Of course, Ms Angel hasn't always been on a first-name basis with industry
kingpins like Mr. Flynt. Before moving to Brooklyn in 2003, her porn career
began at Rutgers University (she graduated with a B.A. in English literature),
when one of her college roommates-cinematically named Mitch Fontaine-bought a
digital camera and started snapping photos of Ms Angel, sans vêtements. "There
was like 10 people living there-you know, the kind of house where you'd wake up
one day and somebody was living on the couch or sleeping in the bathtub," she
said. "I was working out of my laptop that was buried under a heap of clothes,
but it wasn't much of an office, it was more of a hobby .. I wasn't really a
sexual person. I was really kind of shy, and I was somewhat of a political
activist in college. I wasn't going down this road at all."
That road apparently took a hairpin turn, because her platonic partnership with
Mr. Fontaine wound up carrying the pair deep into a realm of hard-core
pornography at break-neck speed. Mr. Fontaine, who declined to be interviewed
for this article, has remained Ms Angel's confidant and business partner,
though he doesn't star in any of the filMs "In the beginning, we were like,
'This isn't porn, it's art'-which is really stupid," Ms Angel admitted. "And
then I had met someone who offered me a pass to go to the big AVN [Adult Video
News] convention in Vegas [in 2005]-it was a porn expo where every company had
their booths and all these porn girls are signing stuff," she said. "I was
looking around, and I kind of liked it-I thought it was pretty fuckin' cool!"
Before her flight back to New York had landed, Ms Angel said, she knew that the
porn industry was something she wanted to be involved in for the rest of her
life.
In the last three years Ms Angel's Burning Angel has become the crown jewel in
a rapidly expanding genre of adult entertainment known as alt-porn. In essence,
alternative pornography is any erotica that strays from the traditional tenets
of mainstream smut. But nowadays, alt-porn is usually used to describe explicit
material that features a set of heretofore-unorthodox elements like tattoos,
piercings, punk-rock music, "imperfect" body types and dyed hair. And while the
seeds of today's alt-porn movement were planted in the early 90's by a few
offbeat magazines and underground Web sites, its fan base and scope remained
largely underground until 2005-the same year Ms Angel was drafted by Hustler.
John d'Addario, who operates Gawker Media's popular porn/sex blog Fleshbot.com,
has observed Ms Angel's sudden rise from a professional perch. On the phone
from New Orleans, Mr. d'Addario described meeting the petite, tattooed
Brooklynite at the 2005 AVN Expo, when she was still basically unknown. "What
first struck me about Joanna was that she was very bright, and I got the sense
that she was in control of her own career; she had a very defined vision of
what she wanted Burning Angel to be," he said.
What that is, it turns out, is a compendium of hard-core videos, music features
and photo books of punk-rock girls in various stages of undress and
provocation. Burning Angel is a subscription site-an undisclosed number of
members pay $12 dollars a month for access, and the site currently boasts 1.5
million hits a day. While the company wouldn't disclose subscriber information,
Ms Angel did say that a relatively large percentage of Burning Angel's members
are female. The company has also put out a number of gonzo films-the Cum on My
Tattoo trilogy, starring Ms Angel, has been particularly popular-and currently
has four full-time employees. The site is updated three times a week, but the
frequency of production is scattered, with the number of shoots varying from
month to month.
Ms Angel's preferences have developed in sharp relief to the plasticity of the
female stars she met at the AVN Expo. In their early work, Ms Angel and Mr.
Fontaine featured the kinds of performers normally snubbed by companies like
Hustler and Vivid. It didn't take long before Ms Angel knew that she was onto
something. Right after their first film was released, things began to change.
"We started to get a lot of attention, and it was really weird. I started to
notice that thousands of people were reading my blog on Burning Angel, and I
started to get recognized on the street-everything started to happen at once,"
she said.
Soon, Hustler came knocking on Ms Angel's door to announce Larry Flynt's
interest in signing a contract with her. And following a short meeting with the
company's executives in California, Ms Angel was signed up to direct movies for
the adult-fare conglomerate. "We went from filming a $10,000 movie that was
basically filmed wherever we could film it, to making $30,000 to $40,000
big-feature porno movies," she said. (The feature films include Porny Monster
and Joanna's Angels 1 and 2.) Fleshbot's Mr. d'Addario, for one, remembers
marveling at the 75-foot-tall posters of Ms Angel at the AVN Expo, only one
year after they first met.
But almost as quickly as Ms Angel got involved with Hustler, she discovered
that, no matter how hard she fought, Mr. Flynt would never really understand
her creative vision. "He really is into the traditional blond California porn
that's shot in front of swimming pools and waterfalls," she said. So back to
Williamsburg she went.
But in Brooklyn, she's still on her own. The success of Burning Angel seems
anomalous.
"In LA, porn is an industry. All the big porn companies are there; they're all
on the same road," Ms Angel exclaimed. She added that inquiring about the New
York porn industry is "like asking what the Wisconsin fashion industry is."
Dan Miller, the editor of Adult Video News, the industry's leading trade
magazine, agrees. He believes that New York is doomed to be a porno wasteland
forever. "I think the East Coast presence is always just going to be a fraction
of the West Coast," he said. Eon McKai, who heads the alt-porn division of porn
megahouse Vivid, was equally skeptical of Ms Angel's decision to keep her
company in New York. "It was our hope that she would come over here to Vivid,"
he explained. "But basically she said-and I've got to give it to her-'It's hard
to be a woman in this business and get respect.'"
Ms Angel's purported attachment to New York is a big part of her shtick. After
admitting that all aspects of filmmaking are much easier in LA, she described
how this city gives her work qualities that can't be reproduced anywhere else.
"Think of a movie or TV-like Seinfeld is filmed in New York; you can tell," she
said, rather inaccurately. "I always think that the products we shoot out here
turn out a little unique-it's really cool-and the grittiness and whatever.
"I've always appreciated good scripts, because I'm an English major," Ms Angel
added. "I think there is a certain amount of intellect that you need to make
good humor that a lot of people don't realize."
But any suggestions that Ms Angel means to intellectualize porn are quickly put
to sleep with a dose of candor. "I'm not really intellectualizing it, but I'm
definitely using my brain," she responded. And Mr. d'Addario, of Fleshbot,
argued that the very contention is inherently null. "There's only so far you
can go with intellectualizing porn," he explained. "There's still something
about it that hits you on a very basic level, and if it stops turning you on
because it has all this baggage on it, then it stops being porn."
"It's been really cool, because even though we are a porn company, there's
still this kind of innocence to us," Ms Angel said. "We still have a lot of
girls on the Web site who are from New York-just kind of hipster, rock 'n' roll
girls who just want to do this for fun. So I think that adds a level of
freshness," she explained. "But it's like, this girl works in a coffee shop ..
She'll get paid, but it's not her job; it's not just another day at work."
