Popshots Over America: Shooting Porn Outside Southern California

Whatever you do, don’t call it Runaway Production.

Porn Valley is so similar to its Hollywood counterpart in so many ways that it’s easy to forget the ways it’s different. For example, we can draw parallels to casting couches and the perils of piracy, hackiness (Hello!) and auteurism, people in it for the art and people in it for the paycheck, and the various rigors and perks of living in a ‘company town,’ like Emmy swag bags for the Hollywood people and the opportunity to get thrown off that Instagram guy’s roof for the pornographers.

But with Measure B, the recent condom law in L.A. County (passed in November, 2012 by a margin of 14 percentage points) and A.B. 1576, which would seek to take the condoms-in-porn law statewide, many porn companies have given serious consideration to moving to Las Vegas, where shooting porn is still illegal but Who Cares: It’s Vegas! (see: prostitution) or New Hampshire, where shooting porn is as legal as it is in California but Jesus Christ: It’s New Hampshire.

But whereas the spiritual heart of the Hollywood movie industry is (well, not in Hollywood, but, you know, in Burbank and around the Fairfax District, and Santa Monica, etc.) centered around Los Angeles, porn’s great strength and weakness is that it can be shot anywhere, and by anyone; in the same way that Lasky’s Famous Players set up shop in dusty L.A. in the early 20th century and found the climate beneficial, porn can thrive anywhere that boobs are appreciated. It just so happened that Southern California reached critical turgidity for porn producers in the 1970s and, following California v. Freeman in the late 1980s, had no reason to leave.

Until now. While even local law enforcement agencies and judicial review boards view Measure B and A.B. 1576 as ridiculous at worst, unenforceable at least, and a pain in the ass at best, both legal obstacles represent a growing threat to Porn Valley’s sovereignty.

(If you have stowed away on the Space Shuttle Endeavour for the past few years, both bills were sponsored by The AIDS Healthcare Foundation and marketed with false information about HIV danger in the San Fernando Valley porn industry, a trumped-up threat of porn stars introducing AIDS to the general population, and a subsequent drain of public funds to support the AIDS-ridden porn industry. Bullshit.)

But while everyone who watches HBO knows that you come to the Valley to be a porn star, don’t forget that the Florida, San Francisco, and Arizona porn industries are also significant employers, not to mention unlikely North Carolina, home to both Adam & Eve and AEBN, a VOD provider.‘San Francisco isn’t just an alternative to L.A. in terms of an aesthetic,’ says Andrew Magnus, writer of ‘Marriage 2.0,’ an epic set in the Bay Area for Adam & Eve, ‘the whole city is much more open to sexual exploration, whereas L.A. seems to find its sexuality in small pockets.’

It?s true. Between Kink in San Francisco and InSex in Oakland, several locations of Good Vibrations, the Center for Positive Sexuality, Bawdy Storytelling, the Folsom Street Fair, the heart of both gay male porn and queer porn, the Bay Area is where porn is more an integral part of the cultural fabric of the community.

But if San Francisco and L.A. are uneasy porn siblings, both are nosing around Las Vegas for the same reason.

‘Las Vegas has been a real pleasure to shoot in,’ says Lee Roy Myers of Woodrocket Productions. Myers directed numerous parodies for New Sensations, Adam & Eve, and DreamZone before hanging out his own shingle and moving to Vegas full time and officially in January, 2014. ‘The whole town is so much more welcoming than L.A. was.’

How so?

‘In L.A. you got the feeling that if you weren’t with Warner Brothers or Sony, if you wanted to shoot in some place other than a rented mansion or the Hustler studio, that the whole town was against you. In Vegas it is so easy to get [film] permitted, and locations don’t gouge you.’

Myers says that his own living expenses are half of what they were in Los Angeles, that aside from the Strip traffic is comparatively non-existent, and that the frank understanding of the sex trade all make shooting in Las Vegas a breath of fresh air.

‘The down side is that the roots of the porn industry are still in Southern California,’ he says. ‘And it costs money to move. We are still flying people in. But we’ve got major (Porn Valley and San Francisco) companies renting our space, and I predict the majority of porn performers to be out here next year.’

Plus, Myers says, ‘Vegas is a town built on mining, gambling, drinking, and prostitution. It’s created a real interesting history. Don’t get me wrong,’ he concedes, ‘I miss the beach’ not that I ever get to go ‘and the greenery, but that might just be my Canadian-ness coming out.’

Slightly inland from the stern-looking-but-when-you-get-right-down-to-it-much-calmer Atlantic Ocean, Colin Rowntree gets up to all kinds of nastiness with Wasteland.com, a venerable family of bondage sites that have, since 1994, justified its claim to being ‘the Darker Side of the Web.’

To Franklin County Court Security Officer Robert Theriault do we owe thanks for making the shooting of pornography legal in the great state of New Hampshire. Theriault approached an attractive young couple in a parking lot (he’d first spotted them paying fines at his day job) and asked if he could film them having sex. They told one of their moms, who reported Theriault. Theriault was charged with soliciting prostitution, but his lawyers argued that the charge was overbroad. In December, 2008, the State Supreme Court of New Hampshire agreed.

But wait. Hasn’t Wasteland been shooting since 1994?

‘It’s Live Free or Die here,’ says Rowntree. ‘Some dope takes his case to the Supreme Court and they reluctantly agree, but we mind our Ps and Qs here. We don’t take our porn stars out to look like porn stars to the Dennys afterward like you do in Los Angeles.’

So no propositions in parking lots. Got it.

‘Right,’ says Rowntree. ‘If it’s blatantly in your face, it’s gonna stink.’ So what would a pornified New Hampshire look like‘Culturally it would be unfathomable,’ says porn star Ashley Fires, who lives in New Hampshire, shoots a little there, but travels to more porn-friendly locations throughout the year. ‘We were looking for a studio recently (in New Hampshire) and were about to close on it when I opened up my big dumb mouth and said what it would be used for. So remember that porn is legal here. And then the guy said `No.’

‘The standard-issue porn star would not fit in socially in New Hampshire,’ adds Rowntree. ‘They’d need mullets and flannel shirts. We use a covered bridge now and then and there’s a little rocky beach over in Portsmouth. Not exactly porn material right there.’

Not in five years, ten years?

‘Only if you like moose,’ says Rowntree.

So we have one state where porn is legal and brazen, but under attack. A city Las Vegas where both porn and prostitution are illegal but Come On, It’s Vegas, and a state that might not have a stomach for porn but it will be damned if it will let you tell it what to do. A fascinating tapestry.