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The Wall Street
Journal |
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By
DAN ACKMAN
Famous porn stars are, of
course, nothing new. Linda Lovelace, who died in 2002, is still a well-known
name. But while her fame, based on "Deep Throat," was scandalous
and the product of an underground culture, Ms. Jameson is
celebrated by the biggest media outlets going. And while pornography
was once shown in backstreet theaters, it is now beamed into hotel rooms and
living rooms, to say nothing of the Internet -- all phenomena that put Ms.
Jameson into a league of her own. Pornography is now big
business -- though not as big as is often claimed -- and, more important,
part of mainstream culture. While Ms. Lovelace wound up broke and renounced
her career, Ms. Jameson is rich and presents pornography as a means to
"empowerment." She is a regular guest on Howard Stern's radio show,
which has helped her develop the kind of stardom that has made her a fixture
on Hollywood's A-list party circuit -- and elsewhere, too. She showed up
recently on a massive Times Square billboard and on CNN's "Anderson
Cooper 360." The culture doesn't just shrug at her celebrity; it
embraces it. Ms. Jameson is now on
tour to promote "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary
Tale." It will undoubtedly move her into the mass market even further.
The book tells the tale of Ms. Jameson's rise, from teenage stripper in Las
Vegas to the zenith of the adult film world, where she now has her own
production company. It includes stories of her sexual abuse, rape, drug
addiction and numerous heartbreaks. But as the story is ultimately a
"celebration of survival and victory on your own terms," it is not
quite clear where the caution lies. The memoir is 579 pages (including
pictures), despite the fact that the author is just 30 years old. That's
about as long as the autobiography of 59-year-old Gen. Tommy Franks, which is
published by the same imprint, ReganBooks, a unit
of News Corp., also this month. As an author, Ms. Jameson
is enjoying the kind of exposure about which others may only dream. She is
the subject of an hour-long documentary on VH1 and has appeared on NBC, CNBC
and Fox News, along with CNN. Her publicist says that she has turned down
Bill O'Reilly and Greta Van Susteren but is planning
to visit with Jimmy Kimmel on ABC next month. Her fame has burnished
her career in adult films, which in turn has increased the rate she charges
to dance in strip clubs, where the real money is. By the time she was in her
mid-20s, Ms. Jameson could make $25,000 a night, according to her husband and
business partner Jay Grdina, who is also a veteran
adult-film producer-director. In 2000, Mr. Grdina and Ms. Jameson started Club Jenna Inc., a company
that produces videos and Web sites as well as managing the Web sites for
other adult stars. Not the types to sell and tell,
they won't say what the business makes. But Mr. Grdina
does claim that they sign up 500 new members every day. Members
pay anywhere from $8.50 to $35 a month to view videos, and more to purchase
merchandise. The company also distributes films on video and DVD. Mr. Grdina says that Ms. Jameson's movies (in which he now
co-stars) sell 100,000 copies on average, much more than the run-of-the-mill
adult film, which does well to sell 5,000. (On the other hand, such films
might be shot in a single day. Ms. Jameson's recent productions, according to
Mr. Grdina, took as much as 12 days to film.) Ms. Jameson's individual
star is rising as her industry sinks into the twilight of porn's age of
innocence. Icons of an earlier era like Bob Guccione
and Al Goldstein have fallen on hard times. Mr. Guccione,
the founder of Penthouse, has lost his Manhattan townhouse and his Hudson
River mansion to creditors. Mr. Goldstein, once the publisher of Screw, is on
probation and is reportedly penniless. While the Internet was
supposed to usher in a heyday for pornographers, in fact it has driven the
price of still pictures of naked people to historic lows. This trend has made
it harder for even Hugh Hefner to make a buck: Playboy Enterprises hasn't
earned a profit since 1998, and its share price has been cut in half in the
past year. On the other hand, it is
now respectable for Fidelity and Janus, the mutual-fund giants, to own
Playboy shares, and they do. Media titans like Comcast, Time Warner and
EchoStar are all in the porn business in the sense that they all distribute
at least soft-core films via their cable and satellite systems. The major
hotel chains participate in soft-core porn distribution through On Command
Corp., the unit of Liberty Media that supplies the pay-as-you-go movie
packages for hotel-room television screens. It's impossible to know
how much the major media companies earn from pornography. Certainly it cannot
be more than a tiny sliver of their total revenues. But none appear willing
to forgo porn profits, as meager as they may be in the scheme of things. The overall size of the
porn business is a subject of wild speculation. Statistics with no basis in
reality tend to be repeated over and over. It is often said, for instance,
that Ms. Lovelace's "Deep Throat" has grossed $600 million, which
would put it ahead of "Terminator 2" and "The Empire Strikes
Back," a totally preposterous idea. My best guess, based on careful
estimates, is that the entire adult-entertainment industry (not counting
strip clubs) grosses something like $3 billion a year. It's a substantial sum
but not more than Pfizer takes in from selling the antidepressant Zoloft. Still, a $3 billion
industry with widening distribution certainly affords stars like Ms. Jameson
the opportunity to earn millions. Her book, co-authored by former New York
Times writer Neil Strauss, is on its way to becoming a bestseller. All alone,
she is displaying the kind of synergy that eluded AOL Time Warner and
Vivendi. On the Web at least, Ms.
Jameson is as famous as Jennifer Aniston or Sandra Bullock, though not quite
as celebrated as Paris Hilton. All told, she has entered the mainstream to
the point of capsizing the old rules, at least most of the time. "There
is an air of conservatism," Mr. Grdina says,
referring to the mixed blessing of such success. "We get a push back for
every step we move forward." Maybe so, but lately the leaps forward have
been much longer than the steps back. Mr. Ackman is a senior columnist for Forbes.com |