Some day, I'm going to do a million-dollar porno, says Juli Ashton.
If
I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd make a million-dollar mainstream film with sex in it that
doesn't just fade out at the crucial moment
A hot and humid Los Angeles August Monday morning at the Faultline, a fetish club in
downtown Hollywood, and Ashton is shooting a hard-core porn movie. Porn actress Sharon
Kane sits in the chair, wearing a pair of shredded jeans, a studded-leather jacket and
cap. Between her legs kneels Juli, the bootblack, in leatherwear and biker boots,
polishing away.
The scene ends. Between takes Juli explains, with a straight face, her long-range
vision. There's a deeper purpose to my being in porn. I got into "adult"
because I like having sex, but also to put a joyful spin on sex and help educate the rest
of the world that porn people are normal, nice, moral people. We just happen to have sex
for a living.
It has to be said that having sex for a living has made Juli Ashton very wealthy. In
the summer of 1994, the graduate of the University of Colorado and one-time high school
Spanish teacher left her old life behind and came to southern California to start over.
She landed in the San Fernando Valley - north of the Hollywood hills - the throbbing heart
of the video porn business. In short order, she had her breasts enlarged, her nose fixed
and her ears pegged back, and, putting her 'preconceptions about the porn industry' to one
side, Juli just jumped in. 'It's been a bed of roses ever since.'
Four years of having sex on screen - with notably enthusiastic performances in such
explicit, upscale porn films as Latex, Devil in Miss Jones 5 and Essentially Juli - and
the 30-year-old Juli has reached the top of adult entertainment. Twenty-five years ago,
during the era of Deep Throat, this would have made her a luminary of the sex-cinema
circuit and not much else. These days, however, in an era of new media technology and
diversifying home entertainment, porn stars like Juli are multi-media celebrities.
In America, two decades of video have seen porn movies move slowly from the red-light
district to the 'adult' section of the neighbourhood video store. For millions of
Americans, porn no longer looms as a demonic entity, but something to be rented on a
Saturday night. Juli's films are available on video for rental or purchase not only in sex
shops, but in general video outlets.
They can also be accessed via subscription TV channels and through the developing video
technology on the Internet. And all over America, in upscale hotel chains such as the
Sheraton or Hyatt, adult guests can access an in-house system of pay-per-view movies which
features not only films from Hollywood, but porn films starring Juli and fellow superstars
of 'adult'.
According to her manager, the genial ex-criminal defence lawyer Lucky Smith, the
profits Juli makes from her film work and assorted spin-offs - the fan club, the live
cable TV show, the Juli Ashton novelty sex toys - means she soon will have enough money to
fund her own million-dollar porno. At the moment, he estimates, she is making about
half-a-million dollars a year.
Bootblack is a typical Juli Ashton vehicle, with a reasonable budget
for porn (between $150,000 and $200,000), affording a decent-sized crew, a wardrobe
mistress, a make-up artist and a dozen performers, including Juli's male lead, the
wonderfully named Randy Spears. The film will be shot over four days and will follow a
written script, featuring a 'proper' storyline. Bootblack will feature
seven sex scenes, covering the usual porn protocols of 'boy-girl' and 'girl-girl'
arrangements, and climaxing with a group scene around the bootblack's chair.
Then it is time begin the sex scenes; each performer takes a swill of mouthwash and
passes the bottle round. More importantly, Randy is issued with a condom. (Earlier this
year, the straight porn industry suffered its first serious outbreak of HIV, with five
performers testing positive. Now most companies require condoms as well as an up-to-date
HIV test. Juli, who for a long time criticised the industry for not taking enough care
of the talent, is delighted. Condoms are now here to stay. There's no going back.)
The scene takes four hours to film: starting with just Juli and Sharon, but culminating
in an elaborate five-parter, featuring four women and Randy. Throughout this sex marathon,
Chi Chi La Rue the director, is full of encouragement: Oh my God, he exults,
that's
fabulous. Oh my God. Filming takes so long mainly because directors have to shoot
from various angles for two separate versions of the movie, in order to satisfy both the
explicit hard-core buyer and the euphemistic, cable-friendly, soft-core market.
Though filmed sex is not like actual sex, Juli assures me her ardour is for real:
I
don't like to fake it. I'm not that good an actor. Towards the end, Randy has
problems maintaining an erection - 'difficulties with wood', as it's known. Finally, fully
restored, he returns to the fray. 'OK,' he shouts. 'Let's rock and roll.'
So, how does a nice girl like you come to be making porn flicks in a fetish bar?
It's obvious that Juli has been asked this question before. Twenty years ago, Linda
Lovelace made her still hotly disputed claims that she was an unwilling participant in
Deep Throat. To this day, despite the countless porn stars who've said they make the films
because they want to, people wonder.
'Let me tell you, I have never been a victim in my life,' Juli declares.
The
deal is, I went to college with no big career plans. I got into teaching because that's
what my parents did. I hated it and I was really bad at it. After a year, she left
and resumed the waitressing job she'd put herself through college with. The job was at a
topless bar. I was not an exhibitionist at all at that stage, she says. Over
time, however, seeing the money dancers made, she gave it a try. One thing led to
another.
Juli was already a fan of porn movies. Me and my husband, our ideal night together
would see one person pick a meal and the other pick an adult video. She started
meeting some of the stars through stripping. They were nice people, and they said a
lot of good things about the industry. I knew I didn't want to dance for ever. And so I
came out to LA to give it a try.
A year into her new career, Juli signed up with VCA, a pornography production company,
as a contract player. A contract player generally works exclusively for the one
company. They tend to earn more money for making fewer films. Juli earns $40,000 a
film and makes three or four films a year with VCA, depending on how I feel, how they
feel, what kinds of scripts they've got. She has input on the script, the director,
and whom she will perform with sexually. I won't work with a man who is new to the
industry. I need to know a little bit about his lifestyle first.
The day after filming Bootblack, Juli shows me around VCA's headquarters. This one-stop
sex factory has a full-time staff of more than 150 - including several female executives -
and boasts a state-of-the-art editing suite, a 48-track recording studio, an art
department fit for a mainstream magazine, and 'one of the largest video-cassette
duplicating plants in California', churning out 600,000 tapes a month. The sheer size of
VCA's operation indicates how corporate porn has become. It's a $3 billion-a-year
industry, and recent analysis of the adult video market shows a quarter of all porn video
rentals or purchases in the US are made directly by women.
And it's a long way from the underground porn scene of 30 years ago, of 'stag' films
shot in rickety hotel rooms for exhibition at bachelor parties; and a long way from the
Seventies and Eighties, when making porn was illegal in California. Performers and
producers regularly had run-ins with the police. People were getting busted on a daily
basis, recalls Gloria Leonard, a veteran of Seventies porn.
We would try never to
shoot on a Friday, because you could end up going to jail for the whole weekend.
Recently, the industry has been making its presence felt in American public life.
Throughout the summer, VCA had a giant billboard poster on Sunset Boulevard featuring Juli
and other VCA contract players pouting at the passing cars. The past year has seen porn
stars featuring in advertising campaigns for skateboard and snowboarder clothing, and for
the US launch of Virgin Cola.
Juli has been interviewed by American style magazines such as Details, Detour and
Bikini. Last winter, the New York fashion title Black Book had a collection of Vivienne
Westwood clothes shipped over to LA for a fashion shoot featuring Juli, Janine Lindemulder
and Jenna Jameson.
Does all this media attention mean porn's now trendy?
No, it's not chic to be in porn, not yet, she insists.
Porn sells, that's
the bottom line. We're not chic, we're public. Those are two different things.
This year, Juli became spokesmodel for Adam & Eve, America's largest sex-related
mail-order company. Her role is to 'spread a sex-positive message'. She also lobbies on
behalf of the porn industry at the California State Legislature in Sacramento.
I spent
days walking from door to door around the state Capitol, meeting with people, putting a
face on the industry, trying to dispel any stereotypes and illusions they had about porn.
And guess what? Often you find they know who you are. They watch the films.
Juli's communication skills are chiefly used, however, on a twice-monthly phone-in show
for the Playboy TV channel. Night Calls is a 90-minute live show that invites callers to
share their views on sex. And she and her co-host reciprocate. Every show is
different. It's saying something new about sex. Per broadcast, Night Calls receives
100,000 callers that they can keep track of.
At the super-plush offices of Playboy in Beverly Hills, where American adult
entertainment achieves its corporate summit, producer Eric Mittleman describes it as a
'driver show', attracting the most viewers to the Playboy Channel of all its broadcasts.
During
the Eighties and into the Nineties, sex was a bit of a minefield. For a long
time, people in America viewed sex as about issues of sexual harassment, office power
games, date rape, Aids. These are all important issues, but the idea of sex as a thing of
fun rather got lost along the way. The sexuality of the Fifties, when Playboy started, was
very different than today.
Does she still watch porn? 'Rarely.'
Some might find it ironic that she got into porn because she liked it, but now it's her
job, she doesn't watch the stuff; and that another reason for doing porn was that she
liked having sex, but now she's a porn star she hasn't much time for sex.
I know. This
is a business to me now, and for the time being that's what's important.
Alongside her various commitments, being busy means starting up her own hard-core
production company, Ashton-View Promotions. Now that she's 30, Juli is starting to think
about 'After Nudity', a time when she won't be in front of the camera but launching other
people's careers.
When I ask her if she'd recommend it as a job, she's surprisingly cautious.
It's worked for me. But it's a life choice, one you can't turn back. I'm very
mindful of that. I had to be absolutely positive that some day, further on down the road,
I didn't want to teach again, because no one's going to let me be around children now.
