The Place of Dead Roads

One night in January 2001, Larry Wachowski, co-director of the blockbuster Matrix movies, walked into a dark club in West Hollywood, where the rules of identity easily blurred, just like in his films. The Dungeon served the devoted BDSM -- bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism -- community in Los Angeles. It was a place where power dynamics between two different types of people were regularly played out: eager submissives, or slaves, and the dominatrixes who, for an hour or for a night, took complete charge of their minds and bodies, using ropes, whips, chains, knives and needles. Wachowski fell into the former category.

One of the people Wachowski met that night was among L.A.'s highest-profile dominatrixes, a tall, imposing blonde with a traffic-stopping figure who used the nom de kink Ilsa Strix.

In the weeks following their first encounter, Larry Wachowski returned to the Dungeon to see Mistress Strix. Boundaries fell swiftly, stunning the Los Angeles bondage community, which prides itself on the fact that mistresses keep their submissives at arm's length. The relationship between Larry and Ilsa, both in their thirties, would eventually destroy two marriages and possibly alter the creative course of one of the most influential movie trilogies of the past quarter-century, co-created with his brother, Andy: the original Matrix, released in 1999, and its two inferior sequels, which both hit theaters, six months apart, in 2003...

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