One of the first things you do learn about renting your place out for a film production is the money you make is like the money you make going to the local Indian Casino. Things might go very smoothly, you have a great time, and walk to the bank with an easy check to cash. Or the opposite. What felt like a win at the time you were having all the fun is actually a loss when you reconcile everything later after the fun and the booze wear off. You get a check but it will barely cover the expense of the carpet the grip lit on fire with the cigarette that he should not have been smoking, nor will it cover the long distance calls the distraught starlet made to her suitcase pimp boyfriend that is still back in Ohio taking care of his court dates, you won’t get reimbursed for the couch that was permanently stained by the toxic jizz the stud launched for a facial but missed because he was too busy trying to jack himself off and couldn’t see where he was spewing with his eyes closed to concentrate on getting off. Of course, I warned Ing and Spark of all of that, but risks be damned, they needed the money to make back rent before the landlords served them with an eviction.

So, if they were going to let porn be shot in their studio then they had to take their chances, including letting Ron “the hedge hog” himself burrow into their couch for one of his infamous power naps that most speculated was actually mild narcolepsy.

They had to be prepared for anything.

Ing had also worked herself in to do make up for the shoot too. That turned out to be the first sign that not everything was going to be going as smoothly as I had hoped. Ing ran into our studio. She looked distraught but seemed to be holding herself together well enough to ask a question.

“I don’t know what to do.” She asked.

“About what?” I replied as casually as possible to try and foster a sense of peace and tranquility.

“Make up.” Ing said. Strange, she worked for a cosmetics company and had done make up for mainstream feature films in LA so that was not really what I expected from her.

“What about it? Do you need supplies?” Supportive. Concerned. Helpful.

“No, I have everything I need.” She was fidgeting and nervous.

“What is the problem then?”

“They want me to put make up on her ass to cover up pimples – I have never done that – I didn’t expect to have to do that – I don’t know if I am comfortable with that – I don’t know what to do!” She looked like she was going to cry any second.

“Well…” I guess I didn’t really know what to say to that. Anything coming to mind was going to sound callused and un-sympathetic. Sex videos have naked people in them; that is just a fact, and naked people sometimes have pimply  asses that require make up to hide those unsightly blemishes. Just be glad you aren’t going to be the one picking up the anal condoms afterwards, honey… I was thinking…

Your pussy was sweet
I remember it clearly
Those scratches left scars

If you have heard of Sasha Grey, then you may know her as the porn star that crossed over to mainstream and appeared in Steve Soderberg’s “Girlfriend Experience” and as a semi-regular on the hit show “Entourage”. Porn fans of course know Sasha Grey movies by what a craven little slut she appears to enjoy acting as and some of her Amateur-Footage-439225.html”>scenes are considered legendary. Sasha Grey has almost a 100,000 followers on Facebook. Millions of viewers have seen Sasha on free tubes or grabbed her torrents, but one movie they haven’t seen Sasha in his her first amateur porn videos which have found their way to Homegrown Video, the original amateur porn company.

Everyone has to start somewhere, even in the porn world, and that usually means making an amateur sex tape and sending it around to companies like Homegrown Video. In fact, Homegrown has been the first step on the way to porn superstardom for many others like Wicked Pictures’ Stephanie Swift, and Vivid’s Meggan Malone. Before Sasha Gray did Entourage, before her movie, and before she was getting fucked by Rocco, she made amateur porn too, only know one ever had a chance to see it because it was buried and lost in a tangle of missed opportunities and high expectations.

Finally Sasha Grey’s amateur porn videos have been “found” and released by Homegrown Video. This is Sasha Grey before the superstardom and the mainstream success. If you want to see what Sasha was like when she was just a horny young lady trying to break into porn, when she could have you’re your girlfriend and hung out in your entourage, before she learned her “chops” and developed her own sexual stylings, when she was just a raw talent waiting to fuck and suck her way to the top of porn and beyond, then you need to see her Homegrown Video, Cherries #80.

Alyssa was done. Time to go.
I was living the stereotype like a freaking sucker chump on a slow decline into palookaville. Feeling ashamed, hollowed out, carved up, and roasted crisp. Ashamed that I wasn’t smart enough to read the signs and see the play going down to suck us out of whatever we could give up to make their scene. Hollowed out by my greed which eviscerated me and left me gutless and wretched in my own bullshit, I was easy carvings for a couple of hacks with greedy intentions and little remorse. The drive home Alyssa roasted me for failing the sacred calling of manly men to defend his woman to death do you part. Fucked. Fucked over. Fuck.
I was a total heel. Worse, I was the gummy shit stuck to the bottom of the heel that picks up all the crap until it lop sides the gait and must be scraped off. I felt disgusted and useless but if there was one thing I could do it would be to talk to Jim South. After all, he was our agent and he proclaimed that he would be playing sheriff if ever we had a problem on set. He was the one to talk to if we had a problem, if we couldn’t get paid for example, he would be there to make things right and make sure the sun would still be setting in the west.
I went into the office but had to wait while he took call after call and found enough to keep busy with between calls that I began to wonder if he even knew I was sitting there. But then he would remind me that, yes, I was actually there waiting, as he would look at me and make eye contact then sort of nod like my number had obviously not come up yet. So wait.
Finally, he looked at me. Only now he wasn’t just the sheriff but also the judge, jury, and executioner too. Apparently, I guess we were the ones that had the problem.
“I heard you had some problems on set yesterday”. His okie accent made the word “problems” stretch out, roll, and snap like a whip across the back. I tried to explain but he was not the least bit concerned about me getting paid; see, I was a slave to his getting paid. “If you are going to turn down work then I don’t know what you expect me to do”.
I did all I could do. I agreed. Thanked him not so much for his time but for teaching me a good hard painful lesson. Yes suh, massah, suh.
If Aja were still in the business then I would’ve asked her what we should do next time. If she had any great advice on how to deal with the agents, and directors, and producers, and talent and all the other freaks, trolls, and scary monsters we might have yet to encounter. Making amateur videos had been so much better, more fun, easier; maybe we should go back to doing that and forget the LA porn scene. I would’ve liked to have one more chance to chat – to pick her brain – free of charge again. But she had already retired from the business, like a thousand others that came through LA, and made a trip around the World Modeling office then fall off the face of this earth.

Los Angeles, CA

Homegrown Video has won numerous awards for its content over the years, but one accolade has always eluded the company, an Xbiz award. From Las Vegas Nevada’s AVN show to the Venus show in Berlin, Homegrown has won awards for best amateur and special praises for being the longest running series in the history of porn. However, Xbiz Awards typically celebrate and emphasize online achievement so for Homegrown to finally be recognized points to one more sign that the company has really “arrived” online to span the globe.

Many old school brick and mortar porn companies are typically tainted with the perception of being obsolete in today’s online community. Homegrown Video has labored to prove that not only is its brand of homemade amateur porn still relevant to the fans, but that also the company is still a vital player in the adult industry. Indeed, surveying the landscape of mountains of content, one finds that true amateur porn has never been more popular.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Homegrown will never be satisfied with that. True to original form, Homegrown sets the standard and lead the way, staying cutting edge as it cleaves a path to the future of online adult entertainment.

Winner of more adult awards for amateur content than any other, Homegrown Video is the original amateur adult video company, established in 1982. Recognized by Newsweek Magazine as the “longest running series in the history of porn”, Homegrown Video continues to thrive online, on cable television, and with wholesale and retail sales of its DVDs worldwide. The exclusive site for Homegrown Video’s immense library is www.homegrownvideo.com. Wholesale inquiries may contact Sales Representatives at Pure Play Media, 818.717.5355. All other inquiries may contact Homegrown directly at 619-641-7969.

Stephanie Swift did a fine job of pretending to listen. And who says that porn actresses don’t know how to act? I completely believed her as she assured me that she wanted to stay under the Homegrown Video umbrella, protected from the shit storm of bullshit that seemed to be looming on the horizon of the Los Angeles porn scene. Was I naïve to trust that she felt comfortable and secure in our little corner of amateur porn where she could have sex with whoever in whatever manner however she desired? Not really. If I became jaded with mistrust and treated her accordingly with mistrust and a mercenary desire to  extract whatever last vestige of her dignity and self worth that I could then that would take me just one step closer to everything that I rejected in that LA scene. I might just as well move back there and run the porn equivalent of a chop shop – where all the stolen desperate souls of earnest young starlets are painted with whorish make up and their bodies are recast with silicone replacement parts and the identification numbers that one counts as a measure of self worth are ground down and replaced with something false so that I could sell them out fast and cheap.

Chalk it up to one more reason why I am a total failure as a porn kingpin.

Stephanie Swift said she wanted to take some time off and think about things. Her relationship came first. She wanted to do more videos and she wanted to do her first true box cover with Homegrown but she had to make sure that her boyfriend and his parents didn’t discover her anal sex scene performed sans condom. Ok, then just call us if and when you are ready.

We never heard from her.  Too bad. She was certainly star material. A woman truly born to porn. She had the looks. She had the honest to goodness real sex drive that would keep her going when the charm of quick money had long since been replaced by endless days on a set with terrible catering, whiny male co-stars wearing ankle high sports socks, directors with their dicks out, and bitchy starlets trying to usurp her contracts were daily rigueur. Bummer. The big trade show in Las Vegas was coming up and having someone of Stephanie Swift’s caliber standing behind your booth attracting the horny fans in droves to your booth would have been fantastic. I called to see if she would just want to come out and sign some autographs. All expense paid trip  to Las Vegas to party and sign autographs is something most brand new girls in the porn scene would jump at, but not Stephanie.

She wouldn’t even return my calls.

“Well, there are thousands of videos made per month so the likelihood of him seeing it is not very big.” I said consolingly. “Besides Max isn’t going to put you on the box cover is he?”

“I can’t be on the box at all.” Stephanie Swift was standing at that crossroads moment, no way to go forward without paying a price, no way to go back free and clear of a lasting record of her antics. Forever now barricaded by the barbed wire of people’s opinions of what she was doing, Stephanie Swift was going to have to learn what lust in the big porn city of Los Angeles really meant. Lust for the latest hot girl in the porn biz is one thing but lust for the almighty dollar is another mightier lust. Lust for the woman can be quenched in minutes, while lust for the dollar usually can never be satiated. Stephanie Swift had to come to grips with the fact that the only way to sell more videos than the competition is to put your best face forward, literally. She was going to have to become a porn star and rise to the level that God and LA’s porn moguls intended or she was going to have to quit now and hope that no one even saw her in a video until she could make the excuse that it was just someone that looked like her… a lot like her but definitely not her.

“Can you tell Max to not put me on the box?”

“I can ask but I can’t promise anything. Max has to run his business differently than I do. I can make that promise. Max could maybe make that promise. But the other people that Max sells his titles too are not about to make any promise like that.”

“I really don’t want my boyfriend to find out what I did. If he finds out that I performed anal sex without a condom then he will definitely break up with me.”

“Doesn’t he understand that being in the porn biz is about all kinds of sex? Didn’t you guys talk about the risks before you started doing this?” I had asked that very question – a few times – so at this point I was simply being a grindstone of accountability against which responsibility is sharpened. Whether or not this approach was working at helping the situation or not was just a very dull, absolutely mute point. I just had to whet my appetite for making a point even when there was not a point to the point of what point was so pointedly making everything so difficult.

I was worried about Stephanie going to Los Angeles to work with Max Hardcore. There were plenty of models that after working with Max decided porn was definitely not for them  and would hit the eject button on the porn vehicle career path before even really pulling out of the starting gate. Shooting a Max Hardcore scene was certainly a trial by fire. He demanded high intensity, extreme sexual acrobatics, and absolute obedience to his directing style. Love him or hate him for the type of content he makes, one still has to acknowledge that he does have a standard of style and, scoff at this all you want, an artistic vision for what he is doing.

I once saw a memo from one of his chief production company clients, internationally successful porn company Private Media, and one of the directives stated “Start with the female dressed up and with good make-up then start with one male performer but add another or two or three more and do not retouch the make-up during the scene. By the end of the scene the female should look completely opposite, sweaty, disheveled, a complete mess”. This was the type of scene that made Private a successful company and Max cut his porn chops on this kind of client, but I wasn’t sure Stephanie was ready for this type of stuff. It was a long way away from the kind of amateur porn Homegrown Video distributed, which apart from the Max line was based on letting horny folks do whatever they wanted to do with whomever he or she wanted to be with.

I told Stephanie to call me and let me know how it went.  When I didn’t hear from her, I didn’t know what to think.  I worked for Max back when there was a rumor that a girl had died on his set and he had buried her in the San Fernando Valley somewhere. Even though I knew that wasn’t true I still knew some models that were so freaked out by the sort of crazed scenes that they did afterwards would disappear to mend their fragile and shattered sense of self. Then you might never hear from the model again, or the model would say “Don’t ever work for Max” to any other aspiring starlets, or the model would realize that it wasn’t so bad – the pay good, the notoriety better – and they would spend the next couple of weeks  shooting exclusively for Max.

I called Stephanie a few times. Almost a week later she finally called me back.

“Be patient,” Stephanie assured us, “when I am ready then we can do that.”

We never felt comfortable in the hard sell approach to these matters. Nobody wants to be responsible for encouraging someone to do something that later he or she might regret. At least, nobody that operates from a considerate consciousness and a humane respect for his or her fellow beings wants to pressure anyone into a porn career. Making amateur porn and becoming a porn star are things that need to come from the heart and soul of the truly sexual, unashamed, and uninhibitedly exhibitionistic of us. Stephanie so far had been so spare in words, soft in her tone, and shy in her demeanor that we wished to tread especially lightly in any conversations about doing more videos. However, just because she was quiet and not terribly extroverted, we should not have underestimated the sexual demon that lurked inside of tender, innocent, dainty Stephanie Swift.

The first clue was that she asked to work with Max Hardcore, the notorious producer distributed exclusively with us at the time. Only the truly freaky hardcore porn girls would request such a thing where so many others said “absolutely no fucking way” otherwise. We had told her about Max, the annihilator of assholes, the pugilist of puckered orifices, and the destroyer of derrieres.  And we showed her the footage of his scenes which some reviewers had described as being hard to look away from in the same way that is true of an accident on the freeway. But instead of scaring her straight back to amateur porn where one can do whatever, however, with whomever, she  wishes, Stephanie wanted us to make the introduction immediately.

For even a city the size of San Diego, most young adults that make the choice to go to Los Angeles feel that it is a big jump – LA represents another planet. For a young amateur porn model on her way to becoming a big time mainstream porn starlet, Los Angeles presents another universe entirely. There are agents, and producers, and people that alienate you because you challenge their space as competition to that piece of the stardom that shines hot with flashy cash. There are hardcore physically demanding sex scenes that you might not want to do but if you don’t then that person aligned directly behind you is going to land the part and collect the cocaine dusted do-re-mi.

We warned her. Max only shoots anal scenes. “I don’t want to do anal.” She said. “My boyfriend only wants me to be with girls.” She said.

We reminded her. Max doesn’t work with condoms in his anal sex scenes. “He can only have sex with me if he wears a condom” .

What about only working with girls?

At this point, we new Stephanie Swift was the kind of girl true fans of porn, amateur, pro, doesn’t matter, true fans love seeing REAL SEX.  Fans definitely know the difference between the one that  is really getting off… in the sense of getting off just on being in front of the camera and those performers who  are just going through the motions to get the job done. Unfortunately, since those truly hyper sexual sort of freaks that get off on that sort of kink don’t really form the majority of performers. We all would like to think otherwise, but that is just a fantasy. So, finding someone like Stephanie, with her erotic Eurasian good looks and potent sex drive, meant discovering that rare sort of person that really should make xxx movies and would obviously be a superstar.

And superstars sell videos.

Unfortunately, Stephanie was adamant about not wanting to go that route. She just wanted to be in videos and to be able to get her freak on; however, not at the risk of those well heeled La Jolla level wealthy parents of her handsome and well educated boyfriend finding out. Well, well, well, ok. We could respect that. She was welcome to be in as many of our videos as she wanted and if she ever changed her mind then we would talk about putting her in one of our “Here Comes” videos.

The “Here Comes” series from Homegrown Video was created to take people that wanted to become superstars in porn and give them the best possible vehicle and spotlight for navigating that path. This meant shooting an entire video of scenes featuring the model and getting a big shot photographer with a make-up artiste and an assistant or two to shoot a picture that we would put on the box cover. Then before the title released, we would contact the adult press and try to light a fire of publicity that would be burning furnace hot as soon as the video came out. At this point, the mainstream Los Angeles based porn companies that signed stars to lucrative contracts would come a ‘calling and then that model would be well on her way to fast money, rock star boyfriends, and snorting coke at swank parties in the Hollywood Hills. Stephanie Swift naturally was a candidate for shooting this sort  of title, where the ante was upped by such a greater investment of time and energy.