I Wrote a Short Story About What It's Like to Be on an Adult Movie Set
Fictionalized, of course
About a year ago, I got in my car to go to a place where an adult movie was going to be filmed because I was writing a piece of journalism about it, and as I drove there, I thought about how much older I was than the first time I set foot on an adult movie set, and I wondered if that would make it any different. The first time I was on an adult movie set it was 1997; this time, it was 2024. So you can see it had been a long time. And in the interim I had seen a lot of things. To be perfectly honest I don’t know how much the adult business has changed over time. As people say, it is what it is. The production of adult content is neither fundamentally good nor fundamentally bad; although I don’t really agree with people who say it’s a job like any other job—like working at McDonald’s. Because it’s not.
Regardless, I went to the shoot, and everything was very professionally run, and as I drove back my thoughts turned to what I had been thinking about earlier. Probably the main thing that was significant between when I had visited an adult movie set when I was younger and when I visited it now was that this time my back hurt from the driving and the standing around and that sort of thing. This was due to my getting older, and a car accident when I was younger, and all the times I fell off a horse, and too many years of sitting at a computer, and life. Anyway, maybe I saw things more clearly at this age or maybe I didn’t. Eventually, I wrote the journalism story, and that was that. Or so I thought. But not really.
At some point after that visit to the shoot, I got this idea that I wanted to write a short story. The fictional story would be about a sexagenarian man who lives in the San Fernando Valley who discovers that an adult movie is being filmed in the house behind his house. His career was writing ad copy for what amounted to widgets that were sold in printed catalogues. But his job had been phased out, and he had been pushed out (politely), and so he had retired. His wife was sort of disconnected from him, which was basically his fault. And they had no kids. And then by happenstance it turns out this house behind his house has been rented for the day by an adult production company. That was all I had, when I started: the idea. In the first scene, he would wake up and go to retrieve the newspaper, the print edition of which he still had delivered, and when he bent over to pick it up off the lawn or wherever I would have it land, his back would hurt. So, this man was me, sort of.
In any case, I wanted this fictional short story to read like something that could be published in The New Yorker. I don’t know what they call the type of fiction that’s in The New Yorker, but I guess I think of it as classic American short fiction. Mostly it seems like fiction in which some person has some revelation at the breakfast table while dust floats through the air. Anyway, I wasn’t aiming for something quite so akin to a literary Saltine cracker, but I did want my story to be a bit … regular … or conventional … or traditional. This “boring” style would contrast nicely with the “exciting” provocative subject matter, I felt. Also, I estimated the story would be around 5,000 words, which was long for me and which I think I settled on because I figured out that’s about how long the average New Yorker story runs. I also determined the story would be comprised of five parts of approximately 1,000 words each. That would make the execution of it more manageable.
I started banging out the story. In the first part, things start off relatively normally. In the second part, the matter gets taken up a notch. By the time we get to the third part, we’re really in the thick of it. I had a great time writing it; mostly, I was just amusing myself. I thought the premise was pretty hilarious. A fish out of water tale with an X-rated twist. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t erotica. But it was about the sex business, so it had a certain titillation factor. I think I churned out the first and second parts pretty quickly. And then when I got to the third part, I balked. What was the setting of the making of this adult movie going to be like? How would my main character see what was taking place? What would everyone say to one another? I put myself in my main character’s head and wrote the third and fourth parts. And then when I got to the fifth and final part, I got stuck.
It’s like watching people dig ditches, but everyone is naked.
More so this year I have been talking about my fiction with my shrink. Increasingly, the main characters in my fictional work are men—I’m also writing a novel set in the adult movie industry—and my shrink is a man, so that helps. In the very last part of the short story, I had to decide how much of this shoot my main character was going to see and how it was going to look through his eyes. The reality of being on an adult movie set is that it’s very mechanical. Someone is directing the choreography, and people are manning machines recording the scene, and the entire enterprise is the manufacturing of a commercial product for public consumption. The performers are actors engaged in physical labor. It’s like watching people dig ditches, but everyone is naked.
Eventually, I figured out how to show what my main character saw in a way that pleased me. I was done. I spent a couple days revising the story. Then I submitted it to perhaps a dozen places that publish short stories, including The New Yorker. After some time, I heard from an online literary magazine that will be publishing the story later this year. That made me happy. I let the other places to which I had submitted it know that the story had been accepted for publication elsewhere. I’m sure The New Yorker was very sad to have missed the opportunity, but that’s life. Also, when the story is published, I believe it will be paired with a photo I took—not on an adult movie set but somewhere else in the Valley. That’s nice.
I should probably say something about the photo at the top of this newsletter. I took it on the set of an adult movie in 2009. You can read about it here. One thing I like about taking photos on adult movie sets is that you can cheat. They’ve already created a scene. There is the set. The lighting illuminates the action. The performers are camera-ready. And someone else is running the show. Ideally, once the action starts, everyone forgets you’re there. That’s when you can see the real stuff, which, oddly enough, sometimes ends up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. The girl’s half-open mouth, the fake flowers arcing gently, the man’s hand placed where someone told him to put it. It’s real and it’s not. That’s the art of it.
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