Normally I despise writers, what with their weak chins and need for constant reassurance, but I found Hentai's help invaluable, especially as I was hounded from the set by performers Penny Flame and Tony Tedeschi, who objected to cameras.
"Do you sell advertising on that site? Do you make money?" asked Tedeschi. "This is how we make our living."
"Who's that dude?" Flame added.
I responded that I would stop taking pictures and I wouldn't publish them. Flame had perfect nipples and Tedeschi looked like a better-fed Our Lord Jesus Christ.
"Well, you took the pictures anyway..." Tedeschi said.
"Nope. Won't publish them," I said, and left.
Director Madness provided a perfect segue.
"Is that your blue car?" he asked. "You're blocking someone in."
Being asked why I was the one taking pictures in a room full of people wielding camera equipment was one of my fears the first time I walked on a porn set. Yet no one has ever questioned my presence at the hundreds of sets I've been to since, until today.
Was it because I wasn't weariung pants?
In the parking lot, I quizzed Hentai. I wasn't going to take his picture, either, but for other reasons.
"When Andre commissioned you for this script, what was the turnaround time?" I asked, probing.
"About a week," Hentai said.
"And that was -"
" - about 12 pages."
"12 pages," I said. "In a week."
We stared at each other.
Hentai has written ten features for Madness. He does not give them titles.
"I'm a Buddhist," he said. "My art is a bird that I let free."
Madness requested Hentai write him a script about twins. Madness then cast the Rose girls.
Ava and Mia came to Los Angeles from Alaska in 1997 with their parents. Ava is 13 months older.
"Their characters play fraternal twins," Hentai said.
Back inside, Tedeschi said that no one had told him I was coming, but that it wasn't he who was irritated about my taking pictures, he said, it was Flame. "She was really angry," he said.
Flame also directs movies for Shane's World, a company that advocates the selective distribution of cameras.
I met Ava Rose in the same studio a few weeks ago for Metro's Taboo 22. Today she looked more contemporary. She and her sister gave me permission to take their picture.
They are tiny; they look so much taller in their photographs.
Madness has inherited the filming of Hustler's Barely Legal series. For today's Adam & Eve project he was directing the Rose sisters in a scene in which Mia told Ava that she slept with Ava's boyfriend.
"Did you sleep with Jean just to make me jealous?" Ava asked.
"Yes," Mia replied, "and if I find out who you're sleeping with now, I'll fuck him, too."
"You bitch!"
Then they were interrupted by their father, who laid down some swift justice. Meanwhile, a prop goldfish might have been injured, but he had it coming.
"Prick goldfish," the boom guy said.
I got the pictures I needed to make this seem at least nominally like a porn site. But I had a nagging question.
"Wayne," I asked, "on set in there, when Penny said to Tony: 'Fill me with your manliness'..."
"Yeah?"
"Did you write that?"
"No."
