Derrick Pierce, the imposing, seasoned adult and mainstream actor, model and fitness guru, looks confused for a second.
“You actually mean you want me to ‘fuck in character?’”
I pitched it as a polyamory story, but ‘Primary’ is really a portrait of relationships in Los Angeles in October 2019.
“Yes, Derrick, I want you and Penny to fuck just as your characters would,” replies the director. She has a grand, unique vision for this project, her first for Erika Lust’s Lust Cinema, the new studio that expanded a boutique European art porn operation into a worldwide enterprise.
Pierce laughs. He’s wearing comfortable clothes that are very similar to what his character — a novelist who can afford a vast, historic bougie-chic Craftsman home in the understated-yet-uberhip Mt. Washington area of Los Angeles — would wear. The outfit is part of the meticulous production design, as Pierce, one of porn’s jockiest jocks, is much more likely to wear athletic wear and backwards baseball caps in real life.
“I’ve known about it since you told me about it, but fucking in character still feels weird.”
“You” is the director, Casey Calvert, who is also a noted performer and long-time Spiegler Girl. Calvert and Pierce are friends and have worked together often. Last year, when she was offered an opportunity by Adult Time to star in, write and cast her own Pure Taboo script (“The Starlet: A Casey Calvert Story”) she wrote the part explicitly for Pierce. Now they’re back together, but Calvert, her directorial hat firmly on, will keep her clothes on and stay behind the camera. And this is meant literally, as she personally shoots the close-ups as her cinematographer, industry veteran Bryn Pryor, lenses the master shot.
A month later, as she was deep in the editing process — which she supervised much more closely than is the norm for other adult companies — Calvert was thrilled about the results.
“Watching the rough cuts, the footage that I personally shot is some of the sexiest stuff that I’ve ever seen,” she told XBIZ. “If I can watch something that I shot and say ‘Wow, this is turning me on a little bit,’ I feel I’ve been successful.”
The genesis of “Primary,” a six-part serial about young people living and loving (in a variety of permutations) in 2019-2020 Los Angeles was a call for innovative porn projects put out by Erika Lust last summer, as the Swedish-Spanish director and her husband and collaborator Pablo Dobner set up a temporary home on the less Hollywood-y, more hipster-y East Side of the city.
Calvert and co-screenwriter Mark Logan decided to pitch an ambitious idea: a serial in the model of Netflix’s limited-run productions like “Easy,” showcasing hip, professional Los Angeles 20- and 30-somethings living only a few miles, but culturally galaxies away, from the white-leather couches of the typical Porn Valley McMansions.
An extra layer would be provided by the fact that two main couples would be in polyamorous relationships.
Kira Noir plays a yoga instructor in a long-term boyfriend-and-girlfriend relationship with Small Hands (aka Aaron), a studio musician. Aaron, a trust-fund kid, owns a Beverly Hills house with fantastic L.A. skyline, and Kira lives there with him.
Calvert had her production designer furnish Aaron’s wealthy-rocker pad “as a very clean, modern house space to contrast with Derrick and Ana [Foxxx]’s Craftsman.”
The Craftsman home where the bohemian Derrick and his wife Ana, a TV producer, live is the location where XBIZ visited the production. It didn’t have to be dressed up too much: Calvert, a Southern California architecture obsessive, fell in love during another shoot with a genuine 1912 architectural masterpiece, listed on the city’s Historical Landmark registry. The owners are adult-industry friendly and so a deal was struck.
On set, the historic home becomes another character in this typically mainstream-TV-and-advertising-grade Lust Cinema production. All sturdy wood, real Tiffany lamps and artisanal detailing, it was built in Los Angeles’ pre-Hollywood glory days by Eager and Eager, the same architectural firm behind the Doheny Mansion, seen in “Gilmore Girls,” “Mad Men” and “Princess Diaries.”
Derrick’s wife Ana and Kira’s husband Aaron have just started dating. They meet, young urban trendies as they are, at a food truck.
“Originally in the script they meet at a restaurant, but I asked my friend Evan if we could shoot at his food truck,” says Calvert. “Yeastie Boys happens to be one of the best food trucks in the city. Evan’s hands are in the series.”
Since Calvert’s goal was to build the character relationships like any other series, the show never shows Aaron and Kira having sex, although their hookup is crucial to the plot.
On the day XBIZ visited, Pierce and lover Penny Pax are definitely shown having sex, though — the kind of realistic, romantic, messy sex that prompted Calvert to ask them to “fuck in character.”
“Derrick and Penny are in a not-so-healthy dating relationship,” says Calvert. “She’s very needy. She needs more than he can give. But he likes fucking her.”
The Historical Landmark home’s garden, a not-too-manicured woodsy hillside going through its yearly California Fall mutation, doubles as a park location where Pierce and Pax are having “the talk.” He can’t do this anymore, he says, in a completely natural tone, as the crew stands around in the pumpkin latte weather.
A few takes later, it’s time to shoot them upstairs, in the early-20th Century bedroom that was erected before the movie studios transplanted their East Coast operations to the California Sun. If those walls could talk!
“Look, you like her,” Calvert tells Pierce, as Penny Pax disrobes and cues in her favorite soundtrack for getting it on in an oak-paneled historical home: World War II-era pop tunes.
As the Andrews Sisters harmonize on the blue-eyed calypso extolling “rum and Coca Cola” and “workin’ for the Yankee dollar,” Derrick Pierce wants to know how exactly his character, the artisanal-coffee-sipping, “Paris Review”-subscribing novelist, would “fuck in character” his needy, curvy, strawberry-redheaded lover at that point in the story.
“You like her,” Calvert patiently continues, “and your dick likes her, and she’s fun.”
“So, like, romantic?” clarifies Pierce, hugging Pax like a besotted teenager at the sock hop.
“Yes!” says Calvert.
“Oh good. Different then than with my ‘wife’ Ana — she’s more of my kind of freak.”
“Exactly,” confirms Calvert. “I tried to write everything different.”
A topless Pax bops around to a Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” as the stills photographer — a local artist whom Calvert admired on Instagram who told XBIZ she had never shot explicit sex professionally until this project — followed her around snapping away.
“Oh,” adds Calvert, “And it should feel natural. If you only fuck for 10 minutes and you cum happily and you feel that’s it, then that’s it.”
The performers were thrilled to be allowed to express themselves sexually freely as they are.
“I am so proud to be a part of this movie!” Kira Noir enthused to XBIZ after she wrapped a few days later. “I’m going to recommend it to everyone, porn lovers or not. The storyline is real and intense, and being able to freely fuck my friends the way I wanted to without the typical pornographic parameters to worry about.”
Kira’s poly journey takes her both on a date with Serena Blair and a one-night stand with Michael Vegas.
“That was the first sex scene we did,” explains Calvert, “and may be my favorite because they’re such good performers. It wasn’t the first time the actors were having sex but they’re both such good performers that it really, truly felt like the first time. They were so perfectly awkward!”
Ana’s character’s adventures lead her to hooking up with an old fling, played by Isiah Maxwell. Some older people who remember fondly that old, sexy MTV soap opera from 1999-2002, “Undressed,” might find “Primary” a similar kind of round-robin sexual exploration among unusually good looking younger professionals.
The visual and atmospheric feel of the serial is not only Netflix-era slick, but also of a piece with some of the more soapy entries in Erika Lust’s celebrated XConfessions series. Calvert learned the Tao of Lust first-hand last year in Barcelona, where Lust has her studio and where she shot Lust Cinema’s debut feature, The Intern.
Lust herself entrusted Calvert with this complex, big-budget production on the condition that she tried to replicate the standards of her Spanish studio in terms of a more gender-balanced presence behind the camera. More than half of the crew was recruited from mainstream sets, especially women filmmakers making their first foray behind the camera in adult.
“Being a performer-turned-director,” says Calvert, “I was honored by the complete creative freedom I got from Erika, and how amazing and committed all of my actors were. Having primarily a mainstream crew who’s never worked in adult before, who all came in with open minds and learned a lot, was amazing.”
For Calvert, everything about Primary felt like a dream project. She “got to write my own script and tell my own story, got to work with the people I wanted to work with, got to do something with my own artistic vision.”
And she really hopes fans of adult and fans of plain good old storytelling will find her “weird blend of something that is porn but blurs the lines between what is adult and what is not” to their taste. “I got to do things like show people getting erections in dialogue scenes and not doing anything about it! There’s all this casual nudity that you never get to do in mainstream — or in porn.”
She shows us the scene where Derrick and Ana are having a conversation, and he’s just naked in the shower soaping his penis naturally, and “it’s not big deal.”
“It’s a kind of thing that in a mainstream movie would get cropped. But it’s gorgeous and you’re not afraid of nudity,” says Calvert.
A freshly showered Derrick and Penny come down the stairs from the historic bedroom to join the crew — and the recently arrived Aaron and Ana, who are getting their makeup done for a night shoot — for a veggie and eco-friendly catered dinner by Karla (from L. A. Farm Girl Catering).
“How long did you guys go?” asks Small Hands.
“27 minutes, according to the time code,” says the DP.
“Can you believe this?” Pierce hams it up in mock shock? “They just want you to fuck!”
“It’s so strange,” Small Hands riles him up.
“Yeah,” Pierce continues, “Casey just wanted us to fuck as the characters would!”
“She wanted us to connect!” adds Pax, joining in the fun.
“This crazy director…” punchlines Pierce, putting an arm around Calvert.
“Primary” will be first unveiled as six episodes of between 30 and 45 minutes each. It’s supposed to be watched as a series, but Calvert has been given the freedom to also try to edit it as a feature.
“I wanna do a two-hour-long ‘Director’s Cut’ cut it more like a standard, mainstream feature, in both XXX and NC-17 versions,” she explains.
“I pitched it as a polyamory story, but Primary is really a portrait of relationships in Los Angeles in October 2019,” says Calvert.
“I see it,” she concludes, “as snapshots of something that could really happen to any of us — which is so rarely shown.”
