If you don’t know who April Flores (aka Fatty D) and Carlos Batts are, you must not be one of the cool kids. So get familiar.
April – the porcelain-skinned, zaftig beauty who is as much artist’s muse as adult film star.
I’m on the cover of Plumpers this month and I did a spread for Bizarre Magazine and Topco is releasing my sex toy. It’s an 8 lb replica of my pussy! They really outdid themselves with my coochie.
Carlos – the mohawked auteur who is more artist than mere porn director.
I’m working on a robot and I have a kid’s story and I’m curating shows.
The LA-based couple made the trek to San Francisco to promote their new movie, Voluptuous Biker Babes — follow-up to the very well-received Voluptuous Life — and meet fans at Good Vibrations adult shop on Valencia Street.
The two of them have become evangelists for something bigger than the artfully erotic movies they make or the handful of mainstream porn scenes April has been in – something that brought a crowd of seen-it-all, kinky San Franciscans out in the drizzling rain and had them practically gushing.
“We appreciate you guys as superheroes,” giggled one fan.
Batts shot Voluptuous Biker Babes at the original location of Russ Myers’ Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! They spent 4 days in the desert and Batts broke down FPKK and took the same number of characters but just made all the original characters slightly askew.
“People kept making references to me and April being like Russ Myers and…I liked the guy, but I didn’t really get it. But I kind of understood that he really liked big girls and during that time period, he was the only big girl provocateur and I said okay…”
Voluptuous Biker Babes is at its core well-lit, highly stylized sex, but the sex is interspersed with a really funny storyline and dialogue between actors.
How did you overcome the fetishization of BBW porn and the separation between BBW and mainstream adult movies?
Well, I’m very lucky because I have a lot of friends who also direct and are performers, so I was always friends with the director or the performer [that I worked with]. So it wasn’t really approached from the aspect of size. It was just approached from the aspect of ‘I want to work with you’. So I have to give the people I’ve worked with a lot of credit for not looking at a body size. The way I think about myself…I don’t think about my size and I think they also saw that.
How did you guys meet?
We met at an art opening.
Carlos interrupts, “It’s very romantic.”
He approached me by saying, ‘hi, have you ever done any modeling before?’ I thought it was just a pick-up line, but he was serious.
The cover of [Batt's photography book] Wild Skin is from our second shoot together. And while I was posing I was thinking ‘wow…I wanna fuck this guy. But he didn’t know that.’
Carlos jumps in, “And I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this girl is so fucking hot. She was wearing a pink bikini and covered in baby oil. So then my publisher came over from Germany and [April and I] had just started dating. He went through 3,000 photos and he pulled 2 images for the cover – both of her.
What’s your collaborative process?
He’s the director, I’m just the subject. That’s how I like it. So I just say “okay”.
He’ll say “you’re going to be in the desert, on a bed, having sex”. I’m like “okay”.
He’s like “on top of a truck”. I say “okay”.
And I trust him totally so I know whatever crazy shit he’s saying I can trust him that it’s going to look cool and it always does. In the beginning, I was like “why am I going to wear these ugly rubber gloves? But it always looked cool, so I learned to just say ‘okay’”.
And when he had the idea for a 6 foot, 200 pound drag queen dressed like “Divine on acid” to wrestle his wife in the desert?
She said ‘okay’.
Carlos Batts has an untitled, super-secret horror project in the works and April Flores appears in her second boy/girl scene in Belladonna’s Dark Meat 3.
April Flores and Carlos Batts will be hosting a midnight screening of the director’s cut of Voluptuous Biker Babes on March 6 at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.
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The Germans have a word for wanting someone to lose, schadenfraude, but do they have one for wanting someone to win? It has to be something better than fahrvegnugen. Anyway, we want April Flores to win, Win, WIN, and as such she and photographer husband Carlos Batts are featured in “The Hustle,” a gallery show at New York’s Powerhouse Arena that pairs dozens of artists with their muses. An article in the London Telegraph said that Flores lit up the opening as only someone who makes people swoon at the tiniest application of lipstick can do.
