Becoming the Green Door, or How Working in Porn Shaped Me as a Filmmaker

I parked outside of the squat brick building on the northern edge of South Central Los Angeles, only remarkable for its green-painted metal door. I was a few months out of graduate school, broke and desperate, unable to land even unpaid assistant editing work after sending hundreds of resumes, with no family connections or safety net. This was a desperate attempt – a Craigslist find. A wild swing at anything to pay my rent. I pulled out my resume, took a deep breath, got out of my beaten-down Saturn, and knocked. The green door cracked open.

My next few years would become an essential part of my creative development, in ways I’m still discovering.

This was 2008, the end of an era for adult film: a new site, YouPorn, was starting to stream scenes for free. Pornhub was barely a blip. The big porn studios responded with lawsuits, slow to adapt to a new world. They would be gone within a few years. I would be gone, too, laid off and unable to tell people what I’d been doing throughout this three-year hole in my resume, a casualty of the new streaming era.

I didn’t just work for any studio, I worked for the biggest studio, Vivid Video, and I worked with one of its biggest directors on a team of just three people, in our own studio in South Central. I edited hundreds of scenes, wrote narrative feature-length porn scripts, and even directed – the dialogue scenes, at least. I can’t tell you everything here. I could easily write a book, but I want to focus on a moment that has come to define my own films.

It started the day that green door opened. “You Scott? Come on in. Girl’s not here yet.”

I’m going to call him “Jimmy.” He was friendly and funny, a film school grad himself, and now he was a name porn director. He rented a 15,000 square foot studio space for $2000 per month in a “bad neighborhood” – the kind of space artists dream of. He had built it out himself – a bathroom, changing room, kitchen and small office control room. He was proud of it. Jimmy had this studio because he was an outsider – he didn’t want to work at Vivid’s main studio in the Valley; he did things his way. For several years, I would sit with Jimmy in that studio control room. My desk faced a large open studio window with a full view of the shooting stage, basically a bunch of flats and Ikea furniture – front row seats to a new world.

I liked Jimmy right away and for those few years, we became a team. Not friends, but I became Jimmy’s “guy.” He hung up the postcard I made for my recently completed short film called Nosebleeds, bragging to anyone who would listen that I was an artist, like him (he never watched it). Jimmy told me he was a pioneer in lighting adult films, in the perfect angles, in casting. He also had the main skill you need to direct porn – knowing how to make people feel comfortable. He wasn’t a perfect guy, he was thorny, but I’ve met much worse in the regular film industry.

But I’m getting ahead of myself … Day one.

There was no interview. Jimmy sat me down at a computer with a stack of DV tapes. I’d get $200 a scene, no matter how long it took me. I would cut a trailer and then lightly edit the scene for continuity, he explained, leaving it long and raw feeling. The trailer was the most important part – it was how we got people to subscribe. He showed me where the taser was if I was ever there late, and where the pistol was if I was ever there really late, assuring me we wouldn’t have any problems because the local gang worked for us as drivers. This leads to other stories I won’t mention now, but let’s just say Chekhov was right about guns.

Jimmy introduced to me the rest of the team: the Grip/B Camera operator who I worked with every day, but is irrelevant in this piece, so I won’t name him. A kind, soft-spoken single dad who served as Jimmy’s straight man. He and Jimmy were both regular guys in many ways – they wore cargo shorts and carried leathermans.

There was also a fourth guy, a weird, middle-aged nerdy P.A. who would be fired within two weeks for constantly making inappropriate comments to the girls. In my mind, he looks a bit like a young Randy Quaid, so I’ll call him “Randy.”

A knock at the door.

The girl walked in with the makeup artist and driver. It would be her first scene ever – that was the conceit of the show we made. Most of them were 19. She would be performing with an industry vet (usually a guy, of whom we had a rotating stable of about six). The girl was unremarkable. The makeup artist had a career in regular TV, but secretly did this on the side secretly to make extra money. This was true of many people I’d meet in the industry.

I started going through the footage Jimmy had given me as the girl got into makeup. An hour or so later, Randy walked in and handed me a pair of headphones. Jimmy was about to start the first part of the shoot – an on-camera interview – and I couldn’t make noise. Randy looked excited. “She’s hot,” he said. I was unsure if I should feign enthusiasm or disinterest. Whatever kept me the job.

“CUT.”

Jimmy came into the room radiating enthusiasm – the interview had been a good one.

“How’s it going? You have any questions? Gonna be a good scene today, I can feel it! Great interview. We got pizza coming at 2, if you want. Alright, I gotta go shoot this shit.”

He walked out. Moments later, a clap and the real scene started. They were already naked, making out. Randy watched through my window as I edited. It felt weird watching porn in front of a stranger, like I should be hiding it.

“Hey man, they’re about to start fucking. Want to watch?” Randy asked.

“I don’t know, man, I feel kind of awkward,” I answered.

He looked baffled. “Why would you feel awkward?,” he asked. “That’s why they’re here. They want you to watch them.”

I had assumed they were like me, desperate for money, unable to get into the “real” film industry. Later, I learned that some were. But many weren’t. The reasons the women came here were varied, but many of them did want to perform and be seen. The studio was a place of collective fantasy, for them as well as the audience.

I came out of the office for a few minutes to watch the two performers going at it. I looked over at Randy, who looked into my eyes from across the studio, raised his eyebrows, and slowly nodded an “oooh yeah.” He was borderline drooling. I went back to work, he went back to watching as the studio echoed with the slap of skin on skin.

“CUT!”

Jimmy burst in again, sweating and giddy. “Amazing today so far. Fucking amazing scene.”

“Are you done?” I asked, as he watched my first rough trailer.

“Nah nah, we’ll finish after lunch. Pizza. Come out and hang out. Or go out. Whatever you want! If you go out, knock when you come back, so you don’t interrupt if we start shooting. Closed set.” He gave me a few notes on my trailer and disappeared, cracking jokes about the grip and the male performer.

In the first few weeks, Jimmy invited me to a few industry parties, but he never pushed me too hard. He knew I had a serious girlfriend, although several times he thought it would be funny to send a naked Sunny Leone in to sit on my lap and ask me about the process of editing, delighting in my discomfort. He would whisper “Scott Cummings’ mother is a whore” into the microphone during scenes, to make sure I was watching closely enough. He was a prankster, a Jersey guy, anxiety-ridden to the core. He cared deeply about his mother.

That first day, I didn’t have the guts to eat with them. I went out and got Subway, worried they had me figured out: I wasn’t a “porn guy.” I was totally a phony. I doubted they’d let me back in and what the hell was I doing anyways? I had to put lunch on my credit card – it was less than $10. I drove back.

I knocked on the green door again and Jimmy answered, a taser in his hand. “Oh shit, you scared me. I didn’t know if you were gonna come back. Where’d you go? Subway? Yeah, this pizza sucks. I’m from New York, it’s an embarrassment,” he said, as he took a bite of pizza, the same one we would eat almost daily for years. “We got tons, if you want some. Take it home for dinner to your girlfriend.”

I beelined back to my studio office, as the two bathrobed performers joked around with each other in the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Jimmy walked in with a bowl and took a hit, offering it to me. I took it from him and smoked. “Alright, we gotta do the box cover, then the pop shot. If you need the bathroom, go, cuz you can’t be walking through set when we shoot the last part of the scene. Stills, let’s go!” He turned on Mötley Crüe. I could hear the click of the shutter and Jimmy barking orders.

I went back to editing, but I did need the restroom, and that restroom was directly past where they were shooting. I was going to have to go out and walk through the set now or wait until they were finished for the day. I resolved to just act professional. I left the safety of my little room and headed toward the sole bathroom, past the click of the camera, Mötley Crüe, and Jimmy’s barked comments. I snuck a peek as I walked by and stopped dead in my tracks, fascinated.

The talent was on a bed, well lit. The guy was behind the girl, inside of her. She was making a “sex face.” They stared directly into the camera. They stayed like that, unmoving, mid-copulation, while he shot. Then they’d make small adjustments. Every once in a while the guy would start moving himself slightly in and out in an effort to stay hard through the process. Jimmy asked them to change positions. The guy lost his erection – he asked the girl if they could really fuck for a minute. They repeated this in every position, ending with him standing, her on one knee, with his penis frozen in various positions in her mouth – unmoving, often one or both of them looking directly into camera. Jimmy registered his pleasure. “Fuck, yeah. This is amazing. Fucking amazing!”

It’s this image that has never left me, one that I have found again and again. The frozen tableau, the direct address to the camera, the performance. In that moment, surrounded by Ikea and half-empty pizza boxes, they were Gods, who wanted to show themselves to us. And even though he wasn’t onscreen, Jimmy was there too, giving his own performance.

The finished the scene. As they packed up I met the girl and chatted. Her makeup was gone and she was dressed down, painfully normal. Unrecognizable. Mortal. She asked if she did OK.

I was a fiction filmmaker before this moment, but from then on, I became something else. This memory and this image greatly informed Buffalo Juggalos, the medium-length nonfiction film I made in 2013, in which the film’s participants, Juggalos in the city of Buffalo, often stare down the camera in frozen tableaus. On more than one occasion, as my cinematographer Nandan Rao operated, I would feel the excitement creep up. “Amazing. Fucking amazing. That’s fucking incredible. Fuck!” That was Jimmy’s voice coming out of me.

I’m hesitant to lionize Jimmy. It’s easy to criticize him as an exploiter, picking up naïve and starry-eyed girls from the Midwest and pulling them into a tawdry world. But there were layers to it. He always gave them “the talk.” On our lunch break, he would sit them down and give a straight-faced lecture about how to survive in the industry – how to slowly build an audience and career, but also a few economic basics: don’t lease a car, don’t lease a house, no drugs but pot, put half the money in a savings account or the stock market. Women in porn rarely last more than three years, but you’ll get rich enough to never work again if you do it right. Most of them didn’t listen, pulling up in leased Hummers and decked out in Juicy Couture everything the next time they came around. Some also turned to drugs – mostly pills, which quickly got them blacklisted. We were a mainstream porn studio – drugs were totally forbidden.

Jimmy was an exploiter, but he was honest about it. That’s the thing that has always frustrated me with nonfiction – the convoluted pretzels filmmakers twist themselves into to prove that they are not exploiting subjects. I came to film in general through exploitation films – people like Russ Meyer always spoke to me more than Al Maysles. I grew up reading Apocalypse Culture and watching skinheads punch Geraldo, staying up late to see softcore porn movies on CityTV after 2 a.m. and sitting through Cassavetes and Godard films because that’s what CityTV played from midnight to 2. I deeply love “edgy” everything. Eventually I was introduced to and fell in love with experimental and “art films,” and my biggest weakness is a certain strain of academic film you can mostly see at festivals – lugubrious, unwieldy, pretentious, difficult and inscrutable films are like candy to me. And if it’s from Tajikistan and stars nonprofessional actors? I’m all in.

My taste in film developed and solidified at CalArts, but six months after graduating, I was in the polar opposite world, Jimmy’s world, and these two worlds merged. Even though I always stayed somewhat at arms length from Vivid, I was not only witness to a secret world, I was also part of it – an insider and an outsider at once. The people appearing in my films often see this in me also. I am not comfortable in an impartial role, and I am not the audience. I am not the invisible observer. I’m there, part of it. I get to go behind the green door, but I stay at a remove, behind a pane of glass. Part of the world and outside it at the same time. Academic and pornographic.

I decided to openly embrace that contradiction in my own filmmaking impulses. I haven’t made a “fiction” film since I worked for Jimmy. It changed something – the sleaziness, the realness  and the fantasy of it all, the possibilities – it pushed me somewhere closer to nonfiction, even if I bristle at the word “documentary,” which implies an objective outside perspective that isn’t very interesting to me. I want to be in there, part of it. I am a pornographer.

For many years, I kept my own background in the adult film industry a secret, something I also shared with Jimmy, whose mother never found out what he did for a living. Even if two-thirds of the adult industry also worked for Disney or the CW, no one in Hollywood would admit it – a shameful, career-killing secret. The indie film world I now inhabit is oddly conservative – the “middle class-ness” of so many of the films has always been a bummer for me. Too many films seem beholden to respectability, declawed and defanged. Has the world forgotten that arthouse films and adult films were often screened in the same theaters, and often distributed by the same people? The line from Bergman to Kirdy Stevens is more direct than the line from Bergman to Rian Johnson. It’s still somewhat baffling that it isn’t public knowledge that one of the most important figures in arthouse film distribution in the U.S., the paragon of respectability cinema, started out collecting and theatrically distributing erotic film reels and stag films.

I publicly outed myself when my feature debut Realm of Satan premiered at Sundance in 2024. In the context of Realm of Satan, it makes sense – several of the people featured in the film are porn makers and talent. One of the first filmed representations of a black mass is in a porn film from 1928 called Messe Noire. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on the Internet Archive and it’s incredible and totally hardcore. Some people say Edison essentially created the first porn reel in the 1890s. Whatever the case, it didn’t take long for the new art form to explore magic (Méliès), sex, and snuff – again, Edison with Electrocuting an Elephant or Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, essentially a commercial for another of his inventions, the electric chair. Sin, sex, snuff, Satan, black magic – the fabric of filmmaking. Film needs to rely on that fabric, or it becomes television.

Back to that first day.

Jimmy was on the phone with his mother, as he gathered his stuff to go home. Everyone else had already left. He was probably arguing with her about a neighbor, or her taking her medication, or something his girlfriend said that upset her. He was drinking a beer, as he always did after a shoot around 3pm.

He hung up and looked at me.

“You coming in tomorrow? I got like 27 scenes that need to be cut. That’s like 6,000 bucks right there. We usually shoot at least like six or seven scenes a week; once you catch up it should be steady. I’ll always have work for you. Invoice me on Friday, I’ll pay you same day.”

“Yeah, sounds amazing,” I answered, still unsure of this whole operation.

He threw me a set of keys. “Lock up when you leave. Place is all yours. Come whenever you want, just be careful at night. I’ll be here tomorrow around 10.” My money troubles were over. He was happy, I was happy.

“Don’t forget to take the pizza,” he shouted, as the metal door slammed ominously shut, and the studio settled into silence. I put my headphones back on as I started to edit a second scene.
Jimmy still makes porn and I make “somewhat experimental, nonfiction-adjacent performance films,” but we’re not in touch. That door is no longer green and the neighborhood is slowly gentrifying, but once you get behind that door, you don’t get out – you yourself become the gateway, the portal. You are the Green Door.

All images courtesy Scott Cummings.