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The Daily Grind
Friday, June 29th
AVN On the Set: Upload Wraps with a Body Cavity Search
On the Set: Upload Wraps with a Body Cavity Search
By: Jared Rutter
from www.avn.com
LOS ANGELES - Despite desert windstorms, exploding meth labs, permit screwups and other perils of location shooting, Upload, SexZ Pictures' extra-big budgeted cyber-thriller, wrapped up its three-week shoot on schedule and with footage to spare.
"I'm thrilled with everything we're getting," director Eli Cross tells AVN on the final sex scene day, "but it's just a lot of hard work."
Several crew members, including one of the cameramen, have missed work because of stress-related problems. Kylie Ireland, Cross' usually perky partner, looks exhausted. Both of them are harried but coping.
"This shoot has really wanted to fall apart," Cross says, "but it hasn't. Everybody has wanted to keep it together, and so far we have."
It was the three days in the high desert that took the biggest toll.
The first day, a trailer housing a meth lab blew up on the other side of a hill from where they were working, bringing on clouds of smoke and police helicopters.
The second day heavy windstorms played havoc with the sound recording. There were also permit problems regarding county vs. city jurisdiction of the patch of sand they'd staked out as a location.
The third day they were denied access to a dry lake bed, where a sex scene had been scheduled, and had to move to a place called Vasquez Rocks.
Later on, when a Valley office building where they were going to shoot several key scenes suddenly became unavailable, they were forced to build sets elsewhere.
Today, a Sunday, they're in downtown Los Angeles at a studio whose stages are used by both X-rated filmmakers and mainstream indies.
The project's latest loss, due to a conflict, is porn legend Ginger Lynn, who had planned to come out of retirement for a cameo in a crucial scene.
Cross was quick to replace her. "We lost Ginger," he says, "and that's disappointing. But we have Michelle."
Michelle Aston, who was working on the movie as a production assistant, is a tall thirtysomething with bright red mohawk-cut hair and ample tattoos. She works as talent but has also done a fair amount of mainstream acting.
Stepping in for a legend at the last minute? "I love it," she says with a big smile. "But my fist is too big. I don't get to fist Hillary, Flick does."
That's Flick Shagwell, the British performer who segued into a career as a makeup artist. She's returning to acting, briefly, as one of two security guards who woman-handle Hillary Scott in the scene about to be shot.
It is a fisting scene, and as such will not appear in all DVD copies of Upload. As with Corruption, which included similar action, there will be a regular cut, without fisting, and a Director's Cut that shows everything—about three minutes of screen time, with dialogue. Distributors will be able to order either version, or both.
The fisting has a dramatic purpose. Scott, playing a rebellious cyberpunk, is suspecting of hiding on her person a microchip bearing a deadly computer virus. Two government security guards, determined to find it, conduct a double body cavity search.
The set is a cold, forbidding prison clinic. Hillary—who has been opening her orifices with vibrators offstage—is hauled in by the guards. They make her disrobe and bend her over the examination table.
As Michelle holds Hillary down by her hair, Flick pulls on a shoulder-length plastic glove and starts probing.
"You're not trying to bang her," Cross directs. "You're just rooting around, like you lost your keys."
Flick eases four fingers into the petite blonde's vagina, then, slowly, the whole hand.
Hillary emits a loud yelp. Acting or real?
"Hill," Cross says solicitously, "if it's hurting real bad, just say Cut."
"It's not hurting at all," she replies nonchalantly. "If anything it's the hair pulling." Michelle eases up on her grip.
Flick's whole hand is now inside her, all the way up to the wrist. In character, Hillary shoots back, "Does it make you hot, you sick bitch?"
Next, the hand inches into her anus. Finally: "Everything's in except for the bottom of my thumb"—which is fine with the director.
Flick removes her gloved hand from the anus and shoves it down Hillary's throat, still in search of that elusive chip.
Michelle, looking really mean, delivers the menacing punch line: "That was just foreplay."
After more shots from different angles, Cross has what he needs. Next up is a solo masturbation scene with co-star Eva Angelina, and that's the last sex scene to be shot.
Already in the can are two big fight sequences: the virtual face-off between the two female antagonists, much of which will be CGI-manipulated, and a real brawl with Eva beating up two guys.
After that it's three more days of shooting "exposition and plot and dialogue" before things wrap for good.
The footage then goes into the editing bays and CGI labs where the movie will be assembled and the 23-plus hours of raw BTS footage whittled down for the DVD Extras disc.
SexZ Pictures will release the package in September.
Pictured: Eli Cross, with script, directs male lead Derrick Pierce in the desert. Photo by Kylie Ireland.
kylie@kylieireland.com">kylie@kylieireland.com">Kylie on 06.29.07 @ 01:31 PM pt [link]
Tuesday, June 26th
On the Set of 'Upload'
6/5/07
BEHIND THE SCENES
THE FINEST DINNER I NEVER ATE
ON THE SET by CHARLES LONBERGER
I had the finest dinner I never ate when I arrived on the set of SexZ's latest epic, Upload, and was set down to a plate of very cold spaghetti and somewhat stale bread while the cameras rolled and bald, buff Derrick Pierce and the statuesque blonde, Trina Michaels, shared some bitchy dialogue.
The film is the latest opus from director Eli Cross, and is a massive undertaking. As the intense director pointed out to me, with this production he is charged with "making 350K look like 2 million." It is a huge project, one that shifts the emphasis drastically from the intimate, excellent, Perfect Creatures of earlier this year, over towards filmmaking as production management. It is a challenge that is, he confided, "difficult to manage," one which leaves him with "far too much to do all the time." He was happily right on schedule and had had, at the time of my visit, only one day that had run overtime. The reason for that was that the scene – film noir in flavor – had "far too many elements" in it, due to the demands its extreme stylization placed on make up, hair and lighting.
Cross was keen to keep the film down to a manageable running time ("I'm not looking to make Upload – The Miniseries," he winked.). In fact, he firmly said, "I'll cut sex scenes if I have to and be brutal with the editing," which he insisted was the most "influential" aspect of the filmmaking process, reiterating, as he has said before, that the editor is the equal of the director in importance in the creation of a movie.
In the case of Upload, he might have added CGI, as he has a staff of effects artists on this film, which features one scene conceived entirely on computer.
Of paramount importance to this film was Cross' ever-present Kylie Ireland, who assumed the Herculean role of production designer on it. The visually adept director delegated the look of this film to Ireland due to the magnitude of its scale. By entrusting her with the art direction, and thus how the scenes look, it freed him to concern himself with "movement motivation."
"She has a much better sense of the visuals than I," he admitted. "So much of this film revolves around the Tech, and it required a visual design for how the terminals look as they work together. She designed hand held concepts of how these futuristic networks – a Grid, inspired by Minority Report – would look and came up with hand held extensions for it," he sighed. He confessed his appreciation for her contribution. "With her, I don't have to worry about it," he said. "I don't have to just rely upon myself for creative inspiration, and she gives me something real to work with," although, as her Life Partner, "It's trying not to bring your work home with you. Sometimes…," he smiled, "a simple professional conversation can make it hard to personally communicate."
Nonetheless, on set, Ireland was stealthily quiet as she attended to a magnitude of production aspects with a focused, serious-mindedness.
Cross is the consummate Actor's Director, and he cast this film very, very carefully, making the Outlook Award winning actress Hillary Scott audition three times for the role of Tesla. Scott won acclaim in the director's Corruption, wherein she played the role of Natasha, which, as Cross was quick to point out, was an "entirely different animal." Natasha was "the definition of victim," a "dark force mired in grief she didn't entirely understand." Tesla, in contrast, is much more like the real life actress herself. "She's smart and sharp and fierce," he observed, "a force of light, not a victim and intently focused on her own happy endings." He summed it up by praising her "hard work ethic" and her "ability to show me different aspects" of her character. Yet, in contrast to this was the almost flippant requirement when casting the lead role of Cassandra. He chose Eva Angelina because she was the type who would enjoy "kicking men's asses and having her own kicked."
This film represents an important breakthrough of a different sort for actors Pierce and Michaels. Pierce, an established SAG actor who will also have a chance to spotlight his martial arts skills in Upload, is a trained actor who ironically is more familiar to the public for his tattoos and sexual performance skills, and will here have a chance to out his thespianism, while Michaels, a stunning sub mostly known as the Blonde in countless Blacks on Blondes productions, will have an opportunity to profile her substantial and admirable acting abilities, which we had a chance to observe up close and over dinner.
In a different way, the production also expanded the enigmatic actress Julie Night's filmmaking experience. Having worked her way through BTS on her climb up the ladder to the Director's chair, she paid her dues as the PA this day, doing the "grunt" work and lugging heavy containers with her sinewy frame up and down many flights of stairs. After sharing some peaceful private time with this living, breathing mystery, she returned to her role of worker ant.
As for Cross himself, he "tried really, really hard not to focus" on himself. "I make the movie I am making, work really hard on it, and do not worry" about critical perspective in the process. Clear, communicative and sympathetic with his actors, supported by his muse and crew, Cross gave us a seminar in filmmaking as a collective art, a ringmaster who didn't have to crack the whip, though everyone knew it was there.
As for me, I enjoyed my dinner with a saucy blonde, even if we didn't take a single bite.
kylie@kylieireland.com">kylie@kylieireland.com">Kylie on 06.26.07 @ 04:46 PM pt [link]
Sunday, June 3rd
On the Set: SexZ Pictures' Upload
On the Set: SexZ Pictures' Upload
By: Jared Rutter
Posted: 1:00 pm PDT 6-1-2007
LOS ANGELES - SexZ Pictures' Upload, with a big budget, big script, big cast, kicked off its 20-day shooting schedule with a monster scene: nine women and eight men banging each other in a BDSM orgy on a dungeon set.
"Big day today," says actor Evan Stone, one of the bangers. "Lotsa stuff happening." Indeed.
On a downtown Los Angeles soundstage, director Eli Cross, who co-wrote (with Alvin Edwards) the hefty 65-page script, is launching a huge project. Everything is going well, he says. But of course it's only the first day, and it's all sex.
The trickier parts are still to come. Swatches of dialogue to be mouthed by performers more used to emitting only spontaneous natural sounds. A complex story set in the future with period flashbacks and simulated reality interludes. Hollywood-style action sequences involving weapons, shoot-outs, fights.
Cross is already fretting over the blocking of a gunplay sequence to be shot the next day.
SexZ has give him one of the longest shooting schedules ever for an XXX movie, twice as long as what he had for his award-winning Corruption last year. The budget is also higher, over $300,000.
A "big chunk" of that, says his partner Kylie Ireland, is for the special effects that are crucial to recreating a future world. The CGI budget alone would fund many smaller scale video features.
Ireland is in charge of art direction, with three departments working under her: sets, costumes and props. The latter include the elaborate computers that figure importantly in the story and goodies like hand-held mini-computers, designer steroids, surgically implanted ID chips and "dermal pouches" for concealing contraband.
Though she hadn't planned to, having so much else on her plate (she's also shooting BTS footage), Ireland will be doing a sex scene herself. It's a black-and-white flashback to the 1950s, with period underwear and vibrators; she's partnered by Delilah Strong and the movie's male lead, Derrick Pierce.
At the moment Cross is directing not simulated reality but plain old simulated sex between various couples against a blue screen. These segments, in post-production manipulation, will be used as inserts in a cellblock setting in a virtual reality sequence.
The couple faking anal action are Veronica Rayne, a statuesque brunette, and veteran stud Mark Davis. Three more such setups are still to be shot; after that will come the orgy, for an hour and a half of real time.
Three makeup artists have been working on the women since morning and they're all ready to roll.
Eva Angelina has the leading role of Cassandra, a federal agent with a troubled psyche. She's been in porn for four years, starting at age 18, and this is her first leading dramatic role.
Most of her many scenes have been in gonzos. Her meatiest acting so far was as Stormy Daniels' kid sister in Wicked's Sleeping Around, which garnered rave reviews.
She's all eagerness, primed for the challenge of a big part. "I am so excited," she grins. "I'm ready for the long hours." She's not concerned about handling dialogue, having had some mainstream movie acting experience as a young teen.
She's especially looking forward to her climactic face-off with co-star Hillary Scott, who plays Tesla, her cyberpunk antagonist. She says the concept calls to mind the Laurence Fishburne-Keanu Reeves showdown in The Matrix.
This is doubly a red-letter day in Angelina's career: her first-ever double penetration. She chose her partners: youthful newcomers Alex Gonz and Justice Young, with whom she's completely simpatico.
The orgy, she says, is Cassandra's fantasy. In it she assumes the identity of a girl she's seen abused in another dungeon scene, still to be shot. Her character is supposed to like abuse and Eva isn't about to fake it.
She tells her partners, with a smile, "You guys can pretty much do whatever you want. Choking, slapping and spitting is a must."
As the sun starts to set outdoors, Cross announces, "We're done with all the blue-screen bullshit."
And about time too for the assembled clusterfuckers, who are thoroughly sexed up and raring to start.
Cross positions twosomes and threesomes on various apparatus—gyno chairs, massage tables, cages, X-frames, slings, hoists—on the large dungeon set. The 17 people break down into seven groups.
The women are Angelina, Rayne, Julie Night, the original anything-goes girl, Carly Parker, a big-breasted blonde, Faye Runaway, a tall skinny blonde, Marsha Lord, a tall skinny redhead, Shannon Kelly, a petite red-haired MILF, plus Aidan Quinn and a brunette, who do girl-girl with strap-ons.
Stone, Davis, Gonz, Young, plus Alex Sanders, Christian, Sledge Hammer and Tyler Knight are the men.
Cross addresses the cast. "At SexZ Pictures the only company rules are you have to be 18 and walking on two legs. But just because we can shoot anything doesn't mean we have to. Discuss [with your partners] how rough you want to go, what you like, what you don't like."
For the soft version there won't be any restraints.
Acknowledging the high hormone level on the set, he says the sex doesn't have to be simulated; the cameras will shoot around insertions. But he warns the guys, "If you pop you don't get paid. So hold it for the hard."
There are three men with handheld Sonys, designated A, B and C. They prowl through the writhing, sweating, screaming bodies, shooting every detail.
Rayne and Davis, on the gyno chair, are doing their anal for real this time. He's pounding her so hard the chair keeps skidding all over the floor. Night is being d.p.ed—hard—by Stone and Christian. Sanders is working on the 19 year-old Runaway. "That girl is smokin'!" he exclaims during a break.
Finally Cross yells "Cut! Take your cocks out of the girls!" He has to repeat Cut about a dozen times before the turned-on talent slows down.
Cross and Ireland take a moment to huddle over what's been shot, as they do at every break. They're being shadowed by a four-man crew from a Canadian reality-TV show that's doing a segment on them as a porn industry couple.
Cross tells them that the official hardcore footage they're about to shoot now will be "the same thing but with bondage and a bit more anal sex."
The makeup brigade moves in to touch up the ladies and help the gents towel off.
Eva is cuffed to the massage table, her double-penetrators hovering over her. Julie's chained to a hoist. Carly gets attached to the X frame. Davis whips Veronica's butt.
When everybody surges into high gear again, the detonation of sexual energy practically raises the roof. It seems to be an indication that SexZ's ambitious project is off to a helluva start.
Note from Kylie: This scene was day 1 of the shoot, back on May 20th.
kylie@kylieireland.com">kylie@kylieireland.com">Kylie on 06.03.07 @ 09:33 AM pt [link]
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