While local director Bryce Wagoner was putting the final touches on his debut documentary, After Porn Ends, he obtained the opinion of two people any filmmaker exploring the world of adult entertainment would want by their side: his grandparents.
“I showed my MeeMaw about ten minutes of the film and told her I had a chance to make this movie but that it involved pornography,” Wagoner admitted when we spoke via phone last month. “After watching the clips she said, ‘Honey, I’m just glad you were the first one to come up with the idea.’”
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And while his MeeMaw took the overly supportive path that grandmothers are supposed to take when their grandsons inform them that they’re working on a large-scale project, his grandfather decided to take a road less traveled: the realistic one. “I told him there was going to be some nudity but nothing gratuitous and he said, ‘Son, you can’t make a lumberjack movie without depicting some trees.’”
Mr. MeeMaw had a point. If After Porn Ends were a film about the tree cutting community, a few trees would certainly be depicted in the process. Honing in on a dozen of the porn industry’s most famous names and telling the story of what happened after the camera stopped rolling, the movie offers an inside look at an industry that is just as misguided as it is misunderstood. But make no mistake -- this is not a film that should be judged according to its cover, which features a scantily clad Mary Carey looking adequately prepared to tackle the type of wood that doesn’t exactly live in the forest.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Born in Lynchburg, Wagoner spent most of his childhood growing up in Richmond, attending St. Mary’s and St. Bridgette’s Catholic Schools. This led to a desire to be like his childhood hero, Robert E. Lee, and attend Fork Union Military Academy with hopes of one day graduating from West Point. But unlike his idol, Wagoner’s same-sex school habits finally got the best of him. “After three years, I finally decided that I wanted to see girls in school” he said, laughing. “So I transferred to East Carolina University.” It was here, after a round of soul searching and a disastrous hurricane named Katrina, that Wagoner finally found the career path he had been searching for all along.
“I always enjoyed dabbling in writing stories; both my half-brother and half-sister were studying theatre at NC State and UNC Greensboro, respectively, and I finally realized I was probably just denying my DNA,” he said. “So I re-enrolled as an English Literature and Theatre major and started pursuing an acting and filmmaking career.”
It was this career change -- one that Wagoner describes as “hurry up and wait” -- that led him down a path that included odd jobs such as performing motion capture animations for the popular wrestling-themed video game series, Smackdown vs. Raw. “I was fascinated with how it worked,” he added. “But again, more sitting around.” In search of a way to kill these large blocks of time that involved nothing but thumb twiddling and shallow conversation, the video game cast and crew decided to pass the time the only way any self-respecting male would: they sat around and watched really weird pornography. More specifically, really weird porn involving vegetables.
“Some of the guys were sitting across the stage cracking up,” Wagoner recalls. “And my friend AJ says, ‘Oh my God, how in the world do you do anything in your life after that!’
“I started wondering what people in porn do when they’re not in porn anymore,” he continued. “That question was a seed with water and fertile soil, and it started to grow.”
At its heart, After Porn Ends refuses to be just another documentary about the adult film industry. Wagoner could have taken the easy way out and allowed the porn to tell his story, as we’ve seen in previous documentaries such as 2008’s The Price of Pleasure, which explores the effects of extreme sexual degradation for the purpose of arousal, or 2009’s Graphic Sexual Horror which provides a sneak peek into the frightening world of bondage that you never asked for or really wanted to begin with.
Instead, Wagoner took a different route than his directorial counterparts. Determined to let the actors, rather than the intercourse they were having, tell the story, he made it a point to include less than five minutes of actual sex footage in the documentary--a statistic that makes the enthralling story told within After Porn Ends that much more compelling.
“That was my intent all along -- we originally wanted to show the really bad acting scenes, but they were just too bad,” he said, laughing at the numerous Razzie-esque performances he undoubtedly encountered while scouring through thousands of hours of porno clips to gather clips for the film’s b-roll. “It was a real tug of war, which worked out well. My producers wanted more nudity and I said no--we went back and forth on that. I understand why they wanted more, but it ended up being a fantastic happy medium.”
That game of tug of war--one that Wagoner refused to take lying down--is certainly paying off. After Porn Ends stands strong as the number one independent film on iTunes; the number one overall streaming film on Netflix in 2012, with over 250,000 views; and mainstream attention from the likes of 60 Minutes, CBS’ The Insider, and the Huffington Post.
“I wanted to show some of the nudity but I didn’t want it to become the topic of conversation or the focal point of the film,” he added. I wanted people to see the film and get my point across without having to include a ton of T&A.”
If it seems like Wagoner is a bit out of his element trying to tell the story of professional tits and ass, it’s because he is. It took him less time than your average round of bad sex to let me in on a little secret. “My relationship with porn before this movie was non-existent. I didn’t know any porn stars other than Jenna Jameson, and that’s only because she was on E!”
Before beginning work on this film, Bryce Wagoner had about as much experience with porn as your average member of the Pope’s advisory board. As the self-proclaimed “conservative who made a movie about porn stars,” Wagoner was forced to put his personal preferences aside to make an insightful film that appealed to an audience known for watching more hours of others getting it on each weekend than Wagoner viewed all through college. “This film isn’t about my politics,” he added. “It’s about my profession.”
It wasn’t long after personally diving into the subculture that he was so accurately trying to pinpoint in his film that Wagoner discovered why the porn stars he interviewed had such a hard time leaving their former lives behind. “Watching it eventually became an addiction,” he said, speaking of the hands-on research he completed in order to get himself acquainted with a world he had ignored for the majority of his life. “At one point I had a production assistant dropping off shopping bags full of DVD’s at my house.”
“At the time, it was just to help get the job done, but over the course of making this film, I became a walking Wikipedia for porn,” he added, laughing. “It’s part of the resume; I was just there to do a job and that’s all it was.”
But while Wagoner may label it as “just a job,” the underlying themes included within his film are anything but. At several points within the film, the topic of permanence arose--a subject that is just as relevant to Wagoner’s directorial decisions as it is to the subjects who decided to open up to him. No matter how fast you run or where you hide, participating in porn will be a life chapter that never truly closes. In the same vein as his subjects, the undeniable attention that comes along with a film like Wagoner’s also arrives with the notion that as long as he lives, his career will be tied to a film about pornography.
“I’m proud that this will always be with me,” he said with a smile. “It changed my life.” Still beaming, he continued, “To get something made is hard enough, but to get it made well? That’s nearly impossible. And to say that this film was made by a Richmond kid from the West End that enjoys Bill’s Barbeque and a cold sweet tea -- I truly couldn’t be prouder.”