Spoiler alert: The five-part series is sad. One of the series’ most poignant moments is a smiling Weeks expressing buried concern over losing her identity to her porn star alter ego. But, as the documentary shows, the amount of “hustle” the job demands, and the public persona it requires performers to develop, can both be hugely taxing - particularly for someone as young as Weeks. According to Weeks, she started by Googling “how to be a porn star” when she first considered sex work as a way to pay for school, never anticipating how her involvement with the industry would come to dominate her life. The series follows Weeks in the months after her identity was first revealed by a classmate at Duke, and shows how she, her family and others in the porn industry have responded to her rise to stardom. I kind of have the mind and the emotional baggage of somebody much, much older than me." "I don't have the mind of an 18-year-old. But in the year since she started doing porn, Weeks admits, she has grown a great deal. "I think my experiences have aged me," she says in the documentary. Many of Weeks' early claims still pop up: She loves what she does, and she makes no apologies for joining the adult industry to pay her Duke tuition. She has not delved deep into how her treatment by the public - the treatment directed at so many sex workers - has affected her life.īut in a new documentary series from Condé Nast Entertainment, "Becoming Belle Knox," those missing details of Weeks' story are presented in full force. In essays deriding outrageous tuition costs and expressing love for the porn industry, Weeks has offered astute arguments - but they are arguments that never veer too far into the gray areas that exist in the lives of female porn performers, whose bodies and choices are policed to a near-unimaginable extent. Tomei no longer appears in the cast credits, nor do three other performers from the pilot.Miriam Weeks, also known by her stage name Belle Knox, also known as "the Duke porn star," hasn't been afraid of publicly taking sides since she was outed as a porn performer during her freshman year of college. Now, according to an NBC release, the opening segment involves Denise and Jaleesa ''clashing'' and Denise seeking refuge with a different roommate, a Southern belle played by Jasmine Guy. The sequences proved to be tired and flat, the lines forgettable, and the whole thing exuded a kind of forced perkiness, like a contestant in a beauty pageant. (Marisa Tomei), a transfer student from Minnesota who is white and, not so incidentally, a compulsive talker. The pilot centered on her check for dormitory fees bouncing, coupled with Denise and her 26-year-old, divorced roommate, Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis), finding themselves assigned a third roomie Lisa Bonet, as you should know, takes her ''Cosby Show'' character of Denise Huxtable into the setting of Hillman College, a predominantly black institution where she is a sophomore. ![]() The immediate enemy, of course, is ''Cosby.'' Unless ''Tour'' is shifted to another spot, the series-unlike Zeke Anderson-doesn`t have a chance of calling itself a survivor. ![]() Despite the character stereotyping and the contrived finale, ''Tour of Duty,'' along with HBO`s recent presentation of the fine ''Vietnam War Story,'' shows that television can handle the subject in an intelligent, sensitive manner. Posey`s combat photography, which, while necessarily not overwhelmingly graphic, is effectively suggestive of the horror. Along with, not unexpectedly, the WASP, avuncular captain (Kevin Conroy) and the callow, by-the-book Jewish lieutenant (Stephen Caffrey).Ĭoupled with the impressive acting is Stephen L. The few good men he selects represent, of course, the same spread of demographics that goes back to ''Guadalcanal Diary'' and ''Battleground'': the cocky black kid from Motown (Keith Amos), the super-patriotic volunteer out of Iowa (Tony Becker), the Hispanic machine-gunner from the Bronx (Ramon Franco), the Southern California health-food hound (Eric Bruskotter), the white, blues- playing, anti-war college dropout from Chicago (Joshua Maurer).
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