November 22, 2000 09:30am
Sex Survivor's Sleazy Demise
Source: Wired.com
by: Noah Shachtman
In last week's triple-X knockoff of the hit TV show, dozens of cameras were supposed to capture 28 porn performers carnally competing for $1 million in prize money. The Internet-only audience members, paying $70 a pop for the week-long webcast, were promised streaming video of the event and the right to vote competitors out of the Los Angeles mansion, where the action was taking place.
But that was before the mansion's cameras stopped working; before the stars started beating each other up; before accusations of a rigged show started to fly; and before the firm hosting Sex Survivor pulled the plug on the event, claiming they were owed over $100,000.
Tony Garcia -- a partner at Arch Entertainment, the Los Angeles Web services shop doing technical work for the event -- alleges that Sex Survivor chieftains EastWest Productions bounced a $57,000 check that is part of a larger, $100,000 plus bill -- for completed design work, server space and traffic direction.
So after repeated warnings, Arch stopped giving server space to the Sex Survivor site at 5 p.m. EST last Friday.
Disappointed online smut aficionados immediately began flooding the EastWest switchboard and were promised a full refund.
By 1 a.m. Saturday, Fred Sherman, the executive producer of competitor site Pornstar Survivor, was gleefully calling reporters with news of Sex Survivor's demise.
Sex Survivor's problems began long before that, however.
Several of the performers scheduled to appear, including Kendra Jade, Sky and Zoe, were no-shows. "No cash up front," Kendra said.
The contestants who were there started getting zany even before the event officially got under way.
"The (check-in) meeting was a bit long for (performer) Raquel Ann More, who had to pee so bad she stood up in the middle of the room, pulled down her pants and peed into a Styrofoam cup. The laughter turned to gasps and howls (sic) when Danny Sanders grabbed the cup and DRANK it!" wrote Steve Nelson, a participant who provided Adult Industry News with reports from the Sex Survivor mansion.
But technical problems kept the audience from fully appreciating what was going on. Fans never saw many of the video feeds from Flynt Digital.
"A day into the event, most of the 44 cameras are not functional, and have not been at all," complained one subscriber, "Movie Mogul," on the porn news site Stunning Curves.
At first, these difficulties didn't seem to affect the performers. Events like the "Fastest Face-Off" and "Blind Man's Muff" went as scheduled. And the actors and actresses were connecting for extra-circular activity as well.
"It was like a fantasy come true," exclaims Dave Cummings, the indefatigable 60-year-old retired Army Lt. Colonel-turned porn actor. "I got up in the middle of the night, brushed my teeth, went into the (next) room, (had sex with) a couple of girls, and went back to sleep."
Nearly all of the contestants seemed similarly inspired -- in part, no doubt, by the $350,000 first prize. British bombshell Billie Britt, for one, was "all over the place. All she wanted to do was 'get shagged,'" Cummings reports.
But without the video, the online voting for who could stay and who had to leave Sex Survivor was light. So the program's producers decided to abandon the audience-participation process.
That's when trouble in paradise began.
"When it got to the last 15 people, they wanted the talent to vote each other off," said Sharon Mitchell, the 1980s' porn queen turned sex therapist. "Now, these are people from fundamentally broken homes and different, messed-up backgrounds. The porn industry is where they've found camaraderie. So this was very upsetting."
Mitchell ran group encounters each morning and individual counseling sessions throughout the day for Sex Survivor's performers. She believes that the stars agreed to split the prize money, no matter who won. Cummings says they left it up to the show's crew to decide. Either way, nearly every competitor's exit turned melodramatic.
When Teri Weigel, the former Playboy bunny who now does triple-X, was asked to leave, she took her gripes public. In the Sex Survivor chat room, she began ranting that the show was rigged and that fans should demand a refund, according to fans and fellow performers.
"All emotions seem to be heightened," Steve Nelson said. "Even small irritations are becoming a major matter for the contestants left, because of lack of sleep. The daily meetings facilitated by Miss Sharon Mitchell have been a godsend in keeping peace and order to the house and gearing everyone up for a day of sexual challenges."
But even the meetings couldn't keep the contestants from occasionally smacking one another.
"Nadia Foster ... was very unhappy to go. She felt she had a real chance to win and felt it must have been a mistake.... There were some words between Raquel and Nadia on her way out that resulted in a kick to Raquel's eye," Nelson wrote.
After an exhausting week -- with the site shut down, many of the participants fuming and the Web designers preparing to sue -- Sex Survivor executives declared a male and female winner, Charlene Aspen and Billy Glide. The two are supposed to receive their prize money by Dec. 15.
"It was (the producers') first time in porn," Mitchell explains. "They got a lot more than they bargained for."
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