In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema
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Adventures in adult cinema
GERRIE LIM
For P.H.
“Beware the naked concierge!”
Her body was a mirror that reflected back not only her feelings
about the world, but her feelings about herself.
Wei Hui, Marrying Buddha
Contents
FOREPLAY
PART ONE
Landing on Mars
Enter Drew McKenzie
The Weird Turn Pro
Plot? What Plot?
PART TWO
Damsels in Undress
Jammin’ with the Jennarator
The Ballad of Ava Vincent
Lust on the Orient Express
Foreign Affairs
Czeching in at the Hotel California
PART THREE
Naked Hollywood
Going, Going, Gonzo!
A Dream Called Janine
Contractual Obligations
Death and Taxes
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RECOMMENDED READING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY GERRIE LIM
INVISIBLE TRADE
INVISIBLE TRADE II
SINGAPORE REBEL
ABOUT MONSOON BOOKS
COPYRIGHT
Foreplay
“Porn stars have issues like Kleenex has tissues.” Annabel Chong said that to me one afternoon as we were having drinks on a balcony overlooking the pool at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, the very same hotel in Beverly Hills where, aptly, Julia Roberts played the naïve hooker and Richard Gere her suave client in their Hollywood hit movie Pretty Woman. (Not all porn stars were hookers, of course, though I knew some who were. Annabel wasn’t one of them.)
This book, which began in Los Angeles and ended in London, was initially built around that idea, the strange nexus of innocence and commerce reflected by the “personalities” that these girls projected, as part of their “celebrity branding.”
I was curious to explore the difference between the illusion and the reality. However, as time went by, the book morphed into something different, for which I am strangely indebted to the late Spalding Gray, whose monologue Swimming to Cambodia (about the filming of the Roland Joffé film The Killing Fields) first planted the seed. I first read it in July 2001, on board an Amtrak train from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, and it was then that the idea of my own extended first-person account of the adult film industry in America began to take shape.
I wanted the book to be both a memoir and a travelogue, in which I could communicate my perspectives on the adult film industry, a business colossus that once evoked nervous mirth but now arouses genuine curiosity in so many people, to the point where it has become a mainstream staple of pop culture today. At the end of 2005, the American adult film industry generated an unprecedented US$12.6 billion, in a year in which a record-high 13,588 hardcore titles were issued by the various production companies. Such numbers were surely countervailing forces against the conservative views of the George W. Bush administration.
This was suddenly the tenor of our times, wrought of the winds of change that reflected new realities. Not everyone has to like what the adult entertainment industry produces, and perhaps understandably so, but everyone has to now confront its obvious existence. Because Jenna Jameson had become a household name. And so I asked Jenna about what fame had done for her, and her views were quoted in Penthouse in her Pet of the Month layout. Because Asia Carrera was a genius at the stock market. And so I wrote a story about Asia, commissioned by and published in The Wall Street Journal. I found myself in the position of explaining the inner workings of a whole industry to a mainstream audience that, until recent years, had little or no access to such arcane knowledge.
I then felt compelled to chronicle that journey, a ten-year cycle of events inspired and motivated by an astute observation I had first encountered in Joan Didion’s The White Album, the very book that made me want to become a writer, in which she wrote: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. By the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
This, then, is a book of my actual experiences.
Gerrie Lim
Part One
Landing on Mars
Enter Drew McKenzie
Annabel Chong, over dinner one night, pointed out to me the fact that we were the only two people from Singapore involved in the adult film industry.
We ate out on a wooden deck with a panoramic view of Benedict Canyon, a setting so lush that we could’ve been in Tuscany but for the howling coyotes reminding us that we were still in Los Angeles. Perhaps it was the crisp autumn air, a nice if nippy chill we’d never get back home, but Annabel thought her observation really funny. From a country of four million people, there were just the two of us. From a country where porn is illegal, no less, which made us an even rarer pair. Double happiness. Or double trouble.
We laughed about this, as we watched the sporadic traffic below us taking those famous bends on Mulholland Drive. Maybe that car whizzing by was Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle. Or maybe it was nobody. There were lots of nobodies in this town, enroute to becoming somebodies. A lot of them were aspiring actresses, some who transitioned from struggling in mainstream Hollywood to become porn stars. Annabel was one of them, but she now preferred to be known by her real name, Grace Quek, because she was about to retire from the business. She was tired of being the girl from Singapore—the tiny city-state in Southeast Asia—who had become a celebrity, literally overnight, thanks to one infamous gangbang.
The one significant difference between us, of course, is that I’ve neither disrobed in front of the camera nor participated in a gangbang. However, that’s only because I’m always on the other side of the camera, as the ersatz scribe and enthusiastic chronicler of lust, the not-so-innocent bystander and, for better or for worse (usually worse), the only writer from Southeast Asia to land on Mars.
The red planet, figuratively speaking, happens to be the San Fernando Valley, annexed by Los Angeles in 1915 and still the epicenter of that ongoing earthquake called American porn. “Mars ain’t no place to raise a kid,” to quote Elton John from his song “Rocket Man.” An anonymous urban sprawl north of Los Angeles, the Valley (as it is more popularly known, thanks to Moon Unit Zappa’s hit song “Valley Girl”) comprises 220 square miles of mostly residential homes, apartments and ugly strip malls. The physical area is about the same size as Singapore.
I have long harbored a personal theory as to why the San Fernando Valley is porn’s Ground Zero. The sheer sameness of the place, with all the solidly middle-class houses with their identical meticulously mowed lawns and ultra-clean residential streets, offers the perfect anonymity for anyone wanting to shoot porn. Even AVN (Adult Video News, the trade journal of the industry) is headquartered here, on a small side street in quiet, suburban Chatsworth. A few blocks away, every few minutes or so, some director is calling “Cut” as a couple disengages after having rutted furiously. Condoms get discarded, vibrators stop buzzing, and baby wipes go around to dry off the nether regions, all in a day’s work.
Sure, some sex-starved nosy neighbor might call the police if they peek over the hedge and spy naked people next door, but it really doesn’t happen often. Everything is done with a modicum of secrecy. Both cast and crew are told to park their cars a discreet distance away from the house. But funny things do happen, like the time two girls, Gwen Summers and Jessica Drake, attracted police to the house because a neighbor had alerted them to screams. When the
cops arrived, they discovered that it was Gwen who’d been screaming, in ecstasy.
“It was a movie for Legend Video, called Sex Acts,” Jessica told me. “I was dressed like a fairy godmother and Gwen was a princess, and I was fucking her with a strap-on so hard that the police showed up. They thought it was domestic violence. So I’m walking around the set wearing a strap-on and we’re taking a break and I didn’t know the police were there yet. And I’m walking around pretending like I’m jacking off, and I ran right into the cops. I went, ‘Holy shit!’ I’m standing there naked wearing a strap-on!
“They said, ‘We got a call for domestic violence and there has been some screaming and yelling.’ And I pointed to Gwen and said, ‘It’s her! It’s all her fault!’ The cops were laughing, because I’m sure it’s happened to them before, and they said, ‘We’re just going to go ahead and take a look around the premises, so that we can say we searched everything.’”
“I am a sex worker,” Jessica cheerfully declared to me, having starred in such porn-fan favorites as Blonde Brigade, High Infidelity, Trick Baby, Trailer Trash Nurses (and, let’s not forget, the sequel Trailer Trash Nurses 2), and the best-selling adult DVD of all time, the Jenna Jameson scorcher Dream Quest. “I got into this business to do that, so people could see me have sex on camera, for the attention. I want it. Everybody look at me! Me, me, me! And I like the fact that I inspire people. I realize that I provide a fantasy and I’m fine with that. I want to be everybody’s fantasy.”
We writers, ever on the lookout for the soundbite, love this kind of stuff. So many of us have penned pieces about porn, even literary lions like Martin Amis, and serious magazines like The Economist (“Branded Flesh,” read its headline in the issue of August 14, 1999, a piece about porn’s biggest studio, Vivid Video). The modern world had accommodated the preferences of those with non-vanilla sexual tastes—a trickle-down victory for the 60s counterculture and the 70s feminist movement. Libertarian democracy is about having freedom of choice and its proponents, people like me, were no longer shunned but now made to feel privileged. People I met at dinner parties would raise an eyebrow but also pepper me with questions galore. “Is there really such a thing as a fluffer?”, “You actually had lunch with Asia Carrera at her house?”, “Have you ever met Tera Patrick?” I have also lost count of the guys who beg for knowledge of their favorite stars from the past: porn queens like Kristara Barrington, Tori Welles, Rachel Ryan, and Tiffany Mynx. “So did you test-drive her?” a woman asked me with a knowing wink, when she found out that I knew her favorite porn star.
With such smartass joie de vivre was this book written, covering a ten-year cycle from 1995 (when I started out working for Spice, the adult cable channel) to my most recent journalistic outpost (as International Correspondent for AVN Online, the journal of the online adult business). The pinnacle of that decade was, undoubtedly, the four years I wrote the “Cinema Blue” column for Penthouse Variations, from the issues of October 1999 to that of April 2002, the very last one containing what many would surely consider my all-time professional highlight: my very own interview with queen bee Jenna Jameson herself. In such top-tier fashion did I leave Bob Guccione’s then-ailing empire, with no small whimper but a nice, if non-coital, bodacious bang.
Two years later, Jenna published her autobiography, the coyly titled How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, which became a New York Times bestseller, the closest to mainstream success that anyone in the industry has attained. Good for her, I thought. “I made it one of my missions to get this industry accepted by the public,” she told me. “And I think I have been pretty successful in doing that, especially in getting it accepted by women. They see my interviews and go, ‘Wow, she’s a real person! She’s like me. She has a personality like me. And she has no inhibitions when it comes to her sexuality.’ I think that has an impact on the way some women go about their sex lives.” This quote was also used in the text accompanying Jenna’s Penthouse Pet of the Month centerfold layout in 2004 (Penthouse owns the copyright to everything written by all its writers, hence they could use it without even notifying me; I never even knew about this till I saw the magazine itself, but I felt proud to be credited.)
That single utterance by Jenna, in my opinion, summarized the cult of the porn star in all its postmodern glory. Never underestimate the vicarious pleasure compelled by the image of the sexually available woman. How else could one explain why porn in America has become such a massive business?
In 1998 I began researching the stats and discovered that a whopping 686 million adult videos were rented in the United States. By 2001, out of US$63 billion earned in video rentals, US$23 billion came from adult films. Whenever the American economy seemed to careen upon uncertainty, porn (both online and offline) seemed the only business growth area, with no end in sight. Indeed, at the time of writing, the American adult entertainment industry is at its strongest ever, having generated US$12.6 billion in the year 2005 alone. Of this, US$4.3 billion (or thirty-four percent) came from video sales and rentals and another US$2.5 billion (or twenty percent) came from adult Internet sales.
“Because the majority of companies are privately held, hard numbers are difficult to ascertain,” noted Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Publications. “But when you add up all the segments, from videos and magazines to strip clubs and Internet, a number that approaches US$13 billion seems logical.” The total number of hardcore titles released in 2005 was a record 13,588 (including new releases, features, and that ever-reliable money-spinner, those two- to four-hour “greatest hits” compilations). There were 957 million rentals of adult DVDs and VHS tapes in 2005, and the wholesale value of these sold throughout the year had topped the one-billion-dollar mark. (The study was culled from combined research done by AVN, Forbes, the New York Times, Kagan Research, Juniper Research, and an influential pro-porn advocacy group, the Free Speech Coalition.)
And some of this was the indirect result of people like me.
Why? Because I was commissioned by my editors to provide readers with provocative prose, since I was in the privileged position of getting to meet the lovely Penthouse Pets on their movie sets. “Did you ever have any formative moments when you realized that you were born to be a sex goddess? Were you always sexually exhibitionistic?” I asked the sultry brunette Devinn Lane, Penthouse Pet of the Month for October 1999 and contract girl since January 2000 with Wicked Pictures. Devinn had starred in teasingly titled films like Bordello Blues and Working Girl and would shortly go on to create and host the Playboy TV hit reality series 7 Lives Xposed. (A holdover from the old Hollywood studio system, “contract girls” get paid massive amounts of money to work exclusively for a single company, for whom they are required to star in a set number of films each year.)
“I can remember,” Devinn purred, “being very young and being excited by the fact that boys were interested in me, that they were watching me, that they would make comments about how my breasts bounced up and down whenever I walked down the hallway to my locker. There was a kid who would pull my skirt down in the middle of the quad at school, and it really wasn’t that embarrassing to me. Those are the things you don’t understand until you get older and you realize you are an exhibitionist. I actually enjoyed the fact that everybody saw that.”
That sounded mildly tittilating, to be sure, but what was really interesting about that interview was that it could be seen in the full glory of widescreen DVD. Yes, sweet young Devinn was cheerfully topless, her 36D breasts bouncing away happily as she gleefully chatted with me on a couch backstage, making for my only appearance thus far in an adult DVD. (The viewer need only click on “Devinn Lane Interview” in the extra features section of her film Jack and Jill, produced in 2001 by Wicked Pictures.) Naturally, I can be seen keeping my composure throughout.
However, as often happened, the old excitement started to wane for young Devinn, and on November 14, 2005, she officially announced that she was parting ways with Wicked Pictures, her onscreen
home for the past six years. Towards the later part of her contract, which expired in July 2005, she had moved to the other side of the camera and had directed and produced twenty-five films, including Pillow Talk, Beautiful Nasty, a three-part series called Road Trixx, and a talk-show series called The Devinn Lane Show, the latter in mock tribute to David Letterman—complete with zany “Top 6 or 9” lists (“Top 9 Reasons Why An Adult Film Star Should be President”) and interview segments where her fellow porn star “guests” giggled away while she chatted with them and showed clips from their latest films (usually, and conveniently, those from Wicked Pictures). Truly, to see a gorgeous blond lass beaming ever so proudly following a ten-minute clip of her performing virtuoso oral and then vaginal sex, was something Letterman could never even dream of having on his show. Writing about adult film was a newfound challenge in my first forays, as I found myself professionally examining the genre. The very first “Cinema Blue” column, which I wrote in the spring of 1999, was a piece of live reportage—my first-person “fly on the wall” view of a porn shoot. The film was entitled, aptly, Flesh for Fantasy, and the venue was the Malibu beach house of the director, Nic Cramer. It featured a winsome threesome—Rebecca Lord, Linda Thoren, and Keri Windsor—three girls, sucking tit and licking clit, with colored vibrators and rubber toys to boot. My prose was naturally evocative of such nuances:
Linda sat on Rebecca’s bare thighs and promptly impaled herself with the rubber member. The camera followed it disappearing into her vagina … After Linda cried out with one orgasm after another, it was time for another break. “Some producers here in L.A. call me Linda Decibel,” she told me, sipping cold water from a tall glass. “It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m actually very shy, but when I’m naked in front of a camera, it’s totally different. I don’t know what comes over me. I just become this sexual being, an exhibitionist, a complete slut. I really like it when guys get to see a close-up of my pussy.”