LAJ ARTICLES

Porn Superstar

“I think we should start with the blow job, then the missionary, followed up by the reverse cowgirl and then finally the anal. And he should pop on her ass.”

Then, someone else: “Nah, start with a sixty-nine, then the reverse cowgirl, then missionary and have him cum on her face.”

Apparently, I thought to myself, there is no Robert’s Rule of Order on a porn set. Having arrived on set just moments ago, I learned only one law: that my chauffeur and I were not to make eye contact with the female star calling herself Savannah. “Okay, but don’t you know who I am?” I thought.

I stepped onto the set where Vivid Video superstud Steven St. Croix currently had his head deep between the legs of the aforementioned diva. Moments after I sat myself in an overstuffed chair, Mr. St. Croix poked his head up from eating out Savannah and announced for all to hear, “Marco J. Spumante is in the house!”

He then returned to the task at tongue…er, hand.

Other than times like these, it’s hard to know when you’ve made it in the porn biz. Sure, when you’re known by one name, when they line up to have you sign your autobiography at Book Soup fer chrissakes –- okay, maybe not then. But when you’re just the porn screenwriter, well then, sometimes it’s hard to know if you’ve made a name for yourself in Silicone Valley.

When you tell people that you write porn, you are invariably met with one of two remarks: “There are scripts for porn?” (most likely from the women) or “You are my hero” (the guys, natch). Though it may sound easy to the casual observer, it can sometimes be tricky to work the requisite five sex scenes into an eighteen-page script. Usually, it winds up that there’s at least one sex scene that, truth be told, is not inherent to the plot. And, yes, there are plots.

Some of my favorites from my personal oeuvre include:

– Best Little Haunted House in Hollywood (loosely based on the night I spent at a hotel in Bruges haunted by some randy spirits) which included the tag line “The thing that goes bump in the night is in your pants!”

– Thrills and Thrills, Part Deux, which were equal parts Quills and Interview with the Vampire.

– Grand Opening, which was the pornified version of a legitimate movie I had already written.

I had already been writing for Vivid Video for a couple of years before I moved back to Los Angeles. AVN’s review for my first movie, She Town (I wanted to call it Coochie Town, but Playboy nixed that title), mentioned the “crisp dialogue” –- you can look that up. I think they must have been referring to the exchange between the movie’s Private Dick and Femme Fatale when he tells her that he gets “four hundred a day plus blowjobs…um, expenses.” That movie actually helped pay for my honeymoon in Italy.

But now, Marco J. Spumante (people sometimes ask how I came up with my nom de porn – and I’ll tell you what I tell them: It just came to me, I swear) was single and back within driving distance of the San Fernando Valley. There was nothing to keep me from visiting the shoot of one of my scripts for the very first time.

The first script of mine to shoot (Hollywood Hostel, based on my fantasies of my friend Mike’s new job managing one of the Hollywood youth hostels around the corner) was being filmed at a freeway-side motel in Oxnard. Try asking a friend for a ride to Oxnard sometime –- it’s about as bad as needing a ride to LAX on the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving. However, ask that very same friend for a lift to a porn set and all questions of time, traffic, and gas money go right out the window. The only question was, “What time shall I pick you up, Marco?”

When I arrived at the Wagon Wheel Motel, I found a dialogue scene being shot (yes, there is dialogue, that’s what I do) in the lobby. The star, Kira Kenner, was playing the proprietor of Hollywood Hostel and was to check in a female guest. Try as she might, though, the blonde making her porn debut across from Miss Kenner couldn’t get the two lines of dialogue out in any way resembling what I had written. Mind you, it was some tongue-tying verbiage: “I need a room” and then, something like “thank you.”

Eventually, they set up the sex scene (referred to as the “commercial scene” in porn parlance) on the couch in the lobby. I sat about ten feet away on some apple crates while the male actor did a bored Kira from behind. During a short break, as the male star woefully attempted to get himself hard for “the pop” (not called the “money shot”, I’ll have you know), Miss Kenner and I had a lovely chat. No…really. We talked about books and fashion (I had commented on her cool, Diesel sneakers –- the only thing she was wearing at the time, unless you consider anal beads to be clothing). My friend Steve ambled up to liken the experience of being on a porn set to somewhere between the first time he discovered dipping chocolate in peanut butter and discovering that first Playboy in his dad’s sock drawer – only a little more boring.

The actors finally resumed the business at hand. Popping her co-star’s cock out of her mouth, Kira began rubbing her cheeks.

“Am I getting stretch marks?” she asked me.

“Your face is fine,” I said.

A little later, Kira pulled the cock out of her mouth again, looked over it towards me and asked, “How’d you like something this big in your mouth, Brian?”

I assured her that that occupational hazard was, fortunately, not mine.

I soon found out that, seemingly, the writer on a porn is something of a hero. The all-male crew all came over when they were informed who I was to say “hey.” Later, as they set up the blonde ingenue’s first sex scene, she came over to chat with me. She was fresh off the boat from Florida – her former boyfriend didn’t like her stripping, so she left for the Valley and got herself cast in this adult entertainment in a flash. That’ll show him!

She was called to the next set for her sex scene with Vivid superstud Steven St. Croix. We’d had beers a few times; he’s a good guy. As the blonde readied herself with wine and a vibrator (she was much less nervous about her sex scene than she had been for her dialogue scene), my friend and I positioned ourselves near the monitor. The room itself was way too small to fit anyone other than the actors, cameraman, director and boom operator, and even that was a stretch. The rest of the crew, a mixture of older guys with graying pony tails and younger guys trying to work their way up the porn ladder, did whippets out of a Hefty bag in the parking lot.

We watched the blonde fuck the living crap out of Mr. St. Croix on the monitor. The sexual gymnastics became so pronounced they actually broke the bed. Not missing a beat, I turned to my friend and said, “Exactly how I wrote it.” Yup, it’s good to be a legend.

By: Brian Mazo

PdflogogtLAJ_April 2005 Vol. 1_11

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