Because it does, doesn’t it? When Michael
had the idea to make his own website, every single person he knew thought he
was going insane. But what they weren’t thinking about was the time he had
wasted on so many other projects that had only failed one after the other. He
had gone to law school but he had never been hired by a proper firm, only as an
intern and they had told him, in very few words, that he should be as far from
the word of law as he could. It was a bit brutal back then but he understood what
they meant. In any case, he had tried to make anything and everything in order
to be his own man and have a life of his own, to make his parents proud.
Because what he wanted was to repay them for all their efforts to raise him.
Michael opened a cupcake store, which had to
close only a month after it opened because absolutely no one bought anything.
He had learned how to bake for several months and it all when to the trashcan
in a matter of days. Then, he decided to team up with a buddy from college and
open a dog walking business. They did everything an owner could want like
bathing them and walking them, doing exercises and so on but they failed
miserably once his partner let one of the dogs escape and the owner sued him
for it. Michael had also tried to make it in the call center world but they
told him in the interview his voice was not the right one for the job and in a
Burger King they told him he was tall enough, but they failed to tell him what
his height had to do with anything.
So many tries and failures had made him a
little bit bitter and more of a loner that ever before. He had never been the
kind to go out a lot or something like that. He would prefer to stay home and
watch movies. So maybe that’s when the idea came to him. Like any man his age,
he watched porn from time to time, when being specially aroused. He had never
really paid any attention to the movie as such, only to the act they were
performing. He must have been really bored that day because he remembered
thinking it all look so fake, so prepared and too rushed for his taste. It was
gay porn by the way, for reasons not worth explaining as they explain
themselves.
The thing was he watched the same clip, which
was about fifteen minutes long, like ten times. He watched every single part
with detail and then realized sex sells. It was that easy and he had never
thought about it. But then he realized he hadn’t thought of it because of how
people perceived pornography, no matter if it was between two men, two women or
a straight couple. If you said that you worked in porn, must people would think
you’re a pervert or that you just want to be having sex all day long and that’s
not what it is and that was something Michael understood that night, when he
decided to properly investigate.
So, must of the films done in the country were
low budget and that’s why their production was such garbage. He knew the video
he saw must have been made with a handheld camera and some sort of small
microphone and not much else. He investigated further and found out these
productions companies, which normally only made very few clips a year, sold
what they did to larger companies in the United States and there they were
marketed online or, not very often, in sex shops all around that country. But
that had to imply to movie was good because if it wasn’t people would make it
here and just sell it here or upload it online or something. The thing with all
of this was to win money and to make it a proper business, to make it a proper
job with everything correctly labeled.
The next thing for Michael was to find the
money for it. He had some savings from his earlier jobs and knew he could
convince some of his friends but before that he had to have an idea in order to
sell it properly. He came up with a film called “The spy”. At first, it seemed
like some ridiculous thing but then you realized it had everything a person
would want in a movie: sex, drama and even a bit of romance and comedy. He
wrote it with the help of a friend that went to film school. His name was
George and he was the first person to tell him how insanely great his idea was.
He promised to help Michael with cameras and lights and so on if the movie got
made but, as a student, he had no money to share with him to do the movie.
Michael decided to pitch it to every person he
knew, no matter if the movie was gay porn or if he want it to do it in a way he
had never seen porn being made. Most people just looked at him as if he had
turned insane in mid sentence. Others were interested but only because it
seemed like such a crazy idea. And the only people that were on board, two men
and a girl from George’s film school, told Michael they could help with the
production and give only a small amount of money. It was a beginning but they
needed much more in order to make the movie as such. He tried to remove things
from the script and George got the cheapest but best camera he could find at
that price and they still weren’t close.
Their next step was to go to the local
production companies and offer them a place in the movie if they had money to
invest. But all of them were very harsh; telling them you just couldn’t get in
into an industry and try to change out of nowhere. They told them they had to
have experience and a way of doing things that wasn’t too out there because in
porn, differently than in movies, people just wanted the same thing that they
had always seen and no one would invest in a movie that, in appearance, seemed
to be more like an art film than a porno. Michael was disappointed but George told
him most people in cinema were just like that, as they hated competition
specially when the competition was good.
Their last resource was to get financing from
abroad. So Michael wrote hundreds of emails and sent them all the same day,
hoping to be shooting the movie soon. In the mean time, they had created
profiles for the characters and, to make things cheap, they had decided that
everyone in the crew would appear on the movie but without getting paid, only
their names on the credits. One month passed and it was a long wait. Michael
was beginning to lose hope but George always tried to cheer him up, trying to
make him focus in things about the movie they had not yet thought about like
lighting, costumes, makeup and so on.
Finally, when all hope had been lost, Michael
received a letter, a proper physical letter, from one of the biggest production
companies in the United States. They had agreed to finance the movie but only
if it was done according to certain standards they had, mostly things they could
agree on easily on a contract. The next month, it was all about flying to Los
Angeles and signing the contract. There, an executive told Michael that his
vision for pornography was very interesting and that, if the film was a
success, they could be thinking about working with him again. They were so
happy that day, that George and Michael had a nice dinner to celebrate and, at
the end of it, they shared their first kiss ever. They realized right there;
they had feelings for each other.
But production started days after that so they
put all their focus on the movie. They got some good looking but different guys
to participate in the movie as actors and they shot it in the streets of their
cities, except the sex scenes of course. For those, George’s friend Alexa had a
thing for everything related to art direction. She transformed a room in an old
house owned by Michael’s grandparents into a perfect replica of what Michael
had imagined for the movie. It was supposed to be the place were the two lovers
escaped to be together, away from all the looks. The scenes when they had sex
were incredibly easy to film and they even got some money from a condom company
because they would show a close up to one of the wrappers.
Filming lasted for a whole month and, at the
end, they had a great party to celebrate their success. They announced that a
friend of George’s that had already graduated was going to make the editing of
the film. He was very good and told George he wanted to be part of the film.
The production company sent a guy to monitor their progress and everything went
as planned. Another party was held when the movie was displayed as a “new
feature” on the website of the production company. In only one week, a million
people paid to see it. The movie was an absolute success all over the world,
making the actors stars and the crew simply heroes.
They would be hired again for more movies, one
of them being a proper sequel to “The spy”. George and Michael began dating and
eventually got engaged. They never moved to the United States, even at the
insistence of their job. They knew what they did was special because it had
another scent to it, if you will. Michael was proud of his achievement and
shared it with everyone. Some people left his life but others were just proud
of him too, even his parents who wouldn’t see the film but celebrated it all
the same.
