Love, Marriage and Other Bad Ideas” — the latest entry in New Sensations’ successful Romance line — is a big title being shot by a small crew.
Director Eddie Powell and his four-person team are hard at work in a rambling three-story house in the hills above Sunland in northeastern Porn Valley. The room on the third floor is not all that big and everybody’s crammed into it: Powell, his second cameraman, a soundman, fiddling with controls, a boom holder — and three actors.
Director Eddie Powell and his four-person team are hard at work in a rambling three-story house in the hills above Sunland in northeastern Porn Valley.
Jacky St. James, who wrote the screenplay, is also part of the team. A slim, pretty, thirty-something blonde, she is script person, set manager, assistant director. Like the others, she wears many hats.
It’s the second day of a four-day shoot — long days. Powell says the team was up till all hours the night before and they started early today.
The camera is trained on actress Natasha Nice. She’s seated next to Wolf Hudson, looking suitably badgered, as her dysfunctional husband. Behind the desk is their therapist, played by Richie Calhoun (formerly just Richie, he has acquired a surname). He bears a passing resemblance to Ryan Gosling and has an easy command of dialogue.
The shrink tells the wife to stop pressuring her hubby and suggests they try an open relationship. Natasha, infuriated, jumps to her feet and knees him in the balls. He falls to the floor, and she looks down at him for the parting shot: “We love each other, even though our sex life sucks.”
That’s the end of Natasha’s dialogue. She has a sex scene with Wolf coming up, but not until later, so she takes a break and we talk. This is her fourth movie for the Romance line (after “Engagement Party,” “Dear Abby,” “Love Is a Dangerous Game”), and she has earned the title of “Romance Queen.”
She is petite, with ample breasts and sparkling blue eyes. Born in France, she came to this country at age three with her family, attending a private French high school in Los Angeles.
Despite her ability to handle dialogue and get into character, she’s had no acting training and little experience in porn outside of the handful of features she’s done for New Sensations, Sweetheart Video and Girlfriends Films. She says it just comes naturally.
“I like to act, it’s a lot of fun. I like the all-day schedule, the crew. It makes things a little more personal, makes me feel I have more to offer than just fucking.”
Now 23, she’s been in porn for five years. She began masturbating to the stuff while she was still in middle school. “I watched so much porn that I broke two of my parents’ computers,” she laughs. When she came of age she logged on to sexyjobs.com and made the leap.
She has almost 200 titles to her credit, quite of few of them girlgirl. “I like the cock, but I’m more passionate with girl-girl. I can’t really get women outside of work. I have no ‘game.’ I can’t go into a bar and come onto a woman. My time on the set is the only time I can be with women. Also, I like being rough with girls. With boy-girl I’m more romantic.”
So it’s no surprise that she should score in Romance features.
Back on the set, the dialogue continues, with Alison Tyler, a tall, saftig brunette, exchanging lines with Richie, who’s still on the floor. Jacky gives occasional coaching: “You guys should be challenging each other.”
She works well with actors and has a say in casting, which has been key to the Romance line’s success. Certain actors, like Natasha, are cast frequently, but new ones are subjected to what Jacky calls a “grueling audition process.” For this movie they read “seven or eight girls” for the role eventually landed by Alison.
What they look for is naturalness. “Unlike professional auditions, these actors don’t come prepared, so we try to see how natural they can be.”
The other couples in the movie are Dana DeArmond and Xander Corvus, and Lexi Belle and Anthony Rosano — all four of them Romance regulars. Each couple has a different problem they’re seeking help for. But the therapist’s response is so “cold, mean and rude” that he winds up getting slugged twice and kicked in the balls. When he meets Alison, though, he is transformed. “The mean prick becomes nice,” Jacky says, ironically, as if that would actually happen in real life.
But of course this isn’t real life, it’s entertainment, and from the way things are going — the dialogue is unusually smart and funny for a couples-porn flick and the actors seem to enjoy that — it sounds like very fine entertainment indeed.
It would seem that New Sensations’ look at Love and Marriage will turn out to be Another Good Idea.
