I had an interesting chat with director Jennifer James Sunday morning.

James and I seem to agree on one point- that it wasn’t the Internet so much as sexual overkill that brought this industry to its knees. And this is why James, always a maverick willing to try something different, is working on this current project which she’s telling me about.

“We got to survive in this crazy world,” says James who invited me to the set at John Wilkes’ Nighthawk sound stage, but I deferred on account of football and this being the verge of playoffs, etc.

James is co-directing a movie about a guy named Roger who has a baby fetish. It’s a non-porn movie but doesn’t so much sound like a mainstream movie, either, when you hear the gist of it.

James, through her business partner, met an investor named Keeffe who’s a former lawyer-turned-actor and is playing Roger.

“He’s a retired attorney and a very successful one,” states James.

“And he’s a retired businessman. He retired some years ago and he decided he wanted to get into Hollywood so he’s been doing a bunch of extra stuff the last two or three years. He’s worked as an actor in some 20 movies. He had this story he wanted to tell, an idea in his mind and started writing a script.

“He came to me with pretty much a finished script and asked if I could help with this thing and shoot a trailer of it. When you make a trailer you cut it from scenes of an existing movie, and there was no movie. So he wanted to shoot about 25 pages of the script then cut a trailer. So we’ve staged seven or eight complete scenes so far with establishing shots and locations. He was so happy with the trailer, now we’re shooting the entire film.”

James notes that most movies shot now are on HD, and so is this.

“We’re shooting better quality stuff than most movies at Sundance,” James feels.

According to James, it gets pretty funny when you have a middle aged man in a baby diaper holding a big fat cigar and a martini glass.

“I told him the usual ongoing thing in Hollywood, is, if you’re a director, it’s very important to maintain your air of superiority,” laughs James.

“It’s really an important issue. Otherwise you lose your credibility if you’re not inherently arrogant. But here’s just a normal guy willing to wear a diaper.”

James says what she also likes about Keeffe is the fact that he’s an intelligent guy trying to make things happen.

“Here’s a guy who’s putting his own money behind this project and believes in it enough that he’s willing to stand there in a diaper to make it happen. You got to give the guy props for that.”

In the movie, Roger ends up falling in love with a call girl who has a daddy fetish.

“I’ve asked Keeffe if this baby fetish was something he particularly liked,” says James. “And it isn’t necessarily his fetish. “

“What’s also interesting about this thing is that it’s a very sex-tinged concept,” continues James.

“It’s one that no one else has wanted to touch- a full grown man in a diaper. But the way he’s written it, is, there’s no sex at all. And there’s basically little or no nudity in it. But it’s a very sexual theme. The girl’s a hooker. She seduces lots of people- to me it’s kind of the future where erotic is.”

“With porn we’ve gone to the well once to often,” James also deels.

“All of us got too greedy- too many D.P.’s, too many gangbangs; too many anal scenes. We’ve stuffed every orifice. I think we’ve reached the end of how disgusting we can actually allow ourselves to become. I think now there’s got to be a better way and I’ve always believed in the erotic.

“I don’t necessarily believe you have to see some dick going into a pussy for something that’s sexy or sensual. To me this is the future of erotica, that weird gray area in the middle where something’s sexual- you can feel the energy- yet they’re not fucking. We’re not even doing any dry humping. Not even pretend humping. That’s the whole idea and I was fascinated with the idea. I felt that I’d done everything I wanted to do in porn. I made the big budget movies. I did what I wanted to do and with the industry changing, I’m done with that. I’m going back to what I used to do which is mainstream.”

Playing the female lead in this project is a mainstream actress named Leslie Ballard [pictured].

“She has done some parts in things,” notes James. “She’s talented and successful in an interesting person in her own right.”

James says Keeffe specifically wanted an Amerasian girl with Vietnamese roots and that there were a group of them who came to the audition.

Ballard’s father was apparently a well known American general in Vietnam. Not to mention the fact that Ballard herself is Keeffe’s ex girlfriend of seven years.

“He wrote the part for her,” James reveals.

“When they broke up, he told her she wasn’t getting the part. But when we had the casting call, she, by far, was the best. Now they have this real love-hate-thing going on set. We’ve shut down three or four times because one or both of them couldn’t make it happen. They’d get angry and I’d be in the middle of this thing for about six weeks now. But this is what it’s like in regular Hollywood.”

According to James, Ballard brings an innocent sexuality to the part- for lack of a better term- that you wouldn’t get from a porn star.

“It really works and people from mainstream Hollywood have commented that she really has it,” says James. “She really knows how to make the character come to life.”

In one scene Ballard’s hooker character takes her trick for the night to a strip club, then gets on the [stripper] pole herself and pulls off her panties and gives them to a stripper.

“They kiss and then you see the three of them leave together,” says James.

“It’s quite obvious what’s going to happen but I think it’s kind of refreshing we don’t see it happen which is what we always do in a porn movie. I’m not sure we haven’t lost something by doing that. I missed the days when we used to see the girl get the guy turned on. I’ve had guys ask why can’t we see that any more? In porn we’re told as directors that no one wants to see that.”

“I think what the industry has done is the same thing the Republican party did,” continues James.

“It kept going to a more and more narrow demographic. Not every guy wants to see some guy put his knee in a bitch’s face. By going to the more extreme, we’ve killed our own industry. It wasn’t Internet that killed porn, it was us. We had to make it more extreme, cheaper and more compilations. At some point we fed on our young and we deserve what we got.”

“There are still movies that are selling. Quality is selling. Big budget shit is still selling. Pirates is surviving. Wicked is surviving. Digital Playground is surviving. It’s the little shitty gonzo producers that are going under and it’s a shame. But we did this to ourselves. We forgot that quality mattered and the audience’s opinion matters. The Internet didn’t help but we really put the nails in our own coffin, I think.”

James says she’ll also be bringing in a name actor to the project in order to get a decent deal.