Jewel Shepard has made that difficult, odd segue from working in front of the camera to working in front of the word processor. Since her days in the cradle, her dream was to be a grade “A” movie star. She got about as far as a few dozen grade "B" (or lower) movies viewed on late night TV by either die-hard fans or insomniacs. It was not the most glamorous of occupations. In one movie -- the immortal Party Camp -- she was thrown into genuine pig excrement. Roger Corman shipped her off to the Philippines for Caged Heat 2, and what the casting director assured her would be “a vacation in paradise.” In that one, she was flogged, beaten up by a band of orange-clad warrior women and practically devoured by bugs the size of Buicks. So Jewel decided to become a writer, knowing full well that she was fighting an uphill battle to get folks to take the star of Hollywood Hot Tubs (and its even-better sequel, Hollywood Hot Tubs II) seriously. She started by polling her fellow B-Movie Queens, interviewing stars of the past and present to create the definitive book on the subject, Invasion of the B-Girls. This is the book that answers the musical question, why would anyone appear in a film called Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama? Why anyone would watch such a film is equally mysterious. Her first book was a smash. It sold like crazy, still sells (do a search on eBay) and even got purchased by Dick Clark as the basis for a not-yet-filmed-but-she's-still-hoping "A" movie. Better still, it prompted a demand for her second book -- an autobiography entitled, If I'm So Famous, How Come Nobody’s Ever Heard of Me? -- and brought her offers to write for magazines, including Premiere, Cosmopolitan, Details and many others. (It also yielded this surreal scene: Jewel autographing copies at the American Booksellers Association, seated between Ross Perot and Senator Paul Simon, both of whom wanted their picture with her.) She also received a fan letter -- which she opened very carefully -- from Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
