Part One: Lights, Camera... Predicament!

Or, if you’re a purist—action.

As any director will tell you, the first shot of a film is crucial—for establishing tone, mood, and what Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. Pornography, while gratuitous by its own definition, also has its own cool swatches of tone, mood and stoic (or amped) heroism to ascertain. And thus we begin, with a slow fade-in to a pair of artfully bound feet, rope interlaced with rope, in a stately Golden Gate of taut constraint. A few ominous clicks and clacks off-screen; a sanguine splash of nail polish; the first few seconds inform us that the lady in question is both well-heeled and well-heeled.

Pan up: The setting is dank—warehouse dank; the sort of dank that beckons a cattle-call of fantasy—and there she is, the brown-eyed ingénue—for where there’s smoke, there’s fire; and where there’s high heels and rope, there’s a lady waiting.

She’s a pretty girl, back straight, arms pulled behind her in a braided topknot of human moorings. She would, by most criteria, present the idealized form of the damsel in distress (i.e., pretty, crimson-lipped, if it weren’t for that sly smirk pursing her mouth. That being said, if you were to de-colorize the frame, reduce it to a daguerreotype, she’d fit perfectly—and the next thing you’d expect to see would be a mustache-twirling fiend, followed perhaps by an intertitle explaining that the No. 7 train was on its way.

Between the smirk and the glint in her eye, you might think our young damsel was well-accustomed to being the apple of the camera’s eye. But not so—in fact, this was Sabrina Wolf’s first adult film—ever.