Paper Work

Whenever anyone asks me if I’ve ever had any bad experiences in my career I tend to only speak of one minor incident in my early days. It was more a case of being gullible which resulted in being ripped off on a small scale.

I found alot of my early work in the back of The Stage news paper. The people advertising in there were usually the agents or the people you were really better off staying well away from. My first ever top shelf style shoot was found in there and because I found the agents who in turn put me out to alot of other potential employers it took me a while to work out The Stage was abit of a hit and miss resource.

Every week id rush in to WH Smiths for the latest copy. Most of the time it was the same old adverts but occasionally a new one popped up. Sometimes the ad would run for a few weeks and other times just for one single week.

But as per usual, since id had what I considered an easy and loving entry into the business I liked to think the best of everyone until I had good reason to think otherwise. I was about to learn the hard way.

As id effectively had my induction into the biz with the pro clique I’ve learned all about signing paperwork and my supposed “rights” as a model. All professional shoots required me to sign a model release form. No, that wasn’t so I’d be released from captivity after the trauma of shooting a porno. It simply implied that the material we had just produced belonged to the producer or production studio and they maintained all rights of the footage or images and how it would be used.

It’s pretty damn obvious if you ask me that if I’m having sex with someone with a film crew recording the action and then I get paid that I’m doing it for a purpose but from what I’d heard it was very common for girls to have serious regrets soon after and beg and threaten producers and companies not to release the footage or even to go as far as retracting it.

Can you imagine Hollywood stars pulling this stunt? Tom Cruise saying no I don’t want to be associated with this movie any more, it only got 2 stars in Rolling Stone. Re film it with another star in my place.

OK, OK...I do sympathise with the girls. It’s not nice to find you can’t get a serious job again because your face and vagina are all over HMVs adult section, but you knew what you were doing when you filmed it. If you really hadn’t thought about the consequences you shouldn’t be there. The sad fact is that most porn stars don’t fully understand the consequences. No one can. Human beings aren’t born with hindsight.

Producers often say that no model would ever get very far in court a) because you’d find it hard to find a lawyer willing to take this kind of case on and b) because even if you did manage a) the law on porn is so grey even the authorities can’t tell you what’s what. It would cost someone an arm and a leg to take it to court and chances of you winning would be slim. Plus it risks placing your shady past all over the papers which is what you’re trying to avoid in the first place.

Producers don’t believe in the power of model releases yet they still collect them just in case!