First Steps

Sorry to suddenly flip stories but after my short sabbatical I felt like writing about my beginnings.

I’ve told you about alot of my firsts in porno but I’m yet to divulge the tale of my first EVER shoot. My stepping stone into the surreal underworld that is sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly judged yet always intriguing, that is the sex industry. The beginning of my new vocation. The taster that got my juice buds suculating enough to make me want to experience more.

This shoot, my first journey into the business of pornography was a full nine months before I made a conscious effort to pursue porn as a career. I was simply testing the water. Playing a game and just trying to have some fun. I wanted to do something wild and daring and totally unlike the real me. I wanted to not be me for a while.

I found an advert in The Stage newspaper from a guy looking for females for adult photographic work. It said no experience necessary and new comers welcome. I built up the courage to call this guy one lunch time. He sounded nice. He asked me what I looked like, how old I was. He said he would travel to my town with all his equipment and book a hotel to shoot in if I couldn’t shoot from my own home. This sounded like a plan. So far so good but I wasn’t prepared for him to say could I make it that evening? Eeek!

My brain raced. Could I make it that evening? Did I even want to do it that same evening? Was I ready that soon? Id assumed it would be arranged in advance and that I would have time to build up to the big day. I knew I wouldn’t chicken out, when I set my heart and mind to something I do it but id really been hoping I’d have some time to get used to the idea and come to terms with what I was about to get myself into.

I told him this was my first time. This could have been a grave error as I opened myself up and laid bare my biggest weakness to a complete stranger. This could have been the magic words to a psycho but my instincts were telling me this was the right thing to do. I wasn’t thinking of dramatics. I was being positive and making sure he knew I wasn’t a pro to cover my back when I would no doubt turn up looking like a rabbit caught in the head lights. I was more worried he’d not pay me because I didn’t do a good enough job than getting raped and murdered. I figured if I was honest with him he’d help me along and coach me through the experience. I really had no idea what happened at an adult photo shoot. Not even enough to forge together a rough idea.

He, Neil, said that he’d pay me £50 cash per hour. Considering I was used to getting just £5 an hour in my then job, £50 was like winning the lottery. He said it would only take an hour or so. I dont recall if he expalined what end use the pictures would have. I didnt know the difference between pro or am in those early days. i didnt know there were hobbiests so i guess i must have assumed at the least that he was a pro.

He was only going to take pictures of me on my own in sexy poses. He asked if I was ok with spreading my legs and I assured him that was fine and it really didn’t bother me in the slightest. I knew this wasn’t going to be some glossy glamour shoot such as those soft and tasteful ones seen in lad mags. I was fully aware that this was top shelf magazine stuff. Naughty, rude, no frills images of me baring myself in all my glory. It was almost worrying how unfazed I was by this notion. I wasn’t erotically excited by it at all either. I was excited but more so by the thought of doing something so different. So unlike me. Of stepping into the unknown and doing something that took confidence. Now I reflect that it also took stupidity and desperation.

Neil wasn’t pushy, it was my own irrational fear that if I said no to his suggestion of shooting that night that I might lose out altogether. Never one to miss out I gathered my thoughts as quick as I could and worked out that yes I could make it that evening. Only just mind. I’d have to grab a taxi home from work to bath, shave my pegs and re do my hair and makeup and collect some lingerie and then cab it back into town. It would be a rush but what the hell. ‘Let’s do it’ I thought.

I put the phone down on a high, buzzing from the adrenaline rush. I still didn’t know where id got the courage from to make the call. I thought I’d be more nervous about that evening impending activities but I didn’t have enough of an idea of what was to happen to be that way. I didn’t have any expectations or aspirations. I was just going to go along and see what happened. I couldn’t think to hard about something I didn’t know anything about and I was glad as I couldn’t talk myself out of it.

I had a smug air about me that afternoon and a naughty glint in my eye knowing that I had just created this hugely controversial secret about myself. I suddenly felt all grown up and adored.

All Work and No Play

I’ve already discussed all the time we performers spend at the GU clinic too. Going for tests, picking up certificates. Team that with the fact your local clinic, as I well found out, might not be sufficient to provide you with the relevant paperwork so more travel is involved. The two main clinics for the business are both in London. I’ve know people who had to travel down from oop north just to get tested once a month then pick up results 7 days later.

Then comes the part that no one thinks about. The admin and back end. The time I spend checking my emails, scouring for work, networking, and marketing myself.

In those early days there were no such thing as Facespace and MyBook. Now managing my office time is an even more impossible, never ending job in itself. I often think I should employ a secretary. Many girls do have secretaries in the form of there pimpy, lecherous partners. These guys act as managers, sometimes calling themselves chaperones. They do all the organising and communication, often pretending to be Sally Ann on email and over the internet and you will find them feeding Sally Ann lines when she speaks on the phone to producers etc. Sally merely has to turn up to the job and do the business, for which her fella will have driven her there and will more often than not enjoy perving in the back ground at his girlfriend or wife getting fucked by other people. He will of course enjoy the money she has just made him.

But more about these sometimes unbelievable arrangements later.

This admin side of my job is time consuming but very necessary. Without it I simply don’t work. Yes I have several agents but I only remain at the forefront of their minds in my early days. Once I’ve been around the block and some fresh meat has waltzed into town I can pretty much wave goodbye to any help I see from my agents unless I’m specifically cast in a part which is rare. Or that I’m called in last minute to fill in for someone who’s no showed.

I’ve made quite a good business for myself just by being flexible enough to cover these flaky girls. I’m centrally located and can always be relied upon. Yeah it’s not so soothing on the ego knowing a large percentage of my work only happens by accident but it is a business and the aim of the game is to earn money.

I get emails from my ads on the modelling websites daily. In fact the volume they come in I found it quite a quick process to learn to sort the wheat from the chaff. I categorise emails into three sections.

Genuine interest. These people are known to me and often professional companies who write helpful, detailed and informative emails supplying links to work often through a website of their own.

Then there are the idiots who I have already discussed. They are fantasists and time wasters. They will write mails like “how much to fuck you?” Yes really that’s it. No please or thank you or even a hello. Or they will make up elaborate stories about running professional companies but not be able to back these claims up. The emails will be so detailed you fall asleep half way through. They describe things so obvious such as “then you will insert a well oiled dildo I have that is 12 inches long and 5 inches wide slowly into you soaking wet shaved pussy” rather than simply state “you’ll do insertion with larger toys”. Yawn – delete!

The last category is in between. They could be genuine but not so good at articulating. Maybe shy or just new to this and not know the lingo or how things work in the business. These people I will entertain until they prove to be examples of the second group. Its these people who eat your time. You waste precious minutes and even hours with email correspondence asking questions to establish how valid they really are, giving them the benefit of the doubt but also getting excited that potentially this is another job. Then it all goes south and you’ll have put off a real job in the vain hope this prat is serious.

Sometimes you don’t get so lucky and you go all the way only for the guy not to show up on the day. I said I worked out quickly how to identify most time wasters but I’m not an enigma machine.

I also have to learn to master the art of self promotion, setting up and maintaining all my adverts and profiles. Tweaking the text so that I sound as appealing as a pair of Jimmy Choos to Paris Hilton. I have to update my images regularly. It’s like having an online portfolio and only the best five or six images will do. You have to keep your images fresh as many people will look at your profile one day and not feel drawn to you but maybe three months later they see a different image and forget they ever saw that dodgy old snap of you or just feel that maybe you are worth booking after all.

I spend time mailing people who advertise for work on message boards. I scour the World Wide Web looking for more and more modelling profile sites to join in the desperate attempt not to be missed by any potential employers.

Then after all that I have to be my own PR agent. I have to create a successful fan base and market myself to them. This will ensure I remain popular enough to stay in demand with professional companies and studios. This as you might imagine means replying to fan mail, sending out signed pictures and DVDs. Uploading images and movie clips on the net and setting up my own official fan pay site where I can promote myself to the world letting them know all my latest movies and movements. Creating my own hype and making people love me.

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!