Page 22 - AVN January 2016

INTERVIEW | | By Sharan Street
Work in WHO’S WHO
Progress David Lord on ‘Casual Encounters’ and a life in porn
sex in a dark parking lot lit by car headlights, he said, “Like the car scene in this,
I’ve had in my head my whole life I’ve been watching adult. I think I saw something
similar to it in a movie years and years and years and years ago.”
In the end, he and his fellow cameramen got that shot. And even though he
worked with multiple cameramen, largely due to Drake’s very busy travel schedule
for personal appearances, the director kept a consistent look throughout. “My vision
was clear going into it. Literally, everything was premeditated.”
Lord continued, “When you’re watching your movie in your editing bay and
you’re jumping up and down and pumping your fists, going ‘Yes, Yes, Yes,’ that’s
where I’m at with this movie. It’s everything I wanted it to be.”
He shares the credit for this end result. “I can’t say enough things about my crew
and cast. Jessica really killed it in this movie. Really trusted me. … I really respect
when people stretch beyond their comfort zones. She really pushed herself. When
you see that big scene with the cars, it was about 30 degrees in the middle of a
canyon.”
get my shots, make it pretty, set up these
On the Set David Lord (right) with Barrett Blade and Mercedes Carrera while shooting The Key. Photo by Glenn Francis
”I got to do what I love to do, and that is
scenarios that are in my head and try to
re-create it for everyone else to see.
in Showbiz, the book’s title gave a nod to the adult star’s most famous
When Ron Jeremy penned his autobiography, The Hardest (Working) Man
attribute. For director David Lord, remove those parentheses and you’d
—David Lord
have the story of his life—because this is a guy who truly works hard.
Going back to Lord’s IAFD.com credit page, it also doesn’t reveal when Lord’s
Lord’s 76 directing credits on IAFD.com don’t give the whole picture. Sure,
adult career really began—and he got started young. A Southern California native
some of these are elaborate productions that took considerable effort to make it to
who moved to the San Fernando Valley at age 13, Lord first tried to get a job in
DVD, such as his biggest movies for Adam & Eve Pictures: 9 1/2 Weeks: An Erotic
adult when he was 15, “but they’d caught me after three days,” he said. “I was
XXX Parody (2014), Grindhouse XXX: A Double Feature (2011) and Killer Bodies: The
always a worker. I always wanted to work.”
Awakening (2011).
Eventually, he got his foot in the door.
But there’s also his uncounted behind-the-scenes work on countless other
Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Lord played in bands—and like all of his
movies, including production manager duties on many of Wicked Pictures’ biggest
fellow musicians, he did telemarketing. “Whether it was pens or toner, you sold
movies—such as last year’s winner for Best Drama, Stormy Daniels’ Wanted. On
shit. Telemarketing—it was what you did. Especially if you had long hair and you
set he is a commanding presence, barking orders and tossing out sardonic asides,
were in a band, it was what you did. Like your day job.
and his easy competence comes from his deep roots in porn. With a résumé that
“I was looking in the LA Weekly and I saw an ad: telemarketing adult videos,” he
stretches back to the 1990s, he probably knows as much about DVD production as
continued. “I answered the ad and it was Arrow Film and Video, with Lou Peraino,
anybody in the biz.
the last of the Mohicans, and Butchie and Tony and all those guys. Deep Throat. And
But sharing that history was not why the director had stopped by AVN earlier
he hired me. He hired me to sell videos. And at the time we were selling Betas and
this year. He was there to talk about Casual Encounters, his most recent movie for
small box and big-box VHS. And that’s how I got in.”
Wicked Pictures. “There are the few movies in your career that you’re really proud
After that Lord bounced between Western Visuals and Arrow most of the time,
of,” he said, and “Casual is probably one of my best movies I’ve ever made.”
but he also worked for Scott Taylor at New Sensations, for Caballero, and also for
Lord explained, “I was given a challenge [by ‘the Steves’ at Wicked] to tell a
Private, where he—and the industry as a whole—moved from VHS to the next big
story without any dialog. … I got past the ego and bitchiness and said, ‘All right,
thing.
let’s think about this.’ And that’s how [Casual Encounters] came about.”
At Private he sold CD-ROMs (“games and picture sets and all that”), but then, “I
Lord realized, “Most of our conversations aren’t conversations anymore. So
saw DVDs on the horizon. I’m a dork, I’m a nerd—I loved shit like that.” So Lord
how do I tell that story? I tell it through social media. I tell it through texting. I
got into producing DVDs rather than selling them: “getting the masters, getting
tell it through emails back and forth to people. And that’s what tells the story, in
photo sets, figuring out how many extras I can come up with, what the functionality
combination with the visuals. ... There are only five spoken words in the whole
of the medium was, and how to get maximum benefit.”
movie.”
“Most people remember me when I was at Private USA and I started doing DVDs.
The movie stars Wicked Pictures contract star Jessica Drake as Julie, who
... I was kind of the grandfather of that technology in that era,” he recalled.
answers an ad in the “casual encounters” section of a website. That decision is the
Lord also produced DVDs at Wicked Pictures for several years. “We did some
key to unlocking another side of her sexuality. Moving beyond the constraints of
great stuff over at Wicked. We were the first dual disc. I actually did the first-ever
traditional relationships, Julie seeks to experience sensual pleasure on her own
script-to-screen, where you can read the script and click it and it’ll jump to that
terms.
point in the movie. We did a follow-along, which I believe was one of the first comic
“It’s a different take on storytelling,” Lord said, “and I got to do what I love to
do, and that is get my shots, make it pretty, set up these scenarios that are in my
head and try to re-create it for everyone else to see.” Of one scene involving public
book follow-alongs, where it was the panels of the comic book—one of Jenna’s
movies. You could watch the comic book and then flip the angle button and go to
(David Lord continued on page 24)
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