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.
nope
She took topless pictures too, that's still considered pornographic.
I don't think government would be compleletely unneccessary. Three thousand years ago, maybe, but I think the modern economy would still need governmental functions.
But today, you would still need roads. You would still need infrastructure. You would still need funding for sciences. You would still need some standard setting bodies, although those might be private. You would still need a fiat monetary system and management thereof.
Private and church contributions would be enough to deal with social problems, and there wouldn't be nearly as many social problems, just elderly and sickness. And you wouldn't need much in the way of criminal justice functions and you wouldn't need defense.
Fair enough, I did say "for all I know", meaning I don't know.
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.
I agree with you that Government cannot force us to love and we should not look to government to replace our individual responsibility to provide charity to the poor. Nevertheless, I maintain that scripture indicates individuals, the church, and government all have an obligation towards the poor. None of the three should forsake their responsibility or delegate it to the other. But the responsibilities do overlap.
But I also think that as the economy has become more complex and changes occur ever faster, that government's role has necessarily expanded. In a farm economy like Israel 4000BC, where everyone was believers, leaving the corners of the field, leaving the fields fallow every 7 years and not harvesting everything, together with a third of the levitical tithe may have been sufficient for the poor. However that is not sufficient and certainly not efficient in the modern economy.
I'm not saying the government programs are administered well or that tax rates shouldn't be lower. I'm saying all three have responsibilities and certain of those are best handled by government. And the anti-tax advocates do not see the destabilization to the economy that would result if certain programs were not in place.
It's hard if not impossible to measure the economic benefit to the individual taxpayer because the government provided disaster relief to orange growers in 19xx. But I believe that the benefits far outweight the costs for many such programs. They make the country stronger and more competitive and more resilient. That encourages risk taking and innovation and builds wealth.
Got any examples where the founding fathers voted in favor of porn? Or the use of mind-altering substances?
The fact is in most of the colonies, the town drunk was eventually hung. I'm not aware of porn even existing in colonial America.
The war on the Bible is coming whether we stand our ground or not. Standing our ground is the only hope of delaying it that we have.
You are laying the seeds of your own destruction, not because you follow the Bible but because you think you know better than God what need to be done. "
Has God said to allow porn? Has God said to Homosexuality? Has God said to allow people to use drugs and to push them on others?
"I think that sometimes people should read their Bible as a whole and not listen to people who try to make it the worlds largest chose your own adventure book."
I agree 100% that people should read their Bible as a whole. How you possibly construe that into an argument that we should allow porn and drugs is beyond me though.
Only that he found it hard to believe that a religious conservative could support taxes when the Bible clearly tells believers to pay taxes and even Jesus paid taxes. I think taxes are too high, but unlike libertarians I think government must fulfill it's responsibilities and taxes are necessary for that.
I checked the Constitution itself, and I just can't seem to find where Congress is authorized to fund prohibitionary wars. Can you?
Yes, Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act. Every constitutional challenge to it so far has been rejected by the courts. I don't have time to go into all of their findings, but suffice it to say, it's been pretty thoroughly challenged.
I think constitutional conservatives should leave religion out of politics. That's the American way, imo.
Impossible our very concepts of civil and criminal law rests on concepts that are religious in nature, such as the right to property and the sanctity of human life. You are asking for an artificial division that cannot exist.
The American way is that we respect the right of people to adopt their own religious beliefs and practice those as they see fit, provided that they don't interfere with other's rights.
As already demonstrated on this thread, Porn and drugs have a lot of victims. It is not protected by religious rights nor should it be.
No, what's your point?
What are you smoking to say that I said something about drugs? I mentioned drinking, which is a drug but then so is caffeine.
Drugs were mentioned 2-3 posts back by Tpaine. I responded, then you hit my response with "DannyTN knows better than God". I'm still wondering what it is, that I've espoused, that you think is contrary to what God desires.
I do not think that God wishs to have 60-80% of the population of the United States thrown in prison because they watch porn. You know, your WOP?
Doesn't it suck when people don't blindy accept your 'facts'?
I don't see anything there about giving it away, do you?
YOU misrepresented my position.
I can't argue with someone who lies, plays tricks, misrepresents statements and piles on.
I am done with you.
If you do not wish to debate someone how lies, stop looking in that piece of silvered glass.
How am I minrepresenting your position when I used your own words? ;->
I await your answers.
No, I don't object to being termed a "religious conservative" at all. I consider that a high compliment.
But you objected to Long Cuts comment. Why?
Only that he found it hard to believe that a religious conservative could support taxes when the Bible clearly tells believers to pay taxes and even Jesus paid taxes. I think taxes are too high, but unlike libertarians I think government must fulfill it's responsibilities and taxes are necessary for that.
Nonsense, as libertarians also see taxes as necessary, as you know.
I checked the Constitution itself, and I just can't seem to find where Congress is authorized to fund prohibitionary wars. Can you?
Yes, Congress enacted the Controlled Substances Act.
You defend their specious, socialist 'commerce clause' reasoning? Good grief.
Every constitutional challenge to it so far has been rejected by the courts. I don't have time to go into all of their findings, but suffice it to say, it's been pretty thoroughly challenged.
. Indeed it has. Judge Thomas himself has challenged this liberal interpretation of the 'clause', -- as a joke. A bad joke on liberty.
I think constitutional conservatives should leave religion out of politics. That's the American way, imo.
Impossible our very concepts of civil and criminal law rests on concepts that are religious in nature, such as the right to property and the sanctity of human life.
Amazing that you can claim to equate our basic rights to life & property to some religious concept. -- Please elaborate, as it has never been done before, to my knowledge.
You are asking for an artificial division that cannot exist. The American way is that we respect the right of people to adopt their own religious beliefs and practice those as they see fit, provided that they don't interfere with other's rights. As already demonstrated on this thread, Porn and drugs have a lot of victims. It is not protected by religious rights nor should it be. Drugs Destroy
Nope, that 'victim' allegation has never been convincingly "demonstrated". You are simply begging the question.
As the Klinton Krowd was prone to do, I've parsed your question and have interpreted it to mean: What percentage of the US population is pro-porn.
The answer is: most of the Libertarians along with a gaggle of low-life perverts.
That isn't what the market shows, if it was just a few people who liked/bought porn then their would not be so much of it for sale.
Watching sex performed mechanically by automatons can deaden the senses and in the case of married people, destroy intimacy and marriages. After all, the greatest aphrodisiac is TRUST.
But most people who support pornography wouldn't want to know how many women involved were raped as children.
I have a cousin who was raped at age 13 by three 13 year old boys when she was walking home from school. Then the newspaper in their town published her name in the article reporting the rape! From that moment on, it was a struggle for her parents fighting her addiction to drugs and her descent into promiscuity and running away. Thank God she hit bottom, got to a fork in the road, chose the right one, and became a Christian and delivered.
Pornography can never be a victimless crime even when consentual because the billions of dollars that the industry generates is used for child pornography, promoting homosexuality to our children, and for the abortion industry. (Oh and persecuting the conservatives and Christians who dare to oppose their agendas). In fact, the Playboy foundation was instrumental in getting Roe vs. Wade through the courts.
...and when I formed the Playboy foundation in 1950 in 1965 it became the activist arm of the Playboy philosophy. I started doing the philosophy in 1963, the end of 1962 actually and then formed the foundation. The foundation became as the magazine and the company prospered, a way of putting our money where our mouth was, and by the early nineteen seventies we had donated several million dollars to a variety of controversial causes. Many of them related to sex laws, sex research with Mathers and Johnson and the McKensey Institute and the civil rights movement. In the process also we helped to fight the series of cases that lead eventually to Rowe versus Wade and legalized abortion. Hugh Hefner
(From Interview with Hugh Hefner
See also: The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner)
Bundy was a master manipulator. He told Dobson what he wanted to hear as a last way to cause more trouble in a world he was about to leave.
BTW, news flash, most serial killers have been exposed to Christianity in their lives. Is the Bible, with its murder, rape and genocide responsible? I doubt it, as well as doubt the dubious porn connection.
I don't know which government you're talking about, maybe that of Luis XIV or a Muslim country. But this country was formed by the people in order to secure their liberties.
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