Chapter 4: The Valley Goes Gonzo

Chapter 4 “The Valley Goes Gonzo”: Jenna fends off her drug issues and a bad boyfriend in Las Vegas. She goes to LA, makes new friends and shoots her first porn at the height of the “gonzo” trend in adult film.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
My sex drive took over. Is that so hard for
you to believe? I mean, I'm good at a lot
of things, sex being one of them, so I think
I've certainly succeeded at doing that. And there's very few
people that have Jenna Jameson.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
To do porn shoot things isn't always nice. You do
everything in front of a camera, and you can never
forget about that you're professionally in the first place. In
my private life, I only do those things which I
want to do with my partner, Racosa Frede performer.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Many people think porno people are so bad and that
professionals are so good, and most professional people that I've
met are pieces of shit. They're child molesteds, big bullshit people.
Everyone watches porn and then looks down on it.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Te t Boy, Welcome to General World.

Speaker 5 (01:15):
Welcome back to Jena World. I'm your host, Molly Lambert.
This is episode four. The Valley goes Gonzo.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
The moment you become a porn star, you will always
be a porn star for the rest of your life.

Speaker 5 (01:35):
Jenna Massoli has chosen her new stage name Jenna Jamison
and met a modeling scout who says she can get
her into Penthouse magazine. Jenna has done one pro photoshoot before,
for the Biker Bible, Easy Riders magazine. On the cover
of Easy Riders, Jenna sports a long red wig with bang,
a velvet cross choker, a silver chain mail bra, black

(01:58):
leather short, and black final thigh high boots. She looks
like red Sonia. She's posing with a blonde model who
drapes a leg over the headlight while Jenna straddles the
wheel of a motorcycle that's been painted with flames and
skeleton kings. Inside are more glam shots and separate press
pics of Tommy Lee and Nikki six from Motley Crue

(02:19):
on motorcycles with an interview at a house in Las Vegas,
Jenna is modeling under her new stage name Jenna Jamison
at a photoshoot set up by Julia Parton. Julia directs
her through a range of poses, showing her how to
position her body so it reads on film how she

(02:40):
wants it to. Jenna feels herself straining to look sexy
and is sure it looks bad. Even though she's been
nearly nude on stage. She feels way more vulnerable and
exposed on camera. Then she gets a call from a
photographer named Susie Randall.

Speaker 6 (03:00):
I try not to think about myself. Maybe I'm atrel blazer.
I was always looking for the best.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
You outwork the.

Speaker 6 (03:08):
Men, you out chom everybody. Susie Randall, photographer.

Speaker 5 (03:15):
Now we must go to swinging London in the late
nineteen sixties, when sexual liberation came to England and pulled
its pantaloons down, creating Austin powers. The new sexual freedoms
make repressed British people very I'll just say it, howny baby.
Susie Randall is a London lass living hand to mouth
working as a nurse. She spots an ad looking for

(03:37):
amateur nude models and ditches nursing for what the British
called glamour modeling. She gets cast as an o pair
in the Eric Rohmer film Love in the Afternoon, But
French new wave movies and nude modeling don't pay well.
In aren't staple. There's no clear path from sexy modeling
leading into other work because Love Island hasn't been invented yet.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
I go in through the back door.

Speaker 6 (04:02):
I jump the line.

Speaker 5 (04:04):
So Susie Randall decides to get behind the camera too.
She uses a remote control camera to take artsy pictures
of herself spread eagle and sells them to Hustler. She
becomes a talent scout for new models who takes test
shots of them. Her big discovery is a Norwegian model
named Lillian Muhler, who becomes the star music video girl

(04:25):
for Rod Stewart's disco slam hit Do You Think I'm Sexy?
And she plays the pe teacher in the Van Halen
video for hot Ford Teacher.

Speaker 7 (04:35):
When I started Playboy, what I was interested in was
the romantic connection between the sexes rather than buddies in
the locker rope. A woman's input is key. If you
don't have that in mind, then you're going to be
spending a lot of time in the locker rope alone.
Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine.

Speaker 5 (04:56):
In nineteen seventy five, Susie Randall moves to la with
her South Africa and husband, who writes masculinist New Age
books like The Dominant Man, The Pecking Order in Human Society,
and The Nero Prediction about ancient Roman astrology. Susie Randall
gets staffed as a full time photographer for Playboy, working
under a female editor named Marilyn mo Grabowski.

Speaker 8 (05:19):
The plus side is I identify with some of these girls.
This is Miss America to a lot of girls. I
have a rapport with them. They know I'm in charge,
and they know I'm the boss, but they know I
identify with them. Mo Grobowski Playboy.

Speaker 5 (05:39):
Mo Grobowski is a Roman Catholic girl from Santa Monica
who starts working for Playboy in the sixties and over
a decade becomes its West Coast photo editor. Geez a
nineteen seventies LA woman who resembles Joni Mitchell and Diane Keaton.
Thin and brawlis with long, straight, blonde, middle parted hair,
blue eyes, and no makeup. It is Moe Grabowski, not

(06:02):
Hugh Hefner, who scouts Playboy models like Dorothy Stratton and
Pamela Anderson into doing Playboy.

Speaker 8 (06:10):
I said, Pam, you can be a big celebrity. All
you have to do is go after it.

Speaker 9 (06:17):
Men.

Speaker 8 (06:17):
It held Pam down for a long time.

Speaker 5 (06:22):
Women like Moe Grabowski and Susie Randall are behind the
scenes at Playboy, doing a lot of the real work
and insulating the magazine against charges of boys club misogyny.

Speaker 6 (06:33):
I add the best gimmick in the business, a sexy
gil taking pictures of sexy gills.

Speaker 5 (06:41):
Susie Randall also works with musicians. She takes a very
horny photo of British singer Robert Palmer and shoots an
album cover for the jazz vocalese group The Manhattan Transfer.
In nineteen seventy six, Susie Randall falls out with Playboy
over money and starts her own production.

Speaker 10 (06:57):
Studio, which is what she's still doing.

Speaker 5 (06:59):
When Na meets her in the nineteen nineties. After being
sent the Julia Parton touch shots, Susie Randall rings Jenna
to book her for a photoshoot in Los Angeles. Though

(07:21):
in nineteen ninety one, Jenna flies to Los Angeles wearing
cowboy boots, men's boxer short, a white tank top with
no bra, and a baseball cap.

Speaker 10 (07:30):
She swooped at Lax.

Speaker 5 (07:32):
By a makeup artist named Emma Nixon, who also models
under the name Nicole in Easy Writers and The Letters
to Penthouse video anthology.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
After Emma finished my face, I hardly recognize myself. I
looked for the first time in my life like a woman,
and that woman appeared sexy confident and sophisticated. She was
Jenna Jamison, and I liked her all lot lot more
than Jenna Masoli.

Speaker 5 (08:04):
Makeup helps to create the image of Jenna Jamison beautiful
and urbane, but also cool and rock and roll, leather
and lace. The signature Jenna Jamison look is black eyeliner,
smoky eyeshadow, and a cinnamon lipliner with nude lipgloss. Emma
brings Jenna to meet Susie Randall on set at a

(08:27):
house in the valley, and she's taken to a setup
of a bed with satin sheets.

Speaker 6 (08:32):
As a photographer, you only as good as your model feels.

Speaker 5 (08:39):
Susie runs Jenna through a litany of poses and outfits
at a breakneck pace. Jenna finds it hard to both
hold positions and relax her face to look alluring at
the same time. Afterwards, Emma drives Jenna to beautiful downtown Burbank,
where she's put up in a shitty motel by the
five Freeway.

Speaker 11 (09:01):
I've always loved being on stage since I was a
little little girl, and I think that's what drew me
to this industry. I started out just doing magazines. When
I was in college. I had never even been in
a strip club. My father's a dentist. I mean, I
came from this really well off family and this was
not what we would normally consider a career opportunity.

Speaker 4 (09:25):
Nicki Tyler performer.

Speaker 5 (09:29):
On the second day of the shoot, a model named
Nicki Tyler strikes up a chat with Jenna. Nicki Tyler
is a five toot seven Sagittarius with a blonde surfer
girl look. She's born Nicole Madison, grows up well off
in Marin County and enrolls at UC Santa Barbara. Then
her dog gets sick.

Speaker 11 (09:52):
I didn't want to ask my parents for any more
money because they had paid for my car and I
had credit cards, and they had paid for me to
go to school, and I was totally taken care of.
And I was like, they are gonna die when I
tell them that I need fifteen hundred bucks like now,
because she was on IVS and I was just not
gonna let this little dog go. And I answered this

(10:13):
ad that said bikini, nude and lagerie modelin and I
was like, I will never take my top off. This
is my theory on that I think a lot of
it is. I just didn't think I was pretty enough.
And I think a lot of the jealousy that goes
on in this industry and women not liking women in
this industry is that they're jealous that they're not desired

(10:33):
that way, even though they could be. Our society is
so screwed up with the whole body image thing. Women
don't know what looks good.

Speaker 5 (10:44):
She leaves UCSB to transfer into cal State Northridge Clinical
psychology program, but when she gets to LA she drops
out of school to try acting instead. She appears in
These Slobs Versus Snobs comedy Zoo Radio co directed by
Jay Roach, who will go on to direct Austin Powers.
Yeah Baby. Nicki Tyler lives in a nice suburban house

(11:07):
in the Valley neighborhood of Sherman Oaks. She drives to
Van Nuys Boulevard to pick up copies of the magazines
that feature her first nude layouts.

Speaker 11 (11:18):
I couldn't get the balls up to go to the newsstand.
I was like, really uncomfortable with this, and I sat
in my car, going, NICKI, if you can pose in them,
you can buy him. And I saw this old man
working and I thought, Okay, I'll go over there now
and around the corner comes this cute young guy and
he goes, what's a cute girl like you doing in

(11:38):
a men's magazine?

Speaker 10 (11:40):
He worked there.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
We ended up getting married. I was young. I had
just turned twenty one.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
Nicki is living with her newsy husband when she invites
Jenna to stay with them at their nice, big house.
Jenna says yes. Nicki is the first person to make
Jenna feel welcome in la when Jenna arrives in the

(12:09):
valley in nineteen ninety three. It's the pulsating epicenter of
pornography for its proximity to resources used by the other
film industry, soundstages and a constant pool of aspiring talent,
as well as office parks and warehouses from the mostly
departed aerospace industry long before the pornography industry settles there.

(12:32):
The valley is known for its cycle of financial booms
and busts, mirrored in its climate by severe droughts and
extreme flooding. California gains American statehood in eighteen fifty during
the Gold Rush, and there's a financial boom in the
valley raising cattle on ranches for prospectors to eat until
the gold rush ends and beef collapses. Now worthless, ranches

(12:56):
are resold with promises of verdant trees dripping citrus fruits.
But there are pesky plagues, a flood, a drought, another drought,
a smallpox epidemic, and a plague of locusts. Nathaniel West's
The Day of the Locusts is not about this particular
locust plague, but he does depict La as besieged with

(13:19):
constant plagues of fortune seekers lured in by fantasy images.
As railroads connect the valley to the rest of America,
there's a boom in wheat that ends when supply starts
to exceed demand. In nineteen oh five, La taps into
water to the Owens Valley. To get access to the water,

(13:41):
the valley must agree to annexation by the city of
Los Angeles. The next big boom is the aerospace industry,
and the valley fills with aircraft factories and new housing tracks.
As the film industry develops, the valley becomes a backlot
for studios to shoot cheaply. In in Gone with the Wind,
when Scarlett O'Hara vows that she'll never go hungry again,

(14:03):
she's not in Georgia, but in the valley Seemi Hills area,
where Rocket Dyne tested liquid propellant, rocket engines and nuclear reactors.
In the nineteen seventies, the porn industry and its studio
system take root in the valley, utilizing its existent network
of office parks and sound stages. By the time Jenna

(14:25):
arrives in the valley in nineteen ninety one, it's been
the geographic center of the porn industry for two decades.
Jenna sleeps on the couch at Nicky Tyler's Sherman Oaks house.

Speaker 4 (14:38):
She'll always be my number one girl.

Speaker 5 (14:43):
One night, Nicki Tyler sends her boyfriend to their bedroom
so she can spend quality time with Jenna, and they
end up fooling around on the couch. Jenna says this
was the only time they had sex, although Nicki has
also claimed they were friends with benefits for years. Done
with her LA work trip and a couple and richer
for it, Jenna begrudgingly returns to Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
There was something about Vegas that was poison. Every day
I spent there, I slowly lost my grip on reality.
It seemed as if the better and more exciting LA
became the worse. I made Las Vegas for myself.

Speaker 5 (15:26):
When Jenna gets back to Vegas, she's determined to level
up her living situation.

Speaker 10 (15:30):
There.

Speaker 5 (15:31):
She has a box filled with cash that she's been
saving from stripping, but when she tries to dip into it,
she finds it's been depleted. Her boyfriend Jack admits he
took most of her savings about thirty grand and lost
it gambling at the Golden Nugget. Jenna feels trapped in
their shitty apartment, which has become a metaphor for their

(15:51):
shitty relationship. Things continue to deteriorate into constant fighting, toxic codependency,
and cheating paranoia that makes her feel insecure and depressed.
With her money all gone and no way out, Jenna
does a line of meth for the first time in
six months. When Jenna can't get hold of anyone and

(16:13):
her dad's for a few days, she heads over there
and finds his house abandoned. She spirals, worrying that her
family has been killed. Maybe her brother pissed off the
wrong drug dealer. Maybe her dad's enemies and the mob came.

Speaker 10 (16:27):
Back for him.

Speaker 5 (16:28):
Even if they are still alive, She's distressed that they
didn't even tell her they were leaving town. When her
phone does ring, it's Susie Randall asking her to come
back to La and shoot more photos.

Speaker 10 (16:43):
She flies out for a week and goes through the motions.

Speaker 5 (16:46):
When she comes home, there's a message that her dad
and brother had to suddenly blow down and we'll touch
base when they can. Her dad finally calls to say
that the family, meaning him, her brother Tony, Tony's wife Selena,
and Jenna's grandma are on the lamb. Her dad checks
in every couple weeks from a payphone in a new state.
Jenna doesn't know exactly what they're fleeing from, whether it's

(17:09):
real or a delusion created by her brother's meth field paranoias.
In a way, it doesn't really matter. Her family, one
of the final things tethering her to the state of Nevada,
have flown the coop, and so Jenna starts going to
La more and more often. Nikki and Jenna go to

(17:41):
the Van Nuy's newsstands so Jenna can see her photos
in magazines like Sherry, Hustler and High Society. Jenna notices
that she's being credited under random names like Daisy Holiday,
names that are not Jenna Jamison. They also have interviews
about how horny and wild she is. She never did

(18:01):
turned out by some ghostwriters. Through modeling and more stripping
at The Crazy Horse, Too, she makes back the thirty
grand that Jack lost at the Tables.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
I rented a small, high end two bedroom apartment and
a skyscraper in Las Vegas called the Crystal Towers.

Speaker 10 (18:27):
It was beautiful.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
The foyer had black and white checkered tile, the bedroom
was immense, and the balcony overlooked an outdoor pool.

Speaker 5 (18:38):
When Jenna World returns, Jenna makes a name for herself
in Los Angeles. Oh my God, welcome back to Jenna Worlds. Finally,

(19:00):
Jenna has a nice, stable place to live, earned with
her own hard work. She invites Jack to move in
with her there.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Whoops.

Speaker 5 (19:11):
He pays his half of the rent and likes having
a centerfold girlfriend. She wants him to feel dependent on
her and hopes that having a nicer, less meth Danish
place will give him reasons to stay home at night.
She's also out growing The Crazy Horse too. She is
tired of playing the sweet, innocent cheerleader for a bunch

(19:31):
of drunk assholes every night. She doesn't like when the
patron's mouth off and call her a bitch, even though
she's getting paid for it, so she hangs up her
pleasers and decides to focus on modeling. On her trips

(19:54):
to La, Jenna detoxes, she finds that crystal meth doesn't
mix well with work.

Speaker 10 (20:00):
She wants to be on her.

Speaker 5 (20:01):
Best, most lucid behavior at photoshoots, but it's practical vanity too.
Meth makes her unconsciously grind her teeth and strain her
facial muscles. She doesn't want to look all fucking tweaked
out in her pictures because she needs them to sell.

(20:25):
But whenever Jenna goes back to the Crystal Towers and Jack,
she also goes back to crystal meth. As she becomes
by Western, going back and forth between Vegas and La,
the contrast becomes stark. She's either in nightmarish withdrawals or
manic relapse, and she still doesn't trust Jack. She gets

(20:46):
a bad gut feeling about a hot, stacked blonde at
his local bar. Jenna approaches her one night lies and
says she and Jack have an open relationship, and bates
the other woman into admitting that she's fucked on Jack
a little bit.

Speaker 10 (21:01):
Then, in an.

Speaker 5 (21:01):
Act of psychosexual self sabotage, Jenna invites the woman who
coucked her over for a threesome. Jack pretends not to
know her at first, and the moment that Jenna sees
the other girl touching Jack's dick, she flips out and
starts beating her up.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
As I lay in bed each night, I imagine having
this other life that he knew nothing about and couldn't control,
a secret identity that would crush him if he discovered it.

Speaker 5 (21:33):
Jenna decides to get back at Jack for his crimes lying, cheating,
stealing her money, and gambling it away. She's going to
start fucking other men, and she's going to do it
where everyone else can see on camera. Jenna has several
good motivations for getting into adult films. She wants to

(21:53):
make more money, she wants to hurt her cheating boyfriend's feelings,
and she genuinely believes she'll be grated it. So Jenna
approaches a new frontier adult films. Jenna wants to start
her career at the tradway with softcore lesbian scenes. She's
a fan of a director named Andrew Blake, who's known

(22:15):
for his gauzy, sophisticated eroticism and worked with her hero
Savannah Andrew. Blake books Jenna with her friend Nicki Tyler
for a feature called Fantasy Women. He films Jenna and
Nikki kissing and touching each other for a scene called
Afternoon Seduction. Jenna also has a solo masturbation scene called
Gallery Exhibition. Shooting goes well enough to boost her confidence,

(22:39):
but it drops when Blake doesn't ask her. Back in
the nineties, there was an established path for female performers,
starting with nude pinups and progressing to solo videos and
girl girl scenes. Some girls never do scenes with male
performers at all and make a lot of money just
doing solo and girl girl hardcore sex facts in male

(23:01):
female scenes start with blowjobs, then vaginal sex, then anal sex,
then multiple partners, and finally various combinations of all of
the above, like gangbang scenes. The ideal scenario is a
slow build, where a screen debut creates audience appetite for
more content, which they roll out with a few movies

(23:22):
a year, but most performers can't afford to turn down
work in the window they're being offered it and end
up shooting as much as they can, which can lead
to burnout. Many are in and out of porn within
a year or two after running the gauntlet. Jenna doesn't
want to blitz through the steps too quickly, but she's
ready for a swing at the big leagues. She books

(23:43):
her first hardcore shoot for a series called Up and
Comers you can guess how that's spelled with a guy
named Randy West, as part of an industry trend called Gonzo.
When porn moves to video in the eighties, there's also
a ship in content. In nineteen eighty three, Sony puts
out the Betamax camcorder. Before the camcorder, video cameras connected

(24:08):
with a cord to a recording base, but the camcorder
eliminates the cord and the bass, making the camera operator
free to move anywhere in space. Camcorders hit the home
market that year.

Speaker 12 (24:23):
To me, it was freedom. It was about going out
with a camera in public and seeing what would happen.
I enjoyed it, and it was also hot. Jamie gillis performer.

Speaker 5 (24:37):
Camquorders allow for a new kind of visual immediacy, a
proof of alleged realness handheld video leads to cinema veritay.
In nineteen eighty nine, a porn actor named Jamie Gillis
innovates a new kind of adult movie where Gillis and
a cameraman named Duck Dumont cruise around San Francisco's North

(24:57):
Beach area in a rented limo, picking up random men
to have sex on camera with actress Renee Morgan. It's
called On the Prowl, and it's the basis for the
On the Lookout part of Boogie Knights, where roller girl
kicks the shit out of a guy who recognizes her
from high school. On the Lookout is the depressing third

(25:18):
act low point of Boogie Knights before the surprise, happy ending,
but Gillis claims On the Prowl was an exciting development
in porn, which is always seeking better ways to show
sexual spontaneity. Gillis helped pioneer a successful series called Dirty
Debutantes that's specialized in breaking new girls into the industry.

Speaker 12 (25:40):
I had been in the business already for many years,
and I just said, oh my god, they're so boring
these stupid movies with the stupid scripts. So I said,
let's just take a girl and bring her out and
find somebody who wants to fuck her and.

Speaker 4 (25:53):
Is excited about it. I literally brought girls out to.

Speaker 12 (25:57):
The public and whoever came along.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
That's what we shot.

Speaker 12 (26:00):
Now. That to me was fun because it meant that
we didn't know exactly what was going to happen.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
I always liked reality.

Speaker 13 (26:07):
I hated the.

Speaker 12 (26:08):
Old moans and groans type of porn.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
Jamie Gillis can't necessarily be trusted, but he's a fascinating guy.
Born Jamie Ira German in New York on four to
twenty an aries Taurus cusp. He graduated from Columbia University
magna cum laude in nineteen seventy and was driving a
cab until he answered a village voice ad for nude models.
Openly bisexual, he worked in both gay and straight porn.

(26:37):
For the first on the Prowl, they drive around and
pick up a couple of sailors who agreed to film
with them. Renee Morgan has sex with one of the
sailors while Gillis and the other sailor watch, and Duck
Dumont captures it with the camquorder. Hi on adrenaline and
who knows what else Jamie Gillis's first call is to
his lawyer to see if selling something on the pre

(27:00):
is covered legally. The lawyer says Gillis is crazy and
should not release the tape, advising him that the wild
card aspect is too volatile. If they were to pick
up someone like a senator's son, it could bring down
the entire recently legalized porn industry. Gillis says, one of
the sailors does get in trouble with the Navy, even

(27:21):
though he wasn't a direct participant in the sex, and
Gillis calls the Navy to say he will humiliate them
in the press if they don't drop the charges.

Speaker 12 (27:31):
So that's the only time in my life I had
a sense of what power was.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
It was like, wow, the power.

Speaker 7 (27:38):
Of the media.

Speaker 12 (27:40):
It was a wonderful feeling to have saved that kid.

Speaker 5 (27:44):
I cannot verify any of Jamie Gillis's stories, particularly the
ones that make him sound like a cool, great guy,
But Gillis ignores his lawyer and releases on the prowl.
The air of controversy over its legality only boosts its
pop up larity. It's not just a new tape, it's
a new genre.

Speaker 12 (28:06):
I remember I was selling it for twenty dollars, which
was unheard of. I think most tapes at the time
were selling for ten. So I was selling it for
twice as much as anyone was asking. And I thought,
this is revolutionary, this is exciting, And as it turned out,
I was right. It spawned the gonzo business. Not that
I had everything to do with it, but I had

(28:27):
something to do with it. Jamie Gillis, director.

Speaker 5 (28:33):
On the Prowl is a huge hit that kicks off
a new format known as gonzo porn. Gonzo had become
shorthand for first person experiential writing, also called new journalism,
where a writer breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that
they're also a character in the story. Calling it gonzo
implies a certain down and dirty experimentalism. So gonzo porn likewise,

(28:58):
makes the camera man a character who acknowledges that a
sexual encounter is being filmed for an audience to watch.
Camcorders are making amateurs into directors and performers at home too,
and as civilians start shooting amateur sex tapes, professional porn
starts to emulate the amateur look. In gonzo porn, there's

(29:21):
a new layer of eroticism in getting people to do
things they otherwise wouldn't do through the allure of being
on camera. It's a fictionalized take on the casting couch,
which is when men in the mainstream film business promise
acting work to aspiring starlits in exchange for sex. But
in Gonzo porn, the performers are aware that they're going

(29:42):
on camera to have sex and have already signed a
release form. Gonzo porn often has the camera operator, who's
sometimes also the male performer, talking directly with the star
about what she's going to do before she does it.
As a form of foreplay, Gonzo reveals the existence of
its own production and film crew to double down on

(30:03):
the porn illusion that you are voyeuristically watching raw intimate
acts recorded live, and like you might imagine from the name,
Gonzo porn tends towards extreme and fetishistic sex. Jamie Gillis
licenses his On the Prowl franchise to Vivid Video, saying
he prefers the creative side of the biz. On the

(30:24):
Prowl's success ripples through the industry. In nineteen eighty nine,
John Stagliano's The Adventures of Butt Man featuring Jamie Gillis continues,
establishing Gonzo as porn's next wave. Camcorders also influence independent
filmmakers like Steven Soderberg, whose low budget breakthrough Sex Lies
and Videotape is about the dangers of keeping a loaded

(30:44):
camcorder in the home. Gonzo porn feels like a direct
backlash to the rise of the contract girls. In the
contract girl model, the girls are the stars and the
men are the accessories to their sexual journey of self discovery.
In gonzo porn, the star is a dirtbag man who
acts as a stand in for a straight male audience,

(31:06):
fulfilling a fantasy of getting young women to degrade themselves
on screen. The premise is usually that the girls are
stupid to think this is smart and will get humiliated
for it, first verbally and then physically. If the contract
girl system was about elevating the sexualized woman into a
temporary star, gonzo porn is about putting women who like

(31:27):
to fuck back in their place under the boot of
creepy losers paying to watch them get disposed of. In
gonzo porn, the girls are an endless replaceable commodity that
they are constantly trashed for new girls as part of
the appeal, which mimics capitalism if vivid girls invested in
parasocial cults of personality, Gonzo is a rejoinder asserting that

(31:52):
the girls are still just interchangeable.

Speaker 10 (31:55):
Pieces of meat.

Speaker 5 (31:57):
After on the Prowl, Jamie Gillis's follow up Gonzo movies
become increasingly violent, blatantly abusive towards the starlits, racist, and
generally very bad vibes. Then, a man from Racine, Wisconsin
named Paul F. Little a Leo becomes the new most
hated man in pornography in nineteen ninety two for his

(32:19):
crimes against taste. After he renames himself Max Hardcore.

Speaker 13 (32:26):
A message from Max.

Speaker 7 (32:28):
Never use violence to get what you want, especially from women.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Max Hardcore pornographer.

Speaker 5 (32:40):
Pushing the limits of extreme sex is the game within
the Gonzo arms race, and in Max Hardcore films, the
focus is on violent sex ax delivered by Max purposely
devoid of any interest in female pleasure. Max Hardcore pedals
a fantasy, all right, but it's not about sex. It's
about taking revenge on women, and in his signature cowboy hat,

(33:03):
he picks up barely legal girls dressed as Lolita's. Max
Hardcore's content is so extreme that even Ron Jeremy thinks
it's in bad taste.

Speaker 10 (33:13):
I don't like it at all. It's too extreme.

Speaker 7 (33:17):
These days, it's all about how many dicks can you
stuff in one ax.

Speaker 5 (33:21):
If a girl's not smiling, if she's not enjoying it,
then I don't like it.

Speaker 10 (33:27):
Ron Jeremy performer.

Speaker 5 (33:31):
But Max Hardcore's nineteen ninety two independent release, Anal Adventures
of Max Hardcore becomes a smash hit without any of
the major porn studio's involvement. The established studio players think
Max Hardcore's work is bad for the industry's reputation. It
makes them look like pedophiles and sexual sadists trying to
exploit girls into making a big mistake. Steve Hirsh's utopian

(33:55):
eighties vivid video vision of couples watching porn together at home,
is he not in line with Max Hardcore's which brings
porn back under a dirty raincoat. Hardcore might single handedly
undo years of other people's work, legitimizing porn in mainstream
culture as not just for male sexual deviance. Most performers

(34:17):
from the Valley Studio system refuse to work with Max Hardcore,
but armed with his camcorder and a cowboy hat, he
makes his name on what gets called pro amateur content,
scouting local talent in Florida and branding himself as an
industry outsider. Max Hardcore's extreme sexual content is not about
what feels good for the female performers. It's about what

(34:40):
looks the most shocking, painful, or ostensibly humiliating for the
actress on screen. He innovates the on camera use of
gynecological speculums as sex toys. People behind the scenes claim
that Max Hardcore is just a character Paul lef Little
is playing, and that before shoots Dying, he thoroughly walks

(35:01):
the girls through what the scene will entail and tells
them to speak up if it becomes painful and they'll
stop rolling. One performer named Anastasia Blue says Max Hardcore
called her after they shot to wish her a happy Easter.
The writer David Foster Wallace touches on the industry controversy
over Max Hardcore in Neither Adult nor Entertainment, His account

(35:23):
of the nineteen ninety eight Avian Awards, first published under
a pseudonym in Premier magazine, Wallace brings up a new
issue raised by pornography in the nineteen nineties, whether it
might be addictive. The new cultural fear is that fantasy
visual images of extreme sex have become so widely available

(35:44):
they are going to supplant physical intercourse.

Speaker 14 (35:49):
Max's videos promotional posters have him carrying a girl in
mini shorts over his shoulder against a backdrop of various
city The skylines. The pitches at the bottom say see
pretty girls sodomized in manners most foul. See come splattered

(36:11):
girls too stupid to know better that David Foster, Wallace writer.

Speaker 5 (36:19):
By the early nineties, gonzo is the most popular genre
in porn, and narrative storytelling in porn is on life support.
But not all gonzo porn is like Max Hardcore's. There's
another side to gonzo, where the extreme intensity of the
sex acts correlates with emotional intensity. It is naturally European.

(36:43):
Gonzo's descent into escalating acts of depravity is not an
American invention. It's an attempt to keep up with the
globalization of porn and European porn, where censorship rules are
less strict and culture is less sexually repressed. Like German
expression led to film noir, and French New Wave led
to New Hollywood. European porn leads to American Gonzo.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
I want to see emotion, fear, excitement, the eyes going
up from being surprised.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
The true innovator of Gonzo is naturally Italian. His name
is Rocco Sefreddi aka the Italian Stallion. Born Rocco Antonio
Tano in Abruzzo, Italy in nineteen sixty four. A Taurus,
he grows up in the seaport town or Tona Amar.
After considering the priesthood, he moves to Paris, where he

(37:41):
meets some French people at Le Sex Club who scout
him into Libiz. After seeing his lieutenan Inchcock. He takes
his stage name Rocco Safreddi, most likely from Alan Delon's
character in nineteen seventies. Borslino and his parents may also
have named him after Allan Delon's character Rocco and his brothers.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
I tell him it's my vocation, it's the dream of
my life. He was with two girls and he told me,
let me see what you know. I remember having sex
in front of two hundred people there, and in the
morning I was in the studio working.

Speaker 5 (38:20):
Rocco grew up Roman Catholic, where sex is suffused with
guilt and shame. He shoots an anal sex scene for
his very first film, Attention Fiat.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
As an actor, I put to my strong passion and
anything I do, it can be porno or it can
be straight movies. The main difference generally is emotions and
physical Unfortunately, we look more for the double penetrations for
triple penetrations than how all the penetrations canna start.

Speaker 5 (38:52):
Rocco Safreddi becomes porn's biggest male breakout stars since John C.

Speaker 10 (38:56):
Holmes.

Speaker 5 (38:57):
He becomes known for group sex with a pan pleat
of women in his movies.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
In my real life, I never do that. It's too exhausting.

Speaker 5 (39:09):
So by the time Jenna arrives in Porn Valley, Gonzo
is still dominating the industry. The brains and body between
the Up and Comers series is a legendary stick man
named Randy West.

Speaker 15 (39:24):
Jenna contacted me and said she wanted to get into
the triple x business, but her agent didn't want her
to do porn. A month later, I'm on a shoot
in Woodland Hills and there's Jenna. I knew Jenna was
special right off the bat. I figured she'd be the
next Ginger Lynn, but nobody had any idea she was
going to be as big as she turned out to be.

(39:45):
Jenna told me when we first met that she was
going to be a star. Randy West performer.

Speaker 5 (39:54):
Randy West is born in New York in nineteen forty
seven as Andrew j Abrams, a libra. He gets a
baseball scholarship to EU Miami, where he plays in local
rock bands and makes some money doing nude figure modeling.
He moves to California in nineteen seventy nine, where he
joins male stripper troop the Chippendales and changes his name
to Randy West. A lot of guys who end up

(40:17):
porn stars are trying for success as athletes, actors, or
musicians first and then land in porn. Randy West is
one such character. He starts his acting career in a
non sex role in the French softcore film series Emmanuel,
and gets into hardcore porn with films like Fratthouse Frolics.
In nineteen eighty, Randy West becomes the first male model

(40:39):
to appear with an erection as a Playgirl Centerfold in
the nineteen eighties, his porn career dips and he starts
selling pot on the side. Randy West's story is like
a nice version of the John Holmes story where nothing
bad happens. A guy with a huge hog just moves
to La, sells a little bit of good weed, and
makes thirteen hundred pornographic films in the nineteen nineties. Randy

(41:04):
West is also Robert Redford's body double and Indecent Proposal
and Michael Douglas's body double in Basic Instinct.

Speaker 15 (41:13):
Eyeshot her when she still had her real tits, and
her tits were awesome.

Speaker 5 (41:21):
When Jenna World returns, Jenna makes her porn Valley debut.

Speaker 10 (41:33):
Oh my God, Welcome.

Speaker 5 (41:35):
Back to Jenna World. Jenna makes a request to Randy
West to shoot with an actress named Kylie Ireland. Up
and Comers is like Dirty Debutants, based around shooting girls
who are new into the industry. The house in the
Hills where forty six year old Randy West lives and
puts girls up is also the set he films gonzo

(41:59):
style stop without real takes or setups, trying to capture
spontaneous action as it occurs, Randy West sets up Jenna
and Kylie on a blue and white Mexican falseublanket on
the grass in the backyard to go at it for
an hour and a half. Randy West tries to talk
Jenna into doing her first boy girl scene that day,

(42:20):
but she says no. One thing that helps Jenna survive
in the industry is that she's really.

Speaker 10 (42:25):
Good at saying no to people.

Speaker 5 (42:27):
She doesn't have the fear of being a bitch that
makes some women be default polite to strange men. But
during a threesome with Kylie Ireland, Jenna decides of her
own volition that maybe now she wants to give Randy
West a little bit of head like he suggested.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
I needed something to do to keep from looking stupid
on camera, so I just held it in my mouth
a little.

Speaker 15 (42:52):
In the middle of the scene, Jenna said it was
okay to eat her pussy, and at the end of
the scene she and Kylie gave me a blood job.

Speaker 5 (43:01):
He offers her two grand to do a penetrative sex
scene with him at her next shoot. She plans to
do boygirl sex eventually, and Randy West seems experienced and professional,
so she accepts For the follow up shoot, Jenna arrives
wearing a preppy white tennis dress. Randy directs her to
show off her body to the camera and also shows
her petting his cat.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
I wasn't sure if I could go through with it
because he seemed a little bit lecherous, but the moment
he shut up and stripped down, something snapped inside me,
and a primal part I had never been in touch
with leaped out with a guy. There was strength, energy, intensity,
and passion. It was a dance in which we wrestled

(43:46):
for control, and as soon as I let go and
abandon myself to the moment, I won.

Speaker 13 (43:53):
When the sex started, she just fucking rocked.

Speaker 5 (44:00):
As part of abandoning herself to the moment, Jenna agrees
to let Randy ejaculate inside her. She finds this to
be his most shocking request because it's not photogenic. Usually
there's a pop shot onto the girl so that the
viewer can see it, but then he asks her if
she would squeeze it out on camera, and Jenna, discovering

(44:21):
the expanding limits of her own exhibitionism, says, okay.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
I flexed my PC muscles and the cum just burst out.
Of me accompanied by a loud squirting sound. It would
be an unnglamorous but pivotal moment for the adult film business,
one of the first internal pop shots.

Speaker 13 (44:45):
It was one of my greatest accomplishments in porn. The
fact that I didn't come in forty minutes. I don't
know how I lasted.

Speaker 15 (44:52):
And then I asked her if I could come in
her pussy and she said okay, so we did a
cream pie.

Speaker 13 (44:57):
Jenna told me later that she was relieved that she
he didn't have to take a load on her face.

Speaker 5 (45:04):
Jenna is exhilarated, and just as she hoped, Jack is
livid when he finds out, they have a huge fight
and he splits for a week. But instead of dumping her,
Jack actually starts putting effort into their relationship. He also
gets her back into crystal math, and so the cycle continues.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Just like at the Crazy Horse, the girls with the
monster silicone got all the attention, and I had to
compete with the one organ I had that was bigger
my brain.

Speaker 5 (45:51):
There's no word for when a woman feels emasculated by
another woman who's more womanly than she is, But that's
how taller, blonder women with bigger tits make Jenna her
new brass ring is a solo VHS cover, the metric
by which nineties porn stardom is measured. The bigger the star,
the more space they get on the box cover. Jenna

(46:12):
meets a producer who promises her a box cover. Unlike
her professional dare I say pleasant experiences with Andrew Blake
and Randy West, this shoot feels scuzzy to her from
the get go. When she gets to the studio City set,
she is immediately grossed out by the dirty condition of
the porn house. The movie is called Baby Doll, and

(46:32):
the credits misspell her stage name.

Speaker 16 (46:37):
Sugar Spice and everything nice, very very nice. As a
matter of fact, it is smoking since City presents the
perfect excuse for self abuse. Jenna Jamison as the girl
next door who's naughty fantasies and vivid imagination lead her

(46:57):
on a sexual roller coaster ride through hollywood It's hottest
modeling agencies, casting couches, oral auditions, all night Mazzola parties,
and back alley jam sessions. It is a hard climb
to the head of the class, but Jenna's got it wired.
This girl's left more guys panting than a staremaster in Overdrive.

(47:19):
Look Out, Hollywood, Baby Doll has arrived. Baby Doll VHS copy.

Speaker 5 (47:27):
Baby Doll is made by a husband and wife directing team.
Jenna plays a girl fresh off the bus from Iowa,
trying to make it in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
It's not that I don't like sex, you know that's
not true. I want to make it because I'm good,
not just because I fucked the right people like I did.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

Speaker 8 (47:56):
That's okay, honey. I do that because I wanted to
do that. I have no regret.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Then fuck me, bitch now.

Speaker 5 (48:07):
I know it sounds crazy to call Randy West, who
shot Jenna squirting com out of her pussy, respectful, but
by her own account, he made her feel safe. On
set on Baby Doll, Jenna is physically repulsed by her
male co star. It's her first real test as an actress.
While filming, she feels the disconnect of blowing a guy

(48:28):
that she's not attracted to, and also gets mad that
he can't stay hard. She gets through filming as quickly
as possible and leaves feeling ready to quit porn. That
day Jenna returns to Las Vegas depressed and directionless. Retreating

(48:52):
back to Jack and Crystal Meth again, she decides that
her big brain isn't enough. Her natural breasts are nice,
but they're not what sells. As she turns twenty years old,
she decides she needs really big, fake boobs.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
I needed to do something to get more jobs, otherwise
I'd lose the only source of income left to me.
At least that's what I told myself. The real reason,
in retrospect was that I wanted more attention from Jack.
I thought that if I look sexier, he would want
me more.

Speaker 5 (49:27):
How pathetic, Her friend Rockabilly Jennifer refers her to a surgeon.
Jenna wants to go up one cup size from B
to C. The doctor gives her d cups, and her
new boobs look super fake because Jenna is so petite.
When she first sees the results, she starts crying still.

(49:49):
Jennifer and Jenna celebrate at an Italian place and then
celebrate each other's bodies in a bathroom, but Jennifer says
it will be the last time she's pregnant with a
Rockabilly baby that will come out with a tiny greased
pompadoran leather jacket if it's a boy, or in a
cherry print dressed with swallow chest tattoos if it's a girl.
Once Jenna sees how much Jack likes her new boobs,

(50:11):
she feels less regret, but she still feels like life
is passing her by. Her family has resettled in Redding,
California without her, and Jack is still cheating on her constantly.
The one thing that she has for herself is her career,
which is stalling out. Although working with Susie Randall is
supposedly an honor, it's also grueling and underpaid. Whenever she

(50:35):
shoots with Susie, she has to sign away all the
rights to her pictures. Susie Randall talks a big game,
but Jenna has been working for a year and she's
no closer to being a penthouse pet or playboy playmate
than she was before she met Susie Randall.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
Though she is a great person and a talented photographer, Susie,
I soon realized, is also a shark. Her specialty is
nice young girls, much like myself, who are so happy
to have a modeling opportunity they'll do anything.

Speaker 5 (51:09):
Modeling takes advantage of the continual stream of new people
who want to get into the industry so badly they'll
take any kind of work. Eventually, if they stay long
enough and get fucked over a few times, they'll realize
they deserve to be paid a stable living wage to
do a job professionally, even if it's something they genuinely
love doing, like having sex or podcasting. Jenna starts smoking

(51:32):
meth too, which makes her paranoid. She stops booking shoots
with Susie Randall because she feels like it's a scam,
but she also wants to stay home in Vegas with
Jack to keep an eye on him. She gives up
on her ambitions, cancels work commitments, and dedicates herself to
getting high. Smoking is a harder and briefer high, so

(51:54):
she constantly needs more meth, and for that she needs Jack.
She's become completely dependent on him for drugs and validation,
the latter of which only makes him pull away from
her more.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
At the time, I truly believed that in order for
him to abuse me the way he did, he really
had to love me. If he didn't, he just wouldn't
respond her care, which would have been even more painful
to bear. The problem was that he didn't know how
to love. His father had abandoned him, his mother and

(52:29):
cousin were dead, the uncle who raised him was a monster.

Speaker 5 (52:36):
They fuck and fight and use drugs like a true
child wife. Jenna does speed and cleans their place compulsively.
She forgets to eat because she's high all the time,
and starts to look skeletal. When she does do photoshoots
in Vegas, she's erratic, grinding her jaw and constantly disappearing
to smoke more math. People start asking if she's okay

(52:57):
because she's so clearly not. Jenna gets really into crafting
and collaging with a hot glue gun, making elaborate paper
mache dragons. If you ever feel bad about how much
stuff got accomplished in the twentieth century, just remind yourself
that all those people were on medical grade speed, including
the President. One night, Jenna pulls a little pearl handled

(53:20):
pistol that she has on Jack and confronts him about
cheating again. He hits the gun out of her hand,
then throws her across the room so hard she chips
a bone and blacks out. She's too physically weak to
stand up. Jenna is hitting rock bottom. She's scarily gaunt
and has stopped working. She finally acknowledges that she is not,

(53:42):
as she has been telling herself, just a social drug user.
She calls Nikki Tyler in La, who offers to take
her in, but Jenna is addicted both to meth and
her cheating, lying, now physically abusive boyfriend who is also
her drug connect. She's all the way down in a
deep hole that she has dug, but the prospect of
climbing back out of it feels too daunting. Jack makes

(54:06):
the decision for both of them.

Speaker 10 (54:08):
He says he's.

Speaker 5 (54:09):
Leaving her, and she realizes in this moment that he
is moving in with his side piece, who is actually
also his drug dealer. Now Jenna is truly alone, and
all she yearns for is death. She tries to overdose
by taking four darvasset. She answers the phone, hoping it's
Jack returning, but it's another guy from Jack's tattoo shop

(54:33):
who recognizes that Jenna is in bad trouble and comes
to her rescue. He makes her call her dad, which
she really doesn't want to do, and tell him what's
been going on. He gets Jenna into a wheelchair and
puts her on a plane, sending her to her family
and Redding.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
It was impossible to separate where the depression from meth
withdraw and where the depression from Jack with d raw began.
My entire adult life up to this moment had revolved
around him.

Speaker 5 (55:08):
Jenna's family accepts her and nurses her back to health.
Her brother is clean now. Their dad says he regrets
laying down the law everywhere but at home. After a
month of convalescing and reading, she finally hears from Jack.
But Jenna has grown a backbone and knows that going
back would be a fatal mistake. She's ready to go

(55:28):
out on her own again, back to La and the
porn business.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
The problem with sobriety was having to deal with reality.

Speaker 5 (55:44):
Jenna goes straight to Nicki Tyler's house, where she's been
promised the couch again. She is getting back up to
a healthy weight after dropping down to under one hundred pounds.
Nicki is horrified by Jenna's gaunt appearance and her sparse
wardrobe of boxers and tank tops. Oh Nikki takes Jenna
shopping for new clothes, fulfilling one of Jenna's longest held dreams.

(56:07):
Jenna takes a short gig dancing at Crazy Girls in Vegas,
back around her old temptations. She stays strong when she's
around someone smoking math, she now feels repulsed, and the
same goes for Jack. He shows up to Crazy Girls
physically ravaged by his drug use. They have lunch and
he begs her to take him back, but she feels nothing.

(56:29):
They are a long way from hot buttered hand jobs.
At the Venetian, Jenna is offered a role in a
movie with Tiffany Million, a former wrestler her heat Wave Studio,
maker of films like Pull My Hair and Call Me Stupid.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
I had to make a life for myself. I was
good at this whole sex on camera thing. I enjoyed it.
If I only chose high quality projects from reputable directors,
I could avoid the less savory.

Speaker 17 (57:00):
Side of the business.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
Everyone I talked to told me not to go into
adult films. They all had their reasons, and they all
made sense, but the notion wouldn't leave my head.

Speaker 5 (57:13):
Jenna makes a friend on set named Ben Banks, who
goes by the stage name Stephen Saint Croix up Ices.
He's raised as a Jehovah's witness and a religious Connecticut household,
and goes to trade school to become a bricklayer, but
God doesn't want him to be a layer of bricks.

Speaker 18 (57:30):
There are only about eight guys who work consistently. They're
not as appealing as the models walking down Hugo Boss's
runway who women would love to see naked. I'm trying
to make male actors more recognizable. Stephen Saint Croix performer.

Speaker 5 (57:51):
He works as a PA on nineteen ninety two Deep
Throat six, directed by Ron Jeremy. When the male performer
hired for Deep Throat six fails to show up because
there's a warrant out for his arrest, Saint Croix steps
in front of the camera and becomes a star. In
nineteen ninety five, he becomes the first ever Vivid contract boy.

(58:11):
He tries to get into comedy and Hollywood, taking classes
with the la Improp Troop the Groundlings, but mainstream films
don't want him, and so he goes back to porn,
performing as Stephen Saint Croix and sometimes using the name
Jean Luc Goedard after the French New Wave director.

Speaker 18 (58:30):
I like working with people.

Speaker 5 (58:34):
When Jenna meets Stephen Saint Croix, he's driving a landscaping
truck for his side business and gives her a ride
in it. Back to Nicky's, Jenna is itching to get
off Nicki's couch, both because she wants her own place
and because Nicki's newsy husband is a drag. Jenna also
spots signs that Nicki is abusing speed. She's staying up

(58:56):
all night cleaning and doing crafts. The north Ridge earthquake
hits in nineteen ninety four, shattering all the windows in
Nicky Tyler's house. After the quake, Nicki and her husband

(59:17):
move into a bigger house. Jenna gets her own room
this time, but she can't handle living with tweakers while
she's clean, Nicki is paranoid and erratic, and her husband.

Speaker 10 (59:26):
Is a bully.

Speaker 5 (59:28):
Whenever Jenna tries to bring up issues, Nicki gets defensive
and says Jenna is disrespecting her. Jenna finally finds a
sympathetic ear in Nicky's brother, Michael, who's also worried about Nicki.
She finds sympathetic other parts in Michael too, who resembles
her friend Nicki, but as a tall straight man Michael

(59:48):
is chasing his own dream, starting a designer handbag line.
Michael takes Jenna to a piercing shop in Studio City,
where she commemorates moving to La full time with a
belly button pere, which was the style at the time.
They go through the classifieds and find Jenna her own
little studio.

Speaker 10 (01:00:05):
Apartment in Van Nuys.

Speaker 5 (01:00:07):
She puts a mattress down on the floor and Michael
takes her on a shopping spree to buy furniture, but
he always leaves her place immediately after they have sex,
and Jenna wants more from a relationship, so to provide
the intimacy she craves, Jenna buys a tiny television and
falls asleep watching it every night. She tells Michael she

(01:00:29):
wants him to stay over and do more boyfriend stuff,
but instead of stepping up to the plate, he further withdraws.
Having expressed her needs and been rebuked, Jenna has now
learned to just walk away, but being on her own
in La isn't easy. As much as she wants to
be independent, she also wishes she had someone to rely on.

(01:00:51):
She doesn't have a car and is making just enough
money to cover food and rent. She resents having to
do everything for and buy herself, which turns into a
depression that involves lying in her dark apartment, watching TV,
ordering takeout, and never going outside. Her career is stagnating too.

(01:01:12):
She's booking just enough work to survive, but she's oversaturated
in magazines and not moving up in porn. So Jenna
starts doing research acquainting herself with the major adult studios.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
I came to the conclusion after I had done a
few films that the best way to become a huge
star is to be a contract girl. The first person
I wanted to go to was Steve Hirsch at Vivid.

Speaker 5 (01:01:41):
When Jenna World returns, Jenna becomes a contract girl. Oh
my god, welcome back to jenal World. She's heard Vivid's

(01:02:03):
contracts for performers aren't what they were in Gingerlyn's era,
but she still approaches Vivid first because they're the number
one studio in porn. Steve Hirsh likes Jenna, but won't
promise her the special treatment and top star billing that
she wants. She needs to find a studio that's still
growing their brand. A husband and wife photographer team refer
her to an up and coming studio called Wicked Pictures,

(01:02:26):
run by a guy named Steve Ornstein.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
I wanted to pit a couple companies against each other
to see how much money I could make, so I
went into Wicked.

Speaker 10 (01:02:38):
Wicked.

Speaker 19 (01:02:39):
You have to try really hard to lose money in
this business, Steve Orenstein, Wicked Pictures.

Speaker 5 (01:02:48):
The Wicked Picture's office looks exactly like a business office
in a porn There's a black leather couch and a
dark lacquered wood desk with disorganized paperwork a trash Tablena
is nervous if the decorps stresses her out. Steve Ornstein
himself sets her at ease. He's a jewish redhead from

(01:03:08):
the valley whose mom is an accountant, just like me.
Steve blinks nervously, making her feel less nervous. He's not
a slimy huckster. He's a businessman, and he understands that
Jenna is a business woman. He asks her what her
career goals are and really listens when she tells him
she wants to get to the very top of the

(01:03:29):
porn industry with Wicked. She bluffs confidence and overdoes it
a little.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
I've done a billion magazines with no one's help. I
made myself the most photographed girl in the business. The
movie scenes I've done have been pivotal. A lot of
people know who I am, I know what I'm worth,
and I'm ready for the next step. The most important
thing to me is to become the biggest star the

(01:03:56):
industry has ever seen.

Speaker 5 (01:04:01):
He dictates a contract for his assistant to draw up.
She asks for a clause that she gets to approve
other contract girls, which he agrees to. Jenna reads it over.
She decides to take Steve Ornstein at his word and
sign right there, which could have been a huge mistake,
but Jenna's instincts are right. Steve Ornstein is a good

(01:04:21):
guy to work for. To make eight movies in one year,
Wicked Pictures will pay her forty eight thousand dollars and
as a signing bonus, throw in a new fridge for
her place. Steve Hirsch from Vivid Video and Steve Ornstein
from Wicked Pictures, the two Steves of Porn have similar
life stories. They are both Jewish guys named Stephen who

(01:04:44):
grew up in the valley in the seventies. Both Steve's
are second generation in the adult film business and both
worked their way up in sales first before starting studios.
Stephen Ornstein's father moves the family to La for the
climate after arthritis limits his ability to work as an
auto mechanic. In La, Steve's mother answers an ad for
a bookkeeping job at Lynden Distributors, which turns out to

(01:05:07):
distribute adult magazines and helps Steve get a summer job there.
He moves over to a company that ships X toys
and stag films, dropping out of college to apprentice there.
At twenty years old, Steve Ornstein becomes shipping manager for
an adult video company. In nineteen ninety he starts his
first production house, Excitement Productions. Excitement makes twenty four films

(01:05:31):
before Steve falls out with his co producer. He decides
to start up his own studio, and in nineteen ninety
three he founds Wicked Pictures in Canoga Park. He hires
his mother to be Wicked's accountant.

Speaker 19 (01:05:45):
My plan was to make films for the couple's market
that had a relatively high production value. I wanted to
put out a small amount of movies and be proud
of each one.

Speaker 5 (01:05:55):
At first, Steve Ornstein doesn't plan to have contract Girls.
He thinks high quality pornographic film should be enough to
make his company a success, but Wicked Pictures releases thus
far are flopping. An agent sells Ornstein on a starlet
named Chasey Lane, and they make her the first Wicked
contract Girl her first release. Nineteen ninety three's The Original

(01:06:18):
Wicked Woman is Wicked Pictures first hit and sells Steve
Ornstein on the contract girl concept. The Original Wicked Woman
is about a time traveling alien named Nova who has
sex with historical figures like Julius Caesar played by Stephen
Saint Croix and Cleopatra played by an Egyptian German porn
star from Van Nys named Isis Nile. The Original Wicked

(01:06:41):
Woman is also seen clearly in Jeff Green's porn collection.
In the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode porn O gill.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
I was making six thousand dollars, a movie that sounded
like huge money to me at the time.

Speaker 5 (01:06:58):
Jenna re enters the adult own business in nineteen ninety
three in mercenary mode. She is not here to make friends,
only money. At this point, Jenna feels like men only
exist to fund her and drain her energy. She puts
up a big wall emotionally, but her unavailability makes guys
more interested. But no matter how hard they pursue her,

(01:07:21):
she declines, if she never lets anyone in, she can't
get hurt again. That'll show them. So she cuts off
the one friend she made, Stephen Saint Croix, and isolates
in her vanny's apartment with her TV and fridge, only,
leaving it to work. Her single minded dedication to promoting
her career and Wicked Pictures starts paying off. Jenna gets

(01:07:44):
two pages of coverage in Adult Video News, the porn
industry's main publication. She gets happy news from her family
that her brother and his wife are having a child,
and sad news that her grandmother has breast cancer. Jenna
gets sick and has an allergic reaction to medication that
takes her out of working for a month. She holds
up eating instant ramen to save money while she can't earn.

Speaker 10 (01:08:08):
Alone with her.

Speaker 5 (01:08:09):
Thoughts in her crappy apartment, she has thoughts of self harm.
Despite having done the enormous lift of getting clean, leaving
Las Vegas and Jack and getting her porn career back
out of the mud, she doesn't feel the sense of
accomplishment that she should. She knows that deep down she
still desires a romantic partner, and that to accomplish this

(01:08:31):
she'll have to leave her apartment and lower her guard.

Speaker 1 (01:08:36):
I needed to know that there was a warm, sentient
human presence somewhere who would walk through my door at
whatever hour, like my father arriving home from work when
I was a child, and reassure me that someone on
this earth actually cared about me.

Speaker 5 (01:08:54):
She recovers from being sick and shoots Priceless for wicked.
Erotic thrillers are a hot trend in nineties Hollywood, and
so porn is also doing already neo noir thrillers. Priceless
has a black and white flashback and a plot inspired
by Debt, again with shades of basic instinct.

Speaker 16 (01:09:15):
Jenna's facing murder one, but has the gnawing feeling that
this has all happened before. Can she refute the charges
and still lead an intriguing sex life Priceless tagline.

Speaker 5 (01:09:31):
Jenna gets to pick her Priceless co star and chooses
Peter North. A Taurus. North is a Canadian woodman known
for his large sized penis and ability to ejaculate on command.

Speaker 9 (01:09:45):
Your penis is also referred to as your Peter and
when you are erect it faces North plus I am
from the North. Peter North performer.

Speaker 5 (01:09:58):
Porn Alden Joseph Brown in Nova Scotia. North was discovered
at a private party in la where he was modeling
sportswear and drafted into gay porn. He worked gay for pay,
bottoming in films under the name Matt Ramsey before doing
straight porn as Peter North.

Speaker 9 (01:10:16):
It wasn't a part of my sexuality at all. I
was only able to do it because of my strong
mind and my physical ability to have control over my
own body.

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
Peter North Ross.

Speaker 5 (01:10:31):
In Priceless, Peter North plays a private dick on the
trail of a femme fatale played by Jenna, a young
widow who wears all white and is being accused of
murdering her powerful male boss.

Speaker 9 (01:10:43):
You know, everyone thinks it would be so easy to
stay hard on set, and it's not easy at all.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Our scene was on the hood of a vintage automobile
and it was phenomenal. When he began to fuck me,
I was literally in shock. He tore me wide open
so that it was impossible to do anything but be
in the moment, and when.

Speaker 10 (01:11:07):
He came, he covered the car and me.

Speaker 5 (01:11:15):
Priceless is a huge hit for Wicked, and Jenna gets
her wish to be a box cover star. There's a
big glamour shot of her face and color, smaller black
and white pinup shots, and a clipped fake newspaper headline
that says police seek new leads into bedroom killer suspect.

Speaker 7 (01:11:33):
Priceless launched the career of its star, blonde goddess Jenna Jamison,
and in this you can see why her performance is remarkable,
intense yet quiet, erotic yet innocent. Her matchup with Peter
north Ranks is one of the best scenes in the industry.
If you're interested in a video that tells a complex

(01:11:54):
story with erotic overtones, then this is your movie. Priceless
is indeed worth the price. Lenny Nero IMDb Reviews.

Speaker 5 (01:12:05):
Stephen Saint Croix is also in Priceless. He invites Jenna
to be his date to a charity event and she accepts.
She's still shy at heart and hasn't interacted with other
people for the last seven months outside of work. She
clams up and clings to Stephen, who loves all the
attention they get with Jenna on his arm. He drops
her off at home and doesn't try to put a

(01:12:27):
move on her that night, which piques her interest. They
start dating after that. To celebrate the successive priceless Steve Ornstein,
who Jenna has affectionately nicknamed Blinky because he's always squinting,
buys Jenna her dream car, a black Corvette convertible.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
Slowly, I realize that they needed me as much as
I needed them. I could have some sort.

Speaker 10 (01:12:53):
Of control.

Speaker 5 (01:12:56):
To help control the arc and pace of her career.
Janna gets the publicist named Joy King. Joy is surprised
by how petit Jenna is in real life, since she
seems larger than life on screen. They hit it off instantly,
and Jenna finally has a best friend again, who, like Jenna,
is a cool, bisexual nineties babe. Joy and Jenna start

(01:13:19):
scheming how to advance Jenna's career and stardom.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
It was clear to both Steve and me that making
movies was only one part of the job. The rest
was to promote myself to work the entire world as
if it were just one big, crazy horse club. So
Joy's number one objective was simple, to get my face
in the media.

Speaker 5 (01:13:45):
Joy King, like Steve Ornstein's mom, also works as an
accountant for porn. She started out bookkeeping for kids movies
and ended up doing accounting for Caballero Home Video aka
the General Motors of Porn. She then becomes the publicist
for Wicked Pictures. Stave Bornstein wants to keep raising the
bar at Wicked, he green lights one hundred and twenty

(01:14:07):
thousand dollars budget for a movie to be shot on
real film rather than video cameras. It is titled Blue Movie,
no relation to the Andy Warhol art film, and it's
the passion project of Michael Zen, a director who makes
both gay and straight movies. Like Interview with a Vibrator,
Blue Movie is about a transvestite director based on ed Wood.

(01:14:31):
Drag queen Jackie Beet has a non sex speaking role.
While Blue Movie has a huge budget for a porn
it's still low budget. Jenna plays a journalist and tries
her hardest to give a good performance. Now that VCRs
enable viewers to skip past non sex scene parts, they
mostly do, but there are still porn creatives who want

(01:14:54):
to make narrative films where the sex is an extension
of the plot and characters. They know that all almost
no viewers finished watching after they finished themselves, but a
truly compelling pornographic film remains the dream. The first day
on the set of Blue Movie, Jenna be friends a
makeup artist named Lee Garland. Born James Santiago, a Capricorn,

(01:15:18):
he became Lee Garland, a hammy and beloved gay man,
recognizable by his jet black dyed hair and beard connected
into thin sideburns. He does makeup and wigs on what's
called both sides of the hill, Hollywood and Porn Valley.

Speaker 4 (01:15:36):
I'm a makeup artist, not a magician. Lee Garland makeup artist.

Speaker 17 (01:15:43):
He was, in fact a magician. He had a makeup
brush for a wand, and his little designer bags full
of potions and lotions and everything else. He was indeed
a master. You could always tell when Lee was finished
with his final girl. He disappeared just long enough so
that you'd notice he was gone, and he'd come back
with his squinty glazed eyes in his grin, and we

(01:16:04):
knew he just smoked his off duty joint Brad Armstrong.

Speaker 5 (01:16:09):
Director Jenna is starstrek on set by Gina Fine, who
worked with and dated her hero Savannah Michael Zen runs
a tight professional set. Jenna feels finally like she's back
on the right track.

Speaker 20 (01:16:28):
I perform in maybe fifteen sex scenes a month on film,
and if I don't get my dosage of pussy daily,
I did crazy and the chemicals start boiling inside.

Speaker 5 (01:16:39):
Night, Jenna meets her Blue Movie co star TT Boy
born Philip Troy Rivera in Puerto Rico on April thirtieth,
nineteen sixty eight. A five foot seven Taurus te T
Boy is known for a few things. He has a
huge cock, he doesn't kiss, he hates getting blowjobs, and
he fucks like a madman.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
I've lost plenty of work because women are afraid to
work with me. I'd be better off with a little
eight inch prong.

Speaker 5 (01:17:11):
He also studied acting at the Lee Strasburg Institute. When
Jenna sees him for the first time, he is wolfing
down a can of tuna fish. Whatever plans Jenna might
have had for the scene go sideways. When TT Boy
arrives after a couple of minutes of foreplay, he just
starts slamming her.

Speaker 10 (01:17:29):
They shoot take after.

Speaker 5 (01:17:30):
Take in every position, and he comes four times back
to back Jenna and TT Boy become good friends after
the scene. She says, despite his ravenousness on set, he's
chivalrous in real life, offering to beat up her enemies
for her. Jenna loves working with someone who can keep
her on her toes during a scene and make sure

(01:17:51):
that she isn't just fucking on autopilot. A lot of
the woodmen in porn are old, slimeballs or unprofessional, or
thinks'll fall in love with them when they fuck, or
can't keep it up on camera. Jenna respects te T
Boy because he is, like her, a true professional with
a deep respect for the art form.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
There was such great camaraderie on set. It changed my
entire view of the adult industry and showed me what
was possible if every piece was functioning properly.

Speaker 5 (01:18:26):
Gina Fine is cool at first, but on set for
their sex scenes, she becomes robotic. Gina yells at the
crew for making her work with someone as young as Jenna,
which she feels emphasizes her age in comparison. Jenna celebrates
her twenty first birthday on set.

Speaker 1 (01:18:45):
When I first began doing movies, it was so new
and so fun, and I was horny and I just
wanted to have sex.

Speaker 10 (01:19:04):
Next time.

Speaker 5 (01:19:04):
On Jenna World, Episode five, Savannah the story of Jenna's
porn hero Shannon Savannah Wilsey, whose tragic story enabled the
media to turn on the porn industry again. Jenna World
is an iHeartRadio production executive produced by Anna Hosnier and

(01:19:25):
Becco Ramos, supervising, produced by Bei Wang, produced by Victor Wright,
script editing by Jonathan Mills, engineered by Graham Gibson, and
edited by Rory Gagan. Today's episode of General World featured
Lauren ser Video as Jenna Jamison, Max Silvestri as Roco Sifreddi,

(01:19:47):
Cameron Farmer as te t Boy, Natalie Robamed as Susie Randall,
Andrew t as Hugh Hefner, and Lenny Neirojen Romalini as
Moe Grabowski, Harry O'Neil as Nicky Tyler, Emerson Rosenthal as
Jamie Gillis, Dave McNamee as Max Hardcore, Victor Wright as Ron,

(01:20:07):
Jeremy Blake Anderson as David Foster Wallace, Mookie Blakeclock as
Randy West, Corina Longworth as Baby Doll, and Priceless VHS
copy cat Toledo as Vicky, John Daly as Stephen Saint Croix,
Alex Gouter as Steve Ornstein, Connor Malbuff as Peter North,

(01:20:27):
Sam Taggart as Lee Garland, and Stavros Halkias as Brad Armstrong.

Speaker 19 (01:20:34):
Oh my god, ho