“I want a lot of come on his face. I want to see come dripping everywhere,” gay porn director Tony Alizzi is saying to the men in leather chaps standing before him. On a late-May afternoon on the third floor of Steamworks, a gay bathhouse on North Halsted, filming for this scene for Prowl 3 has been going on for almost two hours, and it’s time for the money shots. All four performers can come on command, and they’re ready to accommodate. Michael Brandon, the film’s star, straddles the wooden tripod he describes as a “sexual sawhorse” as his costars Brad McGuire, Carlos Morales, and Diego Alvarez gather around him and start to masturbate. One after another, they ejaculate onto Brandon’s face and chest. “Ah, fuck, yeah, shoot it on me, blast that load,” the star moans.
This year, Alizzi says, “we took advantage of the 10,000 leather queens at the IML. We used our booth as a casting booth. There’s an area behind the curtain where we had people take their pants down and we took Polaroids of them, and when somebody was really exceptional, Rick Tugger, my assistant, who’s responsible for casting, would call me back there and I would give it my approval–to see if they, quote, measured up.” Newcomers Alvarez, Nick Piston, and Rich Strong were cast this way. Shooting started three days later.
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“Can we get some water?” Michael Brandon asks, light glinting off the semen streaming down his chest. An assistant brings him a bottle.
In the next room, which doubles as a group dressing room and break area, two o’clock sunlight pours through the large windows. Bright blue Formica tables and yellow chairs are set up in front of a wall of lockers. An assortment of vending machines lines the opposite wall, but there’s also a catered lunch set up at the far end of the room: sandwiches, chips, and cookies neatly stacked in wicker baskets, a tub filled with bottled water and other cold beverages. Don Auxier, the film’s production assistant, sits at a table carefully going through his file folders. Now that the scene is completed it’s his job to hand out the checks, which are clipped to each performer’s file. Auxier has taken Polaroids of the actors and photocopied their driver’s licenses or state IDs as proof they’re at least 18. Some of the performers’ files contain copies of contracts.
Monster is Brandon’s claim to fame. At ten inches long and six and a half inches in circumference, his penis may not be as big as Dirk Diggler’s. But Monster is real, and over the past two years it’s been the star of more than 100 films and photo shoots and uncounted escort jobs. Brandon freely admits that his dick is his alter ego, and www.xxxmichaelbrandon.com features a journal of Monster’s thoughts. “Monster’s the star,” he says cheerfully. “I have sex two or three times a day, but if it was up to Monster I’d be fucking all day and all night, you know what I mean? The way I look at Monster is that Aretha Franklin was born to sing and Michael Brandon was born to fuck.” Both the Grabbys and the GayVN Awards (the Oscars of the gay porn industry, held annually in California) honored Brandon as 2001 performer of the year. “All in a day’s work,” he says with a wink and a smile, giving Monster a quick squeeze as he heads toward the showers.
The company he invested in had planned to make money through both videos and a live-feed Web site. But after three months and $100,000 of Alizzi’s money, it was in trouble. It had only put out two videos, “and that doesn’t make a product line,” says Alizzi. A lot of the money had gone toward the Internet portion of the business, “which I was never able to develop,” he says. “At the time there was the Internet craze, and I thought to be on the cutting edge I had to have all that high-tech stuff. The point is I had to refocus the company.”
“I’m at least making my money back, which is a really positive thing for a company that’s just three years old.” He adds with a mournful laugh, “The misnomers of the industry are: Instant wealth. And get in the porn industry, get a boyfriend. I turn 40 this July, and I’m trying to be a sugar daddy, but lately I’m more daddy than sugar! Listen, I’m in production maybe 18 days a year, which constitutes the days I have naked men around me. The rest of the time I’m on the phone trying to sell the damn thing.”
