Jenna Jameson - Pornographic Film Career

Pornographic Film Career

Jameson says that she started acting in pornographic videos in retaliation for the infidelity of her boyfriend, Jack. She first appeared in an erotic film in 1993, a non-explicit softcore movie by Andrew Blake, with girlfriend Nikki Tyler, whom she had met modeling for Suze Randall. Her first pornographic movie scenes were filmed by Randy West and appeared in 1994's Up and Cummers 10 and Up and Cummers 11. She quickly achieved notice and appeared in several other pornographic films while still living in Las Vegas.

Of her first pornographic movie, Randy West said "Jenna contacted me and said she wanted to get into the XXX business, but her agent didn't want her to do porn. A month later I'm on a shoot in Woodland Hills, and there's Jenna. She said she wanted to get into the business, despite what her agent said. I told her if you want to just do a girl/girl scene, we can do that. She said she wanted to work with Kylie Ireland, so I set it up. When the sex started, she just fucking rocked! I knew Jenna was special right off the bat. I figured she'd be the next Ginger Lynn, but nobody had any idea she was going to be as big as she turned out to be. Jenna told me when we first met that she was going to be a star."

Jameson got her first breast implants on July 28, 1994, to enhance her stripping and movie careers. By 2004, she had had two different sets of breast implants and a chin implant.

Jameson's first pornographic film appearances were lesbian scenes (a common way that female performers ease into the business). She says: "Girl-on-girl was easy and natural. Then they offered me lots of money to do boy-girl." Her first heterosexual scene was in Up and Cummers 11 (1994). At the beginning of her career, she promised herself that she would never do anal sex or double penetration scenes on film. Instead, her "signature move" was oral sex, lubricated with saliva. She has also never done any interracial sex scenes with men (despite that category's runaway popularity during 2000s). When asked about this on The Howard Stern Show on February 8, 2008, she said that she was not necessarily opposed to doing so; rather, "it never really came up", as there were few black men working in porn when she started, and none of them worked for the same company she did.

In 1994, after overcoming her drug addiction by spending several weeks with her father and grandmother, Jameson relocated to Los Angeles to live with Nikki Tyler. Her first movie after that was Silk Stockings. Later in 1995, Wicked Pictures, a then small pornographic film production company, signed her to an exclusive contract. She remembers telling Wicked Pictures founder Steve Orenstein: "The most important thing to me right now is to become the biggest star the industry has ever seen."

The contract earned Jameson US$6,000 for each of eight movies in her first year. Her first big-budget production was Blue Movie (1995), where she played a reporter investigating a porn set; it won multiple AVN Awards. In 1996, Jameson won top awards from three major industry organizations, the XRCO Best New Starlet award, the AVN Best New Starlet Award, and the Fans of X-Rated Entertainment (FOXE) Video Vixen award. She was the first entertainer to win all three awards. A stream of other awards followed.

By 2001, Jameson earned $60,000 for a day and a half of filming a single DVD, and $8,000 per night dancing at strip clubs. She tried to restrict herself to five films per year and two weeks of dancing per month. Her husband Jay Grdina has said that she earned as much as $25,000 per night dancing.

Since November 2005, she has been the host of Playboy TV's Jenna's American Sex Star, where prospective porn stars compete in sexual performances for a contract with her company, ClubJenna. Winners of the contracts for the first two years were Brea Bennett and Roxy Jezel.

In August 2007, Jameson had her breast implants removed, reducing her from a D to a C cup; she also said she was finished with appearing on camera in pornographic films, though she would continue running ClubJenna, which was grossing $30 million per year. In January 2008, Jameson confirmed she is retiring from pornographic performances and has since said that she "won't even do a Maxim cover."