It started with just three of us, me, Kent, and Rad. We were roommates at Clinton State University. Rad (short for Radovan) was a foreign student from Luminia, an obscure little 3rd world country in Eastern Europe that no one gave a shit about. One summer, Rad went home to visit his family. When he came back, he brought a box full of low-budget Luminian porn with him. His uncle was connected in some way to the industry over there.
So, we did what any three twenty-year-old college guys would do: We got high as fuck and watched it. Of course, the only one who understood anything that was being said was Rad. I don't speak fucking Luminian, and neither did Kent. I don't remember who started it - I think maybe it was me - but we began doing our own voice-overs for the actors. Soon, even Rad was joining, and we were all laughing our asses off. It became our regular thing on the weekends.
Okay, now fast-forward a few years. We all graduated, and suddenly had to figure out what the fuck to do with our lives. Used to be a college degree was a job guarantee, but now it's just guaranteed debt and 'we wish you luck with that.' This was around 2008 when the economy had totally gone to shit. But in spite of it all, we were optimistic - or stupid - well, probably just young.
"Hey, Ryan?" Kent asked. His voice was always quiet and kind of high pitched, almost effeminate. He always played the women when we did the voice-overs
"Yeah?"
"Man, I just got this idea." He brushed his hair out of his blonde hair out of his eyes. It was a kind of Andy Warhol look. It didn't do much for me, but the chicks seemed to really go for it, so I couldn't criticize him too much.
"Yeah?" I said when he didn't continue his thought.
"Yeah, what?" He asked. We were fucking baked.
"You said you had an idea."
"Oh yeah!" He shouted excitedly. "Listen, you know how we're always doing voices for Rad's porn?"
"Uh huh."
"Well, I mean, like, we've been doing it for awhile, you know. And I don't know, like, if we're still into it, I mean... wouldn't other people be into it, too?"
"I don't know, man," I said, laughing at how stoned Kent was. "I guess so."
"So, like what if we could sell it?"
"Rad's porn?"
"Yeah... I mean, but, like with our voices on it, and stuff."
"You want to sell Rad's porn? Wouldn't he be pissed?"
"No, man," Kent said shaking his head, "Fuck. You don't get it. I don't mean his DVDs. I mean, we make our own DVDs from his stuff, and put our voices on it."
"Ahh," I said, finally grasping on. "Like those old fucking Kung-Fu movies and shit, where their mouths and voices are all screwed up." I continued moving my jaw for a few seconds imitating a bad dub job.
"Yeah," Kent said, laughing, "Like that."
"You think people want to watch Kung-Fu porn?" I asked, feeding off Kent's laughter.
"Why not? People watch all kinds of fucked up shit. Besides, we've been watching it for like a couple of years now."
"I guess you've got a point there."
"Listen, I was reading this article..." Despite how he might sound here, Kent was actually the smartest one of our group. He was constantly reading things. "And it was saying that porn was like a bigger industry than major league sports, and this huge part of the economy in California and shit, right?"
"If you say so, man."
"Alright, so like, there's all these companies making porn in California. I don't know anything about making porn, and I don't have any connections there. Do you?"
I laughed and sarcastically answered, "Yeah, I'm a broke-ass sales clerk by day and porn king of California by night."
"Okay, so we haven't got connections in California, but we do have a connection in Luminia."
"Rad?"
"Yeah, man," Kent shouted, "haven't you been fucking listening? Rad's uncle is connected to the business. He gets us the videos cheap from over there, and then we do the voices in English on them so people can understand what the fuck is happening, and we sell them here."
Later, we talked to Rad about it. He didn't seem too convinced (and he was pissed that we'd smoked without him), but we wore him down eventually, and he agreed to talk to his uncle for us. This resulted in an argument over the phone that we didn't comprehend because it was in Luminian.
"He said no," Rad sulked after hanging up the phone.
"No?" Kent asked, "But why?"
"Just said no," Rad shook his head sorrowfully.
"Well, what did you say to him?" Kent asked.
"I said you wanted him to send more DVDs so we could sell them."
"Shit! Rad! Why did you tell him that?"
"It's what you said!"
"Jesus fucking Christ. Of course he'd say no. I mean that's basically asking him if we can steal from him."
"Isn't that what you said?" Rad asked, looking confused.
"No... Listen... no, you know what, next time you go home, I'm going with you. I'll fucking talk to them myself. This is a fucking gold mine idea. I can't let you fuck it up."
Three months later, Rad and Kent took off for Luminia. They were there for two weeks. When Kent returned (without Rad who stayed behind to look after his sick father), they had managed to broker a distribution deal with Kosenkova films. They'd granted us rights to five of their movies as a trial. In return, they took a 35% cut of our sales.
They'd initially wanted 60%, but Kent had argued that we could break into a very lucrative market, selling our movies for ten times the rate charged in Luminia, and without us, they'd get nothing. It sounded like bullshit to me, but I guess they admired the balls he had.
Our first priority was hiring some talent. I was okay for doing the male voices, but if we were going to be professional, we needed an actual woman to play the female roles. We put up an advertisement in Craig's List and were surprised at the number of responses we got from Drama students at the university. We spent way too much time auditioning them, and finally ended up settling on a girl named Denise Linsdale - Yeah, I know. You've never heard of her either. Give me a fucking break, okay? She had a great voice.
So, this is how it went: Denise and I would watch a scene once through and take notes about what we thought was going on. Then we'd compare our notes and agree on some kind of story that may loosely match what was happening on the screen. Really, we only needed to fill about two to three minutes with improvised dialogue. The rest was just 'ooh, ahh, you like that baby?, fuck me harder, oh yes, that feels good' etc. We'd record everything on a computer, which would remove the original dialogue from the movie, and synch up our own dialogue. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
The results were pretty amateur-hour, though, to be frank. Quality was clearly not our top priority. Yet, at the end of it, we had a porn video with a semi-comprehensible story line, and most importantly, people fucking in English for American audiences. Kent decided that we should have a website, and focus on digital content instead of manufacturing DVDs in order to cut costs. So he hired a web-developer named Spyder2112. I'm pretty sure that's not the guy's real name, but I never met him in person. Kent dealt with him purely online.
Kent summarized our business model over beers the first month we turned a profit: "It's shit. We know it's shit, and our customers know it's shit. But it's cheap shit. We can afford to sell it cheap, because we get it for next to nothing. Look, man, no one expects to win a fucking academy award here. We just give the people cheap imported shit at rock bottom prices. We're like the fucking Dollar Store of porn."
Our business grew pretty quickly, and Kent kept our overhead to a bare minimum, so whatever we did make was almost entirely profit. We hired a woman by the name of Kim to manage our books. We sent about 35% back to Kosenkova films (well, after Kim and Spyder2112 massaged the figures - it was more like 25%... maybe 20%). Despite our skimming, they were still impressed with how well we were doing. They sent us more movies - better ones, too.
Rad scouted for other companies to work with. Kent would fly out, close the deal, and bring back more Eastern European porn. At our peak, Denise and I were dubbing maybe two or three films a day from all kinds of different places I couldn't find on a fucking map.
You might think watching porn all day long is a fucking dream job, but it gets old after awhile. Pretty soon every day was just another fucking day at the office. Kent could have hired more voice actors, but that would have cut into our profits.
"Last thing we need at this point is another fucking mouth to feed," he said when Denise brought the subject up.
After that, she worked for another week and then quit. She wanted to do something more fulfilling and meaningful with her life, she said. She moved to Minnesota to be near her family, and started working as a dispatcher for a taxi cab company.
Once again, we appealed to the Craig's List community for a replacement. This time the response was even bigger than last time. Kent decided to handle the hiring decision by himself, though. He only interviewed four girls, before he found one that was relatively satisfactory to him.
"This is Erin," Kent introduced us. "She's taking over for Denise. Show her, you know, how we do things."
"Hi," said Erin. She also had a good voice. Not quite as sexy as Denise, but still pretty good.
I shook Erin's hand, and Kent went back to his office. She was another drama student from the university. I wouldn't guess she was more than twenty-one. Maybe younger. She was plain looking - neither hot, nor ugly. She was short and small breasted, small assed. She had blonde hair that hung around her oval face without lending it much character. Her mouth was a touch too big, and she smiled a lot with it.
Look, let's get this straight. I'm no super-stud either. I was twenty-seven. My brown hair was just starting to thin out, and I had the beginnings of a pot-belly from too much beer and junk food, and too little exercise. So, glass houses, and all that - Neither of us should really be chucking rocks around in the looks department.
If I sound judgmental, it's probably because I spent all my time looking at all these toned naked beauties and muscular beef-cakes. They're all close ups and collections of body parts that put normal people to shame - large bouncing tits, washboard abs, voluptuous ass, long slender legs, gigantic cock, smooth soft labia, perfectly asterisked asshole. When this is your life day-in, day-out, you know, it's hard not to feel disappointed by the real world with all its natural flaws.
Erin had a bubbly personality that seemed really excited just to be there! I instantly found her annoying. I mean, maybe five or six years ago she might have seemed like a really fun girl, but now she just made me miss Denise. Denise was all business and efficiency. I mean she and I could joke around, but there was none of this wide-eyed innocence about her. That shit might seem charming, but it grates after awhile.
"You know what's so interesting about porn," Erin was saying, "is these actors are like surrogates for other people's fantasies. Like, they do all the things we can't do in real life - you know like cheating on their husbands and wives with the baby sitter in a public change room and stuff. I mean, if you or I did that, we'd be like really shitty human beings, right? So we pay them to do it for us, and live vicariously-"
"Yeah, that's great," I interrupted her. "So, this is what we do here. Basically, we take foreign movies, and dub them into English."
"Yeah, I know," Erin said. "Kent explained it. It's like layers of simulacra. I wonder what Baudrillard would say about this."
"Look, this isn't your Master's thesis. It's just porn, okay?" I told her irritably. "We get videos of people fucking, and we do their voices. Forget the simu-stuff and Bo-tard, or whatever the fuck his name is. Nobody's interested in any of that shit. Just come here and sit down."
Erin pouted and stared at me, wounded, defiant, but for the first time since I met her, she was silent. After a minute, she crossed the room and sat on the old leather sofa we kept in the 'media room' (in other words, the room that we kept the big screen TV in). There was a fairly new desktop computer to one side of the room. Beside it, sitting on hairless mannequin heads, were a pair of headsets with microphones. These were wirelessly linked to the computer for recording. This room, like every other room in our little office, was lit by bright, harsh, florescent lights.
"Alright, so you get a pen and a note pad and I get a pen and a note pad, right?" I handed them to her. "We're going to watch it once to get a sense of the plot."
"You don't know what the movie's about?"
I gave her the DVD case. The cover featured a couple of naked, large-breasted, sexily pouting, raven haired girls. They formed a kind of tent above the face of a spiky haired blonde guy looking super-excited, presumably about the prospect of fucking both these girls. It was a totally generic image. All the writing was in Cyrillic, large and neon as if begging for the reader's attention, but totally indecipherable.
"That's all we've got to go on," I explained. "Any ideas?"
Erin just shrugged.
"Okay, so as I was saying. We're going to watch it once and try to figure out the plot. I mean it doesn't have to be exactly right, as long as it makes some kind of sense. To be honest, people aren't watching these things for the story line, if you know what I mean."
I grinned, and expected Erin to laugh. All I got, though, was a bit of a nod. I was starting to feel a bit guilty about bursting her bubble earlier. Besides, knowing I'd be working with her for awhile, it would be better if we didn't hate each other.
"I'm just saying, you know, it doesn't have to be Shakespeare, as long as we've got something. Alright? Got it?"
Another sulky nod.
"Good," I said.
I started the DVD. Bouncy euro-disco theme music accompany the credits, which roll over an extended scene of a black haired girl (one of the two on the cover) in a shower, lathering her body. She spends a lot of time soaping her large breasts, her ass, and especially between her legs. It soon turns into a masturbation scene.
Interspersed with this are shots of a classic Porsche convertible driving along a winding mountain road. There's a guy driving - the guy with the spiky blonde hair. He's wearing a sweater with a mock-collar, and a pair of reflective sunglasses. Beside him is a gym bag and a tennis racket.
The guy pulls up to a house - sort of a mansion - and goes inside with his stuff. He drops his gear, and calls out something. (We continue to cut to the shower scene, where the woman in the shower really getting into getting herself off). The guy begins to undress - first his shoes then his sweater. He makes his way up the stairs, leaving his pants at the top. His button-down shirt is discarded outside of a closed door, which he opens onto a bedroom. He sits on the bed and removes his socks. Finally, just outside of another door, off come the boxers.
As the final credits fade, we get a close-up of an impressively thick and long cock. Then the man opens the door to reveal - what do you know? - the naked woman pleasuring herself. She sees him standing there and is startled, covering herself. He covers himself, too. There's shouting back and forth between them. Eventually the shouting calms down, and they're just talking. After a minute of back and forth, he grabs a towel, and attempted to hand it to her. She drops it on the floor, grabs his cock instead, and pulls him toward her. They start kissing.
I hit the fast-forward button on the remote. All the sudden, the two characters began to move at warp speed, pinging around the screen. One second she's shaking her head furiously at his crotch, the next he's tossed her on the bed and is thrusting into her like a needle on a sewing machine.
"Wait, what are you doing?" Erin protested. It was clear that she was really getting into the scene.
"This is just a waste of time," I explained. "There's no story here, it's just fucking. You're not missing anything, trust me. I'm skipping ahead to the next good part."
Since I started this job, I've lost interest in watching sex-scenes. They're mostly all the same, more or less, and after seeing so many of them, my mind starts to wander from erotic thoughts to more practical issues - like cleaning. The guy cums all over the place, they've messed up the furniture, their own clothes, themselves. But they never explain what happens after. Does the woman do a load of laundry. Does the guy scrub his semen out of the carpet? Do they just live with the mess and hope no one notices? Shit like that bothers me for some reason.
I hit the play button at just the right moment. Over the years I've developed an impressive (at least to me) accuracy with the forward, reverse, pause, and play buttons on the remote control. The couple slowed to normal speed. They were both panting hard. The woman's face was on screen - her make-up smudged, strings of white cum in her hair. She says something to the guy, then sucks more cum from her fingers, licks her lips, and gives the camera one final sexy look before the scene fades to black.
In the next scene, spiky blonde guy and the black haired woman are sitting at a breakfast table. The guy is reading the newspaper. Another woman, also with dark hair, but taller, and with more angular facial features comes in. She's dressed in a yellow summer dress, and has brought coffee and toast. She kisses the guy in front of the other woman, who looks away. The woman in yellow sits beside the guy, rubbing his shoulder, holding his hand and so on. The guy mostly ignores her.
The two women chat back and forth (Erin will need to do the voices for both. We'll record them separately and overlay them, so it'll sound like a real conversation) when suddenly the guy jumps up, and shouts something with a look of shock on his face. He waves the newspaper at both women, still shouting, and then rushes out the door. The women looked amused. After a little more chatter between them, the first woman (from the shower) checks her watch. She gets up, slings her purse over her shoulder, and leaves.
Meanwhile, the second woman stares out the window to the backyard, where the pool boy is cleaning the swimming pool. She calls to him, and after a short exchange, he joins her in the living room. There's a painting leaning against a wall, and a ladder set up next to it. She says something to him, then begins to climb. The boy, a mop-haired red-head, holds the ladder steady for her. He looks up. We see from his perspective up the woman's dress. She's neglected to put on underwear.
She says something to him. He looks bashful. He hands her the painting, which she hangs on a nail already conveniently in the wall. We continue to get up-skirt shots of her pussy. Without warning, the woman loses her balance flailing her arms. The camera shakes violently, and in the next shot we see the ladder on its side. The boy is lying on the floor next to it. And somehow the woman has landed crotch-first, straddled over his face. Her skirt has ridden up to show a nicely trimmed patch of pubic hair beneath his nose like a weird bushy moustache.
The woman laughs and says something to the boy. The boy says something back (muffled). The woman clutches at her breasts, then his hair. He grabs her ass with both hands as she begins to moan.
I paused the DVD there. The woman's face was frozen in an expression that you would expect an escaped mental patient to wear.
"Well?" I asked.
"What?" Erin responded.
"Your ideas about the story," I explained. I looked at her note pad. There was little written on it. "Tell me what you think is happening so far."
"Well, there's this guy, and he and the chick in yellow are probably married. And then there's this other woman, I don't know, maybe her sister or something. Anyway, he walked in on her in the shower after playing tennis, and they ended up having sex. So he cheated on her. But they were trying to hide it from the wife. He's some kind of big shot - like a banker or politician, I think. Whatever he read in the paper was something he had to go take care of. Maybe a politician. Then the sister decided she needed to go out shopping or something.