On Writing Dirty Movies

I think I mentioned this in a past blog post, but I did actually get the chance to write a few adult films back when I was in college. The experience was honestly one of the coolest things in the world to me. I also was able to get the chance to figure how exactly these movies were written. Now, this was how these movies were produced back in the mid-2000's, so who knows how they do it now. I'm guessing things have changed a good deal, since everything has moved more to a clip style structure. I think it would be fun to kind of break down the process of writing an adult film as it was back when I was doing it. Now, I had 3 films produced, but I did work on other scripts, but my material was only used in part, or was re-written before production started by someone else at the company. So I'm not going to name drop any of those movies here.

So, to start, I wrote for three different production companies. The first movie was for Vivid, and the second and third were for two smaller studios. The only real difference between the Vivid scripts and the other studios was that the Vivid script had to focus on the contract performer, and had a limit on how many scenes she could perform in. For example, my first movie that I wrote was a small budget film called Blue Collar starring Mercedez. She was required to perform in two scenes in the movie. One of those scenes had to be a girl/girl scene. All of the other performers could only perform in one scene each. 

For a small budget movie for Vivid, these movies were usually shot in a day or two, so you are not writing a full feature script. Generally a small budget film had a script that was between 7 to 10 pages long. The script did not include any actual detail about the sex scenes except for a short scene marker.  You would write the lead up, maybe the tease, but the actual sex in the script looked like this: 

Sex Scene 1 - M/F - Soft, Romantic 

They also set up a total scene requirement. So for Blue Collar, I want to say it was a total of five scenes. Mercedez would be featured in two of those scenes, and other female performers would handle the remainder.  Sometimes you will get notes that one of the scenes needs to be a group scene, or needs to be an all girl scene.  

Fun fact. Blue Collar is where I got my pen name from. I had actually given a different name to be used for the credits, but someone at Vivid typed it in wrong, so I was credited as Red Rose. Hence, R. Rose. Always kind of love that I was essentially gifted a porn name. Thought I would trot it out for these blogs, since it felt totally appropriate. 

For Blue Collar I did have a general structure to work with. They were working with pre-existing sets, so I had to incorporate those into the script.  The general plot of the movie is that Mercedez inherits a house that is in need of some major repairs, but she doesn't have the money to do the needed work. So her and her friends set out to seduce the contractors to get them to do the work for free. I know, it is basically one step up from the pizza guy plot, but it was honestly the best kind of script to cut my teeth on. 

An issue that I ran into regularly when working on the scripts for adult films was that you have to create some kind of through line while breaking up the story, and not having too many (or any) scenes that don't culminate in sex. For a low budget film you are also not going to be having any extra characters. There are no non-sex roles, because there is no money or time for them. This is bare bones film making. 

For my second and third movies, I didn't have as many restrictions. They still gave me a general number of sex scenes to work with. I think my second movie, Anal Adventures 1: Sorority Sisters (I did not pick that title), I had a limit of three sex scenes, the movie was all girl, and it all had to take place around this one house, but they also allowed me to include a lot of non-sex material to fill out the story.  It was about a haunted sorority house. I believe the script ended up being around... 35 pages long? I wish I still had it to check. The final movie I worked on was for a smaller company that was just starting up, and they wanted to go all out for their first feature, so the script was around 40 pages. I had a lot more freedom in how the scenes were structured, with the only requirement being that the lead actress had to be in I believe two or three scenes. 

I have actually never seen this movie, and it is near impossible to find now adays, so I'm not going to drop the title. Working on it was not a bad experience at all. The performer and her husband who produced the film were really nice to work for, and definitely took their films seriously. The issue arose from the final film being censored by the distribution/releasing company. The movie was about a female assassin, and included scenes of guns being fired. That apparently was a big no no, and a bunch of stuff got cut. The movie itself was hardly shocking, and there was no blood or guts or anything, but because the mixture of sex and violence is such a tricky line, most companies don't even run the risk. 

That is something else that comes up when writing any kind of adult material. There are somethings you cannot include in your scripts. As noted above, violence is a tricky one. It is not forbidden, as there are films like Lovers Lane that mix slasher style violence with hardcore sex, but studios can get uncomfortable around certain things. Every studio had their own rules, and if you want to get your movie made, you stick to those rules. Some of it comes from who they are selling their movies to, such as a channel like Spice or Playboy, or if they feel there might be some legal issues. 

It is important to note that when I am discussing the length of these scripts, remember that they are going to be placing 10 to 15 minute long sex scenes into these narratives. So ten minutes of dialogue plus almost 75 minutes of sexual content can push these movies right into feature length. For the bigger budget movies those scripts could be up to a full 75 to 90 pages. This is why some adult films are like 3 hours long. A good example of that is Digital Playground's Pirates. They were able to trim almost of the sex out of that movie, and still have a feature length film that they could do a mainstream DVD release for. 

Talking about all of this stuff has kind of gotten me wanting to try my hand at writing an adult script again. I actually plan to post a mock script in a couple of days. So keep your eyes open for it.