For every ruthless scumbag in the adult-entertainment industry, there is an acquiescent victim ready for doormat duty. In tales of manipulation, abuse and plain bad manners, HUSTLER connects exploiters with exploitees.
On her third day as a professional screen slut, Cheri Swelz learned her first lesson in hard-core exploitation. Swelz’s employer that day was Stan Brent of Raw Talent Productions.
“I walked in there, and there were 40 guys waiting for me,” says Swelz, a 28-year-old brunette. “He didn’t even tell me it was a gang-bang.”
Perhaps the film’s title, Bang’er 40 Times, should have aroused Swelz’s suspicions. The hefty $2,000 fee she was to receive for the day suddenly made sense. She went through with the scene.
“I was taking four or five guys at a time, jerking guys with both hands, sucking one, having one in my pussy, one in my ass, nonstop for six hours,” says Swelz. “One guy tried to fuck my ear or come in my ear—I don’t know what he was doing. Another guy tried to stick a foot in my
pussy.”
Under duress, Swelz sucked and fucked in good faith that day, but she was unpleasantly surprised when she received her paycheck.
” I didn’t get the $2,000,” she says with disgust. ” I got $750 or something. To this day, I’ve never been paid what I’m owed.”
The battle of the sexes is serialized in the glut of hard-core product that pours out of California’s Porn Valley each year. Directors and producers, for the most part male, want to expend as little money as possible on production costs, while the predominantly female talent pool is conversely intent on being paid more to do less.
“The young girls don’t realize that these men have been doing this for a long time,” says Pamela Dee, the tight-bodied, Hawaiian star of more than 100 X-rated films. “A lot of new girls tend to be too eager. They want it really bad—that’s an advantage for guys.
“They’ll nickel and dime you until they get what they want,” Dee adds. “You gotta know what your limitations are and stick to them, because you can easily get bamboozled into doing something you don’t want to do. Until you get some experience under your belt, you have to learn the hard way.”
Pom years are telescoped like dog years; given the notoriously short shelf life of the average career in the jizz biz, teenage skin stars are as prized as southpaw pitching prospects. A teenybopper new to the ranks of sperm gurglers is easy to play for a sucker in the bottom-line-oriented, every slut-for-herself world of hard-core pom.
“People think they know what they’re in for, but it’s worse than they think,” says Randi Rage, a busty veteran of three years in fuck films. “Only the strong survive.”
“Some girls are afraid, and if they get in there, and someone starts hurting them or something, they don’t want to say nothing because they’re afraid they ain’t gonna get paid,” says Peach Puddin’, the Southern-born star of dozens of X-rated films. “I’m not prissy—you rough me up,
I’m going to turn around and knock the shit out of you too.
“There’s good points and bad points about porn,” adds Puddin’. “You get in there, and you got the guts and the gung ho, and you’re pretty, and you get on the A-list, they’ll start wanting you, and they’ll start kissing your butt. But the feminine ones, the shy ones, they’ll be chewed up bad by the sharks.”
Some observers believe that it is naive to expect honor and fair play in a profession where girls trade sex for cash.
“I’m not sure that when people take advantage of them that it’s done with any kind of malicious intent, because it’s so expected, it’s almost done by rote,” says Bill Margold, longtime woodsman, agent and current director of Protecting Adult Welfare (PAW), an adult-industry counseling service. “In truth, there’s no such thing as being taken advantage of in this industry. This is a business of cockroaches; it’s predicated on exploitation.”
Margold’s office is in Van Nuys, California, and is adjacent to World Modeling, the biggest talent agency in the business. On a recent afternoon, while super-agent Jim South snaps Polaroids and processes new girls next door, Margold does his damnedest to dissuade 18-year-old Cherie Carter from diving into whoredom.
“You start out as hamburger, and you work your way up to various types of meat,” Margold warns Carter, ravenhaired and pretty. Carter, though, has already performed in two X-rated films and is confident that she already has all the life experience she’ll need to handle the rigors of being a working slut.
“I’ve been in stripping, I’ve been a runaway, I’ve dealt with boyfriends hitting me, I’ve dealt with guys that I totally care about totally fucking me over, and I was very sexually liberated at a very early age,” Carter retorts.
“Bill will try to talk you out of it,” says Peach Puddin’. “But you’re all eager to do it at the time, and no one’s going to talk you out of it.”
Some girls navigate the shark-infested waters of porn without so much as a scratch. Alexandra Nice, a 26-year-old Pole, has been in the industry for four years and has no complaints. “I’ve had a good experience,” Nice says. I’ve never met abusive people in this business.”
Others seem to encounter trouble at every turn.
“Some girls come into the business and are almost predisposed to being abused,” says Max Hardcore, maker of X-rated films so rough that many starlets refuse to work with him. “Some girls will let you piss in their mouth while you’re fist-fucking them. The worse you treat them, the more you degrade them, the better they like it.”
“These are the Calamity Jane girls,” says Sharon Mitchell, the star of more than 2,000 adult films. “It’s like they’ve got Loser tattooed on their forehead. Trees fall on their cars, and the first time they have sex without a condom, they get chlamydia.”
Mitchell cofounded Adult Industry Medical (AIM), a nonprofit HIV-testing clinic. Together with Margold’s PAW, AIM makes up the safety net for porn stars. Part of Mitchell’s intake for new girls is distributing copies of Nina & Sharon Explain It All, a video orientation in which Mitchell and porn veteran Nina Hartley warn viewers about the business’s predators.
“They are not your friends,” Mitchell says in the video. “They only want to get you for the best price so they can put another mirror on their Mercedes.”
While porn attracts its share of unscrupulous operators, an easy mark will be taken advantage of in any line of work, and there is no evidence that porn harbors a greater percentage of sleazy people than any other walk of life where money changes hands. However, there is evidence to suggest that if there is a shark prowling porn’s waters, Cheri Swelz has met him.
Now a veteran of almost 80 films, Swelz is still getting screwed, she says, most recently by Jim Malibu, director of Metro’s record-setting gang-bang flick Houston 500.
Swelz claims that Malibu agreed to cast I her as a fluffer for the gang-bang and that he invited her to his house to seal the deal.
“He wants to test me out or whatever, and he takes out a camera,” says Swelz. “I just thought he was going to take some sample photos. He was like, ‘ I want a couple shots of you doing this,’ and then he took out his dick. I’ve given lots of head to get jobs in this business, but you shouldn’t have to do anything for a fluff job. I gave him head, and he came all over my face. So he has a whole entire roll of that. Then he calls me the next day, and he goes, ‘Don’t go to the gang-bang— you’re not hired anymore.’ He had 200 other girls that wanted to do it, or so he says. I love giving head; so the head part I really don’t mind. I’m really upset about the deal, but it’s about the roll of film. I’m still trying to get that back.”
Blowjobs are like handshakes in blue film circles. Porn chicks have been sucking producers’ dicks for as long as there have been box covers to grace and fuck flicks to star in. Sometimes, these offcamera dalliances are virtually contractual: The throat work is performed explicitly in return for a role in a movie.
“The guys are like, ‘Hi. Get on your knees,'” says Swelz. “Blowjobs come with the territory. There are some business-oriented companies that won’t pull that shit for all the money in China. Then you get these jackoff dirtbags that want to be the next biggest porn director. Every girl in the world sucks their dicks.”
“Don’t give a blowjob to get a job,” says Sharon Mitchell. “You’re supposed to get paid for that in front of a camera, and there’s always a girl behind you with a better blowjob.”
While a fuck slut may be given to understand that although she doesn’t have to suck anyone’s dick, doing so often helps. Refusing blowjobs, on the other hand, can jeopardize jobs, as Peach Puddin’ claims to have found in dealing with Philip and Christian O’Toole, two brothers from England who shot under the name Philip Christian in the mid-’90s.
“Me and another girl were at their warehouse,” Puddin’ recalls. “One of them took the other girl, and one of them took me, and he was like, ‘What about a quick blowjob?’ I said no, because that’s not what I do. I didn’t get the part, because I didn’t give the blowjob, but it went around in the industry that I did, and I didn’t get work for a while. So I got screwed twice. If you don’t do exactly what they say, they’ll blackball you for a while. You hang in there, you can get deblackballed.”
Performing sexual services appears to be an absolute requirement for doing business with some porn outfits.
Regan Senter, of Beautiful Models International, is perfectly open about the policies that cause many girls in the industry to label him a sleazebag.
“Compared to the kinds of things that even the highest echelons of the adult industry ask them to do, what I ask them to do is practically nothing—except a few positions and a little bit of oral,” says Senter.
Part of Senter’s intake procedure is taping a sex scene starring himself and the prospective talent. “The demo tapes show a girl coming into a casting bureau, and the head of the casting bureau is saying, ‘Okay, honey, let’s perform sex right now. Don’t worry, it will only take a few minutes,'” says Senter.
“Ninety-eight percent of my performers have performed a demo tape with me,” Senter adds, though he concedes that, “I don’t sign that many people.”
What accounts for the general lack of fight in porn’s doormats? How can there be such a thing as a surprise anal or a surprise gang-bang, for that matter? Just because a girl is a suck slut doesn’t mean she doesn’t have free choice. Why do geeks walk into punches, agreeing to work for less than their established rates or performing sexual acts they may not be comfortable with?
“There are a lot of pieces of our puzzle that we haven’t put together yet,” offers Sharon Mitchell.
“Most of the girls aren’t as stupid as everyone thinks they are—they just know they’re caught,” says Peach Puddin’. “They’re doing it because they need the money, and they’re afraid that if they say something, they’ll get fired or if they don’t finish a scene, they won’t be paid. It’s a position they got themselves in, and the only way to get out of it is to go through with it. If you stick up for yourself, they’ll say you’re too bossy or too bitchy.”
“What happens is you get tired, and you just want to leave,” explains Pamela Dee.
“You’re thinking. All right, fine—let’s get it over with. What you really want to do is go home, and the fastest and easiest way to do it is give them what they want so you can get out of there.”
Porn chicks cave into pressure, but they may also be vulnerable to a daddy complex or a need to please.
“They want to be told they’re pretty,” says Pamela Dee. “They’ll do whatever they can just to hear those words.”
The widespread notion that porn chicks are damaged goods may itself lead to abuses. Checks can bounce, promises can be broken and boundaries can be disregarded because a porn slut can be expected to take such abuse lying down.
While women in the industry may suffer their fair share of injustices, many in turn fail to extend basic human compassion to those who stand below them in the pecking order of the disenfranchised. Tardiness and no-shows are epidemic among talent and can cost production
companies thousands of dollars. A member of a production crew is paid a flat day rate; a porn star who flakes or shows up four hours late can ruin the days of a dozen working stiffs who may earn a tenth of an actor’s salary.
“The day in the third grade when you learn that the planets revolve around the sun, they didn’t go to school that day; the planets revolve around them,” says James Bilich, a production manager with 13 years experience on porn sets. “I make a schedule to take care that everything is going in a straight line, but we can just wipe our ass on it every day because a schedule means nothing to these people.”
While the oppressed may pass injustice on to others with even less power, there is a wide gulf between a no-show’s lack of professional courtesy and the kind of abuse Pamela Dee claims to have suffered at the hands of bad-boy auteur Max Hardcore.
“Max Hardcore is propelled by demons,” Dee says, remembering the night she visited Hardcore’s house in the hills above Los Angeles four years ago. “He doesn’t feel. He needs to have his balls blown off.
“I had to take my clothes off, because he wanted to see what I looked like,” she recalls. “He had me sign a piece of paper, which of course I hadn’t read, which of course was a release. The next thing I know, his partner had a whole room set up with all this video equipment. I was like, ‘What is this, a camera test?’ I was stupid—I was only assuming, not asking questions. The next thing I know, he weaseled himself into me, and he’s doing a scene with me. Nowhere along the line did I say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this was not what we talked about.’ He wound up putting me in the hospital.
“He had me from behind, doggy. One finger became two fingers, and then there was a thrust like I have never experienced before; I screamed. He had jammed his hand up inside of me—a fist. I went to the bathroom; blood was coming out. First I was thinking that I had gotten my period. Then I could tell that his partner was very scared, because they more or less pushed me out the door. The next morning when I woke up, I was lying in a bed of soaking-wet, bloody sheets. He was supposed to pay for the hospital bills, but I never even got a phone call.”
If what Dee says is true. Hardcore could have been liable to criminal prosecution. Dee complained to her agent, Jim South, but the matter was dropped, and she has since retired.
“It’s true that I did fist-fuck her,” admits Hardcore, “but I fist-fuck a lot of girls with no problem. Some girls have medical problems that a good, hard fuck brings out.” Hardcore maintains that Dee’s first experience with him couldn’t have been as traumatic as she puts it, because she returned to shoot a second scene with him a month later.
“It was another pretty brutal scene, I believe, with a DP with a dildo,” says Hardcore. “I guess some people are just natural-born victims. That girl could really take a pretty good beating.
“I’m a nice guy and a straightforward businessman,” adds Hardcore. “I am also a cold-hearted fighter. You need a killer instinct to succeed in this business.”
With experience, some porn chicks have developed the skills necessary to stick up for their rights in a field dominated by men with finely honed killer instincts. When a director tried to strongarm starlet Brandy Alexandre into accepting a cut rate for a scene, she practically held a production hostage.
Alexandre received a late-night phone call from producer and woodsman Buck Adams asking her to fill in for Victoria Paris on the set of My Wildest Date. Only when she arrived on set was she informed that she was expected to do anal, which she refused to do.
“He did it anyway,” Alexandre writes in her unpublished autobiography. Being Brandy. “I didn’t say anything then, but I refused to sign the model release until they coughed up an extra $200. They said I had agreed to so much money, and that’s all they would pay. They couldn’t release the movie without my signature, and they knew it; so they had to give in. I’m sure the incident damaged my reputation (it’s always the girl’s fault), but it was a shitty thing for them to pull.”
Where hardball is not enough, Brandy Alexandre, like several others after her, including XXX superstar Kylie Ireland, turned to the courts to mete out justice.
A dispute between Alexandre and her former boyfriend John Stagliano over royalties for the film Buttman Goes to Rio was heard before Judge Joseph A. Wapner’s People’s Court. Alexandre won her case, an episode titled “Porn to Lose.”
Porn stars do not constitute a family, as much as they may say they do, but they can watch one another’s backs.
“It’s like a sister thing,” says Pamela Dee. “The other girls don’t bite. Women will be there to help each other and be supportive when you’re in trouble, and when they’re not, always remember that it is your right as a human in the United States of America to say no.”