Lovelace, Hollywood's latest look at the adult film industry, opens today. Amanda Seyfried plays Linda Lovelace, the most memorable star of Deep Throat, the 1972 movie that launched the "porno chic" movement and presumably spiked the number of blow jobs given and requested across these United States.
Smart reviews of Lovelace have been quick to point out the film's problematic treatment of Lovelace, a figure the film denies desire and smarts. Complex reached out to performer, director, writer and entrepreneur Joanna Angel, of burningangel.com, for her take on how Hollywood gets the adult industry wrong.
It's Not a Party:
"I wasn't around then, but porn now is not the party that it is in Boogie Nights. Porn is an industry where lots of movies are made. There is a system and there is a formula. It's very rare that you’ll see drugs on the set or anything like that. It's a job."
There's No Moral Lesson:
"Things are different now, and there's really nothing that's going to help my career to learn about what exactly happened to Linda Lovelace. I get uncomfortable watching or hearing anything about girls that had bad times in porn. But people love to hear a sob story. People don’t want to hear about a girl that went to college, who gets along fine with her family, who also happens to make porn for a living. If I could write an honest TV show about porn, I would love the opportunity. If anybody out there from HBO or Netflix wants to give me an original series, I will write the shit out of that.
There Isn't That Much Money:
"When Sasha Grey was playing a porn star on Entourage, there was a scene where she's fighting with Vince. He wants her to stop doing porn, and she tells him that it's just a gang bang, so it won't be that intimate. He says, how much are you getting paid for it? Like, he's just going to give her that amount of money. And she says something like $250,000, some figure that is so exponentially off from what even the most beautiful, big-name porn actress would get for doing a gang bang.
"As a producer, this is the most frustrating misconception, that porn is a quick and easy way to make money. It's not. Especially on the production end. A story about two kids deciding to make a porn to make money, which is what Zack and Miri Make a Porno is about—for someone in a movie or on TV to suggest that, I’m broke, let's make a porn and get rich—that's insulting to all the hard work that gets put into turning a profit in this business. My company's not even that big, but the big execs at Vivid and Wicked, they are all real business people who would succeed at anything they put their minds to. They’re not just idiots who stumbled upon a big pile of money because they made porn.
"But ultimately I’m not offended by anything. We’re all out here to make something entertaining for the world to see. When somebody’s making a movie, things have to get fictionalized."
