Kitten Boheme has always been a writer.
In college, she majored in theater and minored in history — because “I wanted to be sure that when I graduated I had a degree in fields that would be nearly impossible to work in,” she said, obviously joking. Post-college, Boheme went on to do mainstream script writing. A handful of her projects have since been published and performed around the world, though she won’t reveal what or where.
“It wasn’t a huge leap for me to take what I was doing in my vanilla life and apply that to the adult industry,” she explained. “I started with writing erotic stories… and found a call for submissions in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Big Book of Submission. That gave me the writing bug. I started writing for all the submission calls I could find.”
Boheme’s erotic story submissions eventually morphed into writing scripts for adult films.
“[Porn script writing] is basically writing erotic stories, only I don’t have to fuss and fret about the sex — that’s someone else’s problem!” she said.
Her “big break,” as she says, in the adult industry came after meeting Jacky St. James. Boheme passed St. James a selection of her erotic short stories. Soon after, she received a call requesting some short vignettes for Digital Sin and New Sensations.
“Actually, I think it was a series of text messages. I’m way too shy for phone calls,” Boheme explained. “And just like that, I was a fancy pants porn writing machine.”
As of today, Boheme has completed ten adult feature films, half of which have earned award nominations and wins, and a number of short vignettes. Her first full-length feature film script was Gone, a project completed for Angie Rowntree and Sssh.com.
Within the context of contemporary adult entertainment, with all its strictures (as well as freedoms), in a world where people often seem content to squint at stray images on a tube site, being a script writer certainly comes with a set of unique challenges. We asked Boheme to share her insights regarding just a few of them.
YNOT: I imagine you write for projects that allow a lot of creative freedom, as well as for ones that have relatively strict guidelines. Can you tell us about these processes?
Kitten Boheme: While working with Jonathan Morgan and Wicked Pictures, I had complete freedom. I was able to write any story I wanted so long as it was funny, featured a strong female lead, was able to be shot in minimal locations and stayed under a certain number of pages. I came up with all kinds of wild ideas! Not all of them made it to screen, but I’m pretty proud of the ones that did.
For Booty Thirst Trap, I was called by Andre Madness and he said something like, “I’ve got this script idea for you, but I don’t know what its about… All I have is a title, and I want it to be a series of vignettes. Can you do it?”
Armed with nothing but an abnormally high level of confidence and an inability to say No to people, it was now up to me to figure out what the hell Booty Thirst Trap was about. I ended up being inspired by Dragnet reruns I was watching in a hotel room — “The stories you are about to see are true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent…”
A lot of the script work I’ve been hired for seems to boil down to “Can you do it right now, and can you do it fast?” Porn work moves so much more quickly than writing for the theater. I think the longest I’ve had to work on a script was one week. The shortest: 24 hours.
There are endless silly, offensive jokes about porn that boil down to “What script?!” Can you describe what goes into crafting a great porn-specific screenplay?
I often embrace those silly and offensive jokes surrounding porn and porn scripts. For example, Back Door Pass is a film full of those stereotypical porn setups. You know, stuff like the pizza delivery guy with his large sausage. I think that was one of the most fun films to write.
Crafting a porn-specific script isn’t a whole lot different than crafting a script for the stage. It all boils down to every character wanting something and giving them a reason to be in the story, even if that something is just a glass of water.
There is nothing worse than watching a sex scene where someone just shows up for no reason, has sex, then disappears without a trace. WHO ARE THEY?! WHAT DO THEY WANT?! So, I try to build a coherent story with characters that are after something, although in the confines of a porn script it sometimes gets a little more complicated because you are more limited to what you can do – because, budgets.
I also try really hard to arrive at the sex scenes naturally. I try to avoid two characters chatting about their pet fish then, out of nowhere, they bang. I need to give them a reason to want to get it on. I feel like my job is writing dialogue that makes the characters into fully fleshed out persons who are believable in scenarios where sex is the necessary and most obvious conclusion to what’s going on.
What industry-specific limitations must you consider when writing?
The limitations seem endless sometimes. The biggest is budget. I’m often told I can write whatever I want, but it all has to take place in a house, which kind of narrows down the kinds of stories that can be written. It’s hard to write a sweeping historical drama when it all has to take place in a mansion in the hills.
This is also a great time to try to get extra creative though. If 85 percent — a totally made up number I pulled out of my ass just now — of scripts take place in the same handful of mansions, how do I make my porn in a mansion stand out?
I have also bumped into problems with industry lawyers. Some of the scripts I worked on had to be signed off by a lawyer, and there was this one particular script I wrote that was instantly denied because this lawyer thought it wasn’t believable that a brother and a sister would live together and that the younger sister would be the responsible breadwinner and the brother would be a mooching deadbeat. Somehow a script with witches and curses or time travel was more believable than a successful young woman. After a bit of a fight though, this script did end up being accepted.
Sometimes the [performers] themselves are a limitation. I’ve been told, to write parts for people that don’t speak much English or that they only have a few hours to learn lines so keep it simple. There’s also the odd “Well, we’ve hired someone who is terrible at learning lines, but they’re the star so give them most of lines.”
But, most of the time, the performers are absolute superstars. I am always amazed to see what they do with a script I’ve given them. For example, check out how amazing Whitney Wright was in the movie Cursed. What she did with that role was kick-butt awesome!
Kitten Boheme has a couple of stories that are really close to her heart, so she is launching her own studio – PornCat Productions. Hire her for script writing, sex toy reviews and erotic stories. Find her on Twitter at @KittenBoheme.
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Laser border/background on author image by Pixabay via Pexels.
