By Mike Watt

Ryli Morgan has only been modeling and acting for a little over a year, but she's off to a flying start. Her debut film, the short Despair (written and directed by her significant other, artist Mark Baranowski), has been picked up by Seduction Cinema. She was also a high profile broadcaster on the very popular Internet site, "All Nude Sports". That's pretty good for anyone's first year.

After meeting Ryli at the 2002 Frightvision horror con in Cleveland, I got the chance to talk to her about her career - past, present and future. My first question to the petite North Carolina model: "What made you pursue this wild and crazy business we call 'show'?"

"Goodness," she replies, "Childhood dream, pretty much. From the time I was around five and knew a little bit about the world [and] who got the attention, it was the dancers, the singers, the models and the actresses, and I wanted to do all of that. I didn't really have much luck, going through normal channels. I tried the teenage 'going to a modeling agency' thing, where I was told I was too short. The typical story. So I didn't really bother with it too much after that. I was figure skating, and that took up a lot of my time. I devoted myself to that for a while, but realized I wasn't going to get too far because of the damage I was doing to my knees. Once I met Mark and really got the courage and the self-confidence to pursue this kind of career, I decided that if I was going to do it, I'd have to set out on my own and make myself a star rather than wait for someone to make me one. The rest is history. Basically, I took some photos and just went from there. I figured erotica would be the quickest and easiest way to get my foot in the door. I'm cute, or attractive - or whatever term you want to use - but I don't have a typically unique look about myself. I'm sort of the average American chick. I don't have the ethnic catch or anything like that, but ever since I was young, I wanted to be more to the sexy side of things. I've always been very comfortable with my sexuality and tended to flaunt it. I'm an exhibitionist."

She ends the confession with a self-conscious laugh. Actually, the exhibitionist aspect of her personality lent itself well to the types of projects she wants to do. Obviously, someone who isn't comfortable going au natural isn't going to pursue a stint as a broadcaster on "All Nude Sports".

Ryli became a part of All Nude Sports from the site's very beginnings. "Actually, I was contacted by a guy out of Las Vegas, who said I'd be perfect for this 'Bad Girl Cinema' project that he was involved with. I was to be the first 'bad girl'. Since that didn't go as planned, his associate, who was working on All Nude Sports, asked if I'd like to join up. So I did."

"Basically, they got the idea from Naked News out of Canada," Ryli says of her former Internet home. "[The Naked News is] a little more businesslike and sterile. The female broadcasters just happen to strip while they're giving the news. And they had gotten complaints that there weren't enough sports reports. So All Nude Sports took that information and ran with it. They give the actual headlines a day late, taken from the wire previous to midnight, then broadcast the headlines and the girls are strip-teasing the entire time - and rubbing, touching and that whole nonsense. [laughs] It actually ends up being a pretty decent show. I have to give them credit for that. I was a broadcaster for a few months, and then became the production assistant, before heading out on my own."

With "Bad Girl Cinema" still on the back burner, Ryli concentrated on staying high profile with All Nude Sports. But it's her work with Baranowski that she really enjoys. The aforementioned Despair was their first collaboration, though it took some time before they gathered the nerve to embark on a project together. "Sometimes it's hard to work with the person you live with, so we tried to avoid that for a while, but we both knew that we wanted to go into the movie side of things. I didn't see much interest in me from the modeling world at the time, so I decided to try my hand at acting. Mark had a story he wanted to do, and when he puts his mind to something, it's gonna get done and it's gonna get done quickly. The whole movie took two weeks, from the conception of the idea to releasing it. It was a really quick deal."

Despair is a two-character story about the age-old struggle between art and practicality. A young artist can't support himself and his young wife through his work and ultimately falls into, well, despair. Beautifully lit and shot, the movie was done entirely by Morgan and Baranowski, each taking their turn behind the camera while the other did their parts in front. "Actually, the project was planned to be a feature film, but it became a short because of the time constraint. Mark wanted it out by the end of the month, to coincide with Halloween, so there are bits and pieces he left out that we felt weren't really pertinent to the story. It was interesting in a way because, having done things in school and whatnot, I'm used to doing takes. Everything [in Despair] is the first take. He did all the editing through the camera, so there wasn't any 'shooting the last scene first'. Everything was done in order. So that was definitely a new experience. I'm thinking of everything I'm doing first as a dry run, and he wants that on film. So it was a different kind of concept."

As for the fear of working with the person you live with, Ryli insists that there was only a little tension on set. "Just a bit - more from my aspect. He had exactly in his head what he wanted each shot and the whole project to be, but trying to explain that to me, sometimes wouldn't exactly translate. I was worried about not living up to what he wanted. It was more tension that I put on myself, rather than anything he did or the entire situation, hoping that I was portraying exactly what he wanted me to."

All in all, though, the experience turned out to be both enjoyable and successful. Enough so that they have another movie in the works. "We're working on our next project now, Runaway Terror, which began shooting in May. It focuses on a scandalous producer, one who fully believes in the casting couch. One by one, the starlets that he beds end up dead, but nobody knows who's killing them, since there are numerous people who hate this guy."

Ryli is hesitant to talk too much more about Runaway Terror, for fear of "jinxing" things. So far, that's the only project in the couple's immediate future, although Baranowski has several in the works. "I'm not looking much further than the next film. If I get too many things on my plate, I'll want to work on them all without focusing on any one thing. And that's bad. (laughs)"

Visit Ryli on the web at www.rylimorgan.com.