Watching two people have sex in front of a camera isn’t nearly as exciting as you’d think. I know this because I was in a porn movie. I was just out of college and when the opportunity to earn a little extra cash came up, I jumped at the chance. I kept my clothes on. I was an extra.
One Saturday morning a long time ago, my buddy called me and asked if I wanted to be an extra at a porn shoot. Much like when somebody asks you if you’re a god, when somebody asks if you want to be on the set of a porn movie, you say “yes.” They were paying $50 cash, which for a broke recent-college graduate without a full time job was a decent payday. My friend and I were soon on our way to some gaudy mansion in Glendale to begin our careers in the porn industry.
The movie being shot that day was the sweeping epic tale of legendary lover Rudolph Valentino. Yes, it was a period piece. Not that the crew seemed overly concerned with the accuracy of the time period. I’m pretty sure the casual observer can see more than a few wrist watches in some shots. It was immediately clear that this was not the production of one of established porn producers. Running the show was a trio of aging Italian men. The star of the film was their studly young nephew, who was reminiscent of a thinner, better looking Fabio and could barely speak English. He wandered around the set in a daze asking his uncles in broken English, “Fuck? Fuck yet?”
My buddy and I filmed our scene in the morning and spent the rest of the day hanging out, eating junk food. Telltale signs like empty bottles of KY let us know that they had been filming at this house for a few days. We were told that they were shooting the day’s only sex scene in the afternoon and we were welcome to stick around, which we were planning on doing anyway.
A few hours later, we gathered in the back of an upstairs bedroom to watch the action. There were about fifteen guys in the room, mostly the crew and a few assorted perverts like my friend and me. Finally, they called action. And it was startling.
I no longer think that most porn stars can’t act. The weird thing about watching a porn scene live is the undeniable fact that it’s artificial. The Italian Stud certainly had the equipment for the job, but lacked the stamina so they had to keep stopping the scene before it was over too soon. The woman was screaming in ecstasy, only to stop on a dime when they called “cut”, leaving an empty silence in the room that remained until they started filming again and she picked right back up where she had left off. It was quite a performance, but standing in that room there wasn’t anything titillating about it. The whole thing was oddly uncomfortable. After staring slack jawed for about half an hour, my buddy and I decided we had seen enough. We collected our cash and met our friends in a bar to tell the tale.
A few months after the shoot, I tried to find the movie but came up empty. Years later, I was relaying the story to a friend and not more than an hour later, he sends me an email with the link to buy the DVD.
It’s a really bad porn. It actually fails on every level from the awful story to the mundane sex scenes. But in one scene, when Rudy is standing on line waiting to hear about a job, you can see three quarters of my face, giving the performance of a lifetime. The movie has surely not gone down as a classic, but it was my movie debut and we all gotta start somewhere.
-DGB
