Sex in Tight Places

By Josh Eliot

A “tight” asshole? Lips wrapped tightly around a hard cock? Or a hand with a tight grip jacking you off to climax? The word tight in the title of this blog has nothing to do with any of those statements. Having said that, I do remember yelling out: “Your ass is so tight” or “Tighten your ass cheeks on my cock” about a million times to the models for them to repeat on camera. I guess the same went for lips. When directing, the moment things got quiet on the set I always felt the need to yell out a line or two for the models to repeat back. It’s not like the majority of actors would do it on their own, so in order to keep things energetic, I had my staple list of one liners to feed them. I also had a staple list of actions, too. For example, the “underneath” sucking shot was simply that. It’s not the most sexy angle of a cock getting sucked, so we always needed something to spice up the look so it wasn’t just a dick going in and out of a mouth, which got boring to watch after a few moments. I’d tell the model to do the “swing thing.” The swing thing would basically be having the model on his knees sucking the dick while the guy getting sucked would pull his dick out of the sucker’s mouth, using only his hips. He would then swing his dick from side to side, every once and a while clipping the bottom guy on his chin. For the most part, the bottom guy would try to catch it with his mouth or I would tell him to get his hand up there and “snap the dick,” which basically meant he would push it down towards the lens and it would bounce back up and down. We’d have him do it a few times to get a good bounce. It always looked great shot from underneath, and overhead too. I was always sure to repeat the swing thing and the snap thing in every other angle I shot: wide shot side, side close-up, side closeup with pan up body to face, etc., etc. It was a formula, for sure, when shooting a scene.

It was 1990 and I was in my second year of directing for Catalina and still getting the formula down, when our new GM decided to put my skills as a videographer to the test. He was always smoking weed and coming up with out of the ordinary ideas for me to execute. This was the first time, but not the last. Cat Men Do! was one of those later movies that came from his sativa filled brain and I hated every last minute I spent making that movie! He had a very specific idea for this one, and I guess because I was smoking a lot of weed at the time too, I absolutely loved it! The name came first – Sex In Tight Places – and his idea was that the actors would be in small, hard to shoot spaces while having sex. This project would basically throw “the formula” I was still learning out the window and force me to come up with solutions on how to shoot in tiny, cramped spaces. Since this idea stemmed from the GM, he threw in a little extra money for me to spend on the sets. I was off to Warner Brothers Studio in the valley, because they had the best set props anywhere. It was there that I rented two of my sets for shooting: the bus bathroom set, complete with hinges so you could open up one of the walls for shooting, and the graffiti covered phone booth, which had a pop off top for overhead shots. Those folding doors that phone booths had were not removable, making it a real pain in the ass to shoot. The other two sets I built myself were an air conditioning duct and an elevator interior.

We were able to load the phone booth in our van and take it to the set where we built a brick alleyway, which we filled with a bunch of litter. Danny Sommers is a city worker painting over the graffiti on the brick wall, while pedestrian Steve Kennedy drops a dime in the pay phone, hoping it will dial him up some action. The two stars were very helpful in coming up with positions in that tight ass booth – one with Danny holding the top of the booth doing pull ups while Steve Kennedy fucked him all the while using his foot to keep the accordion doors open. Aside from that position, the poor still photographer, Jeff Burton, was fucked and I felt really bad for him. For the bus bathroom scene, we brought the large unit over on a flatbed truck, then set it up in the Catalina warehouse where we shipped all the VHS tapes from. Doug Niles and Dean Pike really were troopers for that shoot, because the temperature in that warehouse got very hot, making things ten times harder. For the finished movie, we stole some stock shots from My Best Buddy, where we had interior and exterior shots of a real bus.

The air duct shoot was a breeze, as we had a studio with visible air ducts for the lead in storyline. Cole Phillips and Damien looked pretty damn good in their hard hats, and once inside the air duct, set the intimacy of the small space helped them connect more sexually. Yes, in case you are wondering, I ripped off the idea from Warner Brothers' set rental department by adding hinges to the wall panels of my air conditioning duct, making it super easy to get shots from every angle.

The final setting, the elevator, was a breeze. We made an elevator before for The Big One, Chet Thomas’ earthquake themed movie, when we were in San Francisco. You basically build a three walled set out of wood paneling, throw some carpet on the floor, and frame some lighting panels on the “removable” ceiling… done. What was the most satisfying about shooting that elevator scene was the surprise Steve Regis brought with him to the set. At the last minute, Steve’s co-star, “what’s his name,” dropped out. We thought we had to cancel the shoot, but Steve said he had a friend who would do the scene with him and assured me I would love this guy. I agreed, sight unseen, so as not to cancel the shoot. When the studio doors opened and Steve walked in with his big, studly, raunchy redhead friend, everyone on the crew felt their heart skip a beat. This guy was handsome, but not overly so in the traditional sense. It was just his overall look and the way he carried himself which was very sexy to us 20-somethings!

Steve played a businessman stuck in an elevator with a hot blue collar delivery guy, whose coke-can, rock hard cock gave us all goosebumps when he opened his fly and pulled it out for the first time. I remember making eye contact with our still photographer, Jeff Burton, and we made a silly face at each other, acknowledging our approval of this hot new model to the set. Since Jeff had such a hard time getting good shots in the phone booth scene, we let him take his time with the new stud to get lots of great hard-shots. The crew and I just sat back and enjoyed the show. We really were like a bunch of oversexed kids in a candy store on that shoot, which never happens! It felt like the fastest scene we ever shot. His dick came out hard, stayed hard even during re-lighting and camera angle changes, and he even came on cue! Now remember, this was years before Viagra; we were not used to this on the set. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and damn! We didn’t name him until after the shoot, and struggled to find a really hot, masculine name to match his looks and the vibe he gave off. On the drive home after the shoot, Steve and his friend/co-star, who cabbed it to the set, rode with us in the van. We were determined to come up with the perfect stage name for him. We wanted something macho and I remembered Tom Brock from the 1988 Catalina movie, They Grow ‘Em Big. He was an ultra-masculine stud who worked for Falcon, Matt Sterling and Catalina from 1985 - 1988. Tom Brock was in some of the most popular movies of the time, including Inch By Inch (1985), Bigger Than Life (1986), Bulge: Mass Appeal (1988) and In Your Wildest Dreams (1988). We decided Brock would be a great first name, then suddenly a Maxon brand truck pulled in front of us on the freeway and I said, “That’s it: Brock Maxon.”

Literally the very next day, I reached out to Brock Maxon and started offering him EVERYTHING. We set up and shot a couple hard photo layouts of him, which graced the cover of Honcho Magazine. We quickly cast him in Chet Thomas’ Cruise Control, starring Derek Cruise, and The Taste of Leather, starring Joe Magnum, the winner of the 1988 International Mr. Leather contest. Brock, Joe Magnum and Donnie Russo worked together in the stand-out scene. Then, just like that… boop. The hottest new stud on the scene got hitched, “married,” to some lucky fucker and removed from the porn star pool, never making another movie again. Now this was a real, “What the fuck!” moment, even though it had nothing to do with my producer, Scott Masters!

Making Sex In Tight Places was good for me as a director and even more so as a videographer, teaching me tricks to use on future projects. Even though Doug Niles was ready to kill me, because we had two crew members shaking the bathroom set constantly to emulate a bus driving, the great group of guys in the cast were all on board for the challenge. But best of all, it's one of only three movies where Brock Maxon ripped the screen apart with his presence. Can you imagine if “what’s his name” didn’t cancel and we never got to meet Brock Maxon in the first place? That would have been as much of a “bummer” as it was having to make Cat Men Do!

Bio of Josh Eliot:

At the age of 25 in 1987, Josh Eliot was hired by Catalina Video by John Travis (Brentwood Video) and Scott Masters (Nova Video). Travis trained Eliot on his style of videography and mentored him on the art of directing. Josh directed his first movie, Runaways, in 1987. By 2009 when Josh parted ways with Catalina Video, he'd produced and directed hundreds of features and won numerous awards for Best Screenplay, Videography, Editing, and Directing. He was entered into the GayVN Hall of fame in 2002.