Earlier this year, twice-crowned XBIZ Director of the Year and Adult Time’s Chief Creative Officer Bree Mills asked her Twitter followers who they thought should play her in an adult movie based on her teenage years.
Several major performers volunteered for the intriguing opportunity. Fans suggested numerous adult actresses who would look appropriate when given “the Bree Mills signature look,” a dapper, boyish style that can be described as somewhere between a precocious science fair winner and a blonde Buddy Holly.
“I didn’t want it to be gimmicky,” expressed Mills, laughing during an exclusive interview with XBIZ at a French bistro in Los Feliz, after a cut of the film was ready to be shown to press. “I didn’t want it to be someone with short hair and glasses!”
She confided, “It was fun to see who people thought could play me, though.”
The best choice, according to her — if you had the adult-looking Mills in mind — was not a female performer, but director Billy Visual. “Billy had glasses for a while and was less buff,” Mills said, “and people at the time described him as going through ‘a Bree Mills period.’”
Although the Twitter survey was fun for her, it turns out that Mills already had someone in mind for the part. “When I started conceiving this project, I was already thinking about Kristen,” she revealed. “I had worked with her on several projects and I connected with her. I knew from the beginning it was going to be Kristen.”
“Kristen” is Kristen Scott, the chameleonic starlet who had shown much promise in roles for Adult Time’s Pure Taboo and other prestigious brands, with no less than a 2018 XBIZ Best Supporting Actress trophy to show for her efforts.
“I had shot ‘The Intervention’ for Pure Taboo,” said Mills, “and it had Kristen as a lesbian character. Ever since, I’ve wanted to give her a very good role. She’s been noticed as a supporting actor, but I wanted to arm her with a good vehicle to carry her into the awards period.”
Many were confused by the choice, considering that Mills and Scott don’t look very similar now. But Mills was not casting for a powerful thirty-something lesbian director of prestigious adult fare, with a cul-de-sac home and a wife, kids and pets. She was looking for an awkward, reserved teen going through an uncertain gender and sexual journey.
“When I was in high school, I looked more like Kristen looks in the movie, than what I look like today,” explained Mills. “It also helps that Kristen Scott is very attractive even with the no-makeup look.”
Mills told Scott back in January that she wanted to cast her as “Sam,” the teenage Bree Mills alter ego in “Teenage Lesbian.”
“Bree told me that she wanted me as the lead of ‘her personal story’ and of course I was very excited about that,” said Scott, who also enthusiastically agreed to an interview with XBIZ to promote this very special project.
Scott, a Generation Z post-Millennial who had her coming of age in the early 2010s, relished the chance to take a time-machine-style trip to the 90s.
“The 90s was the last decade where gay and lesbian youth were facing a lot of open aggressive discrimination and shaming,” Scott explained. “I was ready to put myself in those shoes. I grew up bisexual, or pansexual. I always identified as bisexual in school in the early 2010s. My generation cannot even imagine being thrown into a dumpster like Bree was.”
Scott is referring to the film’s powerful opening sequence, where a small group of bullies sneak up on an oblivious Sam and gay-bash her by throwing her in a public dumpster.
“I identified with Sam because I was a tomboy growing up. I liked to fantasize being in a band with my peers. So I was really channeling that when I was walking around with a Walkman — something that I had never used! — the day we shot the opening. The emotion I experienced facing that kind of bullying or harassment was real … a powerful, incredible experience.”
When Scott was exploring her sexuality circa 2012, it was the Tumblr era of the internet’s evolution. “I would look things up, anything that I was curious about,” she said. “It was the first time I saw trans people! That was readily available when I was in high school. I could just be myself and be unapologetic about it. A lot of youth now don’t even think about it. We don’t have to face it to that extent. I found the different events we went through in the story fascinating to me.”
Especially memorable was Mills’ take on that staple of 90s teen films — a character’s ambling through an unauthorized house party, which she shot as one continuous shot.
At the party, a drunk bro-ish character (played by Scott’s real life boyfriend, Robbie Echo, in one of the film’s many adult industry cameos) challenges Sam to explain her attraction to women while attempting to fondle her.
“How do you know that you’re gay?” he asks Sam.
“How do you know you’re straight?” she answers.
“I was born a normal guy.”
“And I was born a normal girl, that’s how I am,” Sam shuts him down, before making her escape into yet another circle of adolescent hell.
“It was the perfect way of putting me in that headspace,” Scott said. “Depicting that moment when you don’t even know who you are and someone is aggressively asking you about your sexuality.”
To get to the heart of Sam’s character, Mills’ general acting note to Scott was to play the teen as a “disinterested lesbian.”
“Think of Sam as not being present, not being communicative, only focused on her own experience,” Mills told her lead actress.
Scott took that note and then proceeded to give a revelatory, truly awe-inspiring performance in a role that would challenge many a mainstream star her age. Her Sam is nuanced and pitch-perfect, the kind of role that would make her an overnight star if spotted at Sundance or any other hip festival. Scott is that good in “Teenage Lesbian,” and then some.
“When I was a kid, I was trained as an actress and a model and a singer,” said Scott. “Bree has always given me opportunities to do stories with depth. When we did [Pure Taboo’s] ‘Half His Age,’ I was excited to be on set every single day.”
That communion between director and performer resulted in what turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Kristen Scott to join the industry’s leading actresses in what the industry would call a “performer showcase,” except in this case, going way beyond the performance of sexuality.
Mills and Scott also managed a rare feat: by betting on realism, they have taken one of porn’s more widespread concepts, the teenage lesbian, and completely resignified it. You guys want teenage lesbians? Here are some actual teenage lesbians.
The film is not a literal account of Mills’ coming of age, but, as she told XBIZ, “there’s a true story behind every scene.”
“I took liberties with the timeline,” she remarked. “Every situation happened, but not in the same year.”
Mills further described “Teenage Lesbian” as “not a linear autobiography.” She characterized the project as “a work of fiction that is inspired by real life.”
“The story takes place in Sam’s final year of high school,” Mills explained, referring to the lead character played by Scott. “It’s not so much a story about coming out, but a story about coming to accept yourself.”
The director wanted to offer “a more realistic version of that time period in a young person’s life.” As a studio head, Mills knows full well that teenagehood is widely fetishized in porn, almost to the point of cliché, but she also pointed out that “it’s not something that is taken seriously in the adult context.”
“Since the movie is about the power of accepting who you are, I chose Kristen [Scott], someone I’ve worked with a lot over the years,” Mills illuminated. “She’s a very good actress who has also shared her own coming out stories — she had a relationship with a woman in high school, and it was her main relationship. And because I like to do improvisational work, when I explain a situation, I like actors who bring something from their own past. Kristen’s own experiences with women were relevant.”
The story is told as a series of memories through the school year, with “Teenage Lesbian” taking place somewhere in “the 90s” in a generic suburban landscape that a couple of casual lines indicate might be in Canada, Mills’ childhood country.
Almost every character is based on a specific person from Mills’ teenage years. The character of Sara (played by Kendra Spade), Sam’s first actual girlfriend after she becomes open about her sexuality, is the exception. “The movie’s Sara is a composite of several people who gave me the confidence to be who I was,” said Mills.
Tommy Pistol and Dee Williams play Sam’s parents, a divorced pair with very different psychologies but a similar disconnection with their alienated teen daughter.
“I actually came from a very open-minded family,” Mills explained. “My father came out of the closet when I was 8. My mother was involved in the theater: I was very fortunate in terms of family reaction to sexuality. But I struggled a lot with gender identity. I saw myself alongside the boys in the schoolyard.”
At the time, in the early 90s, Mills noted, “There was no representation for gay women — the only examples I knew were women my dad was working alongside, very masculine, very macho.”
It took a while for the younger Mills to realize the varieties of lesbian experience, a journey that is chronicled in “Teenage Lesbian.”
“All I wanted was to take the cheerleader to the prom!” she said, laughing. “I was into all the heterosexual clichés: I wanted to be Brandon from 90210. But trans issues and rights were not widely discussed in the 90s. I had gender confusion mixed with teen angst. It didn’t make it an easy process.”
In the movie, Sam tries to bind herself with duct tape to hide her tell-tale breasts. “That scene spoke volumes about that time,” said Scott, who plays it absolutely spot-on, with full empathy for the teen’s predicament, which mimics the director’s.
“It was the pre-‘Ellen’ coming out era,” Mills said. “Young people today grew up with PFLAG in school. I remember briefly on dial-up internet looking up ‘gender reassignment.’ I wanted to recreate most of the experience of having those issues during that time. This was only 20 years ago, which is both not that long ago, but also so different.
“My first sexual experience was at 15, obviously changed to 18 in the story,” she explained. “I was madly in love with this classmate: we became fast friends and started taking naps together. We never, ever discussed it. This went on for six months. One New Year’s Eve, I kissed her on the mouth in public and she freaked out and never spoke to me again.”
A version of this semi-requited crush is enacted in the film by Scott and a devilishly coquettish Aidra Fox, mercilessly taunting our confused teenage lesbian. Mills styled Fox’s character “Nicole” as a Hot Topic goth and coaxed a performance out of the always stunning bedimpled brunette that smolders with the intensity of peak-period Fairuza Balk.
Through every month of her senior year, indicated by onscreen separators, Sam goes through a series of trials and experiences. They take the Bree-stand-in character (played by Scott as an amalgam of “My So-Called-Life” Angela, Molly Ringwald and a heroine from the heyday of 90s queer indie cinema) from the initial baptism-by-dumpster into the finale, when she accepts herself and finds her community, her people.
Each monthly scene is an opportunity for Mills to allow some of the industry’s most talented performers to shine in custom-made roles. Kenna James plays an angelic college-age mentor who indoctrinates Sam into the cultural (and physical) world of lesbian life. If, as someone said, every coming of age movie since the 1980s is really “The Karate Kid,” James’ character is the Ms. Miyagi of “Teenage Lesbian.”
The more mature co-ed seduces Sam, while introducing her to 90s lesbian culture staples like the Catherine Deneuve-Susan Sarandon-David Bowie movie “The Hunger,” and Jeanette Wintersone’s 1985 novel “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.”
Whitney Wright, one of Bree Mills’ stock players, turns in a hilarious performance as a hipster culturati who enthralls Sam with her knowledge of arthouse film and Britpop music. Except, this being Whitney Wright, the character’s monologue on Britpop is completely improvised and bears no resemblance to any history of actual UK bands from the 90s.
In fact, a strong candidate for funniest scene in porn this year is Wright, bedecked in a series of bizarre feathery coats that make her look like a hip-beyond-her-years ostrich-woman, baffling Kristen Scott with made-up Britpop bands with names like Emotional Lawyer.
“Those ‘ostrich coats’ were absolutely based on the real person who wore them,” shared Mills, who was fascinated by this hipstertastic creature “despite knowing how horrible those coats looked!”
Another revelation is one-of-a-kind bisexual performer Wolf Hudson, who, although in his mid-30s, plays Sam’s rave-loving high school best friend. Hudson delivers the kind of supporting performance that would have mainstream agents asking “who was that guy?”
The extended cast also includes Brad Armstrong in a cameo as a “cool” guidance counselor who trades mix CDs with Sam, Alina Lopez as a possible mollied-up horny raver and Emily Willis and Gianna Dior as “homophobic mean girls who nevertheless make out at parties.”
A turning point for Sam (and Bree) is the scene where Kenna James’ character takes the teen lesbian to her first LGBT support group. Mills herself plays the facilitator and Casey Calvert, Maya Kendrick and Kendra Spade make up the members of the group sharing coming out narratives, which, as it is pretty obvious, are based on the performers’ own experiences.
“All of the girls in the community center told their own actual coming out stories during their monologues,” said Mills, “or were at least inspired by their actual experiences. I wanted everyone to have their own autobiographical moment.”
And when it came time to make the usual “hardcore version” and “softcore version” — for hotels, premium cable, etc. — Mills opted for another approach.
“Instead of softcore, I ended up making a mainstream independent film about coming out,” she said. Now, Mills and Adult Time are looking for mainstream distribution for that version, while the “uncensored version” (i.e., the one with all the explicit sex in it, aka porn) will be released as three episodes on Adult Time.
The “mainstream version” was cut (by Gamma’s ace editor Clit Eastwood) like an R-rated film and will also be released for free on TeenageLesbianFilm.com.
“We are actually submitting it to festivals!” said Mills. “I wanted to tell a real coming of age story. I wanted something that would stand as a good film. Because sexuality is a central part of self-exploration.”
“Here’s how I see it: I want to experiment,” she added. “I’m interested in being transgressive, breaking the stigma and making things people would want to watch. And I’m always going to be passionate.”
For Mills, “Teenage Lesbian” is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“It is a very special experience to be able to recreate my memories and the entire cast were so respectful and inspired.”
