Page 32 - AVN July 2016

LIGHTS,CAMERA...
ON THE SET | | By Tod Hunter
A Cellar Full of Skin
Girlsway goes dark for Missing: A Lesbian Crime Story
content on all major platforms where people can pay for their porn. We have it on
our membership site, and each episode will come out each week like a TV show.
It’ll be available on VOD for people who want to fast-track and see it all at once,
and it’ll come out on DVD as well.”
Mills grins when asked about the cast: “We have an all-star cast for this one. The
lead role of Lara Bradford, our investigative journalist, is played by Riley Reid. For
this role I imagined playing her in a very different way from how people usually
see her. I styled her after a sci-fi show called Orphan Black, about an edgy alt-girl
protagonist. She’s got a leather jacket, combat boots, ripped jeans, dark makeup.
It’s a different look for her, and the range of her acting is something nobody’s ever
seen her do. It’s a challenge for her, acting-wise, and she’s done an amazing job.”
The cast also features August Ames, Allie Haze, Kenna James, Kendra James,
Cassidy Klein, Karla Kush, Sara Luvv, Karlie Montana and Reena Sky, with cameos
by Adriana Chechik and Cherie DeVille from previous episodes and Mills herself in
“my Hitchcock cameo.”
As part of the larger multi-movie scenario, the big reveal in Missing is the identity
of the Real Villain, which Mills requests not be spoiled in this story.
The onscreen reveal is in the first part of a dramatic, swooping single shot where
the camera follows The Villain through her lair: The garage filled with naked
women is less an orgy than a torture chamber. Stills by Alan, wielding a camera,
says, “It only gradually becomes apparent to us how fucked up this room is. At the
end, you’ll say ‘Wow. That’s horrible.’” One girl is tied in a corner, her hands high
above her head. One sits despondently in another corner, whimpering, bound into
immobility. One is tied to a chair, a tube stuck to her thigh leading to an IV bottle.
In the middle of the room, on a tarp, two dead-eyed girls, legs intertwined, bang
their crotches together, lost in heir own world. Beyond them, two more nude bodies
cross each other on the floor to form an X, discarded, lifeless, abandoned. The floor
has stacks of labeled jars each filled with a clear sci-fi essence that the Villain is
draining from her victims.
The ambitious hand-held shot is laid out: it starts by focusing on the Villain’s
shoes as she enters the room, then the camera dramatically swoops up to reveal her
face. The Villain struts over to the despondent girl, fingers some sweat off her, licks
it from her finger. The hand-held camera, simulating a Steadicam with a V-shaped
(continued on page 36)
Canada-based Girlsway has selected a familiar location house for the
production Missing: A Lesbian Crime Story, but rather than using the well-
exposed marble-floored living areas, they’re shooting in the house’s
garage, a claustrophobically small space made more crowded by light
stands supplementing the translucent panels in the garage doors.
Screenwriter and co-director (with Stills by Alan) Bree Mills is in constant
motion, checking costumes, pep-talking her performers, setting up shots and
conferring with her co-director. She stops for a moment to talk about the
production.
“Missing is actually a continuation of the same narrative that we’ve been
building over the last couple of features we’ve done,” Mills says. “All the work that
we do fits in the universe that we’ve created, and the features are the big comic-
book stories in that universe. Missing picks up about a year after the events in The
Turning, and about six months after Project Pandora, which we just released.”
Mills continues, “It’s about this post-apocalyptic society where there was a
lesbian epidemic and it has been controlled by a right-wing organization called
AWAL—the Association of Women Against Lesbians—led by a woman named
Anita Sharp. The real goal of this movie is to introduce Anita’s character and set
up AWAL as the real arch-nemesis of the MANTIS organization that we’ve been
building over the last couple of features. It’s by far our most ambitious project to
date, in terms of the scope and the cinematography. It’s a new level for us. We’re
blasting the color saturation in post and it’s a 2.35 widescreen.
“In all of my movies I try to pay homage to one cinema genre and this one
I’m going to play off elements of true-crime and crime-thriller type films,” Mills
reveals. “But instead of a detective movie I wanted to spin it with a journalist
who’s uncovering acts behind these cases. When people watch it they should see
the standard elements of a crime thriller, with our own twist. All of our films are
filled with Easter eggs and interconnected story lines, but this will hold up as a
stand-alone.”
Mills’ ambitious plan for Missing is to shoot the equivalent of a six-episode
feature series, with each episode running 40 to 50 minutes. “I always approach
our projects less as a movie and more as a TV season. We typically release our
Taking Notes Reporter Riley Reid (top photo, left) interviews Karla Kush and Allie Haze (bottom photo, left)
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