The Fall of San Fernando Valley: How Silicon Valley F*$%ed Over Silicone Valley
What happened to the once-illustrious San Fernando Valley now that everyone is, basically, watching everything for free?
“We called it Porn Star Airlines,” Nina Hartley laughs. She is referring to Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), which used to operate the last flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. “It left at 11.30 pm and it was full of porn stars. Always.” The sexually free-spirited San Francisco was then, as it turns out, the only city in the United States where porn producers could do everything. “Literally everything,” Hartley stresses.
“By that time,” the legendary porn star adds, “sixty to seventy percent of the porn industry had moved from New York to California, where everything to make movies was readily available.” But it wasn’t just LA that took a big bite out of porn flicks’ budgets. In fact, Ronald Reagan had just declared war on pornography, and the then US president, former governor of the state of California and — according to his biographer — one-time actor still had many friends in Tinseltown. “The LAPD often confiscated equipment from porn sets,” Hartley recalls, “and they would even arrest people working in the industry and charge them with prostitution. So…
