Posted on 05/28/2004 5:25:59 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
A Mormon Girl Gets Her Start in the Adult Movie Business
Jan. 23 — When 20-year-old Michelle saw the handsome Spaniard who would later become her fiancé, she thought it was love at first sight.
[WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual acts that some readers may find offensive.]
"The day we met, he said, 'You're going to be the mother of my children. I love you,'" she remembers. "You know what I mean? I never had that before. I never had a guy be so in love with me."
The couple met on the set of a porn film in a rented house in Prague in July 2001.
Michelle, the daughter of a retired Air Force captain and former bishop in the Mormon Church, was an up-and-coming starlet in the adult video world. She had had some setbacks in her first year in the business, but believed her career was turning around with the Prague trip, which would be her first starring role. Her co-star, 28-year-old Nacho Vidal, was already a well-established star.
The director had told Michelle that Vidal liked her work, and when the pair saw each other they immediately fell into each other's arms, kissing from one side of the house to the other.
"There's nothing bad about you," she told him admiringly as they prepared for the shoot. "You don't know me very well" he replied with a grin.
But when the director finally got the pair to settle down to the business at hand — filming a sex scene — the tone changed. Without any prompting, Vidal got rough during the sex, slapping Michelle's face violently from side to side, and choking her. [Pleased to meet you/Hope you guessed my name]
Afterward, she looked shaken, her face reddened and her eyes watery. But she insisted she was OK. "I look torn up — can you tell?," she asked an ABCNEWS producer who was following her progress for Primetime. Laughing and wiping her eye, she turned away and said without conviction, "I took a beating today, and it was great."
'Belladonna' Is Born
Michelle had gotten her start in the business at 18, when she came to Los Angeles from her home in Utah to look for work as a nude photograph model. When she failed to get modeling work, her agent encouraged her to try porn. She refused at first. "I always hated porn. I thought it was the most disgusting thing in the world," she told Primetime, which followed her career for more than two years.
But she finally agreed. Taking the name Belladonna, like the poisonous flower, she found herself preparing for what she thought would be a simple boy-girl sex scene. She was shocked when the director told her he wanted her to do anal sex — something she says she had never even thought about before. Worried she'd have to go through with it if she wanted to work again, she let him talk her into it. "I was kind of scared. I didn't know if I could say no," she remembers. "I didn't know any better, you know?"
After the session, she was shattered. "I wasn't ready for anal sex.... It was painful. But I can hide it really well." She had just turned 18, the legal age for participation in sexually explicit films.
Michelle went on more shoots over the next few months. Then her agent sent her on a job where she would have sex with male actors in prison outfits — 12 of them. Once again, she tried to back out, telling the director it was "sick," but once again she was talked into it. She had sex — all kinds — with the 12 men. "It was really hard because I really felt like a piece of meat ... in a lion's cage, 12 lions.... I had to do a lot of things I can't imagine anyone wanting to do." She was paid $4,000.
Afterward, she says, she couldn't stop crying. She packed her bags and went home to her family in Utah.
Glimpse of the Big Time
But within a year, she was back, even agreeing to promote the prison movie that had so upset her.
She began to feel that her career was picking up. She got a small part in a movie for VCA, one of the "high end" companies that produce big-budget films, and hoped it might lead to a contract. On the shoot, she met porn legend Ron Jeremy, who was making a cameo, and began to feel like she was fitting in. "The first second I walk in, this girl grabs my breast, and I'm like, Wow, you know, that's like the best welcome ... 'cause then you feel like, Oh, someone likes me, you know?"
Another company considered giving her a contract, but at a meeting, the owner, veteran porn star Ona Zee, sensed that Michelle was not emotionally ready to become an adult star. "There's a part of me that wants to say to you, 'Run for the hills, girl, do something else, because you can be something better,'" she told her.
At the high-end companies — which produce a small proportion of the thousands of adult titles released each year — performers often have contracts and can make six figures by shooting just eight to 10 movies a year. They can pick their own partners and condoms are generally required. Shot on film with elaborate, sets, costumes and plots, the movies can have budgets up to $250,000.
But Michelle did not get a studio contract, and ended up taking a job with a company known for "gonzo" porn — sex-only, amateur-looking productions shot on video. The company, Elegant Angel, was making a film in Prague and offered her a starring role, which she hoped would show the big studios that she could carry a film.
Love Blossoms in Prague
She was thrilled at the attention Vidal gave her during the week in Prague — but wary. "It's weird to have a guy love you that much. That almost scares me because I have a hard time trusting men," she told Primetime, explaining that her first boyfriend cheated on her repeatedly and ultimately left her for a stripper. Privately, Vidal had told Primetime he could never be with just one woman, and would be happy if Michelle's attraction did not lead anywhere.
She came back to Los Angeles by herself, so sore from the week's filming that she says she could hardly walk. But then she flew to Spain to visit Vidal, and their relationship seemed to be going places. She said he could keep having sex with other women, as long as he agreed to be "honest to me, loyal, and just respect me and tell me that I'm number one every day."
She even began hearing wedding bells, telling Primetime, "The second I get married, I won't having sex with men in this business any more."
Wedding Bells
By December 2001, Michelle and Vidal were engaged. As she proudly showed off her diamond ring, saying how pretty it was, Vidal joked in his Spanish accent, "I need to f—k so many girls for that ring."
The couple was in love, Michelle says, but they were fighting regularly. Vidal would sometimes get what he calls "Latino jealous" when he saw her talking to other men at clubs. Michelle told Primetime, "It's hard to be in a relationship with someone in porn."
By now, she was working steadily, even shooting for the same company she shot the prison gangbang for. "I guess now I've gotten past the whole feeling-bad-about-it thing. I'm like, 'OK, I did it and that was pretty damn rough of me' ... Like wow, you know?," she said with a laugh. "I can say that I've done pretty much everything there is to do, and I can walk away feeling a little proud about it, you know?"
The Primetime producers who had been following her noticed changes. At 18, she had said she would never use drugs, but now Primetime learned that she was sometimes high on marijuana during her scenes. She was working without condoms, though she said the risk of AIDS was never far from her mind — or her prayers. "The fans don't like to see condoms ... If I would have said I want to use condoms every time, I really wouldn't get any work," she explained. She contracted chlamydia, which can make you sterile.
And anal sex — which she had be talked into during her first shoot — was now her specialty. "Funny, isn't it? Something I didn't want to do and now I'm known best for it," she told Primetime. No longer a fresh face in the business, she found she had to agree to even riskier sex acts to earn the same money.
Ona Zee, the producer who had interviewed Michelle the previous year, noticed a difference, too. "I said to my husband, Our baby is all grown up and left home. She's no longer the adorable fresh-faced girl that I met ... Now she's really in the life ... Even in the pictures that I see of her, she's much harder, much tougher."
Behind the Smile
During interviews with Primetime, Michelle kept the happy smile she had always had — even when describing things that many people would find disturbing. However, her composure cracked when Diane Sawyer asked why she always smiled. Tears came to her eyes as she said, "Because I like to hide — hide everything, you know?" Then she began to cry, explaining that she hides her real emotions because she wants to show everyone how happy she is. "And I'm not happy ... I don't like myself at all," she said.
Michelle confessed she often felt physical revulsion during her scenes: "My whole entire body feels it when I'm doing it and ... I feel so — so gross." While pretending to be enjoying the sex, she said, she was in fact counting the minutes, telling herself, "Hey, I only have this much time left. Don't worry about it. Get the check. Gonna go deposit it in your bank." She admitted: "You get addicted to the money."
Like other performers Primetime spoke to, Michelle said that during shooting she often imagines herself outside her body. "I call it the 'other half,'" she said.
Bringing Home a Trophy
In January 2002, Michelle's Prague movie won an award at the Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas, considered the Oscars of the adult industry. Things were not going smoothly with Vidal that day — he complained that Michelle "don't do the ironing my clothes... I still 28 and I need my mother," and at the ceremony he openly checked out other women — but there were crowds of admiring fans for Michelle and she soaked up the attention.
After going on stage to pick the trophy, she was beaming, telling Primetime she had worked hard for it. "I think this is the very beginning of my career, like I've just begun," she said.
And at the 2003 AVN awards two weeks ago, Michelle was an even bigger winner, taking home awards for best supporting actress and three other categories.
>>I feel the same way. After a long porn scene in which I star with 7-8 nubile 20-year-old actresses, I feel so USED. So CHEAP. So DIRTY.
(weeping)<<
Awwww, royal crap, Dad! Could you please come out of mission control and clean the Diet Coke out of this keyboard. Laz got me again!!!!
Well, here's the rub: pornography isn't evil (intrinsic or not) nor is it illegal. As a matter of fact, it is generally protected as a form of free speech.
You say it's evil, I say it isn't. I at least have the law on my side of the argument.
In the post to which you responded, I never used the word children. I called them daughters. It is sometimes right that laws are made for the protection of the more vulnerable among us. 18 year olds are right on the cusp, and not everyone would agree that an 18 year old is not a child.
I would call them KIDS. They're not really children, but they are not really adults either.
LDo you agree with the Brady Bunch that an 18-year old gang menmber killed in a shootout counts as a "child", too? Oh, I forgot, he's not one of "our (precious, virginal) DAUGHTERS!"
In my mind, 18 year olds are KIDS regardless of sex.
You offered a faulty and unequal analogy. While the result of one 18 year old shooting another (and I presume you are referring to 18 year old males) is certainly more tragic, they are at least of the same age and mentality.
In Michelle's instance it is men who are significantly older, and even much older who are seducing her into a terribly destructive lifestyle full well knowing the harm it will cause her, which is something she is not yet old enough to fully understand. These men are predators, who are taking advantage of and exploiting her lack of experience, maturity, worldliness and the innocence of her youth (not the innocence of her soul) and becoming very wealthy (far wealthier than Michelle) in the process.
Please read The Law before you judge Bastiat too harshly or for that matter, at all. He too believed in God.
But I maintain that insufficient consideration of the poor and needy is more likely to cost us control of this country than is overconsideration.
True enough, but we disagree on the nature of the consideration: Christ did NOT come as Caesar and for good reason. Helping the poor is an act of Charity, in other words Love. To look to government to do the job is to replace charity with force. God does not force us to Love; He cannot. The two things are anti-thetical. Remember 1Corinthians 13.
Dude, are you kidding me?
"Sexual intercourse is designed by nature and nature's God to produce offspring within marriage."
I really don't think nature cares one bit about marriage. I believe sexual intercourse is designed by nature to ensure the continued existence of the species.
If God could get all men to repent and follow Him, government would be unnecessary.
What was filmed was the filming of the MOVIE, which gives one quite a different perspective. The actors were not "pretending" to have porno sex, they were REALLY having it.....No body suits and even worse, no condoms.
The girl looked petrified, but the producer didn't stop (like they often do in the REAL movies when there is take after take), he kept right on rollin'.
Far different than a Hollywood produced MOVIE.
Did you see it? (The second time I asked that question.) I bet you didn't did you?
Hey DUDE, nature may not care one bit about marriage, but God who created nature and authored the ten commandments, does.
Why should people who do not follow your religion have to follow your religious laws?
The law does, at least in this case. Read post #490 for a more full version of my views on "the age of majority", which I DO believe is seriously flawed as practiced here. The fact remains, at 18, she is old enough to make these kinds of choices, for good or ill.
"In my mind, 18 year olds are KIDS regardless of sex."
In my mind too, at least in most cases. it still doesn't matter.
"These men are predators, who are taking advantage of and exploiting her lack of experience, maturity, worldliness and the innocence of her youth (not the innocence of her soul) and becoming very wealthy (far wealthier than Michelle) in the process."
The same can be said, and to a FAR greater degree, of car salesmen, credit card companies, and myriad OTHER scams that prey on newly-emancipated 18-year olds. Still doesn't make them evil, at least apparently not enough that courts or legislators found it necessary to intervene. I know, I know...since we're talking about SSSEEEEEXXXX, that somehow makes it all the worse, but tell that to a kid who's stuck with a lemon car at 25% interest, which happened to a student of mine. Or a credit card with a 20% rate (another student, whose indebtedness cost him his security clearance, and thus, his place in my school). This girl/woman/whatever at least MADE money instead of losing it by the truckful.
Point is, scammed or not, we still held our students fully responsible for their mistakes. They could have avoided them by only consulting those the Navy specially trained to advise them on these matters, but didn't, because that card, like, let them spend FIVE GRAND a month! And that ride was, like, SOOOOooo sweet! Sometimes the process of learning and growing into a true adult can be a difficult one, but I'm sure they won't make those mistakes again.
This girl, however, DID go back to that work. Like I said, she at least got paid.
As C. Everette Coop suggested, at the very least condoms should be legally required.
I suggest you watch it the next time it is aired. If you don't see the evil and the destruction, you are blind and also perhaps, intellectually dishonest.
You're still using your own interpretation of what you saw. It doesn't change the fact that she didn't try to stop it herself, willingly placed herself there, and accepted payment for her work.
Hey, if you're going to quote Adolph Hitler, you should have the courtesy to attribute it.
So, she knew enough about sex to want to appear in adult movies, but had no clue of that risk? That's like telling me a person who smoked during the last 20 years had no clue that cancer was a risk. That is, it doesn't change my opinion one whit. Did she end the scene, and call the police to report assault? Refuse the money in leiu of a lawsuit? No.
"If you don't see the evil and the destruction, you are blind and also perhaps, intellectually dishonest."
No, as you seem to not understand, I simply do not look at the world as you do, through a "spiritual" and religious prism. Your view is not the only one, or in this case, the only valid one.
Okay, but Aquinasfan was asserting that nature and nature's God conspired to design sexual intercourse for the purpose of producing offspring within marriage. I assert that nature could care less about marriage. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I had quoted him. Can you provide me with the source of my quote?
My point was, we held those who made mistakes accountable. They were fully aware of the consequences, and were fully briefed as to the existance of the scams. In ten years of service, I've seen hundreds of such cases, in addition to Sailors being the victims of scam marriages (if you don't know, ask), "pay advances" (ditto), "strategic pregnancies", and a million other scams and ripoffs. Didn't matter a bit...they still had to pay the piper, as any adult would. That's what being an adult is all about.
The people in your scenario, may have been cheated, and were caused needless hardship, but they are not being corrupted. And I doubt there is equivalent psychological damage.
Because all evils cannot be regulated does NOT mean this one should not be.
When she was younger, I can't argue the point ! GORGEROUS !!
But recently, WHEW !!!
Don't forget Racquel Darrien either !!
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