At Harvard it’s the Widener Library, at Princeton it’s room ten at McCosh Hall, and at Yale it’s the stacks in Sterling Memorial Library. Every Ivy League school comes with its most popular sex spot, and any Yalie will tell you about the prurient appeal of “the stacks”—15 floors of silent, dark, rarely trafficked bookshelves, lined by carrels with doors of frosted glass. Entranced by the mythology of the stacks—and by their own self-mythology—a group of students began production in December on a pornographic film titled (what else?) The StaXXX. They plan to wrap postproduction by April and screen the film during an alumni weekend that celebrates the university’s tercentennial, on April 19-21, to which President George W. Bush (class of ’68) has been invited and which former president George Bush (class of ’48) is expected to attend. They say they have already begun planning a sequel, called Dubya: “a quasi-fictionalized chronicle of [young] George’s collegiate sexual exploits.”

Ever since an article on The StaXXX broke in The New York Times in late January, the filmmakers have been besieged by media requests, ranging, they say, from The New Yorker to Hustler. Three Hollywood agencies have come knocking, and the group recently decided to let CAA represent their story. More than 80 e-mails a day arrive from distributors wanting to sell the film and from investors seeking to help with the financing. The feeding frenzy has led some to speculate that fame was the students’ original motive, and the fact that there is currently no usable footage has only contributed to public skepticism. Yet four people say they watched a scene being shot, two actors are readying to perform the next one, and the filmmakers showed me a written treatment—insisting the film is not only for real but will come to fruition.

The visionaries behind The StaXXX are four strapping, articulate, white senior men who agreed to meet me in front of Sterling Memorial Library one mild winter evening. I arrived first, sat on a ledge near the entrance, and lit a smoke. After a few minutes, a tall, towheaded guy came out of the shadows and introduced himself. Over the next ten minutes, the others materialized, coming from different directions, seeming at once shy and too cool for school—their hands shaking as they reached out to bum cigarettes.

These would-be auteurs insisted on being identified only by their porn pseudonyms for this article. “Zeke ‘Silver’ Cohen” is the group’s earnest businessman, “Dallas Everhard” the arty dreamer, “Baby Gristle” the unofficial bad cop, and “Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp” the charismatic hipster. They say the idea for the film grew out of a group they run, called Porn n’ Chicken, that meets weekly in various dorm rooms to eat chicken, drink beer, and watch pornography. (Students at the University of Pennsylvania, picking up on the recent media flurry, are said to be forming “Porn n’ Kosher Chicken.”) Cohen says Porn n’ Chicken began in 1996, when the Graduate Employees & Students Organization (GESO) was striking for better wages. “They started meeting to discuss strike issues and began ordering chicken from Popeyes, drinking Miller High Life—‘the champagne of beers’—and watching porn,” he says. “Then they realized they could just eat the chicken and watch the porn.”