Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [37]
The film was featured on Fox News and the Colbert Report, as well as on The O’Reilly Factor. It sold well, four times Hustler’s other releases, Thrill says. DVD, video, and magazine sales of porn have dropped by 25 to 45 percent because of free Internet porn. Thrill said he had just completed Everybody Loves Lucy. In this latest film, Lucy and Ethel sneak into Rickey’s club and find that it is a sex club. “People like these familiar characters that they already know,” Thrill says. “You would not think anybody would want to see Herman Munster have sex, but they actually did.”
Thrill spends about six or eight hours on scripts, most of which have five scenes. A script runs about a dozen pages. “Once you get into the actual sex, we like them to stay in character,” he says, “but these are no Academy Award-winning performances.”
The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most porn stars are also prostitutes. They charge a range of fees, usually in the thousands of dollars, to fans on porn escort Web sites.
When I ask ex-porn actress Jan Meza, thirty, who once did a scene in which twenty-five men had sex with her, how she would describe the producers and directors of the porn industry, she answers curtly: “Pimps.” The porn stars make anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 an hour as prostitutes. Roldan would, along with other porn actresses, be flown into a city, including New York, and stay at a hotel for a week. They would meet clients in their hotel room.
Lubben says the AVN convention and awards ceremony brings together high-priced porn stars and clients.
“Ninety percent work as prostitutes,” she says. “They meet a lot of their big clients in Vegas during this convention. There is really big money being made by some of these women at night, as much as $2,000 an hour.”
The most famous porn actresses can make as much as $30,000 a week as hotel-bound prostitutes. Clients “would see you in the film and they wanted you to be exactly the same way,” Roldan says. “It was uncomfortable to meet some married stranger. I would walk around these cities and feel sad and empty. No one cared about me. My agent didn’t care. All I had was money and nothing else.”
The most successful porn films keep pushing the physical and emotional boundaries of the women onscreen and incorporate an expanding array of physically and verbally abusive acts.
Ariana Jollee, twenty-one, is sitting in a motel room beside a particle-board desk and a bare white wall, giving a pre-film interview for 65 Guy Cream Pie, produced in 2005 by Devil’s Film. She has sex with sixty-five men beside the indoor pool of a Prague resort during the film. She is smiling at the camera. Jollee has sleek, dark hair with bangs, a tribal tattoo encircling one bicep, and wears jeans and a loose black tank top. She has rounded arms, full cheeks, and a slightly heavy chin. Jollee started doing porn in 2003, when she was twenty, debuting in a film called Nasty Girls 30. She has done hundreds of films and was one of the industry’s premier gonzo girls, purportedly enjoying extreme abuse. Jollee tells the camera that she performed in a twenty-one-man gang bang on her twenty-first birthday. She says she is looking