It is that typical suburban high school story.
You’re about to go to college (you’ve just turned 18, by the way) but right before you can graduate, the teacher calls you and your mom (ok, stepmom) into the classroom and informs her that you’ve been caught cheating.
We thought Whitney Wright would be perfect for this new series.
Your future — your whole standing in the dwindling upper-middle-class, in fact — is the balance. The teacher says she can make it go away, though, if you make out with your stepmom.
“Not a chaste peck,” she insists, with a lewd, sarcastic grimace while she peels an apple with a switchblade knife right out of a 1950s James Dean juvenile delinquent flick. “I said fully make-out,” she demands. “With tongue!”
And so you acquiesce.
Ok, fine — this is only a typical suburban high school story maybe in the fevered imagination of some hentai anime creator. Or in the increasingly strange — and getting stranger with each new scene — world of Adult Time original programming.
“We thought Whitney Wright would be perfect for this new series,” explains Adult Time Chief Creative Officer Bree Mills, who oversees the creative slate of Gamma’s groundbreaking streaming service. Mills, of course, is also the multiple XBIZ Award-winning (including Director of the Year for 2018 and 2019) wunderkind responsible for introducing a sense of polished visual style and grounded acting into cliché-prone niches like “family play” (a.k.a. “fauxcest”) and “power play” (with her PureTaboo.com venture), movie parodies (via PT’s “Anne”) and other subgenres.
She has also recreated the successful “Black Mirror” formula of tech menace and creepily dystopian sci-fi for the adult industry with Future Darkly, the debut episode of which XBIZ exclusively covered in early 2018 (for “Artifamily” with Tommy Pistol and Jill Kassidy).
And then there is Whitney Wright, the one-of-a-kind performer who combines the strong acting skills that give her a range from nubile naiveté to full-blown psycho with a minimal expression change, with a deadpan wit and intelligence that have made her renowned on set as a purveyor of her own sexy/creepy/cool brand of porn star.
In fact, I’ve recently overheard the following conversation between two directors at an industry event:
“The character is this … this … weird kind of…”
“You mean a Whitney Wright-type?”
“Exactly!”
“Too bad there’s only one Whitney Wright-type — Whitney Wright!
Which brings us to the series Mills thought Wright would be perfect for: Adult Time’s “Lesbian Revenge,” a new offering to entice members into choosing the streaming platform, where they also get access to the entire 50,000-scene Gamma Entertainment catalog.
Wright is the director of record for “Parent-Teacher Trap,” the first installment of “Lesbian Revenge,” the afore-described playlet about the switchblade teacher, the cheating teen (who is very much of legally consenting age, having, as we said, just turned 18) and her oh-so-suffering stepmom.
She also wrote the scenario, which is “Pure Whitney” in its off-kilter, bonkers-adjacent perversity.
The performer will soon take the reins of the whole “Lesbian Revenge” series, comprised of six episodes, like a U.K. mainstream series or some prestige Netflix projects. But for the first episode, Executive Producer Mills is very much the Big Person on Set, coaching Wright into the intricacies of the Bree Mills School of Production (featuring Porn Script Theater and the #PowerOfActing).
“I’m shadowing,” jokes Wright, who has earned her directing stripes in scenes for MissaX.com and AllHerLuv.com, and is ready for the new challenge of a full-on Mills-approved series.
It seems redundant to explain the premise of a series called “Lesbian Revenge.” It’s of course a GG series (or oftentimes, as in this case, GGG). It’s also creepy, in line with a studio that describes most of its taboo-busting offerings as “gritty, dramatic and exploring the darker side of sexual pleasure.”
And there’s revenge, broadly understood as power dynamic play, in this case made very much explicit by that darn switchblade, slicing with menace all around that biblical apple.
“I’m suddenly hot for teacher,” says a crew member when Kendra James steps into the classroom set, a permanent fixture of this Valley “porn house,” and a symptom of how popular school scenarios are in age-play erotica.
James, a striking redhead with the sculptural, car-accident-causing physique that has existed in every era of porn, has been encased in a stern tailored-skirt-and-shirt set. In the makeup room she’s reserved but polite, taking a few moments to get at ease with the pre-shoot hubbub.
This guarded reticence contrasts with the expansive friendliness of the adult industry MILF extraordinaire playing stepmom, an immediately heartwarming Alexis Fawx. The amply bosomed Fawx laughs, shares stories about her permaculture classes and exchanges tips about local vintage and thrift stores with her castmates and this chronicler as soon as greetings are exchanged.
“Come, we’re doing this,” Fawx tells a bemused XBIZ representative, and drags us to a sunny patch outside where some roses are in full spring bloom.
“We are all taking photos smelling the roses,” a giddy Fawx confides, pulling out her phone and showing the rest of the cast and the crew nostril-deep into vibrantly colored petals.
After Fawx adds us to her collection (“yellow — you’d look good with the yellow ones”), we return to the makeup room where her fictional stepdaughter, Mackenzie Moss has sunk into a cocooning couch and is going through her Instagram.
Moss is a versatile blonde starlet in her mid-20s, very smart, Eastside-of-L.A. and Brooklyn-cool, who just happens to look like the most wholesome, crush-struck girl at a prom she really didn’t want to go to. There’s something of classic-period Molly Ringwald in her stance, both kitten-in-the-headlights seeming and inescapably headstrong. Her beauty is at once suburban and pre-Raphaelite, with a killer Silver Lake haircut that can be shaped into many meanings, not all of them delicate or unknowing.
Wright comes in, calling the performers for blocking. Mills explains her ideas about the scene to the cast and crew, who are sitting at the prop school desks, listening with studious expressions.
“OK, Mackenzie — explain to your stepmom why you guys have to do what this monster teacher is having you do.”
Moss goes into a perfect impression of a helicopter-parented, post-millennial kid who sees only a little harmless fauxcest standing between her pep squad present and the Ivy League.
“Mom! Just do what she says. Look — I’m about to graduate and this could ruin everything. I am 18 and going to college is…”
“OK guys,” laughs Mills. “Let’s try a softer variation.” She turns to Wright. “We have to make sure the ‘I am 18’ doesn’t sound too much like age verification compliance — which it is!”
Everyone laughs. Moss does a couple of joke takes where she mock-emotes, “But, moooooom, I am absolutely of legal age to make out with you, my stepmom, who’s no blood relation of mine.”
“Guys! Seriously!” Mills tells the actresses, swiftly regaining control of her troops.
“I generally find that my first choice is not the best, but I only figure that out after I see it on the monitor,” Mills explains to Wright, who looks like she’s etching every piece of advice into granite tablets inside her memory palace.
The cast has a few more questions and Wright clarifies the finer points of the twisted tale she has wrought. Mills is definitely making sure that her “shadow” is absorbing the Gamma Way. For future episodes of “Lesbian Revenge,” it’s just going to be the full Whitney, without training wheels.
“OK, ready?” Mills asks when the complicated choreography of how to go from PTA to full-on, three-way sucking-and-licking-and-writhing-and-cumming has been pre-arranged and explained to #NoTwitterMatty, Craven Moorehead, Curious Judas and the rest of the usual Gamma gang of tech pros.
Whitney looks at Mills, confused for a nanosecond, with the trademark Whitney Wright Big Eyes, which are Margaret Keane-painting level indeed.
“Oh,” she smiles. “Action!”
