‘Does XBIZ want to visit the set when we shoot the full-length music video, or when we do the movie-within-the-movie at the Western ranch?”
Not the kind of question your adult industry reporter usually faces when covering a shoot. But then, Casey Calvert is not your average director.
Following her sweep of the 2023 XBIZ Awards — winning Feature Director of the Year and Best Screenplay, while her high-profile 2022 projects “Going Up” and “Sorrow Bay” took Feature of the Year and All-Girl Movie of the Year, respectively — it would have been understandable had Calvert taken a well-earned vacation and rested on her laurels for a bit. Instead, she took the awards bonanza as a challenge.
The “Birdman”-influenced “Going Up” was a complicated shoot featuring intricate Steadicam acrobatics and a cast of dozens. Now Calvert’s propensity for self-demand dictated that she push the creative and logistical boundaries even further with her follow-up: the third and final season of “Primary.”
Season 3 marks Calvert’s return to the series on which, she recalls, Lust Cinema’s commitment to quality content and diverse casts and crews first gave her room to grow as a filmmaker.
“In Season 1 of ‘Primary,’ I established this very mumblecore, lo-fi cinematography aesthetic,” Calvert tells XBIZ, as she is busy editing the six episodes of the third season for its imminent unveiling in late July. “I did that because I was a new director and also that was aesthetically what I liked in 2019.”
“Don’t get me wrong!” she adds. “The vibe of Season 1 was exactly what I wanted to see at the time, and what I was feeling inspired by then. But being perfectly honest, in hindsight, that was also what I could direct at the time. I didn’t have the language or the skill set to direct anything more complicated than that, and that became the aesthetic for the first two seasons of ‘Primary,’ and it worked so well.”
After completing Season 2 in 2021, as soon as the pandemic restrictions were lifted, Calvert took a break from her intricate jigsaw puzzle of hip 20- and 30-something Los Angeles creatives trying to navigate the often tricky world of polyamory.
“When I was putting together ‘Sorrow Bay’ and ‘Going Up,’ during the ‘Primary’ hiatus, I decided that I wanted to learn more about and get more involved in cinematography for my 2022 projects,” Calvert explains. “In simpler words, I just wanted to be fancier with what I’m doing with the camera.”
The educational experiment worked, as evidenced by the aforementioned awards bonanza — but it also unleashed previously unglimpsed auteurial ambitions.
“When I was in prep for Season 3 of ‘Primary,’ I was like, ‘Do I want to go back to this lo-fi aesthetic?” Calvert recalls. “Or do I want to have this look like my movies from last year?’ What I ended up deciding — and I think it was the right choice — was to kind of merge the two approaches.”
Thus, the final season of “Primary” still reflects the influence of early 2000s mumblecore indie films and lower-budget, limited-run Netflix productions like “Easy” — plenty of two-shots, not a lot of super-tight close-ups. Unlike previous seasons, however, there are also roaming Steadicam shots amid, for example, a vast 19th-century Western town location.
“We did get a little bit fancier with some coverage and some inserts, and very selectively picked scenes to get more creative with while still maintaining the aesthetic of what the world of ‘Primary’ that we had carefully built over two seasons looks like,” Calvert notes.
“I think that was really successful,” she beams, showing a preliminary cut of one of the episodes. “It still looks like a little indie movie, like I always wanted it to.”
Tricky Flowcharts of Polyamory
Much like real-life polyamory — a subject Calvert is very much invested in both professionally and personally — keeping track of the characters and their nuanced relationships throughout three seasons of “Primary” can require pen and paper, if not chart-making skills.
The final season takes place a year after the events of the previous one, which aired in 2021. Season 3 is anchored around three main couples: Abigail and Parker (Ana Foxxx and Derrick Pierce), Eva and Olivia (Kira Noir and Victoria Voxxx) and Dean and Violet (Codey Steele and Siri Dahl). While the first two couples will be familiar to viewers of the previous seasons, Dean and Violet are newcomers for this final installment.
In true poly tradition, though, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Crucial plot points concern Phoebe (Calvert herself), who lives with Abigail and Parker; Joyce (Ryan Keely); Patrick (Michael Vegas) as a charming hookup; Leo Vice as Elliot, another charming hookup; Vanessa Vega as Abigail’s solace-providing friend Zoe; Sid (Alice White); and recurring from previous seasons, Joe (Cam Damage) and Jacob (Small Hands), the latter appearing via Zoom from New York in a crucial, plot-forwarding role.
Okay, and what’s happening with the poly issues?
“Abigail and Parker are married, and then Phoebe is their partner, who moved in with them,” Calvert elucidates. “But we’re not calling it a triad, because I don’t think that’s what they are. Phoebe moved in more as a platonic friend who sometimes fucks them, and they say ‘I love you’ but they’re not necessarily dating as a triad. There’s a little bit of an exploration of what that looks like.”
The idea of “exploration” keeps surfacing in Calvert’s description of this labor-of-love project: What does it mean, in practice, in 2023, to be polyamorous? What are all the flavors? What are all the possibilities? How to navigate, or negotiate, these nontraditional relationships?
“Eva and Olivia are dating,” she continues. “Olivia is very much a monogamous person who has given Eva permission to explore in a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of way. Eva, on the other hand, as we know from all previous seasons, is not a monogamous person: that does not work out for her. So she has been accepting of this ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing, but it very much comes to a head in Episode 5 of this season.”
As additions to the central cast, Dean and Violet add yet another layer to the smorgasbord of affective and sexual possibilities.
“Dean is the first AD for the movie they are adapting from Parker’s book, and Violet is the producer of Olivia’s music video,” Calvert reveals. “Dean and Violet are in an open relationship — they’re probably what one would call ‘swingers,’ but I’m just not really leaning into that because that’s not what I want to explore. I’m exploring poly, not swinging.”
Season 3 is structured like a symphony of polyamory, where the plot passes like a leitmotif from one group of characters to another through a connecting third group. All this makes for a complex but fun editing challenge.
“There’s a lot of scenes where we’ll be with Parker, then we’ll be with Dean, and Dean will text Violet and then we’ll be over here with these other characters, and the focus passes through,” she explains, running her index finger around the literal flowchart of poly characters and relationships she has drawn for us.
A Full Music Video
Having taken Calvert up on both set visits, we arrive first at the music video location, in a fully-functional arts complex in the Los Angeles area. It is still early in the almost two-week shoot — atypical for mainstream porn schedules, but by now par for the course for “Primary.”
The willingness of top talent to block off several days for Calvert’s productions speaks to her reputation among the performers.
Drawing upon Victoria Voxxx’s off-porn career as the leader of her own Vegas-based band, Voxxx, Calvert crafted the character of Olivia as an ambitious musician and took advantage of the multi-season, multi-year nature of the project to give her a realistic career arc.
“Shooting a big music video felt like the next progression for Olivia,” Calvert explains, as the AD gives blocking instructions to the real-life members of Voxxx for what will end up being an actual video shoot for their song “Without You.” In highly meta fashion, that actual video for the real band is being directed by Casey Calvert, while the BTS is documented for inclusion in “Primary" as a project by Voxxx's character.
“So much of this season is about work and how work affects romantic relationships,” Calvert muses. “We met Olivia as a struggling musician a year ago, but now her music career is going well and so she naturally is shooting a video. Around the same time the series comes out, there will be a completed music video for Victoria’s song. This is a cross-promotional tool for the film, but also it’s legitimately for her to showcase her enormous talent and her music.”
Olivia’s success is the catalyst that connects her and Eva’s storyline to the work/love themes of the show’s final season. A powerful music world figure, Jacob dated Eva in Season 1, but in Season 2 met Olivia and is now helping her with her career.
“Eva at first doesn’t mind,” Calvert notes. “Eva is happy for Olivia to have success. But now Jacob wants her to go on tour with him. The label wants to get to know her a little better and asked for a video. So Jacob is funding this music video.”
As Voxxx runs through a playback of “Without You,” the director contemplates the evolution of her cast.
“You know, I’m a different director than I was in 2019,” she reflects. “And Kira and Victoria and Ana and Derrick, they’re all such different people than when we started this show. Think about Small Hands and where he was in 2019 and where he is now — literally! He’s on the other side of the country!”
Calvert smiles, moved by the thought.
“I feel really lucky that I was able to have the same cast spread out over four years, who were still excited to come play these characters that I wrote specifically for them. I wrote these characters for who we were in 2019, and then for who we were in 2021.”
They are all very different people now, she acknowledges.
“For many reasons, Season 3 ends this wonderful project,” she says quietly. “I wrote the season with a conclusion. It ends. One of the things I really wanted to make sure I did for this season was keep the heart and the core of ‘Primary’ — it’s still a show about polyamory. And a show about relationships. And a show about how lives intertwine.”
Trying to push that into a fourth season, she adds, would inevitably cause the show to slip farther away from what it was meant to be.
“So it’s done,” she declares. “This is it.”
Season 3 ends with a montage, for which Calvert commissioned an original song.
“Throughout all the seasons, there’s a band named Marni I’ve been working with,” she explains. “It’s this musician I met at a show by Phoebe Bridgers’ original band, and ended up working with him on all three seasons of ‘Primary.’”
Previously, Calvert had licensed Marni’s music, but this season, the band’s mastermind reached out and asked if he could craft her an original song. Her response?
“‘Why yes, you can!’” Calvert reports. “And I sent him the script and a piece of art for inspiration. And the final song, ‘Pollock Pines,’ is just — perfect. It made me cry.”
The Western Town
For the second visit, we drove out to one of those mythical movie ranches that have provided a backdrop for Hollywood magic since the beginnings of Tinseltown. Watching “Primary,” keen-eyed viewers will probably be able to identify the “Western” location from mainstream movies and TV shows.
In Season 2, writer Parker was writing a script for a movie based on his book “Talking to Ghosts.” In Season 3, the movie is being made.
“Parker goes on set and he hates the movie,” Calvert says. “He’s very unhappy with how they are portraying his characters, and how they have changed his script. He is taking out his frustration when he goes home.”
“Going Up” crucially features a play-within-the-movie. Also, the character Calvert plays in “Primary,” Phoebe, is a poet, so there are actual poems-within-the-movie. A pattern?
“Yeah, I keep doing this,” Calvert laughs, as PAs with walkie-talkies buzz around her, going in and out of movie trailers where the costume designer is outfitting extras in full-on cowboy gear. “I’ve been thinking a lot about why. And I think maybe the only reason why I keep doing different variations of film-within-a-film is because I can only write about what I know, right? And this, right now, is what I know.”
The movie-within-the-movie serves to comment on Parker’s relationship with his own work and filmmaking. It very much has a dramatic purpose, which is to make Parker miserable.
Though a generous booster of all her actors, Calvert reserves special praise for Derrick Pierce.
“I think he is so underrated as an actor in this industry,” she says. “I don’t think he’s ever won an acting award. And he auditioned for me in Season 1 like everyone else did. He was very good. But now? One of my favorite scenes in Episode 3 is a scene where Derrick and I are sitting out by the pool at night, he’s smoking a cigar. And he’s just so good. I think that people see him as this ‘muscle tattoo gym dude’ and overlook just how great he is as an actor, both for drama and comedy.”
The day continues as take after take is attempted both for “Primary” and for the Western.
“This is absolutely my most expensive location,” Calvert says, trying to marshal the small army of production personnel needed to pull this off. Some of the “Primary” crew are doubling as the movie-within-the-movie crew, but there are also extras — and two leads, Steele and Keely — playing crew members for the Western. It’s mayhem, but the good, fruitful, creative kind.
“Plot-wise, I really needed this set,” Calvert asserts. “Parker had to be here because he’s supposed to be writing his next book and his agent is hounding him, but he’s so obsessed with the problem in his brain that is this movie all around us, that it’s ruining his relationship.”
Over the course of Season 3’s six episodes, Parker will come to realize that he has to let this go and protect what is most important: his relationships and the people in his life.
“The whole goal of going to the Western town was to take Derrick Pierce’s character and put him in a place where he doesn’t belong,” Calvert shares. “That absolutely was successful and was absolutely worth the extra work of making everyone drive an hour out of Los Angeles and have a wild production day at the Western town.”
Calvert admits that the shoot was “a lot, and very hot.”
“You need RVs and you need bathrooms and you need a water truck. And you need a fire safety officer and blah blah — and it’s like $10,000 a day just to arrive there.”
But she adds, “I’d love to shoot a whole movie at that Western town!”
Work and Money
Calvert crafted Season 3 of “Primary,” she explains, as “an exploration of the intersection of work and relationships, and one’s relationship with work and also adjacently with money, and how that affects their relationships.”
As far as the writer-director is concerned, this is part of the show’s overarching purpose: to probe all things poly.
“A lot of conversations right now about poly that are happening on the internet, that are happening in my personal life as well, are like, ‘Does every relationship need to be romantic?’” she explains. “Your relationship with work is another relationship in your life, your relationship with your friends is another relationship in your life. All of these are relationships. Who says that the most important relationship in your life has to be romantic? It might not be. It might be a relationship with yourself.”
As examples, she cites Abigail and Parker, who are doing very well financially.
“Parker got paid a lot of money for this script. Abigail got a promotion. But then Phoebe moved in with them, and one of the reasons why is because it made financial sense. They have a big enough house. She didn’t have to pay rent in her little apartment anymore. They have a lovely spare bedroom with her own bathroom, and it just made sense for Phoebe to move in with them.
“And Eva is also doing very well now financially. She has bought a house. Her influencing, social media, YouTube thing that she’s doing is going really well. She’s saving up to open up her own yoga studio. And that is affecting her relationship with Olivia, who is still broke.”
To Calvert, how work and money change previously established relationships or provide new opportunities all feels like it falls under the very large umbrella of alternative relationships and alternative lifestyles.
“And that’s ‘Primary’ for me,” she concludes. “It’s really a show about love. It’s a show about how people love what’s most important to them.”
