Digital Underground Talk <I>Sex and The Studio</I>

Metro’s porn-rap crossover hit Sex and the Studio has spawned a sequel, which will be released in mid-October. Digital Underground’s Cleetis Mack and Money B, the brains behind the award-winning series, recently dropped by AVN’s offices and chopped it up about Sex and the Studio the marriage between hip-hop and porn and the origins of "sex packets."

AVN: Tell me about your new video.

Cleetis Mack: This is the Second Sex and the Studio. We’re taking the show on the road.

AVN.com: Which Hip-Hop stars are in this one?

Money B.: Episode 2 of Sex and the Studio features a plethora of superstars. We got Ludacris, Chingy, Xzibit, Mystikal, Bonecrusher, Coolio, Randy Jackson from the Jackson 5. Yes. Randy bared it all … well, he tells it all. He doesn’t bare it all.

Cleetis Mack: He gave us some of those old Jackson 5 stories that we knew were around. The list just goes on and on and on. We have the whole hip-hop industry in this movie.

AVN:What’s the Premise behind Sex and the Studio 2?

CM: The premise behind Sex and the Studio 2 is taking the show on the road. Like, we did episode one, then we went on tour, and, during the tour, we decided to shoot episode two. So we took our show on the road. And that’s the title of it, Taking the Show on the Road.

MB: We went to San Diego Las Vegas, Seattle, New York, Miami, Atlanta and we topped it off with Brazil, which you have to do.

CM: Rio De Janeiro.

AVN: Was the porn shot on the road or here in LA?

CM: We shot the sex for Sex in the Studio 2 in several different places. Mainly L.A., although we did some sex scenes in Rio DeJaniero. We did one in Miami … did a little moving around, but basically, the sex happened in LA, and the parties kind of happened everywhere else. That’s what you find in the movie. So if it just happened to happen, like, two girls going down on each other on the road, we got it. The set-up sex was in L.A. The just-happening sex was all over.

AVN: Is there a lot of spontaneous sex in the video?

CM: A lot of real close to. (Laughter)

AVN: Did you handpick the female stars?

CM: Yes. We definitively handpicked the female stars.

Click here for the gallery.
TRAILER: Sex and the Studio 2
AVN: Which Girls?

CM: We have Nikita Denise in Episode 2; she was handpicked. We have four beautiful Brazilian girls that we went through a whole Brazilian database to find. And we still didn’t find the best-looking ones, and we still didn’t find what we wanted. So we had to go out in Brazil and actually find the girls we wanted. A lot of them were first-timers.

AVN: That must have been a hard day at work.

CM: Oh, man, it was crucial.

MB: We have Nyomi Marcela, Mia Smiles.

AVN: Can you give me a highlight from the video?

CM: Well, our biggest-selling album was Sex Packets, and a lot of people wanted to know what a sex packet was, and what was the whole story behind it, so we re-enacted it for Sex and the Studio Part 2. We gave a demonstration of what sex packet is and what it will do for you, and because we decided to pull out a sex packet of the Asian collection, we had Nyomi Marcela and Mia Smiles come down there.

AVN: What’s a sex packet?

MB: Sex packet were developed in the Bay Area in the late ’80s, early ’90s. To put it in a nutshell, it was a pill you take to induce a wet dream. So the picture that you got on the packet was the person you would have sex with. The last person or anything that you saw before you fell out was the person who would come. They had to ban it because the last thing you saw was who you had sex with, so if you took one and your mom busts in, you’d have sex with your mom, or if your cat ran by… so it got kind of crazy. It was a real underground thing that was really going on in the Bay. We put a little on top of it, but there really was a thing called sex packet.

AVN: Can you still get sex packets?

MB: It would be hard trying to get a sex packet now. It was a fad thing, like I said, in the early ’90s. It got a little dangerous, and that turned people off on it. There’s still some light forms of it, without going into the things that we do. But there are alternatives to the sex packets.

CM: We’re pretty close to one of the doctors who developed the pill, so we still have a little inside on it, so if we really had to get one, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too far fetched for us to grab one.

MB: But being around all these beautiful porn stars all day long, who needs it? I got live sex packets.

AVN: Why do you think Hip-Hop and porn have been going together so well over the last say five or six years?

CM: Hip Hop is porn. Hip Hop and porn have been going together so successfully because of the attraction to each other. Musicians love porn stars, and porn stars love musicians. It’s an infatuation with each other. Like Money B always says: “We keep the same hours.”

MB: It’s the same lifestyle. We always hanging out, drinkin’ and partying.

AVN: So you hang out with porn stars outside your professional associations?

CM: Always have.

MB: It’s kind of hard not to bump into them.

CM: We hang out, hang on and hang off.

MB: We bump into ’em. Bump bump bump.

AVN: What about rock guys, will they participate in this?

CM: We’re going to do a rock and roll edition of Sex and the Studio. Probably around episode seven. We’re doing an alternative and a rock edition. We’ve been reaching out to a few a people, and there are definitely a few people willing to come in, sit down and tell us their stories and maybe even get a little freaky on camera. Rock stars are the wildest. Makes the Hip-Hop concert look like church when you go to a rock and roll concert. Rock stars, we envy them. We can’t even party like they do. We don’t even have the budgets to party like rock stars.

MB: Look out for the country-western episode of Sex and the Studio. It’s happening. Tim McGraw gettin’ raw. It’s happening.

CM: We got Randy Travis and Garth Brooks gonna do a DP.

MB: Ride like a cowboy. That’s how they do.

AVN: I heard you have a light jazz Sex and the Studio coming up with Winton Marsalis.

CM: Yeah.

MB: Those guys are horny. And some of them like to blow.

AVN: Tell me about the soundtrack.

CM: Oh my god, the soundtrack is amazing.

MB: Each episode of Sex and the Studio, the VHS and DVD, includes a full-length soundtrack. It’s all exclusive songs. It usually includes our crew, Digital Underground, and other name artists. Like in this, we’ve had Razz Kazz The Loonies. For anyone into underground we’ve got Planet Asia, Alcoholics, and of course the whole Digital Underground family. If you check it out, you’re gonna hear some exclusive music. The CD comes with the DVD, so it’s an added bonus. Two discs: DVD and CD.

AVN: When does it hit the streets?

CM: It’s set for release in mid-October.

Rappers in the video include Ludacris, Xzibit, Chingy, Mystikal, Coolio, Bonecrusher, AMG, Numskull of The Luniz, DJ Premier of Gang Starr, while sex scene performers include Mia Smiles, Nyomi Arman, Nikita Denise, Mr. Marcus, Domineko and four Brazilian starlets shot in Rio de Janeiro.

In this edition, the Sex and the Studio tour bus takes to the road, stopping off at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, the Bunny Ranch and nightclubs in Atlanta, Miami, Seattle and San Diego. The DVD will have an expanded collection of extras, including more interviews and on the road footage, plus outtakes and bloopers. An audio CD of 17 original songs from the movie will be packaged with the DVD as a bonus disc.

The gonzo-style feature was directed by Cleetis Mack, with music supervision by Money B. Both are members of the legendary Oakland Hip-Hop posse Digital Underground, the group that discovered Tupac and released the seminal album Sex Packets.