PORN VALLEY NORTH—AVN caught up with top director B. Skow on the set of his latest feature, Temptation, which features Girlfriends Films contract star Prinzzess as a young Amish adult undergoing her "Rumspringa" in a house full of lesbians, and asked him what else he's currently got in the works, all of which will be releasing under his Skow for Girlfriends Films imprint.
"The movie that I'm working on and editing right now is a Jessie Andrews thing, Gardener," Skow told us. "It's about a girl who's kidnapped at a young age and kept confined until she was an adult, and about a guy who's obsessed with growing flowers and he was a mental patient; he took it to a limit where he wanted to grow this girl and when she was of age, he wanted to impregnate her and make a perfect baby. And it's a really odd sort of thing. It's based on the story of the girl from Northern California, but I didn't want to criticize that person or be rude to that girl, what she went through, so it's totally imaginary. It's me and David [Stanley, Skow's frequent scripter] going to the ends of my imagination and, you know, we just took the idea of someone doing that and went into their head and tried to make it really insane, and make the sex work for itself.
"Kurt Lockwood plays the insane guy; he's playing a really different character than you've ever seen him," Skow continued. "It's fun and it's different, and the cast is amazing. Jessie Andrews was good—good in a way where, like, she didn't have a ton of dialog, and you see those movies from Hollywood that don't have a ton of dialog, but she's a great face actor; she's really artistic. She was amazing to work with; she had a great eye for things, and she was really into it, so it was fun. It also had all the girls I like to use right now. A.J. Applegate and Karla Kush both gave really good performances. The best of the best right now are in that movie."
Skow and Stanley have one of the best working relationships in the business. Both used to direct for Vivid Entertainment, and while Stanley has moved on to other opportunities in the Midwest and Skow is about to re-up his contract with Girlfriends for a third year, he told us how he works with Stanley to come up with the movies that won Skow this year's AVN award for Best New Line, not to mention last year's Best New Production Company award for the short-lived Skow Digital.
"I think our process has been, for the boy/girl stuff, a lot of times I'll have a topic or I'll get into something, and then we'll talk it out, we'll sit on the phone for an hour or so, and we both think a lot alike, and it's weird," Skow explained. "It's almost like, I'll call him up and tell him, 'I just saw a one-legged deer,' and he'll be right along with it: 'Oh, yeah! And we could GoPro that limb and follow it—" and no matter what we say to each other, whatever it is, we both kind of get it and are able to figure each other out. David is just amazing at putting words in people's mouths, like in a script, and we go back and forth, and once it's done, I'll tinker with it some.
"The process of writing and the process of directing are different, because as a director, I'm thinking of where it's going to be, who's in it, why they should work together, and the whole process of putting it together is more of the directing/producing process, like figuring out your budget," he added. "I'll get a script back from David and I'll love reading it because I'll have a story idea, and he'll write a script around it that's so out there and it's great—almost impossible to shoot, but it is awesome, it's amazing to read, and it sparks so much creativity! Like he'll have a script where a girl's running down the street nude and getting shotgunned down, and I'll love it; he has such an amazing imagination, but it's like, 'Well, we can't get a permit for that; we're hiding in a house, so here's what we're going to do: We'll have to use a window'; whatever. That's the thing about adult stuff: You have this much money and it's funny because it makes you have to be as creative as possible. But it's fun; I like that feeling."
Of course, one big piece of news that was recently reported was Skow's hiring rising star Lilly Evans to do her first boy/girl scene, for Skow's popular series Beautiful New Faces, which wrapped shooting about 10 days ago.
"I used to do something called Brand New Faces, where I'd get girls that never even were nude anywhere before—but I'd find them and I'd introduce them," he noted. "I'd make sure they really wanted to do a scene and really wanted to be in the industry, and it was the first time they were on camera. It was a true thing. Out of I don't know how many girls we shot—hundreds—there were only maybe 20 that were girls that we found out later had done other stuff or the agents lied about where they got them from, but the majority of it was real; we really researched it and it was a cool idea.
"But the problem was the girls I could never get because they weren't brand new. You had to kind of take any girl because it was her first time; it was more about that. Beautiful New Faces is totally different. It's the same kind of fun, interesting kind of interview thing, but the series is about girls I think that are going to all be the next box cover girls, you know, and I pick four of them for each volume. I get them within months of them getting into the industry; you know, like girls that come in and you shoot them and it's like you walk off saying 'Wow!' So I've shot them all before I did these movies, and I got to see how they work, I got to see them on set, I got to see how they act, and then I shoot them for this. It's fun; they get to pick their partners; I ask them who they want to work with; I give them an improv script without notice so I get to see how good of an actor they are, what they can improv, and then I interview them. It's a fun thing."
One of Skow's movies that's selling like gangbusters is the recently-released Proud Parents, which garnered an AVN Editor's Choice, at least in part because it's a story inspired by the inner workings of the adult industry itself.
"I really liked that movie—in fact, I loved it!" he exclaimed. "That was something I had thought about for so long, and I wanted to somehow take my experience and David Stanley's experience—we both have sort of the same view of what we do and we have the same observations of this industry, so it was so much fun coming up with ideas and him really adding things and nailing it—you know, just things that people in the industry would know and people outside would like to know. It's fun to watch, and there's a lot of history of porn in it. I'm really proud of it; you might say I'm a 'proud parent.' It is a cool movie."
But as good as that was, Skow's most nominated movie to date has been Daddy's Girls—and Skow told us that there'll soon be a pair of sequels in the works.
"I'm doing Daddy's Girls 2, and I'll probably have that ready in time for the AVN nominations," he said. "I can't talk about what the plot is, but I'll be shooting 2 and 3 together. The original script was like a hundred-something pages, and we broke it down into three parts. The ending is going to be really amazing, because it's going to sort of break every rule you're not supposed to break, and in the end, everything will be revealed, but nothing will really cross the line, ever."
Skow is still smarting from some of the criticism of Daddy's Girls, since it appears to condone incest, still a major taboo in American society—but in fact, none of the sexual relationships depicted in the movie are between blood relatives.
"You know, it's funny, because now, everything is about incest, but Daddy's Girls wasn't really about that," he declared. "It was about two best friends who have sex with each other's daughter, so it wasn't incest, but a lot of people who didn't see it were like, 'Ohmigod, an incest movie!' But there's no incest in it. But the movie sold incredibly. I mean, the movie has built a fan base. [Girlfriends president] Moose sold more Daddy's Girls last month than probably most of the DVDs going out the door at other companies. It's amazing what he's done. The first year I was with Girlfriends was kind of tough, and then all of a sudden, my fan base took off, and people were buying it like crazy off Girlfriends' website. We're selling a lot of DVDs, and it's amazing to sell so many DVDs these days."
It's that sort of success that has restored Skow's faith in adult filmmaking.
"I love making the movies I make now; they're so much fun, and it's so much fun to sit down and come up with crazy stuff and put stories together," he said. "It's so much more satisfying, and even the gonzo that we're doing now, like Beautiful New Faces, is stuff I've always wanted to do, stuff I always thought 'This should be great' but I never did anything with it; it was just in my head, and now I'm able to do it."
Pictured: B. Skow (inset) with Prinzzess and Jeanie Marie Sullivan from the set of Temptation.
