“I should have died on impact.”
That’s Blake Lovely talking about a Nevada car accident she was in last December. We’re discussing her new feature, “Once Upon a TS Summer,” which premiered Thursday — but Lovely doesn’t just want to talk about the movie itself. She wants to explore the entire process that took her from being a relatively new, rising performer to becoming the driving force behind one of the major trans titles to drop in 2025.
After she shares photos of her car post-crash, it’s hard to dispute her assessment.
“I was a little bit late for my first shoot with TransAngels,” Lovely recounts. “I’d wanted to shoot for them my whole life. That was ‘the’ studio. So I was a little distracted thinking about everything I had to do on set that day. That’s when an old man in a giant silver Toyota Tundra pickup truck decides to make a left turn onto a hiking trail right across my lane while I’m doing 60 miles an hour. When we collided, I went from 60 to 0 immediately.”
Although her car was wrecked, Lovely managed to escape with severe bruising. What she’s most proud of is that, while she had to cancel that day’s shoot, 10 days later she was back on set, fulfilling her dream of performing for TransAngels.
“I had to spend almost a grand hiring a special-effects makeup artist to cover up the bruise in my groin area from the seatbelt, but I did it!” she beams.
Lovely points to the accident as a turning point in her life. It’s what precipitated her move from the outskirts of Las Vegas back to Los Angeles, a decision that ended up turbocharging her career. While she’d already received her first award nominations — including an XMAs nod for Best Trans Sex Scene, for Evil Angel’s “Blake Lovely and Autumn Rain” — it was the LA move that saw her starring regularly for Evil Angel, Adult Time and especially Grooby.
It was through her professional association with Grooby Creative and Editorial Director Kristel Penn that “Once Upon a TS Summer” started to come together. The movie is Lovely’s passion project: She wrote the story based on her own experiences, assembled an all-star crew and cast, and took on directing duties for the first time in her career. She also stars in every scene.
“Blake reached out to me over the summer with this idea,” recalls Penn. “She really had a clear vision. She knew exactly what she wanted, and whom she wanted to enlist.”
Lovely notes that it was her agent who suggested she direct.
“I’m only a year and a few months into my career,” she says. “I was lucky that I’d had a great start, but this was a big step. I needed some help.”
What ensued could be a montage from one of those “Let’s put on a show!” flicks, where the star gets the band together. Since Lovely had never directed before, her first step was enlisting someone with a lot of experience to serve as her director of photography. There was only one name she had in mind.
“I immediately asked Aiden Starr for help,” Lovely says. “She’s the most award-winning director I know, and she directed the scene I did with Autumn that got me my first XMAs nomination.”
Starr, who has been nominated for 29 XMAs in the course of her career, including a win in 2019 for Director of the Year — Trans Works, was more than willing to help.
“Bringing Blake’s vision to life was an incredible honor for me,” Starr says. “She is incredibly talented in so many ways.”
Starr had one condition, though. For a feature shoot that needed to take place in multiple locations over a short period of time, she wanted a producer and production manager with serious chops.
“I told Blake that I would really like for Brah Bones to be the producer,” Starr says. “He’s a fucking amazing producer, and we’ve been friends for a very long time without ever having had the chance to work together. I knew he’d be perfect for this project.”
Bones, aka Marc Kramer, is an industry luminary who worked his way up from being an extra on an Adam & Eve shoot in the late ’90s, to being a driver, production assistant and eventually a production manager and producer on hundreds of releases for studios like Vivid, Third Degree Films, Zero Tolerance, Adam & Eve, Cinderella, Metro and Evil Angel. He also did a stint as head of production for Larry Flynt Publications, and spent years working for iconic director Axel Braun at Wicked Pictures, right up until Braun’s retirement in 2023.
The only problem was, Kramer had already hung up his producing spurs.
“I was done, I was retired from producing,” Kramer explains. “I was doing some work as a talent agent for Coxxx Models, but I hadn’t produced a picture or managed a production since 2023.”
Still, when Starr and Lovely approached him, Kramer saw the chance to work with the rising starlet and the veteran director as too good to pass up.
“I’ve known Aiden since she started in the industry as a performer,” Kramer says. “I’ve seen the progression of her ability as a director with Evil Angel, how good she is and how dedicated. She puts her heart and soul into what she does. I love her attitude and her professionalism. So I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this because I want to work with Aiden.’”
For her part, Lovely credits Kramer for launching her own career in adult, back when she was working in the music industry.
“My music lawyer had a side gig taking photos for Marc,” Lovely recounts. “I really wanted to get into adult, so I texted Marc some pictures and asked if he could help me out. At first, he was like, ‘Oh, you’re cute, but you need to grow your hair out and do these other things before you’ll be ready for porn.’”
Soon enough, however, Kramer was serving as her de facto manager, helping her book her first shoots. When Starr said she wanted to bring him on board, Lovely was completely behind the idea.
“Marc always takes extra care of people that come from nothing and really want it, and aren’t afraid of hard work,” Lovely attests.
Lovely then laid out for Starr and Kramer exactly what kind of movie she was looking to make. She described it as a ’90s homage in an almost Tarantino style, but with hints of 1980s John Hughes movies like “Breakfast Club” as well.
The movie features a series of vignettes about Lovely’s last summer at home before graduating from college, each of which is its own standalone scene, but with a throughline connecting all of them.
To turn the story into a full script, Kramer suggested going to industry stalwart Andre Madness, now co-owner of Nexxxt Level Talent.
“I did at least 40 or 50 movies with Andre for Adam & Eve back in the day,” Kramer says. “He’s probably written over 300 scripts. He hadn’t done that kind of work for a while, but I knew he could take the five chapters of this movie, really tie them together and write good dialogue. So I pushed him on it and he said, ‘All right, Marc. We’ve been friends for 25 years. I’ll do it.’”
From there, the process became a lot of intense back-and-forth between Lovely, Madness, Starr and Kramer.
“This was 100% a group project,” Lovely declares. “I may have my name on it as director, but it was a community effort.”
During our conversation, Lovely’s enthusiasm for the project is unmistakable. Everyone who worked on the project notes her drive and positivity.
Penn, who has been handling PR for Lovely for some time, says the project has lit a fire under the star-turned-director.
“She’s so involved and excited to get this project off the ground,” Penn says. “I speak with her at least once a day now.”
Adds Kramer, “She’s always got such an upbeat attitude. She’s definitely brought that positivity to set every day. She made me laugh a lot. It was a fun experience.”
The group’s shared enthusiasm led to high standards and attention to detail. During the pre-production process, Starr recalls, the team scouted numerous locations in order to find the perfect fit for each scene.
“We were indeed looking for an art-house ’90s inspired look and feel to the movie,” Starr says. “The sets needed to be the perfect combination of Pulp Fiction’ glamour and grime, and ‘Breakfast Club’ subversive suburban flair.
“But the sets weren’t the only aspect to the look and feel,” she adds. “Andre’s retro-inspired, culty comedic writing style really filled in the meat of the movie sandwich. And our editor, Sadie Lola, used these ‘Pulp Fiction’-inspired titles and this Bay Area indie editing style.”
As production began, the level of collaboration between Lovely and Starr intensified.
“Blake and I talked exhaustively about shot design, focus and the pace of the edit to convey the plot and comedy moments perfectly,” Starr recalls. “She had to trust me with the final shot execution as she was on camera for every single scene. I made sure at the end of every day that she was happy with all the footage before we moved on to the next scenes.”
Kramer highlighted the importance of that partnership.
“Having Aiden on this shoot was really important,” he says. “When you have a director like Blake who’s also in every scene, it’s hard for them to do anything at that point, because they’re in their creative mode in front of the camera. So having someone with Aiden’s directing experience was really important to getting scenes right while Blake is performing.”
For the cast, Lovely and Starr reached out to some of the biggest names in the business, assembling an all-star team of heavy hitters that includes Aubrey Kate, Foxxy, Jade Venus, Haven Rose, Draven Navarro, Pierce Paris, Sage Roux, Adam X, Derek Kage, Silas Stone, Tony Sting and Steve Rickz.
The first scene features Lovely in a threesome with Rose and Navarro.
“There’s this hot taboo scene where the foster sisters are fooling around and the adoptive father catches them,” Starr reveals. “Of course he joins in, and it turns into this really hot, really explosive three-way.”
Lovely sees that opener as the most stereotypically “porn” scene in the feature.
“The idea is that Haven and I have been through foster care,” she explains. “It’s more of a rescue foster family. We have no family relationship. We were adopted in high school, but we weren’t really close. So when I come back for the summer, you see us have all this tension. And it’s Haven, as the younger stepsister, who convinces us all to have sex together to bring the family closer.”
According to Starr, the sequence is actually light and comedic.
“The movie is really snarky and sassy and fun,” Starr says. “That scene is really, really funny.”
The second scene pairs Lovely, who’s taken a summer gig as a teacher’s assistant, with Foxxy as the school principal to whom she has to report on her first day.
“Foxxy is a fucking OG diva,” Starr says. “She tops in this scene — she’s the principal at this local college and she’s Blake’s first introduction to the school.”
Foxxy sets Lovely to cleaning the office, and when she goes through some personal boxes, she finds one full of sex toys.
“Here I am playing with one of those dildos,” Lovely says. “And Foxxy catches me, which leads to us hooking up.”
Adds Starr, “Foxxy tests her out to see if she’s going to be a good fit for this kinky faculty — and of course she is.”
Scene three finds Lovely meeting Aubrey Kate, the teacher she’ll be assisting. The two are assigned to watch over Sage Roux, which turns into another three-way.
“That scene is hilarious and was so much fun to shoot,” Starr raves. “The girls and Sage really dug into the dialogue that Andre wrote for them, and there was a lot of fat to chew on there. They really enjoyed it.”
Lovely echoes Starr’s praise for the acting, particularly Roux’s.
“Sage is literally straight out of ‘Breakfast Club,’” she says. “His combination of the bad boy and the jock in one person is really comical.”
The next scene features Lovely with Venus and Paris.
“The scene with Jade and Pierce was really special,” Lovely says. “Andre had written these characters to be sex addict, swinger, sex freak types. They play these people who were popular and cool in high school, but now, five or six years have passed and they’ve been together the whole time, and the relationship has gotten boring. So now they’re swingers and they’re trying all of these things to spice up their relationship.”
Starr adds, “They lure her into their fuck dungeon. There’s a lot of erotic tension in this scene that I really enjoyed.”
The scene stands out for another reason as well, according to Lovely.
“I’d been really focused in this movie on the guys topping the girls, but it made sense that this would be the one scene where we have a guy being topped,” she says. “It felt really grounded in reality.”
The big climax is a gangbang featuring Lovely with a bunch of ex-football players from her old high school, played by Rickz, Adam X, Stone and Sting, along with Kage as their erstwhile coach.
“That last scene is amazing,” Starr says. “Blake does so much double anal in that gangbang. It’s incredible.”
Lovely concurs.
“It was super intense,” she says. “The idea was: Instead of doing the generic 18-year-old cheerleader getting gangbanged by the popular guys on the football team, what if it was the girl who wasn’t that popular, but she comes home one summer and all of those popular guys are now kind of small-town losers? They’re all at a party together, so I decide to end the summer with a big bang and show all of these guys who used to be the ‘in’ crowd that I’m the ‘it’ girl now. So my line is that I’m grading them on stamina, and then they all rail me.
“I didn’t have sex for like two weeks after that,” she laughs.
Starr says she particularly enjoys shooting gangbangs.
“I have a bit of a classical art education background, and there’s just so much in a gangbang for me to put together in terms of pictorials and mise-en-scene,” she says. “More bodies is just more beautiful shots that I can find and stack people into.
“We also really lucked out and got amazing guys,” Starr adds. “You don’t always get a bunch of strong male performers in a gangbang, but they slayed it.”
With the whirlwind shoot — the entire feature was filmed over only five days — behind them, everyone XBIZ spoke with had nothing but high praise for the experience and for the finished film.
“I am obsessed with how this movie turned out,” Starr enthuses. “I could not have asked for better performances from the entire cast. The crew really brought their A-game as well. We all worked so hard and it really shows.”
Penn says she can’t wait for the public to see “Once Upon a TS Summer.”
“It feels to me like something worth watching not just for the sex scenes, but for the whole movie,” she says. “The sex is amazing, of course. But also the cinematography, the storytelling and the humor — those are all equally good. Blake really poured a lot of heart into it.”
Kramer half-jokes that he’s really looking forward to going back to retirement — but would definitely consider coming back to do a sequel.
“I think we made something really good,” he reflects. “The acting is good, everyone was prepared, and it was a real team effort. That’s what it takes to make a good movie. If the team doesn’t work together well, you ain’t going to come out with anything worth a damn.”
Lovely says she couldn’t agree more.
“No one outshines anyone,” she says. “I may have been the center of the film, but I wanted everyone to have their own moment because I’m about community. I love it when people have success alongside me. I really think we made something truly special. I’m surrounded by so many amazing, wonderful, lovely people in this industry who inspire me.
“The thing that I thought should have ended my life is the thing that set this whole movie up,” she says. “Because if I don’t get in that accident, I don’t move back from Vegas to LA. I don’t get set up with my life here, and I’m not put in the position that I was to build my career and then be given this opportunity. And it all started from what I thought was one of the worst days of my life.
“There’s real irony in that,” Lovely adds. “Porn saved my life. It gave me purpose, it gave me community and it gave me something to work toward. I’ve never felt more like I’m on the right path, and I am honored to be where I’m at right now, with this movie about to release.”
“Once Upon a TS Summer” is now streaming on GroobyDVD.com.
Follow Lovely, Starr, Kramer and Penn on X.com.
