What Do people Like Melissa Hill and Ruby and Sean Michaels Know About Porn Today

13 Responses

1. Why is it that porn chickies tend to buy handbags (of which rumor has it some cost over $5K each) and shoes. Performers need some pairs of shoes to wear performing but if they have more than ten pair they bought too many. Also, who in the hell needs a $5K handbag (probably charged to MasterCard or Visa) when perfectly serviceable purses are available for less than $50 — most of their cars are probably worth less than $5K for crying out loud unless they are in debt up to their assholes leasing or buying a Mercedes like one now former performer whom I will leave unnamed here wrote in her book she had and ended up turning in early because she couldn’t pay her lease payments (which I understand has actually happened to more than one performer over the past 20 years)! Give me a fucking break, 40%-60% of porn chicks — grow a brain and use that cash you are making with your tits, mouth, pussy and ass (that last one in more than one way) to make a future for yourself or at least support yourself if you aren’t lucky enough to make it more than six months in the biz! Look to people (but ignore the posts about smoking marijuana) like Kasey Warner who isn’t blowing 80% of her cash on ridiculous items like a $5K purse or $40K worth of shoes (admittedly her Twitter leads me to believe she probably spends a fair share of her paychecks in Home Depot buying tools and fixing up her house — but at least she has a house to do that with). Also, you can say what you wish about Phyllisha Anne, Melissa Hill and Kylie Ireland but you don’t see them with a fundraiser request for motorbike accidents, health problems, etc. unlike some (including Sharon Mitchell — she crashed her motorcycle and couldn’t afford to repair it even after all those years at AIM and performing, look her up on the Rialto Report to see that one).

2. I think this reflects a couple of things. The first is that the emergence of people who are a little older and experienced (dare I also say wiser) to lead the union is not unlike what happens in Mainstream. The leaders of the screen actors guild are not the hot young actors and actresses who are lighting up the screen – frankly, they’re too busy working. Rather its typically older, experienced talent that have been around and worked a lot, typically as character actors and extras, and who have a sense for business and administration. Just because you’re young, look enthusiastic and sexy giving head and every director wants you for now doesn’t mean you’re qualified to run a union. Meanwhile, just because you’re shot out or past your sell by date doesn’t mean you didn’t learn something during your time onset or now have the distance and skills to get something done for the body as a whole. I’m not in the industry, but everything I’ve ever read about Sean Michaels over the years was that he was a gentleman, a class act and a businessman because he had his own line of titles for awhile.

   But, lack of buy-in from the current crop of hot young things will doom a union. The only way it will work is if they can put together a coalition that includes the most important production companies who agree only to hire talent that has joined the union and, more importantly, to refuse to hire talent that has crossed the line – in Hollywood, that’ll get you blackballed in a heart beat. Second, the union has to deliver something of lasting value to the talent – to me, that would be some kind of minimum standard rates and residuals.

   You could argue that the union could advocate for performer safety, but OSHA may take care of that for them. The union could merely take a stand that it expects producers and directors to abide by the law. Then, I suppose, it would be up to the union to decide if it wants to report every non-condom shoot to OSHA.

   If the whole point of the union is to create an avenue for a health care and a voluntary 401(k) retirement plan, its not a union, its an association. And, while folks have taken exception when I’ve written this before, any performer can get health insurance through the affordable care act with premiums that will probably be competitive with anything the union can put together for comparable coverage, and any performer who wishes can open a SEP IRA at Schwab tomorrow if they want to create their own retirement plan. I suppose a union or association could provide access to a financial planner who could help porn chicks make sounder financial decisions about their contributions. But again, that’s an association and not a union.

   Not a bad thing, but a different thing.

   At the end of the day, given the length of time performers stay in the industry, the lifeblood of the union is going to be the new performer who comes in and burns bright for a few years. If you can’t mandate that they join, a union won’t have much in the way of teeth. The people who should benefit from the union are the performers who really do make a career out of adult entertainment, such as Nina Hartley (who performed for 30 years), Julia Ann (nearly 25 years), Jesse Jane (15 years), Phoenix Marie (nearly 10 years), Kayden Kross (10 years), and Stoya (who spent 8 years in the industry). They have performed in hundreds of scenes – maybe a thousand in Nina’s case – and while folks are still watching them online, they get nothing from it. In mainstream, they’d still be earning something, no matter how small, every time their work is rebroadcast on cable.

3. “How dare you to call me a slut?!” she said after taking two up her cunt and one up her ass. It’s no surprise what Mike points out. It’s the politically correct culture, baby. I am I and you are nobody. It’s a bit too late to cry at this after two decades of education to entitlement by the media, politicians and even (and especially) parents. Pink quotas, islamists, differently able, coloured, intellectually challenged, hearing impaired, migrating resource, person of size…shall I continue? We have changed dictionaries creating stupid neologisms to artificially mask or sweeten the reality. Obviously now we are dealing with a bunch of entitled differently adults (translate: kids).

4. How any performer spends their money is NONE of your business. Let’s stop pretending that new girls or female performers in general are making hundred thousand a year & just squandering it. And how much of that money goes back to their agent for flying them to LA, model house, test fees & then agent fees.
   _______________________________________________
   There are lots directors & company owners now are broke that made WAY more than the female talent in this industry for much longer period of time. But NONE of you throw shade on them the way you do the female performers. Some who have made millions of dollars are now broke _____________________________
   Male talent may have gotten paid half of what their females did, but then they were booking 5 to even 10 scenes a week for YEARS that are now broke. Legends who are now broke.
   _____________________________________________________
   Hell, many who had big homes, new cars, savings accounts & normal jobs lost it from the housing market crash & then the economic downturn…. Did they squander their money too.
   STOP HATING ON THE FEMALE TALENT
   You are only keeping the status quo & preventing something like this Union from being a success. This is a systematic way to keep telling the females in this industry we don’t matter, we aren’t good enough.
   Doing this helps keep those agents & directors who take advantage of new performers in place.

5. Performers, producers, and others that made big money for years in the adult biz and have squandered it away, all have one thing in common. With few exceptions, they never treated what they were doing as a legitimate business. Money was easy, foresight was short.

6. Sam hit the nail on the head. Very FEW performers, male or female have ever made over $100,000.00 from performing in porn Throw in the escorting ie prostitution, dancing ie stripping, and some of them break the six figure mark. I remember in 2005 AIM had an anonymous questionalre that asked how much do you make, in movies, escorting and dancing. One female performer, who was definately one of the top performers of all time, who many assumed would be making a million bucks wrote $165,000.00 as her answer. As I was talking to Mitch about it I said I’m making more than that just off their blood and piss. And Mitch said, “And you dont have to shove anything up your ass.” Classic Mitch.

7. First, of the 100 most prolific porn stars of all time (that is, the ones who have starred in the most films), 96 are men. Next, the ten most prolific male performers, on average, have slept on-screen with 1,013 different women each (45 a year for an average career length of 22.4 years). Whereas the ten most prolific women on average have slept with 148 different men (8 a year for an average career length of 17.7 years). Nina Hartley, for instance, who made her porn debut in 1984 and has starred in more porn flicks than any other woman on earth (938), has slept with 199 different men on film. Tom Byron, on the other hand, who has more film credits than any other man (2,549), and who made his debut only two years earlier than Hartley, has slept with over five times more people of the opposite gender than her: 1,127 different women. Men in porn—in an almost absurd parody of the masculine stereotype—really get around. – See more at: http://jonmillward.com/blog/studies/deep-inside-a-study-of-10000-porn-stars/#sthash.lvOAMBTh.dpuf

8. If these statistics are correct Nina made 938 movies & let’s narrow down the time frame from 1984 to the year 2000 and say she got paid $1000 for each one. Nina averaged $6250 a year from paid porn shoots.

   Maybe the fantasy we are all being sold that performers especially female performers are making all this money, getting super rich & blowing all the money they made filming porn movies.

9. If you want to get depressed, listen to the stars of the golden age talk about their lives after porn. I have not listened to Seka’s recording yet, but as to the others, one after another – from Veronica Hart to Sharon Mitchell to Lisa DeLeuw – discuss their drug addition or alcoholism, their money woes, their failed relationships and their thoughts of suicide or attempts at suicide. It ain’t pretty.

10. Keep in mind that people who left porn behind and that are happy are NOT going to talk about their lives for public consumption. I used to wait tables at a pizza joint 20 yrs ago. Not going onto pizza place forums if they exist & talk about my life since then.

11. ya that site certainly has script potential doesnt it…..

12. Sam I agree with you and would think that most of the girls who have been successful in the long term did it on their own, like you have, they own and manage their brand and their content you and others like you that have been very successful on the internet arent really like your cousins in porn valley

13. You say Sean Michaels stopped working a dozen years ago? Nope – he is still active and has probably done more in the past dozen years than 99% of the people in the biz will ever do during their entire illustrious career… and Melissa Hill is so entrenched in the biz, albeit still keeping her cute knees tightly and safely closed, that we had her co-host the XRCO AWARDS SHOW a little over a year ago…