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 She had the honest to goodness real sex drive that would keep her going when the charm of quick money had long since been replaced by endless days on a set with terrible catering, whiny male co-stars wearing ankle high sports socks, directors with their dicks out, and bitchy starlets trying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.

“How did the shoot with Max go?” I asked. I had to figure that since it was not the police calling me in for questioning that the shoot couldn’t have been all bad. The pause at the other end of the line was just a little too long though to think that everything went swimmingly. Max Hardcore had a name to live up to and marathon anal sex was not something most ordinary people would be comfortable with even talking about much less engaging in. “We changed my name to Stephanie Swift.”

Oh, ok, fine with that, not a traumatic issue at all since our Grateful Dead themed named was sort of like a working title until she came up with something better. “How was the shoot?” I asked again, “Did you two get along ok?”

Again, a long pause.

“Yes.” He was completely professional but…”

“But what?”

Stephanie Swift spoke in almost a whisper.

 “Well, I did things… I did some things that I really wish I hadn’t done.”  Welcome to the LA porn scene. She couldn’t say that I didn’t warn her – extensively.

“Like what?” If I was a true perv and worth my salt as a porno kingpin then I  probably would have asked for all the juicy details and had my secretary take “dictation” while I listened to her recount her tale of having Max Hardcore savagely fuck her tight puckered little asshole like a dirty little schoolgirl but, alas, I am a failure in that regard. I just wanted to make sure she was not scared – physically or emotionally. Stephanie was hesitating to continue but I didn’t want to push her too hard.

“Did you do anal?” I finally asked.

“Yes. That was ok. I agreed that would be alright.” She said. “But I let him do it without a condom.”

For a second I felt a twinge of something very similar to jealousy. In fact, who am I kidding? I was jealous. She said no way to anal for my shoots with her much less doing it without a rubber which I was perfectly acceptable with. Chalk up one more failure to prove my worth as a true scoundrel of XXX, a defiler of innocents, an ass fucker phenom. So I guess I was sort of defensively antagonistic when I asked why that was a problem.

“I told my boyfriend that I was only going to work with girls.” Stephanie started douching her conscience. “If he sees me in that video he is going to be really upset.”

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.  

At Homegrown, we had seen this condition before. Total orgasm junkie using porn to get her fix; possessed by a demon whore raised from some oozing, teeming jungle swamp of pure fucking muck. We could not contain her. She caused an emergency for more videotape when we realized that we had not brought enough to tame the sex beast inside her. All day Stephanie had been so quiet. Now her low, groaning, moans were starting up from some deep and profoundly sensual. Her body would convulse with spasms that every now and then would freeze her still, except for her toes, which would twitch like shrimp swimming away. At times we wondered if she was alive or dead, and the only way we could tell was the variety of colors that seemed to iridescently shimmer across her chest, shimmering from pert pretty breast to breast – colorful proof that she was in fact an alien sent to collect orgasmic energy with which to control the universe.

At Homegrown, we have a dedicated responsibility not to let that happen. No matter the consequences. Our mission is to make a world where sex is safe; says so right in the handbook.

When the situation was finally brought under control,  the cameras were smoking, all the other guys and girls in the room  were sweating, except Stephanie who apparently does not sweat, the room was literally melting in the dank sweet swampy smell of over four hours of people fucking. At the end, we all bowed out to just watch Stephanie get off. She created a sense of awe because she was just so intensely focused and concentrated on getting off. We knew what we were witnessing.

A star is porn.