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?

12:00 noon

Cinnamon picked me up and was ready to get back to work this morning. She has been grinning all day long and won’t say a word about her “weekend.” She was very interested, though, to know about my discoveries. She’s worked through boxing everything in Georgia’s bedroom and will be supervising the first Goodwill pickup this afternoon.

I spent the morning watching dirty movies. Georgia has 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’ve packed up most of her office and was pulling out the drawers to make sure I had everything before we send 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 U.S. 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 prostitution.

But there seems to be a way around it, and 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 webcams for which she was paid well, but her clients paid her to produce and 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 are on Georgia Central. The contracts are all encrypted, 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 take the same password. And yes, it is her Hotmail password, AIM, Messenger, Yahoo, et. al.

So, I found a bunch of documents that were password protected, entered the password, and presto! I had contracts. It’s a contract template, that looks like it was for a construction industry project. In the contract, the client hires the production company to produce, script, and edit a film, including handling on-line distribution. Georgia documented exactly how much she received from each client (which was a hefty sum) and she documents a budget for the film. In the budget, she includes producer, rent, equipment, lighting, and sound. Then, get this, every contract has a clause that says, “All actors are amateurs and are not paid for their services.” The next page includes a release for the amateur actors that says they consent to having their pictures in this movie.

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

The real treasure in all of this is that it included the production dates and distribution channel for every movie.

I’ve got to say that 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 that 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 a direct suspect for a murder. Frankly, if I was into this kind of thing to make a living, I’d consider killing myself, too.