LOS ANGELES — Jay West says that he and his wife Jodi create “believable characters and place them in unbelievable situations.”
“They can’t help themselves in the moment,” Jay said. “They are driven to do things that they shouldn’t, but they want to keep it a secret amongst themselves.”
The up-and-coming, South Florida-based producing couple co-owns Forbidden Fruits Films, which specializes in “taboo erotica.” Their sixth DVD is titled “Mother-Son Secrets,” which was released this week by Forbidden’s exclusive distributor Exile Distribution.
“Mother-Son Secrets” comes on the heels of an unusually strong response for previous Forbidden titles such as “Memoirs of Bad Mommies,” “Mother’s Indiscretion,” “Who Needs Boys” and two volumes of their debut release “Blended & Twisted.”
Jay explained that “Mother-Son Secrets” is “a series of vignettes that we started primarily for the VOD market.”
“It has sold very well on the VOD market, extremely well, and we’re very happy about it,” he said. “The genre of it is more of the taboo encounters where people decide they know it’s wrong or it’s frowned upon, but they do it anyway. This title is about mothers and stepsons and wanting to satisfy needs that can’t be satisfied.”
“We have such a backlog of these scenes and we’re trying to put them together in a logical sequence,” explained Jodi, a 40-something soccer mom who not only develops the storylines, but also performs in all the titles.
“‘Mother-Son Secrets’ is stepmothers in situations that might better be handled in other ways, but this is how they decide to handle them. Sometimes people make bad decisions.
“A lot of our friends would tell us these stories. These are based on real situations, outlandish situations.”
Jay added, “They are loosely based on a variety of scenarios. You’d be amazed at what happens behind closed doors. My wife and I are swingers and we have a lot of swinger friends. And with that sexual freedom, you get these stories about people that should not be told, but sometimes they come our way. And we’re like, ‘Wow, really? You did what, where?’”
Jay said that Forbidden Fruits shoots its scenes "in real time" with minimal scripted dialogue.
“Sometimes we have one line, like, ‘Oh no, we shouldn’t be doing this.’ We try to get everybody’s input on the most realistic way to play this situation,” he said.
“It’s incredibly realistic,” Jodi said. “It’s a scenario that’s supposed to be a hidden tryst, a quickie. So we don’t drag it out to a 25-30 minute scene because that’s unrealistic.”
Jay said that Jodi comes up with “a good portion, if not the majority of the storylines.”
“Then I do more of the editing and directing. It’s a collaborative effort.”
Jodi added, “We won’t adjust the scenario to fit the characters. We try to make it as realistic as an unrealistic scenario can be.”
She continued, “We always had a very good following. Every time we did something, they wanted to see a little bit more and a little bit more.”
The couple officially launched Forbidden Fruits Films on VOD and DVD about six months ago and since have earned top spots on major VOD sites such as Hotmovies, AEBN, Gamelink, Adult DVD Empire and Adult Rental.
They met Howard Levine, now the president of sales for Exile, two-and-a-half years ago, when the Wests still only were dabbling in web-camming and shooting for other companies.
“We’ve always been very creative and videocamming was fun but it wasn’t a creative release for us,” Jay said. “We had shot a bit for other people to see how it was done. After a year and a half of making mistakes, we had shot about 500 scenes and somewhere around the 500th production we started Forbidden Fruits.”
Levine called pre-orders for their latest title “ridonkulous.”
“It’s selling like crazy,” Levine said, noting they have taken steps to improve the box covers. “They’re using a lot of people from the swinging community out of Florida, and the believability factor is extremely high. Mine is not to reason why, mine is to do or die. It’s fun to have something selling really well.”
Levine said titles in the works include “Blonde Sided,” about a couple that adopts "an athletic 18 year-old black football player," and “Meet the Fosters,” about "really hot moms who adopt 18-year-olds from foster care upon their 18th birthday."
“We’re just having fun making some adult erotica and keeping it fresh,” Jay said. “It’s very different than what most are out there shooting, but it works for us.”
