Private Castings 4: Bettina A Star Is Born Review

Castings 4 Bettina - A Star Is Born
Private
Directed by Pierre Woodman
Starring: Bettina, Anita Gyongy, Laura Kat Woman, Rebecca Lord, Sweet Lana, Simone
Running time: 2hrs

The big feature of this edition of Woodman's casting series is the initiation of Bettina, but there are several other interesting young women ready to try their hand at a career in porn. The early steps in their careers are demonstrated by casting interviews, glimpses from the sets of photo shoots, and the occasional excerpt from Private's features.

Rebecca Lord
A great way to begin this volume, the first interviewee is French brunette Rebecca, who of course more than made her name on both sides of the Atlantic. Announcing herself as a 20-year-old actress, Rebecca looks really beautiful here, even during the roughly shot casting footage, what with her wonderful smile, pale skin contrasting with dark hair and red lips, and big eyes that grow wider as Pierre asks his rude questions. She strips, and Pierre's comments about her thin body are even more tactless than usual. Personally, I was put in mind of that line from Wild At Heart, about (paraphrasing) "skinny women with tits that sit up and say hello!" It's good fun, even with the minor annoyance of dubbed translations.

However, the greater annoyance of vile picture quality makes more of an impact on a scene from Golden Triangle. Rebecca bathes, dresses in lingerie and looks extremely foxy while enjoying oral, vaginal and anal sex in this clip, which, at a guess, seems to have been edited for length. It ends with a large load shot on her face, captured in slow motion, but the lurid, almost radioactive colours are a bit off-putting.
Interview: France, September 1993. Sex Scene: The Golden Triangle, Indonesia, 1993.

Svetlana
…or Sweet Lana - aptly named, for this sweet-faced student is a blonde cutie who eventually strips to show her impressive busty body. Unfortunately, the interview turns into a bit of a fiasco. Something is going on off camera, the translation of the Russian-speaking female assistant's comments ceases, and there's no explanation for what happens.

An on-set look at a photo shoot helps make amends - the resulting stills are supplied, as for most of the girls, in the extras. Svetlana plays a naughty nurse who gives patients Frank and Alain some special treatment. Even allowing for her ridiculous nurse's headgear, watching the bandaged patients have their wicked way with her makes for a good bit of sexy fun. The photo shoots, of course, are not conventional porn film sex scenes - they have intercourse, but repeatedly stop to pose for pictures.
Interview: Russia, August 1994. Photo shoot: Pirate 34.

Anita Gyongy
Cheerful, charming brunette Anita is one of those girls who really benefits from a touch of Private magic, being transformed from a pretty but plain young woman into a sexy glamour girl in the photo shoots and sex scene that follow her interview, which is conducted in English. The problem is that she initially doesn't fancy what Pierre does, so he sets off with the probing questioning, discovering that she has a girlfriend, that she prefers boys or girls depending on the person, and finally getting her to show off her very sexy curves.

Her reward for agreeing to work with Private is to have sex with lecherous Yves Baillat (and Jean-Yves Le Castel) during a photoshoot that features oral, anal, double penetration and large facials in a rapid-fire segment. A second photoshoot with Richard Lengin demonstrates both how petite she is, and how posed many of the photos are. Her smile and fun nature are unmistakable - clearly she enjoys her work. Following this is a quick, perhaps edited, girl-girl scene on the beach, which suffers again from horrific picture quality, rough sound, and eighties styling (even though it was done in 1995). There's another peek at a stills shoot to wrap up a generous helping of this lovely girl.
Interview: Budapest, March 1995. Photo shoots: Pirate 33, Private 132, Triple X 15. Sex scene: Dolce Vita Hotel, Italy, October 1994.

Simone
I recall seeing this cute, pouty girl with her short red hair in Private Stories 5. Here's how she got started with Private - and it's a very interesting interview. Simone is not just a pretty face; she seems like a forceful personality too. As she leafs through a Private magazine, she opines that, like the girls in the mag, she'd only be doing it for the money. She seems to have an idea about sex for business rather than for pleasure. When the Hungarian interpreter misrepresents her replies to Pierre, she corrects him, revealing that she knows more English than she was letting on during the typical impertinent questioning about her sex life. The interpreter has to leave before she'll get naked, and once he's gone she comments - in English - that he's stupid. Pierre doesn't argue with her, moaning about how hard it is to find intelligent people in this business in Budapest!

There's a mountain setting for the sex scene that nicely illustrates her talents here - Nick and she trade oral licks in a cable car, and then she takes on three chaps in the rarefied air - oral, anal, double penetration, facials and terrible jumpers all feature.
Interview: Budapest, August 1995. Sex scene: Triple X Video 9, Chamonix, September 1995.

Laura Kat Woman
Just to teach me not to judge a book by its cover, cute Laura seems rather shy and naïve during her interview: she's uncomfortable with the pics in Pierre's mucky books, and is embarrassed about being on her period, so Woodman generously allows her to remove only her top. And then she goes and admits to already having had sex with 25 guys in her young life! Naturally, this is what grabs Pierre's interest…

As if by magic, Laura has blossomed into a lithe, suntanned tease in a clip from one of those early Private features directed by Michel Ricaud. She entertains David Perry and Jack Slater on a beautiful tropical beach. Apart from the sex - though I wonder how they can do it, that sand gets everywhere - there's some on-set footage shot by Woodman, which shows legendary director Ricaud trying to get a crab to smoke a cigar, and one of those squirt/pee moments (it's in the scene too, something of a rarity for Private?) when David is eating Laura's pussy. Perhaps she peed in reaction to the waves washing over them, perhaps Perry's cunnilingus technique was just so outstanding - I'll let viewers decide for themselves. This is accompanied by a trip into the jungle for a photo shoot that looked like way too much hard work.
Interview: Lithuania, December 1992. Sex scene: Club Seychelles, August 1993. Photo shoot: Pirate 22.

Bettina
This scene also appears on The Private Life Of Bettina, which I recently watched and reviewed, but this is a much fuller version of the casting. I am not exactly sure how she came to be in the interview in the first place (she's apparently only in Paris on vacation), but Bettina doesn't seem at all disposed towards working with Woodman. Despite threatening to leave after looking at his "disgusting" magazines, she returns to take a closer look. As she concedes more and more ground to Woodman's gently relentless probing, and we hear more of her sheltered background, that shy smile of hers makes many appearances.

It's fascinating viewing, but equally frustrating in as much as the crucial conversations that persuaded the bashful young woman to agree to show her body to him take place off camera. One can only speculate as to exactly what convinced her to take part with him (a virtual stranger) in a sex scene, and what transpires to be a very hard one at that, given that she's reputedly a virgin. Pierre does take great care to relax her and ease her into the sex - all shot from a tripod-mounted camera - but he doesn't spare the horses once she's truly immersed in it, feverishly shafting her pussy and anus.

A couple of points - in my review of her Private Life collection, I speculated that Bettina's stated Dutch origins might mean she had a Surinamese background. Here she states that she's from Germany, of Jamaican origin. Her profile on this disc contradictorily suggests she's Dutch. I also was unsure of her work outside the realms of Private - on a quick trawl of the web, I noted a few appearances in the wider world of European porn, most recently alongside Sophie Evans working for Spanish director Narcis Bosch.
Interview & initiation: Paris, March 1997.

Katia
This young Russian blonde is another pretty, pouting girl who Woodman is clearly keen to work with. She's not sexually experienced and doesn't particularly appreciate the thought of doing what she sees in his magazines, but she does consent to sharing her lovely body - with outstanding, or should that be upstanding, boobs marked by tan lines - with the viewers for perhaps the only time.
Interview: Moscow, August 1993.

Overall
Some of the interviews here are pretty essential viewing for any connoisseur of Private's stars - then again, a couple of them offer very little. It was quite striking to see the young Rebecca Lord, whose pale beauty could as easily have offered her a modelling career for some cosmetics company as a life in porn. As always, I really enjoyed watching Castings, and find more than just titillation in it, but perhaps it's an acquired taste. Castings 4 is often as much about intrigue as excitement.

My main issue with this product is the picture quality. Not as much the castings or the on-set stuff - I expect these to be quite rough and ready - but the clips from features, which are of very poor quality. It was interesting to read that apparently Private consider much of the product from the early part of their video range to be of insufficient quality to merit DVD release in their own right. Yet here is some of that very material, with which Private is hoping to snag some of your cash. Surely they should consider digitally remastering and making the most of some of their classic material.

DVD Comments
As I've already outlined picture quality issues, and must add that the audio is not always too great either, I'll balance this by saying that the menus are extremely well done, the selection of extras, with the girls' cast profiles linked to their casting scenes and to photo sets from magazine appearances, is very good and as usual from Private the audio and subtitle options are comprehensive. Personally, I'd prefer accurate subtitles than the dubbed translations.