Hard At Work: The Sound of Porn
How do you get the right soundtrack to a porn film? Marcus Reeves writes about how he scored an Ashley Ryder film, and also found a new direction for his own music.
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The life of a writer is a precarious one, the life of a performer equally so. As I do both, it’s sometimes twice as unprofitable and unpredictable, but there are many other jobs that add on even more areas of uncertainty, as I found out earlier when I wrote the music for, and doubled as a runner on, an adult film.
I’d been having a difficult time with no work and was heading into a slump. My friend Ashley came to the rescue, saying he could get me out of the house and give me something to take my mind off things. We first met working on the Royal Vauxhall Tavern panto Screwged, a rather hastily cobbled-together portmanteau show I wrote that I then narrated dressed as a Christmas tree. Ashley played the Portuguese houseboy looking for his long lost mother in a plot-line shamelessly lifted from the Divine film Lust in the Dust and at our ‘late night special’ show, he decorated the RVT with several metres of red ribbon which he uncoiled – there’s no real way of dressing this up – from his arse. Several friends still tell me to this day that it wasn’t quite what they’d expected to see at a panto. Since his days as a porn performer, Ashley has moved behind the camera and has now directed over a dozen features. Having originally studied fashion, Ashley has a strong and vivid imagination and is always trying to add something new to what he does – porn has many ‘rules’ and being rather good at expanding limits, Ashley always enjoys adding new elements to his films.
That week he was shooting a film and suggested I come along to act as a runner – he also wanted to ask me to do something else but it was under wraps. I’m well aware that I don’t have the body for porn (unless it was bear porn, which I’d never do!), so knew I wasn’t going to be onscreen but wondered what his mysterious request would be – but before that it was time to get my hands dirty on set.
The shoot was over a week, with certain scenes shot at Ashley’s flat, which doubled as the main character’s house. The film had the working title of Leather Whore – which I’m sure can help you work out what sort of things were going down (so to speak). Each day we’d set up the space – clearing any clutter away (porn sets are usually devoid of the bric a brac we amass in our daily lives, one of the many things that make it completely unrealistic).
Before shooting the main action, the actors do stills shots, so basically have to do every scene twice, which I soon realised is less fun than it sounds – in fact, although the atmosphere was light and the guys all seemed to enjoy the work, it didn’t seem like being a porn performer would be much fun. Shooting any film involves hours of hanging around and as most men know, getting and maintaining an erection on demand isn’t always as easy as people think. Add hot lights, having to repeat most scenes four or five times (meaning you are having sex with a stranger for about six hours a day) and it’s not the cushy job you might imagine. Sure, it pays more than working in Starbucks, but as super-producer Chi Chi LaRue pointed out in a recent interview with my hero RuPaul, the digital age has meant that the wages of adult performers are about a tenth of what they were in twenty years ago.
Working as a runner involved making a lot of tea, running to the shop for cigarettes and food for the crew (except the actors didn’t really eat much, of course), mopping up lube and clearing up condoms, a bit of hair and makeup (predictably the wardrobe was minimal and mainly involved cuffs, shorts, bandanas and lots of strange leather things I’d never seen before). There is also social media – photographing scenes to put on Twitter. I was chastised on the first day for not getting enough cock into the feed, so got a bit more ballsy and a bit less arty on the following days. The producers liked what I’d done so much that several of the images are now being used to promote the film – and another studio was interested in bringing me in to work for them. I never knew I had it in me!
Once the sweaty work was done, Ashley got to his mysterious request – he wanted me to score the film, which excited me greatly. Writing songs has always been a passion, but one that doesn’t come on command (unlike some of my new colleagues). I had a week to write four four-minute pieces of music to accompany the scenes, which was actually a great exercise – it seemed impossible – and although I was tinkering with the music ‘til the eleventh hour, Ashley got what he wanted. Writing the music itself was fairly difficult, as it had to be rhythmic and repetitive without being too distracting – writing catchy melodies is great for pop songs but most people aren’t watching porn to be left with a song to hum along to in the shower. I also discovered that music with heavy breathing might sound sexy as a concept, but in practice sounded more like the audio from a public safety film about asthma. I was really happy with the result. Someone said it sounded like John Grant, the Scissor Sisters and Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds – which was pretty much what I was going for.
Sometimes waiting for the muse means we never get anything done and spend the time we do have distracting ourselves from actually making something. The Leather Whore tracks aren’t perfect – four minutes is an odd amount of time structure-wise for ‘songs’, but whether he planned to or not, Ashley literally got me out of the house and out of my slump. I’m now hoping to develop the songs into an album of electronic music, a new direction for me. I may have left the set with sticky fingers, but I also left with something I hadn’t bargained for – inspiration.
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Listen to the rest of Marcus’ Eine Kleine Sexxx Musik here.
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