Background on the documentary from www.thedailybeast.com - In the age of Google, can you ever really start afresh from porn and have a normal life? A new documentary, Exxxit: Life After Porn [retitled After Porn Ends], explores just this topic.
Director Bryce Wagoner interviewed more than 20 adult stars for the film, including industry legends like Randy West, Asia Carrera, and Amber Lynn. What he discovered was that porn is a fantasy world of quick money whose real price only becomes apparent when you try to return to normality.
"We found the men stayed in the business as long as they could and were mostly OK with it," says Wagoner, an amiable Southerner and former teenage bodybuilding champion. "The women who only did it for four to five years were the most jaded and had the toughest lives afterward. Every woman we spoke to—apart from Amber Lynn, who's still going strong—had to reboot their lives at 30 and start over in some small town." Such efforts were made all the more difficult by poverty. "For one reason or another," says Wagoner, "they didn't save any money, or if they did save some money, they'd lost it through some guy."
Wagoner was inspired to make the documentary by the story of Bianca Trump, a bouncy, fresh-faced porn star of the 1990s whose filmography includes features like What Daddy Doesn't Know, Big Boob Frenzy 4, and Nasty Nymphos 22.
Despite her success, Trump later fell in with white supremacists, covered herself in tattoos, and served time for kidnapping. After that chaos in her life ended, Wagoner found her settled quietly in Washington state.
"Prison changed her for the better, I think," he says. "But she declined to appear on film. She said, 'Nobody recognizes me anymore and I'm OK with that.'"
Such is the case with many former porn stars, but trying to live in anonymity isn't easy.
"We found many stories where people tried to move on only for their neighbors to find out that they once made a bunch of dirty movies," says Wagoner.
"One guy couldn't coach his son's Little League team anymore. One woman lost her real-estate job and then got diagnosed with lymphoma the following month.
John Leslie [Leslie has since past away] lives up in Mill Valley, near San Francisco, which is a really nice area. He's an artist, a chef, a very cultured guy. His wife is a therapist. A serious professional. But some neighbors found out about his past and they wouldn't let him babysit."
Jenna Jameson's case is different because she wasn't seeking total anonymity in her post-porn life. But her chances of finding domestic stability were probably below average given her struggles with many of the personal issues that are so common in the industry. She lost her mother to cancer when she was 2, and was raped by four men in her early teens.
She had tremendous rage at her police officer father, who was an archetypal distant authority figure. (They have since reconciled.) In her 2004 memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, she talks about her battle with heroin addiction and her crippling body-image issues.
"I have very bad insecurity about my body," she wrote in her diary, at age 15. "I feel there is something wrong with it. I hate being seen naked."
Wagoner, though, dismisses notions that only damaged people enter the porn industry.
"A lot of these people are smart, educated, well-adjusted. They get into it simply because they can make more money, and faster than if they were training to be a nurse. But it's a Faustian pact. If you enter the business with something deeply unresolved in your psyche, it's not going to cure it. It's like [porn historian] Luke Ford says in the film: 'You want the roll in the hay, but then afterward you want to burn the sheets.'"
Dear Readers,
ReplyDeleteI sincerely appreciated working on the documentary "After Porn Ends", of Bryce Wagoner and sincerely wish him well with the efforts accomplished.
The Documentary was shot at the most vulnerable and sensitive of moments for myself and my family,during the sudden, unexpected devestating passing of my older brother also an industry veteran Buck Adams, and so as it would be expected that allot of tears were flowing, and we weren't worried so much about appearances, make up and such things, so please excuse this. We, my family,his friends and I chose to participate because we wanted the public to see the family dynamic behind the industry that really exists beyond some public opinion that dictates that porn people are jaded and empty.
Also, we wanted my brother Bucks image to be memorialized one last time, in the end surrounded by people whom he loved and who loved him, his family, his friends, and his fans of which he had many and not necessarily in that order. I hope you enjoy the film.
Very Sincerely, Amber Lynn