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A tall slim redhead born around 1962, Toni spent ten years acting in commercials, industrial videos and the occasional TV show. Tired of Hollywood in the mid '80s, she spent six years crafting leftist documentaries about Central America. Another example of a prim Catholic girl gone wrong, English, educated in a convent, retains some of the values inculcated in her. She doesn't like asking performers to do explicit acts. "I'm not comfortable with the language. I'd say, "Uh ahhh, would you take your penis...ah...and put it by ah uhhh her face. Everyone thought it hilarious. It was the standard joke to try to get me to say something. I still have two girls on a set that have a running bet on when they can con me into saying certain things. "I just came across my Kindergarten report card and the teacher had given names to all of us. I was "Our Little Miss." I look back on the pictures of me and I always wore little white clothes. I was prim and proper until I hit 16 and became a hippie." Given the large number of female performers from Catholic upbringings, it seems that Church schools unwittingly breed porn stars. "There's so much religion and repression. It's a response. Many female performers come from conservative families. P.J. Sparxx's parents are fundamentalist preachers." An atheist, leftist and opponent of marriage, English, as of 1997, lives with and employs in her editing bay at home two former lovers and her current lover. She says everybody gets along but they don't do four-ways. "I'm a nice Catholic girl. "I had a production company and until 1991 I was going to Central America to make documentaries up to three times a year. I'd sell them to PBS, to colleges, the BBC, Australian and Canadian TV... "Someone came to me wanting to edit pornography. And I didn't have a problem with it. They rented an editing bay. Then the next step was that they wanted me to edit some stuff. Fine. I didn't really care. I'd never seen pornography at the time. It was laughable, boring, unerotic, uninspiring...lots of lingering shots on orifices that are all interchangeable. "By this time I was a good editor 'cause I'd been editing my own projects for six years. After being left onetime in Nicaragua by the cameraman, I did a Scarlet O'Hara...'I will never be stranded by a cameraman again.' And so I learned to shoot and I was good. "Then I shot a porno in 1994. Savannah RN. It was hilarious. The first people I worked with were Tony Tedeschi, Cal Jammer, Jon Dough and Tom Byron who was rude to me. I didn't know protocol on a set. I'd shoot sex and let them go [how they wanted]. "Feature film is not a good background to shoot this because in features you have plenty of time to study a shot. In this you have to cover it quickly like news or documentaries." Toni's company Art Attack attracted increasing amounts of porn editing work. "We brought straight world technical and artistic sensibilities to bear on pornography. At one point I had six editors. I've scaled things back since I only work for Vivid now. "When I started editing for Vivid, I met Marci [Hirsch, the sister of Vivid owner Steve Hirsch]. She asked me to shoot a wrap around. A few things happened on the set. The director fell out and so I stepped in. "Shooters direct anyway. What do directors do on a set? They do one of two things. They either walk off the set during sex scenes, which is what Stuart Canterbury and Mitchell Spinelli do, or they sit back and try to direct their sex performers. And it's tedious to translate everything through the cameraman. It's really the cameraman who directs anyway. They're the ones who say "Turn yourhand this way, do that..." In the summer of 1995, Vivid hired Toni to direct features. She debuted with two girl prison movies, Lockdown and Strip Search. "Big commercial successes, they got great reviews and nominations for Best Video and other pointless things. "I've started writing my own scripts because I tired of dealing with writers and having to explain to actors how to justify absolutely unjustifiable lines of dialogue. "It goes against the grain for me to have actors do things that humans don't do. Have straight housewives who at the beat of a heart become raving lesbians who jump on their best friends. There has to be motivations for people to do things like that. "Therein lies a dilemma. If I wrestle with any creative dilemma in this business, which I don't anymore but I used to, it is, why bother? Why don't we all do, knock, knock, "It's the pizza man. Let's f---." "It's PT's opinion, but not mine, that is the best pornography. No dialogue. Just f---. But he has to make films with stories because Playboy [cable TV] demands it. I don't think that no dialogue makes a sexy movie. That's because I'm a woman. "What's sexy is the psychology of a scene and you can't set the psychology if you don't know who the people are. And you can't know who the people are if you don't have plot and character development. The challenge is to make all dialogue and character development relevant to the sex. And it's hard not to get into extraneous stuff. "If an audience knows that this is the husband cheating with his wife's best friend and you carry this tension through the sex, then you have something sexier than just two people walking in and f---ing. If one person is dominating another, or if one person is a john and the other is a prostitute, so that he has the freedom to objectify her more, that's a different sort of sexuality. "Yet, I know that men just fixate on objects. I don't get it. I'm lucky to be with Vivid which has a huge contract with Playboy [cable TV] which demands story. I don't have to fight with my producers to do what I want todo. "I despise people like Max Hardcore and John Bone. They're misogynists and they're happy to tell you that. They don't think it's good pornography unless the woman is screaming in pain, hence every scene is anal. "I've done nasty scenes but never when anyone is in pain. I'm considerate of my actors. "I don't find much pornography sexy. I don't find sex exciting when it's a viewing sport."
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