SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — The rainy season has passed, and the lush hills along the west central coast are dazzling in the sunlight while the blue ocean shimmers overhead. From my home in Echo Park, it’s a straight drive up the 101 Freeway, with just one turn: Madonna Road, the exit for the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo.
The famously kitschy, pink-hued motel with themed rooms is where we’re staying to meet filmmaker-artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, who have booked the Swiss Chalet Room. I’m traveling with my friend Philo, who once lived next door to them in San Francisco. A few months earlier, Sprinkle and Stephens were back at the Madonna Inn, clowning around in the Romance Room while filming for artist Samantha Nye’s video, “Web of Love,” a playful lesbian take on the 1966 Scopitone film of the same name, included in her art installation at the Cuesta College art gallery.
Now everyone has returned for Sprinkle and Stephens’s film screening and lecture at the campus, which overlaps with Nye’s exhibition and feels like a reunion. The duo — Sprinkle, a former sex worker who became a performance artist, and Stephens, an art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz — are presenting their latest film, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), the final installment in their documentary trilogy. It follows Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure (2019), each centered on environmental damage, from mountaintop removal to water sustainability and, now, fire.
After checking in — Philo chooses the Swiss Rock Room, one of the six cave-themed rooms, while I take the Sir Walter Raleigh Room — we make a quick stop at the hotel’s wonderful pool before heading to campus. In the lobby, the jeweled Sprinkle appears, a striking presence with long red hair and a hat that adds at least six inches to her height, draped in black lace, silk, and fringe. Stephens follows close behind, wearing a cowboy shirt and boots, her short-cropped hair and glasses giving her a more understated look.
Inside the auditorium, Sprinkle and Stephens begin by tracing their backgrounds. They met in 1991 after independent careers — Stephens as a graduate student making performance art videos, Sprinkle after an early start in the sex industry. “Annie was such a sexpot!” Stephens said. They became lovers in 2002 and are now married. Their current work is rooted in ecosexuality, a movement they launched in the 2000s that combines environmentalism with sensuality in an effort to challenge extractive attitudes toward nature and respond to human-caused climate change.
Playing with Fire centers on the Northern California fires of 2020, which forced more than 70,000 residents to evacuate. The blazes began in the Santa Cruz Mountains and affected nearby communities including Boulder Creek, where Sprinkle and Stephens lived. The film confronts the devastation of losing homes and neighborhoods, but it also turns tragedy toward comedy and absurdity: eco-friendly texting goats graze on the hillsides, Albert the local free-roaming white peacock occasionally narrates, and animated sequences place Sprinkle and Stephens beside an erupting volcano.
There is even an “ecosex scene” shot in slow motion with porn music, along with a visit to a fire fetishist whose torches are passed perilously close to the filmmakers’ nude bodies and sometimes touch their skin. Later, when I asked whether it hurt, Stephens said, “It felt so amazing, but do not try it at home!” The humor and storytelling make the film surprisingly joyful despite its unsettling subject matter, and its humane approach opens up space for understanding, acceptance, and hope rather than fear.
Fire appears in all its contradiction, both destructive and sacred. Ex-con firefighters are interviewed; a performance artist sets themselves on fire; and scenes of fire-worship rituals recur throughout the documentary. In one especially moving moment, Sprinkle asks her dying mother where she wants her ashes scattered, and her mother replies, “Surprise me.” We then see a cardboard box of her deceased mother — presumably — bound for the cremation chamber, engulfed in flames as the door slowly shuts.
Ultimately, Sprinkle and Stephens come to terms with fire in the way ecosexuality encourages: through respect for the Earth, an erotic relationship to it, and perhaps even marriage to it. In ceremony and celebration, they say “We do” to fire. After the screening, we visit Nye’s Web of Love exhibition, where deep red plush carpeting, low lighting, four magenta heart-shaped jacuzzies, and the three-wall projection create a vivid setting for the video, in which Sprinkle lip-syncs while Stephens plays her sexed-up sidekick.
The two ham it up in a sudsy hot tub, champagne spilling as Sprinkle bounces her bosom on Stephens’s head, clearly reveling in their humor and playfulness, a defining part of their work. “I made my first porn film at 18 years old. And now, at 71, I’m so proud to be still acting slutty!” Sprinkle told me. Driving back down the coast to Los Angeles, the hills still glowed, though they seemed different to me now. Even the ocean appeared less dazzling, and I understood more clearly why Playing with Fire and the pair’s artistic commitment matter so much. They could be painting landscapes, but instead, as they reminded me, “We are activists.”
Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), directed by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, is screening around the world through at least December 21.
