'Just the Two of Us' Marks The Return of David Stanley

VALENCIA, Calif.—David Stanley has a storied career in XXX, stretching back to his directorial debut in 1997 on Big Game, through a short stint at Elegant Angel in the late '90s, then a roughly five-year run at Vivid (where he won Best Director and Best Screenplay for Pretty Girl, starring Ashley Blue) and finishing up with four years at Wicked Pictures, which he left in 2008. In some ways, Stanley's style is summed up best by AdultDVDTalk's Astroknight in his 2007 review of Stanley's apocalyptic Crescendo 2012: "Who Should Watch It : Anybody wanting an adult movie that stands out from the crowd with its substance rather than nastiness. "Who Should Avoid It: Anybody wanting a straightforward and 'normal' adult movie." But it's been quite a while since Stanley was in the Los Angeles area, even though he's maintained his contact with the industry for the past four years or so by writing scripts for his friend B. Skow, first while Skow was still with Vivid—Stanley won the Best Screenplay honors for Skow's Vivid release The Condemned—and then moving with Skow to Girlfriends Films, where Skow has his own line of top-rated features, many of which have been AVN Award-nominated, thanks in part to Stanley's scripts. "I love working with him. It's the greatest," Stanley enthused. "The way I think of it is, I waited 15 years to work with B. Skow. Like, I waited to meet him, and we were always right next to each other. We worked at Vivid at the same time, we were in the business, I always heard his name, but I had no idea who he was until suddenly he called me in 2009 and I started writing for him." So... why is David Stanley back? "Because there's still stories I gotta tell," he explained on the set of his directorial comeback Just the Two of Us. "There's still things in my personal life that I want to talk about. It's all the same muscles; I just don't use them so much anymore because I kind of went off and started doing other things." Like? "Well, I moved to Minnesota, got married, had a kid, and I started a family, and we built a bakery and run an ice cream store in a little beach town in Wisconsin, a little place called the Cornucopia Sweet Shoppe, and I bake all the cakes and cookies and stuff and my wife scoops the ice cream. That's what we do." Well, not all that he does, obviously—and his wife seems to be on board with all of it, as he revealed in talking about Just the Two of Us. "Actually, it should be called The 28 of Us," Stanley quipped. "It's a story based partially on my own life. It's about a couple where the husband likes to watch his wife with other men, and what happens when she confronts her conservative sister and the sister finds out about her activities, and the conflict between those, and how it awakes the conservative sister's libido, and it wakens her up to what she used to be like and she becomes wild again, and the other sister who was wild becomes more conservative, and it's the dovetailing of those two. "It's a very sex-positive story, told from the point of view of a married guy—me—seeing life through that prism, and loving watching my wife with other men and then, well, this was so good for my relationship," he revealed. "It was like we had hit this sort of dry road, and didn't really know what to do, and we started doing this, and it really fixed everything. It was the opposite of the After School Special version, which is, 'Oh, that's your road to ruin.' It really saved us, you know, so I said to myself, that's what I've got to write about, so that's this movie." Just the Two of Us is the first of two movies Stanley will be directing while in L.A., both of which will be released through the Skow for Girlfriends Films label. I'm sort of reauditioning for the job a little bit," he admitted. "It's getting Girlfriends Films familiar with my directing style and things like that, because they know my writing really well now, but they don't know that I know where to put the camera, and they're obviously open to it, so this is really my audition for them, because I want to prove that I know what I'm doing." From what we observed on Stanley's set, there's no question that he does... but that's another story for another time.