Chapter 24

As I was accompanying Mel to the movie shoot in the morning, she’d insisted Max and I spend Friday night at her place.

I have to admit that I was not entirely confident about the coming day; over the years, I’d been taught, or had learned, how to behave ‘properly’ in a wide variety of social situations, but assisting my girlfriend at a porno shoot had NOT been one of them. Not even at college when, under the guidance of our professors, we’d role-played potential stressful situations we might encounter as hospital administrators, had this possibility been covered. I mean, it’s not like I was worried about breaching some kind of etiquette, but I didn’t want to either accidentally cause offense, or make it too obvious that I was a total newbie on set.

Mel chuckled when I confessed my fears; she asked me straight out how I’d felt at the first wild college party I’d attended (Answer: too drunk and horny to be shy, ) and she reassured me that with Judy in charge, it would be a whole lot more restrained than a fraternity party.

“So if I get a boner watching the action, nobody will mind?”

“Well, baby, I will mind, because now we’re exclusive, you’re only supposed to get aroused by me. But I’ll try to remember that, being a man, you are only a VERY primitive organism, and that you can’t help it. Just hold the thought and save it for me for afterwards.”

The affectionate look she gave me took away any insult. “Don’t you get horny at shoots?”

“Of course I do; the whole point of porn is to arouse sexual desires. But I’ve been in the business too long to let it disturb what I’m doing. You’re a professional too; you’ve learned to control yourself until you can let it go. You’ll do fine.”

That was a fair point. Even fairer was the way we then reduced each other’s residual sexual tension with some highly enjoyable mutual release. I slept a whole lot better than I’d feared. Mentally and physically satisfied.

After an early breakfast and bribing the dogs with a chewy treat to keep them amused and, rather more importantly, to give us time to get out of the door without them, us two non-canines traveled to the shoot in her SUV.

Mel drove us over to Beverly Hills, getting into serious Hollywood name country. She turned into a gated driveway, spoke on the intercom, and the gates opened. We went on up the driveway through a wide expanse of grass and flowerbeds, with an honest-to-god Hollywood mansion ahead of us. “Whose place is this?”

She told me.

Wow! Those were two BIG names, a real Hollywood power couple before their current marital ... ah... difficulties. “How the heck did you get in here?”

She grinned. “Their divorce. She didn’t seem to predict that as he happily cheated on his first wife with her, he was almost certainly gonna cheat on her after they were married. Which bit of ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater’ did she not get? She took it so badly when she did find out that all their bank accounts are frozen, including the ones for this place. Oh, and they took out mirror restraining orders, so neither of them can come here without a lawyer representing the other being present. It’s one hell of a mess, Judy says. The housekeeper isn’t getting paid, nor are the rest of the house staff. Most of them have quit and found other jobs, so those few who are left are needing to raise cash to eat and pay the bills. The only people living the high life off this are the lawyers. Renting this place out for movie sets and private parties pays pretty well; Judy says that they’ve been doing it a while. Just don’t want too many people to know about it. Which I suspect is why we couldn’t tell Helga.”

I chuckled my agreement. “Can’t say I blame them. You have a great job, mixing with worldwide stars, and then they suddenly stop paying you; of course you’d be a fool not to work what assets you have got for as long as you can get away with it.”

She ran her finger down the side of my face. “I’ve done some shoots where it was the owners who knowingly rented out their own place, for an amount that would hardly cover their weekly grocery bill. Their price was getting to watch, and let me tell you, that was seriously weird!”

“Oh, I don’t know. If you‘d had sex in my bed, I wouldn’t ever change the sheets until they wore out.”

She laughed out loud. “I knew it! I just knew it! You ARE a complete pervert! God, I love you!”

That earned her rather a prolonged kiss, and the compliment of my first boner since our morning shower. The grin she gave me when she ran her fingers over that was positively feral.

I’d suspected I wasn’t going to get a free ride that day; it was confirmed when Mel got me to hump most of the camera and light boxes for her. Hey, at least I felt almost useful, and a participant rather than a mere spectator.

We’d arrived early so that I could meet Judy in person before the rest of the crew started asking questions.

(So as not to embarrass myself TOO much after my big stereotyping fail with Lucas and Maya, I’d looked Judy up on the Internet. Tall, with shoulder-length reddy-brown hair, she was five years older than me, hailed originally from Maryland, and had come to Los Angeles straight from college fifteen years before to work in advertising, a copywriter. In her spare time, she’d written a few short scripts; she took the opportunity of asking a director she met for some advice, and suddenly she had a couple of scripts accepted. With her BA in Communications minoring in Film, she’d helped out on set a couple of times and gotten herself a few movie credits in the crew as well as script writer. That had led to some regular work directing shorts – both mainstream and porn – that she’d also scripted. She’d also (according to her very helpful IMDb entry) appeared in approximately a dozen of the films she’d directed, either as an extra or sometimes as a named character with lines – in one scene I’d watched, she’d ably played a bartender who dispensed great relationship advice, but could never find herself a keeper of her own. She seemed to have a solid reputation in the business for being both decent and efficient – and of course, Mel couldn’t sing her praises loud enough. Mel had told me that Judy had a long-time partner, Trent, who was an engineer of some kind, though that part was NOT on her publicly-available bio.)

It took me about two minutes talking with Judy to realize that the bartender character she’d acted was pretty close to her real persona; she did genuinely like and care about people; she was sincerely pleased to meet me because I was important to her friend Mel. It was only when a couple more of the crew showed up that she politely excused herself from talking with us, and got to work.

(Full disclosure: while I was finding out about Judy, I’d also done some rather belated research on Lucas’ wife Maya. I’d done an alphabetical search on ‘Pornhub’, but although there were plenty of Mayas, none of them were her. Out of frustration, I’d scrolled down the thumbnail photos in case she was out of place, and suddenly spotted her – as ‘Merida’. I gave myself a mental forehead slap; of course she would be using a stage name, and I’d been lucky that it had been so close alphabetically to her real one. ‘Merida’ sure delivered on the promise of Maya’s cleavage; those babies unfettered were something to behold. Her whole body was lush and just made for passion; I could see why she had been popular. Lucas was a very lucky guy. A worrying thought had crossed my mind, so I’d searched for ‘Atlanta and Merida’, and was a little relieved to find that they’d never done a scene together. It would be a little easier for me to accept Mel and Maya being friends, knowing that they hadn’t had sex.)

Mel nudged me to pick up my load of boxes, and led me to the smaller ‘family’ room where the first scenes were to be shot. ‘Small’ is relative; it was about the size of my own living room, kitchen, utility and foyer combined. There was an air of quiet efficiency as the crew set up; once Judy was satisfied that we were all ready, she brought in the six actors to tell them what they were going to do.

They were fresh-faced kids, all around ten years younger than me. Dressed casually, the girls with no makeup, seeming keen to get to work. If I’d seen them around town, I’d have taken them for normal college students. They sat bunched together on the big couch in front of Judy.

Like Mel had told me, this was a feature-length adult movie of 119 minutes runtime, rather than a straightforward short porn flick of 30 minutes. Judy’s story line ran thus:

‘Dawn’, ‘Evie’ and ‘Janis’ had been best friends throughout high school. They’d been split physically by college and work, but now, on the third anniversary of their graduation, they’d booked a house for a weekend reunion. They’d each brought their current boyfriend; the back story was that they’d shared boys before, and the twist this time was that Evie’s boyfriend ‘Tyler’ and Dawn were going to fall instantly in lust.

“You’re all gonna get a little wasted on wine; the three girls are gonna head off to the bathroom where Evie will suggest a few drinking games and Dawn will push it so she gets a shot at Tyler. See where we’re headed?”

Once Judy was happy that they all ‘got’ her concept, she sent them off to change into the first set of outfits, the girls to put on some makeup suitable for a reunion with friends rather than a big night out.

Janis and her boyfriend ‘Carter’ were first to enter the room, then Dawn and ‘Brendon’ close behind. We took some footage of introductions and greetings; then Judy got Mel lined up for the close up shots of Dawn’s face when Tyler and Evie entered; it took four takes before she was content that, with a little bit of creative editing, she could find just the right facial expressions to portray the ‘lust at first sight’.

Next up were some continuity shots of the boys getting acquainted with the other girls; the first glass of wine did contain real wine; the subsequent ones were non-alcoholic grape juice. Judy didn’t want her actors to get genuinely blitzed, but a slight buzz was good. The girls were soon getting to know each other’s boyfriends; we did some extra takes of Dawn and Tyler sitting close together. The dialog was easy and believable, young people easy with each other, even when the conversation turned to sexual matters, like when Janis asked each guy how old he’d been when he’d lost his cherry, and to who.

You know the old Hollywood cliché, that the best actors are now behind the cameras? It’s a truism. Judy could (and often did) explain – and demonstrate – exactly what she wanted, and get it delivered by the actor. (I noticed as the day went on that Mel was also rapidly heading that way; on several occasions she made great suggestions or adjusted something slightly, and even I could see that it was an improvement.)

Judy had a legal pad covered with notes which she referred to almost constantly. She wanted to shoot parts of several different scenes in that room, including some nude and sleepwear scenes, and the actors were kept busy while they weren’t on camera, getting ready for their next appearance.

So far they’d stayed clothed, although the drinking game sections had involved some making out and intimate touching under the clothes. I’d been a little worried about my likely reaction when the first girl got naked; it was Janis who padded into the room looking for her purse, only to discover a boxer-short-clad Brendon picking up the empty glasses. It took a couple of takes before Judy was satisfied that the facial expressions as they studied each other’s bodies had been captured by the cameras. Then she got Brendon sitting down on the couch while Janis uncovered his cock and began sucking it. Two minutes footage sufficed, and Dawn was positioned on the arm of the couch while Tyler ate her pussy; again, just enough for Judy to be sure she’d gotten the shot she wanted. To show that there’d been a lot of partner-swapping action, but without overdoing it.

Next up, we moved all the kit to the kitchen to shoot some more of the storyline sections. The actors were clothed again, and speaking to script. There were a couple of slips where the actor fluffed their lines, but Judy’s dialogue was straightforward enough for the number of takes to be few. It still took a while, because Judy was using the kitchen as a way of keeping track as the weekend progressed. There were two sexual acts to film in the kitchen and we caught those while we were there; Evie in a loosely-tied bathrobe at the sink when a naked Carter came behind her and started caressing her tits, and then Evie sucking Brendon’s dick while he sat on the kitchen counter.

Judy pronounced herself happy, and we all trooped through to a big marble bathroom to set up for the first full sex scene. Now, that was a totally different setup from the previous two rooms; bathrooms have mirrors and reflective glass, and we had to avoid catching the crew or their equipment in the shot.

The story was that Friday night, things hadn’t progressed as far as swapping partners, but everybody was seriously horny. Carter and Janis wished the others a drunken ‘goodnight’ and went to their bedroom; she exclaimed at the luxury bathroom, they tore each other’s clothes off and screwed in four different positions before he shot cum all up her back as she was bent over the washbasin.

That complete, Janis and Dawn changed again into their ‘drinking game’ clothes; Dawn sitting on the commode while Janis washed her hands, Dawn suggesting that maybe they could try making out with the other guys, and an acting-drunk Janis agreeing with her.

By this stage I was already fairly confused. Although I’d known from an early age that directors always shot all the scenes set in one location or on one stage set, I hadn’t realized quite how the acting would bounce from one part of the whole story to another. Which was why Judy was always explaining which section we were about to shoot, so the actors could adopt the correct persona.

Next up was the Tyler and Evie bedroom scene. In line with the story, a newly love-struck Tyler acted a little distracted as he fucked his girlfriend – Judy had explained she’d be inserting a few wishful images of Dawn in the final edition, to show that Tyler was imagining that it was Dawn on his cock rather than Evie.

And the third ‘Friday night’ sex scene was of course Dawn and Brendon. This time it was Dawn who had her eyes shut as she visualized what it would be like riding Tyler’s dick.

One thing that did surprise me was the need for a ‘fluffer’. Okay, I wasn’t naked and being distracted by everything else that was going on around the room, but if you’d asked me, I’d have told you that to be a successful porn star, you’d be able to get and maintain erections when you were around hot girls like these. Especially when you were only 20 or 21. Trouble was, there were so many stops and starts, so many breaks in the action, even with a top adult director like Judy, that the guys kept losing it. Rather than mess up the continuity and lose the current position, one of the other girls was on stand-by to get the guy back up there so the cameras could start rolling again.