Hot Girls Wanted
ホットガールズ・ウォンテッド
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Eighteen-year-olds recruited by Craigslist ad into amateur porn; the follow-up series Turned On (2017) widened the lens.
Hot Girls Wanted, directed by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus and produced with Rashida Jones, follows young women through their first months in 'pro-amateur' pornography. Riley Reynolds, twenty-three, runs an agency, Hussie Models, from a house in North Miami Beach. He posts ads on Craigslist offering free flights and a place to stay, and the girls who answer are mostly eighteen or nineteen, from small towns. 'Every day a new girl turns eighteen,' he says. Within days each has a stage name, a Twitter account and bookings, at around 800 dollars a scene.
The film's centre is Tressa, a nineteen-year-old former cheerleader from Texas who arrives thrilled. With her in the house are Rachel, eighteen, from Illinois; Michelle, nineteen, who moved from posting nude pictures online to hardcore scenes; and Jade, at twenty-five the veteran. At Christmas in Texas, Tressa goes hunting with her father, who does not know what she does in Miami.
The shine goes quickly. The sites want new faces, most women last no more than three months, and after a few shoots the offers turn to 'niche' work: scenes of staged abuse and humiliation, which the film shows being made without explicit footage. Tressa's boyfriend, Kendall, who had told her it was her body, begins to ask what separates the work from prostitution, and a painful infection makes the physical cost plain. After four months she has 2,000 dollars left of the 25,000 she earned. Between her mother and Kendall, both begging her to stop, she finds it hard to let go, then reluctantly quits. On the phone she tells Riley she misses her freedom. She tells her father, and plans to live with Kendall in Arlington and find an ordinary job; beside him, she says she enjoyed 'that selfishness' for about four months, and that was enough. By the end Rachel, who has begun to question the work too, has also stopped.
Starring
TressaHerself
A nineteen-year-old former cheerleader from Texas whose arrival, doubts and exit form the film's main arc.
RachelHerself
An eighteen-year-old from Oswego, Illinois, who comes to Miami for the work and begins to question it.
MichelleHerself
A nineteen-year-old who went from posting nude pictures online to hardcore shoots.
JadeHerself
At twenty-five the veteran of the house, in a business that treats eighteen-year-olds as the product.
Riley ReynoldsHimself
The twenty-three-year-old agent who recruits through Craigslist and houses his new performers in North Miami Beach.
Why it matters
Hot Girls Wanted asks what choice means at eighteen. The women in it are adults, they sign up willingly, and several say the work makes them feel powerful. The film shows how quickly that choice is shaped by money, by a market that prizes youth above everything, and by an internet that makes sure the girl's home town finds out. Its sharpest subject is consent over time: what a young performer agrees to in her first week and what she is steered towards by her third month. Riley and two of his performers said it dwelt on the worst cases, sex workers called it an invasion of privacy, and some critics found its tone alarmist; after Sundance its directors re-edited it to make plain that it was neither for nor against pornography. What stays is Tressa's face as the excitement goes out of it.