Page 32 - AVN August 2017

LIGHTS, CAMERA
PERIL & ‘DISGRACE’
An adventure with Steve Holmes in Barcelona
SO PEOPLE TALK ABOUT
REVOLUTIONIZING PORN.
WELL, I’M NOT REVOLUTIONIZING PORN, BUT I HAVE A VERY
PARTICULAR NICHE THAT
NOBODY ELSE IS DOING.
—STEVE HOLMES
ON THE SET | By Peter Warren
If ever anyone has trotted the globe with more of a carefree air about them than Steve
Holmes, that person surely lived in another time, and somewhere unshackled by the confines
of societal order.
whenever Steve speaks, his general sentiment perennially parlaying some variation or other
on “everything’s groovy, baby.”
earlier this year to witness: the production of the jewel in his directorial crown, Kink.com’s
Public Disgrace.
in the U.S.: parading naked girls around wide-open areas and subjecting them to any manner
of humiliation, sexual or otherwise, all before crowds of bona fide civilians. In Spain, on the
other hand, the laws are somewhat more lenient, so that’s where he opts to stage these wild
I
One almost can’t help but hear Bobby McFerrin crooning “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”
It’s a necessary disposition for what the 2017 AVN Hall of Fame inductee invited me
What Steve does in his PD scenes, as would stand to reason, simply is not legal to shoot
acts of derring-do. When he first casually suggested to me that I come watch him do it, I
admittedly laughed it off as a flight of fancy. But when it became clear that he was serious
about the proposition … well, how could I say no?
And so off to Barcelona I flew to see this singularly outlandish magic unfold right before
my eyes.
Steve greets me at the airport with a big bear hug and whisks me off to a large black van
that I soon learn is one of the two main transport vehicles for the entire production crew. On
the way to the flat that doubles as the principal accommodations and operation base for Steve
and team, he recounts a bit of the history of Public Disgrace.
Originally overseen by Princess Donna, it was mostly shot in its infancy at Kink’s now
former home, The Armory in San Francisco. “I talked to [Kink founder] Peter Acworth, and
he said, ‘Well, we don’t really shoot it outside, we just pretend,’” Steve imparts. “And I told
him, ‘Well, send your crew [to Barcelona] and you can do it for real.’”
Steve co-produced the site in those early days, and did convince Donna to shoot some of
it in Europe, but once she stopped directing and he assumed sole reign over it, he followed
through on his talk with Acworth and moved it there exclusively.
At the flat, located in the very center of the city, just a stone’s throw from its own Arc
de Triomf, Steve shows me some of the stills he’s sifting through from the previous day’s
shoot, with fellow Euro-veterans Max Cortes and Silvia Rubi, as well as greenhorn performer
Gabriela Flores. The scene was set in a bar, and Steve points out, “See, I can be more daring
than in the U.S., I have big open windows.”
32 | AVN.com | 8.17
Daring as that may be, it’s not nearly as much so as what he shows
me next, from immediately after the sex: “She has our cum all over her
face and we take her for a walk down the street.”
The “she” in question is Flores, and in the pictures she indeed is
being led on a leash by Rubi down a narrow side street, completely nude
and face spattered with semen, as bystanders rubberneck in puzzled
attempts to process what they’re beholding.
Ruminating on his overall approach with PD, Steve muses, “So people
talk about revolutionizing porn; well, I’m not revolutionizing porn,
but I have a very particular niche that nobody else is doing. And sure,
someone might say, ‘This is garbage, I can’t jerk off to this,’ but for the
people who like it, there is only one place they can find it.”
Over coffee the following morning, Steve reveals some of the trouble
in which he’s actually found himself shooting PD—in fact, he tells me he
and Princess Donna got arrested twice when she still ran the site.
“What we’re doing isn’t illegal, but it’s against ‘the rules,’” he
explains. “I remember these two young police officers, I think they just
got out of police school, came up and said, ‘This is crazy, you can’t be
doing this!’ I told them this is not illegal, and they said, ‘There’s no
way this can be legal.’ So I said, ‘OK, we’ll see.’ And we go down to the
police station and they look up their things and then we were out.
“The first time, Donna was so upset,” he continues. “‘Oh my god, I
can’t believe we’re in jail in a foreign country!’ I told her, ‘Don’t worry,
let’s use this time sitting here to plan out what we’re going to do for the
next scene,’ and she said, ‘Are you crazy?!’ But then the second time,
she just brushed it off.”
As if on cue, a taxi then pulls up to the curb beside us and out steps
a petite blonde girl with luggage who joins us at the table. I’m informed
this is Scottish porn newbie Amber Deen—who named herself such after
her hometown of Aberdeen—and she’ll be filling the role of the Dom for
tomorrow’s shoot, the first I’ll be observing during my visit.
Steve briefs her on the schedule for the shoot—she’s to be in makeup
by 8:30 a.m., and he hopes to head out by 11. “So we’re going to go
right into the city center?” she asks him with a hint of disbelief. He nods
in the affirmative with a broad smile.