I like Amy Fisher a lot. But I think that’s as far as she’ll let it go. She’s in love with someone else.
“For my entire life I’d go to nightclubs and men would say ‘Your girlfriend over there is beautiful, but you’re sexy’ or ‘I want to marry your girlfriend but screw around with you,’ Fisher said.
“It took me a long time to get over it, but now I’m cashing in.”
We were talking about how the adult industry is great for defining one’s priorities.
The story of Amy Fisher is a timeless one: Girl has an affair with married man, shoots man’s wife in the face, serves time in jail, becomes a newspaper columnist, reconciles with married man (now divorced) and his former wife, launches an adult career with new husband. It happened in the Bible, in the Gilgamesh epic, in the novels of Charles Dickens, and is the subject of every Bollywood movie ever released (except for Panjit Yayy!, in which the wife is shot in the foot).
But Amy Fisher is not letting her place in history carry her away. Instead, the past 18 months have been a lesson in practicality.
“Naturally, I didn’t start out thinking ‘I want to be a porn star,'” Fisher said. “I got my degree in Business Marketing. The movie (Amy Fisher Caught On Tape) did really well. It told me that people really want to see me in this sort of thing. If it’s that popular, the decision gets easier to make.”
Fisher and her husband of five years, Lou Bellera, shot what would become Amy Fisher Caught on Tape in 2007 (Bellera is a videographer and appeared with Fisher in some of the scenes) and sold the rights to Red Light District, a company the couple is now suing for breach of contract.
“How did they breach their contract with you?” I asked.
“How didn’t they?” Fisher said. “They owe us a ton of money.”
But Fisher says she owns her website, AmyFisher.com, and is also in control of the content of nine pay per view specials, the first of which, “Amy Fisher: Totally Nude & Exposed,” debuted in January as a test of of her staying power, and which did so well it led to eight more being commissioned.
I asked what her impression of the adult industry was, 18 months in.
“I can’t get a job with the average anonymous people,” she said. “The past comes up a lot. It doesn’t matter how talented I am, or what I can do. They look at me and say, ‘You need a job?’ Well of course I do. Everybody needs money.
“So I’ve met some very nice people in the adult business. I think it’s very exciting. But people forget it’s a business and it sometimes makes me laugh.”
What, in particular?
“Girls come up to me and say, ‘Oooh, I really want to work with you’ and ‘You’re so sexy.'”
“You don’t think they mean it?” I said.
“They don’t get that it’s a business,” she said. “I look at them like they’re deranged. I don’t know why they even bother saying it.”
Fisher has lived a fascinating life, but she has not lived it in Los Angeles. I suggested that there was a chance that the girls crawling all over her, saying they wanted to work with her actually meant it. But she thinks of “Amy Fisher” as a brand and, at 34, is not a barely-legal ingenue who just wants to be on the virtual pages of GramPonante.com.
“I’m one sharp lady,” she said, “and one thing I know is business. It was the way I was raised (I wanted her to say ‘East Coast’ but she didn’t) and I’m not into this to live the porn star life, whatever that is.”
What is the porn star persona?
“Oh, ‘I always wanted to be a porn star.’ ‘My life is in chaos.’ ‘I just want a man,'” she said. “That sort of thing.”
But is there a part that a porn star needs to play in order to get fans?
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “I know people know who I am anyway. I’ve come to terms with that. But I think people like me, as a person. So after one of my movies I just want them to feel relieved – “
“That it’s over?”
“No (laughs). But they know that I’m a real person and am not their Destiny.”
Fisher is currently negotiating with a Porn Valley studio for a contract that will require her to do five or six movies a year. She will decide within a few weeks.
“Other than a price you can live with, what do you need from a contract?” I said.
“The movies need to be the higher echelon kind,” she said.
“It’s not Red Light District?” I said.
“No, it’s not Red Light District,” Fisher said. “You can probably guess which one it is, but I’m not going to jinx it.”
“If you take a contract,” I said, “What will be your first move?”
“The first move will be whatever I’m told to do,” she said. “I’m a worker. I show up on time. I make the most of the time I’m there. It’s going to be of the most benefit for everybody.”
On her website, Fisher appears solo, with another woman, and as a sort of Mistress of Ceremonies for a Boy/Girl scene that she does not participate in.
“Those were shot while I was in the contract with Red Light,” she said.
But Fisher will be working with men other than her husband in future movies, whether she becomes a contract performer or not. I asked Fisher and Bellera how they arrived at the decision.
“Everything comes in steps,” Bellera said. “We have a separate life from the porn business. A real life. There’s no room for jealousy.”
“I’m not going to fall in love with someone and go sailing into the sunset,” Fisher said.
Fisher and Bellera have three children together, the most recent a boy born last autumn. Both talk about the adult business as a way of making money to support their children.
The source of Fisher’s fame is a double-edged sword. She and Bellera would not have a pay per view contract without it, but both feel they’ve arrived at porn because other roads were closed to Fisher.
“You do what you do to make a living,” Bellera said. “You’re a proctologist, looking at behinds all day, you’re a cop…this might not be what we thought we’d be doing, but I’ve got to take my hat off to Amy, and support her, and love her.”
“I love my husband and my children,” Fisher said. “[Lou is] someone I can talk to, who will be my friend, who will hold my hand.”
“Since she did what she did (in 1992), she hasn’t got so much as a parking ticket, and people [mainstream employers] still don’t give her a chance. They have a notion that she’s a maniac from years ago. In the porn business, they did give her a chance, and look how she succeeded.”
Fisher has also started dancing. She will appear at Al’s Diamond Cabaret in Pennsylvania and at Denver’s New Oasis Cabaret. In April she will appear at Chicago’s 500-seat Admiral Theatre. She should dance to the song “Maniac.”
“I see her dancing and what she can do to a crowd,” Bellera said, “and I’m just so proud of her.”
I asked Fisher who was the pursuer in her courtship with Bellera.
“Oh, I was,” she said. “In the end it was my overwhelming charm that prevailed.”
Bellera and Fisher still live on Long Island. I asked Bellera about A-Rod, but he might have been talking about Amy.
“You can’t retroactively punish someone,” he said. “He did what he did, let’s get over it.”
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Amy Fisher and Lou Bellera: How to quit worrying and love your celebrity sex tape; Lou & Amy & Joe & Evanka: Coming to terms with your celebrity sex tape
See also: Amy Fisher
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