The Premise
by Nobody Special
From the earliest days of my tenure in this business, I’ve explained the philosophy behind the approach very simply: “I’m just selling shoes. I’m selling very pretty shoes, but I’m just selling shoes.” As odd as it may seem, like any entrepreneurial venture, sound business principles applied to the process will more often than not lead to relative success in the field. Although lacking the sexiness one might expect (or prefer) in the pursuit of an adult movie career, performers would be happier overall if they’d understand the boring economics behind their chosen profession. More to the point today, if the people allegedly enlisted to help these people understood the issue, we might have a lot more talented people in the talent pool.
Obviously you might expect that the companies, particularly the ones that have been producing and distributing the fare for many years, will follow basically typical corporate rationale as they make their decisions. True, some of them may not recognize their actions as such, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating the raw intelligence of the owners in this business. At its core, they all still make a living off of producing material that polite society feels uncomfortable talking about, regardless of how often they may be direct or indirect consumers of the material. You can’t make a career out of bucking tradition unless you have a great deal of confidence and more than a usual amount of keen vision as it relates to the venture.
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Dealing with the savvy companies, however, almost always falls to a third party. In my opinion, actually understanding the position of that third party remains the most critical decision that someone wanting to work as talent in the movies faces. If I could point to one consistent failing in the representation — to use the word very loosely here (so to speak) — that aspiring performers can actually get these days, it would be that the agents (slash) managers (slash) business advisors making money off of these people consistently remain more concerned with their own situation rather than what may be best for the talent they have supposedly promised to represent.
I decided to use Tenaya here as an example both because her situation wonderfully illustrates the point and her “comfort” set we shot provides a completely separate wonderful illustration all by itself. If you’ve been a member of the site for any length of time, you should be familiar with Tenaya, but you may not have pieced together her story since we’ve never really laid it out as such. When you work in the business day after day, sometimes it becomes difficult to remember whether you mentioned some detail or another in an actual post on the site, just told the story to someone in person, or did neither of those things and just privately contemplated the puzzle.
