Bonus Ep 3: You’re Only as Good as Your Model Feels

Novel.

Hey listeners, I'm your host, Ellie Flynn. Thanks for joining me on our third and final bonus episode. Before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that this episode contains swearing and some very explicit sexual language. It also contains frank discussions around pornography. This episode certainly comes with a big explicit content warning, but it's also very fun.

Now.

It's not always easy reporting stories like the one we uncovered in The Bunnie Trap, and once we started investigating this series, we quickly found that most interviews were heavy and difficult, both for the contributors and for the production team.

In journalism school, you're often.

Taught to end a difficult interview on a lighter note to help bring the contributor out of the tough topics you've been discussing. After everything we've been through together in The Bonnie Trap, we thought we should end the whole series on that lighter note. We're going to do that by bringing you an interview that wasn't heavy or traumatic. Instead, it was a riotis and fun rollercoaster ride with this iconic duo.

I'm Hally Randall. I'm a second generation female erotic photographer director and I am sus Randall's daughter.

Hey, I'm sus Randal and I'm an old fart living in the mountains on a thirty acre ranch. I just handle the ranch. I bully my ranch manager.

Sus is much more than that. She's actually a bit of a legend. Ugh.

So, Mom, you could just say saying like, I'm Sus Randal, I'm an erotic photographer and filmmaker, and I was one of the first female photographers at Playboy something like that. That sounds very boring, Yeah, don't worry. The rest of your interview is so fascinating. Like in a one boring sentence that just says who you are.

Ah, Okay, So I'm Sus Randal and I'm a naughty photographer.

Susan Holly's work covers the full spectrum of raunchy because while they both shoot the kind of glamour content you've come to know in this series, their work goes beyond what we focused on. They're both photographers and pornographers, and that's its most extreme. Their work involves elaborate film sets and porn scenes. I wanted to speak to this mother daughter duo to understand what it's like to succeed as a photographer.

In this world.

Their careers mirror the evolution of the glamour industry, from parties at the infamous Playboy Mansion to the rise of internet porn. In the main series, you heard about how guys with cameras like Luis Gomes operates. These two they hold the key to making it big in this business. You see, Sus has a philosophy.

In her work.

I had great fun.

Fun.

That was Suess's special source because it wasn't just Suess who had fun, her models did too. I'm Ellie Flynn and from the team at Novel This is the Bunny Trap Bonus episode three. You're only as good as your model feels. Sus Randall has had a long and glittering career in glamour photography. She's shot iconic playmates and was the first woman to shoot page three for the Sun newspaper. And if you're from the UK, you know what that means.

I was encouraged by my parents to be rebellious, not to take nonsense from bossy teachers, so I'm surprised that was never thrown out.

Sus moved to London and became a nurse. So in the sixties, when sus was twenty two, she lived with seven other nurses in Earl's Court. One night, they hosted a party that would prove crucial for her future career. That's where she met a guy called Humphrey, who'd been specifically invited to meet her best friend.

I was wearing a top then showed my stomach and he got really excited, and I got shy, so I went upstairs and changed into an ordinary shirt, and then after a couple of drinks, I went and put it back on again, and he knew I was his and I stole him.

Humphrey was a writer and director from South Africa. He was struggling to finish his first book, and Susan's wage as a nurse was barely enough to cover the basics of life in London. Humphrey had always dreamed of a life of fame, though, and so he was the one who first nudged sues towards the UK glamour industry.

It's all his fault.

Really, he persuaded me to answer an ad for nude modeling.

I ended up being quite a good model.

Although I had short legs, I knew how to move and how to groove.

Nude modeling soon overtook her nursing. But then Sue's me a photographer who gave her some advice.

He said, for Heaven's sake, keep your clothes on. Sus and I started doing fashion.

At the time, Sus was rocking short hair before anyone else. So one day, when she was walking down Bond Street, she got approached by Vogue for a sheet.

The photographer actually was wonderful. He really made you feel good. I was so excited that I was going to become a photographer too.

But around the same time that she got the job for Vogue, Sus was starting to realize maybe modeling wasn't for her.

There's an awful job modeling. You know, you stand in line and you wait for people to point.

Out, oh you you you not you.

Uh, it's horrible.

And then all the photographers were men, and most of them, you know, would be so full of themselves, but they didn't know how to make you feel relaxed. So I started shooting my girlfriends. Behind the scenes, I took pictures of everybody because people would take their clothes off for me. I didn't know what I was doing, and so they saw this girl struggling with the camera, and you know, and I was funny. I mean, I would just make them laugh. We would just fool around, and that's what worked.

Everything changed when Susan met a new model called Lillian Miller. Susan's husband, Humphrey, had come across Lillian's pictures. He'd followed Sue's into the glamour industry and knew this blonde bombshell from Norway had something special.

Lillian Muller was the secret of our success. We got her to come and see us and persuaded her to do photographs with me.

The photos Sue's took of Lillian was striking. She showed them to another photographer who was working for a publication that you might have heard of, Playboy magazine. He also thought Lillian had something special. He sent the photos to his boss, Hugh Hefner.

Hefna fell in love with her.

This was a man's world, so SU's had to be strategic. She said Playboy could only shoot with Lillian if she was the photographer.

I would pay the models directly, and I would own the pictures. I was able to say, well, you know, if you don't want me to shoot for you, I'll sell my pictures Spendez.

Sue's now owned the photos she'd taken of Lillian. This is pretty commonplace nowadays, but back then, sus was ahead of her time and it gave her bargaining power with Playboy.

They had to kind of trying to sweet talk me into owning her and the pictures. They flew us both over to La so they let me shoot for them.

At the Playboy Mansion, Sue's photographed Lilian for the magazine's cover, making it the first full frontal Playboy spread to be shot by a woman. Lilian was then chosen as Playmate of the Month in August nineteen seventy five and Playmate of the Year in nineteen seventy six. It was a heady time, and Sues threw herself into endless partying at the Playboy Mansion.

It was okay, but not the greatest of parties. I used to get the parties going, and I'd start dancing. And I never used to wear my knickers, so I used to flash my bushy pushy and make everybody laugh get it going. Otherwise they wouldn't get going till like two am. Hefner had a fit. Ah, we're not a pour Omer magazine.

We're this, we're that.

We're very serious Ladi dar.

It was Susan's wildside that would eventually spell the end of her relationship with Playboy. Among other things, there was the provocative shoot sus did of herself for competitor magazine Hustler, which was published under the title Playboy Photographer shows Pink Well.

Playboy took itself very seriously. I mean a lot of the pictures that I shot for Playboy they'd throw out because I kept showing pussy.

After three years of working for Playboy.

I ended out falling out with them. The rest of the men, the rest of the photographers are lock Stock and barrel and just do what they say and take their money and what But I never did that. So getting thrown out by those guys meant that I had to shoot for myself, and so I was the only photographer who owned her own pictures, so bad behavior is quite an advantage sometimes.

Even though sus had left Playboy behind, her career as a freelance glamour photographer and pornographer went from strength to strength. Susan her husband Humphrey, moved to Malibu and had two daughters. One of them, Holly, was very keen to follow in her parents' footsteps.

I was fortunate to grow up with parents who were open.

About sex in their household. There was no sense of shame around what Susan Humphrey did for a living.

We always refer to her glamour photography career because she did do some mainstream stuff. She did shoot glamourer of people with their clothes off, but it wasn't anything that was ever weird in my life. From what I understood. It was mommy and daddy make movies and take pictures for grown ups. You're not a grown up, so this is not something that you know, we show you, and that was fine to me.

Despite her parents' unusual profession, Holly says her childhood was pretty normal.

I know a lot of people don't expect to hear that, but my parents were very attentive, very there, very loving, very supportive. We always had Sunday lunch together. They read me a bedtime story every night. They sent me to good schools. I rode horses with my mom.

It wasn't until Holly got older and more interested in sex herself that her ears and eyes would perk up whenever her parents would talk about work.

There were definitely times that I would sneak into the office and steal magazines and look at them, which you know, seemed riskue at the time, it was exciting. It was like naked people, you know, and like naked people pretending to have sex, so I was always scared of getting caught. Before the Internet came along, the magazines was all softcore. They didn't show penetration. So even the layouts that I would look at that were like boy Girl or Girl

The Holy wasn't deterred. She started attending her parents' sheets, and she was fascinated by something she refers to as the Sux's bubble.

So the SU's bubble was. You know, my mom's sets were very different from other people's sets. First of all, she was a woman, which was very unusual at the time, and she was a glamour photographer, and she cared very much about the hair, about the makeup, about the setting, about the wardrobe, about posing the girl properly, and like she said, about treating them right. You're only as good as your model feels.

You're only as good as your model feels, Sue's's secret to success.

That was not the mantra that most photographers followed in those days. You know, they saw these women as objects, and some of them could be downright cruel. And my mom was always very gentle, really respectful, and very kind. It was just like a very professional, sex positive female environment.

In her teens, Holly decided to become a photographer just like her mum. When she started studying photography, she kept her mom's mantra of always treating the model well at the front of her mind.

You didn't hit on the models, you didn't try to date them, you didn't try to fuck them.

Holly observed that for photographers like SEUs, communicating boundaries or levels as they are often known in the industry is key to a safe sheet, especially on porn sets.

So it's a long checklist of what are you okay with, what are you not okay with? Your hard nose, and your safe words. Specifically for newer models who may feel like uncomfortable speaking up or whom also may not even know what their boundaries are, they may be unsure, so it's important to have all of that stuff communicated beforehand.

Now that's very different from what we know about guys like Luis Gomez and how they conduct their sheets. Sus would prioritize the safety and comfort of her models during shoots, even if they were new and not necessarily familiar with what they were comfortable with. Winning trust and being honest created a safe space for both sides of the camera to get the money shots, and that became the foundations

One of the best decisions that she ever made was to own all of her own content, and that really came in handy when this new platform came along that you could sell all of it on.

When they started out in the glamour industry, Susan and Humphrey were making money by selling her content to third parties who were licensing material from other photographers.

But times were changing.

You know, is this thing called the Internet continued to grow. My father started to see that there was a real potential for us to have our own website and sell our content directly to the consumer rather than through a third party, and that's when they launched SU's dot net.

In nineteen ninety eight. Within months of Google launching, sues dot net was up and running.

Yeah, it was very colorful and very glam and definitely like pretty nineties looking and you would go in and you would just have access to Susan's archives dating back to the seventies.

And the website was a hit.

My parents were making more money on SU's net than they'd ever made. I think in our heyday, we were making like three hundred thousand a month. Pretty crazy. Oh God, I spent it all, you sure did.

I spent it all on horses. I started breeding horses. I had like seventeen at one point, I think it was eighteen eighteen horses. Yeah, that was so exciting, but yeah, drug problem would have been cheaper.

Six months after the website launched, fledgling student photographer Holly came to work for what was shaping up to be a really successful family business.

It was my dad who really wanted me to come and start working for them. My mom wasn't too keen on it. I think that she kind of wanted something else for me.

I always wanted her to be a writer. She's a really good writer, but she wouldn't listen to me.

I think my dad really saw the future in the Internet and porn, and he, you know, knew that he could trust me, and he knew that I was smart and they really needed help.

Susan vice Holly to come help her shoot a porn scene at their ranch. A man and a woman were shooting with an old convertible car in front of the house. It was retro and very stylized. While Holly tried her hand at some artsy shots, Sue's struggled to work closely alongside her daughter.

Every time I would kind of like appear in her eyeline, I think her sort of discomfort of having me on set would manifest itself and she'd kind of like show me to the back. So I ended up just kind of like hiding in the bushes with a long lens and like taking photos because like she was okay with me there, but then like she'd see me and she's like kind of wasn't okay with it. It was there was like a personal internal struggle, I think.

But sus eventually showed her the ropes.

My mom hand fed me her assistance and her styling and her wardrobe, and I had no idea what I was doing. So her assistance would like the set for me, and I'd just take the photos. And I didn't know how to pose a model. I was terrified to give them direction. But you know, it was a lot of fun, and.

So I just stayed together, the family fun.

With the money they made back into the content, more elaborate sets, wardrobes, and scenes.

We had the freedom to shoot whatever we wanted because she was independent, you know, we could just sit down on a Monday and go, what do we want to shoot. Let's shoot like a twenties gangster revival and get a really cool car, or let's shoot like a sexy beach scene, or let's shoot a future space age thing.

But Holly quickly discovered her shooting style was different to her mum's.

I'm definitely more of a results person. I'm not so emotionally invested in the scene as she is. I'm very much about lighting angles. I'm a lot more technical. I'm happy about the shoot when it's over. I'm all about, like looking at it afterwards, what could I have improved? What could I have done better? So we're very different in that way.

Oh yeah, she's lucky she doesn't have my personality. She's got her father's brains.

I would say I'm a lot more like my dad, a little bit more cautious, calculated, measured, emotionally distant.

I'm just rowdy, that's true, out of control.

And soon the tables turned and it would be Holly telling sus what to do on shoots.

I wasn't allowed to be there because I made too much noise.

Yeah, she has a problem.

I was just telling everybody to do it deeper, fast, quicker.

She thought she was at a party. It was infuriating. I had to kick her out of the studio and I'm just like, you can't talk, mom, you can't You're mom. You're ruining the porno. Get out. She couldn't help herself.

With the evolution of online porn in the twenty tens, Holly started to see new opportunities. After years of working alongside her mom, she got a job shooting for a major adult film studio, which was acquired by the biggest adult entertainment corporate in the world, mind Gig. But although Holly loved working in porn, it wasn't her north star. She'd always wanted to work for Playboy.

I had applied to Playboy several times, but I always got the door slammed in my face. And I don't know if it was because I worked in porn, or because of who my mom was, or both.

Of your mom.

Yeah. I mean they were very anti porn. You know, they really didn't want that line to be blurred. They wanted everyone to understand that Playboy is not porn.

But Holly's background shooting porn would prove useful.

Playboy was struggling with how to transition over to the Internet, and mine Geek, being you know, the technology company that they are, came and said, look, we'll take your website from you. We'll do a licensing deal of like six years or something like that. We'll pay you millions of dollars every year, and we'll build the sites up, like we'll really make them profitable. And so they said yes. So then when I found out that mine Geek had taken over, I was like, Okay, this corporation that I

Playboy also gave Holly her own TV show.

I hosted a show called Adult Film School, which was porn. The premise was I was producing the first sex tape for amateur couples.

But Playboy specifications around porn continue to be restrictive, conservative and confusing, and just like her mother, Holly struggled with Playboy's rules.

We would shoot porn stars sometimes, but like only if they were either super hot or if the girls only did girl girl scenes. It was weird. Like their specifications, they weren't really specific.

And in twenty fifteen they became almost too specific.

They decided that they didn't want any porn association whatsoever, which included me. By the way, there was one girl in particular who they found a picture of her like at the very beginning of her career, where she had like a hand job scene like this is an obscure, obscure video that even I didn't know about, and they were like, nope, she can't come back in.

Holly left Playboy, just like her mom.

When I first struck out on my own and started shooting for other clients, it was very different than it is now. I had to shoot a ton of content in one day. I had very minimal budget. I just bought the wardrobe and brought it and dressed the girl and just shot like four or five sets in a day, and I became fast and good and efficient. But it definitely felt like a factory line of porn.

From the sidelines, Holly watched his Playboy struggle to find its feet alongside the Internet and the rise of sites like OnlyFans.

I think it's really hard to stay on top with a softcore only material, but I do know that they are now really embracing the adult community. They have their Girl of the Month now, which is a porn star that they feature on Playboy Plus, which I think is you know, the way to go.

Finally, and Playboy isn't alone.

The porn industry itself has seen positive changes off the back of this online shift.

Models now making more money than ever on their personal content. Platforms like OnlyFans now feel empowered to call up predatory directors and producers because they now don't have to rely on booking those jobs in order to make a living. So there was kind of like a clean sweep of a lot of those people, and and the ones like me who escaped the guillotine got a raisin more chomps.

Like mother like daughter now, Holly finds herself in a similar position to where her mother Sus was at the height of her career.

Before.

I used to have one assistant who lit my photos and my video and shot camera, and now I have like a different person for each of those brands are actually now putting a lot more money into their shoots, so now I work with a much bigger budget. I only do one shoe to day, so it's almost more like it was back in the heyday of my mom's say.

All because of SUS's mantra, you're only as good as your model feels. The best way to get a good shot is to make the model feel safe and comfortable. If only all glamor photographers would work like that. We contacted Luis Gomez multiple times for comment, but we never heard back. He has not been charged with any crimes and is presumed innocent under the law. We also sought

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