I was really enjoying Nicholas Steele's obscure feature "The Novelist", typical of an Adult genre I enjoy wherein the main character is writing a story or reading old letters, and we see the story within illustrated for us. But he violated a cardinal rule: he failed to make the story interesting, treating it more or less as a MacGuffin.
So the ingenuity of the surrounding structure, in which writer Steven St. Croix attempts to complete his novel while suffering noisy distractions from his pesky roommate Randy Spears (now who on Earth would want Spears as a roommate?), is not enough to sustain the film. We see snippets of the romantic Western St. Croix is typing on his computer but they are all brief intros to humping with no character or even situations to latch onto.
Most of the time, pornographers use this highly functional format the same way Nicholas Sparks constructs one of his awful (but commercially successful) novels: getting wrapped up in the parallel set of characters from the past or the future. Steele adopts something of a "Wizard of Oz" approach as all the real-life (so to speak) characters in the umbrella story have counterparts in Steven's fictional tale, played by the same actors but in period dress. All this is fine as far as it goes, but he refuses to create a world for the fictional constructs to inhabit.
Maybe it's simply a budget issue. Nick for some reason made a large number of well-crafted but minor quickies around this time, in a period between his Adam & Eve blockbusters and his later career interregnum as pilot of big-budget parody schlock for Bluebird Films in England. Most of the quickies, credited to NSP (Nicholas Steele Productions) were released 5 or 6 years later by Bluebird as sort of vault titles, but not "The Novelist". Even IMDb's database is confused, dating one of these titled "Fresh" as a 2011 Bluebird picture when it in fact dates back 5 years earlier.
So I would reason that had "The Novelist" been conceived as a blockbuster, running 3 hours long, starring the likes of a Carmen Luvana, probably issued on 2 DVDs with tons of extras, then Nick would have given some depth to the novel being written and created hopefully 3-dimensional characters to populate it.
Alas, what we get are Spears and St. Croix both clad in black as warring cowpokes, with a bevy of beauties coming between them. Among the lovelies are Dee, looking marvelous in her wedding gown about to marry Spears when St. Croix intercedes, objecting during the ceremony and humping her instead. Dee provides not only interracial content but even keeps that wedding veil on throughout her sex scene, pandering nicely to another porn fetish.
Brooke Banner is lanky and lovely as a farm girl tending to her animals when St. Croix humps her; she also reappears in the real world, humping of course in an encore. Dominica Leoni provide a fictional Wild West side by side outdoor bubble bath in separate tubs as part of a lesbian sequence, with Phoenix doubling as St. Croix's literary agent in real life. Film's centerpiece is the queen herself, Cytherea, squirting four times in a rowboat in the Western segment opposite Spears.
MAJOR SPOILER:
Conceit of Peter Wood's script is a final reel switcheroo which I will only hint at rather than spoil completely. The entire structure of the film and the levels of reality are turned upside down, a ploy I found exciting in a "Twilight Zone" sort of way, but ultimately disappointing because nothing comes of it except another Brooke sex scene. Too bad, as Steele had the makings of a classic but fumbled it.
So the ingenuity of the surrounding structure, in which writer Steven St. Croix attempts to complete his novel while suffering noisy distractions from his pesky roommate Randy Spears (now who on Earth would want Spears as a roommate?), is not enough to sustain the film. We see snippets of the romantic Western St. Croix is typing on his computer but they are all brief intros to humping with no character or even situations to latch onto.
Most of the time, pornographers use this highly functional format the same way Nicholas Sparks constructs one of his awful (but commercially successful) novels: getting wrapped up in the parallel set of characters from the past or the future. Steele adopts something of a "Wizard of Oz" approach as all the real-life (so to speak) characters in the umbrella story have counterparts in Steven's fictional tale, played by the same actors but in period dress. All this is fine as far as it goes, but he refuses to create a world for the fictional constructs to inhabit.
Maybe it's simply a budget issue. Nick for some reason made a large number of well-crafted but minor quickies around this time, in a period between his Adam & Eve blockbusters and his later career interregnum as pilot of big-budget parody schlock for Bluebird Films in England. Most of the quickies, credited to NSP (Nicholas Steele Productions) were released 5 or 6 years later by Bluebird as sort of vault titles, but not "The Novelist". Even IMDb's database is confused, dating one of these titled "Fresh" as a 2011 Bluebird picture when it in fact dates back 5 years earlier.
So I would reason that had "The Novelist" been conceived as a blockbuster, running 3 hours long, starring the likes of a Carmen Luvana, probably issued on 2 DVDs with tons of extras, then Nick would have given some depth to the novel being written and created hopefully 3-dimensional characters to populate it.
Alas, what we get are Spears and St. Croix both clad in black as warring cowpokes, with a bevy of beauties coming between them. Among the lovelies are Dee, looking marvelous in her wedding gown about to marry Spears when St. Croix intercedes, objecting during the ceremony and humping her instead. Dee provides not only interracial content but even keeps that wedding veil on throughout her sex scene, pandering nicely to another porn fetish.
Brooke Banner is lanky and lovely as a farm girl tending to her animals when St. Croix humps her; she also reappears in the real world, humping of course in an encore. Dominica Leoni provide a fictional Wild West side by side outdoor bubble bath in separate tubs as part of a lesbian sequence, with Phoenix doubling as St. Croix's literary agent in real life. Film's centerpiece is the queen herself, Cytherea, squirting four times in a rowboat in the Western segment opposite Spears.
MAJOR SPOILER:
Conceit of Peter Wood's script is a final reel switcheroo which I will only hint at rather than spoil completely. The entire structure of the film and the levels of reality are turned upside down, a ploy I found exciting in a "Twilight Zone" sort of way, but ultimately disappointing because nothing comes of it except another Brooke sex scene. Too bad, as Steele had the makings of a classic but fumbled it.