Only a sociopath could have made this movie.” It was my first thought on viewing Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy (1985), Roberta Findlay’s hardcore documentary about the suicide of porn star Shauna Grant. And it was a reaction that begged further investigation, prompting this chapter—which considers the film from a range of methodological and critical approaches, beginning with production history which contextualizes the film within Findlay’s adult canon, and intersects with both first-person interviews and archival research concerning Grant’s suicide.

Positioning the film from this perspective, I then approach Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy as a hybrid documentary, examining the ways that Findlay’s juxtaposition of repurposed footage with interviews about the star’s suicide and additional scripted/staged sex scenes places the film in a surprising conversation with avant-garde tradition, and looks at the ways this dialogue is also apparent in Findlay’s earlier films. In drawing upon the image bank of hardcore pornography itself, Findlay creates a document that constantly questions its own objectivity.

Inescapable are Findlay’s complex (and perhaps performative) sexual politics: she is on the record for her dislike of women, and this translates into the unique layering and compartmentalization of exploitation inherent in Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy. This allows the chapter to map out how Findlay’s film simultaneously transgresses accepted ethical guidelines of documentary, and questions long-standing assumptions that this perceived lack of empathy resulted in her alienation from the hardcore industry.

“I KNEW SHAUNA GRANT. I CRIED WHEN SHE DIED.”

Before Shauna Grant became one of the best known stars of the adult film industry, her name was Colleen Applegate, a teenager from Farmington, Minnesota, who left home at eighteen to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood with her high school boyfriend in tow. They parted ways not long after she answered an ad for Jim South’s World Modeling. South was the gateway for many golden age west coast adult stars, and Applegate soon went from nude modeling to doing films.

Within a few short years, she had starred in thirty hardcore films and been featured on the covers of Hustler, Oui, Erotica, Club, Velvet and more.