11 The average professional lifespan of a female performer is two years. Males, though lower paid, tend to last much longer in the business — sometimes decades. (back to text)
12 Silvera, who broke in way back in the ’70s at Times Square’s old Show World, looks like a curly-haired and extremely fit praying mantis; he’s even weirder-looking now that his curls are mostly gray. He’s also famous for always showing up on the set with a small duffel bag filled with exotic vitamins and herbal and other supplements, all self-prescribed. (back to text)
13 What’s maybe even weirder is that you can then scuttle back to your hotel, if you wish, and watch Jameson and North have hard-core gymnastic sex in The Wicked One on payper-view for $9.95. (back to text)
14 Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the box back to Hecuba personally, a gesture that H.H. remembered thinking was unusually thoughtful and conscientious until it emerged that the detective had really just used the box’s return as an excuse to meet Hecuba, whose critical work he appeared to know, and to discuss the ins and outs of the adult-video industry. It turned out that this detective — 60, happily married, a grandpa, shy, polite, clearly a decent guy — was a hard-core fan. He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.”
Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)
But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies. (back to text)
15 Whether the framers of the US Constitution might, in their very wildest imaginations, have been able to foresee things like Anal Virgins VIII or 900-666-FUCK when they were thinking of expression they wanted to protect is obviously a thorny question and outside this article’s purview. (back to text)
16 (set previously in 1994, by one Amber Chang, at 251 males) (back to text)
17 According to Dick Filth, the imbroglio started when Hecuba crashed the party and was spotted by Ms. Nici Sterling, about whom Mr. Hecuba had said in a recent film review that it was “unclear whether she’d win any beauty contests, but she sure could suck cock.” It was apparently the beauty contest crack that had hurt Ms. Sterling’s feelings, and on seeing H.H., and suffering the relaxation of social inhibitions for which entertainment parties of all kinds are famous, the starlet made a beeline for Hecuba, uttered two high-volume expletives, and attempted to strike the print journalist with an open-handed right cross, whereupon H.H. had the presence of mind (aided perhaps by the six-inch heels that made Ms. Sterling’s balance precarious and forced her to telegraph the blow) to grab her hand before it could knock his trifocals off. Whereupon in turn Ms. Jasmin St. Claire, seeing Harold Hecuba clutching the upraised hand of an agitated and off-balance Nici Sterling, performed a set-pick off the three-foot width of Ron (“the Hedgehog”) Jeremy and leapt on Hecuba’s back and deployed what Filth averred was a pretty authentic- and impressive-looking LAPD-style chokehold, prompting Hecuba to whirl 360º in an effort to dislodge Ms. St. Claire while he still had the cerebral oxygen to do so, inadvertently whipcracking Ms. Sterling into Randy West and mussing Mr. West’s coiffure for the first time in industry memory and (to the best of Filth’s recollection) simultaneously dislodging H.H.’s special autotint trifocals and sending them out in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again.