Tag: John Dowling Jr.

If ever I could say I was in an open relationship with a Playboy Bunny-esque woman, she would be the one. It also was the long-term affair that was my midlife crisis romance. She was different than any woman I had ever known. She was carefree, extremely sexual, and had a stripper vibe. As a bonus, she was a tremendous athlete. We fooled around a bit prior, but she seriously entered my life after she suffered an abrupt breakup of a long-term relationship. It was then, she moved in with me.

I was a single father and had two children to consider. It was important to me to make sure it was in the best interests of my children. After all, a woman that hot, who exuded sex out of every pore, was not your typical suburban mom or even girlfriend. Fortunately, she understood and respected the situation, so she had a home. In return, she became the inspiration for my first real professional video and DP work. She brought her Panasonic 720p state of the art HD camera with her. The rest is history. I took to shooting video as if it was photography. In the process of producing videos with her, I learned the art of editing. We produced amazingly sensual beach and love scenes together.

It started when she attended a holiday party in NYC. We were both invited to an after-party and dinner. Later we all went to a nightclub. As is the unfortunate case with many beautiful women, the host was inappropriate to her. She asked me if I would get her home safely. She was drunk and quite vulnerable. I walked her to her door and we shook hands. She promised to call me about a shoot date. I felt good that I got her home safely and that she seemed to be interested in more than photographs. I was inspired to say the least..

Our first shoot occurred just a few days later. The mutual attraction was strong…and obvious. We shot until the very early morning hours. It started in my studio, which was a renovated garage. Before long, we were shooting in my bedroom and her clothing came off. She was the aggressive one. I just went with it. For over a year she was my inspiration and motivation to become a DP and editor. We wrote a script and sourced locations. She was sure she had funding for our film through her extremely wealthy grandmother. It would have been my second feature film.

She had just gotten implants. They looked and felt anything but artificial and the result was jaw dropping. She desired to seduce the world, sharing her enhanced features via a love scene so sensual, it would melt the hearts of most men (even many women). As an aside, her breasts truly enhanced the curves of her smoking hot Brazilian body. She treated them as if they were assets. In fact, she treated her entire body as if it was a bought and paid for asset. This was something I had never experienced before.

She was addicted to our photo sessions. Anyone with an eye for art would have to know we had chemistry. As for the love scenes, no one knew about them until long after we shot them. The unfortunate truth is that while we saw them as erotic love scenes, others saw them as soft porn. It became embarrassing when we showed them to anyone. All the same, she was the woman who inspired me to become a DP and who also chose me as her co-star. That too was a new experience.

It was not my idea to do shoot love scenes with her. It was hers. In fact, she insisted. It did not start that way. She began interviewing and casting for actors. Interviewing for her meant sleeping with many of them. This was the true casting couch interview in reverse.   It seemed that she was using the casting call to get laid by handsome models and actors. Somewhat ironically, she learned that for some reason, most of the men who applied were gay. Few had any real interest in her and most were awful actors.

So, after yet another casting call at which I shot three test love scenes, she finally said, “fuck it, you’re doing it.” I was shocked! She was sick of waiting. This had been going on for months. She was starting to feel as if no one wanted her and that she wasn’t attractive. The truth was they were just bad actors who were not comfortable shooting love scenes in my living room. For that matter, neither was I.

In retrospect, it was more soft porn than love scenes. What made them love scenes to us was simple and undeniable. We were falling in love. She was just coming out of an eight-year relationship that ended when she was caught cheating with me. I didn’t know she had a boyfriend, so I was a part of the breakup without even knowing it. But it was why I believed I was obligated to give her a home. She was tired of being mentally and even physically abused. She put up with it for years because of his money. I knew that she craved wealth. Everything else, aside from sex, came in second.

She was not particularly interested in me long term as much as she was obsessed with becoming famous and putting her new and improved perfect breasts and body to good use. Her dream of riches by marriage to her hedge fund billionaire was over. Her new dream was to make her fortune as a movie star. To her, it was ironic that this would in part be a result of the physical enhancements he paid for. She was determined and she was smart. She believed that becoming famous was well within her grasp. From my perspective, I was now living with a sexpot, intent on making a feature film with me as her love interest. By default, I became the producer. Her role would be both executive producer and the star of the film.

At the time, I was not in a good place health-wise I had several new stents, so the blood was flowing like I was seventeen again. At least for a few months. And then they failed. We were shooting almost every day. She believed the film we were creating was beautiful. The process however was anything but. It went like this. She would come home from a party or a wild night with her friends quite drunk. She would insist that I turn on the spot lights, open the set, and film ourselves screwing around.

Often she would tag along to events I was photographing to network with just about anyone. She was not shy about using her assets to make a deal. I never knew anyone so carefree and willing to literally embrace most anyone with power or connections.

We would often shoot at night, utilizing only candlelight to create a truly mysterious effect. We would also shoot at sunrise, which was the prime part of the day to accentuate her body and many nude shots. We would go to Target Rock, Fire Island, the Hamptons, Robert Moses, Jones Beach, Centerport Bay, Huntington Bay and the Northport Docks. Mostly, we were filming in or around water as the film we were developing was about a girl who worked at a marina with her father and sister.

As such, she was wet a lot. We often timed the shoots to film at the break of dawn. In the middle of the day, when the sun was too high in the sky, we would stop shooting. It was then I got my editing and proofing done for my paying clients. When the bills were paid, I would come back to her project. She became very frustrated in between shoots. Her M.O. was to bribe me with sex to get me to go back on the project. So, I would work seven days a week, twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes a day with the other fifteen minutes reserved for what she would call “mercy fucks.” Yes, I would get up to three mercy fucks a day when we shot. It seemed she wanted Tarzan as opposed to me, an older man. This was despite our intense relationship and our creative collaboration. She was out of my league. Or, so I thought.

Because she would offer a mercy fuck very casually, almost humorously, as if it were simply a back rub, I was never sure if she truly wanted it. After all, three times a day, on top of the sex during filming seemed like a lot. Maybe she was rehearsing for her role, or simply staying in character. She said she was a method actress. When we were filming a love scene she would get horny on demand. I would say, “are you ready?” She was always ready. It was like Christmas morning the moment she found out we would be shooting and she took it seriously. The characters we were depicting made the roles extremely physically demanding. Due to the number of times we would have to shoot a scene, it could be quite an athletic effort. We treated the film as an athletic competition. She could get me going with minimal effort. In return I gave her five-minutes warnings for my mercy fucks. In most cases, she was ready long before the words ever left my mouth. She would spread her legs on demand. Never in my life had I experienced this. But, she was by no means exclusive to me.

Paying clients, even those with small budgets always took priority over our project. We needed the cash flow. We had to eat and the expenses were high and of course I spent most everything I earned on my children. She was a calculated investment with benefits.

Technically, the digital cameras I used were challenging to shoot with. The goal was to achieve the look of film. Often I would use expensive adapters that would simulate a film grain and the shallower depth of field one gets with film cameras. The resulting video looked more like film than video. It was particularly challenging, as you could not crop video the way you could stills. There were many artistic and technical considerations. Digital video, which made this possible, was new. As such, the lenses were extremely expensive that were available to create the shallow depth of field effect, which is the benchmark for most experienced cinematographers. We would set-up cameras twenty feet away and shoot by candlelight. I would focus the camera on her assets. When she was orgasmic and lost in the moment I would use the remote to zoom in and pan. It was all about her anyway. I was just a prop. But it was the best prop-job I ever had. Being her prop had its advantages. She was so obsessed with making the film that she wanted to shoot every day, sometimes for hours on end.

When people suggesting the shots looked too much like porn, we went back to the drawing board. I was not an experienced director at the time, but I learned quickly. We reworked the script. She began to read lines with other actresses. Painfully, it became more and more obvious. She was awful. She was so bad that eventually we realized that we would never get funding for the film. Her grandmother who promised to assist her bailed when she quit college only months before graduating, I thought that was an insane decision and did everything I could to inspire her to finish, but it was too late. She was depressed but wanted to keep shooting, I did not. I didn’t have the time. I had children to take care of and bills to pay. I was having a hard time catching up, after years of bad health and stents failing one after the other.

That was my other concern. For a while I was in better health. When winter came, it was obvious the stents were failing again. The constant stress on my heart was not the best idea. I was taking two nitro pills before we would film. Even later, when we knew she could not act, she still wanted to practice. She would often say to me “hey do you want to pick out the best shots from yesterday’s shoot?” I would tell her that I didn’t have the time and that she could do so solo. Her response was to sit on my lap and offer a quickie. Mostly it worked, as Jessica Alba or even Marylyn Monroe would have been in awe of her body.

At one point, I got her a job as cover model for a calendar. Even with my obsessive sexual desire, I was already becoming tired of her, even more so as the sex became a significant risk to my health. I couldn’t handle her insatiable desire and the frequency of how often she wanted to do it. She was getting angry, even obsessive, like a true nymphomaniac. Finally, I suggested she go to parties to try to find funding. I told her that I could not produce her film without a budget and that I could not spend as much time in the bedroom anymore either. Initially she told me she had the funding. She didn’t and I couldn’t help her get it. I had to do paying work no matter what she used to bribe me.

She started to sleep with many of my friends. I was relieved that I did not have to service her anymore. Not only was it putting too much pressure on my heart, it was killing my back. Eventually I had to undergo lower back surgery because of that affair. Before the surgery I accepted a photo assignment at Hedonism III. It was an erotic adventure. I was photographing a dozen or so models on the beach, many of them nude. Hedonism was a sexual playground for adults. The management paid for the models, the agents and myself to shoot a calendar for marketing purposes. They considered it good practice to stage voyeuristic events featuring nude photo shoots.

I flew down first. We filmed all week. She came down the second week, which was supposed to be more recreational. We were going to swim with dolphins, climb waterfalls and go to private clubs and beaches. She was hammered within an hour, the first day she got there. She dragged me back to our room to put some makeup on. Of course, that turned into twenty minutes on the bathroom sink. It was her idea of a grand welcome to a tropical paradise. When we began shooting again it was a disaster. She had never seen me photograph other models before. She was so jealous she started bringing female models back to the hotel room to have sex, right in front of me. She needed to be the center of attention. She tried to insert herself into every shot, with every model.

Before we left, her jealousy reached new heights. She was also doing drugs. I knew we would not be together much longer. I had pretty much told her when we got back that she would need to find another place to live. It crushed her. She never understood the connection between sex and love. Maybe it could be attributed to the time, as a young girl, she was abused in a shopping mall. She was literally kidnapped. Her family told her never to tell anyone what happened. She revealed that to me shortly after I asked her to find a new living arrangement.

In a way, she was reliving the incident time and time again. At times, she would insist on being submissive and would cry during rough sex. If I would stop and ask her if she was all right, she would get angry and say “don’t stop and don’t step out of character.” All of this was being filmed. She even wanted to have others film us. We did that one time. It was one of the most awkward moments of my life. Looking back, I think the only reason I allowed it was that I was supposed to die anyway, so who cared. Originally the concept was that no one would ever know who the man was. I certainly was never going to let anyone know it was me. In theory that worked, no one would ever know who the man was in the videos, but once we previewed the footage on higher quality computer screens, we realized that the obscurity of darkness and shadows could not hide my identity once the brightness was turned up.

While at Hedonism we knew our creative collaboration was coming to an end. At one point a friend asked me if she liked to cry when we did it. I knew then he had been with her. That was it for me. So, Hedonism would be our last adventure. While we were filming with dolphins, the dolphin handler came over to us and asked if she was pregnant. She said yes. I was shocked. What a way to find out the girl you were living with for almost a year and who was leaving shortly, was pregnant. I could not let her go with the possibility that my child could be inside of her.

But was it my child? When I asked her, she said she didn’t know. She thought she was having a miscarriage when she got on the plane. I believe she took a day after pill. The dolphins knew she was pregnant because of their sonar and were reacting strangely to her. The dolphin handler said it would be difficult to get the shot of her getting thrust into the air by them. They did not want to hurt what was inside of her. I was amazed at the pregnancy, the miscarriage and the dolphins. Truly I was filled with every emotion you could think of. That evening she spent the entire night in the bathtub. Whatever was happening must have been completed that evening. She was sad and then manic. She rested for a day and I did not see her for much for the rest of the trip. She totally lost it and began doing things I wanted no part of. When we returned, she did not leave and I never asked her to leave again. One evening she was on something and was totally irrational. She wanted to film with my children there. I, of course, refused. That was it. She left the next day.

A few years later, a family member of hers told me that after a long love affair with a much older man, she disappeared in Europe with him. They had not heard from her again. I was told that it was the family’s preference that she marry me. She told them she wanted to but it was news to me. I do not know if they ever will hear from her again. But, something tells me that she is still partying and putting her incredible body to good use. In the last email I received from her, she thanked me and told me that she was working for a charity and had raised millions for them. She went on to say that she was completely sober and in love. She thanked me for being kind to her and giving her a home and a real opportunity, and apologized for how our chapter of love ended. I hope that is the way I can remember her always. I loved my mid-life crisis girlfriend and creative collaborator. I kept the love scene we created together, but deleted all the original footage out of respect for her privacy. I wish her well in her new life, wherever that may be.

 

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