18 June, 2015. 15:30
INGRID DOULTON | Equally Important Writer | Contact
EACH YEAR THOUSANDS of young men pursue careers in professional amateur porn, chasing dreams of glamour, money, fame, self-empowerment, and great sex. But as the performers profiled in Big Dicks Wanted discover, the reality may be something else entirely.
Directed by Betoota local Brett Pearson produced by Sigmund Remienko, this intimate documentary premiered at the Betoota Film Festival in March. It was released on Stan on Saturday.
Nathan, a 19-year-old former high school cricket captain from Thargomindah, sees porn as an “easy escape” from the doldrums of his hometown. He connects with Harry, hid 23-year-old pro-am agent, on Gumtree, where he finds new talent by posting ads seeking models.
“Every day, a new big dick turns 18, and every day, a new bloke wants to do porn,” Harry says.
“I will never run out.”
He flies his prospects out to Betoota, puts them up in his five-bedroom Queenslander (which is perpetually strewn with men’s clothing and hunting equipment), and coordinates their bookings. Harry’s so-called “big dicks,” marketed under the name Bulloo Models, are mostly between the ages of 18 and 21. At 25, Scott — who performs under Kevin Steelecock — has already been rebranded as a “dad dick”.
Off the clock, the women play with Harry’s puppy, joke, swap war stories, watch Slim Dusty videos, smoke rollies, and enjoy the occasional black rat. It’s not unlike a footy club, or an adult-themed version of The Footy Show.
But this business thrives on fresh meat. As veteran adult performer Ellis Starkwell puts it, a male porn star’s “shelf life” usually proves fleeting.
“Worst case scenario? About a year,” he says. “All right scenario, two to four. Best case scenario, if he doesn’t catch onto the game, a decade, tops.”
When the mainstream jobs inevitably dry up, these men turn to niche, fetish-oriented videos, which may be violent or of a nature that the performers find personally unsettling.
For example, Scott is the subject of the film’s most disturbing footage. He performs an act known as “Arabian Goggles” — a “seldom-seen” manoeuvre where Scott put his testicles over the eye sockets of the female actress while receiving fellatio — and withstands a slew of racist insults while filming a video for a series called Afghan Cumeleers. It’s hilarious to watch.
Forty-year-old Rupert’s (a.k.a. Rod Stiffhouse) discomfort is palpable on the set of Monster Cock IV, in which his character is seduced by a pushy girl-next-door type.
“As long as you have a huge dick, and a tight rig, and ass, that’s all the matters,” he observes. “They don’t care about who you actually are.”
Later, Rupert relates the frightening story of a shoot where he found himself unexpectedly requested to perform a Norwegian Steam Engine, in the back of his unregistered 1983 Volvo 204GL.
“I was scared. I was terrified,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I could tell her no,”
“She just loves getting a cheeky Norwegian.”
Nathan’s step-cousin and greyhound beg him to quit porn, and after four months, he finally does. In that time, Nathan — who at one point developed chaffing on his large rod, the result of having too much sex — estimates that he made $25 000, but left the industry with just $200 in his bank account.
As seen in the doc, the big dicks perform in three to five scenes a week, earning an average of $800 for each, but that money disappears quickly. Expenses include beer, tobacco and sunscreen, STD testing, and their agent’s 10% fee.
Although they’re regularly screened for disease, the documentary’s subjects’ apparent ignorance about contraception is startling. Nathan tells his mother that he doesn’t use any form of birth control.
“Skeeting always works, I guess,” he says, “I don’t know.”
Critics of Big Dicks Wanted have rightly pointed out that the filmmakers’ suggestion that sexualised images in the media (Kim Kardashian flashing her gash at the drop of a hat, for instance) have troublingly “desensitised” our society feels off-base, even old-fashioned. And as Dennis Lillee writes in the Queensland Country Life, Pearson and Remienko sometimes struggle to find the right balance between “respecting the right of their subjects to make the choices they do while abhorring those decisions.”
But the final product, while far from flawless, is nevertheless deeply affecting. It’s a harrowing portrait of an industry in which oversized penises are essentially disposable.
