by Sam Hall
“Being a dick about it. This was his fucking idea…” For a moment, the friendly façade Johnno had been maintaining slipped, and his eyes burned bright. “It’s OK. Now, let go of the nice lady, and let’s find out what ridiculous get up Marlow’s gonna dress us in.”
Billy did as he was told with a sigh, and I found my skin missed that contact. The man’s head tilted my way, and a small smile made me think he was aware of the fact.
“Ridiculous?”
The man himself appeared at the door, his eyes taking the three of us in before blowing out a frustrated breath. “Well, I’m so fucking glad I’ve had the seamstresses working night and—”
“Can it, Mar,” Billy said, shoving the other man away and shouldering his way inside.
“Well, thanks for leading us to the lion’s den,” Johnno said, turning to me. “I guess we’ll see you tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow?” Marlow looked cranky at that. “You’re needed now. Didn’t Jennifer tell you?”
“Ah, no,” I said, my heart beginning to beat faster.
“Well, I hope you’re hydrated and have your big girl panties on, as we need preview shots, stat. We load the teaser images tonight. I need spontaneous shots, promo shots…”
I just watched Marlow’s fingers as he ticked off an apparently dizzying number of different kinds of images, my hearing fuzzing, then wavering, as if to protect me from the unexpected workload my best friend had neglected to tell me about.
“Well, you ready to work, girl?”
Marlow’s words threw down a challenge at my feet, daring me to step up and take it.
“People will finally see you and what you can do, and you can get the hell away from this place.”
Jen’s words rang in my ears as I turned to Marlow, squaring my shoulders and pulling my camera out.
“Sure, if you give me a clearer brief. Like Jake over there. Do I do close ups of the girls’ hands down his pants? Do I hint at cock, or are we going the full Monty? I get the vibe you’re going for, no inhibitions and letting loose, but are we talking Leibovitz or Mapplethorpe here?”
“You reckon you can get him to put a whip handle up his arse…” Marlow’s smile was brilliant. “You take that shot. Take them all. I want an embarrassment of riches. Acres of beautiful clothes, beautiful flesh, and all the ways they intersect. Give me the cocoon that all these butterflies are going to emerge from.”
“Got talent releases for everyone? Anyone I have to avoid?” I said.
Focus on the details, I told myself. Treat this as a job, like anything else. Focus on the first step, then the next.
“No limits, love. I told you that.”
“Well, I do. You’d have some PAs or something fluttering around wouldn’t you? I need a long black. The longest black you can get. Make that a pot of coffee, or just keep ‘em coming. Same with the bottles of water. And some kind of lighting. I can do some murky mood shots in here, out of focus and suggestive, but if you want clean, crisp, clear promo shots, we’re gonna need more light, now. I also need some sign off on the direction I’m taking. I’ll start with some shots here with the orgy and use them as a proof of concept. You take a look, see if it’s what you’re after, and then we go from there, yeah?”
Both Johnno and Marlow smiled at this, like I’d passed some kind of test or something, and something I never thought possible happened—I didn’t care. I felt like I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a fantastic world full of alien creatures who kept insisting I do weirder and weirder things. Well, if eating mushrooms and smoking bongs with caterpillars was the price I had to pay to keep the new Canon, I was willing.
6
How do porn cinematographers decide on what to shoot? I thought as I watched the partially naked models sprawl across the couch, their hands roaming Jake Riley’s chest. He seemed very pleased with the arrangement, his hips bucking when one tugged on his nipple piercing, but when he looked up at me, he bit his lip like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
That’s the angle, I thought. They’re putting on a show, like any other performance, but this time, they’re seducing the audience in a more literal way.
I hadn’t had a chance to memorise the operating system of the camera, but as I turned it on, somehow, I found it all completely intuitive. I fiddled with the aperture a bit to compensate for the shit light and braced myself, not wanting to get the tripod out yet. If the shots were too blurry, I’d get it out, but I got the feeling that this would need to be a nimble, mobile shoot. A long shot of the group of them, glowing like jewels, a closeup of that sparkling bracelet as it slid down Jake’s stomach. I lifted the camera and looked down the lens.
Some photographers are gear heads, rhapsodising as if having a religious experience about good glass. I’d never really understood that level of lens love before, but I got it now. The subjects glittered with a sullen brilliance, and I took a couple of shots without too much thought about composition, just wanting to see if what I saw was actually real.
“I’m going to need to pair the camera with a laptop and see what’s coming out,” I said, to who, I don’t know.
“On it,” someone said behind me.
I turned to see a small table had been set up and a laptop opened on it. A slim woman with brown hair tied in a bun walked over and smiled.
“I’m Anna, your tech support for the event. If I could just have the camera for a second, I’ll set up wireless file transfer.”
She held her hand out, this woman dressed in a nice button down and tailored pants, making a perfectly reasonable request, but for some reason, it took actual effort to pass it over to her. She smiled politely, fiddled with it a bit, and then gestured me over. I didn’t usually need to check images, since I shot so close to home. The mists, the bush, it’d all be there the next day if I stuffed it up, but this was a one off.
“There,” she said, gesturing to the screen. “All your shots will come up here as you shoot them.”
“Bloody hell,” I said as I took a look. God, this was good gear. The red of Jake’s hair, the white of his skin—the image was saturated in colour, almost to the point of looking like the old cross processed film negatives. I felt a thrill of excitement as I took the device back, marching over to the couch and getting ready to shoot.
Fingers tangled in scarlet hair, jewelled rings gleaming.
Click.
Lips touching, the faint sheen of powder on her face, the raw reddish stubble on his chin all coming up in perfect focus.
Click.
That faint shine of saliva as lips parted, tongues sliding past them. The moans, I couldn’t capture that, but my brain fixated on that one detail anyway. I slid my view down, where I felt like I could get the movement of throats as they gasped or cooed.
Too much macro, I told myself, adjusting the depth of field and stepping back.
I sure as hell hoped the near porn brief I’d been given was the right one as I watched the women’s hands slide up the rocker’s thighs.
Click.
If I’d ever wondered what men wore up their kilts, I was about to find out. Nails scored pale flesh, the muscles in Jake’s legs flexing and tensing in anticipation. He thrust his groin up, as if gesturing to the women where he wanted them to go. The girls seemed to know what was required, smiling to the camera like sirens as men were lured to the edge of the boat, while I was forced to rapidly move from closeups to wide shots in an attempt to capture it all. Then I narrowed down my focus, capturing people no more, just porn-like vignettes of all the ways the participants bodies intersected. Except it was so much more. With the expensive fabric and jewellery, with the luxe setting, this looked like a couture shoot on ecstasy. Like the point where the beautifully remote models stepped off their pedestals and got down and dirty with the rocker. I thought of Miley Cyrus and her weirdly sexual displays in Terry Richardson’s photographs.
We have an unending desire to see beautiful, sexual imagery, or just sexual, if push came to shove, an
d Mr. Rutherglen was about to flood the market.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. The usual fear, of being a woman, of being associated with anything overtly sexual, of all the complex baggage that seemed to come with that—all of which Miley was as good as an example of that as any. But I refused to give it too much energy. This didn’t have to be Pornhub, this could be Helmut Newton, and in the end, I was just some nobody from a small town. If I was ever going to be more than that, I needed to make the viewer feel the same heart-in-throat, chest pounding anticipation I felt as those hands pushed the kilt right up, revealing those taut muscles in his groin. I wanted them to follow those fingers as they walked slowly across his skin, aching like I did to see the big reveal. I turned continuous shooting on, capturing frame after frame in rapid succession, right up until the moment they—
“Yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.” I spun around to see Marlow leaning over the laptop, scrolling through the images. “That’s perfect. It looks expensive and completely lewd, all at the same time. Leave him.” We both glanced back to see the models had gotten their hands on little—or not so little—Jake and were showing him a damn good time. “That’s about to get super messy. We’ll save that for tomorrow night. Girls, get your clothes and jewellery off first. I’m not sending your costumes out for dry cleaning to get cum off them.”
“Yeah…” Jake gasped. “Get naked, all of you.”
“Come through here,” Marlow said, putting a hand on my shoulder and steering me through. “The rest of the boys are through here and about to start trying on their costumes. Anna?”
“On it, boss,” she said, scooping up the laptop and following us.
“You seriously expect us to…”
The very cranky looking man held a pair of distressed leather pants at arm’s length, glancing up at us with a glare. Those eyes felt like they sliced straight through me, tearing me into two searing parts, while my head felt like it throbbed and was spinning all at the same time. But they weren’t focussed on me, instead, they narrowed on Marlow. Johnno stood leaning up against the door frame behind the couch, and Billy sprawled across the furniture, watching with an amused smile, but they weren’t my focus. There he stood, the phantom that haunted my dreams, the focus of many a late-night internet search. I worshipped at his altar, remembered every note he’d ever sung. Liam Hartley stood at the centre of the room, looking pissed off at what he’d be required to wear tomorrow night.
“Expect you to do what?” Marlow said with a clipped voice. He walked over, plucked the hanger from the man’s hands, and looked down at the garment. “Put on these hand tailored leather pants? Slide them over your very well-formed thighs? Fasten them low on your hips so all of this…” He yanked up Liam’s shirt, and the man shoved his hand away with a growl, but not before the room saw that delicious expanse of rigid muscle forming a V on his hips. “… is on display? Of course, I do. You should be grateful. The Singstars have a foliage print G-string and that’s it from memory.”
“This,” Liam waved to the racks, then expanded his gesture, “is not what was discussed. We were supposed to be—”
“Yes, yes,” Marlow said. “I’d like to introduce you to Kira, your photographer.”
“What?”
I’d imagined meeting the guys from The Changelings many times. From fevered dreams where Liam pulled me from the front row and hauled me on stage into his arms, to something kinda like this, where I’d been commissioned to shoot him. His getting grumpy about a pair of pants wasn’t in the top five.
Neither was the brief look he gave me, that famous scalding stare taking a look and then moving on with barely a thought.
“This is not what this was supposed to be. It’s not about party planning and perfectly designed finger food and coordinated costumes. It was supposed to be raising hell and abandoning all the bullshit, not bringing more in!”
“And you’re going to need to seduce people into doing so. Abandoning all the symbols of success at the onset makes the project look like anarchy. We have to entice the viewers, draw them in, make them feel like their bourgeois little ideas of safety and common decency can be put to one side without the downfall of modern civilisation. And you’re going to start now, with Kira.”
I fought the urge to retreat when both sets of eyes met mine, one blue, one green, as they eyed me speculatively.
“Have a look at what she’s shot so far.” Marlow gestured to Anna’s laptop. “She’s made Jakey getting a handjob actually look high fashion. There’s no bow chicka wow wow, no pneumatically enhanced babes with ten-inch nails pretending that taking ten-inch cocks down their throat is fun. This is hot, raw, and exactly what people are dying to get their hands on.”
“And what’s she got in store for me?”
Liam directed the question at Marlow, but he stared at me, his eyes hot and full of challenge with just a little curiosity. I could give in, let the raging fangirl deep inside me have her head, and fall at my idol’s knees, grateful for anything he gave me. Or… I tightened my grip on the camera, remembering the mask Marlow had slid over my face and the freedom that came from hiding who you were and becoming something else. I felt the shadow of the stiffened fabric on my face as I lifted my chin and met his gaze head on.
“I dunno. Whaddya got?”
7
A very muscular chest for starters.
For a long moment the lead singer of my favourite band just stared at me, as if he couldn’t believe what I’d just said. He was in good company, since I could scarce believe it either. Who the fuck was I? The scrappiest of cats looking up at a king. He smiled, a broad, scary thing, and nodded, as if he heard my challenge and was more than happy to step up to it.
He yanked his shirt off over his head, the hard, flat muscles of his pecs shifting as he held his arms out wide, like he was daring me to walk forward into them. This is not your dream, this is not your dream… I told myself as I raised the camera. I took a couple of shots of the splendour before me, loving the way the low light threw deep shadows over his chest, as if outlining each and every muscle. His hips shifted as he stepped forward, and I kept pace with him, maintaining that distance—both physically and mentally. I captured the vein snaking up out of his waistband that seemed to writhe under his skin.
“Stop,” I said as the backs of my legs hit the couch, and my brows creased when it took a moment to get through to him. He paused, a weird restive smile appearing and disappearing, then his head tilted back before his hands dropped to the button of his jeans. His eyes narrowed, and then his fingers moved to undo them.
“Stop,” I said again. I heard a snort in the background, but that didn’t matter, it was this. “That’s for tomorrow. You don’t want to give them everything they want right now. It’s too easy. You need to tease them, make them want it, and refuse to give it to them. Like in ‘Ache.’”
Liam’s head twitched for a second, and I heard a guffaw in the background as I caught the brittle glitter in his eyes as he inspected me much more closely now.
“A fan?”
I ignored that, not sure that I could maintain this mask if I admitted that to the room. Instead, I ploughed on.
“You sing that song with everything you’ve got, and the lyrics come out like they’re ripped from your throat, like every ounce of longing and need is squeezed into each bar.” I blinked for a second as the moment I heard that song for the first time came to me, hard. Sometimes, when a song is just right, I lose all contact with life, reality, and my own identity and get pulled on this whole other journey, following the singer’s joy or pain, rolled around and torn to pieces until I’m spat out again once it’s finished. “That’s what we need to make.” Marlow nodded, his enigmatic smile back. “Otherwise, what else is this but self-indulgent, high budget porn? There’s nothing wrong with that per se. People gotta get off and all, but I think you want more than that, don’t you?”
The band members were quiet and still, looking more like carved
statues than real men, but Marlow nodded, tapping his finger to his lips.
“So how do we do…that?” Liam said.
“You need to tell me the story of that song. You need to go back to that time.” This provoked murmurings from the guys, but I pushed on. “You have videographers on staff?” Marlow nodded. “Get one in here.”
“Why?” Liam’s voice rang out through the room, like the clearly declared threat he often used at the start of his concerts. “I’ve told that story—”
“No, you’ve explained it. I know about the girl, about the shit she put you through. We’ve all read and seen the interviews. That’s not what I’m asking,” I said, and weirdly, I smiled. My brain felt like it was on fire, like there were all these associations I’d never really considered before. I’d relegated myself to slavish fan, but once I’d stepped beyond it, it all became clearer. These were actual real people with frightening levels of talent, and if this project was going to come off, that genius had to be used. Without it, this would still be relegated to a thinking person’s porn at best, but still… “You used music to bring everyone into your experience with her, but now you need to just use words, completely unplugged.”
Anna moved, unlocking camera cases and setting up gear behind me, and Liam took a seat on the couch, his arm slung along the top of the headrest. “IT’s my side hustle, film making’s my passion,” she said when I looked around.
“Can you set up on either side?” I said, worrying now about clouding my shots. “No lapel mics or anything?”
