Paula Meadows comes from a middle class British background. During the late '80s, she shared a London apartment with writer Frank Russell, and painted erotic art under the name Lynn Paula Russell. As an actress, she appeared in Hair, then began posing nude for English sex magazines in the late '70s. "Some of the photographs were for export but the others were soft stuff for England. Someone told me about Mike Freeman who had just made a hardcore video. Once I'd taken my clothes off I thought, what the hell. You get this feeling that it doesn't really matter after a while." Paula met Mike Freeman and debuted in Truth or Dare, based on a script by Frank Russell. "The second thing was called Happy Birthday. It started off conventionally with two people bumping into each other in the street. My character gets talking to this housewife and I find out that her husband wants to spank her and she doesn't like it. He's got a birthday coming up, so I say why don't I become the birthday present?" Meadows then fought with Freeman and moved to New York to pursue her porn career. "In the early days conditions were appalling. The money was appalling and they were often shooting in places with no running water… They were pushed around, touched up by everybody. But conditions are nothing like that now. When I worked in the United States I was pleased to find that things were totally different from Europe. It was very professional. No groping of people backstage or any mucking about. God! Those girls wouldn't stand for that. No extraneous people were allowed in to ogle. "We had scripts, scene breakdowns, even a dialogue coach. He used to come round and take us through our lines. All the people who work in reputable porno, those who work with the well paid, with the good producers, with good directors, feel they're a cut above those who slum around. There are things they definitely won't do and they pride themselves on good performances and being well turned out." (Porn Gold by David Hebditch and Nick Anning) "Some things are obscene.
It doesn't mean you mustn't do them but they are obscene because they're
ugly. It's the context they're used in. If you want to fist-f--- somebody,
generally you want to give them humiliation and pain."
Paula remembers when
Lasse Braun directed 1985's Young Nympho. "The men said he was disgusting
because he wanted anal scenes. We don't want to do that, it's disgusting.
Event he cameraman thought it was disgusting. He thought Lasse was a
terrible director and that everything was awful. They do it [anal sex]
now, but they didn't do it when I was there."
"People would come into
my office," remembers Bill Margold, "and I would say: 'Will you do anal
sex?' 'Oh yeah, I do that all the time…' I'd say, 'Really' I'd ask this
to guys. 'You'd take a dig up the ass?' 'No, no.' 'Would you f--- someone
up the ass?' 'Oh, no, no.' So I'd ask, 'What's anal sex?' 'Going to
the bathroom.' They don't know. They're so incredibly uneducated in
the United States."
Paula says that porn
does not work as drama. "The moment you start performing a sex act for
real, you become yourself. You have to! Otherwise you can't function
in it and you are not thinking of your character. Perhaps women can
act while they're doing it. Men can't because they've got to concentrate
on what they're doing: keeping a hard-on. Otherwise everything falls
to pieces. I think that's why you can't get any good drama followed
through to the sex.
"I don't think you should
expect people to act while they're screwing. Filming a lot of dialogue
scenes requires rehearsal and care. Ron Sullivan takes that care. He
choreographs every bit of it and I think that's right. You have to cast
people properly, so they are acting something they feel happy with…."
Meadows says that the
most angry attacks against porn comes from women. "When women are aroused
and defensive, they become vicious. I was once helping Tuppy Owens {English
pornographer] at a swing party. I was weraing just a G-string and going
around sitting on men's laps, adjusting their ties and getting things
warmed up. Suddenly I was aware of a pair of glowering eyes and there
was this gorgeous blonde lady standing there and looking at me as if
she could murder me. I still remember that look, how glacial it was,
uncompromising and prejudiced. Only a woman could look at me like that.
Withering…. So I imediately got up and said, 'Is this your husband?'
She said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Do you mind?' And she said 'Yes.' So I said,
'Why are you here, madam, this is a swing party.'
"Many women have that
side to them. They are aggressive and close themselves to anything that
might com ein and disrupt their lives. I hate the thought that women
feel that insecurity - they should be coming out of that now.
"I don't mind being
the subject of a sexual fantasy. I like to be a sex subject. To be an
object is to be just passed around and not considered, and I'm not happy
with that."
Paula's brother-in-law
told her mother about her porn work. "She went dead white. Absolutely
numb. My response was to rush over to her and put my arm round her and
say: 'Mum, it's all right. I haven't changed. I'm still me.' And we
had a drink and we talked about it. In the end, the color returned to
her cheeks and she started talking away like mad. She said 'I wish I'd
had the courage. Yes, you've become so brave.'
"I think girls fall
by the wayside because they're not thinking. They damage themselves
by not being selective enough. Then they get resentful against men and
start to get into a fury. I've not been damaged because I've always
been in charge of what I do. I think you have to minimize the number
of things you are going to regret later on. I've done one or two things
that I don't particularly want to see now, but you've got to think ahead
if it's going to keep coming back at you. That particularly gruesome
fistf--- you did, or the horses or whatever it was that you weren't
sure of at the time…. Don't do it, for God's sake, because you are going
to spend the rest of your life brooding…
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