by Ryan Werner



I wrote the script for A Midsummer’s Wet Dream a week after I got fired from the gas station and a month before I graduated college. I got drunk and sent it to the first adult video company that came up on the internet. Two weeks later I got a check for $175. The day before I graduated college, I got a copy in the mail. I applied at the Adult Warehouse in the next town over and got the job. Graveyard shift.

The clientele were nice. Not in the same ways that a glass of water or a nap are nice, but in the sorts of ways that make them socially upstanding within the context of a store that sells dildos. Virtuous people were everywhere, and I’d take notes on the inside of cigarette cartons as Ms. Asian-Woman-Buying-Imitation-Astro-Glide-In-Bulk told me what makes her feel sexy. She’d leave knowing that it’s all for her when the typically demure Ishokino turns to the strong American Buck in Cumzilla and says, “Bring your white to my face.” My parents told everyone I was in the self-esteem business.

I eventually quit and moved to L.A. Lots of people do it, I realize that, but most of them end up involved with sex on tape only after trying to be in the real movies or on television. I just wanted to see how many different ways I could sneak twenty minutes of story between two hours of fucking. I did the parody circuit at first: Men In Black Men, Fellatio Gump, Schindler’s Lust. I did Gummed With the Wind and Jurassic Pork for the nursing home crowd. The studios kept buying. I was doubling up on my student loan payments. I bet they don’t teach how to write a cumshot in MFA workshops. Not on purpose, anyways.

Fucktasia moved me away from just writing. I wasn’t producing with names or anything—just amateurs who wanted to take a chance—but I was producing. I got calls from studios wanting me to come in and tell them how to shoot the reverse-cowgirl position. I even kept getting calls from home, mainly curious ones that stopped more than they ended.

“Are you eating well?”

“Yeah, Mom. One of the girls made me chili the other day.”

My parents have an old phone, and I could hear Mom twist the cord around her finger.

“Is she clean?”

“Well, she didn’t make it with her cunt, if that’s what you mean.”

She handed the phone off to Dad, and only when she was out of the room did I say, “Hey Dad, did you see Fucktasia?” But I know they don’t care about that sort of thing. The sex, maybe, but not the craft. Most people are like that. Consciously, at least. If someone happened to look, he could see the wrench as Chekhov’s gun in Ballcock or hear Carver’s dialogue in the Vixen Vampire series. When the storm hit the dejected leading man right before the three-way in Mother Nature’s Muddy Fields, he could see King Lear’s pathetic fallacy, and know.






RYAN WERNER has got a body built for sin and an appetite for passion.