LOS ANGELES—Award-winning director Ben Rush has thrilled audiences with suspenseful sinema. He’s made them swoon with lighthearted comedic romps. And he’s gotten them off with balls-to-the-wall sexcapades. But his new feature Eat the Rich marks a decidedly unique place in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, and it defiantly proves that now more than ever, porn has a purpose.

“Eat the Rich has a very special place in my heart because it may be the clearest expression yet of how I see the world and how maddening I sometimes find it,” says the Co-Chief Content Officer & Chief Creative Marketing Officer at Falcon | NakedSword. “It’s the culmination of many things I’ve been exploring throughout my career in adult entertainment: sex, power, class, masculinity, hypocrisy and the ways people ‘fake’ respectability while behaving horribly behind closed doors. It has the structure and energy of a big adult feature, but underneath, it’s an extremely pointed political satire.”

The NakedSword Originals movie debuts September 1, bolstering an all-star cast and a furiously focused point of view. It proves to be a wildly entertaining middle finger to hypocrisy at the highest level, a daring erotic antidote to a suffocating political landscape. All of it is built on the growing frustration and disappointment that Rush has felt at the increasingly chaotic state of the world.

“We’re continually told that wealth is proof of virtue and that being poor is some kind of personal failure. Meanwhile, we watch extraordinarily powerful people avoid consequences for behavior that would destroy an ordinary person’s life,” he says.

“As a gay man, it has also been exhausting to watch our lives and rights become political weapons again. People who have never met us build careers by turning us into threats. They preach morality while protecting systems and individuals who are beyond immoral.”

Rush adds that the anger in the film comes from that gap between the manufactured story the public is fed—and what we can all see happening. “Eat the Rich is my response to being told not to believe my own eyes.”

He says the earliest version of the project came together during the last two years. The central idea was already there: ridiculous wealth, political corruption, and people whose hunger has become so grand that they don’t recognize anybody else’s humanity.

“Obviously, the world did not become calmer or more equitable in the period that has followed. Every time I went back to the idea, reality threw me another layer. Eventually it stopped feeling simply topical and began to feel unavoidable and urgent.”

The film’s centerpiece is down-on-his-luck escort Jayden Marcos. Sensing an opportunity with his powerful, moralizing clients, the savvy sex worker constructs a system to siphon money and direct it to LGBTQ+ causes.

“There are definitely recognizable types, but none of the characters are meant to be a literal portrait of one person. They’re composites. Politicians who manufacture outrage, billionaires who believe money makes them untouchable, media figures who mistake cruelty for courage, and social climbers who will tolerate anything if it gets them closer to power,” Rush says.

“Reality has become so heightened that satire has a difficult time keeping up. I would write something I thought was outrageous, and then someone in public life would say or do something even more disgusting. At a certain point, my job was basically to drill into that reality and give it a dramatic, erotic edge.”

The central anger and premise remained throughout the project’s evolution. But Rush says the story kept evolving as the political environment changed and he became more ambitious about what an adult feature could contain. He notes that Falcon | NakedSword President and CEO Tim Valenti wanted to do something in the Robin Hood vein. When they married the two ideas, something audacious and daring was born.

“For a long time, it was one of those projects that refused to leave me alone,” Rush says. “I would put it away and then return to it with new scenes or a better understanding of a character. The challenge was finding the right balance. I didn’t want the politics pasted on top of the sex, and I didn’t want the sex to derail the story. Each needed to expose something about power, appetite and control.”

And Rush assembled an all-star cast to pull it off, arguably his strongest yet in a long line of hits. The writer/director first worked with Marcos on Wild Game, which won Best Feature at this year’s GayVN Awards. The NakedSword / Disruptive Films collab also starred two of his frequent muses—Derek Kage and Paul Wagner—who return.

Industry veteran Johnny Donovan, who worked with Rush in The Way to a Man’s Heart and is enjoying his greatest success ever, rounds out the core leads. Joining them are River North, a recently named Falcon | NakedSword Headliner in the midst of his biggest year yet. Rounding out the cast are Miles Fallon (another recurring Rush performer who was in Wild Game), Falcon | NakedSword Exclusive Ryan Orion and newcomer Luca Zae.

“It was a combination of performers I already trusted, people I had wanted to work with for some time, and a few discoveries who brought exactly the energy the movie needed. With an ensemble like this, casting isn’t just about who can deliver an individual scene. You have to create an entire social landscape. Each person has to arrive with a distinct presence, but they also need to feel as though they belong in the same heightened world,” Rush says.

“We were incredibly fortunate. Everyone understood that we were making something stylized and provocative, but they never treated it as a joke. They committed to the characters, the dialogue, and the sex with equal seriousness.”

Eat the Rich proved the perfect vehicle for Rush to push his always-provocative envelope even further. In addition to a literal fucking of the “family values” movement, he put religious hypocrisy on blast. Kage plays a closeted priest who hires escort Luca in the most visually striking scene of the film.

“That scene was built around ritual, guilt, and the sexual charge of the forbidden. Religious iconography is extraordinarily potent because it already carries centuries of longing, shame, punishment, surrender and ecstasy,” Rush says. “You don’t need to over-explain it; the images arrive charged. Visually, I wanted it to feel almost devotional, while everything happening within the frame worked against the idea of devotion. Derek and Luca both understood that tension.”

In addition to lush lighting that enhances the eroticism, the scene also casts a few props to memorable effect.

“The rosary was a small but very deliberate detail. In this film, objects associated with authority or virtue are constantly being repurposed. Sacred symbols become intimate, political symbols become obscene, and supposedly respectable people reveal themselves to be the opposite.”

All of it resulted in a finished product that gave the director, pardon the pun, a rush unlike any other he has experienced.

“Making the movie was cathartic, although perhaps not in a peaceful way. I didn’t emerge calm and ready to forgive billionaires and politicians. That said, there was relief in finally giving all that anger a shape. Anger can become explosive when it remains shapeless. Turning it into characters, images, jokes and sex made it productive for me. We could laugh at the people who want us frightened and ashamed. We could expose their misuse of power and strip away their moral authority.”

The catharsis, Rush says, came from refusing to be polite. The film says what it wants to say at full volume, which has a become a trademark of his Falcon | NakedSword productions.

“Adult entertainment is especially suited to confronting power because sex is one of the primary places where societies enforce shame and control. Who is allowed to desire? Whose body is celebrated? Who must stay hidden? Who is punished for being visible? Those are political questions, whether we acknowledge them or not,” he says.

“Features like Eat the Rich demonstrate that adult cinema can entertain, arouse, provoke, and make an argument simultaneously. We should not accept the idea that explicitness disqualifies a work from having cultural or artistic relevance.”

Perhaps most importantly, it proves that projects with a purpose give the LGBTQ+ community the power back.

“First, by telling our stories ourselves and refusing to wash away everything that makes them uncomfortable to a mainstream audience. We don’t take back our narrative by asking permission from people who benefit from misrepresenting us,” Rush says. “That means preserving our complexity. Queer people can be heroic, ridiculous, furious, erotic, selfish, loving, contradictory, and politically divided. We don’t need to present ourselves as flawless to prove that we deserve dignity.”

And in the case of Eat the Rich, Falcon | NakedSword puts its money where its mouth is. The studio group continues its relationship with New York-based fashion brand Skull & Bones, a collaboration that started last year in The Whole Package. The underwear that appears in Eat the Rich features original styles designed by Falcon | NakedSword Art Director Frank Fanucchi. All three styles and color waves will be limited, and a portion of the proceeds benefit The Trevor Project—a nonprofit organization dedicated to suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth.

“We are the first adult studio to go all in on the current state of affairs,” Rush says. “This is less about ‘sex that includes dialogue’ and more of a cinematic experience in which sex is part of the storytelling.”

Projects like Eat the Rich, he says, enable the community to turn the gaze around—and turn hypocrisy into action.

“Instead of queer sexuality being examined, judged and pathologized, we examine the systems and people who claim the authority to judge us. We use drama, desire and humor as weapons. Taking back the narrative means moving past defense. We are not just responding to what others say about us. We are creating the images and fantasies through which we understand ourselves—and then inviting the world to catch up.”