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The Broadway Bomb: 200 skateboarders have a death wish on Saturday
Published on 10/10/08
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Last summer, filmmaker Joe Gallant took great pleasure in capturing a panoramic view of the city featuring the Empire State Building and the silhouettes of water towers as the sun set over the Palisades. "The light looked so magical," he says. This wasn't the only eye-catching scenery: As the shadows deepened, two kinetic couples fervently got it on for the camera. "The girls were riding. Their breasts were bouncing, their eyes rolling to the back of their heads," Gallant recalls in rapturous tones. "The guys were grimacing. Everyone was sweating. The girls were switching guys a little bit at the beginning, but they settled into a partnership for the last journey."
Just after the performers reached their cli-maxes, the lights atop the Empire State Building switched on, and Gallant euphorically called it a wrap. "It was a breathtaking Manhattan moment," he says.
Though they may not all involve sunsets andpanoramas, scenes like this are increasingly being repeated around town. After a long dormant period bordering on nonexistent, New York City's adult-film industry has woken up—with a hard-on. Of course, the local indus-try—which includes at least nine companies, each producing a handful of movies a year—is still dwarfed by the business in the San -Fernando Valley, where about 150 companies churn out 10,000 titles a year and rake in an estimated $7 billion. But in an age when anyone with -access to a camera and the Internet can be an adult filmmaker, NYC has become a breeding ground for a distinctive brand of smut. "There's a punk, underground attitude here, due to a lack of money, that you don't get on the West Coast," says Kenny Law, an editor at the newly revamped porn periodical Screw. "It's real and relatable. It's not just some palm trees swaying in the wind."
One feature of the local aesthetic is that it avoids the stereotypical silicone--enhanced Barbie types. "New York films are grittier. The girls are fleshier and more dangerous," says journalist Gram Ponante, who covers the industry for several publications, including his website, GramPonante.com. "I think New York porn will always be a niche market."
In the porn biz, however, niches can be huge. That's what the local companies are hoping, at least, as each Gotham outfit focuses on a specific sort of titillation. The Williamsburg-based BurningAngel.com makes alternative porn featuring pierced and tattooed actors. In Hell's Kitchen, Black Mirror churns out sleazy sex videos, while neighbor Comstock finds real couples willing to do the deed on camera. In the female fantasy realm there's Candida Royalle's Femme Productions, based in Battery Park City, and midtown's Stella Films. In East Harlem, the newly formed Pie in Ya Face -Productions blends hip-hop and porn. Three local companies—Lucas Entertainment in Chelsea, Dark Alley Media in the Financial District and Dragon Media in the West Village—specialize in gay action.
New York has been a hotbed for XXX cinema before, back in the 1970s. Both Gerard Damiano, a former beauty-parlor owner who directed Deep Throat (1972), and Veronica Hart, an actor-turned-director who served as the inspiration for the Amber Waves character in Boogie Nights, got their starts in the city. "What was really exciting about the business back then was that people thought they were -really -making a great movie," says Barbara Nitke, who worked as a still photographer on The Devil in Miss Jones, Part II (1982) and is the author of Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism. "There would be a script. There would be a lot of work that went into that script. Incredible craftsmanship went into the films back then." With the cameras rolling, -locals such as Sharon Mitchell and Vanessa Del Rio—along with a special-education teacher from Bayside, Queens, named Ron Hyatt, who would later go by the name Ron Jeremy—went to work. By the mid-'80s, though, the industry was steadily migrat-ing to California. "The weather was good. The girls were better--looking," says Legs McNeil, co-author of The Other Hollywood. "It is easy to rent houses for a day if you are going to film a movie. And if you want to shoot some exteriors, you want some palm trees and some swimming pools."
People still want palm trees and swimming pools and Jenna Jameson types. But the 21st-century audience for porn is exponentially larger than it was in preceding decades, thanks to the Internet and loosened taboos, and more than ever, today's aficionados are seeking alternatives. New York's adult companies are ready to provide them.
"It's as if Cassavetes shot porn."
Joe Gallant, the 48-year-old head of Black Mirror Productions, is the Tarantino of the new porn. Using the city as his soundstage, Gallant shoots much of his work on old-school Super-8mm film, hires classic talent from the '70s (such as Jamie Gillis) and strives for a three-act structure. "Joe is really making art," says pornographer and author Tristan Taormino, whose latest directorial work is the forth-coming Hot Ass. "Joe is a complete rarity in porn. He actually has a unique vision."
Gallant also has a propensity for uncon-ventional sexual scenarios that often include enemas and urination—lots of urination. "Most of my movies have piss in them; somebody's pissing in the corner or somewhere, because I like it," says Gallant, who has won three AVN (Adult Video News) awards, the adult-film industry's equivalent of the Oscar. "I like dirty stuff. Some people won't touch it."
Prior to porn, Gallant toiled as a sound designer for soap operas, winning an Emmy in 1996 for his work on Guiding Light. An accomplished musician, he is also the composer for Illuminati, an 18-piece jazz orchestra he calls "an eclectic, Zappa-like big band." After his girlfriend, porn star Trinity Loren, succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in 1998, Gallant started thinking about becoming a pornographer—with a cause. He began -making adult movies in 2000, pledging to donate some of his profits to a trust fund for Loren's daughter.
Initially, Gallant had trouble landing local male talent, so he went in front of the camera for many of his early vehicles. But he had no difficulty finding females, and he embraced them wholeheartedly. "I love New York women. They're real," says Gallant, who mandates regular STD testing for his actors and allows condoms on his shoots. "L.A. women don't sweat. New York women piss. They giggle. They fuck. They fart!"
Gallant's first efforts were offbeat shorts; in the AVN-nominated "Bong Water Butt Babes," an anal-sex vignette, male performers take tobacco hits out of bongs that are inserted into their female partners' buttocks. Four months ago, Gallant moved up to feature-length efforts, producing such fare as Ultra Vixens NYC—a tale of a publicist named Lizzie Grubwurme, who heads a witch's coven. "Some people look at these movies as pretty complete films if you take the sex out," Gallant says. "They're cool little films. I do a lot of gritty, New York stuff. It's as if Cassavetes shot porn."
"Mike Lucas is always on top."
About a mile away but in an altogether different porn universe, adult performer and impresario Michael Lucas's life is playing out like a fairy tale, albeit an X-rated one. A native of Moscow, he moved to the States less than a decade ago and brought his extended family here a few years later. Now his Chelsea-based company, Lucas Entertainment, is one of the biggest gay adult-film businesses in the world. Lucas, 33, performs in almost all of his own productions. "I'm a 'top' actor," says Lucas. "People always make fun, saying that 'Mike Lucas is always on top.' It's a double meaning."
"Michael Lucas is the ultimate porn star," says photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who shot Lucas for his book XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits. "He's so smart. He has seen this world as an opportunity and he has reached into every part of it."
Lucas is an exception in that nearly his entire roster—a rainbow coalition of races, ages and physiques—"flip-flops," giving and -receiving, pitching and catching. Another Lucas hallmark is his films' costume design. His casts invariably wear high-end threads from designers such as Tom Ford and Dolce & Gabbana. For Dangerous -Liaisons (that's right, based on the 18th--century French novel), a $250,000 tour de force set in the fashion business, the talent wore outfits by -designer Alessandro Dell'Acqua. "It's the biggest gay adult film ever," says Lucas, who has a mandatory condom-use policy and tests his actors for drugs—but not STDs. "What we do is safe -because we use condoms," Lucas explains. He -believes testing for STDs is an invasion of privacy.
He takes pride in forging strong relationships outside the adult world—Boy George, RuPaul and Graham Norton all made nonsexual cameos in Dangerous Liaisons. "He's extremely charming and very good-looking. People like him right away," says Greenfield-Sanders, who introduced Lucas to such lumi-naries as the Duchess of York and Betsey Johnson during Fashion Week last month.
When he's out of the office, Lucas travels the world, performing strip and live sex shows. "The cash is good, but it's not a big deal for me," he says. "It's all about promotions. Whenever I perform somewhere, we get tons of -orders."
"She has a bad-girl accessibility to her."
No one will confuse Joanna Angel with Rollergirl. Angel, cofounder of alternative porn website and production company BurningAngel.com, titillates audiences with her enthusiastic performances and nonstereotypical looks. "She has a bad-girl accessibility to her," journalist Ponante says. "She doesn't have that amazon blond, rail-thin, machine-crafted porn starlet look that is characteristic of the Valley." Angel's website content is similar to that of the West Coast–based Suicide Girls. "Her marketing is very well planned," Ponante says. "She's very smart." Featuring pierced and tattooed punker models, the site spotlights sex scenes performed to a soundtrack of alternative rock, often without condoms. "We have used them before but I don't really like them," says Angel, who says that she requires her performers to be regularly tested for STDs.
Angel, 24, who grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, and majored in English at Rutgers, has also moved beyond performing. After her directorial debut, BA: The Movie, she followed up with Re-Penetrator, a parody of the '80s horror classic Re-Animator, casting herself as a zombie who screws a mad scientist to death. "There's blood coming out of every orifice of my body," she says. "During the blow job, blood—dyed maple syrup—is pouring out of my mouth. He is going down on me and there's blood squirting out of my vagina. Even in the porn world, it is just so wrong." Most recently, she took the helm for Joanna's Angels. "It makes fun of Charlie's Angels and Sex and the City," she says. "It's very funny."
Angel and her anything-goes productions exemplify the particular flavor of New York City's burgeoning porn industry: iconoclastic, at ease with bodily functions, unabashedly DIY. And she has no intention of changing locale. "Sometimes I'm like, 'Let's pack it up and move to Los Angeles. It's so much easier there,'" she says. "But I don't want to. I know that my films would lose a certain personality that New York gives."
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Tue, May 27, at 08:38am
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