Do porn flicks actually sell better when they have names that play off of mainstream movie titles?

Joanna Angel: You know, I think so. I didn’t direct it but my production company put out The XXXorcist. When the original came out it was a really popular movie so I think people were automatically drawn to our film. I did a parody of Party Monster that’s called Porny Monster and I don’t think that many people watched the original. And most of the ones who did were probably gay guys so I doubt many people walking through a porn store and were like “Oh my God, Porny Monster!” I guess it depends on what movie your going to pick.

Porny Monster might be kind of a stretch. Can you rank the sex tapes of Tommy Lee and Pam, Paris and Rick, and Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly from best to worst?

Joanna Angel: I definitely think Tommy Lee’s comes first…yeah, that’s the best one. Then there’s Paris’ video. I never saw Tonya Harding’s but Screech’s [Dustin Diamond] was definitely awful. That video was so bad. First of all, no offense to those two girls, but everyone in that movie was really ugly. Maybe Screech just overpowering the whole thing made them even uglier, plus it looks really staged. I think the Paris and Tommy ones are real. The Screech tape looks like, “OK I’m Screech and I want to put out a sex tape and look like I got caught.” You can tell in the Screech video that no one was really into each other. They should have made it like Saved By The Bell. This is what they should have done, they should have made it like as if Screech got off on having sex with girls dressed up as Saved By The Bell characters like Jessie or Lisa and they did Saved by the Bell scenarios. Now that would have been good and really funny.

How did you and your partner Mitch Fontaine get into business?

Joanna Angel: That’s the thing with starting a web company. We didn’t think we were getting into the business at all. Mitch and I went to college together and he asked me if I wanted to start a porn site with him in 2002. I was like…sure, that sounds…interesting. I was kind of a senior, I was a senior but I still had a lot more to go than I would have liked. We didn’t think we were really going to go through with it. We took some pictures of our friends and we had a friend at school with us who knew some web programming and we just threw this web site together. It really didn’t feel like we were getting into the business. We did all of this from our house. It wasn’t like we decided to get into the porn site and all of a sudden there was a swimming pool, a mansion, nice cars…

A few leopards prowling the grounds…

Joanna Angel: Exactly. We were going to Rutgers, living in NJ in a fucking house with eight of our friends.

So how do you handle a friend broaching the subject of starting a porn site?
Joanna Angel: You know it just something about that minute right then, I thought, you know that would be pretty cool. I don’t know it sounded like fun. At that point in my life I was getting kind of bored with a lot of stuff. Friends were graduating, getting jobs and moving on…you know? I was at that point in my life and I needed something new.

And porn was there with open arms.

Joanna Angel: And porn came knocking on my door [laughs]. But more than the idea of starting a porn site, it was just really cool to start something with your friends. I mean, the fact that we had no money kind of put a damper on things but at the time we really didn’t know what people spent money on to run a porn company so it wasn’t like, “We can’t really do this or can’t do that,” we kind of just worked with what we had. And since we were the bosses we could do whatever we wanted to do. It was just photos at first. We didn’t start making videos till two years later. We launched a new web site and starting making DVDs and then it was like, “Whoa, I’m in the porn industry.” I have no regrets. From a business perspective sometimes I wish we could go back and do it all over again because we made so mistakes but that’s how you learn. But I don’t regret what I’m doing at all. I’m having a great time.

Which candidate is going to be sitting in the White House in ’08 and do they need to court the porn vote?

Joanna Angel: I think Hillary is going to win and I think she’d be a very good president. Anyone would be better than what we have now. Porn is always going to be taboo and bad. No one is ever going to want their kids doing it. Even the most liberal administration is not going to be pro-porn. But the one we have now is unreasonably against it and making everybody’s life difficult. But no one is going to start campaigning with, “We’re going to start creating more porn for the economy!” It just wouldn’t make sense and you know what? I kind of like that about it. I think I like that porn is like so…wrong and it always will be. It makes me feel like I’m still a little kind of punk rock and listening to music my mother doesn’t like. I grew up going to a really conservative high school where everyone was republican and I kind of liked being that girl in the class who raised her hand and said, “No that’s not right!” I always liked being different and I think making porn is an extension of me continuing my rebellious life. Home // GIRLS // SEX // Joanna Angel