BijouBlog

By Josh Eliot

**WARNING: Contents May Upset Your Stomach **

It was my love of movies and movie-making that brought me out to San Francisco at age 17 to try to make a go of it. For some reason, my brain retains movie trivia like nobody's business. Things I shouldn’t remember, but just do. Having said that, there are a few things I would like to forget about my time working for Catalina Video from 1987-2009. Not anything related to my co-workers, our ethics, or decisions we made, but things that grossed me out. I often felt like an impostor when I was working in the industry, because my focus was easily shifted if something I was watching made me a little squeamish. For example: when one of our directors was shooting a hot sweaty scene, I would focus on the sweat. Sweat in general grosses me out. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want it dripped on me during a moment of passion, all I want to do is wipe it away. I don’t know if I’m alone in this thought process, but it is one of the many turn-offs I witnessed on the set over the years. The sex we were shooting could be super-hot, but as soon as I saw something that triggered my squeamish side, it was my focal point, it would throw me off my game.

When I started with Catalina Video in 1987, they hadn’t yet embraced the condom. However, director John Travis and producer Scott Masters where trying their best to be responsible by using a spermicidal ointment when we shot fucking. Conceptrol with Nonoxynol-9 came in a tube, much like a tampon, and was a vaginal contraceptive to prevent pregnancy. In our studio, the shower had a douche attachment for the models to use prior to shooting the anal portion of the scenes. Once clean as a whistle, the model would come onto the set and the director or make-up man would insert the tube of Non Oxy 9 into their butt and push the gel up into them. This was short lived, and condoms came a few movies later. While using the Non-Oxy 9, it wouldn’t just magically stay inside - at any given moment it would fly out, most often when I was shooting the underneath shot. It would fly out and land on my camera lens, my arm, my ankle (if I was sitting instead of kneeling) or the top of my head. I made damned sure to keep my head down and mouth shut. An underneath cum shot with a load splattering, not a problem, but this stuff? UGHHHH.

In one of Scott Master’s movies, The Young Cadets, Mike Ryan‘s co-star could not keep a boner to save his life. Scott Masters made some calls and got Chris Burns to come in to do the fucking. Chris Burns (Below the Belt, Dangerous, Men of the Midway) had worked for Catalina Video in These Bases Are Loaded, Skin Deep and NightCrawler, but didn’t have the current “pretty faced jock” look that Catalina was now casting. He did, however, agree to come in as a “stunt dick.” It was very lucky for me that Dan Allman was doing the camera work for the insertion shots, because it went on forever and poor Mike Ryan was screaming his lungs out because Chris’s fat dick was ripping him a new one. Mike was a gay for pay model and really didn’t have a lot of anal experience, and probably could have used a lesson on how to properly douche. Chris was merciless, but the worst thing was that the damned Non Oxy 9 kept flying out and landing on the fill light. 400 watts of burning Non Oxy 9/butt juice that was literally smoking and filling up the studio, and it did not smell like Fabreze! Poor Dan got a cloud of smoke right in his face.

If you are still with me, it’s time to move onto another repulsive (in my book) liquid: spit. For some unknown reason, Chi Chi LaRue came up with this idea that spitting was hot. Now, I was fine over the years with a little appropriate spitting, like in someone’s ass crack, perfectly fine. But for a good year, all of Chi Chi’s movies - straight, gay and bi - had this non-stop spitting all over the place. Chi was also directing projects for Catalina during that period and I happened to be filling in on camera when the spitting started. Luckily, I was able to use my producer card and stopped that shit tout suite. Sorry “girl,” we don’t do that in Catalina productions, think of something else. Chi Chi obliged without an argument because he knew how much that churned my stomach. He did, however, like to keep the sweat on the boys instead of calling for make-up to wipe them down (like I always did), but I just grinned and bore it.

We always save the best for last, don’t we? I was shooting the movie Furry Men Do and there was a Latino actor named Gabriel Rocas that we used from time to time who had the biggest balls I’d ever seen. Like many models, he had his own specific routine to get himself hard prior to running onto the set and shooting a few moments of video with his erect penis. I learned about it on his first pair of movies for us, BEAR Skin & Latin Men Do, in 1999.

He would disappear into the adjoining room and soak his giant nuts in a bowl (that he brought with him) of warm water while he stroked his dick to get hard. Ok, no big deal, sounds pleasant enough. It worked, the scenes were completed and we all went home happy. Then on the set of Furry Men Do in 2000, Gabriel returned, bowl in hand, to shoot another scene. This time, one of my crew members was assisting him in the adjoining room. Always up for a good chuckle, Brad Austin and I snuck a peek into the room to see the crew member carefully blowing Gabriel, being extra cautious not to spill the water out of the bowl that his nuts were soaking in. I wish I had a photo. We finished the scene quickly, the models went to shower and we started to pack up. The crew member came walking into the room with the bowl of water and we turned our heads to look at him, when we heard him say, “Ahhh… Ball broth!” Without missing a beat, he put the bowl of water, pubic hairs and all, up to his mouth and drank the entire thing. Brad and I nearly lost our lunch. That was the very last time I ever booked Gabriel; nothing against him, but I just couldn’t ever witness another serving of Ball Broth!

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. 

Patience is a virtue, or so they say. There were more than a handful of times that my patience wore thin on a porn set. It’s not all fun and games, let me tell you that right now. I became an expert on troubleshooting situations throughout my years of producing and directing, but in the early days, the crew and I were not able to escape the inevitable when a certain someone was in charge. I wouldn’t say my producer Scott Masters was a perfectionist, but he tried damn hard at it. If I’m being completely honest, Scott Masters and I had a love-hate-love again relationship from almost the very beginning. We both shared the passion for putting out the best product possible, both of us were totally invested in the stories we were telling, proper lighting and camera angles. You would think it was a match made in heaven, and to an extent it was, but there was one very important difference that had us butting heads many times over the years. Flexibility, or the lack of it.

Probably the first time it really came to a head was when we were shooting Hard Men 3, the third installment of a very popular series in the 1980s called Hard Men: No Strings Attached. It was basically a Chippendales type video where dancers would dress as a theme character and strip. The twist was that our dancers would strip all the way and when their undies came off they had a huge hard on that they flopped around for the camera, shot from every angle imaginable. We even had a plexiglass floor made for the models to dance on while we were underneath. At the end of the video, there was ordering information where the viewer could purchase a J/O tape of their favorite dancer masturbating, complete with cum shot, sold via mail order. The series was perfect for women or gay men to purchase. It was also perfect for Scott Masters as “director” of the segments. Scott loved plays, musicals and anything to do with the stage, not to mention his “costume fetish” I’ve mentioned before. Our “head butt” came one day when Scott was directing Chris Dano, who was playing a matador. The matador was to enter the stage through separating walls that we built on wheels to open and close. Very theatrical. It was 10:45pm, we had shot the dance/strip, the j/o bonus movie and all we had left was the opening shot where he entered the stage through the walls and dozens of roses showered him from above. “What? Roses? What are you talking about (Scott Masters)? You never asked for roses on your list!”

Well, you would have thought I’d killed his first born. The look on Scott Masters' face said it all as he screamed back at me, insisting he mentioned the roses when he ordered his custom built set over the phone. He definitely had not, and it was too late to run to the store to purchase any. His flight back to L.A. was at 8am, so I apologized if I missed the “roses request,” but reinforced the fact that he had a strong scene and no one would miss the fact that there were supposed to be roses. Well, that fell on deaf ears. Back and forth, back and forth. Suddenly he had an epiphany: “The curtain!” “The curtain?” Yes, the red velvet curtain that the model used in his dance and wrapped himself in for the J/O bonus movie. Don’t you know that Scott Masters had me, the 2nd cameraman, the make-up man, the still photographer and even poor Chris Dano sitting on the floor until 1am cutting up that muther fucking curtain into small strips and making fake roses that were stapled together so we could shoot a 15-second shot of them falling from the sky onto Chris Dano. It took all of my will power not to purposely jiggle the camera during the shot. I think I got home around 3am.

 

Another more draining situation came on the movie The Main Attraction. This was a homage to his Nova Video movie of the same name. Matt Powers was Catalina’s new exclusive, and Scott Masters' secret (at the time) obsession. (I might talk about that “love affair” in a future blog; it’s personal so I’m not sure. But, then again, I do have a big mouth.) Anyway, Matt Powers finished the scene with Vic Summers, which, let me tell you, took a layer of flesh to complete, even before things came to a dead halt. We waited four hours while Vic would watch and rewind the VCR to get himself to the point where he could cum. He must have ran into the set screaming “I’m cumming!” seven or eight times, but nothing came out. Masters refused to let us put the cameras on a tripod because he had very specific angles in mind that called for me to be on a 20-foot ladder and 2nd camera to be wedged with the still photographer, literally on top of each other in the corner of the set. All of our backs were sore and aching but he refused to let us change the angle. At around midnight, Masters decided to end our misery but wanted us all back at 6am to try again for the cum shot, as they all had 1pm flights home. At 6am, we all returned to the studio hoping and praying that a good night's sleep would somehow empower Vic Summers to quickly blow his load. It was a repeat of the night before, so I requested to Masters that we lay Vic on his back on the bed with the VCR in viewing distance so he was comfortable and could just “cum” without having to run into the set and get in an awkward position. That and any other suggestions were met with a “no” accompanied by a long monologue as to why not. Just shy of four and a half hours later, drip... drip. A very un-dramatic visual presentation of what some might call a cumshot.

When I saw John Travis later that month to start shooting My Best Buddy, the crew and I shared our nightmarish experience. Travis was like, “What the fuck? We’ve got so many fucking cum shots in the can, close-up, underneath, overhead, fat dicks, thin dicks, straight dicks, crooked dicks, mushroom heads, no head… couldn’t he have just reused one of those?” Exactly.

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. 

"Like something out of a Greek tragedy (or Clash of the Titans), a naked man lies spread-eagled on his stomach on the center of a ceremonial plaza. The Falconhead appears out of nowhere, clad in black robes that look oddly medieval, and presents an ornately framed mirror to the prostrate man, pushing his face into it with his shiny black boots. Text flashes, "He gazed into the mirror and was consumed by it."
 

So begins Michael Zen's Falconhead (1977), a richly complex film that “features a fearsome bird-headed man with magical powers, a possibly nefarious shaman/landlord, stunningly photographed solo sequences, deliciously ambiguous sexual violence, and lots of gooey, gooey cum eating.”

The man with the head of a falcon character derives from so many cultures. The ancient Egyptian god Horus was usually depicted as a falcon-headed man, wearing the red and white crown which represented his kingship over both Upper and Lower Egypt. Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis, both associated with the cycles of birth, death, and the afterlife.
 

In ancient Egypt, falcons (also known as raptors) represented the soul in the afterlife. In fact, the falcons themselves were even mummified, and recently, some scholars have found evidence that the birds were sacrificed to the gods, or even used in falconry, where young birds are trained to hunt prey.

In the medieval period, falconry became a widespread cultural practice among the nobility, but some of its practices were extremely cruel, including temporarily blinding the birds (the gruesome details are elucidated in the hyperlink above), which made them easier to train.
 

The practice, however, lost popularity in Europe because of the widespread usage of guns and gunpowder. In Britain among some of the gentry the practice survived, and these individuals formed a series of clubs that kept the art alive, leading eventually to the modern development of falconry in Europe, North America and Africa.
 

There are so many elements in the above of terrifying power, sacrifice and cruelty, but also beauty and awe. Birds of course can fly, and this action has always inspired humans to think about power and its limits, the Icarus myth being the most well-known one.

And falcons in all their variety, who soar in the sky, are carnivorous creatures, who hunt for earthbound prey, the creeping things in the creation account in Genesis. Yet, at the same time, humans have attempted to tame, even confine, this energy through the art of falconry.
 

It's like this type of bird represents for humans a boundary breaker, someone who can brave the wide gaps between heaven and earth, nature and art, life and death.

Perhaps in the mirror the falcon-headed man presents to the prostrate man, we see ourselves consumed by what seems to be our own physical sexual power, but ultimately, it's a power given to us by a natural, or even supernatural force that encompasses, in fact, thrives on, extremes in order to not just survive, but triumph.

The falcon-headed man is the endless orgasm of life and death; we can imitate it, mirror it, but our life is a disconnected series of gooey cumshots in the sublunary earth. The men are consumed; but he burns like that famous bush, not consumed.
 

The poet Yeats proclaims in his famous poem, The Second Coming, that in a time of crisis “the falcon can no longer hear the falconer;” in these times, perhaps, we have lost the seismic energy that charges body and spirit together in a dynamic relationship. I see this line as implying that falconer cannot bond with the falcon; he has stopped up his conduit to the falcon's awesome energy he was able to tap into.

Thus, all that's left, as in the famous line at the end of the poem, is the “rude beast slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born,” a dead life devoid of creativity, passion, and love.

Quotes from the Falconhead review by DM at BijouWorld.
 

Now, as many readers by now have figured out, often times (more so in more recent porn, and I am showing my bias for Bijou Classics), there is a splice between the sucking and the fucking and the cumshot or cumshots. The viewer wants to get his money’s worth, even if, and readers probably know this fact, in the actual filming the actor’s cum isn't always caused directly by the action.

’ve heard some porn directors hired guys to suck the actor’s off to keep them hard, or to hurry the climax because time is money. 
 

I think the word actor is important here. Now some porn stars of the past (I think of the prolific David Ashfield and also, see below the legendary Al Parker) enjoyed the sex, and the acting wasn’t so much acting as more like someone filming a live sexual interaction, not filming something that was necessarily planned in advance. 
 

And also, many of our titles put the sex in the context of a story and in many cases, a fantasy. Yes, the story needs actors, but the sex doesn’t seem as staged, or, I might say, as clinical. 

For example, the scene in Turned On!, where Al Parker is worshipping the cocks of endless hunky men, is a fantasy. But it’s also a fantasy that Al probably enjoyed in his own sexual experience, and he was being daring, because Al usually topped, and he we see him submitting, and because the hunky men seem to merge into one man, they become something more like Man with a capital M. Man as the air we breathe and the blood coursing through our veins. It’s obviously not real, but it’s also somehow more authentic. Why? Because in order to get to that orgasm, the mind needs to be working as well as the cock and your sexual partner or partners. 

It’s just got to happen. In the moment. 

And when the context gets more kinky, in my experience I’ve noticed guys in elaborate bondage (a fantasy made reality) get hard, but the climax has got to happen. I’ve seen responsive tops, who in many cases are fulfilling the bottom’s own fantasy, often do actions not exactly bondage-related to make that money shot happen. In one case, I saw the top put his gloved hand over the bottom’s face, as a final dominant act. In another case, another guy sucked the bottom’s cock. Or, and most wondrously, do nothing to the bottom’s cock, and it just happens. 
 

The facts (courtesy of Back2Stonewall.com):

David Ashfield was one of the biggest names of 1980s porn, making dozens of movies and appearing in plenty more as a stunt dick.

He was slim, born in 1960, had a huge and thick cut penis and topped (although he started off as a bottom in early Falcon loops). 
 

David starred in movies like Below the Belt, and was famous for big ejaculations.

David speaks for himself; passages from an interview in the October 1987 issue of Hot Shots:

“Fantasies started to come along when I was about 12 years old … I grew up in the desert in Arizona. So of course, I had dreams and fantasies of long blonde-haired country boys; and grass and trees; playing in the woods; you always dream of what you don't have.”

“Do you find it more exhilarating with a live audience?"
"No, because it's a totally different trip. When we're doing the movies we're in a corner, just us and the cameraman; it's still pretty much private, even though there are people there. Everyone knows exactly what's going on, and are all part of the deal. Whereas when I'm on stage I'm a spectacle. I try to be a trouper and do a good job of it, bring out the Scorpio side of my image, but, a lot of times I still get the willies.”

“For the record, what is the main feature about your cock that makes you stand out in a crowd?"
"A lot of guys have a dick as long as mine, but most people don't have one as fat as mine. It's 6-1/2 inches around. And in the movies I can really fuck.

"Do you find a lot of guys can't take you?"
"Some can, some can't. About an even number, I guess.”