by Jake Brown
Charlie Fry: With Jasmin and in the case of every other star I handled, they very quickly realized they don’t want to be one of the pack — making small money. They quickly realized they want to be a star, because like many girls in the industry, they’re dealing with all kinds of negative selfimage issues, and inherent character traits that lend themselves to needing and wanting attention.That is what I played on, and Jasmin already had a negative self-image when I started working with her, and what I did was tap into what was causing them pain to essentially exploit it by directing them where to go in the business. Jasmin was definitely emotionally scarred, deep enough that she would do whatever it took to get to the top — no matter how unsavory the image she had to take on.
I found Jasmin to be extremely malleable, extremely responsive to anything that I needed for her to do. She was very motivated in the beginning, and was a natural back then at selling this outrageous image we were building for her as the world’s most controversial sex symbol. So starting out, she was very gung-ho, very motivated, she had the attitude of, ‘I want it, and I’ll do anything to get there.’
Jasmin: Once I was back in California, Charlie had me working almost immediately in a variety of adult entertainment-related avenues that in hindsight were clearly designed to push me toward the eventual goal of film. For all his underhanded business dealings and charging me 35% of every fucking dollar I made in commissions, I will give him that he was good at what he did. One lesson I’ve learned after this many years in the business is an agent’s job is simple: to get you work. Well, Charlie kept me busy right from the beginning. First off, he had me doing feature dance gigs locally and in some cases nationally that brought me between $1800 and $2000 per week. He’d also lined me up with some calendar and magazine shoots in publications like Penthouse and High Society, which provided me with some great initial exposure. Being entrepreneurial on my own right from the start, I also landed photo layouts independently with Hustler and Gallery. Charlie got me some little vignette video pieces in a couple Playboy video specials, so it was clear to me that there was some demand for me right off the bat.
Charlie Fry: First of all, most of the girls I dealt with had already had experience being a stripper, and Jasmin had already done some dancing, and with Jasmin, both of our interest at the time was in her becoming a feature. Because just doing porn scenes alone wasn’t where the big money was, it was out on the road in strip clubs dancing live for your film audience as a feature. She was a pro right from the jump too. I remember when we first got started I had a feature booked into Ft. Myers. We were in Ft. Lauderdale, and another girl I managed had started the gig Thursday night at the Orenthia, but had been beaten up by her boyfriend Friday during the day, badly enough that she couldn’t appear on Friday night. Jasmin at that time had done some stripping, but hadn’t danced as a feature before. I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to put Jasmin to the test and gave her a crash-course on what to do. She then borrowed a mini-van I’d let her borrow, drove to Ft. Lauderdale, literally showed up at 8 o’clock, stepped into a borrowed costume and went on stage. She pulled it off too! I think that showed me that she had a mix of talent that blended very naturally with a boldness that she displayed right from the jump. It’s this gung-ho/do anything attitude that got her as far as she did in as short a time as she’d had in the business when she became a star.
Jasmin: Because of my ethnic make-up and darker complexion, I also had a unique appeal that made me a bit more exotic to the generic white girls who dominated the business at the time I was beginning to enter that world. As the weeks wore on heading into the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996, the more money I made and the more attention I got, the more I also began to see where I had something unique to offer. Things truly changed when Charlie got me onto the Jerry Springer Show, offering me national exposure for the first time and showing me its implied potential. While the magazine shoots and feature dance spots were great, I wasn’t able to properly expose (pardon the pun) myself to maximizing my money making potential without the component of video stardom, which was a norm for any high-profile dancer on that circuit. It was just a fact of the business, and I could already see from the differentials in what I could charge versus someone like Tiffany Lords, who Charlie also managed at the time. As a manager, Charlie also had a subtle but ever-present way of controlling every situation he was in that made me afraid to question him. He was very convincing, and he used basic dollars and sense in my case to secure my agreement to give adult film a shot. He didn’t appeal to the glamour of it with me, because he knew I was a businesswoman, unlike most of his dim-witted clientele. He also told me he knew he could make me a huge star. I believed him once he explained the demographics of porn and where he thought I would fit in as something different.
Charlie Fry: I would basically just lay out what I called an ‘If / Then’ statement. Wherein I said, ‘If you want to be a big feature star and don’t want to spend years building up your reputation, then here are the choices of what you have to do. You can go out and fuck a Senator or Governor and get caught; you can become a major porn star by doing something outrageous; marry or get caught with some celebrity — but those are all flash in the pan type things. If you really want to see the big money — which is really what the premise was in feature dancing, you need to have the infamy.’ And from my memory, she was into it: she wanted the money, the fame, to change from an unknown to becoming a name in the business.
Jasmin: To me, that meant that much more money and the catalyst actually came one day when we were discussing features and the fact that they grossed more when the dancer was also an adult film star. They were the ones who could command the most, and he made it sound like that was something to consider. The other porn star he managed at the time, Tiffany Lords at the time, who had co-starred in a John Wayne Bobbit movie, had gotten a good bit of media attention from it, so I saw the exposure factor was naturally much higher. While I had Charlie talking in one ear, I had had Kurt talking in the other prior to our break up about how much the feature dancers made when they also had film going on. Once I’d agreed, he sent me to a company called Blue Coyote Productions, that he’d worked with in the past, and they had me in mind for a single-scene that would pay me $800, plus another $500 for a photo shoot they would do on-site. So it was $1300 for a day’s work, which was basically two-thirds of what I was used to making in a week dancing. I also was thinking in my mind about the fact that doing this would raise my feature rates, so I kept my eye on the money, and suffered through whatever inevitable anxiety I was feeling my first day on the set.
My first day on the set of my first scene fell on a spring afternoon in April of 1995. I was supposed to go down the night before and had no car to speak of, so the company had to arrange a ride for me. Anyway, getting down to Palm Springs, I had actually been chauffeured — so to speak — by my actual CO-STAR, Peter North, who I had never heard of before. I actually even confused him with another porn star named Randy Spears, so you can imagine the look on my face when he showed up at my apartment to pick me up. My naivety would come back in my face BIG TIME later that day — and I’m not speaking figuratively — but on the drive down, I was just obviously nervous. You could read it on my face like I was wearing a sign that said ‘new girl’across my forehead, and in truth, I had only ever seen one porn movie before in my life. Anyway, I was happy we were shooting in Palm Springs, because it’s a very relaxed resort town about two hours outside of L.A. and is designed to calm, which I needed badly by the time we pulled up to the Palm Desert Springs Resort. The confusion about my co-star had been shared by the company producing the video and when we arrived, Randy Spears’ picture was up on the wall instead of Peter’s. To boot, even though we were shooting at a really nice resort hotel, they had put me up at the Motel 6, fulfilling Charlie’s ‘Deluxe Accommodations’promise! At least Peter took me out to dinner the night before at Tony Roma’s, which was nice of him. I guess he could see I was nervous and w
anted me to feel more comfortable with him the next day, and soon enough I would see why.
So lying in bed that night, with the next morning and all that was to come hanging over me, I was trying to review any and all advice I’d gotten over the past spring and summer, from dancers who’d done film to Charlie to people who worked at video companies. Later on, the director who I worked for on my rise to stardom, John T. Bone’s had the best advice to keep work and business separate, which was more general, a few specifics I had picked up from visiting a couple sets were as follows:
Most of the men who actually fucked on screen weren’t that good looking, which had been a big revelation to me until you considered the stamina factor. In that average-looking guys statistically had an easier time keeping it up for the amount of time it took to shoot one of these scenes, which could run several hours at a minimum. Some of the men I worked with even used DICK injections to stay hard. I never helped a guy off-screen to stay hard, because it’s his job; he’s getting paid to be a performer. Part of his job is to keep a hard-on. So on screen, when the camera’s rolling, I did whatever I had to do, but off-camera, never. On top of that, most of the viewers of these movies were average looking men, and John had once explained that from a marketing point of view, we wanted our target audience to feel like they were right there in the room fucking us. The men were ornamental, as most times it was the women who were the focal point — i.e. stars of the movie and fantasy, so those two points added up nicely in my mind because it made me more the star and my male counterpart on screen more like my driver.
The fact that the men I had to work with on screen were average looking made it easier to not be tempted to date them off-set, because they weren’t hot. To amplify that point, I had met Ron Jeremy on one of the sets I’d visited, and I noted both that I didn’t find him attractive in the least, and he could stay hard forever. He was a very nice guy though, but I never worked with him.
One of the most practical pieces of advice I suppose I got was from another porn star named Misty Rain, who I met at a feature once on the road. I befriended her, and she gave me some simple words of wisdom: Have a glass of wine or two before your scene, because it will help massively to relax you. John was very strict about people not drinking on set, so it had to be discrete, but that definitely helped to relax my nerves a bit. You just had to be careful not to get outright drunk because eventually you’d pass out on set. So with all this swirling through my mind, I felt a little bit woozy and fell thankfully to sleep.
When I got up the next morning, I felt naturally nervous, like I was heading into an audition of some sort even though I already had the part. When I got to the set, there was an extremely cool make-up artist named Steven Ernheart waiting to work with me, and he did a very nice job, which made me feel better, but I still felt really out of my environment. He was also EXTREMELY gay which meant I naturally felt more relaxed around him also. He did my hair up big and bouncy and had dolled me up with all different kinds of face make-up, like dark lids and light lips, so it looked really sexy. So from that, I at least felt the set-up was professional, which also made me feel more at ease. Next, they did my photo-shoot, both to get it out of the way and to transition or ease me into the next phase of the day, which was the actual porn shoot. So the photo shoot went like a breeze, I could do those in my sleep. So a couple of hours later, they ushered me from the photo set onto the movie set, and it immediately disagreed with me because there were an obvious ton of people hanging around who had no direct relevance to the shoot. To me, this was 100% business, not a social hour, and it made me very uncomfortable, but I wasn’t established enough yet to just wave them all off the set. I guess they were going for some kind of a ‘family environment’ where everyone was very friendly with each other, which stood contrary entirely to the impersonal method by which the actual porn scenes were shot. On screen, it was all business, in spite of how we made it look for the viewers at home, and I preferred to stay in that headspace the entire time I was on set. I didn’t mix business and pleasure ever if I could avoid it — that went back to my dancing days, and every time I’d broken that rule, I’d ended up with an asshole like Dick or Kurt.
When I’d first signed up with Metro, which at the time was one of the biggest porn video companies in the business, John T. Bone had given me the indispensable piece of advice of keeping my personal life as separated from my professional life as I could. He explained I would have tons of groupies and hangers-on who wanted to be my friend as I became a bigger star over time. He pointed out that the set wasn’t for socializing, which was a little funny sounding that day because there were people everywhere hanging around who didn’t belong. But in the larger scheme of things, John had the right idea regarding work ethic. I saw quickly that other girls and guys around me who were also acting in these movies would get together on the weekend, party, and have orgies and whatnot living like their whole life was a movie set. It was just not the way I approached things at all, even from that first day. I was all business, I didn’t see anyone there as a friend, and tried very hard to maintain a life outside of my shoots that had nothing to do with the business. I was there to make money, not friends. So while I’m sitting there that day, trying to prep myself mentally for all of what was coming, there’s all this irrelevant chatter going on around me I was trying to block out. Well, I should have been at least listening a little, because someone asked me if I’d ever worked with Peter North before, and when I replied that I hadn’t even known who he was before that day, a bunch of the make-up and hair people started laughing.They had actually been laughing in reaction to an answer I’d given to the question of whether I had ever worked with Peter before. When I had answered not just no, but that I had no idea who he was before that day, they all just erupted.
Anyway, Steve, my make-up artist could clearly see I was NOT getting the joke or laughing along. So he took enough mercy on me to let me in on the fact that Peter came VERY well endowed, such that Steve had to use his curling iron as a visual aid to re-enforce his point! Naturally, my eyes went wide when he held this thing up, but then to boot he went past the size issue when he told me Peter North’s nickname on the set- THE DECORATOR. I supposed to a bunch of gay make up people that is funny, but they weren’t the target — figuratively or literally — of the joke, I WAS. Anyway, right around the time all this was flooding through my mind, washing away any confidence I had built up for what was about to CUM, the director John T. Bone calls for everyone to get prepared to shoot. I felt like I was in a daze of some kind, with television monitors and cameras and lights. I was dizzy and felt a little like someone had spiked my drink or something, which was probably the best mental state for me to be in given it was my first time. A porn star’s job isn’t like anyone else’s where you walk in the first day and someone greets you with a manual on how to perform your job, and someone else trains you in, and picks up the slack when you’re a little slow picking up the pace. You have a director, make up people and a co-star, but in essence you’re being asked to take the most intimate thing two people share. Not only do it with a room full of people watching, but ultimately with the potential for the whole world to see you nude and being hammered by what turned out to be the largest male member I’d ever seen. Let alone had inside me. The director was a very patient guy. He was telling us what he wanted, what positions and so forth. Anyway, the whole shoot took about 3 hours, and by the end I was in such pain that I was dying for something to cool me off. Well…not exactly the liquid I ended up getting splashed all over my face, but I finally found out what Peter North was famous for, and why he was called THE DECORATOR when he shot a monster load of his cum all over my face and hair. It was arguably the most disgusting thing I have ever experienced in my life, in spite of how we made it look to you on screen. I felt…well, dirty, and I guess that was emotionally appropriate in context of what we were doing, but it was degrading rather than sexy to me.
I held it together till the director yelled,
‘Cut’, but once the scene was done Peter could see I was visibly in a state of mild shock. So he was immediately apologetic, and even more so when he found out I had no idea that was his signature thing as a porn star. When he did it, I was flabbergasted and scared and wondered what the fuck I got myself into. I was flipping out inside, even while he was inside me, because I had no idea how big Peter North was.Then when he came all over my face and it got in my hair and shit, that was the scariest thing. I was just devastated, but in the same time I wasn’t turned off. In a way, I felt like I was, you know, creating fantasies. I felt glamorous and hot, you know, even from the first time. Anyway, he drove me back to Huntington Beach, and Charlie called once I was home to see how everything had gone. I lied and told him fine, but I was still a little uneasy inside about the whole thing, but at the same time, couldn’t help feeling any damage that was coming was already done in a way. My logic there turned into a ‘why turn back now’ kind of thing, but it isn’t like you do one porn shoot one day and the next they have you lined up for something else. You’re NOT A WHORE, in spite of what assholes on the religious right might like to think. Half of those fuckers can’t get hard without watching one of my videos anyway, which makes them bigger hypocrites if you think about it. Anyway, to fill time until the next shoot, Charlie of course had a bunch of dance dates lined up down in Florida. We had about a week of press to do down there anyway in conjunction with the movie, so I guess in a way I was grateful for the distraction. So while I was down in Florida, Charlie’s mental wheels were already turning on how we could kick start me out of the small time and into the big time, because I guess he saw there was this stagnate thing going on in the industry at that time. Something was missing, and it wasn’t so much in shock value, or even in how over the top things could be where they were kind of stationary in a way. In sexual terms, it was like everyone was doing this missionary thing and it felt like there was this massive element of excitement missing from the virtual middle-America bedroom our movie sets were supposed to represent an escape from. So while Charlie and I are sitting in his office one day brainstorming, we came up with the idea that would make me a Frat House LEGEND: The World’s Greatest Gang Bang.
