“We don’t have enough time. We just have to keep going.”
That’s director Casey Calvert, talking to XBIZ on the set of the new Lust Cinema feature “Going Up” in early May 2022, several days into the 14-day production. A full crew of set dressers, production assistants and camera ops swarms onstage and through the backstage corridors in an actual, functioning Southern California community theater whose exact location will be discreetly omitted from this chronicle. With not a white pleather couch or massive ring light in sight, the location — evocative of “Waiting for Guffman” — is frankly novel for a 2022 adult feature.
It’s about different ways people move through a space as opening night gets closer as anxiety speeds up over time.
“We just don’t have enough time,” she repeats, surveying the small army of workers racing all around her to bring her vision to the screen. "Man vs. Time — one of the classic conflicts in storytelling.
“Also, another big theme: Everything is going wrong,” she adds, her signature dark eyes alert but noticeably tired behind black-rimmed glasses.
But is she talking about the production now swirling all around us, or about the plot of “Going Up”?
Both, it turns out. And in both cases, the show must go on.
Two months before “Going Up” was due to start shooting, Calvert suffered what she and her friends and fans have since come to refer to as “The Concussion.”
“It was an on-set accident working on an indie production at the beginning of March,” Calvert tells XBIZ. “I was in the middle of writing this ‘theater movie’ for Lust, as we were calling it, and we were doing preproduction. That’s when I suffered The Concussion.”
The Concussion derailed Calvert’s quality of life for months, including the bulk of production and post-production on “Going Up.” It didn’t help that she was initially misdiagnosed, resulting in multiple spells of memory loss and debilitating “brain fog” for the usually workaholic performer-writer-director.
“This theater had been booked in early February for May 2, and that was unchangeable,” she explains, emphasizing the last word. “It was what it was, and we decided not to change it, also because I had booked the leads back in February and I really wanted this specific cast. It hasn’t been an easy process.” “Woman vs. Time,” then.
Nevertheless, when XBIZ visits the set, Calvert seems her usual multitasking self, equally minding the technical aspects of film-making and making sure her cast members are comfortable, prepared and ready to go. But other days have been rockier, she confides.
“The Concussion definitely affected me during the writing of this movie,” Calvert says. “It has affected the directing to a lesser extent, after I got diagnosed properly. The first week I brought a blanket to set, in case I had to take a nap. But I didn’t have to.”
The show went on.
Lust Cinema originally asked its exclusive contract director and lead American auteur for a musical, so Calvert started working on a project with original songs, alongside her professional and life partner, Bryn Pryor. The collaborators played with the time-tested trope of “a musical about putting on a musical,” but at some point the music angle was dropped completely and the shooting script mutated into an anxiety-driven movie about a community theater troupe encountering ever-mounting obstacles leading to the opening night of a play.
“It’s about different ways people move through a space as opening night gets closer,” she explains. “As anxiety speeds up over time, the problems get bigger and greater.”
The community theater and the “Everything’s going wrong” theme were indeed inspired by Christopher Guest’s 1996 quirky cult satire “Waiting for Guffman,” while the frantic pace, real-time stakes and Steadicam-meandering-through-endless-backstage-corridors aesthetic owe a debt of inspiration to the very eccentric, unlikely 2015 Oscar winner for best picture, “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” directed by Alejandro Iñárritu.
Another inspirational touchstone was the 2015 Disney/Pixar animated film “Inside Out.” “Going Up” centers around a play-within-the-movie titled “The Voices Are Loud” — an actual play by co-screenwriter Pryor, featuring several characters personifying emotions.
“Bryn wrote an actual play!” enthuses Calvert. “But we only get to see a bit of the first act and we hear a little of the second act in ‘Going Up.’ We only see them rehearsing the play. Our film ends with the curtain going up.”
The Southern California community theater location doubles for a fictional town in North Florida, the region where Calvert grew up. The Southern setting is not merely nostalgic; it also allows the script to incorporate social commentary about race and racism, different sexualities and even the role of the arts in a sometimes hostile environment. After all, this is a troupe that has decided to stage an avant-garde play with abstract characters in a small-town community theater.
At the center of the tension and drama in “Going Up” is Travis, a busboy and amateur actor who has been tapped to replace the star of the show, Dominic, who has dropped out at the last minute. Calvert wrote the role specifically to showcase the acting range of Seth Gamble.
“I really wanted him to play against his post-‘Perspective’ type,” Calvert says. “Most people cast Seth as a cool, suave guy, or as a bad guy who’s creepy and sinister — a secret psychopath. I really wanted to see him play an insecure guy who’s in over his head. I wanted to give him a challenge.”
Although the insecurity of Gamble’s character drives most of the tension leading up to the final moment when the curtain is “going up,” Calvert cleverly switched up expectations during the climactic sixth and final sex scene. It’s a reverse gangbang dream sequence, visually inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and centered around the missing piece of the “Going Up” puzzle: the man who wasn’t there, Dominic, played by Isiah Maxwell.
“The chaos of opening night is Dominic’s fault,” Calvert explains. “It’s because of him that everything is going wrong. His wife saw the play, and she flipped out about the content of the show and pulled him out of it.”
And so Travis the busboy must step up.
“Seth surprised me,” Calvert adds. “His willingness to be vulnerable on camera and the subtlety of his performance were just amazing.”
Gamble is joined in the core cast by Victoria Voxxx as Eliza, the stage manager; Maya Woulfe as Susanna, a stagehand; Tyler Knight as Shaun the director, a non-sex role; and
Charlotte Sartre as Michelle, the lead actress in the play. “Charlotte also amazed me,” Calvert says. “She auditioned and had a supporting role but when I saw what she could do, I literally rewrote the part of Michelle for her. She’s at a whole other level — she’s a technician about her acting. She is able to give you modulations of a single word that change the whole meaning of a line.”
But the world of “Going Up” goes way beyond those five co-leads. There are 24 speaking parts, including both sex and non-sex roles.
“We are neck-and-neck with Gamma’s ‘Women’s World’ for number of actors in an enormous project,” Calvert jokes, alluding to Adult Time’s recent lesbian mega-extravaganza.
The other actors in “The Voices Are Loud” include Sonia Harcourt, Kira Noir, Lilly Bell, Derrick Pierce, Kyle Reed, Rusty Shackleford and Alice White. Playing the production staff of the play are Ryan Keely, Brad Newman, Apryl Rein, Regan Humphrey, Lief Bound, Luke Auyes and Mandy Slade.
Anna Claire Clouds, Moe Reese and Calvert herself, playing a reporter, round out the huge cast.
“This is the biggest project that I’ve done in terms of budget and scope,” Calvert notes. “We had a very lengthy audition process. I asked for video auditions and I got like a million!”
Since Calvert started her ongoing collaboration with Lust Cinema, many adult performers who like acting, or were theater kids or are still involved in community theater, have realized that hers are very actor-friendly projects. Some familiar faces have become mainstay performers for Calvert, with Victoria Voxxx and Maya Woulfe being to her productions what DeNiro or DiCaprio are to Scorsese’s.
“People are starting to call them ‘The Casey Calvert Players,’ which I kind of hate!” the director laughs. “But I cannot lie — I absolutely have a stable of go-to people I love working with. And there’s a very good reason for that: my filmmaking style calls for a certain kind of performance and people like Victoria or Maya always bring it. Still, I like keeping an eye out for new people and I’ve developed a system of open auditions. Whenever people reach out to me and want to work with me, I ask them to get something on tape and I enter them into a database of possible candidates for future roles.
“On top of everything, I also have become my own casting agent,” she adds with mock exhaustion. “Almost all of the audition tapes I get are amazing, though. I see potential in almost all of them.”
After two seasons of “Primary,” her innovative, sprawling take on both polyamory and Netflix-style 20- and 30-something episodic storytelling, Calvert decided it was time for a break before tackling season three.
“I wanted to let ‘Primary’ settle a bit,” she tells XBIZ. “I felt that if I jumped straight into season three this year, people were going to pigeonhole me and say, ‘That’s Casey — she does ‘Primary.’ That wasn’t enough for me, although I love ‘Primary’ and its world. But I wanted to grow as a filmmaker, try new things.”
“Primary,” the director notes, “has a very specific mumblecore aesthetic. ‘Going Up’ definitely does not. And neither does my other big project this year, ‘Sorrow Bay.’
“I feel like 2022 is the year I’ve expanded my cinematic language,” Calvert concludes, as her cinematographer and camera operators and assistants race behind the Steadicam towards the bowels of a nondescript community theater somewhere among the strip malls of Southern California, doubling for suburban Florida.
The show must go on — and it does.
