Dark fantasies are unleashed in this provocative independent feature made with virtually no budget.
A piece of stolen mail sets the story in motion in writer-director Bryan Poyser’s full-length independent feature film Dear Pillow (now on DVD).
The film concerns an unusual trio: a lonely 17-year-old boy with a police scanner and an overactive imagination, a gay pornographic-filmmaker-turned-pornographic writer who works for a magazine called “Dear Pillow,” and their kinky female apartment manager who enjoys random phone sex. By unleashing the dangerous fantasies of these (and other) characters, they test each other’s boundaries in a dangerous game of sexual chicken.
Screenplay Based on Actual Experience
During a telephone interview, the Austin, Texas-based filmmaker said he wrote the screenplay based on an actual experience. “When I was a freshman at the University of Texas, I got a phone call from a woman I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me her name; she just started having phone sex and then hung up right in the middle of it. She never called back again, and I started wondering who she was, why she did it, and what her story was.”
So together with producer-cinematographer-editor Jacob Vaughan of Switchfilm Productions with whom Poyser had made several short films, he began initial auditions where they found Viviane Vives, who was cast as Lorna, the lusty apartment manager. Vives and T.E. Kolenda, her partner at their production company Barcelona Films, also came on as associate producers of the film, along with Russell Kane and Duncan Montgomery.
Accomplished filmmaker and musician Rusty Kelley was cast as the teenaged Wes, the sexually frustrated protégé of his older, porn-writing neighbor, Dusty (Gary Chason). Kelley was still in high school at the time, so the production was anchored around his spring break. Rounding out the cast are Corey Criswell, John Erler, Isabel Martin, and Brian McGuire.
While the subject of Dear Pillow is the affect pornography has on its manufacturers and consumers, the controversial elements in the film are aural rather than visual. Shocking yes, but still just words.
Never-ending Longing
Poyser explained, “In earlier drafts of the script, there were more explicit scenes, but in the process of rewriting the script we came to the conclusion that this is going to be a movie where no one achieves completion. That’s really the point of the movie. Pornography plays into a never-ending longing that can never be filled. We wanted to make something that was challenging in terms of what you hear, but safe in terms of what you see.”
Dear Pillow did well on the festival circuit and was released on DVD in an unrated version in late 2007 by Heretic Films. With a subject this uncomfortable, Poyser felt these early festival screenings were a necessity.
“This is a film for adventurous movie-goers of all ages who are not easily offended,” Poyser said. “It definitely gives people something to talk about. We present an exploration of pornography that hasn’t been sugarcoated. This is aggressively presented porn that isn’t the punch line to a joke or a shocking snuff film. We present the middle ground here about a multi-billion-dollar industry that is all over the world and available to everyone.”
- Dear Pillow
- Director: Bryan Poyser
- Run Time: 85 minutes
- Rated: Unrated (explicit language, sexuality)
For more information on controversial films, read about Midnight Movies, The Backyard, and Aimee & Jaguar
