Lauren Garroni, Every Outfit Co-Creator, Just Directed Her First Erotic Thriller — but the Genre Looms Large in Her Life

Lauren Garroni made her name commenting on the fashions of “Sex and the City” as one half (with Chelsea Fairless) of the genius minds behind the Every Outfit on Sex and the City Instagram account but her heart doesn’t just belong to television. She’s also a film buff who has a poster for Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” on her wall — which of course means that she has her Letterboxd Top 4 answers locked and loaded. One is “The Long Goodbye.” Another is “Cruel Intentions.”

That one-two punch is telling. “Sugar Baby,” her feature film debut as director and co-writer (with Bree Essrig, a sugar baby who drew on her own experiences for the script), is a wily erotic thriller that plays with audience expectations as much as it presents a refreshingly candid look at sex workers. Garroni wanted to craft a movie that, just like her favorites, would be specific while telling a broader story.

 ”One of the goals, I would say in the more grounded part of the film, was for sex workers to watch this film and go, ‘Oh, I’m not being talked down to. This feels relevant to my experience,” Garroni told IndieWire.

Of course, that honesty is only just the starting point. In “Sugar Baby,” Mary Beth Barrone’s Marie meets and negotiates with Jeff, a seemingly nice guy eager to pay her $30,000 to spend a week with him. Played by James Tupper with just the right mixture of breezy confidence and sleazy White Man Arrogance, he seems like a guy Marie can handle — until she can’t.

Garroni didn’t intend to write an erotic thriller when she first began pitching movies but that was the request she heard at every meeting. And besides, the genre is in her DNA.

 ”My father produced direct to video erotic thrillers in the early ’90s,” she said. “So I grew up with the reputation of, ‘Oh, Lauren’s father’s a pornographer.’ And I’d have to be like, ‘No, no, no. There’s a difference between hardcore and soft core!’ So this, in a way, has been an albatross I’ve been carrying my entire life.  My father jokingly loves to say, ‘This is your legacy, these movies!'”

‘Sugar Baby’Courtesy of Lauren Garroni

For “Sugar Baby,” Garroni embraced that legacy. “ Some of [my father’s films] are more beautiful than they deserve to be, because Wally Pfister, who went on to become Christopher Nolan’s DP, worked on these films,” she said. “And there was a shot in one where a girl is trapped in a jail cell that was built into someone’s home, and it was a very girlish bedroom. It only lasts for about 15 seconds in the film and Brie and I were like, ‘Oh, that could be an entire movie.'”

A similiar bedroom pops up around the midpoint of “Sugar Baby,” the first of a few different twists to a movie that could have been a straightforward erotic thriller, the kind two steps behind the audience. Instead, Garroni and Essrig repeatedly switch up the premise. That’s Garroni’s piholopshy on genre films in general.

“This is a conversation I had with Mary Beth because she was like, ‘You know, there shouldn’t be an [hint] that Jeff is evil until the moment that he turns,'” Garroni said. “And I had to tell her, ‘The audience knows he’s bad. It’s not if he’s gonna go bad. The question is when.’ Which is why I built in a second reveal that hopefully the audience does not see coming.”

Filmed over the course of just 18 days (most of them spent in the lavish home that turns into Marie’s prison, one you may recognize from Lifetime movies), the hardest aspect of “Sugar Baby” for Garroni is the hardest thing about most indie films: Getting the word out. Although 18 days was also a tough shoot.

 ”It truly is no time and no resources, or all of the resources and all of the time,” Garroni said. “There’s no other way. I was told by my producers not to say the budget because seemingly it looks more expensive than it is, but this is a sub million dollar film we shot in L.A. in 18 days. I’m sure other directors are like this: When you watch the film, you live with all of the mistakes, all the things you didn’t get to do that day.”

But more importantly, Garroni wants people to actually see the movie — and she has one more major selling point, if “erotic thriller” doesn’t quite do it for you.

 ”‘Sugar Baby, I’m happy to admit, can be told in under 90 minutes,” she said, laughing. “That is the correct timeline for this story.”

“Sugar Baby” is currently available on VOD.