Adult Stars Spend a Day on the Set of 'Director's Cut'

LOS ANGELES—Even though it was just past noon, the interior of Sam's After Dark, a strip club on East Washington Boulevard southeast of downtown, was indeed dark—and filled to the gills with people. Those included Adam Rifkin, director of the indie feature Director's Cut; Penn Jillette, the movie's male lead, not to mention its scripter; several mainstream actors including stars Missi Pyle, Harry Hamlin and Hayes McArthur, all veterans of dozens of movies and TV series; a shitload of extras, most of whom had gotten there through rewards for donating to the movie's FundAnything campaign—and the adult contingent, including Debi Diamond, Ron Jeremy, SpieglerGirls Dahlia Sky, Lea Lexis and Callie Calypso, and ATMLA performers Dani Daniels, Karlie Montana and Aubrey Addams. Oh, and Mick Luvbight and his partner, Gadget the Purple Pony. (Don't ask.) "I'm one of, I believe, many executive producers, a position I obtained through the crowdfunding on the film; I paid to be here," said executive producer Eric Thirteen. "This was a really awesome way for me to get into the film industry without having to have any contacts or go through any kind of system, so this has turned out to be really amazing for what I bought in for." And just how much was that? "Let's just say I gave a lot of money," he evaded. "I think Penn's work and Adam's work, they're both fantastic. Adam did this movie Look that was just phenomenal. So I have this podcast called 'Double Feature,' and we had covered the movie Look, and both me and my co-host were blown away by it; I thought it was super, super good. And Penn's also got a lot of really good work, and he did Bullshit prior, which is just laden with good science and nudity, which is where you want to be, so I had heard that they were doing a movie together, and who doesn't want to be a part of that, right? So this was just a really, really cool way to get involved." And what are a crowdfunded executive producer's duties? "That's a good question," he chuckled. "I am starting to find more and more; they are expanding. I believe my only real obligation is to show up and have a good time, okay? But you find, just being on the set, that they need you to do just weird stuff. So occasionally, I'll be someone's stand-in, or if you look carefully, I'll be a background character all over the place. If you can't tell who it is, maybe that's me.  "Today, my duties were to meet a lot of adult entertainment stars," he added. "There wasn't a lot of wrangling, but there was a lot of schmoozing, so that was good—which is another one of my favorite tasks on set. So yeah, today is like a big carnival here; everybody's having a party, and it's just a blast." The porn stars, of course, play the strippers who work in the club where Pyle, Hamlin and McArthur go to relax, talk business—and be spied upon by Jillette, who's stalking Pyle with intentions to kidnap her and put her in his own movie ... but it's WAY more complicated than that. "Two movies are actually being shot here: Director's Cut and Knocked Off, the movie within the movie," Rifkin explained. "What we're doing is, Director's Cut is a movie that has a movie within it being made, so what the story is about is, Penn Jillette plays a stalker obsessed with Missi Pyle, and he buys a role on the crowdfunding site that funded Knocked Off, because that's one of the rewards you can buy on crowdfunded movies, and that's how he gets access to the set. So he kidnaps Missi off the set and takes her to his home dungeon where he intends to reshoot the rest of the movie starring himself as the romantic lead, and so it's a very twisted, very meta-weird movie about movies and about celebrity culture." And Rifkin should know "twisted" and "meta-weird": Start with his scripting and direction of The Dark Backward (1991), about a failing comedian who grows a third arm out of his back, then continue with Small Soldiers (1998), about children's war toys that develop minds of their own thanks to government microchips invented to control missiles; Zoom (2006), about an incredibly cute team of superhero kids under the tutelage of aging speedster Zoom (Tim Allen); Look (2007), a movie (and, later, a series) with several plotlines that's shot from the perspective of (now-omnipresent) public surveillance cameras; and the recent Reality Show (2012), a cable TV series that takes off from the 1973 PBS series An American Family and features several adult stars. The whole concept of Director's Cut is so complex, it's like trying to find the end of a Möbius strip. (FYI: there isn't one.) Contributors to the FundAnything campaign, which number nearly 5,000, were each sent a copy of the script—and there, the confusion started. "Director's Cut takes a lot of the concepts that we are familiar with like the director's commentary track, for example, and turns them on their head," Rifkin explained. "Why I say that is, in our movie, Penn's character has hijacked footage from the 'real' movie, he has shot footage of his own, and he has cut it all together and created his own director's cut, and then when he's done, he does his own director's commentary on it. Here, the director's commentary is actually a narrative device, as opposed to an optional feature as it is with so many other movies. It's something that's never been done before. And also too, what's interesting about it is, when the movie first starts, we think he's the director, but as the movie unfolds, we start to learn that he's not really the director, he's this crazy stalker." So some of the stuff he says in his "director's commentary" is complete lies? "Correct," Rifkin said. "So he's the 'unreliable narrator,' as it's called." The strip club scene is for the movie-within-the-movie, Knocked Off, a crime thriller about two detectives (Hamlin, McArthur) and an FBI profiler (Pyle) who are after a serial killer—and as such potboilers typically do, contains its share of nudity, provided by the porn stars, who make the club's large stripper-pole stage their own, performing routines most of them have perfected through years of strip club appearances. "I just loved doing it," said Lea Lexis. "As you know, I was a gymnast back in Romania before I came over her to do movies, and they asked me to demonstrate some of my best moves on the stage here, so I did splits, balanced on my head, and all sorts of sexy positions that'll look good on camera. And what would an Adam Rifkin movie be without Ron Jeremy? "I met Adam through Charlie Sheen," Jeremy said. "I was at Charlie Sheen's house, and he goes, 'This guy wants to talk to you.' So Adam got on the phone, said he's a big fan of the business, and we were going to get together for drinks, and the next thing you know, he put me in The Chase with Kristy Swanson. I had a couple of dialog scenes in there... I've worked with Adam on a lot of projects, from Without Charlie, produced by Steve Bing; Night of the Golden Eagle; Detroit Rock City, the KISS film; the caveman comedy, National Lampoon's Stoned Age [aka Homo Erectus]; and Look, both the movie and the series. He's put me in just about everything he's ever done. "He's a very, very, very loyal friend, and he's a gentleman," he continued. "He's a very sweet guy; I've never heard anything bad said about him." In the Knocked Off segments, Jeremy plays the club's DJ. "Adam wanted me to write my own lines and make them funny if I possibly can," Jeremy explained, "so I came up with lines like 'Please welcome Mariah; her tits are so big, when she was born, her dad had stretch marks. They're so big, she's standing on stage and her tits are parking the car. They're so big, Stephen Hawking can't even measure them. They're so big, they won't take calls from Steven Spielberg. Her body is as hard as passing a bill through Congress.'" Also on hand was veteran actress Debi Diamond, who's currently an engineer and host of Vivid Radio—and who did her first sex scene with Jeremy way back in 1982, for Mike Carpenter's Golden Girls Film 106. "I love Adam Rifkin!" she exclaimed. "I was asked to come to the set. I told them I would do whatever they wanted; if they wanted me to say something; if they didn't want me to say anything; if they wanted me to get water; if they wanted me to run lighting cords, I would do it. I'm a team player, and I like life, and I'm just so happy to be free. They got me as a bartender, because I'm actually a trained bartender in real life. I'm multitalented." Her big news of the day? "I'm gonna start shooting again." It was a tough shooting day, since all filming had to be wrapped by 5 p.m. when the club was scheduled to open—but that didn't stop pretty much every major player from wanting to have his or her picture taken with the topless porn stars, some of which can be seen in the frequent updates that donors receive on almost a daily basis, most of which are put together by Jillette's wife, Emily. Principal photography is scheduled to wrap sometime next week, and what with the editing and other post-production necessities, it's unlikely that the finished product will be ready before sometime in the late spring or summer of 2015—but from what we saw on set this day, it'll be way worth it. Pictured, l-r: Debi Diamond, Penn Jillette, Dahlia Skye, Adam Rifkin, Karlie Montana, Lea Lexis, Callie Calypso and Missi Pyle.