Chapter 23: Back in the House

I spent the morning watching dirty movies. Is an ‘actress’—paid to do a sex scene in an adult movie—a prostitute?

The middle-aged sex worker

Cinnamon picked me up Tuesday morning ready to get back to work. She had been grinning all day long and wouldn’t say a word about her weekend. She was very interested, though, to know about my discoveries. She’d boxed everything in Georgia’s bedroom and planned to supervise the first Goodwill pickup in the afternoon.

I spent the morning watching dirty movies. Georgia had a collection of DVDs, not just the ones in the safe deposit box. I discovered them behind a false panel in her desk drawer. I’d packed up most of her office and was pulling out drawers to make sure I had everything before we sent the furniture to a consignment shop. The collection is immense. Apparently, Georgia not only made her movies, she kept track of who she made them with, the dates, and personal information about the clients.

There has been a long-standing dispute regarding whether being paid as an actress in a porn movie was the same as prostitution. California courts ruled several years ago that there was a difference and that precedent has stood for many years, making California the porn capital of the US. On the other hand, other states have lumped the work into a single category. Paid to have sex is paid to have sex. Porn is therefore, by definition, prostitution.

But it seems Georgia found a way around that. These may be the only prostitutes that the world has known that make their johns sign a contract. They don’t work every day, but they make a lot of money for every movie and sometimes turn around three or four in a day. Georgia has her webcam chat room on which she made good tips—in the vicinity of two or three thousand a month. But her clients paid her to ‘produce’ an adult film, not to act in one. She had a variety of scripts that she used, sometimes augmenting them with improvised scenes. All the scripts were in a business folder on Georgia Central. The contracts were all password protected, but dear Georgia was not very original. Once she arrived at the password 431DuffyLn, she used it for everything. Her online banking and her porn site sign-ins all took the same password. And, yes, it is her Hotmail password, AIM, Messenger, Yahoo, Gmail, et. al.

So, I found a bunch of documents that were password protected, entered the password, and presto! I had contracts. It’s a boilerplate contract that looks like it was used for a construction industry project. In the contract, the client hires the production company to produce, script, and edit a film, including handling online distribution. Georgia documented exactly how much she received from each client—which was a hefty sum—and she documented a budget for the film. In the budget, she included paying the producer, rent, equipment, lighting, and sound. Then—get this!—every contract includes a clause that says, “All actors are amateurs and are not paid for their services.” The contract also states the production dates—some of them spanned several weeks, so customers got more than one chance to perform—and the distribution channel. Attached to each contract is a scan of a form 2257. This form has all the legal information for each actor who will perform in the film, including all assumed names and aliases, verification that the actor is over eighteen years of age, and a copy of their driver’s license. It includes a release that allows the production company to film and distribute the movie and a sworn statement that they are not being coerced or paid for their performance.

Wow! I’m glad I’m not a lawyer trying to pick this one apart. Or maybe I wish I was. It looked like a lot of billable hours for some lucky lawyer.

I’ve got to say I didn’t think anyone I’d talked to so far had the brains to put together this elaborate a scheme. Of course, I didn’t know Georgia, so I couldn’t really assess her cleverness, but I didn’t think she was a Marilyn Chambers. Besides, this was the kind of thing you would think much younger people would put together. What kind of market is there for middle-aged women having sex on film?

And none of this leads me any closer to narrowing down the field of suspects. Frankly, if I was into this kind of thing to make a living, I’d consider killing myself, too.