LOS ANGELES – Traci Lords was just 16 years old when she started making pornographic films. Within two years, she had made dozens of them.

However, her career abruptly ended when it was discovered that she was underage. She was arrested and video stores were ordered to take her work off their shelves. That could have been the end of the line for Lords’s show-business career, but she was determined to move in to the mainstream. In 1990, four years after her arrest, she costarred with Johnny Depp in John Waters’s Cry-Baby and went on to take roles in several television shows and many movies and was a regular in two TV series, Profiler and the Vancouver-shot First Wave. She never went back to porn, and she admits, in an L.A. hotel room, that she was shocked when her long-time agent told her that she should audition for a film that had the word “porno” in the title.

“I was nursing my baby, who was seven weeks old at the time,” she says, “and my manager said, ‘The good news is that Kevin Smith wants you to be in his new movie, but the bad news is that it is called Zack and Miri Make a Porno.’

I said, ‘Is this some kind of twisted joke?’ I was ready to say no, but I read the script and it made me laugh until I had tears streaming down my face. I thought, ‘Oh, no, I really like it.’ I told Kevin that I wasn’t happy that my character would be topless in one scene. I said, ‘Listen, if you want boobs, mine are lactating and I am not doing it.’

He said, ‘We don’t need your boobs.’ My husband said, ‘You have always made good choices. Why are you worried about what everyone will think? You never felt that way before.’ I knew he was right. I knew that if I had cared about opinions, I wouldn’t have pursued an acting career. I would have said, ‘I can’t do this because I was a teenage porn star.’ So I said yes and I took my husband and my baby to Pittsburgh and made the movie.”

Zack and Miri, which opens on Friday (October 31), stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as long-time friends who decide to make a porn film to pay their rent. She says that when she stopped worrying about the title, she could see it had the potential to be one of the more successful films that she had made.

“I think this film fits with this idea I had at the beginning that I needed to keep taking projects that were better than the one before. Kevin’s script is great and it’s very funny. When I started out, I kept saying that I was not going to compromise myself. I was not going to take roles that didn’t help me to get better. There were times when I was wrong, but mostly I was right and I just kept on persevering.”