“DARE” In Pre-Production: Director, Jett Blakk

By CJ on September 2, 2007

Finally, the truth can be told! There have been rumors flying around for months that I have been hired to direct a film for Falcon. The rumors are true.

I was asked to keep this secret until everything was confirmed, and it is. Boy, is it! We start shooting this Sunday!

After pitching several story ideas to the creative team at our favorite San Francisco company, they chose what I thought was a very cool idea: remake their classic film FLASHPOINT. Actually, what I had in mind was more of a “reimagining” of this 13-year-old gem. While the original was basically a buddy film of HAL ROCKLAND driving through the desert and picking up hitchhiker SCOTT BALDWIN, I was asked to really flesh out the story and the characters but keep the same basic premise: two guys driving through the desert. I think there’s something very romantic and sexy about that.

Luckily, I had already started writing a script which was exactly that. It was called DARE, and it was something I had wanted to do for Red Devil, but knew that I would never be able to afford it, as the production values would be too high. Plus, I hit a snag in writing the script and couldn’t figure out how to get around it.

So when it was decided that I would remake FLASHPOINT, I decided to dust off the DARE script and give it another looksee. This time, I immediately understood how to get around the plot snag and how easily it could be adapted for Falcon, so I began writing:

Wood drives his car through the desert and sees Drew hitchhiking. He picks the young man up, but instructs him that there are rules to riding in his car. The first of which is that the game Truth or Dare can be initiated by anyone at any time and playing is mandatory. Drew reveals that he is headed to L.A. to try to become an actor, but Wood refuses to reveal anything about himself. At a diner, the pair stop for a quick bite and meet Sam, who is also traveling to L.A. Wood invites him along. No one notices that Sam and Drew have identical backpacks, nor do our guys know that Sam is a psychotic drug jockey carrying his latest shipment to the west coast.

At a gas station, a sweating Sam heads for a men’s room stall for a quick fix, only to be discovered by Wood, who, in a fit of disgust, throws Sam’s backpack out of the car and ditches him. Unknowingly, Wood has tossed out Drew’s backpack and the two men carry the hidden stash of drugs with them, which Sam is determined to get back…at any cost.

I turned the finished script in about 2 weeks later to Troy, Falcon’s P.R. guy, who loved it. Now, would Todd, the company president?

A phone call with Todd was arranged for 2 days later, and he also raved about the screenplay. He had a few ideas that he wanted incorporated, and they were good ones, so I had no problem adding them. He was also concerned about the amount of dialogue the two leads had, and I tried to reassure him that it was manageable, and stressed the importance of finding models who could act.

The script rounded out to 28 pages, and while I began looking for my leads, Troy asked me to consider casting four of Falcon’s exclusives in the film: MATTHEW RUSH, ROMAN HEART, ERIK RHODES and CORT DONOVAN. This was fine by me, as I thought it would be a treat to direct any one of them, but FOUR? Wow! The only logistics problem: they could not have sex with each other, as they had already done scenes together, plus they were all such good friends, it would be weird for them.

So in a movie with four scenes, I’d have to cast one exclusive in each scene. which meant that one of the four would have to play Wood or Drew. The problem? None of the four was what I was thinking of for either character. The solution? Turning back to the original FLASHPOINT, there’s a scene where Hal Rockland goes into a bar and is almost gangbanged. He escapes after being forced to suck a lot of cocks. The idea of a gangbang seemed to solve my problem. I asked Troy if any of the four could appear together in a gangbang scene, as long as they were both gangbangers and not a gangbangee. He said he thought that would be fine. Problem solved.

Next, who to play the non-sex role of Psycho Sam? It needed to be someone who looked tough and could play borderline psychotic. Someone with decent acting chops. Suddenly, I got a great idea. There was someone I knew, a porn star from the 80’s who had retired to start a mainstream acting and singing career, someone who was very popular at the time of his retirement but had not appeared in a porn film in almost 20 years. Someone who had told me he would return to porn if there was ever a role juicy enough for him to play, and I was confident he would love Sam.

I grabbed my address book, wiped the dust off the last page in the C-section, and picked up the phone…

To be continued.

JBK