Don't Be A Slut: The Nudie Role That Wasn't

The role was Streetlight Hooker. The show was HBO soft porn. The requirement was full-frontal nudity. And, of course, I booked it.

It was basically a "poem" about a white guy walking down a dark alley when a strange, exotic creature suddenly appears before him – a black hooker in a platinum-blond wig and trench coat, whose thighs rise from the top of her hooker boots like hot-buttered biscuits. (I swear, the biscuits were actually part of the script.) Then she opens her trench coat, revealing her full Eden glory, and kneels on the dirty ground to worship his manhood.

End of scene. Emmy's all around.

I accepted the naked, nonspeaking role for the life-changing sum of $150, the same day I first met with Final Hollywood Scumbag.

I felt queasy about it.

But a TV credit was a TV credit, so I dutifully showed up to a dirty warehouse on the outskirts of Skid Row.

The producer made a grievous error right off the bat. He introduced my scene partner as "the talent for this piece." Then, he saw the look on my face and changed it to, "the other talent."

Too late. I'd gotten the message. The guy was "the talent." I was "the human prop." Accordingly, he was making $250, even though I was the one taking it all off.

And the contract gave the production company rights to the footage "worldwide, for all perpetuity." This meant that if I ever did make it big, they could run my naked footage whenever and wherever they wanted, for centuries, epochs and eons.

It didn't seem like a fair deal.

They got me all dressed up. The thigh-high boots, the trench coat, enough swirling, wild-colored eye makeup to make me look like a parakeet. I was glad. Maybe no one would recognize me.

But they didn't stop at wardrobe and makeup. They also got me into hair, the aforementioned platinum-blond wig.

That was an undertaking. I had a head full of shoulder-length braids. Roughly two-and-a-half bags of made-in-Korea hair added to my own already-thick hair. The makeup artist twisted, turned, pinned down, tied up and suffocated my mountainous tresses into submission so they would lay flat underneath the wig.

Like most black women, I was used to pain when it came to my hair. But this went beyond pain.

The wig was so tight, my head was pounding. I couldn't see straight. I imagined that this must be what a migraine felt like.

All dressed up and nowhere to go, I waited while they shot somebody else's scene outside.

This gave me a lot of time to talk to the makeup lady, who had recently worked on one of my all-time favorite movies and was full of on-the-set gossip about the film's stars, a 70's dancing icon in his comeback role and a Jheri-curl-wearing newcomer in his breakout role.

She and her husband asked me point-blank how I felt about the nudity. And they wondered out loud what a girl like me was doing on a set like this, because most girls did this kind of work "because they had to."

Hour after painful hour ticked by. I had arrived at 5:30 pm for what was supposed to be a 2-3 hour shoot. Six hours later, I was released. They had run into technical difficulties and wouldn't be able to shoot my scene tonight.

Off came the wig.

On stayed the clothes.

I got my $150 anyway.

And when they called me back to reschedule the shoot, I applied the lessons I had begun to learn from all the lying, flaky Hollywood types around me. I told them that I had booked a commercial that was shooting the same day. So sorry, but I wasn't available.