by Paul Heald
“I didn’t know how to thank you for helping me, so I brought this paddle for you to hang on your wall, or burn, or use as a prop in your next movie. Whatever’s most appropriate.” Stanley shrugged and handed over the paddle. “I imagine you hate these toys as much as I do.”
“Boy,” the Californian grimaced as he hoisted the faux cricket bat, “talk about some ugly memories.” He laid it down on the coffee table and turned back to his friend. “At least we were both smart enough to get out of that shithole.”
He squeezed Stanley’s shoulder and led him to a brown leather couch that divided the room in half. It was a simple office, but tastefully decorated with modern art and a silk rug with a Mondrian pattern. The walls were covered with autographed head shots of dozens of woman whom he assumed must be actresses at the studio. He did not recognize anyone except for the woman whose picture was prominently centered behind the producer’s polished mahogany desk, the same stunner who had stormed out of the office minutes before.
Johansson sat down and explained that the classy headshots were designed to send the message that Eden was a respectable business. He disparaged other studios whose décor consisted of “boobs hanging out all over the place.”
The director was a little over six feet tall, lean and fit, with dark hair and a healthy tan. The subtle wrinkles on his face spoke of smiles and sun rather than stress. His bright blue eyes fairly sparkled as he asked Stanley whether he was married or had any children. He seemed genuinely interested in the professor’s home life and expressed regret at his own failure to find the right woman and start a family. Stanley was surprised how little he had changed since college. He seemed no different from the serious young man who was so out of place at raucous frat parties. Stanley took another look around the office. It really did look like any other place of business. Take down the celebrity glossies and the volumes of Kierkegaard and Saint Augustine on the bookshelves and it could have belonged to a partner in a law firm. Johansson did not seem unhinged, but that just deepened the mystery of what he was doing in Van Nuys.
The director stood up and retrieved a sheaf of papers from his desk. “Your email was really helpful,” he said as he tapped a paper in his hand and got down to business. “I’ve set up interviews with about twenty actresses from four different studios, including mine. Since you want to cover the mainstream market, I’ve contacted Boudoir Films, Chimera Productions, and Janus Studios, in addition to Eden. Between us, we’ve probably got about sixty percent of the mainstream market.”
This was exactly what Stanley wanted to hear. He did not want to waste his time talking with fly-by-night outfits with a video camera and just enough money to spend on a hooker. The focus of the book was on mainstream laborers, and he was no more interested in amateur porn than he had cared about amateur lumberjacks cutting down trees in their back yard or running a part-time limb removal service.
He listened with increasing excitement as Johansson explained how he had played to the vanity of his rivals by telling them they were worthy of academic study. The prospect of appearing in a scholarly book had flattered even the most hard-nosed producer. The manipulation had been clever, and Stanley was reminded that Don’s violent outburst at the frat house years ago had been an anomaly and that he had usually been able to get his way through a mixture of diplomacy, horse trading, subtle threats, and outright deception.
Stanley was handed a file folder that contained a sheet of names, contact information, proposed interview times, and some basic financial information about the industry. He flipped through the material and his jaw dropped when he saw the gross profit figures. Maybe the conversion from seminarian to porn mogul was all about the money. He would not be the first to be seduced by wealth, even though greed had not been part of his old persona. He was dying to know what made the man tick. What sort of mental gymnastics did it take to reconcile the nice guy persona with the porn guy persona?
“Would you mind me asking how you got into the business in the first place? The last I remember, you were headed off to seminary.” Stanley put the papers down and continued, “What happened? I know Episcopalians are more liberal than Baptists, but . . .”
“It was pretty much an accident.” Johansson leaned forward on the couch as he explained, elbows resting on the knees of his gray wool slacks. “I went to seminary and spent two years there, but I felt something was missing. The summer after my second year, I was at home in LA doing some volunteer work and thinking over my vocation, when I met a former high school classmate who needed some help scaring off an abusive boyfriend.
“Well, it turns out she was a small-time porn star and her ‘boyfriend’ was her agent, a real shithead who had promised someone that she was going to do some oral-anal stuff in a movie that she didn’t want to do. He was threatening her and generally being a jerk, so I had a little talk with him.” He grinned and Stanley remembered how he had dealt with the would-be rapists at Alpha Omicron.
“As you can imagine, I tried to counsel her and get her out of the business, but she wasn’t interested in my efforts at playing social worker. She was making good money and had no skills that could earn her nearly as much as making videos. Talking to her was like slamming my head against a concrete pillar. I couldn’t convince her that she was doing anything wrong.” Stanley nodded and tried to imagine what he would have done in Don’s place.
“Anyway, we stayed friends and had drinks once in a while. As you can imagine, hearing her talk about her job was slightly more interesting than listening to other people’s grad school stories.” Don got up from the sofa and took a bottle of Pellegrino from a small refrigerator hidden in his credenza. “I became fascinated with the business.”
“And so you started your own porn studio?” Stanley asked skeptically.
“Not hardly,” Don laughed. “All I could see was rank exploitation, but I came to realize that if my friend wanted to make her living being filmed having sex, then she should be paid a wage commensurate with the risks that are involved.”
“I see,” he nodded slowly. “So you became her new agent.”
“Exactly,” he acknowledged the perceptiveness with a nod of his head. “At first I took no money at all; I didn’t want to feel like a pimp. But I got good at dealing with the studios, and pretty soon her friends were asking me to represent them. I was not only getting people a decent salary, but also negotiating things like condom use. I felt like I was making a difference, so by the time summer ended, I decided to delay my studies. I started taking a small percentage and moved out of my parents’ house.”
Stanley did not doubt the story, but it was a big leap from getting young actresses more leverage with exploitative studios to becoming one of the exploiters. “But how do you go from there to making films and running your own business?”
Johansson took off his glasses and polished them slowly. When he put them back on he looked intently at his friend. “This only makes sense if you believe a single crucial fact: if Eden Studio did not exist, every single woman working for me would be working for someone else. That means that if I have the safest studio, the most comfortable studio, the best paying studio, and the studio that treats these women with the most respect, then I’m making a positive contribution.” He finished his water and screwed the cap on the empty bottle. “And remember, I’m also putting tremendous pressure on the competition. I’ve already put several studios out of business, and others are having to adopt our standards, like requiring condom use, in order to stay competitive. Until society evolves, and its need for porn fades, I’m in the business of making the world a marginally better place. That’s all.”
Stanley nodded. The story sounded horribly logical. Angela would surely have some devastating comments to make but his professional instinct was not to argue, just keep his object of study talking.
“You mentioned your parents,” Stanley shifted in his seat and crossed his legs. “What do they think of all this?”
“They haven’t spoken to me
since.” He gestured with his water. “That’s the worst part of all this. I can’t get them to see it’s a ministry like any other.”
“A ministry?” Stanley was taken aback. “Uh, I just assumed that you had some sort of religious crisis.”
“Oh no! I still go to Saint James’ every Sunday.” He gave a wry smile. “They’re not about to put me on the vestry, but I’m tolerated well enough.”
“But how do you reconcile your job and your church? I mean . . .” He had not been to church since he was a child, so he struggled to find the right reference point. “ . . . what about Sodom and Gomorrah and all that stuff?”
Don nodded and replied confidently, eager to tell a favorite story. “The most important moment in my spiritual life occurred during my first semester in seminary when we were studying Latin.” He paused. “Do you know what the word ‘religion’ literally means?”
“I don’t know . . . to redo something?”
“Exactly. Literally it means to retie. The ‘lig’ in ‘religion’ is the same root as ‘ligature,’ a knot.”
Or as in lien, Stanley thought, like the legal tie that the bank had on his house.
“In its original sense, the word refers to the attempt to retie oneself to God, to narrow the gap that opened when Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden.” He paused. “True religion is the act of becoming closer to God.”
“Okay, so religions are all attempts to reconnect with God,” Stanley pushed him. “Sounds good, but how does that get you to On Golden Blonde?”
The producer laughed but hung tightly on to his train of thought, “In its original sense, the word religion indicated no necessary association with any kind of organized sectarian activity. Meditation could be religion, helping your neighbor could be religion, even smelling a flower or taking a nap could be a religious act if it brought you closer to God.” His hands indicated distance with a graceful eloquence. “And if anything that brings me closer to God is religious, then anything that moves me further away is sinful. That’s the compelling part about this understanding of religion; it provides a very nice definition for sin. Sinful activity cannot be captured in some sort of laundry list of condemned acts. Rather, every act must be scrutinized in terms of how it affects our relationship with God.”
Stanley nodded and wondered what his third grade Sunday school teacher would have thought. She had been awfully big on the Ten Commandments. But now he thought he understood where the lesson was headed. Don needed justification for his lucrative participation in the sin business. “So that’s how you deal with your sin!”
“My sin?”
“Uh, yeah. You know, making all these movies.” The director smiled graciously, completely at ease with the accusation. “I don’t mean to be judgmental,” Stanley backpedaled. “In fact, I never think of things in terms of evil or sin.”
“Maybe you should!” Don replied emphatically. “You’ve struck right at the heart of the matter. Is what I do sinful? It’s a serious question. I think that sometimes making a pornographic movie is a sinful act, and sometimes it’s not. It depends very much on who is participating and how they’re treated.”
Don went to his desk and took out a picture of a young blonde woman who looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. She stood next to a backyard swimming pool and filled out her bikini extravagantly. “This young lady came here to interview for a part last week. She was very attractive and very eager to do a film, but when I sat down to talk with her, it came out that she had just been cheated on by her boyfriend and was looking for revenge.”
“That seems a bit extreme.”
“It is! You’d be amazed by the people I meet.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, my guess was that being a porn star would end up being a humiliating and degrading experience for her. A sinful experience, in other words, so I turned her down. I see too many real exhibitionists to take a chance on someone like her.” He smiled. “I did use her story as the plot for another movie, though.”
“So, sometimes making porn is sinful, and sometimes it’s not.”
“In a nutshell.”
“But what about the audience?” Angela was convinced that the biggest problem with porn was its effect on its viewers. Something about the former seminarian’s passion and conviction made Stanley want to engage him on his own terms, to test the superficial logic of his rhetoric. “What if the videos push their viewers further from God? Wouldn’t the movies be sinful?”
Don nodded his head. “Things in and of themselves aren’t sinful, but I get your point. What if porn were an ultra-hazardous material like heroin or nuclear weapons?”
“Isn’t porn hazardous to the audience?”
“If I were convinced of that, I’d quit. But I’ve seen no evidence that sexual fantasy drives people away from God. Our sexuality, after all, is a gift from God. It can certainly be misused, like in violent pornography, but I don’t think my films have a negative effect on their viewers. In fact, the fantasies I sell are pretty healthy.” He stood up and shrugged. “But you can judge that for yourself.”
The professor had no immediate response. He was a comparativist by nature. His study would not care whether porn stars used too many drugs, but only whether they used significantly more than lumber jacks and pest control workers. Who was more soulless, the plodding academic, or his old house mate, the passionate porn czar? He realized with a start that he was more of a relativist than the pornographer, who at least purported to have a single reference point against which to weigh the value of his occupation.
IV.
PORNO OR PARISH
After a quick lunch at an undistinguished Mexican restaurant, the moviemaker and the professor went to meet three of the producers who had agreed to lend their employees to the study. Don explained his plan as they drove his BMW convertible around Van Nuys and Canoga Park. Stanley stuck his arm out of the car and let the cool breeze prop it up like a wing in a wind tunnel. Nary a touch of smog marred the bright blue sky. The Illinois winter had been a harsh one, and when spring had finally arrived, a freak ice storm and high winds had scoured the landscape of its initial burst of color. For someone who had crunched broken daffodils underfoot only a few weeks earlier, the glow of southern California was ethereal.
The studio owner at his side shone in a different way. Don Johansson was a walking advertisement for the joy of guilt-free living. Although Stanley had escaped much of the guilt laid naturally upon children in the Midwest by their Protestant—or Catholic—or Jewish parents, he still hesitated to live too far outside convention. He thought back to the Eden website. It would have been easy to click a button and satisfy his curiosity, but he had not seriously considered it, and not just because some university computer overlord might be monitoring him. On the other hand, Johansson had faced down convention with reason, or what appeared to be reason, and made the leap all the way from the condemnation of porn to its production with a pious wink. Right or wrong, Stanley was envious of his friend’s ability to reconsider basic assumptions and the course of his life.
As Johansson pulled into the weed-choked parking lot of Boudoir Productions, he admitted that he had engaged in a bit of social engineering with the schedule of women he had arranged for Stanley to interview. The first several were veterans who could give him valuable background on the industry. Many actresses were not so thoughtful, so he had front loaded the most interesting people and put the “bubble-headed valley girls” at the end of the process. For added balance, he had included a former starlet who was at present an anti-porn activist. The director seemed to instinctively understand that a skewed sample would taint the sociologist’s research.
In the context of his broader research, the question of why anyone ended up in the porn business was not that important, but Stanley could not help wondering what he would discover. Usually, people just fell into their jobs through chance and a wide variety of external circumstances. No one dreams his way through high school hoping to spray poison on termites, or
cut down trees. But such pursuits do not require overcoming personal sexual inhibitions and ignoring society’s judgments. Could one clear those hurdles by happenstance?
He imagined a group of Swedes or Danes raised on a commune where free love and shared partners were the norm. Someone raised wholly without engrained inhibitions could probably just stumble into a career having sex on camera. On the other hand, how many people fit that unique bill, especially in the U.S.? Of course, some one could be raised traditionally, but lack inhibition due to some sort of anti-social tendencies. He had long suspected that people labeled nymphomaniacs were not suffering from some strange endocrine condition, but were rather non-violent sociopaths. Angela had another theory, insisting porn was not about nymphomania, but coercion. The statistics he had seen on sex slavery were certainly sickening, but he was not going undercover in Eastern Europe. He was studying large scale commercial films in southern California, where sex workers had agents, filled out job applications, and interviewed for roles.
In fact, he had studied something like slavery already. For a paper on illegal immigration, he had interviewed workers whose families were held hostage overseas until outrageous fees were paid for transport to the United States. His present research, however, was focused on people who at least believed themselves to be working under their own free will. None of the questions in his interview protocol would make sense if asked to a hostage. So, he found himself in Los Angeles, looking at a select group of actors, still wondering exactly how anyone other than hippies or nymphos ended up in the porn business.
Before the formal interviews began, Don wanted to introduce the researcher to the studio heads who had agreed to allow access to their personnel. He explained they were a little suspicious and just needed to be assured that Stanley had no axe to grind.
The two men slipped into a waiting room where a pretty blond receptionist told them that Mr. Mulkahey, head of Boudoir Studios, would be with them in a moment. The room was clean, but not as well furnished as the Eden Studio reception area. The secretary’s desk was metal, and hundreds of boxed and unboxed DVD’s lay stacked in a corner. Sexy movie posters lined the walls, but no breasts were completely hanging out, as Don had implied.