Everyone thinks it's just a big orgy, but it's so technical.

You have all these other people in the room.

A three minute scene might take three days to film.

Linda Wong performer.

Coming from the adult industry.

I had a lot of doors that wouldn't open for me.

I would wait for the next one, but I try to go in through the side door, you know.

Heather Hunter performer.

Welcome to General World.

Welcome back to General World.

I'm your host, Molly Lambert.

This is episode ten Beyond General World.

Jenna Jamison feels like her success as a porn star is self directed.

Sure, it takes a lot to stand out in a room of skinny, blonde white women with really big breaths, but Jenna also benefits from being a skinny, blond white woman in the first place, working in an industry controlled primarily by white men pushing eurocentric beauty standards.

Anyone who doesn't fit into a very specific mold is treated as exotic or niche.

But in both born and mainstream pop culture, there are performers and directors of color who want to change things from the ground up and create space in their industries for other people who look like them.

You have to be an exhibitionist, to last long in this business.

I am venessidelio performer.

I'm betraying a It's just a character.

My personal life is totally separate.

Even early on in porn history's seventies golden age, there are performers who manage to break through porn's racist barriers.

Linda Wong, the Japanese American actress we mentioned in episode three, is born Linda Carol Secchi, a virgo in San Francisco.

Linda is a high school homecoming queen ballerina and college dance major who starts nude modeling and is asked to do adult films.

She co stars with John C.

Holmes in The Jade Pussycat, one of Bob Chan's Johnny wadd series of movies.

She struggles with addiction and makes her last film, The Erotic World of Linda Wong in nineteen eighty five, before dying of an accidental drug overdose in nineteen eighty seven at a motel in Petaluma.

The first major crossover star of color is a d's performer named Vanessa del Rio who becomes known as the Latin from Manhattan.

She is born Anna Maria Sanchez.

An Aires, the child of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants from Harlem.

Raised as a strict Catholic, she starts to rebel after her mom takes her to see movies starring Isabelle Sarley, a former Miss Argentina who starred in a string of hit sexploitation movies like Fuego.

Sarle is considered the Latin American equivalent of the French sex symbol Brigitte bardow Anna Maria Sanchez drops out of school in eighth grade, learns to code, and at age eighteen, becomes a computer programmer, then runs off with a boyfriend who steals cars to live in a series of hot Volkswagen Beetles.

After tiring of bug life, she starts waitressing, go go dancing and bartending topless.

She also works as a call girl and street walker.

Then, in nineteen seventy four, or she's offered one hundred and fifty dollars to act in an adult film called Cherry Hustler.

I just asked how much does it pay?

She said one hundred and fifty dollars, and that's exactly what I needed.

That was my half of the rent.

I guess it was meant to be.

She takes her stage name from a friend named Vanessa and Dolores del Rio, the Mexican actress who became Hollywood's first Latina star.

Vanessa del Rio stars in films like Dracula Exotica.

She uses her new influx of cash to take herself on a dream vacation to Europe.

Vanessa del Rio makes one hundred and twenty movies and appears in innumerable peep show loops before retiring from adult films in nineteen eighty six.

She continues to dance and model, and appears in a nineteen ninety six episode of NYPD Blue.

Vanessa del Rio has a second wave of notoriety from being name checked in songs by ice Cube Digital underg in Junior Mafia.

She cameos in the music video for Junior Mafia's Get Money, and on set, Little Kim approaches her to say she's a fan.

Vanessa deploys her coding skills to create a personal website for her Goddess of Lust fan club, where she sells memorabilia and does cam shows.

There's also a tashi in art book about her.

Listen you Can't unring a bell, I can't be a porn apologist.

You can't undo the fun.

I just considered my life an adventure.

It's like I let the wind blow me wherever.

Everything that you could consider exploitative, I found something to get out of it.

Stars like Linda Wong and Vanessa del Rio are among the first to break the white blonde mold, but performers of color also have to contend with issues that white actors don't like being exoticized and racially fetishized.

For these performers of color, working within the studio system often means agreeing to take racially stereotyped roles because that's all that's being offered to them.

But in the eighties and early nineties, there are actors and directors on both sides of the hill, in both Hollywood and porn Valley, who are actively aiming to challenge and change the racist status quo by changing who is behind the camera, in front of it, and running the studios.

In the nineteen eighties, Eddie Murphy is a world famous comedian and a list Hollywood star, wildly popular from his stand on Saturday Night Live and blockbuster movies like Beverly Hills Cop.

Much like porn stand up involves doing something rehearsed and trying to make it appear spontaneous.

Bruce Gowers is a Scotsman who directed the proto music video for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Gowers helped pioneer the form that became music videos by filming promotional performance videos for legacy acts like The Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart.

Gower shot up to become one of the most sought after names in the burgeoning music video economy.

It changed the way music was perceived.

Everyone was doing videos and bands were seeing their sales and chop positions rise.

Bruce Gowers director.

Bruce Gowers moved to La where he directed the music video for Michael Jackson's Rock with You and several Prince videos, including nineteen ninety nine and Kiss.

Eddie Murphy hand picks Bruce Gowers to direct his landmark stand up special Delirious, which shares its title with a Prince song.

In nineteen eighty five, Eddie Murphy hosts the MTV Video Music Awards and goes off script, ad libing and cursing in defiance of MTV censorship rules.

The Los Angeles Times runs letters of Complaint.

I was watching the MTB Video Music Awards on Channel eleven and was appalled by the number of times Eddie Murphy used profanity and was bleeped.

My ten year old daughter was watching, and even though Murphy was censored, she could figure out what he said.

If a show was going to be aired at eight PM, it should be clean enough for the whole family to see it.

Susan Wattling Chino.

In the eighties, Prince has also become famous and controversial for his envelope pushing lyrics and raw overt sexuality.

Eddie Murphy and Prince are both part of what pearl clutters like Susan Wattling from Chino see as a new raunch culture.

Really, it's that Eddie Murphy and Prince's huge celebrity as black men threatens the racist American pop cultural status quo.

So in nineteen eighty three, a backlash starts.

It begins when Rick Alley, a thirty year old junior executive at a Cincinnati tool company, buys the Prince album nineteen ninety nine from a record store and brings it home to play for his family on the living room stereo.

Rick ally buys the album because he loves little red Corvette, which he thinks is about a car that is small and red and not about Quissy.

The whole one side of the album had what you'd call top forty hits.

We didn't get to the four letter words until I turned it over, Rick Alley concerned father Cincinnati.

When rick Ally flips the LP over to Let's Pretend We're married, he is shocked by the content and tries to run his eight year old son an eleven year old daughter into another room while his wife, Mitzy freaks out.

But it's too late.

His kids have heard Prince's ode to matrimony.

Rick Ally runs to look at the record to see if the obscene words coming out of his stereo system are listed on a lyric sheet, only to find that there is no lyric sheet provided with the album, and so rick Alley begins a personal crusade against what gets termed porn rock that starts with a demand that record stores warn you if the album you are buying contains profane lyrics.

I think Prince is a fantastic artist.

I bought Purple Rain too.

He's an incredible musician, and my wife and I are big fans, so you can't say this is a vendetta.

In nineteen eighty four, a group called the National Parent Teachers Association takes up rick Alley's cause with a conservative lobbyist group called Parents Music Resource Center, a coalition of women married to influential politicians funded by ghouls like Mike Love from The Beach Boys.

The PTA and the PMRC go after the National Association of Broadcasters and threaten to get their radio licenses revoked if they play songs with explicit lyrics or indecent thememes.

They demand records come out with ratings and warning labels for sex, drugs, violence, and the occult.

Good Housekeeping magazines suggests parents write angry letters and boycott record companies.

An anti censorship group forms called the Musical Majority, whose members include Martin Scorsese.

Hall and Oats.

The Musical Majority says ratings and warning labels are okay as long as obscene content itself isn't being suppressed.

The controversy just sells even more prints records.

The record companies agree to do the parental advisory stickers, which they have already been putting on explicit comedy albums like Eddie Murphy's Delirious.

In nineteen eighty nine.

The stand up comedy landscape has become rife with comedians whose gimmick is that they are raunchy in court controversy, usually by doing sexist, racist, and homophobic material.

Eddie Murphy resents that he gets so much public flack for working blue, while white comedians who do much dirtier material and are less funny than Eddie Murphy seem to.

Skate hickory dickery dock.

Some chick's been sucking my cock clock Struck two.

I dropped my goo, dumped the bitch down the next block.

Oh, Andrew Dice Clay comedian.

Now when I did Delirious, I got all this flag from my material being so filthy.

The truth is it's nowhere nearest fieldy is some of the stuff they're doing.

Now, I'll feeling like a fucking oh guy watching Sam Kinnison or Andrew Dace Clay Eddie Murphy comedian.

By the late eighties, Eddie Murphy has become one of the most powerful people in the film industry after starring in a string of blockbuster heads.

While Hollywood power brokers are still extremely openly racist behind the scenes, they'll make an occasional exception for a star like Murphy if they sense there's money to be made.

In an interview with Jet magazine, director Spike Lee criticizes Eddie Murphy for not using his power to help other, less powerful black film workers break into a racist industry that runs on a closed circuit of gatekeeping and private golf course networking.

If Eddie Murphy, who made a billion dollars for Paramount, went into their offices and said, I ain't making no more films until you hire some black people in your front office, they would have to do it.

I hope he'll use his clout rather than focus on who gets the best table at Spago's Spike Lee.

Director Eddie Murphy directly responds to Spike Lee's comments in a Rolling Stone interview, saying that Spike Lee is overestimating how much power Murphy actually has with the big movie studios.

The company is called Paramount, not Eddie Murphy Productions.

I can't walk into the studios front offices and demand, shit, how's some black people here.

Murphy also gets critiqued by actor director Robert Townsend, whose movie Hollywood Shuffle is about reductive screen caricatures of blackness at Hollywood studios.

The success of an Eddie Murphy is seen as an exceptional outlier, not a sign that a larger breadth of voices makes for better art.

After initially getting defensive, Murphy processes the feedback from his black peers in the entertainment industry.

He hires Robert Townsend to direct his second stand up special, nineteen eighty seven's Raw.

Eddie Murphy knows the film industry is racist and that studio executives still don't care about fostering diversity, only about using him to make more money.

He is also a where that Hollywood's old white establishment wants to make him a token to pretend that the film industry is more progressive than it is Presenting.

At the nineteen eighty eight Oscars, Eddie Murphy again goes off script.

They came to me and said they wanted me to present the award for Best Picture.

My manager came and told me that the Academy had picked me.

My first reaction was to say, no, I ain't going.

My manager said, but why.

I said, I'm not going because they haven't recognized black people in their motion pictures.

He said, what are you talking about black people?

Win Oscars?

I said, well, black actors and actresses have won Oscars throughout sixty years, but I'll probably never win an Oscar from saying this, but hey, what the heck, I gotta say it.

Actually, I might not be in any trouble because the way it's going, it's about every twenty years we get one, so we ain't due till about two thousand and four, so by the time this all blows over.

I said I wasn't going, but my manager said, you have to go.

You can't sub the academy.

So I came down here to give the award.

But I just feel we have to recognize as the people.

I just want you to know that I'm gonna give this award, but black people will not ride the caboose of society and we will not bring up the rear anymore, and I want you to recognize it.

Murphy expects his speech to spark a big conversation about race and representation on screen.

He is surprised to see nobody mentioning it in the news or the trades the next day, almost as if to pretend it didn't happen.

There are rumors that Oscars brass are very pissed about Eddie going off script to critique the Academy, and that in doing so he has detonated his own chances of ever winning an Academy award.

Rather than responding to the truth and his criticism with a big show of action, they choose to punish him for public criticizing the Academy.

The Academy proves his point approximately twenty years later when they nominate Murphy for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Dream Girls and then have him lose the award to Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine.

In nineteen eighty nine, Spike Lee's third feature, Do the Right Thing, comes out and hits really big at the box office, both critically and commercially.

The success of Do the Right Thing helps kick off a new era of filmmaking known as Black New Wave or Black New Hollywood.

Do the Right Thing makes almost forty million dollars on a six million dollar budget, and as always, it's visions of potential profits that finally motivate some producers to bankroll a handful of young black filmmakers after studios are forced to see that there is a large underserved audience for films about the black experience in America that are made by black filmmakers.

In October of nineteen ninety, Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy make peace publicly in a Spin magazine cover story conversation where they clear the air, reminisced about growing up in New York and connect over both sponsoring the United Artists Against Apartheid benefit for Nelson Mandela or Nelson Mandela told Eddie Murphy his comedy made him laugh while he was stuck in prison.

They also discussed Hollywood's double standards for black creatives versus white ones, which Murphy experienced firsthand when his nineteen eighty nine directorial debut Harlem Knights flopped and he suddenly saw himself being labeled in the trades as washed up and box office poison.

The way I see it, they only want one black person at the top anyway, And even though you've made two billion dollars for Pair Amount and Hollywood, I still think they'd rather have somebody white in that position.

And anytime there's a white boy that comes around that might take the title from you, like Tom Cruise or whoever, it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it from Eddie.

You know what?

I felt like that when I did come into America, because it felt like that was a really good movie and it got really really bad criticism.

It was like, well, what the fuck do they want me to do?

You know?

But this movie, I think it was an okay movie.

I mean, we got some bare views and we got some really good ones.

But I'd expect to be like either.

Or how come we never just talk to each other.

What they like to do is to separate.

You're the biggest black director in the world.

Okay, I'm the biggest black movie star in the world.

That's a dangerous combination to have us hook up because the people who have control don't have control.

Then Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee commiserate about the huge pressure on both of them to fix the entertainment industries racism problems.

And while they're talking about Hollywood, the same thing is happening on the other side of the hill and the other entertainment and just in the valley.

In the late eighties and early nineties, porn studios are dealing with the same issues as mainstream filmmakers when it comes to representation and inclusion.

Despite Asian American author Bob Chen being porn's first big director.

As the business becomes ultra profitable.

It's primarily white men behind the camera, and they tend to fetishize other races in their films.

The earliest porn movies from the seventies are integrated.

It's only later in the video age that performers of color are really siloed off into a separate niche of adult movies centered around racial fetishism and racist stereotypes.

There is always acting work for performers of color, but mainly within this framework.

But some people are always working hard to broaden what pornography looks like and make the industry more inclusive and better for participants.

One of these people is a tall, handsome, life black performer who takes the stage name Shawn Michaels.

When Jenna World returns, we meet the James Bond of Horn Shawn Michaels.

Oh my God, Welcome back to Jenna World.

Shawn Michaels is born Andre Allen in Brooklyn in nineteen fifty eight, up Ices.

He attends Boys and Girls High School in Bedstye.

Because of his striking good looks and six foot three height, he gets scouted into modeling.

He moves to la in the late eighties and works as a nurse in Woodland Hills.

He gets back into modeling, this time without his clothes on.

In nineteen eighty five, at age twenty seven, he decides to get into porn as a performer.

He combines the names of two famous men epitomizing luxury and masculinity, Sean Connery and Michael Jordan, to form his stage name, Shawn Michaels.

Sean Connery is a man's man on and off camera, Shawn Michaels performer.

When Shawn Michaels enters the industry in the mid eighties, films with black performers having sex are treated as a niche genre.

Money flows predominantly to white run companies and white performers.

White men were still considered the most important consumers for the porn business to court because American porn is so racist.

Shawn Michaels does his earliest work in Germany, where is likely racist in a different European way.

Shawn Michaels has an ambitious plan to make high budget, glossy porn for a black audience that reflects his own tastes.

Shawn Michaels wants to portray himself a suave, rich, and seductive like James Bond, talking women out of their clothes with his smooth charisma.

In nineteen ninety, he appears in Oh What a Night, where he's the lone black performer.

His sex scene is with Sherry Taylor, a wife and mother who entered a wet t shirt contest in her thirties and discovered she was an exhibitionist.

Oh What a Night is directed by John Leslie ak John Nuzzo, an Italian American stud turned director from Ohio.

John Leslie, a five foot eleven Steelers fan in Aquarius, worked at a steel mill, then moved to New York for art school and to play harmonica in a band called the Brooklyn Bluesbusters.

In the nineteen seventies, he moves to Mill Valley, California, and gets into porn via the Mitchell Brothers.

When John Holmes is sidelined by the Wonderland Murders, thirty year old John Leslie takes over his spot.

Leslie is known for three watercolor paintings, playing blues harmonica, and directing the hell out of some sex scenes.

John was one of the very very very few who I looked up to as having something to teach me.

He was the best pornographer, best eerotic filmmaker.

He was just an artist in many ways, from his painting to his cooking to his filmmaking.

Paul Thomas director.

Leslie is one of the first performers to move into directing.

In nineteen eighty seven, he directs night shift nurses, and by nineteen eighty eight he's directing full time.

He is fresh off a spate of AVN wins when he makes Oh What a Night for BCA with cub performer turned aspiring director Shawn Michaels.

I was nervous.

I knew my lines and everything, but I was just nervous about working with John Leslie, And of course I had a crush on Sherry Taylor, so I was totally intimidated.

But put me at ease, as did Joey, and I was able to pull it off.

That was basically the beginning of my career as a serious individual in the adult industry.

That was my introduction to an actor becoming a director producer.

Oh What a Night shoots on location in Bodega Bay, California, where Alfred Hitchcock made The Birds.

Sean Michael scene gets him noticed by the big porn studios.

For his on screen presence and physical prowess.

He earns a sterling professional reputation and becomes known as the gentleman pornographer.

John Leslie was the first person to give me a male performer in the adult industry who just happens to be black, an opportunity to do more than just be known for being a black dick in movies, and which also gave me the opportunity to see that the industry did offer more than a lot of racially demeaning types of roles towards not only African Americans, but all nationalities that are in the adult industry.

In nineteen ninety one, Shawn Michaels gets his chance to direct his debut is Girls in the Hood, a takeoff on John Singleton's nineteen ninety one hit debut Boys in the Hood, for which twenty four year old Singleton became the first black director ever nominated for the Best Director Oscar, as well as the youngest ever nominee.

Shawn Michael's career blossoms in tandem with nineties black New Hollywood, led by directors like Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, and the Hughes Brothers.

In nineteen ninety two, Shawn Michaels directs a movie called black Jack City, titled after Van Peebles nineteen ninety one New Jack City.

In nineteen ninety five, Shawn Michaels gets inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame.

In nineteen ninety six, he founds his own production company, Shawn Michaels Productions International.

He hires his sister Sandy to run sales and marketing.

Shawn Michael's films are diverse, which is not to say unproblematic.

They have fetishistic language and themes, but for porn this is still major progress.

He helps expand and humanize the portrayal of black men in porn.

Michael stars in films like a porn remake of Othello and directs titles like Up Your Ass eight.

He has big dreams for his imprint, envisioning a sex comedy porn series inspired by James Bond and Austin Powers called Sean Bond, which comes to pass with titles like License to Drill and Cold.

Finger International Intrigue.

Whatever it'll be, goofy, It'll have things that we can have fun with sexually.

That's what I'm leaning towards sexual comedy.

Michaels and another black performer named Ron high Tower work on the white side of the porn industry while calling out its continued racism.

When high Tower retired from performing in nineteen ninety six, he starts directing music videos for rap groups like Gangstar and Above the Law.

He directs the music video for Tupac featuring Casey and JoJo's how Do You Want It, which features black porn stars like Angel Kelly, Jeanie Pepper, and Heather Hunter.

I work hard, and I planned to go all the way to the top.

Before Jenna Jamison.

One of the porn stars who becomes most successful at crossing over into mainstream culture is Heather Hunter, a five foot three libra dynamo from New York.

When I started in the business, I was being billed as black an Italian.

I had to hurry up and nip that in the butt and let people know I was proud to be African American.

And then there were the titles of the movies.

My manager and I didn't really want to do any stereotypical titles like Chocolate Swirl.

The porn companies did not get contracts to black girls back then, and I just felt, well, why can't the African Americans do that.

Heather Keisha Hunter real name, is born to a funeral salesman and his wife in the South Bronx in nineteen sixty nine.

One of four kids.

Her parents divorced when she's very young, and the family moves around New York to Bedside, Harlem and Fort Green.

As a teenager, Heather is a New Addition fan who paints portraits of her family.

She runs away at age sixteen and supports herself through odd jobs.

She takes up with a graffiti crew and uses the tag Miss forty five after the Able Ferrara film, but gives it up after getting a paid citation.

As punishment, She's enrolled in a youth art workshop to channel her instincts into other forms of art making.

Her teacher is the artist Keith Herring.

Heather works as a clerk and then a go go dancer at the Latin Quarter Nightclub, which opened in the forties as a jazz club, turned into a seventies disco, became a house music venue, and is now currently a reggaeton club.

Hunter answers an ad in the Village Voice looking for exotic dancers.

From stripping, she gets recruited into nude pictorials for Swank mag Her co worker at Latin Quarter is a porn star named Hyapatia Lee, who suggests Hunter could make good money in porn.

In nineteen eighty eight, she makes her first adult film at the age of nineteen, titled Heather Hunter on Fire.

In New York, she shoots titles like Coming on America and Screw the Right Thing.

In nineteen ninety, Heather moves out to Porn Valley and gets a job dancing on Soul Train until nineteen ninety two, when they find out she's an adult actress and fire her.

In La she fulfills one of her main goals, becoming a contract girl.

When I got signed to Vivid in nineteen ninety, I became the first black female to be under contract.

Her Vivid debut, Heather Hunted, is directed by Judy Blue, and detective work on the Internet Adult Film Database reveals that Judy Blue is a pseudonym used by Paul Thomas.

The first porn star to crossover into music is Andrea True, a performer who has a nineteen seventy six hit with More and More and More during the double Golden Age of porn and disco.

Andrea Trudan's parents were Slovenian immigrants in the Nashville polka scene.

More and More and More is a fluke hit, and True's music career stalls out by her third album, a nineteen eighty anti war new wave rock album called War Machine, and she moves to Upstate New York to practice astrology and work as a drug counselor so By the nineties, the path to crossover between porn into music is pretty well established.

In nineteen ninety three, Heather Hung Hunter signs an Island Records contract and puts out a piano house single called I Want It All Night Long.

As a vivid girl living in LA, she's romanced by La playboys like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Charlie Sheen, and Bill Maherr.

She signs a new record contract with Tommy Boy.

While her music career doesn't take off instantly like her porn stardom did, Heather Hunter is so famous for porn she gets name checked in rap lyrics on Lil Kim's debut album Hardcore.

In nineteen ninety five, Asia Carrera becomes the first Asian American Actress to win Best Performer of the Year at the Avian Awards.

In nineteen ninety six, she builds her own personal website, and in nineteen ninety eight, Asia Carrera appears in The Big Lebowski in the Logjam in porn within the movie.

In nineteen ninety eight, Heather Hunter starts hosting a music video show for BET called The Peep Show that shows uncensored music videos to show that Arizon pay per view, where she interviews rappers known for their sexual content like Achan Yele, Have Put It in Your Mouth Fame and Uncle Luke Campbell of two Live Crew.

In nineteen ninety nine, Heather Hunter retires from performing in adult films and vows to crack the mainstream.

Those old stereotypes about the adult business have been chipped away.

It's not so disgusting anymore.

Midori performer.

By the two thousands, major strides are being made for diversity and porn.

Heather Hunter is featured on Cool Keith's album spank Master.

In two thousand and one, a black performer named Medori becomes the first black woman to win any Adult Video News award for Best Supporting Actress.

You have the playboy blonde who is sexy in every man's dream, and as an African American woman, I was like, Okay, where's a sex symbol that looks like me?

And there were very, if not any that made me a little headstrong, and I tried to figure out why, and the further I looked into it, I thought, I want to change this because this isn't right.

Midori's birth name is Michelle Wattley.

She is the sister of singer Jody Wattley.

Born in Durham, North Carolina.

Their father is a traveling minister who takes them on the road as he holds revival meetings.

The family moves to Kansas City, Missouri, and then Chicago.

Her parents split when she's twelve, and their mom moves Michelle and her sister out to California.

I moved to California.

It was junior high school and I was in seventh grade and the girls have boyfriends.

They were kissing, and I was just mortified.

I had never seen, you know, that sort of thing before.

It was just different.

I still have my Midwestern ways about myself.

Michelle Wattley studies dance at a French ballet Academy and Theater in England.

She works as a backup singer of Vidalsas hair model and a commercial actress, she is scouted into modeling, but her five foot seven height keeps her off high fashion runways.

As Michelle Wattley, she plays one of the naked female attendants in the bathtub scene in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America.

She decides to become an exotic dancer and takes the stage name Midori, after the Japanese melon liqueur Midori.

The liqueur was originally named Erme's Melon Liqueur by its manufacturer, Suntri, and it was renamed Madori for US audiences unfamiliar with the green melon flavor popular in Japan, and launched two American audiences in nineteen seventy eight at a party for the cast and crew of Saturday Night Fever.

Midori means green in Japanese, and the Midori sour has the same sweet and sour taste as American green apple candy.

I got into the adult business for several reasons.

One of them was to create some controversy.

It also appealed to me because there was a lack of African American women who were major porn stars, and I thought I could take my music, my dancing and everything and be an overall entertainer.

I've always done music and that was something I never gave up on, but this was a big gamble.

Luckily it worked.

In nineteen ninety five, Michelle Madori Wattley decides she wants to fix the representation of black women in porn by entering the adult industry herself.

Her sister, Jody Wattley has already become a world famous singer.

Jody Wattley was a dancer on Soul Train who was hand picked by show producer Don Cornelius to join his prefab R and B group Shalamar.

Her nineteen eighty seven self titled album for MCA made Jody Wattley a star and style icon.

She won the semi cursed Best New Artist Grammy in nineteen eighty eight.

Like her sister Michelle, Jody Wattley hungers for more images of black glamour and high fashion mixed with street style, so she creates the wearing designers like Isse Miaki and John Paul Gattier with her signature accessory, Big Hoop Earrings.

When I first got in The reason I wanted to go full force in the adult market is because I thought there was a lack of African American people, women, especially being promoted in the same way as my blonde counterparts.

It baffled my mind and it pissed me off.

So I did everything I could to make it where a black woman was able to be on the same level, so to speak, within this business.

Jody Wattley's late eighties influence on culture is so wide ranging that the catchphrase Hasta la vista baby from her hit Looking for a New Love is then adopted by Arnold Schwarzenager in the nineteen ninety two movie Terminator to Judgment Day.

Jody Wattley is inspired by icons like Diana Ross and Grace Jones, and her public image of a beautiful, cool, sophisticated black woman who mixes streetwear and catore inspires artists like TLC and Selena.

Her follow up albums are more straight R and B, and she never surpasses the success of her first album sales, but the Wattley name means something to audiences.

I'm not saying my family's thrilled about what I'm doing, but they love me and support me.

My sister and I have come to an understanding.

We share the same last name and the same parents, but we have different laves.

Jody is no comment about the situation, no comment whatsoever, Tom SD Jody Wattley spokesman.

Medori tries to appear only in scenes she doesn't personally feel our racist.

At first, she is only doing mainstream porn with white male performers, which she rationalizes to herself by saying that those are the scenes that win adult awards and get mainstream media attention.

Medory brands herself as the black Barbie Doll in emulation of the popularity of rapper Lil Kim, whose art for her album Hardcore directly references the esthetics of hardcore porn.

Society is a little more open now and people are more ready for what's going on.

With artists like Lil Kim being so straightforward with her lyrical content, that's open a door for someone like me.

But she adds that unlike Little Kim and other rappers, MADRORI does the stuff that Little Kim raps about, and she does it on camera.

As a performer, Medoria is who I am, whether I'm singing, rapping, or in front of the camera.

Who are you gonna believe?

Between me, Foxy Brown and Little Kim, I'm the real deal.

People use the media to their best advantage.

Within the year, Midori starts to realize the racist limitations of the white focused mainstream porn industry and starts making porn with black directors and performers.

I didn't want to have black guys thinking I didn't do them too.

In nineteen nine twenty seven, Spike Lee offers Medoria a role in He Got Game as a prostitute, which she turns down because she doesn't want to play a sex worker.

She starts directing porn herself and joins the free speech coalition of pro adult activists.

I can cut myself off emotionally when I'm working, but when I'm home.

I need that.

It's made my personal relationships more intense because I look for more than the physical aspects of sex.

I'm proud of the choices I've made.

In nineteen ninety nine, Medoria is featured on a compilation of music by porn stars called Porn to Rock.

The producer of Porn to Rock echoes other adult industry figures in saying that porn is actually one of the nicer tears of the entertainment industry, especially compared to music.

It's certainly less scummy than the music industry.

The people are more honest, the friendlier.

It's, you know, more of a family.

Maybe it's because they're all sleeping again, I don't know, Well, who's to say that in the music industry then not, I'll sleeping together too, DA's caller executive producer will pawn to Rock.

It's the right time.

I knew it was going to happen because with music videos and the girls damn Near naked, and the lyrics and the billboards and ads and Calvin kleinb everything was gearing towards sex.

That same year, Midori has a three month relationship with Kid Rock, who says that she gets just as much attention from fans on the street as he does.

It's so funny to watch him, you know.

People see me and they run up they're like, oh, I got your record and.

I love it.

Then people see her and they're like are.

You do you And she'll be like, yeah, that's me and they'll be like I thought so.

And they'll never really come out with like, oh.

Didn't I see you with a dick in your ass on TV Kid Rock.

It's because they have respect for her work, just like yours.

Kid Rock.

Vadi signs a record contract with a small label in Seattle, and in two thousand, she appears on the cover of the Andrew Dice Clay album Face Down, Ass Up.

I wanted to create some controversy to catapult my music, you know, like Madonna did.

When Jenna World returns, abn holds a roundtable about racism in the industry.

Oh my God, welcome back to jenal World.

By the late nineties, the porn industry has become more diverse due to strides made by performers like Shawn Michaels, Heather Hunter, and Midori.

They saw a gap in the market and catered to an audience that had been underserved for decades.

But while these black performers led the way from onscreen representation, once they'd established that there was a large financial market, many of those same black creators were prevented from cashing in on it.

Here's Jake Steed A Virgo talking with Madori for av And magazine in nineteen ninety nine during a roundtable they conducted with black performers and directors.

Years ago, there were a couple of big directors, guys that have probably been in the cover of ABN who said, nobody wants to see that shit.

Nobody wants to see black Girls.

It just won't sell.

Now, we had something called Black Dirty Debutante, and almost every black man in America watched those movies.

Then the same people who denied any kind of work or respect as far as black talent jumped on the bandwagon.

And what you see is a bunch of white guys trying to commercialize the new untapped market of blacks, and the blacks don't have any power to capitalize on it because they've been so broke, trying to survive, trying to get work.

Now that the black markets open, all the companies that are doing black movies are all white.

They're just commercializing it.

And these places cannot duplicate the black experience.

They can try to commercialize it as much as they can.

But I see that in the future what's gonna happen is that the consumers who watch my movies are gonna say, hey, this is real.

We want something from our perspective, not something commercialized, and we don't want to support a company that's pretending to be black, that's not really black.

Jake st performer and director.

You can start by directing black movies and then you can direct white movies.

It's not that a black man can't direct white movies.

There's nothing special to it.

The problem is that there's so little resources that how are they gonna get the money within the business.

Because there's no money to be made if you're black.

We can't get to a point where we say I made it, therefore everybody else can.

That's like Bill Cosby attitude.

You have to be pro black.

I am pro black.

Racism is so rampant in the industry.

It has to be a dress and it's not a lie just because one or two people made it like I made it.

I made it because I was lucky and talented to persist, persist, persist.

But it doesn't have to be that.

Way because it's a white dominated world.

We all know that it's difficult and it's hard, and we have to get our hustle on it.

And I'm lucky to have the things happen to me that have happened, but I've also had to work really hard and I'm still working hard at it now.

With the dance market, and there are clubs that still will not book me because I'm black.

It doesn't matter how many awards I've won, it doesn't matter how many box covers, magazine covers I've been on.

It's because I'm fucking black, exactly.

And I swear when my record comes out, if these clubs still do not book me, I'm gonna call the ACLU and the NAACP.

Shawn Michaels, who joins the roundtable midway through, gets mentioned first a few times negatively by some of the other black performers, imply that Shawn Michaels panders to the white production companies and doesn't work hard enough to advance the careers of other black performers that aren't Shawn Michaels to help build out their own part of the industry.

For those who run the white side of the porn industry, there's only room for one token blackmail performer at a time, and currently it's Shawn Michaels.

Jake Steed alleges that even Shawn Michaels has had to take a cut in his pay rate because there's still so little work for black performers in the industry.

And they're still not getting paid the same kind of money as the white performers.

Jake Steed guesses that black and interracial content accounts for ten percent of the porn industry, up from three percent a few years before.

Jake Steed and another black performer named mister Marcus credit their own careers to Ed Powers, the inventor of Dirty Debutants, who they say is one of the few non racist white guys in porn Valley.

The key to the future is guys like myself and Sean who make a better product and outdo the white guys who are trying to make black movies.

Put them back where they belong, doing their own thing.

There's a female involved with that too, you know, okay, which is me.

The white AVN interviewer states that for decades, porn has had a racist unspoken rule against scenes of black male performers with white women because they thought it would prevent the film from going to cable due to racists and television affiliates and markets like the Deep South.

One cable company finally broke the rule, and the other larger pay cable softcore networks like Playboy and the Spice Channel followed suit.

This year, I started my own distribution company, and I'm happy to say that we're doing quite well.

We're black owned company, and it's been a long time coming.

I've been able to achieve something that not many people of color or ethnicity have been able to do in this industry or any industry.

In a Marriora, specifically what I do or interracial videos as opposed to all white, all Asian, all Hispanic.

You know, I don't feel that there should be a division.

Shawn Michaels is way more positive about the state of the porn industry than his peers, while also agreeing with Jake Steed that black creatives need their own studios and own distribution companies.

Madori ends up working an office job at Shawn Michael's company later that year.

White people will never understand what we have to go through.

When I go shopping in Beverly Hills, I'm being watched all over the store and I have a platinum card.

You will never understand what we have to go through.

Blacks are always watching other blacks.

We do that the minute I put my name on the tape is directed by I get letters.

I'm so glad to see you direct fuck the movie you directed it.

That's what they're happy about.

They won't to see you come up, mister Mark.

Yes.

Director Sean Michaels wants to stretch his talents beyond porn, so he starts taking acting classes and trying to get in the Screen Actors Guild, which doesn't normally accept porn performers.

I'm going to lease Strasburg, not because I want to lead the business, but because I want to do feature films.

I just want to get in there and act with the public out there that support me.

Why not try to support me on the mainstream side as well.

It's worth a fucking try.

You know, somebody's going to make that crossover, and damn it, it might as well be me.

In two thousand and four, Heather Hunter appears as a judge on a Hustler produced reality competition show called Can You Be a Porn Star?

Alongside fellow judge ginger Linn Allen.

The show airs on pay per view and pits twenty eight female contestants against each other for a grand prize of a one year contract and one hundred thousand dollars.

The reality competition show is hosted by a former adult performer and playboy model who goes by Mary Carey.

Mary Carey ran for governor of California in the two thousand and three gubernatorial recall special election or incumbent Governor Gray Davis was defeated by incumbent terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This election portends a future where celebrity and charisma will start to take precedence over traditionally prized electoral qualities like competence and intelligence.

While this trend was set in motion with the election of President Ronald Reagan, it's the election of Austrian born libertarian mega movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger to a high state office that predicts a future where the wheels of US politics will start to come off entirely.

Look at Jenna Jamison.

She wasn't a fearful woman, and I think that's exactly what it takes, actually being in touch with the power that women have over men when it comes to sexuality.

It's now the mid two thousands and porn is a four point three billion dollar industry, generating about half of Hollywood's reported yearly revenue of nine billion dollars.

Jenna Jamison has built a porn empire in her own name, first at Wicked Pictures and now with her personal production company, Club Jenna.

Stephen Hirsch's Vivid Entertainment company is netting a cool eighty million dollars a year.

Hirsch lives in a one point six million dollar eighty one hundred and fifty square foot mansion in a gated community in the Santa Susana Mountains with a pool and a water slide.

He has a three hundred and seven thousand dollars a year suite at Staple Center called the Porn Box, reserved for him, his friends, and his porn star employees.

Meanwhile, thirty year old Jenna Jamison is at a crossroads to retire from the adult industry to have children with her husband, Jake Gerdina, But she knows that she can't afford to stop working for too long, or the industry will just move on to other stars.

She's taking preliminary steps towards her planned future by getting a breast reduction, taking her gigantic double d implants down to a tasteful sea cup.

She's also starting to worry about how aging will affect her business that involves her body in appearance.

Our looks, pay our bills.

I get botax and I love it.

I'm very expressive and I'm trying to keep lines from appearing.

I did have a chin implant, and I'm having breast reduction surgery.

I'll get a full reduction after i have children.

In two thousand and four, there's a great profile of Jenna by writer Vanessa gregoriotis in a rolling stone with Tom Cruise on the cover.

It's called Jenna Jamison's Forbidden Desires.

Time to promote Jenna's news auto biography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.

The writer visits Jenna in Scottsdale, Arizona, and notes all of her obvious contradictions.

Jenna doesn't display porn in her own house to keep her life work balance.

She shows Vanessa around the Neo italianate new build villa and complains about her dogs drinking out of the toilet and peeing all over the house.

Jenna and Jay look like any other two thousand zero new metal loving Arizonian couple.

The only sign in the house of Club Jenna the porn Empire that they run together is that Jay is hunched over some computers, editing a scene where Jenna is dressed in white Latex as a nurse.

He jokes that they're submitting it to Sundance.

The whole house is decorated with collages Jenna made for Jay celebrating their love.

She complains about Hollywood people still treating her like a freak show.

I'm so unaffected by the whole frig in Hollywood scene.

Give me the job or shut the fuck up.

I'm not a show pony.

I don't want to hang out with you and your friends, and I don't want to leave a message on your answering machine.

You've reached, Scott.

He's busy with me right now.

Ugh.

At the peak of her porn career, famous enough for a big multi page spread and Rolling Stone, Jenna is still not satisfied.

Whenever she accomplishes one goal, she already has her eye on another.

She's got a new lifestyle in mind Housewife.

She's also starting to feel like the porn industry has changed a lot since she started her own career.

The sex acts have gotten more hardcore, and the market has become so saturated with talent that it's even harder to stand out.

I look at these new girls today, taking on six guys and doing boukaqes.

I think, what the hell are they doing?

These girls don't know that You've just start slow, baby, and make them pay you more for each thing you do.

And my day you hardly had to have sex, let alone too.

Dix up your ass.

At thirty years old, she is already saying things like in my day about her twenties.

She's cut down her performing to a couple movies a year with a stipulation that Jay be the only male talent.

After thoroughly exploring sexual exhibitionism, she now feels like taking her clothes off professionally has become mundane and wants to challenge herself in other ways.

The fact is, I'm at a point in my life where I don't want to be butt naked in front of thirty people anymore.

Like many people who just turned thirty, Jenna feels like she's turned a corner into mature adulthood.

She feels ready to settle down into motherhood and a stable home life.

Even in Scottsdale, she gets recognized constantly, so she stays home a lot, which is just how Jay likes it.

She's tired of being Jenna Jamison all the time and wants to be Jenna Missoli again, albeit this time with a lot of money and a horse.

She plans to get her signature heartbreaker tattoo lasered off her ass, cut her hair into a fuck ass bob, maybe even legally change her name to Jenna Gardina, and moves smoothly into the next phase of her life.

While she's the moneymaker in the relationship, Jake Gardina takes care of the business side and tends to Jenna's many moods.

He makes sure the Club Jenna website keeps posting enough Jena content to satisfy fans and keep the money rolling in.

But for Jenna, shooting sexy photos has become a draining chore like any other job.

Her mind is elsewhere.

She and Jay have not yet been able to get pregnant, despite having a lot of unprotected sex.

She's been seeing fertility doctors and looking into alternative medicine, but the thing she wants the most remains out of her grasp and not in her control, and she really really hates that.

Every time she gets her period, she feels like a total failure as a woman.

I'm trying to think positive, but sometimes I can't.

Jenna's book is a huge hit that spends six weeks on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

There's talk of a film adaptation.

Jenna wants Kate Hudson to play her, although she says Kate would need stunt tits.

Jenna keeps expanding into other fields that require less of her vigorous physical participation, video games, comic books, erotica.

She writes an advice column for the British men's magazine FHM for Him Magazine, where she dispenses relationship and sex advice.

When my girlfriend goes out on girls' nights, she never lets me tag along and keeps the plants top secret.

Is she cheating?

What could she be up to in the dark glen View, Illinois.

She could well be having females athletic sex of her life with a richer, more handsome man than you.

The point is this, You either trust your girlfriend or you don't.

Everyone needs space.

Enjoy the time of part with your friends and see how she reacts to you being Captain sneaky.

If she freaks out, she's up to no good.

When I left for Iraq, I thought i'd miss my girlfriend, but I don't.

I'm thinking of dumping her.

What's the best way to break up without upsetting her heart of steel the email.

I think you're fooling yourself about not missing her, and you're building an emotional wall for yourself.

It's nothing to get hung up about.

That's a natural defense for men.

You don't need to break up with a woman unless you go to prison.

Feel free to give in to temptation while you're away.

Be safe over there.

You have my love and support.

The thought of all those guys jacking off in one place gets me so hot.

One guy writes in asking how to get his girlfriend to have a threesome.

Jenna says, you let the girl pick out the third person.

Don't kiss that person on the mouth, and ask yourself if you really want to do it, because it won't be like the porn film fantasy and could fuck up your relationship for real.

Jenna is not ashamed of her storied career, but she wants to get out of porn before becoming a mother.

She's tired of being on all the time and fielding lude comments and comments from strangers, both male and female, who expect her to be the same in real life as she is in her movies, but porn still pays the bills for now, so she's hosting events and banking content in advance for when she goes on a permanent maternity leave.

She wants to leave porn on top, but life has other plans for Jenna Jamison.

Next time.

On Jena World episode eleven, Pirates, a director named Ali June starts Digital Playground Studio and makes the biggest budget porn film of all time.

Jenna World is an iHeartRadio production executive produced by Anna Hosnier and Becco Ramos, supervising, produced by Bei Wang, produced by Victor Wright, script editing by Jonathan Mills, engineered by Graham Gibson, and edited by Rory Gagan.

Today's episode of Jenna World featured Emily Yoshida as Linda Wong, Sydney Battle as Heather Hunter, Iffy Wataway as Shawn Michaels, Becca Ramos as Vanessa del Rio, Jason Walliner as Bruce Gowers, and Paul Thomas, Sara Sobsey as Susan Wattling from Chino, Ian Grant as Rick Alley, Peter Cellini as Andrew Dice, Clay Brian Moses as Eddie Murphy.

Yasser Lester as Spike Lee, Jed Nick mayerd as Madori, Blake Wexler as Tom sd Mort Burke as Dax Couner, Carvel Wallace as Jake Steed, Freddie Gibbs as mister Marcus Grant Creator as In the Dark and Heart of Steel, and Lauren ser Video as Jenna Jamison Oh