On a damp Friday morning in downtown Los Angeles in a chilly, rather shabby warehouse, a group of bearded, tattooed technicians haul cameras and lighting equipment up a flight of stairs. Several other camera crews getting ready to film. One group is here to shoot an episode of Top Chef, the culinary reality show presented by Padma Lakshmi (better known in Britain as Salman Rushdie's ex), another crew is from the E! entertainment channel, here to film an episode of Chelsea Lately, a late-night comedy chat show. But the people here also occupy a more notorious corner of the media industry. They are among the thousands of pornographic actors and film-makers living and working in the Los Angeles area: the sex professionals who turn private passions into everyday paid employment.
Today, Monique Alexander, one of the biggest names in porn, is starring in Teach Me, a Vivid Entertainment production directed by Paul Thomas - the industry's answer to Martin Scorsese. It is in many ways a typical adult feature. It has a small cast, a low budget, no real script and contains sex scenes that could be found in any number of similar releases.
Alexander is petite, pretty and blonde. Shortly after arriving on set she is engrossed in conversation with an assistant who is applying heavy black eyeliner. A few yards away stands her male co-star, a Canadian with a dyed-blond mohican stripe and a deep tan, who goes by the stage name of Voodoo.
Voodoo says he often films four or five sex scenes a week but varies his routine by working at weekends as a sky-diving instructor. He is married to another porn performer. When asked whether having frequent sexual encounters with other people has affected their marriage, he laughs dismissively. "I go home each day and we have more sex," he says. "We can't get enough of it."
Today, Alexander is playing a school teacher - albeit one providing tuition in a black negligee - who seduces Voodoo and then his girlfriend. Although there is no script, Thomas, a rangy man with a greying goatee, has cooked up a complicated story-within-a-story plot that he patiently explains to the performers. Alexander, under contract to Vivid to make eight films a year, listens intently. "It's like I'm in a pink sparkle bubble at Vivid. It's always the same people on set," she says. "It's like a big family." She grew up in Sacramento and initially worked as a receptionist but got into porn after being spotted at a club.
While the set is being prepared for filming, the two-man camera crew loiters. To kill time, Shylar Cobi, the production manager, is working on his putting, knocking a golf ball across the floor, while technicians tape up the windows to ensure no natural light spoils the shot. Then the set falls silent and the action begins.
The two thickset, bearded cameramen silently shift their position around the two stars as Alexander performs oral sex on Voodoo. Out of shot, Thomas takes a seat at a desk several feet away, puts on his glasses and opens a copy of the Los Angeles Times, only occasionally looking up to see what is happening in front of him. A stagehand standing next to me watches the action intently for a few minutes and then, as quietly as he can, opens a bag of Doritos and begins to eat.
Suddenly, there is a commotion: the paper covering one of the skylights has fallen off the ceiling. The performers break and the stagehand who was eating Doritos is dispatched upstairs to fix the problem. The shoot delayed, a naked Alexander walks off to the bathroom, her black stilettos clicking across the floor, while Voodoo stays behind. In porn, as in most lines of business, time is money and he must remain in character so that filming can quickly resume once the set is fixed. Nobody else on the set bats an eyelid.
It's amateur hour in the porn world. Although the professionals in California's San Fernando Valley town called Chatsworth, the industry's unofficial capital, are still turning out around a thousand new DVD's every month, their ability to turn a profit from them is under serious pressure.
But for a chance meeting in a Sacramento nightclub, Monique Alexander would never have become a porn star. As it is, she was spotted dancing seven years ago and has since become one of the industry's biggest names.
Alexander tells the story of her start while a make-up artist dabs away at her face. She was working as a receptionist when she was spotted. "Porn wasn't anything I ever thought about. But I had a car payment to make and couldn't afford it at $8 an hour."
There was no turning back after taking the plunge: films can exist in perpetuity on the internet. "This is something that you have to live with for the rest of your life," says Alexander.
Was her family concerned? "I told my mom after a couple of months," she says. "No parent wants their child to do porn. But I'm a big girl and I'm an adult. She never tried to talk me out of it, not once."
Porn careers tend to be short, but can also be relatively lucrative. Top stars can earn anything from $150,000 to $500,000 a year. Enterprising performers, such as Jenna Jameson, have been able to earn more by producing and controlling their own movies.
Alexander says porn has treated her well. She supplements her pay from Vivid with personal appearances at strip clubs, where she can earn "very good money", boosting her earnings by thousands of dollars. After finishing today's movie, she was due to travel to Hawaii to do six shows.
She has also become a vocal supporter of porn and recently took part in a Yale debate on the industry, which was moderated by journalist Martin Bashir and filmed for ABC's Nightline program. Alexander appeared in the pro-porn camp alongside Ron Jeremy, perhaps the industry's most famous performer. "My argument was: I'm a normal person, it's not demeaning," says Alexander. The work is, she says, "empowering".
Like all performers, she faces competition from a new generation of potential stars. Paul Fishbein, founder of Adult Video News, says more female performers are entering the industry than ever before. "When I started working in this business 25 years ago, it was all hush-hush," he says. "It's now a career choice... There are all these 18-year-old girls wanting to get into porn."
Alexander agrees. "Everyone wants to do [porn] now," she says. "But people should realize that it has consequences. You have to be up for the challenge."
[Excerpted From the Financial Times]
