The photograph, taken by cell phone, shows my cousin Rico’s head, diagonally entering the frame from one side. He is his usual baby-faced, slightly chubby self, his hair tousled as always, his face serious but betraying the slightest hint of a grin. (He was always a bit of a goof anyhow; a few minutes before he was gleefully lifting up his T-shirt to show his large gut and the bandages from his recent gallbladder operation.)

Behind Rico is a green pool. In it are about eight naked, wet, and glistening women in an almost unrecognizable tangle of limbs. None of them are looking at the camera, for they are concentrating on each other. One woman has her head buried between another woman’s naked breasts.

“This is my work,” Rico said.

The photograph, he explains at our family’s Christmas party, was taken on the set of Sex Guru 2. “We made Sex Guru 2 because, well, there was Sex Guru 1,” he said. Sex Guru 1 apparently had the honor of being the #1 best-selling DVD at Tower Records for a while, and so a sequel came naturally.

My cousin Rico is a pornographer. This is not what he has always wanted to do for a living, but, he hastens to add, it’s his bread and butter.

I had more or less grown up with Rico — we are about the same age — probably doing much of the same things: watching robot cartoons, playing tag or hide and seek. Our paths diverged in college; later, he would arrive at our Christmas parties later than everyone else, talking about wrapping up a shoot. A major in theater arts — with an emphasis in set design, if I remember correctly — Rico moved from one job to another: a stint dressing store windows, organizing singing groups to be sent off to perform in Brunei, and now, directing TV commercials and episodes for seven shows for GMA TV, including the popular Extra Challenge, a combination of The Amazing Race and Fear Factor. An advertisement for Red Horse Beer he directed ended with a woman pouring beer on a guy’s pants; this won him an advertising award and the wrath, as he put it, of “troops from GABRIELA,” the Filipino feminist group. (The ad agency wanted the beer poured on the guy’s knee; he insisted it had to be on the crotch, and he won that little battle.)

But if there was anything that would inspire any ire (or admiration, in certain quarters), it would probably be his body of work with the revolving stable of model-slash-actresses popularly known as the Viva Hot Babes. The films Rico directs, he says, are like “Sports Illustrated swimsuit videos — only more hardcore.” I myself have only seen two samples of Rico’s work. The earliest one I saw was a video shot as background for videoke songs, playing at a high school reunion a couple of years ago — and so it was relatively tame, though the women cavorting on the beach were clearly naked underneath their wet clothes.

I asked him if his films had any particular style, whether or not one could tell that they were “Rico Gutierrez films.” “Not at all,” he responded quickly. “No lighting, no story” — the videos are mostly vignettes strung loosely together — “and the camera work is mostly close-up or not.

“It really is just a job,” Rico said. “I go to the set, we shoot, I go home. It’s not very exciting,” he added. (He also described, in slightly more graphic terms, the fact that he found the whole business of filming rather unerotic.)

“The thing is, when I’m there, I’m a different person,” Rico said. “I’m not like this,” he explained to everyone at the table. “I can get pretty lewd, but that’s the nature of the job.” He turned to one side and addressed an imaginary actress in Tagalog: “No, damn it — grab her pussy! Yes! Thaaaat’s it! Now, everyone, we’ll do the orgy scene! Okay, cut!” My God-fearing cousins blanched. I was taken aback as well. “But you know, we’re all professional,” he added. (Whenever his longtime girlfriend would accompany him on a shoot, he said, the actresses knew how to behave.) He suddenly looks around the party. “Hey, where did my kid go?”

His eight-year old son was, in fact, running around outside in the front yard with the rest of the clan’s youngsters. Later he came in, all sweaty from his exertions; Rico mussed his hair with one hand and sent him off again.

(I wasn’t kidding, by the way, about “God-fearing.” The father’s side of my family is fairly religious, with cousins who are actually working full-time in the “ministry;” saying grace before the big Christmas lunch is taken pretty seriously (my dad has been leading it for the last few years now), followed by singing performances and one of my cousins leading the kids on a rather painful “Happy Birthday Jesus” sing-along. Rico’s choice of profession doesn’t exactly make him a black sheep — in every Filipino clan there are infidelities and shotgun weddings and substance abuse and various “improprieties” (at least in the predominantly Catholic Philippines) — but his mom (my Auntie Baby) tells him seriously (in English) that “he will burn in hell.”

“I wanted to tell her that I use the money to buy her medicine,” Rico said with a laugh, “but it isn’t true.”)

Pornography in the Philippines isn’t exactly like pornography in the United States; it’s technically illegal in this country, so “you can’t have insertion of the penis, or insertion, period, or blowjobs,” he said. I can only imagine that it’s the equivalent of late-night movies on Cinemax — though I own neither cable nor a TV, so, uh, I can only imagine.

Sex Guru, for instance (which I only saw the other day), is actually a rather tame affair, enough for me to wonder whether I picked up the wrong title. Hosted by the fabulously stacked Asia Agcaoili, Sex Guru is an hour-long instructional video on — I’m not quoting from memory, but I’m sure she must have said this at some point — “the fine art of sensual massage,” with lots of close-up shots of slick fingers and rose petals and a soundtrack making ample use of the Casio “choir” and “electric drums” midi presets. Still, Agcaoili is an engaging host, particularly in the most explicit scene when she licks and swallows plastic objects of different sizes. (One of Sex Guru‘s most interesting elements is its democratic attention to sexuality: there’s an almost equal attention to beefcake, including long sequences featuring two men lovingly rubbing each other’s chiseled asses in a shower. There really is something here for everyone, even if the video presupposes the straight male gaze.) In the end, the film is a loving tribute to oiled brown skin.

Rico has a funny way of touching your leg with his fingers when he wants you to pay attention to a particular point he’s about to make, and while relating this next story, he was all a-finger. The first scene in Sex Guru 2, apparently, was a demonstration of “Tantric massage,” and he had wanted to show a penis being masturbated. There was, of course, no way he could get this past the censors, because, as he said, “we would get a technical. So we bought this strap-on dildo and made the two women give it a massage,” he related. “No technical!” he added happily.

Another sequence, perhaps in a different movie, had Patricia Javier masturbating. “When that happened,” he said, “I went over to the camera and de-focused it.”

My brother Bulletproof Vest asked, “Couldn’t you have done that in post-production? I mean, save it for a Director’s Cut?”

Rico shook his head quickly and said, “No, no Director’s Cuts. We don’t film anything illegal or anything that’s not in their contracts.” (Maui Taylor, for instance, apparently does not do full frontal nudity.) In fact, a representative from the Department of Health has to be present at the shoot, making sure that everything is, well, sanitary. “I may be filthy, but I’m not a pig, ” Rico said.

I asked him what film from his oeuvre he would choose as his favorite, or as one to recommend to a Rico beginner. “You mean, the most intelligent, or the hottest, or the lewdest?” he asked. “The most intelligent?” He paused. “I haven’t made that yet.”

The film he is happiest with right now, he kept telling me, is this three-minute short called “Haplos” [Caress] he made for an in-house contest for Sunsilk shampoo. The film is short and sweet, with only the barest bit of reference to the product it’s selling; it’s anchored, most poignantly, by a loop of another mini-movie, on a cellphone, played within the short film itself. “Each director,” he said, “was asked to pull out the cast and the plot from a hat. I picked one that read ‘A girl is in a coma’ and I said to myself, ‘I’ve lost before the contest has even begun.” The finished work apparently began as a loose adaptation of Almodovar’s Talk To Me. “But that’s the film that’s more personal. That’s really me. That’s what I want to do.”

Rico called himself a “hostess” — that quaint Filipino euphemism for “whore” — and said that he would pretty much direct anything for money. “It’s definitely not art,” he said, referring to his work for the Viva Hot Babes. “Although,” he continued with a grin on his face, “it’s artistic in a different sense.

“I’m a pornographer,” Rico said flatly. “It’s soft, but it’s still porno. I’m the Zalman King of the Philippines,” he thought after a while. “I don’t have a body of work like he does, but I’m getting there. That’s it. The Zalman King of the Philippines. That sounds good.”

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