[wordup] the birth of a pornographer

[Adam Shand]

This is fascinating, depressing and informational.  Again not so
standard word up fair anymore, but hey.

Adam.

From: http://www.jewishcheerleaders.com/journal.html

The journal thing

This is a new idea . . . me keeping a journal and such. The idea is that
I put it on line for folks to document my trials and tribulations in the
whole porn thing. I assume some other stuff will creep in there too. I'm
going to try not to edit myself too damn much but with the knowledge
that this is for others to read it will inevitably happen. Oh well. If
you want to really see the inside soul and guts of Sam Stern you'll have
to break into my house and creep through my bedroom and steal my huge
black sketchbooks and then get out a magnifying glass to decipher my
inexcusable fourth-grade scrawl. There, I'm totally honest, I can assure
you that.

I'm also not going to attempt to go back and write about the shit that's
already happened to me since I started making "adult videos" (wotta
euphimism. . I tried that one on my mom the other day and it didn't even
work on her. . . she laffed at me. . my own mom. . she was right of
course. . . "adult" is a bullshit term. . but "pornos" is a little crass
and sometimes doesn't describe what I'm doing either. . "FuckFlicks"
might work. . . although that's completely off bass with most of my
videos. . . anyway. . who cares. . point is that I'm not going to go
back and attempt to tell old stories. . just going to write out the
adventures at hand. So here goes. .
Saturday I drove my ass out to the valley, not for the first time and
lawd knows it won't be the last. I had to meet with Richard Daedalian,
who runs a thing called The Erotic Networks, which, among other things,
goes backstage at a lot of shoots and does "Behind the Scenes," or what
they refer to in the Biz as BTS. (Not to be confused with a FIP: Fake
Internal Pop. You know what that is? A fake internal pop? I didn't
either until Saturday; Daedalian explained to me that it's a fake orgasm
that they like to film for cable, to simulate an orgasm, because on
cable you can't show cock and sperm and things like that. So the fuckers
cling to each other with real believeable (winky wink) orgasm faces and
grind their genitals tightly together and clutch their plasticized
buttocks in heaven mode. And that's a FIP.) I got Daedalian's number by
basically begging this other bigwig in the industry, Kelly Holland, who
I met on Mike Horner's shoot back in February (my first entrance onto
the big LA scene, a few weeks after I moved into this gray fucked-up
amazing city), to get me some work or at least a good contact. She gave
me Herrera's number; I told him that Kelly thought I did good work
(although I never had technically worked for Kelly; had just bullshitted
about Max Hardcore while eating a burrito backstage; still, you go with
what you got, and if that ain't enough you embellish a tad.) So
Daedalian, after intimidating me for a while behind his big mahogany
desk, decides to give me a shot shooting BTS for this Sin City shoot,
which is tomorrow in North Hollywood. He's gonna pay me $200 bucks a
day, which is less than he normally pays but I wasn't exactly gonna turn
down his offer, if you know what I mean, especially since I probably
made about $400 or so during the whole month of March. March was not a
rich month for me. In fact it was the poorest month of my entire life,
if you want to know the truth. I got the little money that I had in the
weirdest ways, for example, by dancing at a gay bar on Santa Monica
Blvd, twice, for three hours a night, and getting paid $75. I got tipped
a little bit but not too much. They like a beefier type than me in the
gay bars. And a bigger-dicked type. Those fucking fags. Guilty of
discrimination. Tsk tsk tsk. They should know better. One man and his
boyfriend liked me a lot and tipped me sixteen dollars ("You're a hot
man," he said, fat and cute himself) but that was a rare case. I went
straight to Ralph's and bought some disgusting fried chicken at 2:00 in
the morning that night, eating it while steering with one hand as I
headed down east on Sunset in my lite blue (robin's egg blue) Volvo,
feeling rich because I had more than ten bucks in my pocket.

Being rich

So my whole existence is going to be very different, if I keep working
for Herrera (assuming I do a good job I think there's a lot of work from
this guy, not to mention there's another woman, Nicole London, a former
pornslut herself, who's promised me BTS work as well), I should be rich.
I don't mean rich, I mean comparitively rich. I have not had money since
this summer. I've been living month to month and more recently, day to
day. It has felt good, actually. New. And virtuous. And frustrating, and
scary, but overall I haven't minded it. It feels real. I started taking
care of myself about two years ago, when I graduated from college. Up to
that point, as much as it pains me to admit it, I was babied by my
parents. They took care of shit. It has been a gradual seperation from
them financially, but now I'm on my own (okay, they pay my medical
insurance. Goddammit I'm only 24. And I'm Jewish. Jews get babied a
little bit. We all know that) . And I like fending for myself and need
that - I need to feel like a man - but until recently I've not made
enough money, and have felt like I was losing the game, in some sort of
way. I don't like what people with money do or how they act generally,
but they have this air of success and confidence surrounding them that
appeals to me. Plus there is a lot of shit that I want. Food especially.
I want to go into Trader Joe's and scare those motherfuckers. I have
dreamt about food during these past two months, a lot. Also I need money
so I can start doing my own shoots more often. So let's see how the
whole money thing goes. If I can shoot Behind the Scenes five or ten
days a month, I'll be jammin'. Just jammin'.

Tomorrow

It should be pretty simple. All I have to do is get some simple
interviews with the sluts, I mean stars, and then shoot the sex, or
pieces of it, both "clean" and "dirty." The difference between clean and
dirty is that dirty has the crew, the cameraman and such, in the actual
frame - that's the "Behind the Scenes" part of it. So the viewer,
watching my footage, gets a sense of the scope of the entire project,
how it was made and such. It ain't a hard job. Basically all I have to
do is have a steady hand, make Daedalian happy, make him think that he
hasn't hired an idiot kid. I don't profess to be a great cameraman, or
even have an extremely steady hand; still, I've shot a lot of sex,
already, and I've even done Behind the Scenes work, back in February.
The best part of that episode was, actually, the fact that I made a lot
of contacts. I met Topanga on that shoot, and Dominica ( a very hot
Czech girl that I was planning to shoot, who bailed on me at the last
minute when she realized I didn't have my AIDS test; good for her), and
Kelly Holland, who got me this gig in the first place. So, I'm no fool.
I'll be looking for any contacts that make themselves available
tomorrow. It's something to do, at least; the sets can get pretty
fucking boring - I should be there for about ten hours tomorrow, at
least. I need to get a little bit better about flirting with the chicks.
I usually feel a little desexualized around these girls, which is
interesting. It's like I think that they usually deal with these big,
beefy, large dicked dudes. And then there's little old me - who really
looks young! That's the thing - I feel young around everyone - and I
guess I am young, at least in relation to what I'm doing (I'm older than
most of the girls, at least by a couple of years), and the annoying part
is that I tend to act it, a good part of the time. I guess that will
have to come with experience, and when I'm thirty, or forty, and I'm
directing whatever feature, I'll be able to say, "I've been in this
business forever, why, I was a green kid of 23 and was shooting behind
the scenes cumshots up Keri Windsor's ass with a piece of shit GL-1 ..."

Yeah, that's what I'll do.