Estelle Joseph makes adult movies for adult women through her company, Red Light Interactive. And please don’t confuse it with Red Light District. The two studios—as well as the kinds of movies they make—are thousands of miles apart.
RLI is based in New York, where Joseph produces and directs the series City of Flesh. She has three movies in release: City of Flesh, City of Flesh 2: Apt. 2B, and City of Flesh 3: Cumittment.
She markets the movies through her Website, www.redlightinteractive.com, but she is looking hard for a national distributor. A recent distribution deal with a Los Angeles company was stillborn when the outfit went bottoms up before it could get anything on the street.
“I love watching adult movies,” Joseph told AVN.com. “But I wasn’t happy with the choices I had.” Talking to girlfriends, she found out they felt the same way.
One day she decided, “‘I can do this, and I can do this better.’” A successful businesswoman, she pooled resources with some of her female friends and took her first step into the world of adult video. She calls her RLI product “a true alternative to conventional pornography.”
“Women like erotica, they just want it presented differently,” she said. “We don’t like watching what men think we like to watch: the name-calling, the hair-pulling, the throat-gagging—we don’t like this at all.”
Joseph’s stories deal with the sex lives of women in the big city, all told from the woman’s point of view. Her director of photography and editor are female. She says she imports her actors from “all over.” Most of the talent in City of Flesh 2 & 3 was recruited from Florida.
Her aim is to make the women and the men equally attractive. “Yes, I want to see a good-looking woman, but I also want to see some attractive men. As a female I want to see eye candy just as much as the male does.”
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A major problem—one that’s common to all adult filmmakers—is finding people with “a little bit of acting ability. That’s one of my prerequisites. I really want to improve on that.”
Above all, she says, she strives for realism. “There has to be a reason why two people decide to have sex,” she says. “I just don’t believe in the idea of here you are-there I am, unzipping your pants, and all of a sudden we’re having sex. It just doesn’t make sense.
“I understand that most men don’t care about this, they just want to see the action, but I think for women it is important.”
As for “typical” porno music, she abhors it. The minute anyone overhears it, she says, “they know exactly what you’re watching.” So she commissions hipper-sounding tracks from East Coast musicians, notably Joe Gallant of Black Mirror Productions (another New York porn maverick) and Deep Down Found Sound.
Joseph says she has been a businesswoman for over 15 years, and she has also been a ballet dancer. “I also have a creative side. For me, doing adult movies encompasses everything: the creative side and the business side—and also doing something that I love.”
Interested distributors can contact Estelle Joseph at [email protected].
