When I was in high school in the 1980s, goths all of a sudden became a thing. People who were punks or normies the week before, one day started wearing tons of dark eyeliner and mascara — the girls and the boys — and oversized black T-shirts, smoking cloves and trading in their Clash and Springsteen tapes for Bauhaus, Siouxsie and The Cure. A lot of The Cure.
“And,” gossiped the horrified punks and normies who had been Left Behind in the Great Goth Rapture of 1987, “they break into cemeteries and have sex on the tombstones!”
For most movies, I am casting while I’m writing. I decide what look I’m going for with the character and envision talent that fits that look.
Fast forward to 2019, and I'm standing in a bleak graveyard somewhere between warehouses and shops in the greater Los Angeles area — the vagueness is deliberate — waiting for Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake to begin masturbating her grief away while leaning on a tombstone over her beloved’s fresh grave.
“This whole thing is goth as fuck,” says makeup artist Jenna Valentine, herself a proud gothicist IRL. “I’m as dead inside as the corpses on the ground,” she jests, inside a totally incongruous big-Hollywood production makeup trailer that director Brad Armstrong has somehow managed to park in a not-too-visited part of the cemetery.
Wicked Pictures’ auteur Brad Armstrong is popping in and out of trailer, leading his small crew, including lensman Barrett Blade, producer David Lord and Master of All Drone Shots Curious Judas, from setup to setup.
Unlike the goths of my teenage years, though, Armstrong has not broken into this cemetery. He has legit rented it for a few key sequences of “Lost Love,” his collaboration with partner Jessica Drake, which has been described to me as “a cross between an M. Night Shyamalan horror-with-a-twist story and a spiritual meditation on loss.”
“Cemeteries are particularly hard to find, especially for adult films,” Armstrong tells me, grabbing some snacks from the well-appointed craft services table set up by the trailer. “I used to have a really nice one out in Altadena where I shot ‘Fallen,’ ‘Eternity,’ ‘Falling From Grace’ and a number of other movies.”
“They stopped taking adult shoots about eight years ago,” he continues. “I was worried I was going to have to fake it in someone’s big backyard, but luckily we found a new one.”
Laughing, he adds, “But cemeteries do not come cheap,” as his crew tries to find a sightline that avoids the very few visitors who come in to leave flowers for their dearly departed ones, or to have a picnic — yes, a full-on picnic — among the decaying memorial stones.
Drake looks particularly stunning in her mourning black, sunglasses and stoic expression. She’s not fully in character, De Niro-style, but she’s also not the usual, warm Jessica Drake. She wanders among the graves, silent and stern, her signature blonde coiffure haloed by a particularly gloomy Southern California sky.
“How much extra did you pay them for the gothic weather?” I ask Armstrong, who confesses he’s “a little weirded out” by stepping on the graves. Fortunately, the script calls for a day shoot.
“I’m not really a ghost kinda guy,” says Armstrong, “but I’m sure I’d be looking over my shoulder a bunch if we were shooting the cemetery at night.”
Drake is quietly sharing a pre-shot moment with co-stars Small Hands and Jessie Lee, two tattooed, beleathered apparitions who look like siblings from the Beyond. They shoot a few moody selfies and polaroids among the dead.
It’s a powerful contrast, their new-school style of edgy porn presentation, pioneered by Small Hands’ partner Joanna Angel, which is now a part of the mainstream epitomized by Drake’s much more traditional “porn star” looks.
Drake, however, has transcended her “contract girl” origins and has managed to blaze her own trail as a performer. In fact, her poise has much in common with the glamorous style of classic Hollywood.
Among the tombstones, perfectly encased in her mourning suit and hiding something inscrutable and grieving behind those intimidating shades, she reminds me of a composite of several Hitchcock femmes mystérieuses, a Kim Novak starring in “Family Plot” perhaps.
“For most movies, I am casting while I’m writing,” Armstrong tells me. “I decide what look I’m going for with the character and envision talent that fits that look. I like to picture myself hearing specific people saying the words as I write.”
It helps, of course, to have a close personal and professional relationship with a one-of-a-kind superstar like Drake. She is still big — it’s the clips and iPhones that have gotten small.
Earlier in the day, Armstrong and his crew shot a brief funeral scene, complete with casket, flowers, a minister and a crowd of mourners that included cameos by several recognizable adult faces like Vera King, Norah Nova and Sailor Luna. Co-star Penny Pax is at the funeral, unlike Kira Noir and Donnie Rock, who are not on call for what everyone calls “cemetery day.”
Ryan Driller, dapper as usual in a suit and playing a central character in Drake’s descent into the Dark M. Night of the Soul (we are keeping this account as spoiler-free as possible), jokes around by the casket, but the vibe is tense. Cemeteries have a certain elusive power that makes some people get really quiet and others nervously giddy.
“Aside from cemeteries, I’ve shot in 100-year-old houses that were supposed to be haunted, I’ve shot meatpacking plants and I’ve shot some middle-of-nowhere desert locations,” says Armstrong. “They all have their own brand of ‘weird.’ But by far the spookiest location was the old abandoned Linda Vista Hospital. Totally, totally creepy…” he trails off.
After the coffin is put away and the “mourners” pick up their extra checks and leave to cheerier locales, it’s finally time for Drake’s spooky masturbation scene.
Like any production, be it indie, blockbuster or adult, the shoot tenses up when the sun starts heading towards a different hemisphere. It’s now a race to get Drake’s “girl pop shot” before night arrives.
“All our scenes at the cemetery take place during the day and we have a very full shoot schedule,” says Armstrong, “so our timing has to be pretty spot on. For production the sun is either your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how much you got in the can.”
I ask Drake if having to be highly sexed-up in an actual cemetery is especially difficult for her as a performer, but she is fully immersed in the spiritual journey of her character and perfectly justifies the scene in terms of what the grieving widow is going through. The film, after all, is being sold as “an engrossing look into the grieving process and how it affects emotions, relationships and lives.”
It might also help a bit that the exact gravestone where she will lean as she fingers herself into what the French call “the little death” is actually a prop.
“Most of the time when we do cemetery shoots, we need to bring some ‘hero stones’ with us, both out of respect for the deceased and their families,” explains Armstrong. “In this case, our contract stated that there’d be no close-ups on names on the stones.”
With “Lost Love,” the winning Armstrong-Drake partnership goes even deeper into story-based erotica that explores complex emotions within a genre framework. Drake describes her experience during the shoot as “too intense, too painful and too close to home.”
Watching her get fully in character under a desolate tree in a gritty urban cemetery, immediately before her exhibitionistic take on the alchemy between sex and death, is an indelible image indeed.
And, yes — it is goth as fuck.
