It can be lucrative. It can bring fame. It can be easy work.
Those factors draw young actors by the hundreds, from high school dropouts to
professionals frustrated by their choice of vocation. But along with the Coach
purses, the Vegas parties and the ample amounts of sex come perils most
performers never imagine.
"An 18- to 20-year-old girl, is her life ruined if she does this? Ninety
percent of them, yeah," said Rob Spallone, an actor and president of
Chatsworth-based Starworld Modeling. "They make their $1,000 a day, then
they're out of the business and they don't have 20 cents."
'This is the worst'
At first, the money seems great. Young unknowns can come in, earn a grand for
six hours of work, then do it all over again the next day. With $30,000 rolling
in each month, they've soon got nice clothes and a flashy car. Flush with
success, they hit the town and party. Many turn to drugs.
And when you've grown accustomed to the Cadillac lifestyle in your teens, it's
hard to adjust to the Chevy budget, especially when your résumé lists porn
flicks instead of a college degree.
"If I had a daughter, would she be in this? No," Spallone said. "This is the
worst. They get in and say, 'I'll do this six months and go back to school.'
Bull. You're going back to school? You're gonna get addicted to this, to the
money, to the sex."
When he got into the business in the mid-1990s, filmmakers used to ask for
specific performers - the more famous, the better. Now, he says, they only ask
for new, unseen talent.
This creates a difficult paradox for many young actresses: To get work, they
have to perform more hard-core acts. While that pays better, it also lessens
their appeal for future work and tends to shorten their career.
And in spite of the industry's attempts to police itself through regular HIV
tests, Spallone says gonorrhea and chlamydia crop up regularly. So many
performers contract the diseases, he said, that they've coined a term -
"ping-ponging" - for the way the infections bounce from actor to actor.
"They're meteoric," said Bill "The Bear" Margold, an actor, writer, journalist
and trustee of the Protecting Adult Welfare Foundation, which offers counseling
and services to struggling industry members. "They come in as filet mignon,
then in six months, they're hamburger. The best thing that they could be is a
sterile orphan."
Margold, a huge, mustached, bushy-haired man who resembles the teddy bears that
fill his office, is fond of bold pronouncements. Orphans have no parents to
grieve over their career choice, he reasons, while sterility prevents later
regrets when a family replaces a porn career.
He helped create PAW in 1994, after the suicide of actress Shannon Wilsey,
better known as Savannah. Though he passionately defends the industry, he
simultaneously steers away prospective talent he deems unprepared for the
lifestyle change.
He advocates the introduction of HIV and drug testing, the adoption of a
ratings system to warn of violent content and a specific tax - similar to those
for cigarettes and alcohol - with the money going to fund outreach
organizations like his.
"When your privates become public, you lose your privacy," he said. "People
call me up and what they did 10 years ago is coming back to haunt them. And it
will for the rest of their lives."
In exchange for the $1,200 she accepts for performing sex acts on camera, an
actress also often signs away the rights to her performance and image. What
started out as one scene can then be repackaged in endless compilation films or
posted in perpetuity on the Web.
'It's that girl'
"We know a girl who didn't really do a lot of porn," said Evan Seinfeld, an
actor who runs the Studio City-based adult-entertainment company Teravision
with his wife, porn star Tera Patrick. "She did a little porn, a little
Playboy, but there's an ad running in the back every month of 40, 50 adult
magazines. She's on the inside page of every one with a (penis).
"They airbrushed it on and now it's the official ad of (a transvestite sex
phone line)."
But most people don't think about that, Cannibal said. They think about the
money and the possibility of fame, then dive in. She followed Margold's advice
and slowly built up her career, which proved to be a wise move.
Without someone to guide her before she first had sex on camera, she's not sure
how things would have gone.
"In adult, there's no training," she said. "In any other business with some
kind of risk, there's training. If you're working down on the docks in Long
Beach, there's safety classes. There's nothing in this industry like that."
Part
I: The Valley's secret industry |
Part III: Billions, but profits leave The Valley
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