Page 24 - AVN April 2017

WHO’S WHO
CROSSING OVER | By Peter Warren
MS. ROBOT
Bryn Pryor, Casey Calvert offer peek at indie project
it about the porn business, this has to be about the mainstream business,’ and broke the story open. And we
went from there.”
The actual shoot took place over six weeks between last August and September, and at this point, Calvert
said, the movie only has some audio editing left to be tackled and is “about 92 1/2 percent complete. It’s
almost done.”
Despite not having the fully finished product in the can, she explained, “We scheduled this screening
because we found out that Richard Hatch had cancer and was getting sicker and sicker very quickly, and we
wanted to hold a screening for him before he passed so he could come to the screening. And then nobody,
including Richard himself, realized how quickly he was going to get sick, and so Richard passed away about
two and a half weeks ago.”
Fortunately, she said, Hatch was able to see the nearly completed project. “We took it to him on a tablet
and he got to watch the movie before he passed,” Calvert imparted.
For Calvert, who got a degree in film production from the University of Florida in 2012, having screened a
full-length motion picture right in the thick of Hollywood that she produced and co-wrote is “very bizarre. I
mean, this is technically the third mainstream project that I’ve been associated with and gone to the screening
of [she was also a producer on Pryor’s Cowboys & Engines and X-Rated: The Greatest Adult Movies of All Time].”
Marveling that “not in my wildest dreams” could she have foreseen such a thing, she added, “It sounds
stupid, but it’s all because of porn. I moved to L.A. to do porn. Had I not moved to L.A., I would not be here,
standing in this room after watching 300 people watch my movie.”
She also noted that the porn ties posed no obstacles on the project. “All of our regular mainstream actors
AVN HALL OF FAME director Bryn Pryor (aka Eli Cross)
knew exactly where we came from,” she said. “Richard, especially, was fascinated. Richard thought it was
and performer Casey Calvert co-hosted a presentation
great. We had nobody judge us. You learn a lot about making movies in the porn business—especially cheap
February 28 at a West Hollywood screening house of their
movies.”
independent feature Diminuendo for cast, crew and invited
friends and family.
Co-written by the duo, with Pryor directing and Calvert
producing, Diminuendo is set in the not-too-distant future
and tells a dark tale of a self-destructive director who
MOVIES IN THE PORN BUSINESS—
gets a shot to resurrect his career with a biopic about his
own former lover, a deceased Hollywood star who killed
ESPECIALLY CHEAP MOVIES.
herself the night she won the Oscar for Best Actress nine
years earlier ... to be portrayed in the movie-within-a-
movie by an A.I. robot created to eerie perfection in her
likeness.
Battlestar Galactica alum Richard Hatch, to whom the
screening was dedicated with tributes beforehand from
Pryor, Calvert and co-star Chloe Dykstra, who fills
AYOU LEARN A LOT ABOUT MAKING
—CASEY CALVERT
The part of the director is played by recently passed
the dual role of the departed actress and her robotic
reincarnation. A number of adult stars appear in the
movie as well, most notably James Deen as the loathsome
actor playing the younger Hatch in the biopic, but also
including Ana Foxxx, Tyler Knight, Tommy Pistol, Xander
Corvus, Derrick Pierce, Lily Lane, Penny Pax, Alex
Legend, Trillium, Jimmy Broadway, Lexi Love, and Pryor
and Calvert themselves. In addition, industry director/
cinematographer Hank Hoffman shot the picture.
Bearing some distinct thematic similarities to DNA,
Brad Armstrong’s AVN Award-nominated epic of last
year, Diminuendo actually grew out of an adult script, its
creators revealed, by the late David Aaron Clark.
“[Clark’s] script was just about a director with a sex
doll that he becomes obsessed with,” Pryor told AVN.
Clark intended to direct the project for the now-defunct
SexZ Pictures, but “SexZ dropped it and I felt guilty
because he had worked on it for like two months for no
money, so I bought the script from him.” That script was
titled Doll Parts, Pryor said, and as an homage to Clark,
Doll Parts appears as a working title for the script by
Hatch’s character in Diminuendo.
It was about two and a half years ago, Calvert
expounded, that she and Pryor took to reworking Clark’s
original concept as a mainstream script, but “it was still
about the porn business. And James Deen actually came
over to our house one night and said, ‘No, you can’t make
24 | AVN.com | 4.17
Clockwise from top, Bryn Pryor and Casey Calvert at the premiere of Diminuendo; James Deen, Tyler Knight and Richard Hatch; Derrick Pierce.
To that end, Pryor asserted, “I think we did great with the money that we had. Does it look like a $10
million movie? No. It was never going to. But does it feel like we had more than $350,000? Yeah, I feel like it
does. And by the time we’re done, it’ll be better. So I think we did great with the resources we had.”
At the same time, he argued that making an adult move is a completely different animal from his
experience making Diminuendo. “You can’t really compare the two,” he said, “just because what we did in
adult, it’s more like shooting reality TV. You don’t have the time, you don’t have the money ... [2008 AVN
Best Video Feature] Upload cost every bit as much as this movie did, but I also had to have 16 sex scenes in
Upload, and that eats a bunch of money, so we had a huge crew for adult, but it’s nothing like this. It’s not
fair to compare the two.”
He continued, “The hardest part—and P.T. [Paul Thomas] talked about this one time when I interviewed
him, and he’s absolutely right—the hardest part is that adult is a purpose-driven medium. Thing one is make
porn, not tell a story. It has to be. You’re making a tool, it’s a masturbatory tool. It might be nice to have a
$69 chrome vanadium hammer with a lacquered hickory handle, but if you can’t drive nails with the fuckin’
thing, it’s no good to you. Thing one is it has to drive nails. With this, we get to focus on thing one is tell a
story.”
As to the plans for Diminuendo once the final polishes are made, Calvert said, “The next step from here will
be hopefully finding a sales agent to help connect us with distributors so we can get the movie sold, and then
also submitting the film to different film festivals and having a big premiere at one of those film festivals.”
For more, follow on Twitter: @DiminuendoMovie.