Twenty Questions with Skow/Girlfriends Director David Stanley

Director David Stanley is a veteran creative force in porn who has written and directed very memorable features for Vivid, Wicked Pictures and briefly for Elegant Angel.  He has been writing scripts for director B.Skow as of late and is currently directing his first releases to be released through Skow/Girlfriends Films.  His past AVN Award victories include Best Director and Best Screenplay in 2005 for Vivid's “Pretty Girl.” Stanley won the AVN Award for Best Screenplay in 2011 for Vivid's “The Condemned,” which was directed by B. Skow and in 2014, he won the AVN Award for Best Screenplay--Parody for Vivid's "Clerks XXX: A Porn Parody" also directed by Skow.  Stanley wrote Skow's latest messiah-themed title "In The Flesh" and the images that run with this piece are from that release.  Here are his answers to twenty questions.

1) What kind of guy were you back in high school? Did you always love using cameras?

I was a very emotional, very psychedelic, very movie-and-music-obsessed kid back in high school, which probably doesn't surprise anybody who's seen my stuff. I grew up in a little logging town in Minnesota in the 80's and I listened to a lot of Cocteau Twins and a lot of Grateful Dead and I took a lot of orange sunshine and I watched a lot of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick movies and, like every other 80's teen, fell in love with a lot of girls I shouldn't have fallen in love with.

One of my ex-classmates is now Obama's Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, aka "Penis McDonuts". Penis didn't do any drugs, though I did see him eat an entire sleeve of lingonberry pastries in a Cub Foods parking lot once. And for someone growing up in Minnesota in the 80's, that was pretty much the same thing as shooting heroin into the tip of your penis with a baby syringe. Vote or Die, y’all.

Movies and music were then, and continue to be, my everything. The first time I ever fell in love with a girl was on a date to see "Blue Velvet", and the first time I jerked off in public was when I went to see "Something Wild". (The first time I ever fucked in public was during a screening of the C Thomas Howell nightmare "Soul Man", but that's not a fact fit for human consumption).

I would have been into cameras had I had more access to them, but that didn't really happen until I went to film school. Since then, I've been collecting cameras and lenses whenever I've had the money. I especially love anything to do with Super 8mm, since those were the cameras I coveted all throughout my youth, but never had the money to buy. Richard Kern’s movies were a big deal to me back then too, and they were all shot on Super 8. Another reason.

My movie love in high school was much more centered around seeing movies than making them, though making them was always the dream, and certainly the life I was intending for myself, even before I learned how to load a mag or thread a Nagra.

2) Were you a porn fan before you got into the industry? Who were your favorite porn stars/favorite porn movies?

I really wasn’t, to be honest. Porn always kind of grossed me out. Part of the reason why was because it was so readily available in our household. My grandfathers were into it and so was my dad, who had a huge stash in the back of his closet; magazines and Super 8 film loops mostly. Pre-VHS and CED, we had a Super 8 projector in the basement that I'd occasionally watch old stag films on from the 20's and 30’s. But it wasn’t vey erotic. Just a lotta sepia-toned images of zaftig women in slouchy stockings that didn't really do much for me except make me wish I was watching "TRON” instead.

I was much more turned on by mainstream actresses than by porn stars. I would make clip videos by dubbing between VCR’s scenes from mainstream movies that turned me on. Stuff like 9 1/2 Weeks or Flashdance, or "Charles in Charge" or "Married.... With Children" or "The Mae West Story" or whatever. My fetish for stockings was so strong back then (and remains so) that I didn’t need to see anything but their legs and feet to get off. I didn’t need to go so far as to sneak into SexWorld just to see Ginger Lynn deep throat Jamie Gillis. All I really needed was an ad for L’eggs pantyhose ad to show up while I was taping “The Young Ones” and I was all set cum bedtime.

It wasn't until I was in film school, and working at a videostore, that I was exposed to big-box VHS porno and started to see girls in them that I thought were erotic. Traci Lords was the first girl who I knew by name, but that was mainly because she was in John Waters’ “Cry-Baby”, so she’d already scandalized herself out of the jizz bizz. The next actress I became obsessed with Nikki Tyler, a Vivid Girl from the 1990’s. But that wasn’t so much because of her movies, which were uniformly bad, but because she was my cousin. A situation that got very weird once I started producing her movies and having to watch her in action in person! But that's the answer to another question.

3) What do you think shaped you into the director that you are today?

David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Alex Cox, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Cronenberg, Abel Ferrara, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Carpenter, Luis Bunuel, Bob Fosse, Ann Reinking, Terence McKenna, Thomas Pynchon, Stephen King, Terry Southern, the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Animal Collective, the Butthole Surfers, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, the South Shore of Lake Superior, The Uptown Theater, the Arclight, the Dobie, the sad tale of Billy and Elizabeth Gaffney, Charles de Lauzirika, Blade Runner, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Criterion Collection, ALL THAT JAZZ, Christina Tosi, Los Angeles, Austin, TX, , isolation tanks, DMT, my grandparents, my parents and my wife and child. 

4) How would you describe your creative relationship with B. Skow?

Since we started working together in 2009, our creative relationship follows a basic outline. He calls me with a general idea that he wants to shoot. Something along the lines of “Guy falls in love with his best friend’s daughter” or “Girl taken hostage for 9 years finally escapes” or he will tell me something personal from his own life that he thinks will make a good story and we’ll hash it out for a half hour or so. If we can get to talking about it, then we know it will work as a story and I get started.

After getting off the phone, I usually run to my wife and jump up and down telling her what a cool idea he just had and then I go off and write for anywhere between 2 weeks and 2 months. As much as I possibly can, whenever I don’t have to babysit or work on construction, I sit in libraries or bookstores or in my car and I hash it out.

Over the course of coming up with a 20-30 page screenplay, I will write about 100 to 200 pages worth of material that I then cut down over a series of five or six drafts. Then, once it’s down to around 35 pages, I sent it to Skow. He reads it. Gives me notes. And then I take a week more to incorporate the new ideas and notes and to trim down the page count.

Once that happens, I schedule the movie and write the synopsis, so that, when I turn it in to Skow, he has everything he needs to go and shoot the movie on time and on budget. I like to present him with the complete package, then, if he wants to change things, or has to, he can. But I always give him more to work with than he needs.

5) Who is your favorite male performer/female performer to shoot and why?

MALE: Tommy Pistol and Evan Stone are tied. They are both highly insane, highly creative and very sweet and giving people. You get things from then that no one else can give you. They are 100% open and they hold nothing back. No prima-donna nonsense hiding a lack of talent. They just show up and bring the goods and no matter what you need them to do or where you need them to do it on, they deliver. I wish no one was allowed to work with them but Skow and myself so we could have them all to ourselves. They do nothing but make movies better.

FEMALE: I haven't shot in so long, but the last time I worked, I got to shoot with Skin Diamond, who was beyond wonderful. I love her. I love Kimberly Kane. I think Riley Reid is really perverse and terrific. I dunno. Who's around? Is Nina Hartley still working? Jane Hamilton? I'm so old now. I'm sure there are plenty of wonderful girls, but I don't know their names. I'm about to work with Nadia Styles, who's got this real earthy, truthful dirty girl vibe that hits my harmonic. And Kasey Warner and Sheena Ryder and Karla Kush. Jessie Andrews was fucking amazing in "The Gardener". I miss Lexi Belle . . . and I really miss Sasha Grey. And Stephanie Swift. They were the last two actresses who really felt like muses to me. Like putting them in my movies made me better at making them, instead of just exhausted for having to babysit actresses who don’t care. The girls are everything. If they’re not great, then none of us are.

6) What can you share about your upcoming directorial debut for Skow?

I'm actually directing two movies. One is called "Just the Two of Us" and it's about my personal experiences as a cuckold.

It's also based, loosely, on this couple from Kansas City who post on YouTube under the moniker "Glock27able1". Those videos are so amazing, hotter than anything I've ever seen in porno. Basically, the wife puts on nylons and heels and goes out in public and picks up strangers using nothing but her legs and feet. She isn't a porn star. She's just this "real person" who works for a living, dresses like a professional and loves her husband so much she's willing to jack off strangers all over her stockings. And she's done like a hundred videos like this! They all look terrible, shot on shaky cellphones with like 240 p resolution, but that just makes them even better. The context of what they're doing is so sexy that the look doesn't matter. Which is how it should be. Fuck art direction. Direct the context. That's where the turn-on is.

Movie two is called PRINCESS and it's about a self-entitled 20 year old with sugar daddy issues who gets a visit from her future, murdered self, warning her to drop her terrible boyfriend before it's too late and he destroys her for good. I got really obsessed with this stupid Bravo show about these beautiful 20-somethings living in LA called "Vanderpump Rules" and I thought, "Why can't these girls see how bad their life choices are? Don't they know they're not gonna stay pretty forever?" Then I wrote what might happen if you could force them to take a deep, hard look at theirselves.

Karla Kush is in that one. Never worked with her before, but I'm psyched to. She has great feet.

7) What have you seen change most within the industry in your time in the industry?

I've been around since 1995, so the changes I've seen are pretty apocalyptic. When I started, the whole industry was based around VHS and magazines. And as silly as that sounds now, what it meant back then was that people had to pay for what they saw. Now, thanks to the web, nobody pays for anything. Or at least not like they used to, when they had to.

Back then, there was a middle class to porn, where even low-level directors like me got by okay. But after 2008, that all ended. Now to make a living in XXX, you either have to own your own company and sit around in an empty office all day or you have to shoot five to ten gonzos a week, doing everything yourself, while taking the bus to whatever depressing location you can scrape together.

As far as being on set is concerned (and I haven't been on one in a while), the size of the crew is the biggest difference that I've seen. Back in the day, when we rolled up, we had trailers and honey wagons and grip trucks and craft service trucks and all these people everywhere. A camera crew. A lighting crew. A sound crew. A wardrobe girl. A make-up girl. Two or three PA's. A production manager. And now you go in and there's maybe 2 guys besides you. The girls do their own make-up. Everybody brings their own lunches. The PA is also the second camera man and the stunt cock if so-and-so can't get it up. It's too small. It all just feels like the end of the line sometimes.

And it's heartbreaking! It's like every time you show up, you're standing in the end credits of a Peckinpah movie, where the old cowboys have just realized that the Old West is dead and so are they because the New World's got no place for 'em any more. It's very hard to keep doing porn with that ghostly feeling overhanging everything, which is probably why I don't work very much.

I miss the old days. And not just the money, but the sense of burnt out glamour that porn used to have. That's all gone now. You couldn't even bring it up in casual conversation if you wanted to, that's how gone it is. You can't walk into the office at Vivid and see Ginger Lynn Allen sitting there anymore, and you can't go down to the Pussycat Theater and wait in line to see the latest Jamie Gillis movie. You can click on it. You can steal it and download it. But you can't experience just how weirdly exciting it was to be a a part of what Porno used to be. This hybrid between the old Hollywood star system and sex work. Now it just feels like a party that ended a long time ago that nobody's got the nerve to turn on the bright lights for so everyone knows it's time to go home.

8) What fetishes do you have that you haven’t yet shot or is there a particular kink that you want to put in a future release?

I'm exploring the cuckold thing with "Just the Two of Us", because that's something I just started getting into, that I love. It’s really incredible to watch your partner share herself with a total stranger. It’s like controlled infidelity. I’ve never gotten off so hard in my life as I have watching the videos I’ve made in my personal life. Something about watching another man’s face change right before he cums, all over the person you love . . . OH MY GAWD.

I'll keep shooting foot fetish stuff, but as far as really out there bondage and S&M-themed stuff, I'll leave that to people who are turned on by it. I'm not. I'm just a public pervert with a thing for stockings. I wish I was a little more adventurous, but I'm just not.

That said, and I know this sounds silly, but I think it would be really cool to do a movie about quicksand fetishists. That's a real thing. People who get off on quicksand and being swallowed up by it. Quicksand used to such a ubiquitous thing in movies and cartoons, and now it just isn’t anymore. I’d love to bring that back. I don’t think anyone else is even thinking about it - which is one of the best reasons to make something. So maybe that?

9) What is one thing that you think that a lot of porn directors get wrong about the way that they create a scene?

They focus on the art direction too much. They say "This is what it looks like" but they don't say what it's about. Because porno sex is so mechanical by nature, saying “this is what it looks like!” isn’t enough. You have to develop the context and the attitude if you really want it to smoke. The mind-set and the emotional setting, that's what matters. Just putting your actors in fancy costumes and handing them filigreed props and saying "Okay now. Fuck", is just lazy, vanilla-porn mentality on parade and it’s the bane of everything I’ve fought against.

Where's Gregory Dark when you need him? Talk about a guy who knew how to create erotic context and interesting art direction at the same time. I wish he'd come back. I love Gregory Dark.

10) What are the best things about being a porn director?

Getting to work with people you love. Getting to say something that nobody else has the courage to say. Getting to say "fuck you" to conformity. Getting to play with sex as if it were a color on a painting palette instead of just this shameful, private, keep-to-yourself thing that you're never supposed to talk about. Getting to drive home at the end of the shoot knowing that, somehow, you just shot a 30 page movie in two days, with non-actors and no money that works and is good. Those are the things I love most about the job, and the things I miss most when I’m not working.

And I really love the little surprises, the things that happen on a porn set that could only happen on a porn set. And not the sexual moments, but the moments of melancholy or humor or warmth. Those are what I love and I have a lot of those moments trapped in the amber of my memory, for which I am grateful.

My favorite was when Paul Thomas and I were shooting at this old farmhouse up near Spahn Ranch the night before Christmas Eve, 1996. We were setting up for our last sex scene of what had been a long month of playing catch-up, when one of the actors started playing “O! Silent Night” on the piano in the family den. Kaitlyn Ashley was there, and she began to sing along, and all of us, all these young kids like me and all these grizzled old porno veterans from the Golden era too, we all just stopped what we were doing and listened to her sing. And then we all started to sing along. And whatever armor everybody wore in their day-to-day fell away and a deeper, sweeter truth about the people in this business revealed itself: the people who do this job aren’t evil, creepy assholes who wanna fuck your kids and rape your wives. They’re just a bunch of kids who'd really love to go home for Christmas, but who can't anymore, because they're home won't have them anymore.

So they find home in the small moments, and when the porn star sings, they sing right back. And mean it.

Only in porn does this happen. Do you see the absolute good in what is otherwise considered the absolute bad.

If you can push the envelope in a real way that makes you feel like you've made something original and daring instead of just spending your days counting the minutes 'till lunch then you've picked the right job. When those things line up and their tributaries find their confluence, I'm a happy man. If they don't, there's not enough drywall in in the world for me to slam my fist through in frustration. It is such a waste of life if you can't get it right and it's so humiliating to go home with nothing but a bunch of pop shots. It has to be more than that. It just has to.

I love the feeling of discovery that I get from shooting, of making something artful in a context that most people consider completely anathema to art. Porn can be such an exciting creative experience if you can get everyone to care. The problem is, usually they don't. The actors don't read their scripts, the crew just wants to go home, the cameras are constantly failing. But if you can fight your way through that, and still make something good, then you've unfolded the stone. Then you’re really on to something. Driving home from a show, knowing I made the day got what I wanted - and better yet, got to be surprised as I got it - THAT'S what I love about porn. It that's "getting away with it" feeling that criminals get addicted to. You did something that everyone told you not to, and in the getting-away-with-it, you made it great. Somehow you punched through and took it. That is such a win.

Porn is such a great place for artists, I wish more artists were in it. Imagine how good it would be if it was just people like B Skow and Kimberly Kane shooting. People who re-invent instead of repeat and copy. I don't know how many versions of "Daddy's Girls" have popped up since we made our movie. Think for yourself. Say only what you can say. When you go home, you'll feel better and I won't be able to make fun of you so easily. Everybody wins!

11) What do you think are “must-own” DVDs for fans of your work?

"Pretty Girl" for sure, because that was the most personal movie I could have made. It's basically a mix-tape addressed to someone who never wanted to hear it.

"Bare Stage" (my 1940's stage play), "Melt" (my ayahuasca movie), "The Last Rose" (my Sasha Grey movie), "In the Flesh" (my Jesus movie) and this weird little movie I did called "Viewer Discretion" back when I was at Vivid. That was as close to “Kentucky Fried Movie” as I got.

Speaking of insane, there's another movie I did called "Wet Nurse". Which is the story of a man (played by Voodoo) who's afraid to leave his house, because he thinks that when he does, his pants have parties.

And they do.

12) What do you remember most about the making of “Clerks XXX: A Porn Parody”? Are you a Kevin Smith fan?

I was really, really sick at the time that I wrote that. And very stressed out. I wrote it in a weird fever state that has pretty much wiped out any specific memory. What I do remember about writing “Clerxxx” is worrying that it was too direct of a parody, and that I really, really, really wanted Kevin Smith to like it when it finally came out.

Unintentionally, Kevin Smith had the same effect on filmmaking that John Cassavetes did in that he gave people who had no earthly business making movies permission to do so. By example, he said that you didn't have to be a visual genius, you didn't have to have a million dollars, and your last name didn't have to be "Coppola". All you had to do was find something to say that only you knew how to say, and then say it from the heart, using whatever resources you had at hand, and whatever friends you could.

So I was really, really disappointed that he never said anything about the movie. For a guy who's always talked about porn so openly, I was shocked that he didn't say a single word about an adaptation of his own stuff. Especially since it turned out as well as it did. I really thought we did as good a job as we could.

Oh, well. So much for "Jersey Girl XXX", I guess. Then again, maybe that's a good thing.

13) What do you like most about working with Skow?

His story sense and his patience and his ever-transforming style. Where most people with his talent are happy to sit in one place and repeat themselves, he's always moving, always thinking, always trying to find new and better ways to talk about what we talk about when we talk about sex.

He is, far and away, the best director I’ve ever met or ever will meet in this business. He is endlessly creative, holistically perverse, painfully honest and constantly thinking. I've never met anyone so good at cutting through the bullshit of an idea to get to its essence and I've never gotten better notes in my life on my writing in my life. He's a truly creative guy who cares about every aspect of what he's doing and he makes everybody around him a better artist for knowing him. If I could box him up like a cereal, I would eat him every day with a bucket of almond milk and five bananas. I fucking love him.

14) Who are your role models in porn and how/why do they inspire you?

1. Paul Thomas because he was my mentor, my sugar daddy and the hardest motherfucker I ever worked for AND because he made movies about his obsessions that said "fuck the look, we don't have time for that anyway. what is this movie about?”

PT had the biggest influence on anybody in my porn-life, not just in terms of filmmaking. He was such an unusual character. He was from this really affluent Chicago family and he had been a successful stage and screen actor (he played St. Peter in the movie and play of “Jesus Christ Superstar”) and then he had gotten in with the Mitchell Brothers and wound up in porn. Everything about him seemed mythic and huge to me, and for an impressionable kid from a Minnesota logging town, he was bigger than Paul Bunyan. For the first two years I knew him and worked with him, I basically just wanted to be him. To be this confident, beautiful guy who never rattled and who had had this massive success. My dream back at Vivid was that, someday, I’d inherit his mantle, but it never happened sadly.

Pre B Skow, he was the first director I ever wrote regularly for, as well as the first director to ever buy a script I wrote, period. He taught me everything I know and a day doesn't go by where I don't thi He nk about him for at least 30 seconds of my day.

He was such a strange guy and so into his own pleasure that it was hard not to wanna be like him, even if he was the devil. Ask anybody who knew him and you will get at least one great story. Either about pulling a gun on him, finding him wandering the streets in a dress, or something to do with abusing poultry. He used to jerk off so much his dick bled and get blow jobs on set like they were coffee. How could he not be my mentor? I fucking loved him. And I still do. I miss him greatly.

2. Belladonna is a national treasure. There should parks and boulevards named after her instead of just plants. She's so fucking rad. She brought true female empowerment to a business that tosses that phrase around way too loosely. It's not empowering to let some suitcase pimp or shady company owner ruin your life and take all your money for your efforts. But it is empowering to take control of the money by grabbing the camera yourself and making your own movies and making them awesome. Which is precisely what she did.

And she's FANTASTIC in "Inherent Vice". She fucking owns that movie and it doesn't matter if you know who she is or not. But if you do, you know how the sadness around her eyes got there. And then you love her more than even Pynchon could have made you if you do. Long live Belladonna. Long live the new flesh.

3. Nina Hartley is just such a sweet, warm and wonderful person. I think of her as a role model because she never seemed to let the business embitter her. To this day, she remains as nice as she ever was. Have you ever heard a horror story about Nina? That's 'cause there's nothing horrible about her. She’s our patron saint and someday I hope to see her shadow on a tortilla found in a Church just so I can watch her followers flock to her. She’ s the lovely. That’s for sure.

4. Jane Hamilton. I only met her a couple times, but every time I did, I just wanted to work that much harder and be that much better. Not just as a pornographer, but as a person. She always had this really grounded attitude that was in such diametric opposition to the kind of methed-out personalities I was dealing with, with the younger girls on set. I really liked Jane.

5. Dave Naz. Because he's nice to me and I have no idea why. Plus he's from that whole Richard Kern, NYC, Sonic Youth side of things, which is what I aspired to be from when I was growing up dorky in Minnesota and dreaming of making Super 8 movies for “Film Threat” magazine.

15) What do you think your four year hiatus from directing did for your creative process?

It made me more appreciative of the job. Hard to take it for granted when you haven’t worked in awhile. But in that downtime, I did a lot of non-porn stuff that has made my life a very rich pageant. I got married. I built a bakery and an ice cream shoppe with my wife. I bought and paid for a little ten acre slice of heaven up on Lake Superior that w are currently finishing building our house on. And, best of all, I had a kid. An amazing kid who loves me more than I knew possible.

Had I been shooting non-stop, I would have missed out on all that. And because I didn’t, and I now have those moments in my emotional bank account, there’s so much more for me to draw on as far as telling stories and making moves is concerned. I’ve always told personal stories and now that I have more things to talk about, I’m hoping the movies, like my life, will just get better and richer for it.

16) What is the best mainstream movie you have seen recently?

"Inherent Vice"!! Only Paul Thomas Anderson would have the nuts to try and adapt Thomas Pynchon and the talent, too. And the heart. And all that sweet, melancholic yearning. And be so funny. And oh my God - MARTIN SHORT.

I also really, really loved "Under the Skin". Holy God, that movie is so erotic and unshakable and hyper-inventive without seeming like it is. And so sad. There's a shot in it I can't get out of my head. It makes me cry every time I think of it. The heir apparent to "The Man Who Fell to Earth”. I love that movie.

And "Only Lovers Left Alive", a movie about the death of the sensitive artist in a world of douchebas as much as it is about vampirism, the beauty of old guitars and the quintessence of dust.

And Ben Wheatley's "A Field In England". That movie is so inventive and only about 3 people have seen it. Seek it out. It's so fucking good, just like everything he's done.

17) How about the best porno movie? Is there someone whose movies you like to watch who is working now who is not with Skow?

Since Belladonna retired, the only other filmmaker in the business that I really, really like besides B Skow is Kimberly Kane. She's the real deal and always has been. She's an artist who comes at what she does the way a real artist would: from the heart and with a giddy sense of self-discovery that she trusts instead of smothers. My dream is that she gets her own company and inspires more people to make movies the way she does. I wanna watch her grow old in this business.

When I was going through a horrible time in my life, she called me out of the blue and gave me the best advice I ever got. She said, "when you finally find the person who will love you for you, you will love them with everything you've got."

And when my daughter was born, I finally knew who she was talking about.

So yeah, Kimberly Kane. Even though I don’t jerk off to her.

As far as my favorite thing to jack off to, that would be the videos that glock27able1 makes on YouTube. Hands down, it is the sexiest stuff I’ve ever seen and the only “porn" I watch (thought it’s not really porn, as she never takes anything but her shoes off). A guy films his suburban, non-porn-star wife seducing strangers in public settings, using nothing but her stocking feet? What god did I please?

I would love to make a big budget movie about them or starring them. They’re like this unknown little gem that I just wanna polish. So great.

18) What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy isolating dikaryotic strains of mycelium and germinating them in mediums of agar.

And I love, beyond measure, dancing with my wife and daughter to any song you got.

19) If you could cast any celebrities to do an epic sex scene for you, who would you cast? Give us your male and female choices and tell us what you would ask of them.

James Franco and Kristen Stewart

Because they are both so wonderfully filthy that you could get them to do anything, I would have them do exactly that in a big-budget musical version of Terry Southern's "BLUE MOVIE". In it, I'd have them play the brother and sister porn stars who fuck at the end of the world’s First Mainstream Pornographic Movie! (A movie which, when Stanley Kubrick was going to direct it, was originally intended to star Julie Andrews!. I can't imagine anybody fucking on camera with more verite or vigor than James Franco, who should have been playing for our team all along.

alternate

Joe Swanberg, Alison Brie and Anna Kendrick

Mainly because I'd love to see Alison Brie and Anna Kendrick give a foot jobs while wearing black tights and because of the amount of hosiery on display in Swanberg's movies I feel like this could be attainable if he was involved somehow.

20) Is there anything you want to say to your fans here at Fleshbot?

Yes. “Thank you! You are amazing human beings with great taste and you deserve good movies, so thanks for thinking that I make them and thank you for making me feel so loved.”

Anybody who’s been in this business for 20 years, as I have, has seen more downs than ups. And I’ve certainly seen my share of both. This is the toughest, weirdest, at times pettiest and flakiest, at other times, most rewarding and satisfying business that I know of. So to hear that there are people out there who root for me and still like my strange, sad, and hopefully beautiful take on sex means the world to me. It keeps me going and makes me feel really happy.

Also, PUSH FOR BETTER MOVIES. There are so many good directors out there who never get to work because the gulf between art and commerce is so ridiculous in our world. I'm lucky to work for Skow and Moose. They get it. They know. But a lot of company owners just don’t and it's not even their fault. They just don't believe in talent unless someone else believes in it first. So be that first voice and PUSH FOR BETTER MOVIES. Write to companies. Post on forums. Talk about the directors you like whose work you want to see more of and get them hired. Porno doesn’t have to be terrible or corporate or vanilla. It could be incredible. So push. Push for better movies. And better movies will push right back.

Remember, in the immortal words of Dirk Diggler, "You've got the touch. You've got the powwwwww-errr!”

And you do.

All of the images here appear courtesy of Skow/Girlfriends Films.  You can buy a copy of "In The Flesh" by clicking right here!