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The history of O-girl, or How I Came to Make Crazy Superheroine Peril
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| Back in the late 60's, when I was just a wee lad (around 5), I became an Yvonne Craig Batgirl fan. I'm not sure why this happened. Either I was already wired this way, or if the sight of Yvonne squirming in that tight purple catsuit created it within me... but there is NO doubt: I was forever from that point on, a fan of superheroine peril. Of course, those crafty TV executives knew exactly what they were doing. Don't get fooled into thinking that because it was the 1968, that they didn't understand what putting a very sexy girl in a crazy tight catsuit, and then tying her up was all about. It was bondage. Putting sexy girls in peril has been a trope since... well... they came up with the word trope. They tried to hide it, and make it all innocent, but c'mon... it was all just bondage. Fast forward to around 1994/1995, and in response to a particularly bad piece of fan fiction that I read, I was stupid enough to post my opinion on how it could have been "improved". I am not sure if I was commenting on the writing, or maybe just the formatting, but yeah, I totally trolled the person. Whatever. You can imagine the response I got back. It was a response that was well, and truly earned: "If you think you know how to do it so much better, why don't you get off your ass and do it yourself - Jackass!." Or words that that effect. I may have added the jackass part, or he may have called me something else entirely, but being me, I took that as a challenge. I set about writing some fan fiction of my own. I'd show him! Hmmph! I decided to create a story using my favorite superheroine character: Batgirl. The result was a couple of very long, and overly verbose stories: "The Perils of Batgirl", and "The Perils of Batgirl II" (wow, that second one is an original title, huh?). Anyway, those stories, which are still floating around the internet (nothing ever truly disappears off the internet), were quite popular. As a side note, I'm not sure I could write them today. I guess as you get older, those voices inside your head telling you that what you are writing is very trite, just gets louder and louder. Anyway, we move ahead in time. I started tying up gals professionally in 1997 - and with my business partner, Cory Thompson (MrT), we started Shortfuse Video Productions. For those wondering, this name came out of the fact that Cory could be (actually, would be) very short with people when responding to nasty emails. He was just a flame thrower. If someone complained about something, he believed in the "scorched earth policy" (that, BTW, is why I was in charge of customer service). Our little bondage company became quite successful. We weren't that great in the beginning, but Cory and I were quite competitive with each other, and the result was that our content improved quite rapidly. I believe the line spoken and unspoken between us was “Anything you can do, I can do better.” |
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| The Birth of O-girl | |
| In 1999, I decided that it was time to venture into the world of superheroine peril. Back then, this was just not around. There were some folks doing stuff here and there, but it wasn’t really a thing. I, of course, really wanted to do a Batgirl thing, but back then, I would have been immediately sued by DC/Warner Bros. The days of Porn Parodies were years and years away. Doing a Batgirl thing was just not an option. So… I had to come up with my own character. An homage to Batgirl, if you will. I will say this now: As anyone that has ever tried to come up with a superheroine name can attest, they are all TAKEN. You think of it, it has already been thought up. BlueUnderTheSkyGirl… taken (okay, probably not, but that is just a bad name). So, you can imagine, it was not an easy task. Finally, after many, many names… I ended up with |
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| O-girl. Honestly folks, at the time, It seemed a rightly stupid name. It sounded stupid. It looked stupid. O-girl. I mean, what does that even mean? Regardless, I couldn't think of anything else, so I went with it. I mean I could always figure out a better name later... right? BTW: Over the years, tons and tons of people have asked me what the “O” stands for. Well… I’m just not going to tell you what it meant to me. Everyone has their own attachments and I’m not going to burst any bubbles. But it is... kinda obvious? Right? I brought Cory my idea for a story and he was not into it. He didn’t see the point. "O-girl? Who is O-girl? Is superheroine stuff even that popular?" So I basically just did it on my own. It was another of those times that he would sit back and say, "It's all yours, captain." (Actual quote). |
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| O-girl's first adventure | |
| The first “Adventures of O-girl” story, was a picture-only thing that I shot with Andrea Neal as O-girl, Teri as the evil Princess Olga Deprarda (Really Jim? Really?) and Eve Ellis as her sexy henchgirl, Vixen. Andrea was captured in a net, tied up with straps and struggled while Olga painted a portrait of her (I must admit that was a cool idea). Then to finish her off, Olga tied with fiendish ropes, that tightened around her as she struggled (as a bondage site, this was a particularly obvious peril to choose – and one that I’ve since done a lot of - I mean bondage... tightening ropes... duh!). This first O-girl story did not have anything that you could call, production value. O-girl’s costume was basically the only catsuit I could find at the time, that was purple (Folks, things were really, really different back then). Add to that that I had ZERO idea what I was doing, and the result was not my best effort. Even so, it was very well received. I guess this whole superheroine in peril thing was just as popular as I expected it would be. Cory was impressed with the membership numbers. It boosted our membership by around 500 people over a weekend. Pretty crazy right? Regardless of this, he still didn’t understand it. I think he thought everyone was crazy. It wasn’t his thing at all. No problem. It was my thing, and he just let it be that way. |
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| If you at first you don't fully succeed... | |
| It took another year or so for me to do another O-girl project. This one was going to be on video, and I wanted it to be awesome. I hired people. A location was rented. Sets were built. Props were rented. A big plexiglass box was manufactured. It was going to be the most elaborate superheroine bondage peril adventure ever. No pressure Jim. Seriously. |
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| Andrea returned as O-girl, but this time I bought her a gorgeous purple latex catsuit, and a purple latex teddy. She had a utility belt with an O on it. Joining her in the production were Nicole Sheridan as Hypnotika, Karina as her henchgirl trance, and Cleo Nicole as the hapless museum worker Sarah Masterson. We shot “The Adventures of O-girl, Trapped in Time” over two days in Burbank, CA. Planes from the nearby airport were taking off ever 30 minutes (can you say… “CUT! Fucking planes!!”). I had load of people helping (these types of productions are NEVER done by one person). I had a company lighting the sets, I had extra cameras and production assistants – In a word, it was mayhem. During the movie, Andrea endured getting tied up really tightly with straps, bonked over the head with a vase, and then chained up inside the glass box, with 2000 pounds of sand poured into it. This is, and will remain, the craziest, and stupidest thing I have EVER, and will EVER film. Andrea ended up to her chin in sand. She was… well… Andrea. She dealt with it better than I could ever have expected. It all worked, but I would never ask someone to do something like that again. By the time the sand was up to her neck, she couldn't move her body... AT ALL. |
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| The end result of the project was bittersweet. The production value of this was obviously a lot higher than the previous attempt, but I still had ZERO idea of what I was doing, and subsequently made a TON of mistakes. The "superheroine peril production learning curve" is steep and very, very long. I would continue to make tons of mistakes over the next 20 years (but you never can make something perfectly, right? That just means you have to keep trying). The biggest mistake I made making “Trapped in Time” (besides my crappy camera work), was to farm out the musical score to someone else. It was a really stupid idea. Let me explain. My first love is music. I had played guitar since I was 10. I wanted to be a professional musician. I went to school for music. Why I let someone else write and record the score, I will never know. When I got it back, it was NOTHING like what I had wanted. I was creating an homage to 60’s Batman. What I got was electronica.This would be the last time I farmed out the job of musical scores to anyone. From that point on, I would do it myself. Andrea Neal, by the way was a knockout. Despite my attempts to screw-up the filming of the movie, the cast were great. Andrea was the perfect damsel-in-distress superheroine (God, she looked absolutely incredible in that catsuit), and Nicole and Karina were wonderfully evil. |
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| Andrea retired quite suddenly a few months after this production (not because of the production, she loved playing O-girl, but because she was moving on with a new chapter in her life. Everyone who worked with her, missed her terribly. She was not just a great bondage model/actress, but she was also just such a cool person to hang out with. She is one of those gals that was just a bondage legend, but was in fact, just the girl next door. | |
| The BondageCafe is open for business | |
| Between the filming of this movie and 2001, my relationship with my partner Cory deteriorated. He had gotten into drugs and I just couldn’t deal with that. I tried my best to get him to stop, but it was pointless. Unless someone wants to quit, no amount of pleading, or threats will change anything. It was painful, but I couldn’t stay and watch him kill himself. So I left Shortfuse and opened the BondageCafe in April of 2001. I don't need to go into more detail here. I have documented Cory's story in another blog. |
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| Time for a brand new O-girl | |
| The Cafe was success from the start, and I quickly was able to budget larger productions. I didn’t, however, do another superheroine movie until 2005. This was because, and this might not come as a shock to any of you fans out there, I was not really interested in shooting superheroine stuff in an apartment or hotel room. Yeah, I know people do it, but it doesn’t work for me. In 2005, I moved into my first studio, and we immediately went to work on building sets for a new O-girl movie. |  |
| The question at this point was who was going to fill Andrea’s stiletto ankle boots? Not an easy thing to do, believe me. I decided on Christina Carter, but I didn’t actually tell her that I was auditioning her for the role. As part of a dream sequence of another film (Bittersweet Therapy), I tied her to a chair in a black catsuit, with a time-bomb next to her, and then filmed her struggling in that chair. SOLD. Christina was awesome. |  |
| Black Minx | |
| A short time later, I asked her if she wanted to be the next O-girl. She was excited. I don't think she really understood what she had actually signed up for, but she was all in. I measured Christina for a new O-girl outfit. It would be made up of a custom teddy, corset and boots - all made from some foiled purple leather I had tracked down. Diana Knight was cast to be Lady Felina (okay, an obvious Catwoman rip off… err…. homage… homage, Jim!). Karina returned as Fifi, the evil French maid (her costume was also custom made - ridiculously over expensive, but beautiful), in homage to John Willie. I then hired Sasha Monet to play another baddie, Devon Lust, Dee Williams and Jewel Evans to play Felina’s “kittens”, and Mary Jane to play the scientist, whose love portion formula would be the center of all the action. |
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| “The Adventures of O-girl, The Return of the Black Minx” was born. I wrote the script (it was LONG), and included such crazy traps as a bondage box, a quicksand pit, a dungeon with custom made metal shackles, a set of wooden stocks, and a full sized (working) rack. A elaborate Lust-a-Matic set was built, and I also had a large pendulum blade made by one of the prop houses in Los Angeles. |
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| This was a wild ride. The initial shooting schedule was 4 days, but we ended up reshooting all sorts of stuff, so it ended up being a lot longer than that. The hardest part of this was writing and recording the musical score. I am actually pretty good at writing superheroine peril fiction, and I'm a good musician, but I am just not good at writing music on the spot for a specific scene. It takes me a while. Even if I wrote a cool piece of music, it didn't mean it fit the scene I was writing it for. So it took me a whole long time to write all original music for the 90 minute movie. |  |
| The end result was mighty awesome, but not perfect because I still had so much to learn. Christina was incredible, and dealt with all the insane traps and perils. Diana was fantastic as Lady Felina, and Sasha was equally deliciously evil. Karina was one sexy French maid, and the kittens were very “kitten-esque”. Mary Jane struggled and screamed her way through all of it. She was so into it, that we had to stop and tone her down during her rack interrogation, because it was just too real. I didn’t want to make the movie that dark. This was camp, not a Saw movie. |
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| Finally after all the music and editing was done, I had a party, and invited everyone involved to watch the movie. It was a fun night. I am still particularly proud of the opening of the movie, with Felina coming down to steal the cat statue. The music I wrote and recorded for that fit purr-fecly. |  |
| End of Part One | |