I found this story today on a site called Something Awful about Evil Angel director Kevin Moore called Confessions of a Pornographer. It’s basically about his 15 years in the adult industry and it’s a very interesting read to say the least.
Kevin Moore registered for the SA Forums back in December 2000, choosing the name “darkpriest.”
“I hit my 15 year mark in the industry this year and been some of my most successful years lately. It has been a strange journey that I still enjoy greatly.
What exactly do I do?
I am a producer/director, distributed by Evil Angel. I also perform on camera, though this year I’ve scaled that back. Last year I performed a great deal.
Prior to becoming a producer at Evil Angel, I was a freelance camera operator/photographer for nearly every major company in the Adult Industry.
What is your background?
I am 40 years old and did not make the plunge full time into doing this until 2000.
How exactly did you get into this?
I can partially thank Mitt Romney. I used to work an adult shop when I was 18 and always had an interest in porn and sex. That began my first insight into the industry from a video stores perspective. I learned a little bit about the business, however it wasn’t until the mid ’90s that I began really pursing it. I was very lucky to be at a major college (UMASS) right when the Internet was really starting to blossom. I jumped head first into it and when a company called iBill began allowing third party processing for credit card payments, I tried to start an amateur adult site around my girlfriend at the time. I did this out of my dorm room.
I eventually moved into a full time career at UMASS working as a junior SysAdmin, but on the side still ran my amateur sites. I also began attending CES and would slip away to the adult section and try to make inroads to people there from all the various companies that produce adult movies. I also began shooting female adult performers while they were on tour at strip clubs in the New England area. I would shoot photos of them at the club for various little magazines like Club or Xcitement or whomever would buy them.
Mitt Romney became the Governor of Massachusetts and he gutted funding to public education. Since UMASS was a state school, it had major budget cuts. In order to save people from layoffs, the union worked out a deal where employees could take a voluntary layoff. I knew that my life was at a crossroads. I could stay at Umass and weather the storm or I could take a huge risk and take the voluntary layoff. I chose the layoff and moved to LA to pursue working in the adult industry full time.
My initial time in LA was at first very rough. Luckily I had made some good contacts by this point, but it is an expensive city to live in. I had gotten a gig at the trade publication for the adult industry (AVN) doing photos of events, tradeshows and performers on tour. I had a chance meeting with Joey Silvera, who is somewhat an icon in the industry. He was a long time performer in the 70’s and 80’s. He was now a producer/director at Evil Angel. Joey and I kind of hit it off. His assistant at the time quit and he needed another assistant. He asked me if I wanted to do it and I started working for him. That really began the day-to-day shooting and working in the trenches. I learned so much from Joey and I spent many years working for him.
From Joey I met John Leslie and Rocco Siffredi and John Stagliano and began working at times for all of them. Eventually, after many years of working under them, I began to branch out on my own. I started shooting stills and movies for a wide variety of companies and the rest as they say is history. Eventually I was offered by John Stagliano the chance to direct at Evil Angel.
Why do you do this?
That is a complicated question and if I were to get insightful I am sure it has to do somewhat with my upbringing and also my outlook. I was raised in a very serious Irish catholic household. For a long time I couldn’t come to terms with the way I was raised versus how I felt. It caused me incredible internal conflict and as Alec Baldwin once put it, being irish catholic is guilt upon crushing guilt.
What I know now is that I feel very strongly that adults should be allowed to express themselves sexually with other consenting adults. Repression is a terrible thing. Porn to me is escapism entertainment. It is like people watching “professional” wrestling. Everyone knows it’s fake, yet people still love it Just like horror movies and other forms of entertainment, porn allows people to escape the stress of their life and for 15 minutes live out some sexual fantasy they probably will never experience. Sex isn’t always rainbows and butterflies. Sometimes we use it to explore our own turmoil and conflict. I fully understand that it is not for everyone and not everyone views it the same way that I do.”
Liar
How do men make any money doing straight porn? It seems like there’d be a line of horny dudes wrapped around the block who’d be willing to do all this stuff for free.
Kevin Moore
Most guys can’t do this. Most men think they can, but they can’t. It isn’t having sex in private. It’s having highly aerobic sex in sometimes the most difficult situations, all the while keeping every frame of penetration open to the camera lens. Anyone can have sex for 10 minutes with someone they are attracted to and that likes them. It is a whole other thing to be on a set, where time is money and the girl you’re working with is having a bad day and you have to use your abilities to get her to come around and perform well with you on camera. All the while never losing your erection and then climaxing on command.
ManOfTheYear
What’s it like to pertform? Sexual fantasies aside, being pointed with cameras while trying to have stylized sex with a woman you don’t know in a studio full of people would be the most uncomfortable/awkward/depressing thing I can imagine.
KM
Performing is hard to explain. It is sort of like LSD, amazing and terrifying all at the same time.
A little back story on how it came to pass for me:
I was working as an assistant for another producer at Evil Angel many years ago. He was a very prolific performer in the ’70s and ’80s and then moved into producing movies later in life. He would always tell me two things: You will never be a good camera operator unless you edit, and you will never be a good director unless you have performed.
The idea behind both is that until you try editing your own camera work, you won’t understand your mistakes or how to improve your camera work. As a director, you won’t understand what goes on in the performers’ heads until you do it yourself. Once you have done it yourself, then you understand the struggles and can create a better environment for them.
When you perform and apply that to your experience as a director, it isn’t about when things are good, it is about when things go BAD. There is nothing more humbling than struggling with an erection in a commercial setting, where time is money. Everything is on you as a the male. The longer you take, the more people have to be on set. It is learning how to control your body and in turn when I’m now behind the camera and a guy is struggling, I have way more insight of what is going on in his head.
I’ve never had to perform with a large crew. Due to the fact I was decent with a camera, my first experience many years back was shooting some POV filler content for a company. I was fairly competent and trained myself over time how to hold a camera and keep an erection. Not the easiest task when you consider camera weight and all the things you worry about while shooting. There are a couple people on set with me when I shot those and then I expanded that further and further, trying to make the POV genre more interesting.
For the last couple years I’ve been shooting POV movies with a DSLR rig. It’s not only heavy but also I have to manually focus the entire time. It is sort of like having a mental stick shift in my head. I focus my brain on the technical elements (focus, camera angle, lighting of subject) and then shift back into the sensation so I don’t lose my edge. Then I shift that mental gear back into technical mode. I go back and forth between these two gears through a POV scene.
Typically I have to take some form of break, just because physically my back or arm starts to hurt.
I have done non-POV scenes and sometimes I feel those are easier. Not having a 10-pound camera attached to you makes it so you can just focus on your scene partner and yourself.
The larger issue is the physical act of performing with someone you don’t know. I’ve always taken time before a scene to talk to the girl: What are things you hate and what are things you like? I don’t try to invade their personal space before a scene. Then as we get closer to the actual act, you get a little closer physically. Honestly, you have to flirt a little. Make her feel comfortable. Break the ice and find things in common.
It doesn’t always work. You will not always have great chemistry with everyone you work with.
cf1140
What % of the creampie scenes you have shot are fake?
KM
I have only shot one creampie scene that is real.
I would say the majority are fake.
For creampies something similar to a turkey baster is filled with either Cetaphil or Pina Colada mix and interested into the vagina. It then comes out looking like an internal.
For photos many times Cetaphil is used to fake the facial.
Some producers like Monsters of Jizz or Cumshot Surprise use a setup with a thin clear tubing running underneath the penis that is attached to some sort of pump. The pump then dispenses pina colada mixture.
beanieson
Have you ever seen a first time performer who just chickened out, & couldn’t go through with it? I’d imagine pure nerves (performance anxiety, the crowd, etc) would affect the guys more than the women but surely some of the girls have second thoughts?
KM
I have never shot a girls very first scene. That isn’t my interest nor the genre I’m involved in.
I have never been a big fan of shooting brand new girls, however I recently did put out a movie with exactly that name. I was surprised how well it turned out. Some of the new performers entering this industry are on another level sexually.
The reason I shy away from shooting new performers is my strengths are not in showing new performers how to pose their bodies. That has never been one of my strong suits. I’m much better suited in other areas.
The full interview can be read here.
It’s long and broken down into multiple pages with pictures but well worth a read for a great, real look at porn from behind the scenes from a man who has 15 years experience in the trenches.
