MasterCaneman
Posts: 3842
Joined: 3/21/2013
Status: offline
|
Back in '92, I had the fortune (or misfortune) of standing by at the club I worked at when a member booked the facility for a shoot. My job was to (A) help them move the larger pieces around, (B) stand by with shears/bolt cutters, and (C) keep the club's 'smalls' property (cuffs, impact toys, etc) from walking away with the cast and crew. It took place on a Monday, which was the day the club stayed closed for cleaning/maintenance. And was my normal day off, but I was offered a bonus for doing it.
It was a zoo. The shoot started around ten in the morning, with a stock femdom series that required a couple of scene changes (things like move the St Andrews out and replace with cages, things like that). The 'director' was the club member, who had a real photographer working for him. The first two hours were nothing but test shots for lighting levels while the 'stars' got ready. Myself and three other staffers were kept busy as hell moving shit around to kill shadows, playing with the house lights, moving cables, mundane grunt work until he had a 'set' that would work. Note to potential porn photographers, a real fet club is a terrible place for a photo shoot.
The 'star' was late coming in, and was a real bitch to deal with. She had been invited by the member hosting it, and she brought her own posse with her (makeup/hair stylist, bodyguard, and 'Stan', whose role was unclear at best). The first bunch of 'victims' were also out-of-towners who got lost on the way down and had to be escorted to the door from a couple blocks away. The first shots didn't get taken until after one in the afternoon, and it was a maddeningly slow process as they went through the motions. Around three, the next 'star' finally showed up, another traveling pro who was to play the 'victim' in the lezdom part of the shoot. Another hour wait while she got ready, and the guys from the femdom shoot got themselves set up for the 'leatherman' shoot.
I won't detail all the twists and tangles that went on. The photographer would call out the poses, they'd freeze in tableau, take the shot and set up again for the next one. The 'director' was getting pissed because he had no idea what happened in one of these things (he'd been in the first series until he got tired of the process and quit), and was last seen arguing with the first 'pro' about his unhappiness with the way things were going. She got pissed and stormed out, and the second 'pro' who'd shown up to play 'victim' in the lezdom series had to take over for the maledom series they'd planned. Halfway through that series, Pro #1 came back in and demanded to be let back into the shoot because the 'director' told her he wasn't going to pay her if she bailed before it was done, so we had to tear everything apart and re-set the way it had been planned for her scenes.
All through this, me and the other staffers had to watch all these strangers like hawks to make sure the club's stuff didn't disappear into a suitcase or gear bag, set up and take down the 'big' cages and other furniture (all of which could be broken down for storage). A couple of times, the photographer would have to stop and discuss things with the lead staffer who was in charge of props and safety for risky shots (overheads and suspensions) and we'd have to do a lot of the rigging for that.
All in all, it was the most unsexy thing I'd ever seen go on in that club in the two and half years I worked there. It wasn't like a 'scene' in the least, stopping and starting in a herky-jerky fashion as the actors would assume a pose, the shots were taken, and then re-set for the next series. And this was all done on old-fashioned 35mm film, which meant the photographer must have burned through a couple of hundred rolls in that one shoot. I wish I could remember his name, he was a real professional while all the conundrum was going on.
Want to know the weird thing? After more than a decade of (koffkoff) 'research', I have yet to see one single image from that shoot anywhere online. One of the other guys I was working with told me that the photographer would probably sit on the shots for a couple of years before selling them, which perplexed me because of all the trouble it was to take them in the first place. After that affair, I never saw either of the 'pros' who were featured in it ever show up at the club again, and the member who'd hosted it stopped coming in on the regular basis he used to before. And despite our best efforts, we still managed to lose a few props to the 'castmembers'.
The club docked the member for the losses, we got bitched out, but they couldn't foist blame on us entirely because we had to move stuff in and out of the space and up to the second-floor storage area (long story there). I was on the clock for fourteen hours that day, because we had to break everything down and put it away so the floor crew could do their thing the next day. Whenever I see porn, I always imagine it taking place like that now.
< Message edited by MasterCaneman -- 1/20/2014 8:13:24 AM >
_____________________________
Age and treachery will always overcome youth and ambition.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ~ Sun Tzu
Goddess Wrangler
|
RE: Porn isn't real life. - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread