This feature appears in the August issue of AVN magazine.
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif.—The hilltop house, up a steep hill off a well-traveled Valley street, has an otherworldly quality: it doesn't have the vibe of a place where people live, but not an empty location-shoot-only house either. There are several unplugged pinball machines against one wall, with computer-printed instructions. Walls are high and white, with generic art. A half-finished swimming pool is visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. The kitchen is stainless steel and black granite, with the central island filled with snacks and water bottles. People drift in and out, conversing in small groups.
The Adult Time production, Hard Stop, is about a sex-addiction clinic and the women there for a one-week group-therapy treatment, telling the stories of their addictions and learning from and supporting each other. Bree Mills is directing from her own 45-page script, with the logline: "A self-destructive woman enters a week-long sex addiction rehab, resisting every attempt to break through her denial. But as the raw confessions of the other women strip away her defenses, she’s forced to confront the darkest truth about herself—or risk never escaping the cycle." The group-therapy participants are played by Sarah Arabic, Anna Claire Clouds, Reagan Foxx, Kenna James and Little Puck, and the pressure is off: The movie has wrapped principal photography and today's shoot agenda is a reunion round-table discussion and ancillary material.
"It's very topical, and I find it fascinating," Mills, who is also chief creative officer for Adult Time, says. "I've known people who've struggled with addiction, and seeing not just the impact on them, but the impact on everyone around them. I wanted to explore it, obviously in the context of our industry: looking at sex and love addiction and framing it that way as opposed to another type of addiction. When I knew I was going to do a story about sex addiction, I knew I wanted a female protagonist, and I wanted her to be a middle-aged woman. I started researching the most common reasons women go into SLAA [Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, a real group, not a fictional construct for the movie] and I found that the most common reasons correlate to some of the most common fantasies. Like with Kenna James's character, leading a very sexually repressed life and acting out by putting herself in high-risk situations with strangers and pushing herself to her absolute physical limit as the polar opposite of the repression she's feeling. With Anna Claire Clouds's character, basically public exposure issues and compulsive masturbation issues: The constant need for validation and attention from others.
"As an industry, we always grapple with the duality of the entertainment we create: it is fantasy, but it does feed into a lot of narratives that echo throughout your life and can be quite dysfunctional, and disruptive, and destructive. As women, the formation of our own sexual identities is so shaped by others, and there's not a lot of resource for one to find confidence in their own sexuality, especially as a woman. One of the beautiful things about our [adult industry] community is finding that confidence through being a sex worker, being in the sex industry. I'm always interested in duality in things: isn't it interesting that some of the top male-gaze porn fantasies are also what land women in SLAA?
"I wanted to do a story, then I decided we're going to do a story about women. We're going to make a hetero movie about women. And these women are not going to have sex with each other in the movie, counter to what one might expect—although they do at the reunion show. [chuckle] It's going to be a story about how each of these women's own relationship with sexuality leads them to a point where they find camaraderie and start to build confidence through talking about it with other women, and the community that comes with it. Which, to me, is kind of an allegory about what the industry can provide to people."
"[The therapy scenes] were hard for me, because I'm naturally quiet and introverted," Reagan Foxx says. "I took speech class in college to better myself in public speaking, to get over that shyness. It is very hard for me because I have to learn to get over myself, and that's what I push myself for when I'm doing acting roles. I love that thrill. We shot last week and when we went home for the weekend, I thought maybe I should get involved with plays. Something to bring out the side of me that I now see. I am very honored and lucky to be included with so many well-known and respected younger workers. I don’t usually get that, I get the really, really young ones, 19, 20, 21-year-olds. I'm always their mom or stepmom. This was nice. I can just be the hot... lady."
"This cast and the whole movie itself is so fun," Anna Claire Clouds tells me. "It's rare that you get one group of people together for a full week of acting on the same set, but you get to come back the next week and do the same thing all over again. You get really comfortable with everybody, it just feels like what I imagine people with regular jobs feel like. You go in and you know exactly what they ate yesterday.
"I did a boy/girl anal with Seth Gamble," Clouds continues. "In an interrogation room. My character gets off to being watched, and the potential of getting in trouble. I have no stop, no filter."
"I had a boy/boy/girl with Nathan Bronson and Vince Karter," Kenna James says. "My character was a suburban housewife by day, but at night she would meet up with strangers, and it kept getting more dangerous, more risky, until the point I got caught." And neither of those guys was your husband? "Nope."
All of the sex was shot on separate days from the group-therapy scenes. "We had a day where we'd just come in and have sex," Clouds says. "On the days we had acting, none of us had sex. The group therapy scenes were a theater workshop, basically. We experienced [the sex] in the past, and the therapy was in the present. It was really cool to be able to do."
"It's probably the best sex I've ever shot," Mills says. "Everybody was instructed to be in the moment of excess: Be the character's memory of the best time they were under the influence of the addiction. Everybody here is a great performer, they know how to deliver these fantasies and they also had that mentality going into it.”
The group therapy scenes drew real reactions from the performers, said Kenna James: "There were three that put me to tears: Anna, for sure; Reagan, I was a sobbing puddle; and Puck. I was able to connect to those characters so hard. I broke down in the middle of the scene. And they were real tears. I was really touched when Reagan went through her story. After the second or third take, the tears were very real. I have a picture of me and Puck after we cut, where we're just holding each other on the floor, still crying. Just trying to get past that moment... before we did it again. That visceral feeling... that's real."
"The therapy scenes were extremely raw, " Little Puck says. "I was not prepared for that level of emotion. I was happy that it happened, but it was definitely surprising for me, because I had learned my lines, I felt very confident in what I was going to bring to the table, but everyone else also brought their A game and it gave me chills. It was a lot. As each woman was relating her story we were all having our interactions with the other women listening. I would be locking eyes with another cast mate while someone else was talking. It was a very emotional two days. It was a safe space to be able to experience raw emotion through performance. I absolutely loved working on this feature. It was just a really lovely experience and I feel a lot closer to all my cast mates. It was nice."
Sarah Arabic tells me she plays "a high school teacher who was caught having sex with her 18-year-old student. This took a very realistic approach. In my sex scene, at the end the door opens and I get caught. And that's why I wind up in sex-addiction therapy, because she's kind of delusional. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong, she thinks she's in love with the student. In therapy, she just unravels. Slowly breaks down. It was challenging, because it's not something I relate to personally. I had to impersonate someone else rather than draw on personal experience. Despite the subject matter, I do think the sex scene was really great. I love the way it was shot. I'm definitely going to be watching it when it comes out."
"The scenes where we're all together were all shot in the same room, in a group therapy setting, in a circle," Clouds tells me. "And then our separate scenes were all together, stylized and separate, all flashbacks. All of our scenes have a color to them. My color was green."
"Mine was blue," James adds.
"So when you go through the movie you'll see the colors change through every person's backstory, and the therapy room also has its own color for the present tense. It's all really well done, really well shot and stylized. It's just an incredibly done movie."
"Some of these people I've worked with for 10 years. We've done a lot of stuff together," Mills says. "Going into it I knew that everybody would show up, and really care about the project, and the material, and their characters. The reason we had the powerhouse three days of filming that we had was that everybody showed up. There were no ego battles. It's an ensemble group and everybody has their role to play in the ensemble. Everybody brought out the best in each other. It was true bonding experience. The best thing you can do is put the right people together and give them a good story.
"These women kicked ass."
Photography by Siren Obscura
