is illegal in the United States and likely involves some degree of sexual exploitation or sexual harassment. Actors who do not participate in the casting couch are subject to externalities, including reduced employability. Borcherding and Filson argue that the casting couch became less prominent after the Hollywood studio system, which enforced long-term employment contracts for actors, was eliminated on antitrust grounds in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948). Long-term contracts gave producers stronger bargaining power, which was used by corrupt producers to extract sex from actors more effectively. Pornography The Casting Couch ( 1924), a classic title in the stag film genre, was an early depiction of the casting couch as a pornographic trope that later became mundane as it grew in popularity. In the ten-minute film, a casting director tells a young actress to wear a swimsuit during an audition, spies on her in a voyeuristic manner while she undresses in a different room, and enters the room to solicit sex from her. The actress initially rebuffs his advances with disgust, but returns to the director after taking advice from a book titled How to Become a Movie Star. She performs fellatio and vaginal intercourse in exchange for a role in his film; the latter takes place on a couch. The Casting Couch concludes with an intertitle that states, "the only way to become a star is to get under a good director and work your way up". Zimmer credited the film with popularizing the term casting couch. The trend of casting couch scenarios used on pornography websites began with Backroom Casting Couch in 2007. GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking From 2009 to 2020, the pornographic company GirlsDoPorn produced hundreds of videos of casting couch pornography mostly featuring women aged 18–22 who had not otherwise appeared in pornography. The depicted women were manipulated, coerced, lied to, given marijuana or other drugs or physically forced to have sex, according to the accounts of victims and material from a lawsuit against the company. Six people involved in the website were charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion in November 2019. Official videos from the company were viewed over a billion times, including a paid subscription service on its website, and an estimated 680 million views on the tube site Pornhub, where the official channel was among the site's top 20 most viewed. Pirated copies of the videos were also viewed