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Did you know you can legally, and even morally, sleep your way to the top?

"My motto has always been, if you aren't planning on killing yourself, then you have to have one of those big, take-over-the-world master plans," says Diana DeVoe, who owns and runs DeViant Entertainment.

DeVoe's master plan was a biggie. It involved journalism school, a lot of free labor and her big, black ass. She started crafting her plan at the University of Hawaii, where she quickly decided that journalism wasn't the right way to go. The university, while not known for film studies, had a small video-production center, and she used it to explore the techniques of filming.

DeVoe found she had an eye that belonged behind the camera and began shooting music videos and working for a public-access station. It was then that she decided porn was the way to go. "Until then, I hadn't been exposed to anything adult. I was looking to be creative and tell stories," DeVoe recalls, having just come home from a long day of telling people exactly how to have sex from behind a camera.

So DeVoe took a group of people to a secluded beach in Hawaii and shot her first porn videos. Before long, she had three full-length films under her belt and a desire to get her feet wet in Los Angeles. "We had no connections; people were trying to rip us off," she explains. "Then, they started looking at my reels and saying, 'These are cool, but can you get naked and have sex instead?' "

That's when she took her first shot. After a few months of starring in porn films such as Major League Azz, Black Cocksmokers 2 and Hoochipalooza, she went forward with her master plan. "I struck a deal. I didn't want to be having sex on film and not getting anything back except money; that's not what I came here for," she says. "I would be in a scene and get paid, but in addition to my rate, they'd have to let me shoot a scene at no cost to them."

The moneymakers were happy to have a girl who would star and then offer free labor. They could dangle the carrot of experience in front of her while getting an experienced ass willing to be tapped onscreen. For three years, she would get filmed, and then, turn around and shoot others. She shot more than 300 scenes for free, and in the end, giving it away got her a job. If porn were a major corporation, she did the equivalent of starting in the mailroom -- except instead of a mailroom, there was a mattress, and instead of mail, there was semen.

In the end, she got what she wanted, but it wasn't smooth sailing. The porn industry, she says, "is kind of a fucked-up place. It can be a real roller coaster."

Some women come into the porn industry looking for a few bucks, maybe to buy diapers, maybe to buy crack. "It's hard to tell," DeVoe notes.

But the stereotype that porn will be a woman's downfall isn't always true. "There are some people who jump in the business for a year, and then, they vanish and buy a house. There are some girls who go nuts, but it's mostly because of the money thing," DeVoe says. "If you buy meth, then you'll buy a lot more meth, 'cause you've got more money. If you collect model trains, you'll get more of those."

The porn industry won't make you nuts when you get involved in it, but everyone who gets into entertainment has one thing in common. "We're all attention whores. We want to say, 'Look at me, look at me,' " DeVoe relates. "There's something inherently dysfunctional about that."

The media's portrayal of porn stars doesn't help. A recent episode of The Tyra Banks Show featured three porn stars. Two were buxom blond bombshells, and Banks showed their wonderful lives complete with husbands and kids. "Then, she shows a black girl, and Tyra has to save her from herself," DeVoe says. "The white, blond contract stars get the happy music, and then, it gets all sad with the black star.

"But they have a great reason to segregate the porn industry. A lot of guys like to jerk off to blondes; they will take those movies home. What's jack-offable about making a movie called Crack Ho?"

Such titles sell, she admits, but mostly because of a lack of black and interracial movies on the market. Only recently have all-black and black-on-white movies been trickling in.

"It's an old-boys' network. There's a definite caste system in porn, but it's not just race. I don't understand why it's there, because we all get naked and perform fellatio the same way in the end," DeVoe insists. "Certain people can't talk to each other. I can see Jenna Jameson walking out of a store and she won't talk to me, but we do the same thing on film and we're both vilified by the outside world."

Some companies, DeVoe explains, don't think they make films for guys to jerk off to while their wife and kids are out of the house. They see it as art, or as more-softcore films that land on Cinemax late at night. Those are the companies that are making the money these days. "Bukkake 647 isn't going to show up on cable, and that's where you make all your money in the end," she maintains.

The economics of porn essentially state that if a film makes it to cable, it has paid the bills. The actresses got their cut, the cameraman got his cut, the packaging is made, and everything is settled. DeVoe says that by the time a film hits the shelves, after the cable deals, it's pure profit. Unfortunately for her, cable isn't showing all-black jack-off videos -- yet.

Another problem with the industry, she relates, is that the market is flooded with actresses. "More than 30,000 titles are released each year, not including whatever is on the Internet. The supply and demand is all out of whack."

The indie porn market is growing faster than ever. "These girls get into porn on a lark, and then, they leave on a lark," DeVoe reports. "I had a girl come onto a set after her agent talked her up, and she had never performed fellatio before -- ever. She was licking around and kind of just touching her tongue against him, and I'm saying, 'Go ahead; commence.' She looks right at me and says, 'Commence what?' How are you supposed to work with that?"

Another woman DeVoe knew got knocked up on set, but that wasn't the biggest problem; she couldn't remember on which set it had happened. She kept the child and compared co-stars' photos to her baby's face after it was born.

"Girls will come in and have no plan with their life," she notes. "They'll undercut other actresses and say, 'I'll do it for $200.' If they have no plan, they are living hand to mouth and really have nothing."

But with a damn good plan, you can sleep your way to the top.