But Tawnee Stone, the model/actress in question, worked pretty much exclusively (AFAIK) for “Lightspeed University” and it’s affiliated sites.
Frankly, “residuals in the porn business” doesn’t sound like something one would want to have.
Even so, “getting out of a contract” generally means canceling your contract with one company so that you can work for another company. Faking your death isn’t going to help you there.
C’mon people, put 2 + 2 + 2 together here! I thought the context was sufficiently established and I didn’t think I needed to spell it out completely. Each point isn’t a separate topic.
(1) Fakes death?
(2) Wants out of business?
(3) Is under contract?
The original question was “could she have (1) faked her death because she (2) wanted to get out of the business”. The argument was then that the point of faking your death is to fool the public, not the porn people, so why try to make the porn people think you’re dead? Because maybe you’re (3) under contract and you’re going to get sued if you try to simply walk away from it. In other words, I was theorizing that maybe she wanted out of a contract because she wanted out of the business.
Obviously this is just guesswork since neither I nor anybody else here knows the details. But under my scenario, it’s possible she had seen other Lightspeed girls try to quit and get sued, and so decided to try quietly dying in a car crash.
SFW list of dead porn stars: http://www.rame.net/faq/deadporn/
But to sue the actress, the porn studio would have had to give her money, but she didn’t do the movies she agreed to do. Except the porn studios don’t work that way, for obvious reasons. They don’t hand out money in advance.
To put it clearly, what would the porn studio sue over? These contracts are about exclusivity. An actress agrees to only perform for one studio, and if she performs for another studio the first studio will drop her.
Ever hear of a plumber faking his own death because he wanted to get out of the plumbing business, but had a contract he couldn’t escape and was afraid of getting sued?
I suppose we can break down some possible motivations a starlet might have for faking death.
-
Wants to fool the public
1a. Wants to fool the public to make her merch more profitable
1b. Wants to fool the public so she can disappear into a normal life -
Wants to fool the studio/porn world
2a. There is some obsessed psycho in the porn world who hates her and she’s scared of him
2b. Would owe a bunch of money to the studio or her drug dealer if she just quit -
Wants to fool people from her personal life. That is, she wants her parents or whoever to think she’s dead.
-
It isn’t the starlet, but rather the studio who claims that the starlet is dead. And the starlet doesn’t dispute this because she wants to put her past behind her.
None of these reasons seem very compelling to me. I suppose they can happen, but it sure isn’t a regular occurrence because most porn stars just drop off the face of the earth rather than get reported dead.
But in the case of Tawnee Stone, she hasn’t done any work for Lightspeed in almost ten years, despite her short tenure making her their most popular girl for half a decade. Plus her location and the field she’s working in are well known. Plus there is no indication the rumor came from her.
And besides, do porn contracts require girls to work a certain number of films? I’ve been under the impression they just grant the porn company exclusivity. In other words, the girl can’t work for anyone else while she’s under contract. But I don’t think they require a certain number of films over a certain number of years. I imagine most of those girls are pretty flaky, have drug problems and boyfriend issues and are pretty unreliable most of the time. I would think that trying to force them to show up on time and perform reliably over a number of years would be a losing proposition. My guess is that porn contracts mostly just keep the girls from working for other porn companies because the other porn companies could then be sued.
And it would be pretty hard to fake your death and keep it from being found out. These girls have boyfriends/husbands/family/friends and the liklihood is that eventually somebody would get unhappy with the girl in question and out her. And if there are no police reports and no obituaries and no funerals under the performer’s real name, it would be pretty obvious that the death has been faked if the reason for the faking is to get out of a porn contract.
Ah, I wasn’t aware this. So it would appear she parted company with Lightspeed before I ever “discovered” her. Shows me the folly of trying to argue the hypothetical using specific, real examples :smack:
No worries. Not a big deal at all. 