No Holding Back: The Brad Armstrong Story
My 20 Year Career As Straight Porn's Top Male Performer
Copyright 2004
Not every guy can make a living spraying his semen into the faces of gorgeous young models like I have for the past 20 years.
Whenever I go to conventions or speaking engagements to promote our films it always happens. Some guy will come up and pop "The Question" to me.
"How do I break into the business?"
And I am very honest with them when they ask me that.
"Son, you gotta have a great body, you have to have impressive equipment, and most of all, you have to ALREADY be used to making it with hot chicks."
See, that's what's gonna disqualify over 90% of these guys right there. They are guys who are still living in their parent's house, driving a beat up old car, dressed in torn T-Shirts and baggy shorts with beat up tennis shoes, are lucky if they can snag a ordinary looking girl and here they dreaming about getting it on with models like Nikki Anderson or Julia Taylor.
Those top-flight adult models are very PARTICULAR about who they work with. This ain't the 1970's anymore, when the business was still getting established and the girls didn't have my say. Back then models would show up on the set and be told, "Ok, here's the guy you're going to screw. Tough if you don't like it."
Today's top models hand-pick their co-stars, and no, before you ask, the size of the dick isn't that important to most of these girls. They like big cocks, don't get me wrong, and they love big muscles, but mostly what these girls look for is personality. Same as they would in a real-life relationship.
Think about it, if a girl can't stand a guy, if his breath stinks and his personality turns her off, she is gonna have to be ONE HELL OF AN ACTRESS to not let it show during the shoot. Because this business is about getting VERY up close and personal with each other.
Most of the guys that approach me with this question are about 20 pounds overweight, dressed like rap star wannabes, their personal grooming leaves much to be desired and they do not project that one characteristic that turns women on: confidence.
Remember the hot chicks at your high school and at college, if you went? What kind of guys did they date? Yeah, the guys were good looking but so what, there were dweebs and un-popular guys that were good looking. Did they dress nice? So do lots of nerds. What is it they project that the hot girls go for?
Masculinity. Confidence. They have their shit together. They are well groomed, too. Lots of guys today don't seem to think that matters, but it does.
All right, that was high school. What makes you think it's any different in the adult video business? Some guys seem to think if they land the job they get to sleep with a hot girl no matter what she feels about it.
Maybe at the low levels of the business, when people are breaking in, girls don't have much say and they do have to 'do it' with whoever they get paired with. But by the time you get up to the high quality product, like VCA, or Private, forget it. Those girls only work with who they want to work with.
And the directors and producers are NOT gonna make these top models screw a guy they don't like. The whole point of an adult vid is to turn the audience on. If the girl doesn't like the guy and it shows, how many copies of the video are they gonna sell? Very few.
Volcanic sex scenes are turned in by models who are genuinely turned on by each other. And if you ain't the type of guy that makes a Jenna Jameson or a Nikki Anderson wet just by standing next to them, you're gonna have a hard time getting to the top in this business.
What kind of guy gets paired with the top girls? Well he's gotta be in shape, number one. The fat guys can make a living at the lower level of the business, but they are scraping by. Most of them could make more money with a legitimate job. Directors don't want to pair a curvaceous, tanned babe like Julia Taylor with a guy that's pale, overweight and awkward looking. They want to pair an in-shape guy with their top models because that makes the sex look hotter, which is the whole point, of course.
Secondly, the guy has to have impressive equipment. Some guys get along with the 6 -7" inch cocks but like the fat guys they don't work much and they never reach the top of their trade. The average 'top' stud in the business has a 8-10" penis when erect. That's not just to discriminate against those not blessed; it's so people can see the guy's organ during the sex clearly. If a guy only has a thin 6 incher, people watching a girl slide up and down on that in the Cowgirl position aren't seeing a whole lot. But if you paired that same babe with me or Peter North, guys with big, easily seen 10" inchers, that changes the picture because now the audience can clearly see her impaling herself.
Thirdly, the guy has to be an expert with women. No fumbling, no awkwardness. He has to be a sexual athlete and have a personal touch. He can't be one of those guys in the cheap gonzo flicks that pays some teen amateur girl to blow him while he sits back and does absolutely nothing. The job of the porn stud is to drive the girl wild so her personality comes out during the scene, just as she's trying to drive him wild. You have to be a lovemaker, not a inert cock some girl is blowing or screwing.
Fourthly, the guy has to deliver on the cumshot. Some guys have every quality I've listed so far; they are in shape, they have big dicks, they know what they are doing with the girls......and then when it's time for the money shot nothing happens. Well, they climax, obviously, but it's hard to see. Which is not good. If a guy has spent the last 20 minutes of a video getting sucked and screwed by a gorgeous babe, and then she jacks him off into her waiting mouth, the entire scene has been building to that moment, so the guy has to deliver. When he orgasms, his semen has to be clearly seen and the more of it there is and the more forcefully it leaves him, the more exciting the cumshot is. Which is why guys who only produce a dribble or two don't work much.
Now fair or not, the audience equates a man having a powerful orgasm as the perfect conclusion to a hot sex scene. And what's the most graphic evidence that the man is having a powerful orgasm? Is it how loud he yells? Is it how much is body jerks and shakes? Nope. It's how much semen leaves his penis during the ejaculations and how forcefully that semen leaves it.
So, not surprisingly, the guys who go off like firehoses and who's semen is clearly visible as they ejaculate get more work than the guys who go off like a limp, barely turned on water hose that leaks clear, hard to see fluid.
The sixth and last thing is that you have to have control. And I mean CONTROL. Nothing ruins a scene that the director is trying to create like the male model shooting off early. Do that more than a few times and the phone will stop ringing. Believe me, if the word gets out that you're a trigger-happy fellow, your earnings will nose dive.
And most of the guys who want to work in this business just do not understand that you have to have the WHOLE package to make in this business these days since the competition is so fierce.
Hey, who wouldn't want to make a living making it with hot ladies like Sylzvia Lauren or Sandra Russo? But you have to fit the bill to even have a shot at getting your foot in the door.
Every time there is a casting call for new male talent, how many guys do you think show up? 10? 20? Last time VCA held one of those 200 guys showed up. They get to sit across from a table from the VCA reps and talk for about 5 minutes while they are looked over. Out of that 200, maybe 5 or 6 will get in the door and get to take their clothes for for some pictures. Out of that maybe 2 will get to the next level - a photo shoot with a new girl who is also coming into the business. If he does well with the photo shoots, he will then after a couple of months move on to videos. That doesn't mean he's got it made. He's still trying out. They may start him out with gonzo type flicks with little set up and no acting ability required, or if they think he has promise he may get second billing in a shoot. But most big productions companies like VCA or Private will only add about 4 or 5 male models a year. That's out of about 1,000 guys that show up to try out.
So I admit I get tired of some guy with pimples, who is fat, out of shape, and couldn't get a date in a singles bar full of hot chicks, coming over to me and asking who they need to talk to about 'breaking in' to adult vids.
I try to be polite, but one point I definitely make is that if they aren't screwing hot girls right NOW, forget doing it for the cameras, because if these guys ever got Nikki Anderson's face close to their dicks they would go off in about 3 seconds.
I got into the business by accident. That's the way it's been for most of the top guys. I was going to be a pro football player. Peter North wanted to be a bodybuilder. David Perry was shooting for a career as a male model for the fashion industry.
Peter was asked to do a magazine layout by a guy that saw him at the beach. David had a career going in Europe and then hit a wall and took a magazine shoot to pay the bills. Me? I was UCLA's top linebacker prospect of 1984.........and then I broke my right leg in my first game so badly I still walk with a slight limp today. The doctors took one look and said my playing days were over.
Since I was on a scholarship to UCLA to play football, one of the first things that happened is that I lost the scholarship and was stuck in L.A. after I dropped out of school. I tried to work a few jobs but nothing felt right. The most I could find was a job for $7.00 an hour working as a clerk in a store. I could pack up and go back home to Texas but I knew there was nothing waiting for me there. I was 18 years old, my whole life ahead of me, and already a dream I had been working towards since junior high had just died an ugly death.
So I'm asking around the small group of friends I had made on the UCLA campus before I dropped out about any good work, and one of them, a really cute co-ed I had had my eye on before the untimely demise of my football career told me about a modeling agency looking for new talent. She mentioned a little shyly that she had done some nude modeling for them, and she had gotten some good money for it. She told me with my good looks and physique from years of bodybuilding and football, I would be a natural.
So, out of prospects and stuck in a dead end job, I show up at the South Talent Agency in Central LA. It's a little storefront place, and what they do there is they don't really produce any photo shoots; it's an introductory level agency that farms aspiring models out to photography studios and production companies.
I go in, meet the nice lady behind the counter, and fill out a questionnaire. She takes some Polaroids of me, all the basic front and side shots, then asks if I'm interested in the nude/adult modeling work. And for a moment, I almost said no, then thought what the hell and said yes. So five minutes later I'm standing stark naked in front of this wall while this lady, who looks alot like my high school librarian, with short gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, takes pictures of me from different angles.