Porn provocateur

Lizzy Borden, whose ultraviolent films feature women being beaten, raped and doused in vomit, insists that she is a gender pioneer whose repellent movies are morality tales.

By Janelle Brown

June 20, 2002 | LOS ANGELES -- The most reviled woman in pornography stands before me, a 25-year-old bleached blond in tattered floral house slippers. On the cover of a catalog for Extreme Associates, the porn film company she runs with her husband, Rob Black, director Lizzy Borden wears spider-web tights and a skull-and-bones T-shirt that she accessorizes with a malicious grin and impressively pneumatic breasts. But in the privacy of her own office -- a cramped cinderblock warehouse covered with posters of naked women and autographed Hulk Hogan photographs -- she wears sweat pants and a Quiksilver T-shirt, with no visible makeup and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Plus, the slippers.

"I'm totally bloated today," she tells me, sounding more like an awkward teen than a porn movie maven. "Don't take any photographs!"

In person, Lizzy Borden comes off as a chatty girl with a quick sense of humor, a potty mouth and a slight attitude problem. And yet, during her five-year career as an actress/director, Borden has emerged as a porn powerhouse who manages to offend, disgust and/or alienate not just feminists, politicians and most Americans with a conscience, but a great percentage of the unshockable pornography industry as well. This is a woman whose filmography includes such gems as "Fossil Fuckers" (geriatric women having sex with young men), "Cocktails" (post-coital women drinking vile concoctions of vomit and bodily fluids) and, most horrifyingly, the recent slasher-porno "Forced Entry."

In fact, Borden's films are so repugnant and evil that it's difficult to justify their existence, let alone comprehend why anyone -- especially a woman -- would want to make this kind of garbage in the first place. But Borden talks about her work with pride and a kind of twisted logic. She considers herself a moralist, an artist, a realist and a provocateur (though perhaps not in such grand vocabulary). In an industry that treats women like second-rate citizens, that considers them useful only as long as their breasts are perky and their orifices exploitable, Borden sees a route to power and respect in out-boying the boys. Furthermore, she believes she's just giving audiences the same kind of violence and vileness they've come to expect from their other entertainment outlets, like the World Wrestling Federation, "Jackass" and Eminem.

And thanks to her own abusive childhood, Borden is just screwed up enough to believe this rationalization. "As people stay in this industry they tend to get pretty twisted," explains journalist Luke Ford, a porn insider and longtime chronicler of the business. "It both attracts twisted people and then exacerbates those tendencies." No one epitomizes this more than Lizzy Borden, and none of her work manifests it so completely as the recent "Forced Entry."

The film premiered, oddly enough, as part of the Frontline documentary "American Porn," which screened on PBS this February. During their exploration of the extreme end of the porn industry, the Frontline producers visited the set of "Forced Entry" (actually, the back room of the Van Nuys, Calif., warehouse that Extreme Associates calls its office), where Borden was taping the climax of her film. The PBS producers were so disturbed by what they saw -- star Veronica Caine being "raped" and "beaten" -- that they filmed themselves walking off the set because it was too hard for them to watch.

I felt the same way when I watched the film. "Forced Entry" is purportedly the story of a serial killer and his gang who rape and murder a series of women -- an 18-year-old virgin, a pregnant woman, etc. -- before being caught and lynched by an angry mob. The actresses in the film are slapped, spit and urinated upon, and violated in every orifice, while sobbing and screaming and begging for mercy. Watching it, I was aware that it was just a movie -- that these were consensual acts taking place between actors and actresses who had already had sex with each other dozens of times in past films; and that the blood and screams were fake. The video even included an entire "blooper" reel of the actresses laughing and joking on the set. Still, I was so traumatized by the movie that it brought me to tears: It was like witnessing a real rape, seeing the nadir of man's contempt for womankind brought to life with no holds barred.

It's hard to equate this horror with the outgoing girl in slippers who walks me around the Extreme warehouse, through the spray-painted room where, in "Forced Entry," Veronica Caine is violated and stabbed to death. All the while Borden chats about her beloved bulldog and asks me questions about my career. She seems anxious to prove to me that she's not the evil, actress-beating director that Frontline depicted.

"I've fucked up on a lot of interviews, said things that people take all the wrong way," she tells me, as she sits me down in a broken office chair and puts her feet up on a big wooden desk. (I eye the desk nervously, wondering if it figured in the scenes of any of her movies.) "I'm very honest. Anything you want to know."

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