by MARK SLUTSKY

“When people ask if the East Van Porn Collective is a real thing or if it’s a fiction, we’re not being disingenuous when we say we’re not entirely clear on that ourselves,” says Professor University. “It was like a massive conflating of reality and fiction until we were just kind of living it. Whichever it was, it was happening.”

Professor University is the nom de porn of a Vancouver man, who, along with the also pseudonymous JD Superstar, Monster, nerdgirl, Mr. Pants, Hugh Jorgen and Muffy LaRue, is behind Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective, a playful, sexy and smart little movie that’s a little bit documentary, a little bit fiction film and a whole lot of ambiguous in-between.

The film documents the formation of the titular collective, a group of idealistic Vancouverites who set out to create what one of them calls a “homemade grassroots pervert revolution” by producing sexy movies that appeal to their own desires and sensibilities. Indie porn, if you will—at one point in the film, Mr. Pants says that he’d like he and his collaborators to become “the Fugazi of porn.”

And they do, producing, over the course of Made in Secret, a low-budget movie called BikeSexual. Or, at least, we think they do—the viewer gets a few tantalizing glances and lots of behind-the-scenes drama, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d likely think you were watching a straight-up documentary about the East Van Porn Collective.

Fact, fake or fiction?

But it’s not quite as simple as that. Made in Secret was made by a collective, and it’s composed of the same people you see onscreen making BikeSexual. So is it a real documentary about people making a real porno movie, or a fake documentary about people pretending to make a porno movie? Or is it both?

“It started with a story that I was writing about this fictional porn collective,” says Professor University, speaking on a conference call with the Mirror, Monster and JD Superstar. “I was talking to Monster about it, and she got really excited about the idea and started encouraging me to either a) do it, or b) make it a movie instead of a story. And then things sort of spiralled out of control from there.”

Word got out through their circle of like-minded friends, and, according to JD Superstar, “it seemed like a bunch of us just came together and started having meetings and discussions. And then it sort of became clear what it was—that it was actually a film project. Not that we were really recruiting an East Van Porn Collective, but working on a project dealing with specific issues that we wanted to look at.”

And yet, it seems that the deeper the group got into the project, the more complicated things got.

“I think we started off being like, ‘We want to make a film about a porn collective,’” says Monster. “And then we kind of just started being the porn collective. We were all talking about ourselves as the East Van Porn Collective, and there was a lot of post-modern confusion. We were like, ‘Are we talking about the collective or the meta-collective or the meta-meta-collective, which one is it and why are we doing this?’”

JD Superstar adds: “We were really living in a very strange reality during that whole period, with the movie within the movie within the movie. I don’t think anyone was really clear at the end of that. We didn’t do a good job of distinguishing it, which may have worked out really well for the film, actually.”

Masturbate debate

The film’s multiple levels of reality, though, do beg the question: Were they actually making real explicit pornography or was it all staged for the documentary cameras?

“We decided very early on that we never wanted to go through the movie scene by scene and say, ‘This is real, this isn’t.’” Professor University says. “I’m hesitant to say anything definitive about anything in particular in the movie, but we have come to the understanding that we’ll openly say yes, ‘We made sexy films in the process of making Made in Secret.”

“Penises have appeared onscreen,” Monster interjects.

“I think one scene we can talk about is the shower scene,” JD Superstar adds, referring to a sequence where the crew films her masturbating. “That was bona fide, actualized, really happening, and I think that was great.”

“To me that scene seems pretty definitive,” Professor University says. “Well, she has her clothes off...”

“She has her hand in her crotch,” Monster says, definitively.

Sex and spaghetti

To a certain extent, the collective’s motivation arose from their disenchantment with the state of mainstream porn. “I personally felt very drawn to sexually explicit movies, or pictures, or stories, or whatever else, since adolescence,” says Professor University. “I felt like they would offer me something, but they never did. I was always repelled by what I found and I would walk away going, ‘Ugh, that is so gross, that’s so not what I’m looking for.’”

“I think in some ways porn arises out of this idea that sex is separate from everything else in life,” Monster says. “That we can make movies about anything, except sex, and put them in the normal section of video stores, but if you want to make a movie with sex in it, it goes in the little room.”

With that in mind, they decided to change the perspective a little.

“Something that we wanted to do in BikeSexual is try and make a really sexy movie that avoided the money shot, and try to explore things from a bunch of different angles,” says JD Superstar.

Although you never actually see BikeSexual itself, it’s easy to tell that it is, as one character refers to it, a “pansexual romp,” with every orientation represented and lots of playful sexiness revolving around bike repairs, skateboarding and rolling around in the mud.

“It’s just about integrating sex back into art and real life,” Monster says. “It’s like some things are great, like spaghetti and oral sex and really nice shoes. Lots of things are good and sex is one of them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have any spaghetti in our movie!”

Consensual sensuality

Or, for that matter, a subtle, funny meditation on collectivization and collaborative art. The collective itself is as much a subject of Made in Secret as the sex is, as all decisions made by the BikeSexual/Made in Secret filmmakers were arrived at through a process called consensus.

“Basically the idea is that a group of people, usually a smaller group of people, commit to seeking out solutions to problems and decisions, that everybody feels good about and everyone is in support of,” says Professor University. “It means that where a lot of groups would vote, or someone would make an executive decision, we wouldn’t. We keep talking about it until a solution emerges that everyone feels good about.”

Of course, as anyone who’s ever been involved in that kind of process knows, it isn’t always easy, and a key element of Made in Secret’s plot has to do with the fact that collective decision-making can be incredibly difficult and frustrating, as a conflict over just who is allowed to see BikeSexual threatens to split the group apart.

“My overall feeling,” Professor University says, “is that film is such an inherently collaborative form that it just makes sense to embrace that and formalize that.”

JD Superstar: “The hope that that generated, and that idea of positive community-building, and that we actually really did pull this off, had a big impact on me and I think are the greatest things I’ve taken out of this project. We really did work on making it an experience that worked for everyone and we actually succeeded, and I think I’m probably the most proud of that.”

COLLECTIVE MEMBERS WILL PRESENT MADE IN SECRET: THE STORY OF THE EAST VAN PORN COLLECTIVE AS PART OF FILM POP FRIDAY, SEPT. 30, 7:30 P.M., AT THE THÉÂTRE NATIONAL, WITH VANCOUVER ROCK BAND BLACK MOUNTAIN PERFORMING AFTER THE SCREENING. FOR MORE INFO VISIT WWW.FILMPOP.POPMONTREAL.COM

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