After taking Sundance by storm, "Hot Girls Wanted," Ronna Gradus and Jill Bauer's intimate exposition of young pornography performers, has been attracting audiences nationwide via its release on Netflix.
The documentary, which has been playing on the streaming site since May, won strong reviews from publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and it has drawn attention for its frank profiling of the current pornography industry and its (very) young participants.
Back in April, Gradus and Bauer participated in a roundtable panel where they discussed the making of the film and what they hope it achieves. It's an illuminating, fascinating conversation about the technological age and, more broadly, the world we live in today. Read on below to see 7 of the discussion's biggest reveals:
They were surprised by the backgrounds of their subjects.According to Gradus, "If anyone were to confiscate our computers they would probably be like, 'These dirty girls!' You see that on all of these sites there are seemingly thousands of girls. We've always been aware of that. Who are they? There’s so many of them. Then, when we got into this house, it seemed like this recruiter posts ads on Craigslist. Then small town girls, who want to get out of their towns, graduate high school, go on to Craigslist, click on these ads and then they get a free plane ticket to Miami. A week later, they are on a porn set.""We thought to ourselves, 'Wait a minute, this can't actually be happening because if this were really the story, that thousands of girls are doing this, it would have been told by now.' It turned out that it really had not been told and we just thought, 'Whoa!
This is the story.' We put the boy version of 'Sexy Baby' on the back-burner and ran with this one."Premiering the film at Sundance allowed them to make necessary changes."We had the great benefit of watching the film five times at Sundance and three times in Miami on a big screen," said Bauer. "The same things drove us crazy every time.
For Sundance, you rush for the edit, music and everything. It just drives you crazy. You rush, rush, rush."After watching the film with an audience and listening to people's comments in festival Q&As, the duo made one major change. "We clarified cards," continued Bauer. "In the first version for Sundance, we did these cultural montages. We always thought they were excessive. People didn’t need to be hit over the head to know there is a world out there, a sexualized culture. People didn’t have to see it all over the place. We pared that down and it's really just in the intro. The ending always felt like a two-ending film. We made that tighter. The music is better. It's much better. We actually love this version."
