For This Firm, Overexposure Is a Good Thing

The Gothic Bedroom, with its stained-glass windows and handmade birch bed, exudes a spooky, Anne Rice sort of charm. The gleaming, sterile Doctor’s Office could be mistaken for the real thing. And the Dungeon is a baroque dreamscape of perverse pleasures, where participants can channel their inner Marquis de Sade and the whips and dog collars are compliments of the house.

But if Frank Keshishian had to pick one room that he thinks best exemplifies the craftsmanship and TLC he put into Live Acts Video, his unconventional new Beverly Hills business, it would definitely be the Barn, a rustic assemblage of straw bales, farming equipment and nostalgic Americana.

In fact, whatever your hidden romantic inclinations, Live Acts is eager to supply the sets, props and recording equipment. All you need bring are your partner and your libido. In exchange, you’ll take home a lightened wallet and a videocassette or DVD of yourself appearing in what once were quaintly known as “compromising positions.”

So far it’s been an eye-opening experience even for Live Acts’ owner. “I’d never been in this business before, but you catch on very quickly,” says Keshishian, 44, a former Beverly Hills residential designer who soon may be regarded either as the Westside’s biggest professional laughingstock or, conversely, as the most ingenious promoter of sexual adventurism since Masters and Johnson.

The outcome largely depends on whether Los Angeles, the world’s alternative-lifestyle capital, embraces his unusual new enterprise or treats it as just the latest passing fling.

Billed by its owner as the first such business of its kind anywhere, Live Acts Video (www. liveactsvideo.com) represents the newest twist in high-tech-assisted sensual gratification. At prices ranging from $330 to $575, the Beverly Hills company offers couples and other interested parties the chance to preserve their most intimate moments on videotape or DVD, with the kind of production values you’d expect to find in the Dream Factory’s backyard.

Lodged in a two-story beige office building a few blocks west of the Beverly Center, Live Acts seeks to project a sophisticated, high-end image. Original artworks dot its buffed and polished interior. Skylights and a gurgling indoor fountain create the soothing ambience of a corporate inner sanctum. Patrons may park in the rear of the building and exit through a back door, away from prying eyes.

Once inside, clients choose among the four themed rooms, meticulously appointed enough to pass muster on a Hollywood back lot. Costumes, props, background music and even rudimentary “scripts” also are provided for the imaginatively challenged. Where his visitors take it from there, the owner says, is pretty much up to them.

“It’s not just about having sex,” Keshishian insists. “There’s a lot of role-playing, there’s a lot of scenarios. When they’re acting, I find that our clientele is much more aroused than they would be in a regular situation. They do have a better time, and they do have better sex. It’s a total escape from their reality. It’s allowing them to be someone they normally aren’t.”

Most sessions last about an hour, “plus a little bit,” Keshishian says, after which full showering facilities are available and the set is scrubbed down with an anti-bacterial disinfectant and made ready for the next customer. “It’s never under [an hour]. If it is, they’re doing something wrong,” says Keshishian, a humorous, soft-spoken man who looks as if he hasn’t gotten enough sleep lately. “I’m so busy right now,” he says. “I have no life.”

Besides the four permanent sets, Keshishian plans to add a flexible fifth space that can be transformed in a jiffy into an office, locker room, clothing store changing room (“Say, how do those pants fit? Oh, excuse me, sir!”) or whatever other fantasy interior the client fancies. Keshishian says the business operates in line with city ordinances governing adult-related establishments.

Each set is enclosed within a double-doored, fully sound-proofed room, armed with strategically placed microphones and three cameras, each with 360-degree rotation. Outside, a box lights up to indicate when recording is in progress. “There’s something exciting about movies,” Keshishian enthuses. “The average couple’s like, ‘We’re on a movie set!’”

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A Range of Packages

Of course, not all couples are average, at least when it comes to the size of their wallets. Accordingly, Live Acts offers three pricing packages that let customers decide not only how much to spend but how much seclusion they want. The Silver package, the least expensive, lets them record their session in complete privacy using concealed, hand-operated remote controls.

With the Gold package, a professional technician seated in a separate control room guides three cameras and selects zoom shots. The Platinum package provides a professional videographer “in the same room filming scenes as close as the client likes,” according to the promotional literature.

The company’s in-house video-grapher, known as Bishop, considers it simply part of his job to help coach people through the process, if they go with the Platinum option. “I tell them, ‘Don’t look at the camera. Keep your hands busy, never lay them on your side. Be verbal,’” says Bishop, an affable former adult-film industry cameraman. “I tell people, ‘Enjoy yourselves.’ When they’re having fun, you can tell. And most people are having fun.”

For some clients, being watched in flagrante by a stranger with a camera simply adds to the erotic frisson, Keshishian says. “That’s our main goal, is to make clients comfortable here. Everybody has different personalities, different tastes, different comfort levels.”

Which raises the most ticklish issue facing Live Acts. From an extensive marketing survey conducted before opening, Keshishian found that most customers’ greatest fear was that their private cavortings might somehow wind up being published in a magazine or posted on the Internet.

To assuage those doubts, Live Acts issues each client a written privacy guarantee that only one videotape or DVD copy of the session will be produced and given immediately to them. Live Acts also promises not to release or sell any personal information about individual customers. “We’re here to stay in business,” Keshishian says. “We don’t play games with extra copies. It’d be a nightmare with liabilities.”

Every room is equipped with a 27-inch TV monitor so that participants can follow the on-screen activity if they wish. But the screens, which are directly wired to the video and DVD recorders where the tapes are made, also are meant to reassure customers that what they see is, in fact, what they get, and no funny stuff is going on behind the scenes.

To further ensure confidentiality, Live Acts doesn’t edit tapes or perform any other post-production work. If clients record in DVD, Keshishian says, they can do their own editing on their home computers. Only the videographer ever sees the recordings, Keshishian says; he never does.

Whether it’s Internet chat rooms, computer dating services, phone sex or his own business, Keshishian maintains that what makes customers apprehensive isn’t technology per se but the possibility of its abuse and misuse. Remove that risk, he believes, and the world will beat a path to your door.

Divorced, with a 23-year-old daughter, Keshishian says his family and friends have been very supportive of his latest venture. Since opening in mid-October, Live Acts has catered to about 50 couples and other assorted groupings. Besides attracting dozens of visitors through its appointment-only guided tours, the company has drawn additional scores of novelty seekers with its monthly open houses (which Keshishian says he plans to discontinue because they’re “too impersonal”). So far, he’s limited his advertising to the city’s alternative weeklies but may look for additional outlets.

“We have had some celebrity activity here,” Keshishian says cryptically, quickly adding that he can’t disclose any more because of the company’s confidentiality agreement.

Two non-celebrity customers, Ben and Sonya, a Westside professional couple in their 40s who asked that their real names not be used in this story, said they couldn’t have been happier with their Live Acts experience--though Sonya admits she initially was “very reluctant” when her husband brought home a newspaper ad. “But then we got there, and it just kind of happened,” she says.

Sonya says she especially appreciated Keshishian’s low-key manner and professional eye for design. “I was really stunned about the quality of the place, the beauty of the place,” she says. “They also made you really feel not nervous.”

A number of local adult filmmakers and producers also have dropped by Live Acts to check out the decor, which Keshishian boasts is far superior to a typical adult movie set. Though he has rented out his studios for porno shoots, Keshishian says he’s now “kind of staying away from that.”

“This is really geared more toward the general public. Our rates are too high for them [adult filmmakers]. They’ll want to pay you $500 for a whole day and a whole crew. I don’t think so!”

At first glance, Keshishian seems an unlikely candidate to operate an X-rated video salon. Brooklyn-born and Burbank-bred, he studied design at UCLA, sold real estate for a few years and at 27 opened a residential remodeling business, L.A. Design Concepts in the mid-1980s. The business apparently did well, attracting Hollywood screenwriters and wealthy Westsiders. Keshishian was mentioned extensively in a September 1988 story on interior design in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

He also attracted controversy several years ago when he came up with the idea of using his professional credentials to enable his clients to purchase goods from the Pacific Design Center, the West Hollywood wholesale shopping mall of home furnishings. At the time, the facility was only open to architects, designers and other members of the trade, not the general public. Keshishian or a member of his staff would escort the client on these shopping trips, effectively serving as a middleman.

“The Design Center was cool with it, but the designers in the community were livid they didn’t think of it,” Keshishian says.

Extending his business philosophy to sex, Keshishian seems intent on making an indulgence that was formerly reserved for elites readily available to the middle-class masses. Seeking to capitalize on America’s growing appetite for recording the minutiae of its daily existence, Live Acts synthesizes three current national compulsions: sex, self-display and “reality based” entertainment. It could become the do-it-yourself version of “Temptation Island,” but with fewer commercials and slightly less inane dialogue.

Though he says he doesn’t feel at all embarrassed about his new career, occasionally Keshishian gives a different impression. Asked if he would use such a service himself, he unhesitatingly answers, “Oh, absolutely.” Asked if he actually has, he hesitates. “Have I?” he repeats. “Do I have to admit to it?”

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An Obsession With the Details

While sex generally sells itself, Keshishian is banking on the allure of his themed rooms, which were conceived and built with an attention to detail bordering on obsessiveness, as if Martha Stewart and Larry Flynt had decided to open a boutique motel. Like much else about his business, Keshishian says the themes were selected partly based on his survey results.

To implement his vision, Keshishian hired Design Setters Corp., a well-regarded Burbank outfit that has created sets and special effects for movies, music videos and theme park attractions. Keshishian then sweated out dozens of details about how each room should look.

He regards the Barn as his masterpiece and enjoys pointing out its features to visitors: a weathered RC Cola crate, a saddle, a wagon wheel specially treated to look aged and rusted. At one end of the wooden enclosure, a ladder points to a loft suggestively strewn with blankets.

“It’s not like some kind of cheesy background,” Keshishian says. “They don’t even do this for movies, this kind of quality. We have every square inch finished off in every room. You’d swear you’re in a barn, but you’re right here in the middle of Beverly Hills.”

Rick Tinsley, Design Setters’ senior vice president of production, said his work with Live Acts was “probably one of the strangest requests” he’s ever gotten. “My first feeling was, this has got to be illegal, you know?” Tinsley says. “But then I thought about it, and sex sells. If he does it right and keeps it clean and professional, I think it’s definitely something that will spread throughout the cities.”

Asked if he’d consider using the service himself, Tinsley utters a loud laugh. “I keep on saying yes and no,” he replies. “If no one knew, if it was top secret, I think I would. You just worry about who’s in the other booth.”

But if the increasing mainstreaming of pornography suggests that more people are willing to regard sex as a kind of performance--something “enacted” rather than “expressed,” in the words of British film critic Richard Dyer--those remaining inhibitions may fall away, and Keshishian could have a hit.

“I think there’s an actor in all of us,” says Tinsley. “It’s just getting over the initial uncomfortableness of it. It’s just like those people on TV, ‘Survivor.’ After a while they don’t realize the camera is there. They just go on.”

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An Open House Attracts the Curious

On a cold, rainy night a few days before Christmas, several dozen prospective “actors”--married couples, straight and gay lovers, the enthusiastic and the fashionably faded--gather at a Live Acts open house to meet the proprietor and inspect the merchandise. An erotic slide show illuminates a wall, while a DJ pumps out trip-hop and electronica.

Among the browsers is Gene Jenkins, 37, a security guard who works in the neighborhood. “I was thinking about coming here with my girlfriend and doing a bondage scene,” he says. “I was thinking about going with a Platinum package. I have a VHS at home, but I don’t have the elaborate, exotic sets. They look very classy.”

A few feet away, in the Gothic Bedroom, Jack, a casting director who asked that his name be changed, says the business was “great for L.A. L.A.’s all about fantasy, so it combines sexuality and fantasy all in one. I happen to have a great sex life, so I don’t need this,” he adds. But “I guess it’s like Disneyland for adults.”

Jack’s friend, Nigel, a professional photographer from England, is more skeptical. He reckons he could make customers a better offer himself. “I’ll do it for $200--cash,” he says.

Meanwhile, on a balcony overlooking the lobby, Keshishian is fielding queries from two young men. One, with slightly glassy eyes and a crooked smirk, does most of the talking. “We wanted to know, when you pay for your hour, do you have to stay in the same room, or can you go to other rooms?” he asks. You have to stay in the same room, Keshishian answers.

“And is it the same charge however many people you have in the room?”

How many people were you thinking of, Keshishian responds.

“Ten,” the man replies, grinning.

Keshishian hedges. Probably there’d be a little extra charge, he says, depending on the amount of wear and tear on the set.

Apparently satisfied, the two men move on. Lowering his voice, Keshishian says he generally can anticipate such questions from the results of his marketing surveys. But he concedes that “your marketing strategy is just constantly being evaluated, because there is no manual to this.”

Even so, Keshishian is confident that the numbers are there to support his vision. The numbers, the machines and the human desire. “I guess our market is anybody that’s having sex,” he says. “Not quite, but you know what I mean.”