truck driving on the internet
Friday, January 25, 2002
Here's an anonymous review of the Le Tigre show at Warsaw Thurs. Jan 24th:
"juvenile delinquints with beatboxes. Actually the closest thing I've even
seen to a female Rapeman though the B-52's comparisons make sense too.
There is still much rrriot spirit going on. we left after 5 or 6 songs."
"juvenile delinquints with beatboxes. Actually the closest thing I've even
seen to a female Rapeman though the B-52's comparisons make sense too.
There is still much rrriot spirit going on. we left after 5 or 6 songs."
Thursday, January 24, 2002
http://legerdemains.com/whiterabbit/mr00004.htm
Television talk show hosts Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Arsenio Hall all started out as magicians. Magic is a wonderful way to become more comfortable addressing or performing for large groups of people.
Television talk show hosts Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Arsenio Hall all started out as magicians. Magic is a wonderful way to become more comfortable addressing or performing for large groups of people.
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
The Actress, the Producer and Their Porn Revolution
Steven Hirsch Recognized That VCRs Could Bring Adult Movies to a New
Market--Couples. But First He Needed a Different Kind of Star.
By RALPH FRAMMOLINO and P.J. HUFFSTUTTER
Times Staff Writers
January 6 2002
You can say this much at least, the setting was magnificent--a seafood
restaurant at Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. San Fernando
Valley businessman Steven A. Hirsch thought it was the ideal spot for his
pitch to the blond, hazel-eyed Midwest tomboy. She loved crab legs? He
promised her all she could eat.
Ginger Lynn Allen arrived at Gladstone's restaurant in a lace dress and
heels and joined Hirsch and his girlfriend at their table. It was late 1984.
They were young, in their early 20s, and full of vigor and hope. Allen was
trying to escape a nasty childhood by becoming a movie star. Hirsch was
looking for the money and respect his father never enjoyed. He wanted to
produce movies.
At that moment, neither career was one to write home about. Allen was an
actress, yes, but one who specialized in talents Hollywood doesn't put on
screen. Hirsch peddled the kind of movies she made, but they had hardly
brought him riches or respect. The industry they worked in was still very
much on the fringe.
As an overnight porn sensation, Allen knew she could earn lots of cash for a
few years before being replaced by the next wave of fresh faces. She dreamed
of jumping to Hollywood before then and had no idea what this obscure but
attractive pornography figure could offer her, other than all the crab she
wanted.
She didn't know he was planning a revolution.
Hirsch laid out his proposal. No other porn actress has ever had such a
deal--control over scripts and casting, marketing campaigns devoted
exclusively to her and a guaranteed income that included royalties and could
reach six figures.
Allen was skeptical. Hirsch had little track record as a producer. But as
anyone who knows him will vouch, Hirsch is nothing if not persuasive. He
desperately needed her help. Gradually, Allen began to believe.
Today, Gladstone's could put a plaque over that table where Hirsch and Allen
dined. It marks the birthplace of a new kind of porn--designer porn--and its
unrelenting march into American lives. These days, hard-core sex stars date
rock musicians, appear on album covers and dance in music videos. They gab
with shock-jock Howard Stern. Academics plumb porn for its cultural and
business significance. The Internet is flooded with come-hither Web sites.
Students at Yale hold coed "chicken and porn" parties. Annual rentals and
sales of adult videos and DVDs top $4 billion, and the industry churns out
11,000 titles each year--more than 20 times as many as Hollywood, according
to Adult Video News, an adult industry trade magazine.
Hirsch has become so successful, and perceptions of the industry have
changed so much, that he was invited last May to address a USC business
class. His muscular frame clad in casual slacks and a crisp blue blazer, the
40-year-old executive lectured his audience on "production value" and
"market share"--terms drawn from the same corporate lexicon as former
Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and other
industry titans who have shared their wisdom at USC.
"Ten years ago I don't think I would have been asked to speak in front of
that class," Hirsch says in an interview later, adding that none of the 23
undergraduates questioned the content he sells. "We're already past the
acceptance stage, and at this point we're just talking about a business as a
business. We are nothing more than widget makers."
Those widgets have blessed Hirsch, president of Van Nuys-based Vivid Video
Inc., with an 8,150-square-foot, $1.6-million home with an amusement park
pool in a gated community on the edge of the Santa Susana Mountains. He
shares a suite at Staples Center that costs as much as $307,000 a year. It's
known as the "porn box," because its regulars are porn heavy hitters who do
a lot of business together. They sit right up there alongside Budweiser, Fox
Television and Toyota.
Hirsch won't discuss his income, and there is no independent way to verify
the finances of his privately held companies. But he claims Vivid's revenues
reached $80 million last year, and he and two partners recently netted some
$70 million in a deal with Playboy Enterprises, according to Securities and
Exchange Commission documents and interviews. He jets to Bruce Springsteen
concerts, has several luxury cars and collects fossils in prehistoric amber.
A history buff, he also owns a lock of George Washington's hair and a death
mask of Abraham Lincoln.
Allen's life isn't as golden. She did join Hirsch's new company, then left
porn for Hollywood before returning to the land of quick money. Her
relationship with Hirsch morphed over the years from professional to
personal to physical to nobody knows what anymore. She has a
life-threatening illness and auctions her panties at strip clubs to raise
tuition for a son whose paternity Hirsch refuses to discuss.
"My time is past," she says. As an aging porn queen, she knows she falls
into a pathetic stereotype, but she's having no part of it. The title of the
autobiography she's working on: "I Did It. I Liked It. So What?"
"They'd have their fight, my father would hit my mother, and then she'd take
it out on me," Allen once said in a report prepared for federal court. "My
mother used to scream at me how ugly I was, and she'd tell me I was evil."
Her mother, Marilyn, was the illegitimate child of a prostitute and later
adopted by the son of a Baptist minister, the report says. It describes her
father, Wayne, as a former alcoholic and son of a police officer. She grew
up in Rockford, Ill., a blue-collar town 80 miles northwest of Chicago.
Allen's parents separated when she was 6, then divorced when she was 11. The
next year she tried to commit suicide by taking a dozen sleeping pills, says
the report. At 13, after a particularly brutal beating from her mother,
Allen was taken in by her paternal grandparents. Despite their care, she had
an abortion, began using drugs and her grades slipped. She also was left
with an "almost addictive need for male relationships . . . and validation,"
according to the report, prepared by criminologist Sheila Balkan for a
federal judge presiding over a 1990 tax fraud case against Allen.
After graduating from Rockford West High in 1980, Allen followed her
grandparents to San Bernardino to help care for her dying grandfather. She
worked as a Musicland store manager, but money was tight. So in 1983, with a
boyfriend's encouragement, she answered an ad promising $150 for figure
models. It was run by porn talent agent Jim South in Van Nuys. Things began
happening very fast.
In September of that year, Allen posed for nude photographs, and soon she
was featured in various porn publications, including Penthouse. Next came
videos--which meant sex, with strangers, on camera. As she would later
explain in a magazine article: "The money keeps coming and you get pulled
into it a little more. Things you thought were bad at the beginning seem a
little less bad." In November, Allen agreed to appear for $800 in four
8-millimeter loops--short subjects for peep-show booths in adult bookstores.
Back in Rockford, Wayne Allen, who had reconciled with his daughter years
before, overheard men in a bar talking about her new career. He found the
loop playing locally and demanded that the store owner give him all copies.
After Allen's third visit, the owner called police, who sent him home with a
friend. Allen called his daughter. Porn was lucrative, she replied. No one
got hurt. Besides, it was fun.
Her first adult feature, "Surrender in Paradise," was filmed in Maui. She
turned 21 on location, got paid $5,150, fell in love with her leading man
and began learning truths about being a porn star. "I was making more money
in two weeks than I did in two years, and I was having great sex with
someone I loved." But when she saw her fiance for the first time on the
mainland, he was wearing a dirty shirt and spoke with a New York accent. He
wasn't the man she knew. "He stayed in character for the entire two weeks we
were there." She broke the engagement.
On screen, Allen became a sensation. In 1984, at the porn industry's first
X-Rated Critics Organization awards, she wore a yellow dress with black
polka dots from Sears, and won the veritable Triple Crown: "Best Female
Performer," "Video Vixen" and "Starlet of the Year." One businessman who
helped underwrite the awards show, giving $10,000, was adult video
distributor Fred Hirsch, whose son Steven had a plan. Bill Asher, now a
third partner in Vivid, says Steven Hirsch "grew up when porn was a dirty,
underground business. If he was going to be in the business, it was going to
be mainstream."
The early 1980s were pivotal for the porn industry. Upscale adults were
buying into the VCR craze, which for porn meant adult movies no longer would
be limited to "the raincoat crowd" found in adult bookstores and theaters.
Steven Hirsch was working as a national sales rep for porn distributor
CalVista Video. There he befriended the head of the catalog division, David
"Dewi" James, a tall, self-deprecating British expatriate 20 years his
senior. Hirsch and James became convinced that this emerging home market
included women and couples. "That's something we really felt strongly about,
and that we went after," Hirsch recalls.
They quit CalVista, formed Vivid Video and went in search of a star. In
their view, she had to appear wholesome enough for couples to enjoy--not
like the hardened, cold actresses traditionally found in adult movies.
"I looked like what might be your best friend's sister," Allen says. "I
didn't look like I belonged on the street corner." As William Margold, a
porn actor and industry activist, remembers: "She was comfortably pretty.
She didn't have the kind of beauty that chilled you. It warmed you. She came
along at exactly the right time."
Hirsch and James scraped together $38,000, including a $20,000 loan from
Fred Hirsch's printer, and started to work. Vivid's first video featured
Allen in a tongue-in-cheek tale about a millionaire trying to find a
desirable wife for his socially backward heir.
Breaking with industry practices, Hirsch sank most of the money into the
packaging, hiring a photographer and a Hollywood artist. Instead of a box
cover showing a collage of sex acts, Vivid's showed Allen on a beach,
exposing nothing, under the title "Ginger."
"The combination of a great box cover and young, beautiful women became
Vivid's trademark," Allen recalls. But make no mistake, the sex wasn't
anything less than hard core. The video flew off the shelves, selling an
initial 6,000 copies--a huge volume at the time for adult videos. "Ginger"
rocketed to the top of the adult charts. A tamer version of the video was
translated into 12 languages and sold in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. Hirsch
and James set out to make their star an icon. In return for appearing in
videos exclusively for Vivid, Allen was featured in movies more appealing to
women because they had stronger plot lines than traditional adult movies,
which were often little more than a series of sex scenes.
Instead of spending the money from the first movie, Hirsch and James nursed
the business along, paying themselves just $200 a week. "Ginger" soon
grossed about $700,000, which they put into a series of sequels, including
"I Dream of Ginger," "Ginger on the Rocks," "Ginger's Sex Asylum." All were
intended to sear Ginger and the Vivid brand into the minds of consumers.
For her success, Vivid paid Allen handsomely. During 1985, she received
$99,014 from a combination of her monthly retainer fee, $1,000-a-day
shooting premium, paid promotional appearances and an unprecedented cut of
wholesale revenues, court records and interviews show. With other porn work
that year, Allen made $134,000 and, in 1986, pulled in $126,185, according
to records of Ginger Pix Inc., her corporation.
Those numbers were staggering for an industry where actresses are free
agents and earn, in 2002 dollars, $300 to $1,200 for each scene they
perform, with no royalties, medical coverage or pension. Career curves are
short and brutal, thanks to the constant supply of eager replacements. All
that most of them can hope for is to parlay their film work into lucrative
nude dancing careers or Internet fan sites.
But for Allen, life had never been better. The blue-collar kid bought a
Porsche, dropped $10,000 at a time on shopping sprees, took overseas
vacations. "I did what a lot of women do in the adult industry," she
recalls. "You live right here, right now, today."
The walls of Hirsch's Van Nuys office today are sleek black, matching the
color of the Oxford shirts he often wears. Chunks of ancient amber are
arranged on shelves facing his neatly kept desk. One wall features a signed
photo of all five living former U.S. presidents and documents bearing Thomas
Jefferson's stamp. A backlit awards showcase gives the room a warm glow. It
holds dozens of industry statuettes awarded for "Best Couples Sex Scene" and
the like. To the right of Hirsch's desk is a Dell computer laptop showing
live shots from a nanny cam trained on his daughter's crib at home. The
mother is Hirsch's current girlfriend, Laurie Andersen, a former sales rep
for Video Team, a Chatsworth porn producer.
Would he want his infant daughter, Alexis, to become a Vivid star? He smiles
and leans back in his overstuffed leather chair. "I would tell her to really
think that through," he says. "I would respect whatever decision she would
make. And then I would send her to medical school."
It would be the ultimate triumph for a porn dynasty that began in the early
1970s, when Wall Street tanked and Fred Hirsch gave up as a stockbroker. He
called a family conference in the living room of the Hirsches' comfortable
home in Lyndhurst, Ohio, outside Cleveland. Steven was 11 and his sister,
Marci Sue, was 14 when their parents announced that Dad would sell adult
materials for Sovereign News Corp., owned by the late Reuben Sturman. A
tobacco and candy distributor, Sturman became the nation's largest purveyor
of pornography, with reputed ties to the New York Gambino Mafia family,
according to the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography. "My biggest concern
was what I would tell my friends," says Marci, now 42. "I had a hard time."
Their livelihood aside, the Hirsches seemed a model of family stability.
Dad's job wasn't Rotary Club material, but life was otherwise middle-class
normal, says Tony Ciulla, Steve's best friend from next door who is now
manager of the Marilyn Manson rock band. There was Little League baseball,
go-cart racing and mowing lawns or shoveling snow for money.
The Hirsch family joined the porn industry's migration to California in
1975, and Fred Hirsch began laying plans to start his own company. But he
also had to face ghosts he left behind--obscenity charges from his work in
Cleveland. In 1978, he and six others from Sovereign News were tried and
acquitted.
Young Hirsch escaped ghosts of his own. He says he was picked on in
Lyndhurst because he was one of only a few Jews in his junior high school.
The experience, he says, "helped toughen me up a bit. And it helped give me
the drive to succeed because I had to prove that I was OK."
An introvert by nature, he channeled his frustration into wrestling, a sport
known for its solitude and discipline. The family moved to a two-story home
on a winding, leafy street in Woodland Hills. Young Hirsch became co-captain
of the El Camino Real High School wrestling team, earning all-city honors in
his weight class. His father rarely missed a match.
By the time Steve graduated, in 1979, nearly a dozen production houses were
vying to reach the new VCR market. Fred Hirsch set up Adult Video Corp. in a
small storefront on Napa Street in Northridge. A bank of VCRs hummed in the
back office, churning out duplicates of master tapes. The whole family
helped, creating a peculiar bond and some awkward moments. Marci, who worked
in accounting, remembers wandering into the duplication lab and seeing her
first adult video. In walked Dad. "You have to leave," he said. "I can't
watch this with you."
She felt uncomfortable for about a month, she recalls. "And after that, we
would both be in there watching it. After a while you almost forget what
you're watching because you see it so often."
Fred Hirsch's company prospered. Between 1983 and 1985, its sales nearly
tripled, to $4.2 million, and it cleared $484,000 in profit, court records
show. The firm was a medium-sized force in the porn scene--although it since
has gone out of business.
Steven Hirsch attended business and journalism classes for two years at Cal
State Northridge and UCLA while doing a range of jobs at his father's
company--from packing tapes in the warehouse to working in sales, promotion
and accounting. Then he quit to work at CalVista and soon, he and James
launched Vivid.
There was little money in the beginning. Allen remembers Hirsch rolling
pennies with Wren to make ends meet. But once Allen's tapes became a
sensation, life changed quickly. The three of them began partying together.
Allen says she found Hirsch attractive that first time she saw him at
Gladstone's, but nothing romantic occurred between them then. Hirsch and
Wren were tight, and Allen never was at a loss for boyfriends. By her own
count, she has been engaged 10 times, and never married.
Mainstream respect is an idea that entices and eludes those in porn.
Hollywood is just over the mountains from porn's prime locale, the San
Fernando Valley, and the two worlds mix socially. But porn performers are
rarely taken seriously by the studios. They are more playmates than peers.
By 1986, Allen and Hirsch were successful financially, but Allen wanted to
jump to Hollywood. She had grown weary of making sex videos. "As I became
more and more involved with films, I used more drugs and alcohol," she would
later explain to a federal judge. "As time went on, I couldn't stand what I
was doing. I started using cocaine as a way to escape and a way to cope."
In February of 1986, Allen, age 23, quit the industry. She had been in porn
for 27 months and had appeared in 69 productions, 16 of them for Vivid. It
was now or never to cross over.
She landed her first B-film part in 1988 as a rocker chick in "Dr. Alien (I
Was a Teenage Sex Mutant)." That led to a referral to B-film producer Rick
Sloane, who was looking for a lead in "Vice Academy," a police farce.
"I thought the timing was right to give her the break," Sloane says, adding
that Allen came to his attention just months after her personal and
professional rival, porn actress Traci Lords, began taking mainstream roles.
Sloane gave Allen the leading role. Impressed by her comedic timing, he
wrote a sequel around her character.
She was doing OK in Hollywood, although the money wasn't as good. She
eventually appeared in 28 mainstream productions, in roles that included a
bordello prostitute in the 1990 Western "Young Guns II"; a dying prostitute
in Ken Russell's 1991 "Whore"; a topless dancer in a 1993 Emmy-award winning
episode of "NYPD Blue"; and a recurring role in "Super Force," a short-lived
kids' show.
Through the years she continued to receive royalties from Vivid and make
promotional appearances for the company. But her income dipped. She refused
to return to making adult videos, although she did start stripping to cash
in on her X-rated fame. "The high times were over and we were both strapped,
so she needed to go [nude dancing] financially," says Edward R. Holzman,
Allen's live-in boyfriend during the late 1980s and now a video producer for
Playboy Enterprises. In 1991, Allen reported making $30,000 from stripping
and $25,000 from acting.
Off screen, Allen's troubles mounted. In 1990, a federal grand jury indicted
her on two counts of tax fraud. She offered a curious defense, arguing that
her judgment had been impaired by drug use in the early 1980s. Indeed, she
and Hirsch had done a lot of cocaine as Vivid rocketed to success. "We did
coke in the hotel rooms," Allen remembers. "We did coke in the limos."
Hirsch also says he had a substance abuse problem at the time. "My life was
out of control," he says. "Some of it was alcohol. Some of it was drugs.
That was that."
As part of Allen's defense before sentencing, her attorneys hired Balkan to
review Allen's past. The criminologist said she found a woman struggling
with demons from her childhood that spilled over into her
relationships--like the one Allen struck up with actor Charlie Sheen. She
met him on the Tucson set of "Young Guns II," when Sheen visited his brother
Emilio Estevez, the film's star. Allen says they fell in love. But in
Balkan's view, their relationship went beyond those feelings. "It
represented the legitimacy of being accepted by an actor and his family in
the legitimate acting world," Balkan says.
Sheen and his father, actor Martin Sheen, wrote to U.S. District Judge
Ronald S.W. Lew asking for leniency in the tax case. After an eight-day
trial, a federal jury convicted Allen in June 1991 on one count--failing to
disclose $8,580 she earned during her first few months in porn in 1983. Lew
sentenced her to probation and attached a condition: She had to give up
drugs. Legal fees from the case and her subsequent probation violations were
devastating. Allen claims those costs topped $400,000.
As Allen and Sheen dated, she nursed him through a 32-day rehab and stood by
him when he was named a regular customer of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.
Then, she says, he dumped her. Sheen declines comment today, but Allen still
claims he is "the only man I ever really loved." She blames her rejection on
porn. "People thought who I was was detrimental to his career." Allen
learned the lesson she always feared but hoped wasn't true. "You can't
outlive what you've done," says Wayne Allen, her father. "It'll be around
forever."
Ginger Allen also failed to kick drugs. She had tried in 1989, entering a
30-day rehab program at San Diego's Sunrise Center. But by "Vice Academy
III" in 1991, Sloane says, Allen had reverted to her porn diva ways. She
demanded $10,000 and a motor-home dressing room. Yet he says she habitually
showed up late, flubbed her lines and was so puffy-faced that she needed ice
packs and heavy makeup.
At times, Allen would lock herself away for days on cocaine binges,
according to a federal court pre-sentencing report. In 1992, she failed a
court-ordered drug test and Lew sentenced her to 45 days in rehab.
Hirsch, too, had struggled with abuse problems. With encouragement from a
friend, porn producer Christian Mann, Hirsch checked himself into a drug
rehab center Nov. 9, 1988. He says he is clean and sober today. His partying
years aside, Hirsch's world has never been about the hedonism of Hugh
Hefner's grotto parties at the Playboy Mansion and Larry Flynt's hot-tub
orgies. Vivid executives keep an antiseptic distance from the production of
what they call "the content."
Like his father, Hirsch has hired family to work at Vivid, which now employs
135 people. His sister and father work for him, and so did his brother Brad,
who quit recently after starting a relationship with a Vivid actress.
Hirsch's brilliance, Mann says, is in finding other sources of revenue,
other outlets for his videos: Playboy Enterprises, the Internet, foreign
rights and teaming up with Doc Johnson, a leading maker of sex toys.
Associates describe Hirsch as generous, driven, ethical--and controlling.
"Fred Hirsch is an affable, nice guy," says veteran porn director Bud Lee,
who has worked for both father and son. "Steve is a cunning, ruthless
businessman." In 1997, for instance, Vivid scored an industry coup by
landing distribution rights for a stolen video of actress Pamela Lee
Anderson having sex with her former husband, rock musician Tommy Lee.
Paul Cambria, a Buffalo, N.Y., attorney who represents Vivid, says Hirsch
has an "uncanny ability to make the best deals I've ever seen in my life."
One of those deals occurred the year Allen left Vivid. Hirsch signed a
contract to supply the Playboy Channel with two soft-core movies a month. It
was a deft maneuver. Hirsch shot two versions of each feature. The soft-core
version, heavily edited to show milder content only, went for airing on
Playboy's network. The triple X version went to video stores under the Vivid
label.
Last year, Hirsch made Vivid's biggest deal ever by selling three cable and
satellite cable TV hard-core networks back to Playboy for $70 million, plus
$12 million in possible bonuses. Four years earlier, Playboy had loaned
Hirsch $10 million of the $10.5 million needed to buy the hard-core Hot
network, provided the company could buy it back in the future. At the time,
Playboy wanted a toehold in the market but felt it should keep triple X
content at arm's length. Hirsch then added two more hard-core channels and
his programming quickly lured viewers from Playboy's soft-core fare.
Surprised by the shift in demand, Playboy bought back Hot--giving Hirsch and
his two partners an astounding return.
Beyond being a deal maker, Hirsch has excelled at marketing. After Allen
left Vivid, Hirsch developed a lineup of "Vivid Girls," each presented in
the same way Ginger was packaged. "He wanted to create this star system,
like old Hollywood," says Ciulla, his lifelong friend. But Allen's heirs
don't receive the same generous compensation she did. By signing with Vivid
today, an actress makes less than the industry average of about $80,000 a
year--and some Vivid Girls make as little as $39,000 a year. But a Vivid
actress typically does gain an easier shooting schedule and a longer career.
If she's also a strip club dancer, her value on the club circuit goes up
because of her association with the Vivid promotional machine. "The girls
don't have to worry about anything," says James, Vivid co-founder. "We
handle their careers and treat them like stars."
Hirsch's system, however, imposes controls that would have other workplaces
in revolt. After Hirsch handpicks each actress, the company dictates the cut
of their clothing and the size of their breasts and negotiates the frequency
and types of sex acts they perform, according to a typical Vivid contract
obtained by The Times.
Vivid Girls also surrender control over their screen names and the scenes
they shoot--something a mainstream actor would never relinquish. Once Vivid
shoots a scene, it has absolute control over its use, which can be
staggering given the various ways pornography is available. "We recycle a
movie 10 or 25 different ways," James says. A single scene can be spliced
into various video store movies, sold over the Internet and cable and
marketed as still photos.
Vivid Girls, however, are not included in that continuing revenue stream.
The company no longer pays royalties because it "became too complex," James
says. For instance, Vivid Girl Dyanna Lauren received several thousand
dollars for her co-star appearance in the 1997 film "Bad Wives." Internal
documents show Vivid sold 54,639 DVD copies that, at the suggested retail
price of $49.99 each, would mean sales of $2.73 million. That doesn't count
VHS tape, sales through cable pay-per-view channels and orders on Vivid's
own video-on-demand service. Had Lauren been under a conventional Screen
Actors Guild contract, she would have received an estimated $45,000 to
$261,000 extra from the DVD sales alone. Vivid's contract wouldn't survive
in the real world, say 12 labor experts contacted by The Times. "If you
dropped this document on any agent or lawyer's desk in this town, they'd
laugh and throw it away," says John Laviolette, an entertainment lawyer who
represents numerous Hollywood producers. "It's practically slavery."
Actresses haven't challenged the contracts they are grateful to get,
although some say being a Vivid Girl isn't what it used to be. "You couldn't
get me to be a Vivid Girl again if you pointed a gun at my head," says a
Vivid contract player from the mid-1990s. "They want too much. They get
everything."
Wayne Allen goes to the bedroom and comes back with a small black jewelry
case. He cracks it open. The lining says "XIV Karats Ltd., Beverly Hills."
It holds a man's gold band embedded with a line of five small diamonds. It
was meant for Steve Hirsch.
The ring is a bittersweet reminder that, in porn, sex isn't the problem.
Love is. Once a woman steps into the X-rated industry, she often closes the
door on anything resembling a normal, long-term relationship with someone
outside the industry. Ginger Allen says she knew this from the beginning.
"No man wants his lady with someone else, whether they're performing or
not," she told a magazine reviewer two years into the business. Porn stars,
she added, will have--"not may have, will have"--trouble finding love.
Allen says the greatest love of her life was Sheen. But perhaps her most
important love was her old boss. Friends for years, they became romantically
involved in the mid-1990s. Wayne Allen says Hirsch began visiting his
daughter in the evening, saying he had to be discreet. "He kept telling
Ginger he was going to have her [Wren] move out. He was going to pay her
off."
Hirsch eventually did break up with Wren, and the parting was nasty, says
Paul Fishbein, publisher of the adult industry magazine AVN. Fishbein says
Hirsch gave his girlfriend a "settlement" for her work in starting Vivid.
Wren declines to comment. Hirsch's relationship with Allen thrived. Soon
they were talking of marriage and adopting children, since doctors told
Allen that she could never conceive.
In mid-1995, Allen decided to pop the question herself. She bought the gold
and diamond band as an engagement ring for Hirsch, and planned to present it
to him over a picnic lunch at the beach. But she was so excited she asked
him before they got out of the house. "He said, 'Yes,' and then I told him
something that changed his mind," she recalls. Allen won't say what that
was, but her father will: "She said, 'I'm pregnant.' He gave her the ring
back."
Records show that on March 31, 1996, Allen gave birth to a son, Sterling
Wayne Robert Allen. The father's name is withheld on the birth certificate.
Hirsch declines to comment on his personal life or persistent reports on
porn Web sites that he is Sterling's father and pays Allen a monthly
paternity allowance. "You know you've really made it when people can print
rumors about you," he says. "I'm really not going to comment on it. I'm not
going to glorify this."
Allen remains bitter about the breakup. Success has spoiled Hirsch, she
says. "Steven went from a really sweet, assertive nice young guy to very
calculating," she says. "I think that when you go from a person who rolls
pennies to start your company to being a millionaire or billionaire, you
treat people differently. You forget where you came from, and who you are
and who was there for you."
Hirsch is in front of that class of business students at USC. He spends more
than an hour outlining the details of running a business in the skin trade.
Students scribble notes as Hirsch talks about vertical integration, buy
rates, production value. There is one term he refuses to utter--the P word.
"Pornography has always been a bad word and we're not about bad words,"
Hirsch would explain later. "We're about making money."
As he finishes his lecture, the students applaud politely. His presentation
was impressive, says Brian Francis Linhart, a business administration major.
"I never knew porn could be so cool." But instructor Scott Wyant appears to
have second thoughts about his decision to invite Hirsch. When asked about
it by a reporter, he says he sees no "upside" to discussing it. "Think about
it," he says. "A pornographer. At USC."
A few weeks later in Chicago, Ginger Allen is getting ready to take the
stage of the Admiral Theater, a strip joint in a tired neighborhood on the
west side. It is a Wednesday and the first of 11 shows Allen is booked to
headline through the weekend. The announcer urges the 21 middle-aged men and
one woman in the audience to sit by the chest-high stage--within easy
tipping distance. Fog from dry ice shoots up from the stage, which is
flanked by two huge mock hieroglyphic bookends of nude women. Backstage,
Allen is praying to a god she says is forgiving and watches over her in this
environment.
The sound system blares "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Then to the throbbing bass
of "Sweet Emotions," Allen appears out of the fog wearing a sheer robe and
high spiked heels. She gyrates, clamps her legs around the ears of some
stage-side patrons, dances and rolls on the floor. She giggles and gives
everyone a kiss.
After her third number, she takes a mike, chats up the house and announces:
"I'm going to auction off my panties. Every penny of my panty money goes to
my son's college fund." A Florida man years ago paid more than $1,000 for a
pair, she says. This night, however, the bidding starts at $10, rises slowly
and settles at $45. "Looks like my son's going to community college," she
says.
If she had her way, Allen would not be stripping. "I've definitely made
mistakes. Had I saved my money a long time ago, I'd be in a very sweet
position." At 39, the single mother of a 5-year-old finds herself battling
time and the law of diminishing returns. For a while, the combination of
mainstream entertainment work and tours on the strip circuit underwrote her
upper-middle-class lifestyle, one beyond the expectations for a
high-school-educated clerk from Rockford. She managed to buy a Lexus SUV and
a 6,600-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms for
$580,000 in Woodland Hills.
Then the mainstream work dried up three years ago. So did the big crowds on
the nude dance circuit. In a market flooded with porn-star strippers, Allen
finds herself competing for half her normal appearance fee to strip for
uninspired audiences. "Everybody's been inundated with sex and nudity, it's
not exciting anymore," she says. "So my income has drastically changed
because of too much sex."
Allen says she has refinanced her house twice in five years to pull out
equity, but faced with a $5,500 monthly mortgage and other bills, she
recently decided to go back to porn. Charles Clay, her Hollywood agent for
14 years, says he warned her it would hurt her prospects for mainstream
roles. She called Hirsch first. "His response was, 'Come back to us after
you get your best offer,' " she says. "It was kind of a little slap in the
face." Hirsch says Allen made the decision to look elsewhere. "We wished her
well and still do."
Allen eventually made a deal with rival VCA, another San Fernando Valley
adult production house, for less than her asking price of $100,000. Directed
by a friend, former porn actress Jane Hamilton, Allen ended a 13-year
absence from hard-core videos by starring in comeback movies, "Torn," "White
Lightning" and "New Wave Hookers 6."
She turned to VCA again in mid-2000 after routine medical tests showed she
had an illness, says Hamilton, who acted in porn under the name Veronica
Hart. Hamilton says Allen tracked her down via telephone during a trade show
to see if she could make yet another film. "She said, 'Jane, I found out
some bad news. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to make movies,' "
Hamilton says. "I know she has cancer. I know where it's located. But as far
as speaking the words, she doesn't actually speak the words."
Allen declines to confirm her illness. "I don't want to jinx myself," she
says. She emphatically maintains it is not HIV and volunteers that she
survived cervical cancer 10 years ago. Her father says he and his daughter
do not discuss the illness in detail. "We just leave well enough alone. We
know that she's ill."
Her illness was apparent during the filming of her fourth comeback video at
VCA, "Taken."
Hamilton says she was forced to stop production at one point. "She finished
with a scene and was throwing up and it was obvious that we weren't going to
push on." Allen asked for work again in July because she couldn't pay her
medical bills, Hamilton says. VCA used her in a one-day shoot for a scene in
a movie starring Ashlyn Gere. "I could get a girl who would do the same
scene for a lot less money, but she is having a tough time," Hamilton says.
Allen also picked up temporary part-time work as a director and emcee for a
porn Web site run by Suze Randall, the former Playboy photographer who took
the first nude test photos of Allen in 1983.
Allen has tried to sell her house and continues nude dancing, against her
doctor's wishes, she says. In Chicago, she earned $550 a show, about half
the rate the Admiral pays top stars. She attends AA three to five times a
week, making friends "not because I'm Ginger Lynn, not because of something
they want from me, but because of who I am. I have people that I help to
stay sober."
At home she is an attentive mother to a son who knows nothing of his mom's
career. For the Fourth of July, she baked red, white and blue cupcakes and
bread for his preschool class. For now, all he needs to know is that she
signs autographs for fans. A further explanation will come later and go
something like this, she says: When people want to laugh, they watch
comedies. When they want to cry, they watch dramas. When they want to be
frightened, they watch horror movies. And when they want to feel good, they
watch grown-up movies--like Mommy made.
"I really don't want to be pitied," Allen says. "I've made my choices in my
life. I put myself in this position. I am the one who is going to have to
get myself out of it. I've been very fortunate. Most girls don't have the
career that I've been fortunate enough to have. They don't have a shelf life
of 18 years."
Allen occasionally still receives royalties from her Vivid videos. But
they're intermittent. She says it is up to her to call if she's due royalty
money from the company. She telephones Hirsch directly. Usually, she says,
he takes her call.
Steven Hirsch Recognized That VCRs Could Bring Adult Movies to a New
Market--Couples. But First He Needed a Different Kind of Star.
By RALPH FRAMMOLINO and P.J. HUFFSTUTTER
Times Staff Writers
January 6 2002
You can say this much at least, the setting was magnificent--a seafood
restaurant at Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. San Fernando
Valley businessman Steven A. Hirsch thought it was the ideal spot for his
pitch to the blond, hazel-eyed Midwest tomboy. She loved crab legs? He
promised her all she could eat.
Ginger Lynn Allen arrived at Gladstone's restaurant in a lace dress and
heels and joined Hirsch and his girlfriend at their table. It was late 1984.
They were young, in their early 20s, and full of vigor and hope. Allen was
trying to escape a nasty childhood by becoming a movie star. Hirsch was
looking for the money and respect his father never enjoyed. He wanted to
produce movies.
At that moment, neither career was one to write home about. Allen was an
actress, yes, but one who specialized in talents Hollywood doesn't put on
screen. Hirsch peddled the kind of movies she made, but they had hardly
brought him riches or respect. The industry they worked in was still very
much on the fringe.
As an overnight porn sensation, Allen knew she could earn lots of cash for a
few years before being replaced by the next wave of fresh faces. She dreamed
of jumping to Hollywood before then and had no idea what this obscure but
attractive pornography figure could offer her, other than all the crab she
wanted.
She didn't know he was planning a revolution.
Hirsch laid out his proposal. No other porn actress has ever had such a
deal--control over scripts and casting, marketing campaigns devoted
exclusively to her and a guaranteed income that included royalties and could
reach six figures.
Allen was skeptical. Hirsch had little track record as a producer. But as
anyone who knows him will vouch, Hirsch is nothing if not persuasive. He
desperately needed her help. Gradually, Allen began to believe.
Today, Gladstone's could put a plaque over that table where Hirsch and Allen
dined. It marks the birthplace of a new kind of porn--designer porn--and its
unrelenting march into American lives. These days, hard-core sex stars date
rock musicians, appear on album covers and dance in music videos. They gab
with shock-jock Howard Stern. Academics plumb porn for its cultural and
business significance. The Internet is flooded with come-hither Web sites.
Students at Yale hold coed "chicken and porn" parties. Annual rentals and
sales of adult videos and DVDs top $4 billion, and the industry churns out
11,000 titles each year--more than 20 times as many as Hollywood, according
to Adult Video News, an adult industry trade magazine.
Hirsch has become so successful, and perceptions of the industry have
changed so much, that he was invited last May to address a USC business
class. His muscular frame clad in casual slacks and a crisp blue blazer, the
40-year-old executive lectured his audience on "production value" and
"market share"--terms drawn from the same corporate lexicon as former
Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and other
industry titans who have shared their wisdom at USC.
"Ten years ago I don't think I would have been asked to speak in front of
that class," Hirsch says in an interview later, adding that none of the 23
undergraduates questioned the content he sells. "We're already past the
acceptance stage, and at this point we're just talking about a business as a
business. We are nothing more than widget makers."
Those widgets have blessed Hirsch, president of Van Nuys-based Vivid Video
Inc., with an 8,150-square-foot, $1.6-million home with an amusement park
pool in a gated community on the edge of the Santa Susana Mountains. He
shares a suite at Staples Center that costs as much as $307,000 a year. It's
known as the "porn box," because its regulars are porn heavy hitters who do
a lot of business together. They sit right up there alongside Budweiser, Fox
Television and Toyota.
Hirsch won't discuss his income, and there is no independent way to verify
the finances of his privately held companies. But he claims Vivid's revenues
reached $80 million last year, and he and two partners recently netted some
$70 million in a deal with Playboy Enterprises, according to Securities and
Exchange Commission documents and interviews. He jets to Bruce Springsteen
concerts, has several luxury cars and collects fossils in prehistoric amber.
A history buff, he also owns a lock of George Washington's hair and a death
mask of Abraham Lincoln.
Allen's life isn't as golden. She did join Hirsch's new company, then left
porn for Hollywood before returning to the land of quick money. Her
relationship with Hirsch morphed over the years from professional to
personal to physical to nobody knows what anymore. She has a
life-threatening illness and auctions her panties at strip clubs to raise
tuition for a son whose paternity Hirsch refuses to discuss.
"My time is past," she says. As an aging porn queen, she knows she falls
into a pathetic stereotype, but she's having no part of it. The title of the
autobiography she's working on: "I Did It. I Liked It. So What?"
"They'd have their fight, my father would hit my mother, and then she'd take
it out on me," Allen once said in a report prepared for federal court. "My
mother used to scream at me how ugly I was, and she'd tell me I was evil."
Her mother, Marilyn, was the illegitimate child of a prostitute and later
adopted by the son of a Baptist minister, the report says. It describes her
father, Wayne, as a former alcoholic and son of a police officer. She grew
up in Rockford, Ill., a blue-collar town 80 miles northwest of Chicago.
Allen's parents separated when she was 6, then divorced when she was 11. The
next year she tried to commit suicide by taking a dozen sleeping pills, says
the report. At 13, after a particularly brutal beating from her mother,
Allen was taken in by her paternal grandparents. Despite their care, she had
an abortion, began using drugs and her grades slipped. She also was left
with an "almost addictive need for male relationships . . . and validation,"
according to the report, prepared by criminologist Sheila Balkan for a
federal judge presiding over a 1990 tax fraud case against Allen.
After graduating from Rockford West High in 1980, Allen followed her
grandparents to San Bernardino to help care for her dying grandfather. She
worked as a Musicland store manager, but money was tight. So in 1983, with a
boyfriend's encouragement, she answered an ad promising $150 for figure
models. It was run by porn talent agent Jim South in Van Nuys. Things began
happening very fast.
In September of that year, Allen posed for nude photographs, and soon she
was featured in various porn publications, including Penthouse. Next came
videos--which meant sex, with strangers, on camera. As she would later
explain in a magazine article: "The money keeps coming and you get pulled
into it a little more. Things you thought were bad at the beginning seem a
little less bad." In November, Allen agreed to appear for $800 in four
8-millimeter loops--short subjects for peep-show booths in adult bookstores.
Back in Rockford, Wayne Allen, who had reconciled with his daughter years
before, overheard men in a bar talking about her new career. He found the
loop playing locally and demanded that the store owner give him all copies.
After Allen's third visit, the owner called police, who sent him home with a
friend. Allen called his daughter. Porn was lucrative, she replied. No one
got hurt. Besides, it was fun.
Her first adult feature, "Surrender in Paradise," was filmed in Maui. She
turned 21 on location, got paid $5,150, fell in love with her leading man
and began learning truths about being a porn star. "I was making more money
in two weeks than I did in two years, and I was having great sex with
someone I loved." But when she saw her fiance for the first time on the
mainland, he was wearing a dirty shirt and spoke with a New York accent. He
wasn't the man she knew. "He stayed in character for the entire two weeks we
were there." She broke the engagement.
On screen, Allen became a sensation. In 1984, at the porn industry's first
X-Rated Critics Organization awards, she wore a yellow dress with black
polka dots from Sears, and won the veritable Triple Crown: "Best Female
Performer," "Video Vixen" and "Starlet of the Year." One businessman who
helped underwrite the awards show, giving $10,000, was adult video
distributor Fred Hirsch, whose son Steven had a plan. Bill Asher, now a
third partner in Vivid, says Steven Hirsch "grew up when porn was a dirty,
underground business. If he was going to be in the business, it was going to
be mainstream."
The early 1980s were pivotal for the porn industry. Upscale adults were
buying into the VCR craze, which for porn meant adult movies no longer would
be limited to "the raincoat crowd" found in adult bookstores and theaters.
Steven Hirsch was working as a national sales rep for porn distributor
CalVista Video. There he befriended the head of the catalog division, David
"Dewi" James, a tall, self-deprecating British expatriate 20 years his
senior. Hirsch and James became convinced that this emerging home market
included women and couples. "That's something we really felt strongly about,
and that we went after," Hirsch recalls.
They quit CalVista, formed Vivid Video and went in search of a star. In
their view, she had to appear wholesome enough for couples to enjoy--not
like the hardened, cold actresses traditionally found in adult movies.
"I looked like what might be your best friend's sister," Allen says. "I
didn't look like I belonged on the street corner." As William Margold, a
porn actor and industry activist, remembers: "She was comfortably pretty.
She didn't have the kind of beauty that chilled you. It warmed you. She came
along at exactly the right time."
Hirsch and James scraped together $38,000, including a $20,000 loan from
Fred Hirsch's printer, and started to work. Vivid's first video featured
Allen in a tongue-in-cheek tale about a millionaire trying to find a
desirable wife for his socially backward heir.
Breaking with industry practices, Hirsch sank most of the money into the
packaging, hiring a photographer and a Hollywood artist. Instead of a box
cover showing a collage of sex acts, Vivid's showed Allen on a beach,
exposing nothing, under the title "Ginger."
"The combination of a great box cover and young, beautiful women became
Vivid's trademark," Allen recalls. But make no mistake, the sex wasn't
anything less than hard core. The video flew off the shelves, selling an
initial 6,000 copies--a huge volume at the time for adult videos. "Ginger"
rocketed to the top of the adult charts. A tamer version of the video was
translated into 12 languages and sold in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. Hirsch
and James set out to make their star an icon. In return for appearing in
videos exclusively for Vivid, Allen was featured in movies more appealing to
women because they had stronger plot lines than traditional adult movies,
which were often little more than a series of sex scenes.
Instead of spending the money from the first movie, Hirsch and James nursed
the business along, paying themselves just $200 a week. "Ginger" soon
grossed about $700,000, which they put into a series of sequels, including
"I Dream of Ginger," "Ginger on the Rocks," "Ginger's Sex Asylum." All were
intended to sear Ginger and the Vivid brand into the minds of consumers.
For her success, Vivid paid Allen handsomely. During 1985, she received
$99,014 from a combination of her monthly retainer fee, $1,000-a-day
shooting premium, paid promotional appearances and an unprecedented cut of
wholesale revenues, court records and interviews show. With other porn work
that year, Allen made $134,000 and, in 1986, pulled in $126,185, according
to records of Ginger Pix Inc., her corporation.
Those numbers were staggering for an industry where actresses are free
agents and earn, in 2002 dollars, $300 to $1,200 for each scene they
perform, with no royalties, medical coverage or pension. Career curves are
short and brutal, thanks to the constant supply of eager replacements. All
that most of them can hope for is to parlay their film work into lucrative
nude dancing careers or Internet fan sites.
But for Allen, life had never been better. The blue-collar kid bought a
Porsche, dropped $10,000 at a time on shopping sprees, took overseas
vacations. "I did what a lot of women do in the adult industry," she
recalls. "You live right here, right now, today."
The walls of Hirsch's Van Nuys office today are sleek black, matching the
color of the Oxford shirts he often wears. Chunks of ancient amber are
arranged on shelves facing his neatly kept desk. One wall features a signed
photo of all five living former U.S. presidents and documents bearing Thomas
Jefferson's stamp. A backlit awards showcase gives the room a warm glow. It
holds dozens of industry statuettes awarded for "Best Couples Sex Scene" and
the like. To the right of Hirsch's desk is a Dell computer laptop showing
live shots from a nanny cam trained on his daughter's crib at home. The
mother is Hirsch's current girlfriend, Laurie Andersen, a former sales rep
for Video Team, a Chatsworth porn producer.
Would he want his infant daughter, Alexis, to become a Vivid star? He smiles
and leans back in his overstuffed leather chair. "I would tell her to really
think that through," he says. "I would respect whatever decision she would
make. And then I would send her to medical school."
It would be the ultimate triumph for a porn dynasty that began in the early
1970s, when Wall Street tanked and Fred Hirsch gave up as a stockbroker. He
called a family conference in the living room of the Hirsches' comfortable
home in Lyndhurst, Ohio, outside Cleveland. Steven was 11 and his sister,
Marci Sue, was 14 when their parents announced that Dad would sell adult
materials for Sovereign News Corp., owned by the late Reuben Sturman. A
tobacco and candy distributor, Sturman became the nation's largest purveyor
of pornography, with reputed ties to the New York Gambino Mafia family,
according to the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography. "My biggest concern
was what I would tell my friends," says Marci, now 42. "I had a hard time."
Their livelihood aside, the Hirsches seemed a model of family stability.
Dad's job wasn't Rotary Club material, but life was otherwise middle-class
normal, says Tony Ciulla, Steve's best friend from next door who is now
manager of the Marilyn Manson rock band. There was Little League baseball,
go-cart racing and mowing lawns or shoveling snow for money.
The Hirsch family joined the porn industry's migration to California in
1975, and Fred Hirsch began laying plans to start his own company. But he
also had to face ghosts he left behind--obscenity charges from his work in
Cleveland. In 1978, he and six others from Sovereign News were tried and
acquitted.
Young Hirsch escaped ghosts of his own. He says he was picked on in
Lyndhurst because he was one of only a few Jews in his junior high school.
The experience, he says, "helped toughen me up a bit. And it helped give me
the drive to succeed because I had to prove that I was OK."
An introvert by nature, he channeled his frustration into wrestling, a sport
known for its solitude and discipline. The family moved to a two-story home
on a winding, leafy street in Woodland Hills. Young Hirsch became co-captain
of the El Camino Real High School wrestling team, earning all-city honors in
his weight class. His father rarely missed a match.
By the time Steve graduated, in 1979, nearly a dozen production houses were
vying to reach the new VCR market. Fred Hirsch set up Adult Video Corp. in a
small storefront on Napa Street in Northridge. A bank of VCRs hummed in the
back office, churning out duplicates of master tapes. The whole family
helped, creating a peculiar bond and some awkward moments. Marci, who worked
in accounting, remembers wandering into the duplication lab and seeing her
first adult video. In walked Dad. "You have to leave," he said. "I can't
watch this with you."
She felt uncomfortable for about a month, she recalls. "And after that, we
would both be in there watching it. After a while you almost forget what
you're watching because you see it so often."
Fred Hirsch's company prospered. Between 1983 and 1985, its sales nearly
tripled, to $4.2 million, and it cleared $484,000 in profit, court records
show. The firm was a medium-sized force in the porn scene--although it since
has gone out of business.
Steven Hirsch attended business and journalism classes for two years at Cal
State Northridge and UCLA while doing a range of jobs at his father's
company--from packing tapes in the warehouse to working in sales, promotion
and accounting. Then he quit to work at CalVista and soon, he and James
launched Vivid.
There was little money in the beginning. Allen remembers Hirsch rolling
pennies with Wren to make ends meet. But once Allen's tapes became a
sensation, life changed quickly. The three of them began partying together.
Allen says she found Hirsch attractive that first time she saw him at
Gladstone's, but nothing romantic occurred between them then. Hirsch and
Wren were tight, and Allen never was at a loss for boyfriends. By her own
count, she has been engaged 10 times, and never married.
Mainstream respect is an idea that entices and eludes those in porn.
Hollywood is just over the mountains from porn's prime locale, the San
Fernando Valley, and the two worlds mix socially. But porn performers are
rarely taken seriously by the studios. They are more playmates than peers.
By 1986, Allen and Hirsch were successful financially, but Allen wanted to
jump to Hollywood. She had grown weary of making sex videos. "As I became
more and more involved with films, I used more drugs and alcohol," she would
later explain to a federal judge. "As time went on, I couldn't stand what I
was doing. I started using cocaine as a way to escape and a way to cope."
In February of 1986, Allen, age 23, quit the industry. She had been in porn
for 27 months and had appeared in 69 productions, 16 of them for Vivid. It
was now or never to cross over.
She landed her first B-film part in 1988 as a rocker chick in "Dr. Alien (I
Was a Teenage Sex Mutant)." That led to a referral to B-film producer Rick
Sloane, who was looking for a lead in "Vice Academy," a police farce.
"I thought the timing was right to give her the break," Sloane says, adding
that Allen came to his attention just months after her personal and
professional rival, porn actress Traci Lords, began taking mainstream roles.
Sloane gave Allen the leading role. Impressed by her comedic timing, he
wrote a sequel around her character.
She was doing OK in Hollywood, although the money wasn't as good. She
eventually appeared in 28 mainstream productions, in roles that included a
bordello prostitute in the 1990 Western "Young Guns II"; a dying prostitute
in Ken Russell's 1991 "Whore"; a topless dancer in a 1993 Emmy-award winning
episode of "NYPD Blue"; and a recurring role in "Super Force," a short-lived
kids' show.
Through the years she continued to receive royalties from Vivid and make
promotional appearances for the company. But her income dipped. She refused
to return to making adult videos, although she did start stripping to cash
in on her X-rated fame. "The high times were over and we were both strapped,
so she needed to go [nude dancing] financially," says Edward R. Holzman,
Allen's live-in boyfriend during the late 1980s and now a video producer for
Playboy Enterprises. In 1991, Allen reported making $30,000 from stripping
and $25,000 from acting.
Off screen, Allen's troubles mounted. In 1990, a federal grand jury indicted
her on two counts of tax fraud. She offered a curious defense, arguing that
her judgment had been impaired by drug use in the early 1980s. Indeed, she
and Hirsch had done a lot of cocaine as Vivid rocketed to success. "We did
coke in the hotel rooms," Allen remembers. "We did coke in the limos."
Hirsch also says he had a substance abuse problem at the time. "My life was
out of control," he says. "Some of it was alcohol. Some of it was drugs.
That was that."
As part of Allen's defense before sentencing, her attorneys hired Balkan to
review Allen's past. The criminologist said she found a woman struggling
with demons from her childhood that spilled over into her
relationships--like the one Allen struck up with actor Charlie Sheen. She
met him on the Tucson set of "Young Guns II," when Sheen visited his brother
Emilio Estevez, the film's star. Allen says they fell in love. But in
Balkan's view, their relationship went beyond those feelings. "It
represented the legitimacy of being accepted by an actor and his family in
the legitimate acting world," Balkan says.
Sheen and his father, actor Martin Sheen, wrote to U.S. District Judge
Ronald S.W. Lew asking for leniency in the tax case. After an eight-day
trial, a federal jury convicted Allen in June 1991 on one count--failing to
disclose $8,580 she earned during her first few months in porn in 1983. Lew
sentenced her to probation and attached a condition: She had to give up
drugs. Legal fees from the case and her subsequent probation violations were
devastating. Allen claims those costs topped $400,000.
As Allen and Sheen dated, she nursed him through a 32-day rehab and stood by
him when he was named a regular customer of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.
Then, she says, he dumped her. Sheen declines comment today, but Allen still
claims he is "the only man I ever really loved." She blames her rejection on
porn. "People thought who I was was detrimental to his career." Allen
learned the lesson she always feared but hoped wasn't true. "You can't
outlive what you've done," says Wayne Allen, her father. "It'll be around
forever."
Ginger Allen also failed to kick drugs. She had tried in 1989, entering a
30-day rehab program at San Diego's Sunrise Center. But by "Vice Academy
III" in 1991, Sloane says, Allen had reverted to her porn diva ways. She
demanded $10,000 and a motor-home dressing room. Yet he says she habitually
showed up late, flubbed her lines and was so puffy-faced that she needed ice
packs and heavy makeup.
At times, Allen would lock herself away for days on cocaine binges,
according to a federal court pre-sentencing report. In 1992, she failed a
court-ordered drug test and Lew sentenced her to 45 days in rehab.
Hirsch, too, had struggled with abuse problems. With encouragement from a
friend, porn producer Christian Mann, Hirsch checked himself into a drug
rehab center Nov. 9, 1988. He says he is clean and sober today. His partying
years aside, Hirsch's world has never been about the hedonism of Hugh
Hefner's grotto parties at the Playboy Mansion and Larry Flynt's hot-tub
orgies. Vivid executives keep an antiseptic distance from the production of
what they call "the content."
Like his father, Hirsch has hired family to work at Vivid, which now employs
135 people. His sister and father work for him, and so did his brother Brad,
who quit recently after starting a relationship with a Vivid actress.
Hirsch's brilliance, Mann says, is in finding other sources of revenue,
other outlets for his videos: Playboy Enterprises, the Internet, foreign
rights and teaming up with Doc Johnson, a leading maker of sex toys.
Associates describe Hirsch as generous, driven, ethical--and controlling.
"Fred Hirsch is an affable, nice guy," says veteran porn director Bud Lee,
who has worked for both father and son. "Steve is a cunning, ruthless
businessman." In 1997, for instance, Vivid scored an industry coup by
landing distribution rights for a stolen video of actress Pamela Lee
Anderson having sex with her former husband, rock musician Tommy Lee.
Paul Cambria, a Buffalo, N.Y., attorney who represents Vivid, says Hirsch
has an "uncanny ability to make the best deals I've ever seen in my life."
One of those deals occurred the year Allen left Vivid. Hirsch signed a
contract to supply the Playboy Channel with two soft-core movies a month. It
was a deft maneuver. Hirsch shot two versions of each feature. The soft-core
version, heavily edited to show milder content only, went for airing on
Playboy's network. The triple X version went to video stores under the Vivid
label.
Last year, Hirsch made Vivid's biggest deal ever by selling three cable and
satellite cable TV hard-core networks back to Playboy for $70 million, plus
$12 million in possible bonuses. Four years earlier, Playboy had loaned
Hirsch $10 million of the $10.5 million needed to buy the hard-core Hot
network, provided the company could buy it back in the future. At the time,
Playboy wanted a toehold in the market but felt it should keep triple X
content at arm's length. Hirsch then added two more hard-core channels and
his programming quickly lured viewers from Playboy's soft-core fare.
Surprised by the shift in demand, Playboy bought back Hot--giving Hirsch and
his two partners an astounding return.
Beyond being a deal maker, Hirsch has excelled at marketing. After Allen
left Vivid, Hirsch developed a lineup of "Vivid Girls," each presented in
the same way Ginger was packaged. "He wanted to create this star system,
like old Hollywood," says Ciulla, his lifelong friend. But Allen's heirs
don't receive the same generous compensation she did. By signing with Vivid
today, an actress makes less than the industry average of about $80,000 a
year--and some Vivid Girls make as little as $39,000 a year. But a Vivid
actress typically does gain an easier shooting schedule and a longer career.
If she's also a strip club dancer, her value on the club circuit goes up
because of her association with the Vivid promotional machine. "The girls
don't have to worry about anything," says James, Vivid co-founder. "We
handle their careers and treat them like stars."
Hirsch's system, however, imposes controls that would have other workplaces
in revolt. After Hirsch handpicks each actress, the company dictates the cut
of their clothing and the size of their breasts and negotiates the frequency
and types of sex acts they perform, according to a typical Vivid contract
obtained by The Times.
Vivid Girls also surrender control over their screen names and the scenes
they shoot--something a mainstream actor would never relinquish. Once Vivid
shoots a scene, it has absolute control over its use, which can be
staggering given the various ways pornography is available. "We recycle a
movie 10 or 25 different ways," James says. A single scene can be spliced
into various video store movies, sold over the Internet and cable and
marketed as still photos.
Vivid Girls, however, are not included in that continuing revenue stream.
The company no longer pays royalties because it "became too complex," James
says. For instance, Vivid Girl Dyanna Lauren received several thousand
dollars for her co-star appearance in the 1997 film "Bad Wives." Internal
documents show Vivid sold 54,639 DVD copies that, at the suggested retail
price of $49.99 each, would mean sales of $2.73 million. That doesn't count
VHS tape, sales through cable pay-per-view channels and orders on Vivid's
own video-on-demand service. Had Lauren been under a conventional Screen
Actors Guild contract, she would have received an estimated $45,000 to
$261,000 extra from the DVD sales alone. Vivid's contract wouldn't survive
in the real world, say 12 labor experts contacted by The Times. "If you
dropped this document on any agent or lawyer's desk in this town, they'd
laugh and throw it away," says John Laviolette, an entertainment lawyer who
represents numerous Hollywood producers. "It's practically slavery."
Actresses haven't challenged the contracts they are grateful to get,
although some say being a Vivid Girl isn't what it used to be. "You couldn't
get me to be a Vivid Girl again if you pointed a gun at my head," says a
Vivid contract player from the mid-1990s. "They want too much. They get
everything."
Wayne Allen goes to the bedroom and comes back with a small black jewelry
case. He cracks it open. The lining says "XIV Karats Ltd., Beverly Hills."
It holds a man's gold band embedded with a line of five small diamonds. It
was meant for Steve Hirsch.
The ring is a bittersweet reminder that, in porn, sex isn't the problem.
Love is. Once a woman steps into the X-rated industry, she often closes the
door on anything resembling a normal, long-term relationship with someone
outside the industry. Ginger Allen says she knew this from the beginning.
"No man wants his lady with someone else, whether they're performing or
not," she told a magazine reviewer two years into the business. Porn stars,
she added, will have--"not may have, will have"--trouble finding love.
Allen says the greatest love of her life was Sheen. But perhaps her most
important love was her old boss. Friends for years, they became romantically
involved in the mid-1990s. Wayne Allen says Hirsch began visiting his
daughter in the evening, saying he had to be discreet. "He kept telling
Ginger he was going to have her [Wren] move out. He was going to pay her
off."
Hirsch eventually did break up with Wren, and the parting was nasty, says
Paul Fishbein, publisher of the adult industry magazine AVN. Fishbein says
Hirsch gave his girlfriend a "settlement" for her work in starting Vivid.
Wren declines to comment. Hirsch's relationship with Allen thrived. Soon
they were talking of marriage and adopting children, since doctors told
Allen that she could never conceive.
In mid-1995, Allen decided to pop the question herself. She bought the gold
and diamond band as an engagement ring for Hirsch, and planned to present it
to him over a picnic lunch at the beach. But she was so excited she asked
him before they got out of the house. "He said, 'Yes,' and then I told him
something that changed his mind," she recalls. Allen won't say what that
was, but her father will: "She said, 'I'm pregnant.' He gave her the ring
back."
Records show that on March 31, 1996, Allen gave birth to a son, Sterling
Wayne Robert Allen. The father's name is withheld on the birth certificate.
Hirsch declines to comment on his personal life or persistent reports on
porn Web sites that he is Sterling's father and pays Allen a monthly
paternity allowance. "You know you've really made it when people can print
rumors about you," he says. "I'm really not going to comment on it. I'm not
going to glorify this."
Allen remains bitter about the breakup. Success has spoiled Hirsch, she
says. "Steven went from a really sweet, assertive nice young guy to very
calculating," she says. "I think that when you go from a person who rolls
pennies to start your company to being a millionaire or billionaire, you
treat people differently. You forget where you came from, and who you are
and who was there for you."
Hirsch is in front of that class of business students at USC. He spends more
than an hour outlining the details of running a business in the skin trade.
Students scribble notes as Hirsch talks about vertical integration, buy
rates, production value. There is one term he refuses to utter--the P word.
"Pornography has always been a bad word and we're not about bad words,"
Hirsch would explain later. "We're about making money."
As he finishes his lecture, the students applaud politely. His presentation
was impressive, says Brian Francis Linhart, a business administration major.
"I never knew porn could be so cool." But instructor Scott Wyant appears to
have second thoughts about his decision to invite Hirsch. When asked about
it by a reporter, he says he sees no "upside" to discussing it. "Think about
it," he says. "A pornographer. At USC."
A few weeks later in Chicago, Ginger Allen is getting ready to take the
stage of the Admiral Theater, a strip joint in a tired neighborhood on the
west side. It is a Wednesday and the first of 11 shows Allen is booked to
headline through the weekend. The announcer urges the 21 middle-aged men and
one woman in the audience to sit by the chest-high stage--within easy
tipping distance. Fog from dry ice shoots up from the stage, which is
flanked by two huge mock hieroglyphic bookends of nude women. Backstage,
Allen is praying to a god she says is forgiving and watches over her in this
environment.
The sound system blares "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Then to the throbbing bass
of "Sweet Emotions," Allen appears out of the fog wearing a sheer robe and
high spiked heels. She gyrates, clamps her legs around the ears of some
stage-side patrons, dances and rolls on the floor. She giggles and gives
everyone a kiss.
After her third number, she takes a mike, chats up the house and announces:
"I'm going to auction off my panties. Every penny of my panty money goes to
my son's college fund." A Florida man years ago paid more than $1,000 for a
pair, she says. This night, however, the bidding starts at $10, rises slowly
and settles at $45. "Looks like my son's going to community college," she
says.
If she had her way, Allen would not be stripping. "I've definitely made
mistakes. Had I saved my money a long time ago, I'd be in a very sweet
position." At 39, the single mother of a 5-year-old finds herself battling
time and the law of diminishing returns. For a while, the combination of
mainstream entertainment work and tours on the strip circuit underwrote her
upper-middle-class lifestyle, one beyond the expectations for a
high-school-educated clerk from Rockford. She managed to buy a Lexus SUV and
a 6,600-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms for
$580,000 in Woodland Hills.
Then the mainstream work dried up three years ago. So did the big crowds on
the nude dance circuit. In a market flooded with porn-star strippers, Allen
finds herself competing for half her normal appearance fee to strip for
uninspired audiences. "Everybody's been inundated with sex and nudity, it's
not exciting anymore," she says. "So my income has drastically changed
because of too much sex."
Allen says she has refinanced her house twice in five years to pull out
equity, but faced with a $5,500 monthly mortgage and other bills, she
recently decided to go back to porn. Charles Clay, her Hollywood agent for
14 years, says he warned her it would hurt her prospects for mainstream
roles. She called Hirsch first. "His response was, 'Come back to us after
you get your best offer,' " she says. "It was kind of a little slap in the
face." Hirsch says Allen made the decision to look elsewhere. "We wished her
well and still do."
Allen eventually made a deal with rival VCA, another San Fernando Valley
adult production house, for less than her asking price of $100,000. Directed
by a friend, former porn actress Jane Hamilton, Allen ended a 13-year
absence from hard-core videos by starring in comeback movies, "Torn," "White
Lightning" and "New Wave Hookers 6."
She turned to VCA again in mid-2000 after routine medical tests showed she
had an illness, says Hamilton, who acted in porn under the name Veronica
Hart. Hamilton says Allen tracked her down via telephone during a trade show
to see if she could make yet another film. "She said, 'Jane, I found out
some bad news. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to make movies,' "
Hamilton says. "I know she has cancer. I know where it's located. But as far
as speaking the words, she doesn't actually speak the words."
Allen declines to confirm her illness. "I don't want to jinx myself," she
says. She emphatically maintains it is not HIV and volunteers that she
survived cervical cancer 10 years ago. Her father says he and his daughter
do not discuss the illness in detail. "We just leave well enough alone. We
know that she's ill."
Her illness was apparent during the filming of her fourth comeback video at
VCA, "Taken."
Hamilton says she was forced to stop production at one point. "She finished
with a scene and was throwing up and it was obvious that we weren't going to
push on." Allen asked for work again in July because she couldn't pay her
medical bills, Hamilton says. VCA used her in a one-day shoot for a scene in
a movie starring Ashlyn Gere. "I could get a girl who would do the same
scene for a lot less money, but she is having a tough time," Hamilton says.
Allen also picked up temporary part-time work as a director and emcee for a
porn Web site run by Suze Randall, the former Playboy photographer who took
the first nude test photos of Allen in 1983.
Allen has tried to sell her house and continues nude dancing, against her
doctor's wishes, she says. In Chicago, she earned $550 a show, about half
the rate the Admiral pays top stars. She attends AA three to five times a
week, making friends "not because I'm Ginger Lynn, not because of something
they want from me, but because of who I am. I have people that I help to
stay sober."
At home she is an attentive mother to a son who knows nothing of his mom's
career. For the Fourth of July, she baked red, white and blue cupcakes and
bread for his preschool class. For now, all he needs to know is that she
signs autographs for fans. A further explanation will come later and go
something like this, she says: When people want to laugh, they watch
comedies. When they want to cry, they watch dramas. When they want to be
frightened, they watch horror movies. And when they want to feel good, they
watch grown-up movies--like Mommy made.
"I really don't want to be pitied," Allen says. "I've made my choices in my
life. I put myself in this position. I am the one who is going to have to
get myself out of it. I've been very fortunate. Most girls don't have the
career that I've been fortunate enough to have. They don't have a shelf life
of 18 years."
Allen occasionally still receives royalties from her Vivid videos. But
they're intermittent. She says it is up to her to call if she's due royalty
money from the company. She telephones Hirsch directly. Usually, she says,
he takes her call.
"I'll put your mother in a straitjacket, you punk ass white boy...I'll
fuck you in the ass until you love me, faggot...You're a little white
pussy scared of a real man. You wouldn't last two minutes in my world,
bitch."
--Mike Tyson
fuck you in the ass until you love me, faggot...You're a little white
pussy scared of a real man. You wouldn't last two minutes in my world,
bitch."
--Mike Tyson
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
