This feature appears in the August issue of AVN magazine.
SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, Calif.—The location house, tucked between a freeway and a college campus, has floor-to-ceiling glass walls overlooking a bright-green patch of artificial grass and a jet-black infinity pool with a jet-black waterslide leading to a second infinity pool about 10 feet down the hillside.
This is where Siouxsie Q and Michael Vegas are shooting Reputation, a plot-driven police procedural starring Gal Ritchie and Zac Wild, for Adult Time's Wicked Pictures line.
"They are our lovers, and the whole movie we are watching them yearn for each other—I'm big on yearning, I love a yearning plotline—and this scene is the final sex scene on the movie, where they finally culminate that yearning," Siouxsie Q tells me. "Some of the inspirations were Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, Gillian Anderson in The Fall, things like that I could really latch onto. Tough-girl detectives that are going up against a corrupt system that is patriarchal, misogynist, and racist. It's a story about serial kidnappings going on in Los Angeles, and Gal Ritchie is called in to solve the case. She's reunited with her old partner, played by Zac Wild, and there's some tension between them that we get to enjoy as they get closer to solving the crime and it turns out—shocking—the kidnapper is not who we think. There's always a twist."
Speaking of tough-girl detectives, Ritchie's character is named Gillian Sterling, after Gillian Anderson and Jodie Foster's Silence of the Lambs character Clarice Starling. Similarly, Zac Wild's detective character's name, Alex Fletcher, is derived from Beverly Hills Cop's Axel Foley and Murder, She Wrote's mystery-writer-turned-detective Jessica Fletcher.
"It's cool to get back in the groove of acting," Zac Wild says. "I got my very first award ever for an acting performance, early in my career. I got into this to have a lot of sex, I never thought I would win something for acting. They gave me a script that was really manageable: In this movie Gal Ritchie is the main character, and she has an incredible amount of dialogue. She can do that, a lot of other people can do that, and this is a good stepping stone for me to get back to that point."
A corner of the large living room with a pool table has been staged to look like the home-office area where Ritchie and Wild strategize. A map on the wall has pushpins holding up victims' pictures connected with red string. The pool table is littered with late-night food detritus: pizza boxes, coffee cups, takeout wrappers, a box of gummy candy spilled onto a paper plate.
"My character is an independent woman detective. She has retired from the force and is now a college professor," Ritchie tells me as the techs finish draping the windows and lighting the set for a night look. "She doesn’t let anything stand in her way, she really goes for what she wants. It's really fun to play such a strong female character, I haven’t done a lot of those. It's a very, very dialogue-heavy script, and a lot of it is monologue. That was the biggest challenge."
After the consent interview, Vegas sets out parameters for the sex scene—"No fucking on the pool table, go to the leather couch"—and the sequence starts with Ritchie and Wild peering at the map, piecing things together. "They're crossing jurisdictions," Wild says. "They're not just getting lucky, they're mocking us." Vegas suggests business: "Put your arm on him on 'I'm so tired.' Initiate contact." When Ritchie leans on Wild, the femme fatale tattoo on her arm is visible. Behind the monitors, Siouxsie Q smiles benignly. Wild leans into Ritchie for the kiss—"Cut! Back to one."
"Cock-blocked!" Wild snaps.
Vegas and Siouxsie Q confer with the actors, adjusting pacing, discussing motivations. "Slow it down by half a beat. You're moving too fast. It's your partner. This is unethical."
The dialogue scene works better when they slow it down and the under-the-surface sexual tension builds. When they finally kiss, she puts her hand on his waist, then jumps up and wraps her legs around his hips. "Hold for a second." The cameras reposition, the boom mic is secured. "Let's let these two fuck! And Zac, lose the gum. It worked in the dialogue, but..."
They resume their positions. On "Action!" she climbs back on him, humping his torso. He pulls up her shirt, she squeals. He opens her pants, throws them off, mouth-dives on her pussy as she raises her hips, moaning. She jumps off the pool table, kneels, opens his pants, starts to suck. Slowly deep throats him, pulls off with a groan. I think it was her. Vegas steps up on the pool table, getting ready to shoot downward into the blowjob. "Do you need a pillow [under your knees]?" "I'm okay."
"Get some story in the dirty talk," Siouxsie Q says before she heads back to the monitors. "Let that tension be palpable. Have fun, you guys, you earned it. Love you all, see you on the other side.
"Don’t do anything on the pool table."
Photography by Pleasure Protocol
