Karrine Stephans, the self-proclaimed “world’s most-notorious hip-hop groupie,” appeared on Oprah not to promote the Vivid movie, which is based on footage she shot for the company several years ago before gaining notoriety, but “to warn parents about the life of a music video star.”
“We're talking about what I call the marginalization of women,” Oprah said when introducing Stephans’ segment. “We are bombarded [from the media] with titillating images of women degraded and on display — scantily clad, overtly objectified. There is no escaping it — women are being exploited.”
Stephans is author of the New York Times Bestseller “Confessions of A Video Vixen.” But, as Vivid points out in promotional materials for “Superhead,” “before she did Usher, P. Diddy, Jay-Z and Ja Rule, she did Mr. Marcus.”
“I was shooting the ‘Mr. Marcus’ Neighborhood’ series for Vivid in the summer of 2000,” Marcus tells XBIZ. “An agent contacted me about Karrine. She was real pretty, had a great personality — we clicked. I shot her scene, and she blew me a way. I couldn’t even hang with this girl. I wanted to put her under contract. What she did, orally, came from a real place; that’s where the name ‘Superhead’ came from. I got shit for it because I came too fast, but it became almost folklore in the industry. People would ask me about her every time — and she only did that one movie.”
Stephans never appeared in another adult video, but she did go on to become “a full-time booty shaking, breast-baring dancer” in rap videos, according to Winfrey. Then she quit, and found herself without money or options.
So, she did what many small players on the fringe of the entertainment industry do when the phone stops ringing: She wrote a tell-all book, focusing primarily on what she considers mistakes she made along the way, like the porn shoot she did for Marcus.
The original movie, released on VHS, has been out of print for several years, but Vivid has decided to capitalize on Stephans’ rising public profile by repackaging and re-releasing the footage, along with previously unreleased footage (including a full sex scene), for the DVD market.
While Winfrey’s audience isn’t exactly a pornographer’s target market, any publicity is good publicity, according to Vivid Sales Manager Howard Levine, who tells XBIZ he has already received reorders based on the hype.
“A lot of people have heard about the blowjob scene,” Marcus says. “Lots of them have never seen the clip, and some have seen the blowjob, that’s all. Now they can see the whole thing — how she was on the set, how natural and sexually confident she was. She can say what she wants [about her past experiences], but tape doesn’t lie; it tells you about the person.”
“Superhead” ships April 12.
