“The Only Way Out Is to Get Fucked”: Behind the Scenes of the Brand-New Brazzers Book

In The Other Hollywood, getting stuck inside of a household appliance is the sort of plot that makes for an awards season knockout. But for the megawatt porn studio Brazzers, that’s just another day at the office. “Getting stuck in the things is a major trope for Brazzers,” says writer Esra Padgett, who along with the photographer Rosie Marks spent a year trailing the biggest stars in porn to get an uncut look at the reality behind the fantasy. The result is their striking and sexy new monograph, Raw Talent. After its L.A. release this past weekend, the duo called us up to tell us what they discovered aboard the Bang Bus.

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MEKALA RAJAGOPAL: Let’s start with the Angela White photo.

ROSIE MARKS: She actually does this, because when she won an award at AVN a few weeks ago, she did the same thing. It’s like the paparazzi pictures of people sitting with In-N-Out burgers after winning an Oscar. This was her after winning Female Performer of the Year.

ESRA PADGETT: Winning Female Performer of the Year is like the apex, but Angela’s also a very intelligent performer and businessperson. I hesitate to say she’s at the peak of her career because she’s had a long career already and probably will continue to for a really long time. She’s masterful at figuring out how to reinvent herself as a performer.

MARKS: She’s been at the peak of her career for the last 10 years.

PADGETT: That’s also what’s special about this photo, because she’s one of the most famous people in porn and has been for a long time.

MARKS: Yeah. Watching her perform, you could really tell she completely loses herself in the performance in the way that you watch an actor unravel themselves in a movie. She’s really, really good. 

MARKS: She ran for mayor once, didn’t she? 

PADGETT: In Australia somewhere, right? 

RAJAGOPAL: I love the awards season parallel.

MARKS: It is a thing, because it starts in mid-January with XBIZ, L.A. AVN in the same week, and then they do the Pornhub Awards, which is a few weeks after the Oscars.

PADGETT: It’s something that’s kind of special about the porn industry, especially in the United States. They call it The Other Hollywood. It’s like the Porn Valley. And David Foster Wallace called it Hollywood’s Big Red Sun. It’s always been the weird cousin of Hollywood.

MARKS: And a lot of the crew members will be going between both. Their main job is the porn stuff, and they’ll moonlight in Hollywood or advertising. So they’re linked in a lot of ways.

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PADGETT: Mark Spiegler is an agent who has represented most of the biggest stars of the past couple decades, including Angela.

MARKS: At least half of the female contract stars in Brazzers are represented by him, and to get repped by him is like your ticket to the porn Oscars.

PADGETT: It’s called being a Spiegler Girl.

MARKS: When we were at his house, Esra was asking him who he thought was the next big thing, and the first name he gave was Gal Ritchie, who is an English girl who has been in the industry for less than a year. But then at all the awards three weeks ago, she won Best New Star, which is the award that basically all of the Angelas of the world have won. So he’s got a good instinct, but also he is a fatherly figure to a lot of the girls. At his house, there’s many pictures of him walking girls down the aisle at their weddings, and he has a famous Spiegler’s Thanksgiving, where all the girls from the industry will go over.

PADGETT: This photo was taken at his house in Woodland Hills, and these boxes in it are AVN statues. I think they’re all for Abella Danger. The one with the post-it says, “Most Amazing Ass.” That’s one of the awards that she won. There’s just piles of stuff around his house, and you get the sense that it’s like a home, sometimes literally, for a lot of these girls, some of whom even left the industry and became more successful. He says Spiegler Girls are not just the most famous, but they’re the girls with the most longevity. He told us a million stories and he has an insane memory. He used to have a house where seven girls at a time would be living with him, and it comes up in the book, but he had several fires at his house because the girls kept setting things on fire. He has an endless pool of these insane stories because they all come to him in a crisis too.

MARKS: And he does all his business from his phone. There was this rule that if you were a Spiegler Girl, you had to answer your phone to him at all times. It didn’t matter what you were doing. He has incredibly high standards that all the girls have to adhere to. Lateness is completely intolerable to him, and he keeps a really tight ship, which also makes his girls super successful, because there’s a lot of chaos in the porn industry. Like, no one gets drunk at a party. It’s very straight edge. I was surprised by that.

PADGETT: Yeah, beyond even Spiegler Girls, that was our experience in Brazzers in general.

MARKS: Sometimes we’d be at whatever event and me and Esra at times were the only people having a drink.

PADGETT: That’s why it’s cool to memorialize him in this photo, there’s no one else in the industry like him. He’s stringent, but he’s also this pillar of stability in this industry that can be intense.

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MARKS: This is Jordi El Niño Polla. He’s a really iconic male performer. He’s like an enigma. He represents this part of porn that I find really fascinating. For example, he looks like he’s about 15, even though he’s 30. In all the films, he always doesn’t quite know what’s going on. So in the psychology of porn, he is really popular with men because he isn’t intimidating to men who would be watching him have sex with women. 

PADGETT: He’s an everyman in a weird way, although he’s actually quite unusual. But there’s also a contrast in a lot of the Brazzers porn with him where he’s quite small and they often cast him with the tallest female performers with the biggest boobs and butts. And that is also a unique fantasy that is surprising to me. I remember I saw him win Male Performer of the Year a few years ago, and I didn’t know who he was, and I was just like, “Who the hell is this person?” Everyone was just cheering and going crazy for him. 

MARKS: So this is Brazzers Gala, which was a celebration of their 20th anniversary, and the manager at Brazzers, Ryan, had this idea that he should do a tap dance performance in the middle of the Gala. They made an announcement that they’re sad he can’t be there. So he was rehearsing the tap dance in the head office, having never danced in his life, but they also had this Christmas set in the middle of summer, because they were filming their Christmas porn. The sets at the Brazzers office are just constantly changing. So then two people that work in the Montreal office had all these Brazzers dollars with his face on them sitting around.

PADGETT: Rosie and I were up in this room and everyone in the party was downstairs having a great time, all dressed up, and he went through the little tap routine for us and then finally came down, and again, standing ovation. They hired a tap dance group to dance with him as his backup dancers, and I don’t think they fully knew what the context of the event was, so it was hilarious because they’re performing to a room of 300 porn stars and then Jordi comes to join them, and everyone’s just screaming and cheering and they’re like, “This guy that can barely dance got everyone going crazy?”

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MARKS: We went to Venus Berlin, which is supposedly the most wild of all the porn conventions. I think because it’s in Germany, you can do a live sex show on stage and people just walk around naked. But this was a somewhat recreation of the Last Supper, when they were having dinner at McDonald’s.

PADGETT: Keiran Lee is Jesus here, he’s the guy in the center, and he’s in many ways the face of Brazzers, he’s been with them since basically they started. People credit him with creating the Brazzers face, which is the shock face that’s talked about in the book. Danny D and Xander Corvus were having an argument about who was going to get to be Judas, and Xander thought he was on the right side, but actually when the picture [was flipped], Danny D was like, “I won.” But later I looked at a labeling of the Last Supper, and neither of them are Judas, it’s actually the girl eating the burger, Ryan Reid. That’s funny because people have called her the next Keiran Lee, because she’s the class clown. There’s a real sense of family among the Brazzers contract stars.

MARKS: Then just then a few days later we went to England to study Brazzers UK, and in their head office they had actually recreated in Photoshop a Last Supper with their UK cast and crew. So in the book, this image is mirrored by the printout that they’ve made.

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PADGETT: This is at the Brazzers UK headquarters, and that’s Danny D. He’s a real slapstick jokester. I think he’s a very British character, and, well, he has an insanely huge dick. So around the office there were these replicas of his dick, and there these rubber sleeves that you put over your dick.

MARKS: Apparently it’s meant for people with a small dick, that they—

PADGETT: Extend it. But he just took it and put it inside his zipper, and then was just slamming it in the kitchen drawers. And then he was getting his girlfriend to act shocked and act like she was helping him get it out.

MARKS: He’s kind of quite a British geezer, but that kind of humor is quite representative of Brazzers. It’s all very lighthearted and silly.

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MARKS: In the rest of the UK office, it was full of vending machines, so you get stuck in a vending machine and the repair guy gets you out by having sex with you. And then glory hole tables, where someone gets stuck in a table. In the essay that Abella Danger wrote in the beginning, she put it quite well that whatever situation that you’re stuck in, the only way out is to get fucked.

PADGETT: Getting stuck in things is a major trope of Brazzers. Any common household appliance or situation that you could possibly imagine getting stuck in, or would never think of getting stuck in, happens. And at Danny’s studio, they build all these special contraptions that people can get stuck in. The classic one is the washing machine. That’s why when Abella Danger hosted part of the Brazzers gala, she was revealed to the crowd by coming out of a washing machine. 

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MARKS: This is Mick Blue, he’s another really successful male performer, but he seems to excel at everything he does. He’s now a race car driver and has won all these awards for that. And then he started doing jiujitsu and ended up as a black belt, and now he’s building his acting career outside of porn and he’s got a recurring role on General Hospital.

PADGETT: As a blackjack dealer.

MARKS: He does all his acting under Mick Blue as well. I guess being a porn star does inhibit you from a lot of roles, but he doesn’t want to trick anyone. 

PADGETT: And this is him and his actual racing car, in a real garage. He’s like a jack of all trades. He’s also a scuba dive master. I always think it’s like what a teenage boy would say like, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a porn star, a race car driver, a black belt in jujitsu, a scuba dive master, and I’m going to marry a porn star,” and he actually is all of those things. And also his acting reel. 

MARKS: Well, yeah.

PADGETT: What’s funny in Brazzers-type porn is that they basically cycle through every type of typical job role. You’re a firefighter, you’re a cop, you’re a pizza delivery guy, you’re a spy, you’re a doctor. So when he was trying to make the crossover to mainstream, he made an acting reel that’s basically cut from the first couple minutes of all these scenes that he’s been in, but then it all has this specific type of tension.

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PADGETT: This photo is inside the Bang Bus with the driver, whose name is Chubbs. The Bang Bus is iconic porn history. It still exists, but it’s like this early 2000s, very Miami, reality-based style of porn. It’s a fantasy where they’re driving this bus around and picking up a random girl that then comes on the bus and has sex while the bus is still driving around. A lot of big stars got their start there, so they sign the inside, and it’s all these famous stars memorialized in the interior of the bus. 

MARKS: I think Abella Danger and Luna Star, who were big contract stars, had their first or first major scenes there.

PADGETT: Alexis Fawx too, another contract star, and Mia Khalifa’s in there. The Luna Star one is particular, because according to her, she invented the Reverse Bang Bus, where she was the one on the bus picking up the guys on the side of the road. But there’s also a lot of infamous stories about them getting caught being nude on the side of the highway. Brazzers is Canadian, so when they started, they were trying to emulate things like the Bang Bus, and they took a lot of inspiration from these classic American early internet porn sites. Now, the interior of the Bang Bus is just insane. It’s just dirty ratty old yoga mats and nasty blankets and it’s all torn out so they can just have a sex in the middle of it, but there’s a little bench in the back. Chubbs has one of those claw grabbers to pick up dirty tissues or whatever in the back. This is actually the second version of the Bang Bus because the first one got so gnarly that they had to retire it, but this one’s also been around forever.

RAJAGOPAL: Do you know how long each one was around?

PADGETT: I feel like probably a decade each or more.

MARKS: The outside of the bus is all banged up as well.

PADGETT: But they don’t ever show the outside of the bus because they don’t want to draw attention. 

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MARKS: This was a courtroom blow bang-slash-gang bang. We had been asking for a while to get more scenes with extras in them, because we were really interested in the extras and sextras in these scenes. An extra is a non-performing person who will be acting on scene, which in this instance was the judge and the courtroom audience. And then sextras are collateral in an orgy, but won’t have a prime moment. We loved the trajectory of extra to sextra to performer, and we did watch someone rise those ranks during the time that we spent. It’s fun when there’s 20 people hanging around who all have their own unique story of getting into the industry. The last one we did, there was one guy who Esra spoke to who had taken Ayahuasca three weeks before and had a premonition that he had to be a porn star, and the plant showed him the way. Anyway, this one was super hectic because normally they make the extras leave before the shoot, but because this was a courtroom thing, they were meant to express the shock of… So the concept of the shoot was that Cherie DeVille in the center was sentenced to 24 hours in the ZZ Detention Center by a judge for stealing a pineapple. And then her argument to the judge was that she couldn’t go 24 hours without cock, so she fucked the whole jury afterwards and then she happily went to jail.

PADGETT: This was in Las Vegas, and the director, who’s named Mello Jackson, who’s in the red shirt, his crew calls themselves the Unforgettablezz, and they’re like a family crew. Mello’s brother is filming with him on the side, and their wives are there. The ZZ courtroom has been a staple in Las Vegas for a little bit, I guess. Once the scene started, it was just so wild and over the top, a lot of the extras who were playing the audience members were genuinely in shock.

MARKS: Yeah, because some of them were like the director’s friends, and then most porn extras don’t actually see the sex happening. So just the noises and everything, it was pretty funny. I was standing by the judge on the podium, and a phone flashed that was sitting on the judge’s table, which was Scott Nails’ phone, the guy on the far left, and it was his mom texting him, so that was him looking at the mom’s text in the middle of this blow bang.

PADGETT: And another funny thing that was revealed after, was another one of the performers who’s in this photo, Alex Jones, another contract star, was in the money shot scene and he was focusing on having to come, and the woman who was playing the judge was kind of hovering right over and started singing this Fleetwood Mac song to herself, and he was like, “What the fuck? Get out of my head.” Everyone’s at different levels of tuned in or tuned out. She’s like, “Just another day in the office.”

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MARKS: This scene was shot in a public place, and most of the shoots that we were on were either in private houses or a set in the Brazzers headquarters. So that one was unique. They were shooting until 5:57 and at 6:00 the bar opened to customers, so that was a real last minute scrub down.

PADGETT: But they also have an impeccable reputation for cleanliness. Not all places would even let them rent out their venue for having a porn shoot, so once they do, they have a pretty high bar of cleaning it. This was a real divey bar in Hollywood, so I think they genuinely left it cleaner than when they came in.

MARKS: It just really the exact same thing as being on any other shoot outside of porn. I was maybe before it started expecting it to be a little crazier, but in a good way, it was underwhelming. It’s just for 45 minutes of the day people happen to be having choreographed sex, but apart from that, it operates like a smoother version of a fashion shoot.

PADGETT: It’s all leading up to sex, but they’re actually doing that part for only a small fraction of the day. There’s all these setup scenes of dialogue and extras, and then they also do sex stills, so they’re just taking photographs, and that’s something that I didn’t know about before. And then by the time that sex is actually happening, it goes by really fast.