add the stress of geting a real female orgasm - honestly its too much damn work, when a woman can just as easily (and very often convincingly) fake an orgasm. I am definitely not poo-pooing the female orgasm (I mean, hello!), just being practical.

And that, my dear friends, is the key (and kinda sad) thing - being practical with time and money. There are many things about porn that aren’t likely to change, because of money and time. Granted, there are also many other things (like the pornula) that stay the same because people are lazy and uncreative, and that’s where there’s room for awesomeness.

Posted by Dacia at 09:03 AM | Comments (13)

The unveiling of the next big project…

August 25, 2006

Yesterday, I finalized the contract for my first book.

After getting this news from my lawyer and writing my Fleshbot posts for the day, I promptly blew off all other responsibilities and proceeded to imbibe in food, booze, and boinking until 7 am this morning. Dude. Ow. Totally worth it.

Towards the later part of the binge of awesomeness, my gentleman friend and I met up with Bella Vendetta, Zak Sabbath, Mandy Morbid, Atom and Persephone (Revenge Krew members) for the continuation of our day o’ drinking. Bella and Zak reported that the night before, they totally watched me and Benny do it in Psychocandy 4. They seemed suitably creeped out by it – “It was like, we watched our friends do it, and it was weird,” is what Bella had to say about it. Apparently Mandy took pictures of this meta moment, and I will gladly post them once I get my hands on them.

Oh, right, you want to hear about the book and not just tales of my East Village debauchery? Ok, right.

So the book is called Naked on the Internet, and it will be published in the early summer of 2007 by Seal Press. It’s about female sexuality and the internet and will be cover the wide range of ways that women experience and explore their sexualities online: camming, chatting and making websites; dating, hooking up and forming friendships; sex blogging; watching, modeling for and producing porn; sex worker advertising and networking; as wives and girlfriends of partners who indulge in sexual activities online; sexual health and online support communities; and technology that enables physical sexual encounters. For each topic, I plan to interview a variety of women who have experienced the internet with respects to the topics of the chapters.

And this is where you, my dear readers, come in. If you’re a lady and use the internet for any of the purposes I’ve listed above or any other sexy uses that I haven’t listed, and you wouldn’t mind being interviewed (by email, IM, phone, or Skype), send me an email and tell me a little bit about your personal history of sexy internetting (dude, its totally a word), and then we’ll take it from there.

Check it out, I’m writing a book! Woo-hoo! My empire is expanding (here’s the part with the evil laugh).

Posted by Dacia at 06:25 PM | Comments (5)

Fun in the land of editing

August 24, 2006

The end is in sight - the end of editing “The Bi Apple,” that is. Well, at least the first round of it.

Today was a long day of editing the trailer and the behind the scenes footage, with lots of good moments. Its funny how mundane this stuff becomes after a while, so that I can point at the screen and say, “Yes, those two shots - the one where Simone wiggles the dildo at Antonio and says “You think you can take this?” and it then it cuts to him and then he says “I want that dick in my ass.”” - and not at all think about the exact content. My editor has a healthy sense of humor about the whole process, and we make a lot of puns, and I rant about My Art! My Art! because I think its goddamn hilarious. I’m well aware that of the “its just porno” factor, but at the same time, I have worked my ass off on this movie - its my porny baby. And soon it will be all grown up.

And also! I’m announcing the winner for my Psychocandy 4 contest! You lame-asses apparently didn’t have enough energy to make me some dirty picture poetry, so I only got haiku submissions. The haikus were pretty awesome though, even if some of them (including the winner, we’ll get to that in a minute) counted syllables using mispronunciations of my name. Hurrumph. Anyway, I gathered (translation: forwarded emails to) my crack team of judges - Madeline Glass and Lux Nightmare, and we made a decision. Without further ado, the winning haiku, slightly altered so that the syllables and pronunciation work:

[For] Audacia Ray
and that kidney on e-bay
a paycheck well spent

Pronunciation guide: think audacious… yup, there ya go.

Thanks everyone for playing!

Posted by Dacia at 01:02 AM | Comments (2)

The latest clusterfuck*

August 22, 2006

*Not the awesome kind.

In the middle, you will please note my mostly-dead laptop, and to its left, the monitor that gives it (sorta/limping) life. On the right is my new MacBook, sooo sexy, but also the bane of the existence of my bank account. I have spent the last few days tangled up with these machines, attempting to transfer files somewhat successfully, but also watching precious time slipping away from me, as I’m on deadline for the fall issue of $pread (and really wanting to get all my files in one place) and also the rough cut of The Bi Apple is due on Monday the 28th.

Yes, that is a little wee bit of the movie that you can see on the screen of the macbook. Other key elements of survival in full swing, see if you can find ‘em: birth control pills, an external hard drive, a switchblade and a near-empty bottle of Dewars. We here at Waking Vixen Productions have been losing our minds over the past few days, and may have answered the telephoned question “What are you up to?” with “Eating a cupcake and feeling suicidal” a few days ago. We here at Waking Vixen Productions are also amused by referring to ourselves in the royal we, and have been practicing for our officially-ongoing Fleshbot gig, where the royal we is cursory.

Point being, everything has been all kablooey in the last few days, and all I really want to do is sit for many hours and work like a fiend, but everything (access to the internet being one of the major obstacles to add to the technical problems) keeps getting in my way. Yes, I am whining, because goddammit its my blog and I don’t have to be smart all the time. Feel my technical pain! It’s a big owie!

P.S. - This was posted while using the wireless at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.

Posted by Dacia at 04:42 PM | Comments (3)

Watching me

August 20, 2006

When I got my package of DVDs from Benny Profane on Tuesday, I checked out the covers, got cracking on my Fleshbot post on Psychocandy 4, and promptly didn’t watch the DVD.

It made me nervous. Yes, I’ve seen myself doing it moving-image style in, er, private home movies, but it was weird thinking about this video hitting the shelves now – a video of a scene I shot a year and a half ago. The scene was shot on a weekend trip to LA – a weekend in which I was supposed to also shoot a scene for Eon McKai’s “Kill Girl Kill” but didn’t because I didn’t want to do sex without a condom, and VCA is condom optional, which in the parlance of porn times means “no condom or no scene.”

So I went to LA and had the first dose of sex I’d had in 2005. Why, yes, it was more than two weeks into January. And why yes, I did have both a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the time. And yes, I was immersed in weird self-doubt, struggles with my sexuality, and wanting to be wanted.

Not just that, but Rachel Kramer Bussel had just given me my first major bit of press, in a column of hers entitled “Whore Pride,” in which I’m quoted as saying, “It’s important to me to be outspoken because I’m putting my cunt where my sex-positive mouth is. The combination of talking, writing, and doing is really the only way to destigmatize sex work and diverse sexualities generally.”

When I came back from the scene-shooting in LA, I came back to an onslaught of nastiness in the comments on a post at Feministing - a conversation that has recently been resurrected by Iamcuriousblue and Bitch|Lab after a comment I made about feminism in Bitch magazine:

I’ve always identified as a feminist, and to deal with feminism from the perspective of being a sex worker has been really jarring to me. Right when I started working on $pread, the Village Voice had a piece about me and someone else, about our lives as sex workers, and it got picked up by the blog Feministing. The comments that people left about us almost made me cry. It was awful because I read that site religiously – I mean, these are my people. And getting these reactions made me realize these are not my people; they hate me.

Still following me?

(Sometimes I look back, or I look at this moment or that, and I think – bitchgoddamn, I have a lot going on. It’s hard to keep track of it all - thank goodness for the twin vices of blogging and journaling.)

The thing that has shifted most in the past year and a half - since I shot that scene, had my heart broken this way and that by people who never should’ve had access to my heart in the first place, quit all sex work but occasional modeling and constant blabbermouthing/advocacy work, came out to my family, got (in)famous (cough gag), went into therapy, and fell hopelessly in love with the right person – is that I’ve allowed myself to doubt, to question, to worry about my choices in a different and ambivalent way. It’s a wondering much more healthy, less defensive and more honest – but infinitely scarier than plunging ahead into the unknown, flying my Sex Workers Unite flag bravely/stupidly. Scarier because I wonder – was this (grand gesture) a good idea? And – what am I doing? And – do I always love and honor myself? And – what do I want to do with myself?

And I’m afraid to question these choices I’ve made, not because it brings out the “I told you so” worms, the ones who say mean things and sometimes I believe them, but also because I worry that I will eventually conclude that yes, this-all was a terrible idea. And then what? But also, I think it’s important that I don’t walk around with the fauxface on, the bravado with the empty doubts inside. So whatever, I’m tough and I can handle the flak, and it’s good to talk fear and doubt, balanced with the forward thrust of my life. And I’m thinking about it all. * It’s five in the morning, and we are drinking 40s, eating sandwiches, watching me fuck on screen and talking about our feelings.

“Do you hate me now?” I ask his armpit as my scene concludes on screen, my head snuggled into the crook of his arm, my arms wrapped tight, our bodies fit like magic together

“What? No, of course not – I think you’re amazing and strong and sexy and you’re my beautiful curly-haired girl.” He pauses and asks the tough question, “Do you hate yourself?”

“Sometimes. More often I’m confused – there’s no road map for my life, and I’m not always sure whether or not I’m fucking up.”

“Did watching upset you?”

No. I thought it might, but it didn’t. I looked better than I expected, it didn’t make me feel like I was fat then or that I look worse now (I know these are delusional thoughts, I’m not fishing for compliments). It didn’t take me to a bad place, because that shoot was definitely a good place. But it’s all so goddamn complicated.

So complicated that it appears my favorite retired alt porn brain/body has got some shit to say. So complicated that I’m risking the ugly stuff and writing anyway, because I think its important.

Posted by Dacia at 01:34 AM | Comments (5)

Psychocandy 4 out now!

August 17, 2006

Remember nearly two years ago when I flew to Los Angeles for a weekend to pay a visit to the Pirate Booty household, fuck Benny Profane and make porno? Maybe this, this and this will refresh your memory.

Well:

Ta da!

In honor of such a rare occasion on which you can watch me do it on screen, I am having a contest. My panel of judges (read: me by myself or whoever else I rope into this) will pick a winner for each of the two categories, and winners will get a copy of Psychocandy 4, personally autographed by yours truly. So, to win you must either:

Compose a visual representation of what “Psychocandy” means to you. Collage, photo, illustration, anything you can think of. It must include at least a little nudity (I mean, come on!).

Compose a haiku about what “Psychocandy” means to you.

Hint: dirty plus funny always float my boat.

Deadline for entries is… uh… Sunday, August 20th… midnight… though I guess technically that makes it Monday… ok, 11.59 pm on Sunday. I’ll be posting the winners here next week.

All entries should be sent via email to yours truly: dacia@wakingvixen.com.

If you’re not up to flexing your creative muscles (heh heh), or if you’re keen on supporting indie porn (which after reading my site all this time you should be) you can also purchase the movie here for a mere $17. Did I mention it’s a two DVD set, also featuring Caroline Pierce, Zoe Matthews, and Sexy Lexi? Yup, it is.

Posted by Dacia at 11:31 AM | Comments (12)

This is my brain on jizz-isms

August 16, 2006

I really like thinking up euphemisms for jism. I would probably like this less if I had spent any amount of time as a porno copy writer, like certain other people. But since I haven’t, I feel (relatively) un-jaded about this particular sliver of the adult industry. Just – let me have my fun, ok? I need to have a sense of humor as I become ever more jaded about this shit. Agreed? Agreed.

So. The thing that I like to do that makes me Supremely Awesome (in my mind, at least) and also The Worst Girlfriend Ever is that I like to think up these euphemisms in, er, the heat of the moment. Classic utterances involve the phrases like “Spackle my ass!” and (in the shower) “Give me your man-suds!” The latter one was nearly catastrophic, with the laughing and the slippery-ness and the anger over a missed orgasm because of the former two. (Am I terrible or awesome? The judges are still out on that one). Another one thought up and used liberally by a friend, but which I can’t bring myself to use without cringeing is “snotted.” As in: “Dude, I totally snotted on her face.”

Today’s triumph in jizz euphemisms – let’s call them jizz-isms, as the post title suggests – was “man hummus.” Now, I’ve used this one before, but today it triggered a whole other round of thoughts, you know, now that I’m a Porno Director. So here’s the thing: what do you say to a gay series directed by pervy moi – maybe with Trixie whispering dirty stuff to me while we film like she did during Tucker and Antonio’s scene in The Bi Apple – called “Man Hummus,” featuring all Arab men? That’s good stuff, eh?

To make up a little bit for what a terrible person I am, I leave you with this, one of my favorites, the Men of Color blog.

Posted by Dacia at 02:55 AM | Comments (6)

Media bits!

August 11, 2006

Its time for some fun media stuff… because I’m all over the goddamn place, little media whore that I am.

First up, a wee mention of my movie in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Village Voice column this week. Reading that first line made me laugh and remember, yeah I did say that - and many other ridiculous things - during the shoot. And yes, Rachel has a cameo in the movie that involves cupcakes. But no, I did not insert any jokes about ham sandwiches. What kind of person do you think I am?

Also, really exciting press is in the Fall issue of Bitch. The magazine’s publisher, Debbie Rasmussen, interviewed the four $pread editors about our magazine and our work, and it became a six-page piece. Its most excellent coolness to get interviewed in a magazine I’ve been reading since I was a teenager.

And one I keep forgetting to mention that was done a while ago but you won’t get to see til next year. While we were in Las Vegas last month, Eliyanna and I got interviewed for a Sundance channel mini-documentary series on prostitution, with a special focus on Nevada. We offered our points of view on decriminalization and destigmatization of sex workers in a studio where the AC had to be turned off so as not to adversely affect the sound. It was 120 degrees that day, but we look cooler than cucumbers on the monitor.

I also spent some time this afternoon looking through $pread’s Flickr account, where there are lots of photos of our parties over the past year and a half, plus candids from our two retreats and our time in Vegas, all of course taken by the lovely Erin Siegal. There’s some really good stuff in there, but I love this photo of (l-r) Astrid, me, Eliyanna and Rachel in a casino in Vegas last month. Yes, Astrid and Eliyanna are wearing goofy sunglasses inside. It made the casino more bearable, plus they look awesome-o.

Posted by Dacia at 01:09 AM | Comments (1)

Desires and demands (or theory and practice, episode 612)

August 10, 2006

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between what I like in the porn I watch and what I feel comfortable asking for in the porn I make. Its something of a gap between fantasy and reality – porn watching is often fantasy fulfillment for me as it is for many people, but (as of last week) porn making is a reality for me. There was a big gap between what I would do as a model and what I will do in my personal sex life, and that personal/professional gap seems to have transferred on over to porn production and directing as well.

As far as these things go, my porn is not ferociously hardcore – yes, there are cocks and cunts and they touch each other and stuff (oh! oh! and the cocks touch each other too!) – but there’s no spitting, choking, facials, gaping assholes, general nastiness or name-calling. In some ways, I’m a little surprised at myself, because these are things I like in the porn I watch and the sex I have – but it didn’t translate over as easily as I assumed it would.

There are some requirements I felt perfectly at ease imposing on my performers – like my rule against French pedicures and manicures, because as a creepy foot fetishist I hate them and it is my goddamn movie. But I didn’t quite feel right about demanding the ole hot and nasty from people. On one level, this is a mistake because porn performers are professionals, paid to do sex acts (and people) that they aren’t always necessarily delighted with, but remain professional about. So in that respect I was a bad, lax director who let my performers take the easy and comfortable road. On the other hand, professional or not, this is sex we’re talking about, and I just didn’t feel good about demanding for people to have sex they don’t want or simply aren’t keen on.

I discovered that the balance between pushing a performer and backing off is a subtle but important one, and I erred on the side of caution. If I had pushed more, I might have gotten more extreme, dirty stuff, or I may have gotten the performers angry with me and had them look angry on camera (and be angry in real life, which is worse). This porno stuff, it isn’t as easy as it looks.

Posted by Dacia at 09:11 AM | Comments (3)

The details

August 07, 2006

Before I get into the meat of this post, I just wanted to let you all know that as of today I’m starting to write for Fleshbot – two smutty, slutty and hopefully amusing posts every day. If you don’t already read Fleshbot at least occasionally, I have no words for you.

So I realize that I kind of leapt from “hey I’m making a porno!” into “grrrr… logging tapes makes me suicidal!” and skipped over all the juicy stuff in between. This is partly because I am a woman of the moment, and partly because it’s a little tough to remember all the nitty gritty details of the weekend… so many hours… so much happening. But for you, I will try.

Last week, as I mentioned, I spent the majority of my time driving around Brooklyn running errands, eating hot dogs and making lists… and sometimes eating hot dogs and making lists while driving. This I do not recommend to the average American, but I live in Brooklyn, so it’s all good, especially when combined with yelling “out of my way, cocksmoker!” to slow-moving pedestrians. These tasks were interspersed with phone calls to my friends to blow off steam, many of which started with “You know what I hate?” or “Target is all out of enemas! This is an outrage!” Somehow I managed to get just about everything done – though one of the lists I made in the process was “to do different next time.” At top of the list was “hire a production assistant for the day before and the day after the shoot.” Somehow, “buy a gun” also got on the list. That must have been in one of my weaker moments.

After running errands on Wednesday I drove to JFK to retrieve Trixie and Tucker – an infernal bit of fun that somehow got me stuck at the airport for two hours and also involved fun moments like realizing that I had taken a shuttle from parking lot to airport to meet them while they’d taken a shuttle from airport to parking lot to meet me. Said and done, we arrived at the Sirius studios in time for the Derek and Romaine show. We had a good bit of fun on the air and had an interesting conversation about why some women dig seeing dudes do each other. Romaine, Trixie and I all agreed on the hotness of such acts, but we each had different reasons for our predilections. And that’s why sexuality is cool.

Thursday was mostly a day of paperwork, phone calls and emails, though it was supposed to be a day of early load-in and equipment testing. Due to some timing and miscommunication issues, we were unable to load in until Thursday evening, so I decided to push equipment pick up to Friday morning. This of course meant that people ran late, some of the wrong equipment got sent over and Trixie and Tucker’s sex scene, which we were supposed to shoot at noon, got started a little before 4 pm. The scene itself more than made up for the dramas and traumas of the morning – in my humble opinion it is the best scene in the movie. Or maybe I just feel that way about it because it was the first scene we shot and I was swooning with joy to see Trixie and Tucker do it.

Saturday was unofficially dubbed boner day, since it included two scenes (a boy/boy and a boy/boy/girl) with hopes for four boners. We hit 25% on boners – and you know what, it really wasn’t a big deal. I have said it before and I will say it again – porno is immeasurably difficult on men, and the Cult of the Almighty Erection is kind of silly. I am not denying my love of rock hard cock (mmmm), just saying that there are plenty of things you can do without one, and sex doesn’t start with a boner and end when it goes away. Though a lot of porn is totally dependent on boners and some directors pay kill fees when dudes can’t get it up (because everything is ruined!), I think that in the end product of my movie, the scenes won’t at all feel ruined by lack of boners – because in reality they weren’t. People had fun and got off without them. So there.

Sunday was (comparably) the easiest of the three days – we stayed on schedule because we had to be all loaded out by 8 pm. All the performers on Sunday were super professional – which means that they showed up and/or didn’t have gonorrhea, unlike Saturday. I made the nearly fatal mistake, however, of not planning past wrap on Sunday, which meant that I didn’t think very hard about where the equipment would go when we loaded it out and how it would get there. We ended up renting a cargo van – no small feat on the last day of the month – and I drove all the rented stuff back to Brooklyn, and then got up at 6 am on Monday morning to drop it all off. That was not a happy time.

There was definitely a lot of diversity on set – by this I mean, not everyone was white, but more importantly, the sex scenes were all interesting and different and strayed from the 3.5 positions then pop shot on the face pornula. The action overall wasn’t as hardcore as I imagined (is anal is four out of five scenes considered “not that hardcore”?), but that wasn’t a bad thing, and it got me thinking a whole lot about what I like to see versus what I feel comfortable asking for on set. And that, my friends, is another post for another day (tomorrow, hopefully).

Posted by Dacia at 08:31 PM | Comments (2)

It’s a thing of science!

August 06, 2006

My movie, in mere days, has gone from being a script and a (less than thorough) shot list, to a revised script upon several no-shows (“Give me a few minutes before this scene, I need to go in the other room and rewrite part of the script so it makes sense!”), to people in a room talking or fucking (or both) while I watched them on the monitor (this is a truly surreal experience in itself), to a little less than ten hours of tapes.

Now it’s footage with a continuous time code. And boy, is that strange. I have been really looking forward to the editing process because the meticulous nature of it appeals to me, but it’s a huge and weird challenge to look at the movie in terms of takes and shots and angles to the point of virtually seeing through what’s happening on screen.

On Tuesday when I retrieved the dailies from my editor, I asked him how long he thought it would be before I hated the movie and wished I had done things differently. “You don’t already?” he asked, surprised. That hate kicked in around hour four of footage, but an email this morning gave me some cheer: “And don’t worry about how the footage looks. There isn’t a director alive who hasn’t seen the first assembly of footage and not wanted to kill themself. It’s very common.”

Common or not – argggggh. And seriously, if I thought that reviewing porn could get tedious, editing footage that I’m responsible for is a million times worse, not only because watching 10 ours of unedited porno is kind of crazy, but because the “we should have…” factor is there.

Frustrations aside, it’s a damn cool process, and one that I’m more than inclined towards. Lists of shots and working on pacing and stuff are right up my alley, even if I wish that we had just four more seconds! of whatever shot.

Posted by Dacia at 08:49 AM | Comments (1)

Porno directing 101

August 03, 2006

Me directing Simone Valentino, the leading lady of “The Bi Apple,” script in hand.

I learned by doing – and you know what? It was kinda awesome.

I know you’ve all been itching to hear details and I’ve been wanting to write about them, but I’ve spent the last few days running around a whole damn lot – returning rented equipment, spending time with the movie’s editor, making more giant lists, sorting through photos. Not to mention - eating and resting and fucking.

We had three sweltering days of shooting, with the air conditioner on full blast between takes, though the heat wave this week has made the weekend look cool in comparison. I can’t imagine if the weekend had been this hot (the temp peaked around 105 in NYC today). Friday was the worst heatwise – after we shot the sex scene of the day, the DP (that’s director of photography, you perv), sound engineer and I all noted that our fingers had gotten all pruney from sweat. Ew.

Anyway, I think we did a really cool thing this past weekend, and I can’t wait til it’s finished and people are seeing (and buying) the movie. I got the dailies from the editor yesterday and the film just looks so pretty – the lighting is very un-porno (not blasted out), the shots are cool as hell without being distracting, the rooms we used all look really pretty and the performers are hot as hell. I did something that was a bit of a gamble – but a necessary one in New York – I hired a crew of people who didn’t all necessarily have experience making porno. Many of them are erotic artists with interesting and pervy sensibilities, and it was just perfect. Everyone totally got it, and we had lots of laughs, sweaty nudity and many random conversations that ranged from mayonnaise to shit to NAFTA. Normal porno stuff, right?

The things that I expected to go wrong did go wrong – the wrong rental equipment showed up, we ran behind schedule, there was a no-show, and there were boner problems – but since I expected all of this stuff it ended up not being a huge disaster. Of the bad stuff, some could be laughed at, some could be dealt with by my amazing and adept production manager Mikey Mongol, and then there was some stuff that I couldn’t do a damn thing about.

Though I kept my cool throughout, which seemed to impress everyone but felt pretty normal to me, there were a few feelings stirred up in me that I didn’t really expect and wasn’t quite sure what to do with. Getting people to fuck on camera when they aren’t 100% turned on or hot and bothered for their scene partner is some challenging shit, both in the actual sense and in the internal emotional sense. Although I’m about as straight forward and non-sketchy as pornographers come, it’s difficult to not feel a little sketchy under those kind of circumstances. Definitely something I’ll write about more once I’ve mulled it over a bit.

Some details on the movie are starting to surface in different spots, though I’m still making an effort to keep things a bit quiet until we get closer to the release date – I don’t want to blow my proverbial wad. Plus I like to torture you all. That said, I and various other sources will be leaking info over the coming months.

So far, you can check out a little bit of stuff by Mikey on TGP, plus a picture and blurb over at Gram Ponante’s site, and a big ole post on Fleshbot today, with lots of pictures.

Check it out! And stay tuned for more once I reorganize my life.

Posted by Dacia at 01:35 PM | Comments (6)