It's 1982 and eighteen-year-old Jude steps off the bus onto Hollywood Boulevard, looking for her best friend Winnie. She eventually finds her working at a strip club called Ladies of the Valley, known for its connections to the adult film industry, and soon she is dancing and stripping there herself. But there is more money to be made away from the hot spotlights of the stage, and soon both Winnie and Jude are starring in hardcore adult videos.
Dazzled by the drugs, sex and parties their new life offers, they are also beset by sexism, bitter competition and the precarity of life on the margins, and when their friendship ends in recrimination and a dramatic act of betrayal, Jude goes missing and Winnie can find no trace of her.
Thirty years later, newly divorced and down-on-her-luck, Winnie decides it is time to face her past. Determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Jude, she sets out to brave the dark underbelly of the adult industry she was once intimately familiar with ...
