GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  I can think of ten scenes that were one hundred percent acting. One percent of what I’ve done is one hundred percent faked and the rest of it, on a good day — fifty percent real and fifty percent enhanced. On a great day, it’s ninety percent real and ten percent tweaked. I’m very happy about my entire body of work. I have to say the educational movies that I’ve done, and the educational engagements that I’ve done, speaking to Universities, speaking to future therapists of America, speaking to health care professionals, I’m most pleased about having done. Nurses are trained to be advocates, to educate and role model, to advocate for sexual literacy and sexual health and sexual freedom. I educate people about how to do sex in a more helpful way or a less horrible way, and I role model about how it looks. That’s what makes me most proud.

  The fact that I do have a college degree behind me, and one in the health profession does give me an “in” where a person who quote/unquote had “only” done porn for the past twenty-six years would not get an in. There are the ones starting out who are twenty-one years old that learn on their own. You can’t tell them anything. A couple of women have listened and those who have listened have done the best. All I can do is put out the information and hope that when the merde hits the fan, they’ll think, “Oh, I remember hearing about this.” People have to learn their own lessons and will only listen when they’re ready. I let go of attachment to them doing it; that is not my department. They have to live their own lives and make their own mistakes.

  Our culture is extremely conflicted about sexuality and conflicted about the role of women. Someone said to me, “But, Nina, why is pornography important?”

  My husband said, “Pornography is important because it is our dreams about sex.” It has to be kept in the hands of people who care about the subject and care about the topic. Professional football should be left to professional football. Pornography should be left to the freaks and the queers. Sex is their life.

  A very famous adult director named Bruce Seven once said, “Behind every successful movie is one man’s hard-on.” The people who do good work are the people who love the subject matter. The biggest problem in porn relating to my career has been because of the mainstreaming of it, because of the normalization of it. People came into porn that used to be widget salesmen. They weren’t sexual rebels, they weren’t outlaws, they weren’t sexually unusual people, they weren’t queer or swingers or kinky or anything. They were just selling widgets. In order for porn to work, it has to grab you by the guts and the crotch or it fails as pornography. Pornography is designed to arouse you. If it doesn’t arouse the people making it, how does it arouse you? It’s partly desensitization, but more importantly, if the product being made had passion behind it, you wouldn’t become desensitized. Feelings are contagious and the emotion expressed on camera should be real. If you’re not numbed out by whatever your drug of choice is, it will get you.

  Nina’s inference to director Bruce Seven’s statement “Behind every successful movie is one man’s hard-on,” alludes to the general assumption porn is made essentially for men to enjoy, which is undeniably true to a large extent. However, it is also true there is potential for all genders to be stimulated by a given product if it is created with the consumer’s best interests in mind as Hartley suggested. Desensitization toward any kind of stimulus is almost inevitable when an individual experiences overexposure even if the object of a person’s interest is made with good intentions. In order for certain individuals to remain motivated by sexual material, it is likely they might require alternative classifications of stimuli.

  Years ago, I saw a movie in Germany when I was still brand new in the business. It was a day off and I went into town to an Adult Book store arcade to put in deutschmarks. You’d put in one deutschmark for ten minutes or whatever. I remember being stuck on this channel — the people were ugly, yet I was fascinated and I couldn’t help but respond authentically in my body toward the scene. I did not like the people but it was so clearly hot for them! They were so deeply into it. I watched in some sort of fascinated horror. I’ve seen lots of porn, and I can still be moved by material that is made with passion and desire. Desensitization occurs when you are constantly bombarded with bland material. That has been the biggest negative effect of porn in the last couple of decades. The barrier to entry is very low, and the barrier to exit is very high. You know, I don’t like horror movies, I don’t like scary movies; I don’t like SAW movies or any kind of hostile films or blood and gore. I’ve seen very few Freddie movies, and yet, humans are feeling animals and feelings are contagious — that’s the way the brain works. Any good art form: poetry, music, painting, it moves us. If you show genitalia in action, it’s pornography.

  In the last ten years, the pendulum has reached the limit of how many things you can put into how many holes. What’s supposed to be “hot” is excess so the only place porn has left to go is feelings. That makes a lot of people embarrassed, and don’t forget, a large amount of people behind the camera themselves are conflicted about sex and relationships. I’d say twenty-five percent of the producers and directors have healthy relationships or are able to have relationships, and the rest are in some form of pain and discomfort over the state of their lives. They’d rather be making action movies; they’d rather be making cable with exploding cars and men with machine guns. Porn ends up being plan “B”. You can’t put porn on your resume. My husband is a fabulous editor; he could edit any number of mainstream magazines, but what do you put on that resume for the last twenty-six years? The skill sets are the same — spreadsheets and budgets. Again, because the subject matter is what it is and pornography enjoys the status that it enjoys, they watch you on Saturday, but they won’t hire you on Monday. That has not changed.

  Sasha Grey notwithstanding: Sasha is twenty-two years old. She has a great agent and a great manager, so she might be the first hybrid to enjoy real success in mainstream, unlike Jenna Jameson who only ever did straight adult films. Jenna never did any gangbang or any anal on camera and she has had a certain kind of success in mainstream, but Sasha Grey is crossing over a bit more so we’ll see how it goes. The material available on her is much more extreme than Jenna or Traci Lords. Traci Lords has had minor success in some “B” movies, but Traci Lords only has one legal adult movie anyway.

  Boogie Nights Revisited

  Familiar with Hartley’s work, director P.T. Anderson hired Nina to play the promiscuous porn star wife of the assistant director, Little Bill (played by William H. Macy), in the 1997 film Boogie Nights. Hartley’s character humiliates her husband by randomly engaging in coitus in public forums. Like Jane Hamilton, Hartley’s recollections of her experiences on the mainstream film set were mixed.

  I had the best time in Boogie Nights. I was in the movie because the director was a fan although I did audition for it. Paul [Thomas Anderson] wanted me in that part. I found him to be a good director. He knew what he wanted and he was very calm on set. No histrionics, no waving of the arms, he was very good with me. He treated me like an actor, but nobody except for William H. Macy spoke to me on the set, no other performer. I think Julianne Moore found me terrifying. She never looked me in the eye. Heather Graham did stand next to me on the red carpet and let people take pictures of us together, but I knew that no picture would ever make it into the press. I also knew that I would never be used in any of the press junkets even though I could actually talk. I knew it would never go anywhere else.

  It was like a regular movie shoot, but infinitely larger. Instead of one or two days, he had fifty days. I was on set for six days. There are five catering tables instead of one. There is a production manager, and three sub-production managers. Instead of one PA, there are six production assistants, that kind of a thing. A lot of it is “hurry up and wait,” and make-up touch ups. That scene where I got shot was about eight or nine takes for that sequence which took most of the day. After each time, I’d have to take off make-up, put on a robe and so on. Having to remember to put
my robe back on was the hardest part.

  I knew that I was hired not only because [P.T. Anderson] is a fan, but also because he wouldn’t have to babysit me in the nudity portion. Mainstream performers are very nervous about being nude. They want the set closed with as very few people as possible. For them doing a love scene is very fraught with fear and insecurity so he didn’t have to worry about whether or not I had a nipple showing. Anderson behaved appropriately toward me. He never suggested anything like “nudge, nudge, wink; wink”. Boogie Nights is actually a Hollywood version of the industry. He got some of the details right, but it’s the Hollywood version of an industry of which he is not a member, so many grains of salt.

  Hartley’s integral scene which takes place during a party sequence is pivotal to the subplot. Her explicit sexual exhibition at the social gathering is one of the final straws, serving as an instigator for her husband’s (Macy) over the edge behavior on New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, it was not Anderson’s intention to provide depth to Hartley’s excellent porn star characterization which prevented the audience from having an opportunity to connect with Nina as Little Bill’s wife, on any level other than her obvious profession.

  Anderson left out two important scenes that would have made my character and Macy’s character full people and not just cartoons. He had to cut off thirty minutes of a finished movie to make it fit into theatres. If he’d left out one minute of bad singing with Mark Walhberg, and one minute of that face stomping, my entire part could have been put in. That part he left out, even in the director’s cut, are Macy and I arriving at that party where I end up doing that guy in the driveway and leaving that same party later that night. I was so pleased — when we were leaving the party, it was called a tracking shot. They set up some dolly shots so that the camera could move smoothly and Macy and I are just talking from the door to the car. He did that take about twelve times and did it a little bit different each time. I had to work on the nuance and the delivery and it wasn’t even in the director’s cut. I asked if he could make a reel for me to look at that, and he said, “Yes, of course.” Of course, it never happened. To this day, I’m still annoyed because it was a decent little bit of acting and it made my character a full person which he clearly didn’t want my character to become. What you see me do there is not a lot of acting. What really pissed me off is the fact that in the tracking two shot going from the party, I’m acting with William Freaking H. Macy, people! Here’s proof.

  Macy is a wonderful guy. He’s a stand-up guy and a wonderful human being. He could not have treated me nicer. He treated me like a fellow actor and not a freak show. During the movie is when he proposed to [Desperate Housewives star] Felicity Huffman, that I thought was very sweet. The world needs more William H. Macy. Once the movie was over, I never saw Anderson again except at the party. I flew especially in from New York to attend the wrap party. I knew it was the only party like that I’d ever get to go to! It was a loud, dark, crowded Hollywood party so I saw Macy for a second, I saw Paul Thomas Anderson for a second. Don’t forget, I was brought in as a curiosity more than anything else; after the movie came out I had offers to be in other things, but they wanted me sort of next week and I couldn’t because I had a career and I was booked in the weeks following the opening of the film. After six months, the calls stopped coming. I knew they would. I realized that if I got any other work it would be the dancing bear kind of work and that didn’t appeal to me. I’m very thrilled to have been a part of that film. John Holmes notwithstanding, porn is still about women. Anderson’s film is a fictitious account.

  The Bloom is off the Rose

  If industry insiders such as Hartley believe sex films have become too commonplace even for pornophiles, what can ardent fans of the genre expect to see in the years ahead apart from what is already available? With a growing demand for Hentai (the Japanese term describing the depiction of pornography in comics or anime), computer games, urban porn, and other offshoots of human copulation archived on camera phones and (often freely) accessible through several mediums, anything is possible.

  It is still in my experience a mixed bag at how mainstream porn has become because before 1992 you still had to mail order it, or go to a store yourself, get a movie and bring it home. That part was very positive. It did bring more women and couples into the viewing audience and help to normalize the experience, and help to make it less shameful and less horrible. The internet is really a mixed bag. Frankly, my husband wishes the internet had never been invented. On the one hand, yes, the internet helps connect isolated communities of sexual minorities. On the other hand, it did open up the potential for piracy. For the first five years of the internet, the people who got in there and who sold sex tapes and sexual things made money hand over fist. Now, of course, it’s evened out and it’s everywhere. Now, it’s not as if we have to go see, we have to look.

  I’m glad that mere nudity doesn’t shock the way it used to. I’m a nudist and I wish people weren’t so freaked out. People will never calm down about sex on a certain level because it’s part of the cultural DNA with the Puritan heritage and the effect of Christian morality on all of the laws governing sex and sexual expression, and all of the laws governing birth control. In twenty-six years of porn, I am thinking overall that it has gone in a neutral, slightly negative direction: oversaturation of inferior product, over competition from piracy and free sites. The bloom is off. It used to be that showing naked breasts could get you money. Again, the biggest problem with porn in our culture is that most of the people who create the product have no particular interest in sexuality. They have no theory. It’s not coming from a place of art, personal drive, personal fire or personal arousal so the porn industry deserves to collapse. It’s like the car industry — if you keep turning out garbage, people are going to go to Japan. Porn has become the same thing — so much bad product. All it has going for it is naked breasts. There is no feeling, no art, and no philosophical concept behind it.

  People who are involved in this industry and doing porn, we are having fun. We love to get to go to work and make love with good-looking people. We get paid and we go home. One of the downsides of mainstream porn is that it attracts too many conventional people into it — people who are not rebellious and people who are not comfortable with sex. It puts them in a job that is not their trip, and then they become very conflicted about what they are doing and with or without the need to self-medicate, in order to go to work. Back in the day, it may have been a party atmosphere, but it wasn’t “I have to take drugs because I’m so horrified by what I’m doing”. For them, and for a lot of people, sex and drugs go together. I was so thrilled. I could not believe my good fortune. I got off on the sex. I got off on having my hands on other people; I get off on watching other people have sex because I’m a voyeur. I get off on the women because I’m bisexual. For me, except for my poor money management skills, porn is a job that I’m thrilled to be a part. I got to have sex and have a lot of different experiences without having that weird intimacy thing. I don’t need to hear about your life or your last girlfriend or your mother.

  One Legacy Fits All

  One of the fascinating aspects in documenting the female contingent of the adult golden era is the fact that each woman featured is a unique and distinct entity with personal attitudes, experiences, and insights to contribute. Their combined years in adult entertainment, either in front of the camera, behind the camera, or on the sidelines in supporting roles have culminated in a collection of memories, emotions, wisdoms, and personal truths. It is clear there are several reasons why women might work in some sector of the sex profession. All participants in this book, no matter their demographic or background: socio-economic, scholastic, ethnic — whether they came from a volatile childhood or grew up in a healthy nurturing home emphatically admit they made their own choices, even those who might not necessarily have chosen porn if they had the opportunity to do it again. All twenty-five subjects are strong females whose collective input to
ward the classic erotic film/movie industry is immeasurable. Nina Hartley neatly underscored the personal legacies that she and her comrades have left behind.

  I would say that the legacy is proof positive that the smack against women as being victims is a lie. I recognize all of the eighties Pioneers like Annie Sprinkle on sexual media and philosophy in terms of empowering women. You have women like Kay Parker, and Juliet Anderson, and me, and Sharon Mitchell, and Candida Royalle who are individual women who have individual personalities and have their own way of doing things. I say that’s good for them. They laid down their rules and people listened. They are not cookie-cutter women. They are not two-dimensional people. They are clearly unique. Annette Haven has a certain style of performing. Juliet Anderson had a way of being on camera. Kay Parker had a way of being on camera that was distinctly Kay Parker. You can’t mistake Kay Parker for Candida Royalle because they are completely different. Their personalities would come through and they are clearly real people. Georgina Spelvin is another, and Seka, and Jane Hamilton. We can go look at them and see their individuality. That definitely is one legacy. There is proof out there that women can enjoy sex.