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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Joe Gallant's Black Mirror Productions tries to bring the nastiness of old-school smut back into the New York porn biz. And save the world from John Ashcroft besides.
Jul 22, 2002 | Joe Gallant wants desperately to be the Andy Warhol of adult cinema.
"I love the crowd he attracted. I want my crowd to be like that: free-spirited, spontaneous and able to contribute," explains Gallant, sole proprietor of a porn company called Black Mirror Productions, during a break from shooting scenes in his sweaty, sex-stenched Hell's Kitchen apartment. "Warhol moved from painting to film, and I have my reasons for going from music to hardcore New York pornography."
We've been filming in Gallant's cramped version of the Factory for the last hour, packed in tight among tons of music and video equipment, barbells, books, movies, posters and the scattered papers and files of a very busy businessman. In the far corner of the bedroom, a bank of VCRs runs constantly, dubbing copies of such Black Mirror titles as "Times Square Trash," "Extreme Filth" and "M'ass'terpiece Theater."
When Gallant hands me a hand-held digital video camera and starts whacking away at some anal sex, my first instinct is to refuse the assignment due to a lack of any practical experience. I don't even take vacation photos. But unlike mainstream porn (or mainstream movies, for that matter), at Black Mirror technical specifications take a back seat to the overall vision of the project.
"Warhol had no clue as to what he was doing. He just started doing it. He barely knew how to turn on the camera," Gallant reassures me. "But his naiveté, coupled with a keen observation of social shifts, allowed him to capture a time and an era pretty effectively."
I observe all the action through the camera's small, square viewfinder, struggling to keep the undulating subject matter in the frame and in focus. The director never checks on my progress. He's too busy exploring every available orifice of a 23-year-old blonde named Erika Kole.
"You have delicious balls," she tells him.
"Thanks, it's an old family recipe."
Black Mirror has only been making XXX films for the past two years, but it's a fascination that's been whispering in Gallant's ear far longer. In 1979, a 22-year-old Gallant answered an ad in Screw magazine seeking potential male porn actors. He filled out an application, but never heard back.
"Also, when I was 6 years old, I found a big cache of porn mags in the vagina-shaped hollow of a tree," he tells me, as if recounting a fairy tale or an origin myth. "All the other kids on their bicycles went, 'Eww, yuck,' but for me it was like the heavens parted."
It's a sensation he likens to playing his first bass guitar.
Gallant gigged with a lot of bands after dropping out of New York University in the late '70s. He was heavy into the CBGB-Talking Heads-Brian Eno art-rock scene, but bad habits held him back, like heroin overdoses in the shooting galleries of New York's Lower East Side and a tendency to sell his instruments for drug money. Then he got clean in the '80s and formed an avant-garde outfit called Illuminati -- a group that went largely unnoticed for more than a decade, until 1995's "Blues for Allah" project was initiated at the request of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh.
The assignment was to reinterpret the Dead's music as big-band jazz, reworking the classic "Blues for Allah" album to mark its 20th anniversary. As with porn, Gallant's musical ambitions were predicted through an early, mystical revelation. In this case, inspiration arrived via an acid-soaked sleepless teenage night spent listening to the Dead's psychedelic masterpiece "Dark Star" over and over again until sunrise. From then on, he was hooked.
"Their music is in my cells. It's been a significant part of every life change I've had -- births, deaths, everything," he says. "They were a legitimately heavy band. Capital-H heavy."
Just days before the live premiere of the "Blues for Allah" project, Jerry Garcia died in a California drug rehab facility. He couldn't kick heroin. The concert was initially postponed, and later performed to an enthusiastic packed house at New York's Knitting Factory. Illuminati followed up that success by recording another album of Dead tunes and touring on the post-Jerry jam-band circuit for a while. But with 18 musicians in the lineup, it was hard to get ahead or, for that matter, break even.
It hasn't been any easier getting Black Mirror into the financial black. Gallant's day job as a sound designer on the soap opera "Guiding Light" (for which he won a daytime Emmy in 1996) provides a nice income, but it's not nearly enough to counter all the start-up debt. He admits that Con Edison could be turning off the lights in his porn factory at any moment.
"I started by putting up 400 hot-pink fliers in the East Village," he says. "I got three responses, and began shooting sex scenes immediately. Basically, I've paid for it all myself, maxed out everything to the tune of $68,000. It's been brutal, but this is the first month where I'm also able to see tremendous possibility."
There are a few reasons to be optimistic. First off, "Times Square Trash 2" was labeled a "spotlight pick" by Adult Video News (the trade-mag bible of the porn biz), and received a pre-nomination for AVN's Best Amateur Tape of the Year award. On July 4, Manhattan public-access cable broadcast the premiere of "Black Mirror Vol. 1 -- Arise and Tell the World," an experimental sci-fi/porn hybrid set in the year 2010, just after the official corporate buyout of the American government. In this nightmarish future, porn and free expression are outlawed, diseases and state-sponsored suicide bombers terrorize the population, oil and nuclear interests control the world, media manipulation maintains the status quo and the Earth's only hope exists in a set of secret coded instructions transmitted to the sexual underground via an unknown, extraterrestrial force.
"Why does this information come to three humble, rebel pornographers?" Gallant asks rhetorically. "We don't know yet -- but all will be revealed."
