This feature appears in the September issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition.
LOS ANGELES—“It was such a surreal experience to actually have it play out in front of me and to relive these experiences,” Jane Wilde reflected during a break on the last day of shooting her own autobiographical drama, Stars, arriving at the end of this month from Adult Time.
Those experiences, as viewers will see play out, involved the fresh-out-of-high-school Jane—albeit slightly fictionalized here as “Julia”—seeking out work in adult and getting trapped in the clutches of a nefarious character named Kevin, played with sinister aplomb by three-time AVN Best Actor Seth Gamble. Fitting the “suitcase pimp” mold to a T—and distinctly calling to mind James Franco’s Alien character from Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers—Kevin operates a less-than-up-and-up webcamming outfit he strong-arms Julia into working for over a stretch of roughly a year.
Wilde first brought the idea for Stars to Adult Time chief creative officer Bree Mills early this year, and Mills was immediately on board with it. “Bree has believed in me from the very beginning, before I even ever thought that I could do something like this,” Wilde recalled. “So when I came to her with this idea and wanting to do this, I told her my reasoning was kind of almost selfish—I said it’s not something I want to do for the fans, it’s something I want to do for myself, and also for people that may be in a similar situation that could relate to this—and she totally just understood it. I didn’t have to explain myself. She’s been on my page the entire fucking time.”
Mills wholeheartedly confirmed as much, recounting, “When we had the meeting, she told me her story, which is more or less what we’ve captured in this film, and I knew bits and pieces of it because I know she had spoken to me about it just candidly in the past, but I didn’t know the full scope of the story. But she told me the story and then she told me she had a very clear vision for how we could make it, and by the end of that meeting I just knew it was the right thing to do.”
The multiple AVN Award-winning director said Wilde’s story struck a certain common chord she was eager to relay. “I’ve heard shades of that story from so many different performers,” Mills imparted, “including my own partner (retired performer Sara Luvv), who had a somewhat similar entry into the adult industry, and so it struck me as being not only relatable to people in our industry, but also just relatable to what it’s like coming of age as a young person, what it’s like coming of age as a young woman, and some of those initial lessons you have to learn.”
A big part of depicting the story accurately, of course, was nailing the Kevin character, and according to Wilde, Gamble’s channeling of the real-life “recruiter” upon whom he’s based was downright eerie—to the point that Gamble with no prompting fashioned a goatee on his chin that mirrored the real guy’s look precisely.
“His instincts were just so on point with this character, and with this vibe and just the whole aura of the person that he was portraying,” Wilde marveled. “I genuinely think that he must have met this guy in another lifetime or something, or met someone so similar—and that’s really a testament to how many fucked up people there are out there and surrounding our industry just like this person that I knew—but he just was so on point as far as the wardrobe choices, obviously the facial hair, the way he talked.
“Certain random things that he would say in improv, I would just really look back and be like, wow, I have no idea how he came up with that, but it feels very fitting.”
For Gamble, who grantedly was almost a foregone choice for the role, insofar as being the star contract player for Adult Time parent company Gamma Entertainment, he chalked up his summoning of the character to his own encounters with carbon copy types throughout his life.
“I’ve met this guy a million times,” he mused. “In this business, this guy exists all over the place. There are some people in our industry now that act like this. But also, I grew up in a very low-income neighborhood, so I was actually exposed to a lot of hustler, manipulative type of people. So I was able to pull from that, and I also was pulling from her own take and her own experience. She gave me a lot of what she remembered.”
Wilde is very certain to point out that while Stars does delve into some of the more unsavory bowels of adult, she has no intent for it to come across as a cautionary tale.
“I’m not trying to do anything here except tell my story truthfully as it happened,” she asserted. “And you can look at me as an example of what happens when you are in a bad situation and then you look to the porn industry as a place to find direction in your life and find a community. So I just want people to know that it’s not biased. I very much understand that in porn there’s good and bad, as there is in everything, and this is just my experience. So do with it as you will.”
Echoed Mills, “I thought that what was nice about Jane’s story about her own pathway into sex work is the fact that it’s objective and it’s very candid and transparent, so there’s good stuff that happens and there’s really shitty stuff that happens, but the pendulum isn’t swinging dramatically in one way or the other.
“So often stories are told about us, but not often do the sex workers get to tell their own story,” she continued. “So I thought that was very important to do, especially in the light of films like Pleasure that recently came out, and you know, just the history we have with mainstream media ... the best voice that we can give is give the sex workers a voice themselves to tell their own story.”
In keeping with that sentiment, it was just after wrap on that final shooting day of Stars that Mills officially informed Wilde she would be credited as her co-director on the movie.
“For me this project wasn’t about bringing my vision to life,” Mills explained. “In the back of my mind I knew I did not want to put that pressure on her, but I knew in the back of my mind that if this went through as a positive experience for everyone and a really good collaboration, then absolutely I wanted to make her the co-director of this. And she has been an amazing co-director the entire time, and I really wanted also this project to symbolize that there’s a lot of talent that exists within our industry, and if you just support them, we can tell really amazing stories.”
Of this story in particular, she tauntingly submitted, “There’ll be nothing like it that exists, and that much I can promise you.”
Stars is set to release in its entirety on September 28.
