In just a few years in the business, Joanna Angel has become near legendary as a punk rock girl-next-door gone bad, bad, bad. She got started with her own amateur alt-porn site Burning Angel, on which she showcased herself and her hot friends. Angel then moved into directing and producing DVDs, involving herself in creative projects ranging from the campy satires Joanna's Angels and Joanna's Angels 2 to the straightforward gonzo of Cum on My Tattoo and Joanna Angel's Guide 2 Humping and the outrageous horror-porn of Doug Sackman's
Repenetrator and The Exxxorcist. Until this past weekend a contract director with VCA/Hustler (having parted ways with that company without comment), Joanna just released her newest spoof, Porny Monster, a parody of the tabloid-trash classic.
But if you follow porn at all, you will probably recognize Joanna from time spent wearing her other hat -- as a star, appearing in dozens of scenes for a variety of studios and directors. Some of my favorite scenes starring the esteemed Ms. Angel are in Eon McKai's Kill Girl Kill series, Tristan Taormino's House of Ass -- but you can take your pick; for my money, every scene with Joanna in it is a winner.
I caught up with Joanna Angel at the recent Adult Entertainment Expo to chat about art, porn and politics.
Eros Zine: How and why did you start Burning Angel?
Joanna Angel: I started Burning Angel for no reason at all [laughs]. My roommate in college asked "Do you want to start a porn site with me?" And I said, "Sure, why not? That sounds like fun." I was in my last year of school and not really sure what I was going to do with my life, and it just sounded like fun.
I didn't think I'd be doing it for this long. When I was a junior in college I had a band and we played one show and then we broke up, but when the website launched it got so much attention which was weird because it was such a piece of shit! And it wasn't really like so much attention like most porn sites get, but it just seemed like whether i went to a show or was walking around town or went to eat, that was all everyone could talk about was me and my porn site. Either people liked it or they hated it or wanted nothing to do with it, but everybody had something to say about it.
I was a political activist when I was in college, and I would spend entire years working on campaigns to try to get people's attention. And nobody ever listened! Go to Washington, DC and stand in front of the White House, march down the street yelling things -- nobody ever cared, nobody paid attention. You put a few naked girls on the internet, and everyone turns around -- they're like, what? So it's a very powerful thing, and if used properly you can do something powerful with it.
Eros Zine: You mentioned you were a political activist; what causes were you involved with?
Joanna Angel: I did a lot for animal rights, also for human rights; a lot of stuff with political prisoners; I was part of Amnesty International.
Eros Zine: You also mentioned you were in a band -- did you plan on making that your career?
Joanna Angel: No. [laughs]. I think we knew that it was not really going anywhere. We played one show and then we decided to break up. We thought it would be for the betterment of all humanity. The music was kind of punky but electronic -- we kind of tried to sound like Portishead, I think, Portishead with an electric guitar. And we all broke our instruments after we played, and then we were like... "Why did we do that? Now we can't afford to buy new ones."
Eros Zine: How did you get started coming to the AVN show in Vegas?
Joanna Angel: I came here a few years ago, just as a fan -- well, I had met someone who worked in the industry, and I told him about Burning Angel, and he said "Did you know that this is a whole industry?" This was just me and my friends; I didn't know anything about anything. He got me some passes and I came here and walked around, and I realized this is a huge industry! I remember on the plane ride home, I was with the guy that I run Burning Angel with, and I said "We should make a DVD!" And so we did.
I didn't realize how hard it would be. Especially because we did it all on our own; it's not like we worked with another company or anything.
Eros Zine: What DVD was that?
Joanna Angel: BurningAngel.com the movie.
Eros Zine: When you started Burning Angel, did you think you'd become the kind of star you are now?
Joanna Angel: No. When Burning Angel started, I was just going to run it -- I wasn't going to be on it. But then, I felt really scummy asking girls to do something that i wouldn't do myself. So at first it was a whole thing I did it because I thought it would be wrong if I didn't -- but it turned out I really liked it. When we decided to do videos, I knew right away that I was going to be doing them.
Eros Zine: Do you still consider yourself to be doing political work? In other words, is porn political? Are you changing the world?
Joanna Angel: Well... I feel like I'm changing as much as I can. I think that a lot of people really like what I do, and I think what I do is a positive thing. I think sex is a very big part of life. everybody has sexual fantasies, but a lot of times people are so repressed and it can be dangerous.
I know that females really can be empowered through their sexuality when they don't have to hide it or feel guilty about it. Somebody can watch my movie and learn something about themselves -- and that makes me happy. I also have a lot of fans that read my blog every day and manage to open up a piece of themselves that they didn't know about before. Some part of themselves that has been waiting to come out.
Eros Zine: Burning Angel started out as an amateur site, but you've become one of the industry's rising professionals. Does that feel weird?
Joanna Angel: Well, I have actually started a new site, JoannaAngel.com, because Burning Angel is supposed to be for amateur girls who don't really do porn. I started to feel kind of weird putting my stuff on Burning Angel, because I'm not really an amateur any more. So I started JoannaAngel.com, which is more like a fan site but links to Burning Angel.
Eros Zine: Your most recent project is Porny Monster -- can you tell us a little about that?
Joanna Angel: I worked really hard on it. It's a parody of my favorite movie, Party Monster, with McCaulay Culkin. It's about the limelight, and a New York counterculture I always sort of wished I was part of, but I'm a little too young. It's a total spoof of that movie. In Party Monster everything gets ruined because people get addicted to drugs. In this movie the character gets addicted to dick.
With Porny Monster, I really tried to push the limits, with different kinds of lighting and camera angles that I never really used before, to try to make it more of a real movie. With Joanna's Angels, that was my first movie, and I love it, and I love Joanna's Angels 2, but I didn't know enough about making a movie to really fuck with it yet, do you know what I mean? If you ask Pablo Picasso to paint a picture, he could do it perfectly. I had to know what I was doing before I could fuck shit up. So I kind of fuck shit up in this movie, and it's kinda cool.
Eros Zine: Can you say a little about my very favorite Joanna Angel movie, Repenetrator?
Joanna Angel: We did Repenetrator around Halloween. I said, "We should really put some zombie horror porno movie on Burning Angel as a Halloween treat! We didn't do DVDs at the time, so it was just on the internet. I asked my friend who makes horror movies, Doug Sackman -- he made Punk Rock Holocaust -- and he wrote the script and directed it. We put it on Burning Angel, and our billing company wrote us a few days later and said "You gotta take that down," because it was too bloody and violent.
It sucked -- everybody liked it so much. I said, "Will you just let me keep it up for Halloween," and they said "Okay, all right," and I kept it up for a week for Halloween.
I thought that would be it, but then, nobody left me alone -- for
six months I got an email every day asking where Repenetrator
was. I thought maybe we should shoot five more scenes and put together
a whole DVD, but people couldn't wait -- they wanted it! So we put
it on DVD even though it's one scene, twenty minutes. And it won most
outrageous sex scene at last year's AVN awards.
Eros Zine: Thanks, Joanna! Readers can check out Joanna Angel's work at JoannaAngel.com or BurningAngel.com.
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