Skinflicks: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry
Author: David Jennings
Date: 2000-06-20 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Erotica
Description: So much happens to all of us every day, yet so much is often forgotten. It is easier to remember things when they rhyme; both the momentous moments and the simple ones. Life is not always an adventure. Often it is ordinary occasions and the common place events that bring us the greatest joy. Stop always looking for the next big thing, beacuse more often than not, life is just the next thing. And that next thing is what life is all about. Every rhyme contains a story; some are sincere, some are funny, some are sad, and some are reflective. There is a lesson, a moral, a tale, a smile, or a tear
Publisher: Authorhouse

SKINFLICKS

The Inside Story
of the
X-Rated Video Industry

SKINFLICKS

The Inside Story
of the
X-Rated Video Industry

By

David Jennings

Digital Edition Copyright © 2011 by David Jennings
Print Edition Copyright © 2000 by David Jennings

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 1-58721-184-X

Kindle edition published 4/2011

Published in the United States of America

Kindle edition by eBooks By Barb

“…the best and most realistic depiction of the modern world of pornography written in book form to date…” says Adult Video News publisher Paul Fishbein.

The film Boogie Nights, the portrayal of the 1970’s pornography business, hinted at an approaching revolution in the business. David Jennings, a UCLA Film and Television Department graduate, entered the industry as a “shooter” to research and write a book about his experiences. He began at the time the X-rated video revolution erupted. That revolution transformed the audience from “raincoats” in sleazy movie houses to mainstream Americans who accepted and enjoyed quality films in their living rooms and bedrooms. Jennings founded the first company to shoot adult films DIRECTLY onto videotape.

This daring, tell-all insider story exposes all the secrets. Social, historical and political factors play a huge role in the machinations of the arcane trade. The threats to the industry from within and without include: the U.S. Government-sponsored “War on Porn” and its excesses, underaged actresses and “porno stage mothers”, anti-smut crusaders and porn-addicted vice cops. Twelve years as a writer, researcher, director, producer, distributor, and manufacturer of adult videos qualify the author to completely answer the questions most often asked by friend and foe of erotic media alike:

What are these porno stars really like? What kind of person can make such a public display of something that is so private? What is really happening behind the scenes? (The camera often lies.)

Skinflicks is a book about pornography, not a pornographic book. The author’s writing and research skills are of such high quality that they give a significant range and scope to the material. To honestly depict what goes on, part of the content is necessarily graphic.

ALL OF IT IS TRUE.

Illustrated with over 2 dozen photographs.

To everyone who helped this first-time author with a very extensive project, I owe a debt of thanks:

to my “writing coach”, author and editor Lee Prickett Wagner, for critiquing, editing and teaching, for helping me persevere through setbacks and ill health, and for being such a wonderful friend‌—‌without all you’ve done, Lee, this book could have never been realized;
to John Hart, author of San Francisco’s Wilderness Next Door: A Parkland History and Farming On The Edge, for his review and recommendations in both private consultations and in his classes and seminars, where I first learned the rules for writing non-fiction and the rules for breaking the rules;
to Dr. Joan Nelson, M.A., Ed.D., for generously supplying me with volumes of research on the psychosocial aspects of erotic media and for offering me her expert’s perspective;
to my friends and fellow writers, who read chapter drafts and made suggestions: Jack and Joy Eagle, Tom Seidman and Mike and Sue Maricle;
to Russ Backman, for his computer guidance;
to Adult Video News, “the Bible of Adult Video”, for providing me with the back issues I was missing;
and to Paul Fishbein, Nina Hartley and Bobby Lilly for reviewing the manuscript and making suggestions based on their expertise.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

About the Book

INTRODUCTION

Part I: THE FILM AGE

Chapter 1: PROLOGUE: NEW AGE, OLD MYTHS

Chapter 2: THE BAD OLD DAYS

Chapter 3: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODPORN

Chapter 4: BEHIND THE BULLETPROOF DOOR

Chapter 5: "DIS VIDEO THING"

Chapter 6: LIGHTS! CAMERA! ORGY!

Chapter 7: DAVEY AND THE PIRATES

Chapter 8: YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD PORNOGRAPHER

Part II: THE VIDEO REVOLUTION

Chapter 9: SHOOTING IT

Chapter 10: HONCHOS OF HARDCORE

Photographs

Chapter 11: THE SMUT GLUT

Chapter 12: THE GODDESS

Chapter 13: OVERNIGHT SEXATIONS

Chapter 14: THE BITCHES, THE SWEETHEARTS, AND OTHER GREAT LADIES

Chapter 15: A FEW GOOD MEN

Chapter 16: LADIES’ CHOICE

Chapter 17: OF MEESE AND MEN’S MAGAZINES

Chapter 18: FIGHTING BACK

Chapter 19: CASUALTIES

Chapter 20: AIDS AND OTHER FOUR-LETTER WORDS

Chapter 21: UPDATES

Afterword

About the Author

“Americans will say, practically in the same breath, ‘No one can tell me what to do’ and ‘There ought to be a law against that.’”

—Gunnar Myrdal, Nobel Laureate

When police raided director Paul Thomas’s shooting location in Oakland, California, they not only made arrests and seized videotapes but they also obtained autographs from their favorite stars. This typifies America’s conflicting attitudes about pornography.

The late author and editor Norman Cousins called pornography dehumanizing and degrading. Johns Hopkins therapist John Money calls it liberating and useful in treating sex offenders.

Some write to Dear Abby that it ruined their marriages; others tell her it saved theirs.

In a Time magazine poll, 78% thought people should have the right to buy pornography, and 72% wanted the government to crack down harder on it. Many voted both ways, raising the age-old question of what should be allowed and what shouldn’t be. (Erotica‌—‌goes the saying‌—‌is what turns you on; obscenity is what turns the other guy on.)

Reflecting the confusion over this issue, America’s porn policies hang on the pendulum of politics. In the 1970s, a swing to the left allowed a brief flurry of open commerce in child porn, bestiality and brutal sadomasochism. In the mid-’80s, a swing the other way knocked Playboy and Penthouse out of 7-Eleven stores.

In the 1990s, the pendulum got stuck on the far right. A massive push to eradicate erotica turned confusion into absurdity: Colorado Springs vice cops set out to sting a Nevada mail-order company. They ordered Animal Specials and Golden Showers from an FBI agent running a sting on the other end. The U.S. Government became America’s only commercial pusher of child pornography: Postal agents spent two years sending kiddie porn catalogs to Keith Jacobson, a Nebraska farmer, before he finally sent in an order. Mary Jane Jenkins of Georgia was busted on racketeering charges for buying adult bookstores from convicted porn king Michael Thevis; she actually bought the stores from the IRS, who had seized them from Thevis.

Anti-porn campaigns worsen the “problem” of pornography. Police pressure drives erotica away from legitimate businesses and into the clutches of criminals. As the industry goes underground, AIDS cases among performers become harder to trace. And anti-smut agitation has the boomerang effect of stimulating porn sales.

How should this controversial business be dealt with?

Touting ways of dealing with porn are books by journalists, attorneys, vice cops, sociologists, psychiatrists, movie critics and radical feminists. Porn stars try to explain the nature of the business in their autobiographies but performers aren’t privy to the inner workings of the apparatus that uses them.

To bring about enlightened regulation of this seven billion dollar a year business requires understanding how it functions. But those who run the machine remain silent. The only true insiders, the career pornographers, don’t write books. Operating in twilight legality, surrounded by enemies, the so-called “porno kings” know that personal publicity means disaster.

With a code of silence rooted in the omertà of the old Mafia days, porn moguls stonewall the “real world” (their sarcastic term for outsiders). Any industry CEO with the temerity to actually write about the business would be ostracized; a book advance is small compensation for the loss of a lucrative career.

Unless that career is already over. Like mine.

Unlike my former associates, I didn’t get into pornography to make it my life’s work; I got into it to write about it.

x x x x x x

I’d intended to spend six months in the business, not twelve years. But something happened that changed my plans‌—‌and those of pornographers the world over. The distribution of 16 and 35-millimeter films to theaters gave way to selling Beta and VHS cassettes to video stores. This cued upheavals that turned the world of sex movies inside out: MBAs replaced mobsters, porn stars became corporations, and the annual output of sex movies increased tenfold‌—‌while the industry plunged into depression. A “kinder, gentler” pornography catered to a new middle-class audience of women and couples. And the arrival of porn tapes in shopping malls brought the biggest anti-smut campaign in American history.

During this adult video revolution, I played the unexpected roles of pioneer (the guy with the arrows in his back), producer, manufacturer, distributor, videographer, actor (pants-on), and mini-porn king. My company, Superior Video, Inc., was the first to shoot X-rated features directly on videotape, an innovation that transformed the industry.

Skinflicks is based on my journal of 347 audio cassettes; on hundreds of hours of film and video footage; on collected books, magazines, and news articles; on interviews with vice cops, prosecutors, porn stars and producers; and on my dealings with other porn moguls.

I had originally meant to write only of my journey through the land of the sex movie, to reveal through my experiences a world readers could not otherwise explore. I’d planned to write only of things like working for what the FBI called “the biggest Mafia porn outfit on the West Coast”; being the target of a hit contract; dodging vice cops camped on my doorstep; shooting sex during a wasp invasion, a flash flood, and an on-set AIDS panic; sharing a mansion with porn queen Juliet Anderson and her sex pro lifestyle of film work, strip shows and “fantasy sessions” with select clients. And how I suffered a peculiar porn burnout that brings back a fellow filmmaker’s warning: “Ultimately, the hassles of the pornography business will destroy you.”

I wanted to answer the question that intrigues both fan and foe of pornography: What are these performers really like? What kind of person can make a public display of something that is so private?

Something broadened my perspective: the “War on Porn” that began in the mid-’80s and raged throughout the ’90s. To write about this business while ignoring its uneasy role in our society would be like writing about leopards without describing the jungle. (That’s why‌—‌before relating my odyssey through this arcane field‌—‌I’ve devoted Chapter One to debunking the myths that keep commercial porn under siege.)

Thus, Skinflicks is both the narrative of my experiences and the story of a revolution in erotica that almost made the X-rated movie a legitimate form of American entertainment‌—‌but triggered instead the biggest anti-porn onslaught the industry ever suffered.

It is natural that these two stories coincide. As the documentary film pioneer Alberto Cavalcante wrote, “To make a film about the post office, make a film about a letter.”

x x x x x x

A note about names: I’ve used only the stage names or professional noms de porn of performers and industry figures. In cases where such pseudonyms were not available, I’ve given fictitious names to real people‌—‌i.e. my former mob-connected employers “Tony Romano” and “Marv.”

I’ve only used real names for public figures, people identified in media accounts, and where the use of real names is vital to the information conveyed in the text.

Part I

THE FILM AGE

Chapter 1

PROLOGUE: NEW AGE, OLD MYTHS

“We recognize the existence of pornography and the impossibility of stamping it out, but we do want to drive it back to sleaze town to live amongst the roaches where it belongs.”

—The Reverend Jerry Falwell
Time magazine, July 21, 1986

“They threatened my kids with death.”

Kenneth Tipton, a St. Louis video retailer who’d resisted the city’s 1987 order to drop adult movies was describing tactics he attributed to the American Family Association. “My children were told they were going to be sent back to God so they could be reborn to religious people.”

All across America, video stores were under siege. In Kansas and Oklahoma, police went right to customers’ homes to confiscate rented tapes. In Dallas, they kicked down a door at 4 AM, held a family at gunpoint, and nabbed TVs, VCRs and… a dildo. (A 1978 Texas law forbids any artificial device that can be used for self-stimulation‌—‌presumably hands are OK as long as they’re not prosthetic.)

In the late 1980s, America declared war on one of its fastest growing industries. The porn monster had escaped its cage. Home video had taken X-rated movies of red-light districts and put them in suburban shopping malls. A 1986 Washington Post/ABC poll found that 30% of the American public had watched an adult movie in the past year‌—‌a 50 percent increase over a five-year period.

It was the censor’s worst nightmare: pornography accepted as legitimate entertainment. In response, an unlikely alliance of Feds, feminists and Fundamentalists turned police into morals storm troopers. A Florida grandmother was strip-searched for selling Playboy. Indiana cops pried open peep-show booths to bust the customers inside.

The Clearwater, Florida vice squad donned flak jackets, ninja hoods and automatic weapons to smash into a video store for the benefit of TV news crews.

This “War on Porn”‌—‌as its leader, Attorney General Ed Meese, dubbed it‌—‌continued into the 1990s with the Orwellian firepower of forfeiture laws or RICOs (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations). Supposedly designed for fighting underworld kingpins, these laws allowed police to confiscate your home, cars, business assets and bank accounts before you go to court.

Thus, Ferris Alexander, who’d distributed my tapes in Minnesota, lost $25 million in bookstores and bank accounts; at age 73 he began serving a six-year prison term.

The adult videos enjoyed by millions of middle-class couples were lumped together with crack cocaine and Uzis. Reviewing the 1991 TV documentary Doing Time, the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Stanley blithely wrote, “Lewisburg (prison) houses some of the most dangerous criminals in America‌—‌Mafia bosses, Columbia drug lords, pornographers, kidnappers, hit men, and murderers…”

After a dozen years as a producer and manufacturer of X-rated movies, I can’t imagine myself on that dishonors list. Nor does it seem right for most of those I’ve done business with: agents, actors, directors, photographers, CEOs, and hundreds of others who make their livings in what is perceived as a lurid, shadowy netherworld.

The criminalization of erotica in America succeeds through the perpetration of old myths. To magnify the importance of arrests, police and the FBI exaggerate the wealth of pornographers; somehow every pornographer is a “porno king.” (Those busted rarely refute the claims; if you’re going to be perceived a whore, you don’t want to be thought a cheap one.) Andrea Dworkin thundered about women in porn being raped, tortured and snuffed. Ex-porn stars Linda Lovelace and Stacey Donovan testified about slavery and brutality. Feds, ministers and newscasters paint dark pictures of Mafia control and child exploitation.

In today’s video-dominated adult movie scene, is there truth to these charges?

Myth: Child pornography is a large commercial enterprise. Senator Mitch McConnell (R. Kentucky) testified before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (the “Meese Commission”) in 1985 that child porn is 10 to 15 percent of the “putative 4.5 billion dollar porn empire.” An NBC White Paper, “The Silent Shame,” pegged kiddie porn at $3 billion a year, an amount equal to the entire gross profits of Hollywood movies in 1984.

Fact: A 1984 Senate investigation found that child porn is a small amateur enterprise of pedophile “hobbyists.” The laws needed to control child porn without hysteria were passed in 1977 and 1980. FBI chief William Webster himself told the Meese Commission his Bureau didn’t need any new laws.

The penalties are too severe for even the most unscrupulous pornographers to risk. Witness the fate of talent agent Joe Elliot: after a squabble over $25, actress Adrienne Bellaire told police she’d been under 18 when Elliot had cast her in hardcore movies. The petite divorcee had told Elliot she was 20 but as a minor, she couldn’t be charged with fraud. Elliot couldn’t find the copies of her ID required to exonerate himself under California law. He paid $90,000 in legal fees and fines, spent a year in prison and, under terms of probation, had to give up his career as an agent.

When porn’s top star, Traci Lords, admitted she was underaged, the industry performed the gargantuan task of removing all Lords material from circulation almost overnight.

Commercial pornographers hate child porn as much as vice cops do. Whenever it surfaces, politicos use the community outrage to launch attacks against adult erotica. The Free Speech Coalition (formerly the Adult Video Association) offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone dealing in child porn.

On three different occasions, Robert Best of Bon-Vue Enterprises, a photo processor and manufacturer of bondage videos, turned over to authorities child porn his lab had received for processing. Best turned down the $10,000 reward, though the money would’ve helped him pay $50,000 in fines incurred for distributing his own adult-acted tapes in Arizona. In 1991, Michael Scisson of the Homegrown Video line of amateur erotica uncovered a Massachusetts-based child porn ring. Though Scisson and the AVA helped set up an FBI bust, the Feds warned the industry not to publicly take any credit‌—‌or risk FBI harassment.

Myth: The Mafia controls pornography. Talk show host Geraldo Rivera reported that one out of every two dollars in the adult industry goes to the mob. During the Meese Commission hearings in 1985 and 1986, the U.S. Justice Department claimed that 85 to 90% of X-rated materials were controlled by the Mafia.

“It’s been proven that organized crime runs the pornography industry,” televangelist Pat Robertson‌—‌quoted in the September, 1988 Adult Video News‌—‌told his Christian Broadcasting Network listeners. “Take pictures of a couple of naked girls and try to sell them. See how long it takes to get your legs broken.”

Fact: I’m still waiting for those baseball bats. As a small, independent porn video manufacturer, I sold my tapes to the same video stores, adult bookstores and distributors in the United States, Europe and Canada that the “big boys” sold to. The only messages I got from organized criminals were offers to invest in my company‌—‌offers I could refuse. True, before the age of video I wouldn’t have been able to.

Before video, a few large companies circulated films among adult theaters. Entrenched since the early ’70s, when only they could take the legal heat, these tough old school moguls were all “connected” (to organized crime).

In the early “Wild West” days of video‌—‌the late ’70s‌—‌quarrels over rights to hits like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas brought out the Louisville Sluggers. Independents like the Mitchell Brothers had to make their peace with the old school in order to distribute their movies. (The Mitchells supplied Bonanno Family capo Mickey Zaffarano with girls.)

VCX, Inc., the Zaffarano-backed company for which I worked in 1978 and 1979, bullied its way into being the largest pre-1980 video movie manufacturer in the world.

But by 1985, VCX was bankrupt.

In the early ’80s, video software dealers popped up throughout America like mushrooms after a rainstorm. The mob couldn’t dictate the buying policies of Video Stations and Captain Video franchises. Unlike furtive skid row theater operators, suburban retailers respond to threats like solid citizens‌—‌they go straight to the police.

A host of independent boiler-room sales operations‌—‌like mine‌—‌sprang up to sell porn tapes to these new dealers. Transactions via UPS/COD were quick, direct, efficient. No “middlemen.” The old school had no choice but to compete with all the boiler-room hucksters who were cranking out cheap videos and flooding the market.

No godfather could stop the deluge or rig the price wars. No enforcers went out to stop dealers from buying one VHS of a title and making ten copies for a chain of rental stores.

After the electronics revolution of the 1980s, the only “gangsters” left in adult video were a rag-tag lot I call “Mafia poor relations.”

Myth: Women are regularly forced to perform in porn movies by their agents or managers. So testified former porn actress Stacey Donovan, a star witness in several prosecutions. Later, Donovan revealed that police had paid her $3,000 for the “testimony.” (For refusing similar cooperation, veteran star Sharon Mitchell spent five days in jail.)

Fact: Why recruit the unwilling when there are so many women clamoring to break into porn? Before the video age, the most beautiful of aspiring photo models shunned hardcore pictures. They’d only strip for Playboy or Penthouse, publications respectable enough to use as stepping stones to “legit” stage, screen and modeling careers. But by the late 1980s, porn stars like Teri Weigel, Kascha, Ashlyn Gere, Nina Alexander, and the notorious Traci Lords were using these “high class spreads” to break into X-rated movies instead.

The reason for the change is money. In the film era, stars like my ex-housemate Juliet Anderson were lucky to land a dozen porn roles annually. But Juliet’s protegée, Nina Hartley, starred in over 200 videos in less than four years.

The huge volume of video shoots gives actresses a chance to work steadily, and the speed of bringing videos from set to market make new women stars within months.

Then‌—‌while they’re hot‌—‌porn’s super agent Jim South books them on a non-stop gauntlet of video shoots, magazine spreads, store appearances, strip shows, trade conventions and interviews. The most popular actresses become cottage industry corporations with mail-order offerings of signed photos, masturbation videos, fan club memberships, and “unwashed” panties. “If I worked 27 days out of 30,” said Sandra Scream, “I felt I was slacking off.”

Exploitation? Yes. But not coercion. For $1,000 to $1,500 a day, 19-year-olds‌—‌whose other options might be minimum wage plus tips or $200 a night turning tricks‌—‌don’t mind working weekends.

No one forces women into this hothouse world. There are no guns to their heads (such as Linda Lovelace said she experienced). No sadist orders them to pump iron, spend thousands on plastic surgery, or undergo serial silicone sessions. Often, they’re cheered on by “porno stage mothers.” (Jamie Summers and Sabrina Dawn starred with their real-life moms in‌—‌respectively‌—‌Bringing Up Brat and Grandma Does Dallas.)

With so many women saying “Use me!” the industry doesn’t need those controlled by Svengalis. Agent South and I were chuckling over a letter he’d received from a self-styled pimp. “She’s Swedish and she keeps her weight good,” he’d written. “She does what I tell her because she’s part of my cattle.” The young woman was photogenic and I asked South if he’d consider using her.

“No way,” he answered. “Not with that clown pulling her strings.”

Myth: “Obscene materials being distributed in the United States have become more and more associated with violence and depravity,” declared Ed Meese. “The consumers of this more violent and perverted material are now the major portion of the pornographer’s clientele.”

Fact: In the 1980s, explicit erotic media did the exact opposite of what Meese claimed. And if anything became “kinder and gentler” during George Bush’s presidency, it was the adult movie.

The reason was a changing market. People who shied away from theaters and bookstores had no qualms about patronizing clean, well-lit mall shops with adult tapes prudently relegated to side exhibits.

Early in 1985, Adult Video News discovered that 24% of adult tape customers were women. On September 10, 1990, CBS’s Inside Edition reported that women comprised 47% of the adult video market.

For the first time, women could enjoy porn movies on their own terms‌—‌in private. They didn’t have to sit in rank theaters and share the experience with the dregs of the male population.

The director’s new buzzwords became “foreplay,” “fondling,” “cuddling,” “sensitivity” and “playfulness.” For Club Exotica, director Jerome Tanner said, “I put a skirt on, so to speak, and put myself into how a woman feels.” Hollywood Video’s Hal Freeman pushed his X Factor as “a beautiful love story.” Candida Royalle’s Femme Productions survived exclusively on “feminist” videos, and every major adult video company established a line of “couples’ movies.”

I first aimed for this market in 1982, when I shot Physical, with female protagonists in positions of power and prestige. The feature’s success did much to capitalize Superior Video’s rapid growth in ’83, and couples’ movies became my company’s specialty.

Even the “backlash” videos like the Dark Brothers’ New Wave Hookers and Lemme Tell Ya ’Bout White Chicks don’t so much emulate the blustery macho ethic of the past as parody it.

x x x x x x

Why can anti-porn agitators get away with their lies? Because porn fans are too embarrassed by their closet masturbator image to organize and confront microphones. Industry spokespersons, perceived as “sleazy,” lack credibility. Without opposition, the “big lie technique” works.

While taking every opportunity to trumpet misinformation, smut-busters hide their real agendas from public scrutiny. When porn’s Jack-of-all-trades Bill Margold made the talk radio circuit in 1988, he was surprised that neither callers nor hosts knew anything about HR 3889. That proposed bill made it a Federal crime to receive, possess (emphasis added), or distribute any “obscene” film or videotape. The penalty was RICO forfeiture: if some G-man decided your home movie of a school swimming meet was obscene, you’d lose everything you owned before going to trial. If you won in court, the government would grant you the right to buy your own property back.

HR 3889 didn’t pass. But portions of it did become law as riders on the Omnibus Drug Bill‌—‌with RICO penalties intact.

The Pornography Victims Compensation Act (or “Bundy Bill”‌—‌after serial killer Ted Bundy’s assertion that porn made him do it) would allow alleged (proof not required) victims of sexual abuse to sue producers and sellers of pornographic materials. Failing to pass in the early 1990s, the bill was amended for more attempts at passage.

In a preview of what to expect if the bill becomes law, most of Phoenix’s adult bookstores were sued after the city suffered the assaults of a serial rapist. As columnist Ellen Goodman wrote in the Boston Globe, “In these lawsuit-phobic days, book and video sellers may censor their shelves of anything more sexual than ‘Bambi.’”

Self-censorship. The oppressor’s dream… and the goal of the new tactics for punishing before prosecuting. Prosecutors hate obscenity trials. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who couldn’t define obscenity but added his famous phrase, “I know it when I see it.” Juries get bogged down trying to define the undefinable. Prosecutors have a hard time proving behavior that commonly occurs in people’s bedrooms to be obscene.

If the porn-busters win their war against erotica, pornography will simply go underground. Explicit but conventional adult videos would be relegated to mean streets that only the “raincoaters” would brave. The “couples market” would shrink. An industry AIDS crisis would be hard for medical personnel to trace, because models would be afraid of being busted. With sex movies as risky to deal in as crack cocaine, only criminals would dare sell them. There would be a thriving clandestine trade in kiddie porn, “doggy” films, “horsy” films, “pissers” and “fisters.”

It would be turning the clock back to 1976, when fat men dripping cigar ash told filmmakers to have a “come-shot in the kisser” in the first scene. And guys named “Blackie” showed up at porn shoots with elephantine dildos and offers of an extra fifty bucks to any woman who could take the whole thing.

Ed Meese and his morals commissars weren’t there in 1976.

I was.

x x x x x x

Chapter 2

THE BAD OLD DAYS
1976-1977

When I was fresh out of UCLA Film School in 1970, the only job I could find was shooting movies for an obese, greedy degenerate. Variety called him “the richest man in Hollywood.” He was also a pioneer.

When the Motion Picture Rating Code was established in 1969, pornographers seized the “X” as a kind of Hollywood stamp of approval for sex movies. A year later, my soon-to-be employer, “Telsman,” became the first American exhibitor to show hardcore (first seen in European theaters): Sexual Freedom in Denmark and Mona made their American debut in his nationwide chain of seedy theaters. Needing product to meet a voracious demand, he formed his own production company, which was a direct violation of vertical monopoly laws. (The city attorneys he was constantly battling never noticed this violation.)

When he hired former film students‌—‌myself included‌—‌to shoot for him, the first thing Telsman did was establish his escape hatch. “Remember, at no time did I tell you to put hardcore sex in these movies. But if it’s not there, you’ll be fired.”

He expected us to take the legal heat. But nobody walked out on him; we fledgling Fellinis were desperate for work.

At first, all went well. The novelty of filming naked women, being paid well to do it, and getting to experiment with film techniques not taught at UCLA made the risks worth taking.

The precautions became routine: watching for police helicopters, keeping turpentine handy to destroy the filmed evidence if we were raided, and meeting the models (cast) at Denny’s instead of revealing the location to them in advance. If a model was “hot”‌—‌cooperating with cops‌—‌taking a roundabout route to the set would reveal any cars following us.

The problems began when Telsman stated the pornographer’s challenge that would echo throughout the history of the business. “They get tired of the same old shit. Give ’em something different. Something to remember when they jack off.”

Competition was heating up, and staying in the forefront required novelty. The box office soared whenever Telsman’s marquees could scream some salacious new slant.

He was a genius at uncovering new kinks. We filmed fetishes, flagellations, and every imaginable coupling, tripling and quadrupling known to man, woman or transsexual.

The one thing restricting Telsman was fear of the law. For that reason, he couched the raunchiest stuff in the form of documentaries (his attorneys told him these would be easiest to defend). The worst of these were the “boy-boy” (male homosexual) films.

For us filmmakers, the breaking point came during the making of Black and Blue, about gay sadomasochism. To shoot it, we traveled up and down the state of California, ending up at a ranch near San Diego that was an S and M retreat. The clientele included several U.S. Marines, one of whom was trussed on a rack, suspended by a complicated hookup of straps and chains. As the “master” was beating the Marine, something went wrong.

Usually, a “slave” will give a “safety signal” if there’s a problem: some kind of movement, gesture or word that tells the master to stop immediately. This time no signal was given. Finally, someone noticed that the slave wasn’t breathing. A thong was choking him. Fortunately, the master kept his cool. He applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and brought the slave back to consciousness. The Marine had an other-worldly glow in his eyes. He said it was the most beautiful experience of his life. Telsman liked it, too.

Though the slave survived, our production crew did not. Everybody quit. Pornography remained my main source of income. For the next six months I did freelance camerawork for producers like my old film school buddy, Ace Walker, and spent most of my time searching for legitimate film work‌—‌something Ace had given up on. “At least with porno you keep working,” he said.

With so many unemployed filmmakers competing for the few available jobs, employment inquiries were as welcome as herpes. The only work I got was through a fluke. As a favor to a fellow alumnus, I served a small-claims warrant on a business film producer for him. Later, when I was making the rounds, I avoided this producer’s studio. Finally, I figured, “What the hell. What can I lose?”

The man glanced up from the resume I’d given him. “You look familiar,” he said. “Have you ever worked for me before?”

“I think I did something here. It was a while back…”

He hired me for a week of editing.

During this period, I had plenty of time for my special project. While working for Telsman, I’d kept a running journal, with the idea of writing about the experience. I’d almost finished a book outline when one of my far-flung employment applications brought a request to see a sample reel.

I sent my UCLA Project 3 film, which had won a half-dozen awards and a commercial distribution contract. Back came a job offer: film producer for a large ad agency in western Michigan. I was the envy of all my friends.

I left Los Angeles in the spring of 1972, vowing never to return. During four workaholic years in Grand Rapids, my outline and notes stayed in a box sealed with gaffer’s tape.

x x x x x x

My next contact with porn came in 1976. With my previous experience, I thought I couldn’t be shocked. But I was.

My girlfriend and I were spending an Indian summer weekend in Chicago. Faith had been curious to see what a porn movie was like but was afraid to attend one back home in Grand Rapids. Vigilantes had staked out the two porn theaters there and were photographing patrons in an attempt to embarrass them into staying away.

We chose a hole-in-the-wall theater south of the Loop. Faith had recognized the name of the star in the Chicago Tribune ad that read “Linda Lovelace and Barnyard Friend.”

Clutching my hand, she ducked into the cave-like entrance. For us, hardcore sex between consenting adult performers would have been daring enough; we weren’t ready for what we saw.

Linda’s “barnyard friend” turned out to be a handsome brute: tan and proud, a mixture of boxer and terrier, with a bit of shepherd tossed in to narrow the snout and perk up the ears.

Faith would always remember her first porno.

Next, we visited an adult bookstore in Old Town. We found the place filled with magazines and 8-millimeter films like Hotsy-Tots, Little Lolitas, Family Fun, Dog Instruction, Friends and Enemas, and The Body Beer for Lunch Bunch.

“Let’s get out of here,” Faith whispered.

I was as surprised as she was to find these things being sold openly, not under the counter. Their professionally designed four-color packaging meant they were being commercially distributed in large volume.

I’d thought this stuff was illegal. Kinky as he was, Telsman had been afraid to produce films involving child sex, bestiality, or excretory functions.

Had the law changed during my four years in Grand Rapids? What was going on here? How had all of this been allowed to happen?

I dug out my old writing project. I had this panicky feeling that if I didn’t update it immediately, I might as well throw it out.

I decided to do some research when I visited Ace Walker in L.A. over Christmas. The last time I’d seen him was just before four big vice cops hauled him away.

x x x x x x

December, 1976
“The woman in the film was orally copulating with the penis of a pig. This marriage counselor and psychologist jerk from San Francisco came down and testified for the defense. He said he’d used a similar film in treating a woman who had an aversion to her husband’s penis. When she saw this film, she realized that her husband’s penis wasn’t so bad after all. Believe it or not, a couple of jurors actually bought that theory. We got a ‘not guilty.’”

Lieutenant Lex Zabel of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Administrative Vice unit was speaking into my tape recorder. I had told him I was researching an article on a porno industry without restraints. We were in Zabel’s office at Parker Center, a square, shining monolith in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, a building as imposing and impersonal as the motorcycle cops who buzzed in and out of its parking structure like blue bees around a high-tech hive.

Zabel was a forthright, solid man with a graying toothbrush mustache. Throughout our conversation, I’d be unsettled by his eyes: I recalled the term “cop’s eyes” (from the Paul Newman movie Harper), eyes that allowed no secret to go unexamined.

Administrative Vice‌—‌“Ad Vice”‌—‌was a legend: feared by pimps, bookies and pornographers in the early ’70s, like Green Berets by Viet Cong. Ad Vice tactics had scared Ace Walker into testifying against everyone he knew in the porno business in return for immunity. There were only eight Ad Vice detectives but they were the elite.

“Ad Vice takes the major investigations,” Zabel explained. “We have better equipment, cars, communications and more secret service money. And we can call in men from other divisions.” Zabel’s tone hardened. “Several years ago, we were conducting a massive juvenile pornography investigation. Grand jury indictments… dozens and dozens of kids to interview…”

He hesitated, his jaw tensing momentarily. Then he continued in his flat tone, “We didn’t want it to drag on, ’cause these kids were actively involved in ongoing shooting.”

Zabel’s expression brought back the urgency‌—‌and the pride. “My people called in over fifty men from several divisions, trained them, and, within a couple weeks, we were flying officers and kids all over the state, breaking this thing up.”

I asked him about the court outcome.

“Well,” he sighed, “we did get a few convictions out of it. When you talk to the D.A.’s office, they can give you more specific details.” The hard eyes suddenly looked tired. “You just can’t be a crusader, y’know?” (Ad Vice’s Sgt. Lloyd Martin became one. He kept a garage full of child porn‌—‌just to show people how evil it was. Eventually, the LAPD fired him.)

x x x x x x

When I interviewed Assistant District Attorney Lance Ito early in 1977, the future magistrate of O.J. Simpson trial fame was a brand new member of the Los Angeles D.A.’s Office. His tasks included meeting with unknown journalists such as myself. Then beardless, still in his 20s, Ito was pleasant and informative.

He said that prosecutors lost their main weapon against pornography with the repeal of Section 288a of the California Penal Code, Conspiracy to Commit Oral Copulation. On January 1, 1976, three months after Ace Walker had been busted on this felony, oral sex and the conspiracy to commit it were no longer crimes in California.

“If I’d only known,” Ace lamented. “I could’ve saved my career.”

“Now all we have left is plain old 311.2,” the assistant D.A. said, “California’s obscenity law.” The statute was far weaker than the Federal standard established by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller Decision, which states that to be obscene, a sex item must “lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value” (the “LAPS test”). In California, that phrase was replaced by “utterly without (emphasis added) redeeming social importance.”

“California juries can find some kind of value in almost anything,” Ito said. “Even if something is declared obscene, they can say it has value as an example of obscenity. I mean, it gets to be that ludicrous.”

I asked how they went after child porn. Ito thought for a long moment before answering. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor can be used…”

“And what else?”

“Well,” he sighed, “good old 311.2.”

I waited for him to continue but he didn’t. “That’s it?”

Ito gave a sour smile. “Sometimes the law has some catching up to do.”

x x x x x x

I did some catching up on Telsman at my last downtown interview. City Attorney Richard Helgeson turned out to know more about pornography than Zabel or Ito but you’d never think it to look at him. He had a healthy, clean-cut look and manner and seemed only a few years removed from college. “Child porn has been growing over the past few years,” he said. “So have bestiality movies. We had one last week where a girl made it with a horse.”

“How is that possible?”

“Well, the girl and the horse obviously had… previous experience together. The horse was very well trained.”

Helgeson described snuff films coming through from India in which the participants had normal sex, then “these thugs rush in with knives and butcher them on film. There was one made in Mexico in which the girl obviously went to her death voluntarily. I think she was on LSD or something.”

It was unsettling, listening to this healthy, cherubic man casually describe these things.

“In the last fifteen months or so, we’ve had these fist insertion films come along. Eighteen inches in this one case. We had pathologists testify that the person would have to be under some kind of drugs or sedatives. On this particular film, they got an acquittal. The jury foreman said, ‘Well, it had educational value in that it instructed me not to engage in this form of activity.’”

Helgeson felt this current “anything goes” attitude had grown out of the call for repealing all obscenity laws by the 1970 President’s Commission on Pornography and Obscenity and “the Harry Reems farce.”

Reems, the male lead in Deep Throat, was arrested and jailed in Memphis, the capital of Federal obscenity prosecutions. The pre-trial publicity made Deep Throat a runaway hit.

“Linda Lovelace was granted immunity,” Helgeson said, “but they couldn’t find her when they went to court. Then everybody‌—‌Hollywood stars, politicians, sociologists‌—‌started beating the drum for this guy Reems and he was acquitted.”

The 1970 President’s Commission was “misguided,” Helgeson said. “They were unduly influenced by a European experiment in permissiveness that would never work in America. Their report was a green light to pornographers everywhere. The results speak for themselves.”

I made a mental note to look up that document.

“I think the climate is changing though,” Helgeson continued. “People are saying, ‘Enough already.’ The pendulum is swinging back. And just in time, too. We face a whole new problem in pornography, one that’s taking over the business like cancer.

“Organized crime from New York, Cleveland, Atlanta and Miami have linked together to disseminate obscene materials produced here in L.A. They’re driving out the smaller operators and even one of the biggest and oldest. This guy had theaters all over the country. He was big enough to resist for a long time. Then bombs began blowing up his theaters. His bookstores began burning down. Finally he sold out to them and ‘retired.’”

“His name wasn’t Telsman by any chance?”

“You know the man?”

“I had a classmate at UCLA who worked for him.” That was a truthful answer.

I found out later how the LAPD unwittingly aided the Mafia’s takeover of the West Coast porn industry. Frustrated in court and under pressure to keep the heat on, the police conducted a guerrilla campaign against pornographers. They didn’t knock on doors; they kicked them in. They didn’t nab a few samples of films they had warrants for; they cleaned out warehouses. They didn’t ask Ace Walker to come along quietly; they clamped the cuffs on tight enough to cut off circulation and slammed him into the back seat.

They “turned girls around” with threats of long sentences in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women for everything from prostitution to conspiracy, eliciting tearful, often false testimonies.

The police weren’t concerned that incorrect procedures would jeopardize their cases; they weren’t getting convictions anyway. The whole idea was to force the sex business underground, to keep it invisible.

When a law-abiding citizen is threatened by thugs, he runs to the police. Pornographers didn’t feel they had this option. The Mob, prepared to weather the police harassment, found it easy to move in. Their courtroom victories in obscenity cases encouraged them to push the limits; they imposed none on themselves.

Now that my questions had been answered by the forces of the law, I wanted to get the viewpoint of the other side. This proved harder to obtain.

x x x x x x

Ace Walker almost fell off his barstool when he learned where I’d spent the day. “Should’ve had me along,” he said. “I could’ve opened some doors for you‌—‌the kind that go CLANG!”

“How about opening some doors to the porno business for me?”

Ace hunched over his martini, torturing the olive with a toothpick. He was small and wiry, with quick eyes and sharp features coarsened by a nose squashed by a fastball. “Dave,” he said, “you’re a lot better off without my help. A recommendation from me is like having Hermann Goering introduce you to concentration camp survivors.”

“They’re still willing to hire you as a model…”

Ace winced. “Those days are now history.”

I dropped the subject. Though ostracized as a filmmaker, Ace had continued working as a performer (then, as now, the pool of “reliable” males was a small one)‌—‌until the “incident.” A director had been trying to talk a girl into having anal sex with Ace. “We made it easy for ya, honey,” the man had said. “We got ya the smallest cock in Hollywood.” After Ace heard that, the smallest cock in Hollywood did its best to stay that way.

We left the bar and Ace tried to phone some people for me to interview but they all evaded him. “When you’re hot, you’re hot,” he sighed.

x x x x x x

I spent the last few days of my trip on a jaunt up the coast to San Francisco. The porn shops there‌—‌along with New York’s‌—‌were supposed to have the most daring material.

“They want ‘doggy’ films, ‘horsey’ films,” a proprietor in Oxnard told me. “They’re tired of the straight stuff.” He seemed a typical middle-class businessman, so I asked him how he felt about selling this merchandise.

“I’d never expose my family to it,” he said, “but Americans have the right to see these things in private. And someone is gonna make a buck off of them; it might as well be me.” What a shame Telsman had been muscled out of the business. He’d have been in Porn Heaven.

A store in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District made Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis look like Mary Poppins. Their most expensive super-8 film, selling for $25, had a cover photo of what was supposed to be a large Swedish family‌—‌all ages‌—‌cavorting in a sauna.

The kid behind the counter said, “I got one I can’t display that would really blow your mind.”

“What’s in it?”

“I’m not allowed to say.”

He wanted $50 for it. Curiosity got the best of me. What the hell? It was research.

When I got back to Grand Rapids and projected it, there was nothing but old bits of loops (short sex films meant for peepshow booths) strung together. Just another tourist who’d been suckered. I never felt more like a rube from the Midwest.

It made me more determined than ever to find out everything I could about porn. I began scouring bookstores and libraries‌—‌and found what Helgeson had condemned: The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. I obtained both a Random House copy and an “illustrated” version produced by Greenleaf Classics of San Diego. The Greenleaf book, sold only in porn shops, was crammed with graphic photos out of the kinkiest loops and magazines.

Its publisher, William Hamling, got a year in jail, an $87,000 fine, and was ordered to get out of the erotic publishing business.

Politicos had planned on using the Report of the President’s Commission to drum up votes for a fire-breathing anti-smut campaign. The document had been scheduled for release in September of 1970, just before Congressional elections. Then a press leak in mid-August revealed that the Report had dropped a bombshell on the Nixon Administration, recommending that all obscenity laws be repealed.

A mad scramble ensued: the Senate voted 60-5 to reject the Commission’s findings in advance. Nixon rushed his man, Charles H. Keating, Jr., into a vacated spot on the Commission. Keating, a Cincinnati lawyer (at that time) and founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, Inc. (later Citizens for Decency through Law), was not yet tarnished by anything like the Lincoln Savings scandal that would ruin him twenty years later. He immediately tagged a rebuttal to the end of the Report, calling it “a Magna Carta for pornographers.”

But it was too late. The disclosures of the highly respected blue-ribbon panel of educators, sociologists, psychologists, attorneys and religious leaders would resound in American courtrooms for the next decade.

The Commission concluded: “…federal, state, and local legislation prohibiting the sale, exhibition, or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed…

“Despite the existence of widespread legal prohibitions upon the dissemination of such materials, exposure to them appears to be a usual and harmless part of the process of growing up in our society and a frequent and nondamaging occurrence among adults. Indeed, a few Commission studies indicate that a possible distinction between sex offenders and other people, with regard to experience with explicit sexual materials, is that the sex offenders have seen markedly less (emphasis added) of such materials while maturing.”

This last statement paralleled the results of a bold social undertaking that had a profound influence on the Commission: the so-called “Danish Experiment.” A majority of the Commissioners thought that, despite cultural differences, it would work the same way in America.

Between 1967 and 1969, Denmark systematically eliminated all laws against the distribution of obscene materials of any kind to adults who wished to obtain them. In the first year of this experiment, sex crimes in Copenhagen dropped 25 percent. The following year they dropped another 34 percent. To Danish social scientists, these results were no surprise.

“There is a need for pornography among some people,” said Dr. Maj-Briht Bergstrom-Walen. “If a person is very embarrassed or disturbed or has difficulty making sex, he can still get something for his soul, you might say.”

Danish psychiatrist Dr. Henry Olsen, author of Sexual Adjustment in Marriage, said, “It seems obvious to me that instead of committing rape or some other crime, the people masturbate.”

x x x x x x

In America, too, attitudes toward erotica were changing. Less than six months after our trip to Chicago, Faith and I went to see the 1976 hardcore hit The Opening of Misty Beethoven at the Savoy Theater in Grand Rapids. No longer intimidated by the picture-taking pickets, she waved at her pastor, scowling behind his Nikon. “Hope he gets my good side.”

Faith declared Misty “as good as a real movie.” Adult film historian Jim Holliday would later call it “the best porno of all time.”

The top 35-millimeter X-rated features were approaching Hollywood standards. Barbara Broadcast, Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street, and the Mitchell Brothers’ Autobiography of a Flea made Deep Throat look like something shot in a Tijuana brothel. Mainstream film director Brian DePalma said he wouldn’t mind being the first to make a big-budget general-release movie with hardcore sex in it.

Unlike the ten-minute, storyless, eight-millimeter porn-shop loops that were aimed at specific deviant sectors, these theatrical features had to appeal to a broader audience. They stayed with conventional sex, the kind that met most current “community standards.”

I began to be envious. Here I was, backlighting Amway bottles while other filmmakers were bouncing reflectors off the gorgeous Annette Haven. My films were pushing products for client reps; theirs were telling stories and entertaining theater audiences.

I began to see straight, hardcore sex films as more ethical and moral than the industrial films I was working on. I directed films that defended nuclear energy while disparaging solar energy; taught mobile home salesmen how to overload a sale with extra insurance; and solicited sales contracts for Florida property, sight unseen. My film on why forklift operators were the ones to blame for the frequent accidents they had with a major manufacturer’s trucks won awards in almost every industrial film festival it was entered in. My solarization and infrared techniques showing Jesus walking through roiling storm clouds brought tears to the eyes of congregations and generous contributions from their wallets.

In contrast, as Ace Walker said about showing human beings having sex, “The bottom line is you’re not scamming anybody. All you’re selling is the idea of having a good time.”

Still, the thought of quitting a good, legitimate film job to research the adult film industry seemed absurd. But as I kept reading, I noticed something missing in books about porn.

Carolyn See’s Blue Money was an entertaining compilation of interviews with pornographers, including Marvin Miller of the Supreme Court’s Miller Decision. They’d obviously withheld a lot of information from her, while bragging about their wheeler dealing. The autobiography Here Comes Harry Reems was full of colorful on-set anecdotes but he, too, had little knowledge of the inner workings of the industry that used him.

No writer had ever probed the inside of America’s six-year-old hardcore pornography industry, and later I would find that none had been able to‌—‌or dared to. A journalist named Mitch Morrill ignored the warnings to cease his inquiries and was beaten nearly to death, then poisoned as he lay in a hospital bed.

It was a very closed business indeed.

I had an advantage over the others. The porn industry always needed a skilled cinematographer. I envisioned using my skills to explore a commercial Kama Sutra of erotic secrets. But what if I couldn’t make contacts? Would I have to return to Grand Rapids and beg for my old job back?

I was confident that if I could get started, I’d quickly establish myself as superior to my competitors. Even if I had to start with loops, I was sure I’d soon move up to 35-millimeter features.

This would be a switch: instead of using porn to learn filmmaking, I’d be using my film skills to learn about porn. I vacillated until the midsummer production slack. Then realizing it was now or never, I quit my job, sold everything I couldn’t transport, and headed for California.

x x x x x x

Chapter 3

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODPORN
Fall, 1977

“I still don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Ace said. “If you’re looking for sex, forget it. There’s no casting couch in porn. Girls don’t fuck to get work. The fucking is work.”

I had just told him I was sick of industrial filmmaking and was seeking new adventures. I’d never tell him‌—‌or anyone else‌—‌that I was out to gather material for a book. “Porn,” I said, “is the one form of filmmaking I’m not yet burned out on.”

Ace snorted. “Dave, I think you’ll find you don’t have the stomach for this business.”

“How can I find that out,” I retorted, “if I can’t even find the business?”

My inquiries in porn shops and theaters had only made eyes narrow and lips tighten. Ace had been no help. His contacts still shunned him because of his testimony to Ad Vice. He wouldn’t give me numbers to call, fearing retaliation from pornographers who’d think he was helping a vice cop infiltrate.

“You should pester the union,” Ace said. “Just a month ago, they had some openings for camera assistants.”

“No thanks. I’m over my Hollywood dreams. They died the hard way: from trying to make them happen.”

At the mention of the “H” word‌—‌Hollywood, Ace crushed an empty beer can and hurled it over the rail of his deck. It splashed in a swimming pool somewhere below, miles short of the Universal Studio lights he’d hurled it toward. Ace was having no luck finding work with the “majors.” Without porn contributing to the rent on the Toluca Hills house, he’d taken in roommates. Our nightly beers above the lights of the San Fernando Valley were escapes from the heavy metal pulsing out of one of the bedrooms.

Ace chuckled. I looked at him and saw a sardonic smile in the dim light. “I think I got a lead for you,” he said, “but it’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“Hey, beggars can’t be choosers.”

Ace went inside to make a phone call, then returned and plopped down in his director’s chair. “Here’s the deal. This guy used to work a lot as a model, until his wee-wee went on strike. He knows people. He said he might turn you on to someone.”

“In exchange for…?”

Ace shrugged. “I told him you’d give him twenty bucks.”

x x x x x x

Jesse breezed into Barney’s Beanery a half-hour late. Below his surfer bangs, rose sunglasses and drooping mustache, a small patch of face exploded into teeth with his greeting. In a low whisper that I strained to hear, Jesse said he wanted to play some pool before we talked.

While I lined up my shots, he bopped off to slap hands with his many acquaintances. They’d lower their voices and slip glances at me. I realized what Jesse was doing: seeing if anyone took me for a cop.

We finally settled into a booth. “Know who you look like?” Jesse said. “You look like a younger, leaner Larry Flynt‌—‌you know, the publisher of Hustler?”

“No kidding?” I didn’t know if this was meant as flattery.

“Yeah. Speaking of which, I’m supposed to work with… with Constance Money. Yeah. They’re bringing her out of retirement, paying her big bucks. Me too. At least two thousand a day.”

Ace had described Jesse as “99 and 44/100 percent pure bullshit.”

I wanted to get down to business. So did Jesse. He wanted his twenty immediately. “Then if you bust me, it’s entrapment. If you don’t pay me first, then I know everything I say will be going in a file downtown.”

Jesse shoved the twenty into his jeans and stood up. “I’ll call people.” He headed for the door. “I’ll set things up.” For the next two weeks, I left messages with his answering service. No response.

I finally got a break when Ace got a job offer. He turned it down and passed it along to me. When I thanked Ace for his sacrifice, he said, “I wouldn’t have taken the job anyway.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll see.”

Ace introduced me to Reed Michaels at Tiny Naylor’s on Ventura at Laurel Canyon, where Reed usually ate. “I was even busted here,” Reed said, as Ace squirmed (the bust had come out of Ace’s testimony). “I’m sticking my fork in my strawberry pie and this big dude in a suit comes up and says, ‘Michaels, will you come with me or will you give me trouble?’ I said to my friends, ‘Excuse me, but I think I’ll be leaving with this gentleman.’ I asked them to call my attorney.

“So we go over to my place and the cops kick my door down. Standard procedure, right? And there’s Lee, my distributor, standing there buck naked. He was jogging and was taking a shower at my place before coming to Tiny’s. So after we all get done staring at each other, the cop in the suit asks, ‘What’s your business here?’ and Lee says, ‘I’m meeting some friends for lunch.’ The cops busted up so bad, I probably could’ve walked away without them noticing.”

Reed hired me because I was willing to work for $65 a day. I found out why Reed’s budgets were so low: he was the worst filmmaker I ever met. (To save the cost of a freeze frame, he had the actors suddenly stop moving.) The shoot would be a lesson in how not to make a porn movie.

x x x x x x

“I know this is just a porno,” said Reed’s partner Carl, “but I know only one way to work: PROFESSIONALLY.” Carl used his basso profundo voice to enhance his bald, bearded intellectual image. Like others on the fringes of show business, he gave his credits with his handshake. He’d once written a Movie of the Week‌—‌two years ago. “I’m very visual. TERRIBLY visual,” Carl went on. “I demand that my cameramen make every effort to comprehend my vision and capture it accurately on celluloid. In fact, I demand that my entire crew work toward this end.” His entire crew was me on camera and Reed on the Nagra recorder. It would be a long day.

The first problem was the location, a hillside affair of stilts, beams, expanses of glass, and little else. “We better hang blackout curtains,” Reed said.

“They’ll attract police helicopters,” Carl answered. “We should hang sheets instead.”

“The lights will cast shadows on them,” Reed pointed out.

“Why not hang the sheets first and the blackout curtains behind them,” I suggested.

“We don’t have time,” Reed said. “We gotta be out by midnight.”

While they argued, we could’ve hung both. Finally, the male star, Mike Ranger, said, “They shoot straight stuff up here too, right? Why should blackout curtains look so unusual?”

We hung the curtains.

The meeting of the first two models wasn’t exactly hate at first sight; that came when they took their clothes off. Seeing Gene’s size, April groaned. “I’m still sore from last night.” She had danced nude at The Classic Cat, then she’d taken on three Johns.

When April’s bra came off, Gene wilted. Her siliconed breasts‌—‌“silly cones” Mike Ranger dubbed them‌—‌each came to a distinct point about an inch below the nipple.

The sex reminded me of Japanese erotic art and Tijuana comic books: monstrous penis with bodies on each end. Reed liked April’s shrieks. “A real screamer,” he called her. Pornographers see any emotion as good emotion. Carl, however, kept reminding April, “It’s an ACTING job, honey, you’ve got to show some PLEASURE.”

Gene kept losing his erection. So we were surprised when he said, “I can come any time you want.” Meaning: Hurry up. I can’t hold off much longer. “Let’s do it then,” said Reed.

Gene pounded ’til veins bulged and April’s face became a gargoyle. Then he pulled out and produced a droplet that he shook loose into April’s pubic hair where it glistened like a tiny marble.

“That’s it?” Carl asked.

“If I lie on my right side, I can work up to it easier.”

April lay like a deflated love doll until Gene called, “Ready!” He scrambled for his original position, but slipped. All I caught was his upward salvo before he left the frame.

“Did you get it? Did you get it?” Carl asked. Behind him, Mike Ranger stood helpless in the doorway. Tears of laughter ran down his cheeks. Mike had no such trouble performing.

Paired with a veteran Northern California model named Micki, who kept her blonde hair in ringlets to avoid the chronic hassle of hair blocking head action, Mike demonstrated 101 ways to have sex on the common couch. At least, to me it seemed like that many. Scrambling for clear angles of the penetration, I felt like a referee at a wrestling match: scrunching 20 pounds of CP 16 camera against my shoulders, neck, knees or ankles; slipping on the panties under my tennis shoe; and burning my arm on the hot “pussy light” Carl held beside the lens. (Golden Rule: Thou shalt not permit shadows on the penetration.) As sweat stung my eyes, I swore I’d wear a headband from then on.

I was learning that the best shooters, like the best models, are athletes. (An exception was ball-shaped Eilo Appelbaum who shot the Swedish Erotica loop series. Mike Ranger said, “He just kind of rolls into the right position.”)

The shoot disintegrated when Reed’s anxiety over running late clashed with Carl’s attempts at art. To speed things up, Reed packed away the tripod. I didn’t mind; I was sick of fiddling with its snaplock mounting plate that neither snapped nor locked.

The loss of this basic item didn’t compromise Carl’s vision. He wanted a shot that began on April and Gene leaving the house, panned to Micki approaching, followed her to Mike looking out a window, held on Mike turning and heading for some stairs, then tilted up to catch Mike entering a bedroom. The shot required F-stops from 2.2 to 11, five focus changes, and more than my aching arms to steady the camera.

“In this town, that kind of shot is done all the time,” said Carl when I protested.

“Right. With half a day and three assistants. And tripods too.”

Earlier, I’d incurred Carl’s enmity. Gene was supposed to toss his head in orgasm, spy Mike in the doorway and react. He’d jerked his head around as if shocked. Carl had been satisfied, but I’d blurted, “Gene, why don’t you react after you turn your head, because before that, you don’t even know Mike’s there.”

“Carl feels you co-opted him,” Reed explained later. “You made him look bad in front of everybody.”

I couldn’t believe it. Hollywood ego at this level.

And now the partners were arguing while the sun kept sinking. Reed was hopping like he hadn’t peed in days. “Let’s do it in separate shots, like Dave says.”

“Reed, remember what Bill was saying? How he needs a better product from us? Well, that’s what I’m giving you.”

Mike rolled his big brown eyes. I had an inspiration. “Carl, I think I can do your shot.”

“You can? F-stops and focus changes and all?”

“No sweat.”

By the time they got the results from the lab, I’d be long gone.

We finished an obligatory girl-girl scene with the owner of the house reminding us it was 2 AM. “Now, we can get that D.P. (double penetration),” Reed announced. “What D.P.?” “I’m sure I told you about it,” Reed said. “Gayle and Alan are waiting for us right now in Santa Monica.” The couple had agreed to work for Reed for only $50 each‌—‌as long as he shot at their apartment, saving them the hassle of traveling to a location.

During the drive there, Mike Ranger described doing three scenes a day on a 12-day shoot. “I thought my balls would fall off,” he said.

“Were you able to do it all?”

“Yeah, I managed.”

“Maybe that’s why they had you do it.”

Mike smiled. “I was starting to pick up on that…”

Word of Mike’s prowess was spreading. With the looks, build, and wavy brown hair of a western hero, he would soon be a star of 35-millimeter X-rated features and a favorite of that platinum princess, Seka. I was surprised that his pretty-boy face had felt the fists of drunken cowboys, Chicanos and Indians; he’d been a bouncer in Denver and an oilfield roughneck. He’d come to L.A. with $250 in his pocket. After his money dwindled to $2.50, Mike answered an ad in the L.A. Star. He passed up an afternoon gig hanging drywall and told Kenny the Agent, “I’m looking for something wetter.”

I told Mike I’d hire him first when I shot my own films.

“I know who you should hire second,” he said.

x x x x x x

Though we were six hours late and woke her up, Gayle Monica greeted us with a freckly smile and an offer of coffee and rolls. She was every surfer boy’s fantasy: blonde and petite, with breasts that stood out from her tan like scoops of ice cream fallen on smooth sand. What man wouldn’t be turned on by Gayle doing everything possible to stimulate him?

Her husband Alan wasn’t, even with the aid of the skin magazines that Gayle accepted as part of their love life.

Reed grabbed a phone to call Kenny the Agent. I gave in to exhaustion. The scene was becoming surreal: Alan staring at Boobs ’n Buns while Gayle was trying to get him hard; Reed sitting on the bed yelling into the phone, “No! I won’t use Jesse! That asshole still owes me a come-shot, which he’ll never pay me ’cuz I won’t let him on my set!” Carl sat cross-legged on the rug, brooding over his script. The rising sun was red between the drapes like an embarrassed voyeur.

Then the unexpected happened. Mike entered the room, yawned, sat next to Gayle, and began fondling her. Watching this, Alan suddenly came erect.

I grabbed the CP 16 camera and flipped on the lights. Reed blinked in surprise. “I gotta go, Kenny,” he said. “There’s something going on.”

Most women only endure DP; Gayle enjoyed it. Sandwiched between the two men, she shuddered so violently that Mike‌—‌on the bottom‌—‌gasped, “Easy, easy…”

“Can’t help it,” Gayle panted. “You know how I come.”

Back at Ace’s I attacked a six-pack and reviewed what I’d accomplished on the shoot: $65 to add to the $1,800 I had left; valuable contacts in Mike, Gayle and Micki, the northern California model, who said she could agent shoots for me up north; crew contacts in Reed and Carl (if their duties were kept simple); and learning production tidbits, such as the importance of the skin lubricant Albolene Cream (the most valuable item on a porn set).

But still no distributor contacts. Reed, fearing competition, had guarded his. I lay awake wondering how to meet these furtive people in this closed, paranoid business. Then I got an idea that looked good enough to sleep on.

x x x x x x

Step one of my plan: I called Jesse. I told him I was going to shoot next weekend, and I wanted to hire him.

“Any idea who I’ll be working with?” he asked.

I thought quickly. “Well, there’s this little blonde named Gayle Monica…”

“Yeah? With her I might give you two wet shots.”

Step two: I waited ’til mid-week to call Jesse with bad news: my distributor had backed out, so I was cancelling the shoot.

“Well, this is really fucked,” he said. “I planned my whole week around your shoot. I gave up a chance to work for Gerard Damiano. You know, the guy who did Deep Throat?”

“But, Jesse, wouldn’t it be stupid to shoot without someone to sell it to? I don’t know any other distributors…”

“Dave, don’t cancel out,” Jesse said. “I’ll put you in touch with some people‌—‌good people‌—‌right away.”

My plan had worked. Or had it? Jesse gave me four phone numbers. One was disconnected; another was an answering service, the third, a magazine publisher who wasn’t interested in films; and the fourth, a shooter named Jack Genero who said, “Suppose I give you the name of my distributor and you shoot six loops for him. Then I try to sell him mine and he says, ‘I just bought a new series. I don’t need yours.’”

Then I got a surprise. The answering service party called me back. The fast, friendly voice of Larry from Dollar Distributing told me his new company needed more product. My inexperience didn’t matter. “In fact, it’s an advantage,” Larry said. “My partner Robby will show you how to do them right. He’s the best shooter in the business.”

I was so elated, I forgot all about Jesse‌—‌until Ace played back his message: “Dave, you didn’t call me. Did you shoot this weekend? Did people tell you not to hire me because I’ve been overused? Well, I solved that. I just shaved my mustache. I’ve never been photographed without my mustache. And I didn’t have sex all week. I was saving it up for you.”

“Pathetic,” Ace muttered.

x x x x x x

Dollar Distributing’s projection screen was a wall in a West Hollywood studio apartment used as an office and a warehouse. Larry’s partner Robby was pleased that I scribbled notes on his advice.

Projecting his loops at double-speed to save time gave a comic effect to the women craning their necks to show their faces in shots that featured their genitals. “Showing face and penetration in the same shot is dynamite,” the diminutive director explained in his piping voice. “You get both pussy and personality. Gives the boys a double whammy to jerk off to.”

The last of Dollar’s six loops slapped its tail leader around the take-up reel. Robby shut off the projector and waved a small hand at the stacks of gaudy boxes filling half the apartment. “The most important shot of the loop is the one on the box cover,” he said. “That’s what sells the number.”

Each of the six different box covers featured the series title “CUM” in bold yellow letters on a red background. In each cover photo, a different woman took semen in her face. One of them looked startled as the squirt went up her nostril. “Kisser come-shots are hot right now,” Robby said.

His most important advice was “Spend the bucks to shoot up north. Never shoot in L.A. County.”

Robby believed a pet theory of L.A.’s pornographers. “Hollywood is behind all the hassles. It’s their turf. They sic the cops on us. See, some day this shit will be legal, and they want it all to themselves.”

Run out of town by the LAPD, porn had established its own Hollywood up north. In San Francisco’s south-of-Market industrial zone was Bob Vossi’s Sound Stage, the Universal Lot of porn. Agent Joe Elliot’s ads in The Spectator and The Berkeley Barb brought new talent to his East Bay studio. Among the redwoods of Mill Valley lived porn’s reigning queen Annette Haven. Further north, in Novato, sprawled the estate of filmmaker Alex DeRenzy. In the exclusive bayfront town of Belvedere, the many offspring of the Mitchell brothers raised hell in funky mansions.

“Don’t try for more than three loops your first time out,” Robby said. “When you get good, you can whip out twelve in a weekend, like me.”

Dollar would pay $500 a loop, $600 if it included a DP. Robby assured me that shooting up north was safe. “But if you do get busted, we don’t know you.”

I called Micki, the northern California call-girl, to take her up on her offer to set up a shoot.

x x x x x x

“Defer half my wages?” Micki laughed. “I don’t even take checks. It’s cash on the barrelhead. Anyone I know who ever worked for promises got burned.”

“I’d pay you all of it if I had the cash,” I said. “I’m no fly-by-night. I want to set up a regular operation. And you’re vital to it. I’d be a fool to burn you.”

Micki’s job would be to act, cast shoots, and supply locations, starting with her own Tiburon hilltop apartment, which offered a great opening shot: Start on the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge. Pan past the green humps of Angel Island, the sailboats on Richardson Bay, and the gleam of San Francisco’s Financial District. Pull back past the plants hung in macrame on Micki’s patio and through the open glass doors. Widen out to reveal plants in corners, a terrarium of hermit crabs, book shelves stocked with the world’s great literature, Micki’s sociology degree filling a nook, and, finally, Micki herself, lolling in front of the fireplace on her bearskin rug.

A good cutaway shot would be her sullen cockatiel, whose sole passion was munching marijuana seeds. When Micki called, “Sam? Are you with us, Sam?” the bird would open an eye but make no other response.

While Micki considered my offer, she gave me a chance to butter her up‌—‌with her favorite massage oil. “Rub it between your hands first. It heats up.” She was afraid I would, too. “No sex, OK? I’m too sore.”

She requested we both get naked. “I don’t want clothes snagging my satin sheets.” I hoped she’d take my erection as a compliment.

The massage loosened more than muscles. In her insistent, sometimes screechy tone, Micki told one of those horror stories so common to sex pros.

“MY FATHER RAPED ME WHEN I WAS SIX. I DON’T REMEMBER IT, BUT I FOUND OUT FROM MY SISTER. HE RAPED HER TOO. SHE WAS THREE AND A HALF. IT CAME OUT WHEN SHE WAS IN PRIMAL THERAPY. SHE DOESN’T LIKE TO HAVE ANYONE TOUCH HER BODY. SHE EVEN TOLD HER HUSBAND, ‘LISTEN, WE GET ALONG WELL. WE HAVE SIMILAR INTERESTS. BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO GET YOUR SEXUAL ENJOYMENT ELSEWHERE.’ ISN’T IT AMAZING HOW WE BOTH WENT IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS? IN SCHOOL ONCE SHE DREW A GIRL, THEN PUT A BIG RED MARK ACROSS THE CROTCH. AND TO THIS DAY, I GET THIS RECURRING HALLUCINATION: I’LL BE BALLING A GUY AND ALL OF A SUDDEN MY FATHER’S FACE WILL TRANSPOSE ONTO HIM. IT’S VERY REAL. I USUALLY END UP SCREAMING. IT NEVER HAPPENS WITH CLIENTS BECAUSE THERE’S NO EMOTION THERE.”

Micki moved out after high school. Now, her parents enticed her infrequent visits with gifts. She hated the latest one, a battered Ford Falcon. “I don’t need this,” she said. “I have a Porsche.” But the Porsche wasn’t running, so Micki chugged about in the Falcon.

“MOM WILL ASK, ‘WHAT DO YOU DO IN YOUR MOVIES?’ AND I’LL SPREAD MY LEGS AND SAY ‘THIS.’ MOM ALWAYS TRIES TO LAUGH IT OFF AS A JOKE, THEN SHE CHANGES THE SUBJECT. DENIAL. DENIAL.”

Like many of the Bay Area’s call-girls, Micki had been a hippie in the Haight. “I turned pro because of acid,” she said, fidgeting beneath my hands as if constant motion were by now instinctive. “I was tripping on window pane (LSD), with three guys and two girls on me, and I got this flash: why don’t I make money doing what I enjoy?”

She didn’t enjoy it any more. “I no longer have sex fantasies. Now I trip out on things like lying on a yacht in Hawaii.”

Phone calls intruded on us, sending Micki into her role. (“THEY FEEL WEIRD ABOUT PAYING FOR IT, SO YOU GOT TO MAKE THEM THINK THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOU IS SOMETHING SPECIAL, WHILE GETTING ALL THE MONEY YOU CAN.”) She punctuated her phone banter with explosions of giddy laughter and kicking legs that made massage impossible. “…OF COURSE I LOVE YOU. I DIDN’T CALL BACK BECAUSE I WAS OUT OF TOWN… ENGLAND… I WAS HIS EXECUTIVE SECRETARY. I HAVE SKILLS. I CAN TYPE, RUN ERRANDS. I GIVE GOOD HEAD (laugh)… HE GAVE ME THIS GOLD STAR OF DAVID AND I WEAR IT AROUND MY NECK. AND I HAD IT WEIGHED (laugh)…”

And the bottom line: “WHY? DON’T YOU THINK I’M WORTH IT? I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME… OH, YOU ASSHOLE! YOU WOULDN’T DARE!… OF COURSE I LOVE YOU. IF I DIDN’T, I’D CUT YOU OFF…”

One of Micki’s “New York Jew” clients had just arrived at Oakland Airport. “NO, NOT HERE. I’VE GOT THIS HOUSEGUEST, THIS BIG PRODUCER FROM L.A.… WHAT? ALL THE WAY TO OAKLAND?… OF COURSE IT’S MORE. MY TAXI METER TENDS TO RUN KIND OF FAST, YOU KNOW (laugh)… A HUNDRED FIFTY. THAT’S ONLY FAIR… OH, A HUNDRED THEN, JUST FOR YOU, MAX.” Micki settled for $65 and left for work cursing “that cheap Jew bastard.”

She was still bitching when she returned the next morning. “A twin bed! Would you believe both of us sleeping on a twin bed? And then he had the nerve to wake me up at 5:45 because he wanted sex again and he was leaving at 6:30.”

Micki was taking tricks she wouldn’t have when she was younger. Her Scandinavian features were fleshing out, along with her waistline. Her future in this business was now behind a camera, not in front of it. Maybe that’s why she decided to take my deferment deal, though proclaiming herself insane for doing so.

One of the women Micki wanted to cast called as I was looking at her picture. She had a narrow but pretty face, straight reddish hair, and a nicely curved body. “Kellee,” Micki said, “I’ve got someone here you might want to talk to.” Micki handed me the phone and I said the worst thing possible: “Hi, I hear you do movies.”

“Movies? I don’t do movies! Who says I do movies?”

Micki, her ear to the receiver, yelled, “He’s legit! He’s legit!”

I’d said the exact words a vice cop would.

Even here there were hassles. Four months ago, Tiburon cops had busted Micki at a bachelor party that was actually a sting. The charges were dropped but cops still rang her doorbell at all hours to say things like “A bunch of us were out in the bushes last night. We just want you to know we like your tits.”

Over omelettes on the Sausalito waterfront, Kellee and her roommate Laurel, a tall, dark-haired woman with black pools for eyes, opened a hardcore magazine starring Micki. The three call-girls giggled over the stares and double-takes of other patrons. They enjoyed “blowing the minds of straights.” Micki was pleased to get the magazine for her collection. “The photographers say they’ll send you a copy, but they never do.”

I was intrigued by these women’s game of getting the most money and favors from men, while giving the minimum in return. (“You get him to pick up tampons on the way over? Oh, I love it!”) Their attitude showed when describing their kinkiest film acts: “Sure, I took a pisser in the face,” Micki said, “but I kept my mouth shut the whole time.” Kellee had agreed to have sex with a dolphin (the filmmakers couldn’t line one up) but “only with my back to the thing. I told them, if I have to put my hands on that slimy little dick, I’m charging double.”

I wondered how this barter over every detail would affect my upcoming shoot. I found out.

x x x x x x

Micki phoned with a problem. “I can’t find a girl who’ll do DP for less than $125.” (I’d allotted $100, $25 more than for straight sex.)

“Look, Micki,” I said. “With the extra footage and hassle involved, I figured on making $50 more on a DP loop. Now it’s only $25. I guess I’ll drop the whole idea.”

“Oh no!” Micki said quickly. “I could possibly do it myself for what you’re paying. If I get something to relax the sphincter muscles. Could you bring some ’ludes?”

“I don’t know where to get any,” I lied (Ace had some for sale). “I’ve got some Darvons left over from dental surgery…” I felt like I was watching myself doing this. Maybe Ace was right. Maybe I didn’t have the stomach for this business.

“Oh, bring the Darvons!” said Micki.

The shoot itself brought more surprises. I’d scheduled the DP last, in case it ran long.

But Micki made a “date” for that evening and rescheduled it to go first. The men in the DP were Mike Ranger and Gene, the model with the huge penis. I hoped Micki knew what she’d be taking on.

Gene had done a scene in a hot tub the night before. He said his legs felt like spaghetti. He kept retreating to the den to “concentrate”‌—‌to buzz himself erect with Micki’s Hitachi vibrator, a favorite toy of her girlfriends, among whom Mike included Gene. “How do you know he’s bi?” I asked Mike.

“Just the vibes.” Mike hated the attentions of gay men.

The DP was impossible. Mike’s penis in Micki’s rear kept forcing Gene’s semi-erection to snake out of her vagina. Then Ace noticed something. “Doesn’t it look like he’s still inside her.”

Gene’s penis did seem to be entering Micki’s folds; you couldn’t tell it was really sliding along her abdomen. We shot the illusion.

The next man up was an Ivy League type who claimed to be a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Rob’s only previous loop had also been with Laurel. His enchantment with her carried him through to the wet shot. Then he became conscious of the camera, crew and lights. “Could I have some privacy?” he asked

Outside the room, I called a huddle, keeping to a whisper.

When we heard Rob call out, each crew member did his task in the order I’d outlined. Carl hit the switches and grabbed the pussy light. We snatched our cameras: Reed on Hasselblad, me on CP 16, and Ace on the Arriflex (a back-up on come-shots). Cameras began whirring an instant before Rob spurted. “Nerve-wracking,” said Ace.

Next surprise: Kellee couldn’t do the third loop. She had a “previous engagement.” “I didn’t know you’d run so late,” she said. “I thought there’d be enough time for both.”

“Greedy bitch,” said Carl. “She probably made that date ten minutes ago. I hate the way these cunts jerk you around.”

We’d have to shoot the loop on Sunday, before leaving for L.A. And do it at Kellee’s. “Everything has to be out of here tonight,” Micki said. “My parents will be here early in the morning.” (Presumably with gifts.) “You can’t take it to my place until tomorrow,” Kellee said. “We’re entertaining tonight.”

We schlepped everything to the motel, rose with the sun and schlepped it all to Kellee’s‌—‌where something woke my crew up faster than coffee. The hookers’ apartment was kitty-corner to the Sausalito Police Department, a small brick building more suited to Dickens’ England than modern America. We crept past it like mice sneaking around a sleeping cat.

“Aren’t you nervous living here?” Carl asked.

“It makes me feel safe,” Kellee said. It’s a concept incomprehensible to Los Angeles pornographers.

The next problem was Kellee’s poodle Toulouse intruding on the scene of her and Ace. “He loves the taste of come,” said Kellee. “Maybe at the end he could run in and lick it up.”

“Too kinky,” said Reed. “It’ll get busted.”

The white fluffball’s dander made Ace sneeze. Kellee put Toulouse out on the porch‌—‌too late to save The Smallest Cock in Hollywood. Ace wanted some time alone with Kellee; we waited in her bedroom.

On her wall was a picture of a couple embracing in a crowd. On the edge was a woman with a bloody knife. “Heavy psychosexual significance,” observed Carl, scratching his beard. He picked up a statuette of a cheerleader from Kellee’s nightstand.

“Wouldn’t you know.”

Ace called us into the living room. “It’s just not happening.” He’d talked Kellee into finding a replacement and working with him‌—‌which she’d agreed to do for only an additional $50. Ace’s performance failure hadn’t affected his negotiating skills.

Kellee thought Ace was too intelligent and sensitive for model work. “It’s sad, but it’s really true,” she said. “The best men are dumb. Basic animal instinct types.”

Ace’s replacement didn’t fit Kellee’s theory. John Leslie was an artist, a writer and a skilled chef. Dark and handsome, he was one of porn’s top stars and arrogant about it. “Why wasn’t I called in the first place?” he wanted to know. The reason was money. He charged a hundred a loop, twice Ace’s rate. Leslie was well worth it, delivering a textbook performance. With every break, he’d dash to the TV to catch up on a football game, leaving Kellee naked on the couch.

Work was impersonal. A man whose performance depends on the charms of his partner won’t have a long porn career. The best men rely on fantasy imagery, ironically doing exactly as the fans who envy their access to porn queens: they’re masturbating.

That’s what John Leslie did as he pumped himself into coming on Kellee’s face. His eyes had been closed; she’d been no stimulus to him at all.

I decided that from then on, I’d hire only the “reliable” men, regardless of their higher rates.

Leslie considered charging me even more. I took his comment that the loop was “lit like a feature” as a compliment, until he balked at signing a model release. “I have two fee scales,” he said, “one for features and one for loops. How do I know you’re not planning to slip this scene into a feature?”

“I’m just trying to do an extra good job on my first loops,” I explained.

“How could we be shooting a feature, John?” Carl asked. “We don’t have any sound equipment.” That reassured him.

Persuading someone to buy my loops wasn’t as easy.

x x x x x x

Porn partnerships are doomed. (The best one ended in the worst way when Jim Mitchell shot his brother Artie to death.) There’s too much temptation to cheat on your partner.

Larry and Robby had split up over Larry’s discovery that Robby had shot six loops for himself on company money. Now, they were too busy squabbling over the division of Dollar Distributing’s assets to be interested in my three loops.

Reed still wouldn’t reveal his contacts, even for a 10% commission if one of them bought my loops. He did, however, offer the use of his Showchron editing machine for only $7.50 an hour.

Robby begged off on viewing my loops. “I don’t even have a viewer to see them on, thanks to that asshole Larry.”

Then I suggested that I rent Reed’s Showchron. Suddenly, Robby couldn’t wait to see my loops. “Don’t tell Reed you’re showing ’em to anyone, OK? Just say you want to make sure they’re alright, OK?”

“Why? What’s up?”

“Nothing. Me and Reed Michaels just ain’t the best of friends, OK?”

Reed agreed. “Robby’ll fuck you,” he said, over breakfast at Tiny’s. “He fucks everybody.”

“Too bad. He really seems hot for my loops. Wants me to rent an hour on your machine.”

Reed’s coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth. “Did you tell him where I live?”

“No, not yet…”

“Dave, I’m gonna do you a big favor. I’ll find someone to buy your loops. Just stay away from Robby.”

x x x x x x

Reed Michaels’ apartment was a shrine to his Showchron flatbed editing machine. His other possessions were in boxes‌—‌for ease of relocation, should the need arise.

Watching the Showchron’s screen was Sam “Slam” Ellman, a cigar-chomping troll from Detroit with slicked, thinning hair in clumps that resembled tadpoles swimming toward his forehead. In future years, Ellman would purchase hundreds of my videotapes but today he wasn’t buying. “They’re too straight for me,” Ellman grunted as the tail of my last loop whisked off the screen. “There’s way too much straight stuff around right now.”

A crackdown on the extremes of the past few years was forcing producers to abandon kink. The Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977 wouldn’t become law until signed by President Jimmy Carter in February of 1978 but pornographers were already complying with its ban on using models under sixteen. The Mann Act (transporting minors across state lines for immoral purposes) was being amended to include males as well as females to combat “chicken” porn. Recent convictions of “pissers,” animal films and fist insertions gave vice cops new incentive to bust “specialties.”

“They’re going after anything that looks like it could actually injure someone,” Ellman said. “No more baseball bat insertions.”

Reed pitched a novelty he wanted to shoot. “This shop on Hollywood Boulevard has these rubber duckbills. Like what African natives do. They’re very realistic. Put ’em on some black girl, blend ’em in with some makeup, and who’s to know she ain’t some Ubangi fresh out of the bush? Picture the hum jobs (voice vibrations that heighten sensation during fellatio).”

When Ellman stopped laughing, he nixed the idea as too farfetched. “But you’re on the right track.”

x x x x x x

Chapter 4

BEHIND THE BULLETPROOF DOOR
Fall 1977

I left Reed’s place with no idea of what to do with my loops. Then I found that Robby had been leaving message after message on Ace’s answering machine. I called him back.

“Dave, I got a deal for you,” he said. “Do this one thing for me, and I’ll turn you on to a job. With the biggest distributor in town.”

The Showchron in Reed’s apartment had been Robby’s. He’d sold it to “Will” whom Reed shot for. When Will stopped making payments, Robby wanted to repossess the machine but didn’t know where it was. Until now. I saw no reason to feel any loyalty to Reed.

It was past 3 AM when I pointed out his apartment. In return, Robby put me in touch with S and L Distributors. He had been their shooter before quitting to go partners with Larry. S and L had the reverse of my problem: I couldn’t look up porn distributors in the Studio Directory and they couldn’t place help wanted ads in American Cinematographer. Applicants might be cops or informers. S and L had to wait for a shooter to come through their network of associates.

“You can’t get in the door without my recommendation,” Robby said, “and whatever you do, don’t ever try to screw these people. Don’t even think about it.”

x x x x x x

I’d never seen one like it. The glass door looked two inches thick. The silver coating on the inside reflected a blur of me clutching my film can. Was this the place? No sign identified the business within this grey building in North Hollywood’s industrial section. Four Cadillacs filled its front parking lot. I pushed the button, hearing no ring through the thick glass. I waited.

A big lock clacked. The door opened a few inches, as chains jangled. The small face of a bearded gnome peered out. “Yeah? What can I do for ya?”

I drew a breath. “I have an appointment with Tony. I was referred by Robby.”

The door closed. The lock clacked shut. Had I said it wrong? Should I find a phone, call in, and explain myself?

The lock clacked again. Fingers unhooked chains. The gnome pushed the door open. “Follow me.”

He led me through a hallway partitioned into three sections. The reason for the three doors, I’d learn later, was to slow down cops during a raid.

We entered a warehouse and passed racks of boxes stacked almost to the ceiling fans. I followed the gnome through a doorway into a large office, where I couldn’t help but stare.

Filling the center of the room was a rectangular table, piled high with rubber love dolls, film boxes, magazines featuring page-filling genitals, dildos, lotions, and contraptions that sucked, squeezed, pulled, prodded or trussed sensations out of human flesh. Around the display, men hunched over phones and order pads. In a corner beyond the central table, one of the ugliest men I’d ever seen rose from his desk. His border of stringy hair made his head look like some kind of root vegetable. “Da cocksuckah!” the man exclaimed. “His fuckin’ check bounced.”

“Whose check, Marv?” the gnome asked.

“Whatchamacallim… yer buddy, da guy from Philadelphia.”

“Oh, him.”

“Yeah. Dat guy.”

I’d find that Marv’s East Coast street accent (which I dubbed “3 D”‌—‌“dese,” “dem,” and “dose”) prevailed among pornographers. It was contagious; I’d later find myself lapsing into it.

The gnome turned to the other back corner. “Tony…” He gestured at me. “This guy here–” He halted when Tony raised a hand then punched a button on his phone. The gnome scurried off to a battered desk, leaving me standing with my film can.

Tony was almost good-looking but hard creases in his face made him seem like a cross between Al Pacino and a bloodhound. A grin pushed the creases up into his cheeks. Tony exclaimed into his phone, “Luca Brasi! Mah man! What’s happenin’, pal?”

Luca Brasi was a hit man in The Godfather. Was life imitating art?

Tony caught my glance. He hunkered down into his phone and lowered his voice. I looked away and saw a poster above his head. It was a well-drawn caricature of Tony behind bars, wearing stripes and waving a two-finger peace gesture. The sagging eyes fit the man below but the cheeks were full, as if someone had since then let the air out. Headlining the poster were the words, “Free Romano.”

Feeling out of place, I tried to memorize the names of items on the table so I could jot them into my journal later. There were phallic devices: The Avenger, Mule Crank, Wired Destroyer with Balls, Mr. Wonderful, Big Al, Twisty-Erecto, and a misshapen thing called Rasputin. There were Pocket Pussies and Pocket Assholes. Electro-Vibro Butt Plugs. European magazines that were “Ganz in Farben (printed in full color).” Vibrators and other “marital aids,” marketed under the pseudo-medical brand name Doc Johnson. Potions and lotions: Anal-Vaginal Glide in peach, grape, lemon and tutti-frutti. Bottles of Locker Room contained “the odors of a gymnasium after a hard workout.”

What kind of weirdos buy this stuff? Or sell it?

I reminded myself that I was no better than this crew. After all, I’d double-crossed Reed Michaels, a man who’d given me work, to get here.

Tony hung up the phone, rose and slouched past me without a greeting. Had he beckoned me to follow him? I did. We crossed the warehouse to a rectangular structure that filled a corner. About fifty feet by fifteen, it was constructed of two-by-fours and chicken wire, with cardboard for inside walls. I’d later call it “The Bullpen,” when it became my listening post on the world of porn.

Tony unlocked the door. I followed him in. On crude shelves were dusty film cans with titles scrawled on stained masking tape: Head Plunger, The Milkmaid, Teenage Fantasies. An Alpha Beta shopping cart held a Kodak Pageant projector aimed at a poster-board “screen” wedged between a pipe and a cinderblock wall. Quite a contrast to my chrome, leather and walnut studio in Grand Rapids. S and L Distributors didn’t have to impress clients.

Tony clicked on the lightwell of a standard editing table and said his first word to me. He was a man of few of them. “’Chromes.”

I pulled the 2-and-1/2-inch Ektachrome transparencies out of a manila envelope. Tony spread them over the frosted glass of the lightwell and peered at them through an Agvalupe magnifier. I braced myself for a bad review. Reed’s still photography was on par with his filmmaking skill. Blurred feet filled foregrounds. Elbows hid penetration. Bodies were decapitated. At least he got the come-shots, among them a “kisser” Robby would have been proud of.

Without comment, Tony pushed the ’chromes aside and pulled a Moviscop viewer between the table’s rewind arms. “Numbers.” I wished I’d been able to edit the loops but both Reed and Robby had said that if I did, distributors would assume they’d already been on the market.

Tony cranked through the loops so fast that pelvises were just a blur. He slowed for the faked DP, grunted, and cranked on. He finished and turned to me. “Whatcha want fer ’em?”

“Five-fifty each. But I’ll take five if I get the job too.”

Tony’s pale eyes narrowed. “Why do you want this job, Davey?”

I gave my spiel about burnout with industrial films and my need for a change. It sounded rehearsed. Did I seem like a cop?

Tony thought I had a different motive. “You’ll get tired of staring at pussy, Davey. Everybody does.”

He wanted to confer with his partner Marv. “Duke!” he called out, “Hey, Duke! … Anybody seen the Wizard?”

“He went out, Tony,” somebody shouted. “Cinderella called.”

Tony made a sound of disgust and said loudly, “Aww, that pussy-whipped, bald-headed chicken-fucker…” Laughs came from the warehouse. “Call me tomorrow, Davey,” he said.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Tony stalled me for a week. Finally, he called me in. “Marv was supposed to give me some money for the numbers before he left for New York,” Tony explained. “But he didn’t.” He handed me fifteen hundred-dollar bills. “This is comin’ out of my own pocket.”

With relief, I took the money. “I’m sure Marv has many things to think about. The detail probably got lost in the back of his mind.”

Tony made a sardonic little cupids-bow smile and murmured, as if to himself, “Lots of things get lost in that mind.”

I called Robby to tell him I got the job and to thank him.

“You’re gonna get an education, Davey,” he said, “like nothing you ever got at UCLA.”

x x x x x x

The word “mafia” means “refuge.” That’s exactly what S and L Distributors was for its rag-tag crew of refugees from social and legal problems. They laughed about the FBI calling S and L “the biggest Mafia porno outfit on the West Coast.” I was handed a “Mafia Application Form” (“For whatza wazza u inna de bigga ’ouse?” “U seeza de Godfather? Or justa de movie?”) to be signed “inna u blood.”

This “family” was an indulgent one. Employees stumbled in late, complained of hangovers, and fell asleep at their desks. Nailed for drunken driving? So what? So was Tony. Collection agencies dunning you? We’ll help you scam them.

All got in through friends or relatives (that fear of police informants). They had an “us versus them” attitude toward outsiders. I had just left the parking lot when a cop pulled me over and asked for my I.D. “So you work at S and L, Mr. Jennings,” he said. “What are you shooting these days?”

I said what Robby had instructed. “I’m not a shooter, Officer, I just work in the warehouse.”

These outlaws were egalitarian. At 5 o’clock, the whole crew‌—‌including Tony (but not Marv)‌—‌would lounge at the desks around the display table to drink beer, pass joints and trade jokes. If a floor were dirty, Tony himself would grab a broom. Marv had once been on a ladder, painting a ceiling, when police burst in. One looked up and demanded, “Who’re you?” “I’m‌—‌ I’m the painter,” Marv stammered. The cop jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get outta here!” Marv gladly obeyed.

Most of my fellow employees had one thing in common: failure. Phone salesman Ziggy, a short, strutting pouter-pigeon of a man, was an aspiring character actor. He constantly bemoaned the roles he “almost landed.” At the next desk, Jimmy tested his stand-up comedy jokes on customers: “Why do Mexicans have the lowest suicide rate? … Because it’s hard to kill yourself jumping out of basement windows.” “Did you hear about the Polack who was reported missing? … He put Odor-Eaters in his shoes and disappeared.”

Tall and handsome at 23, Jimmy wondered why his comic career wasn’t taking off. I could’ve told him his humor was too sophomoric but I didn’t want to alienate him‌—‌I did anyway: He had cornered Ziggy, jabbing him with a cattle prod. The battery-powered shaft, a hot seller on the gay S and M scene, gave a shock that felt lethal. Seeing me watching, Jimmy took an Errol Flynn stance in my direction. “Davey, you’re next.”

“Come at me with that thing,” I said, “and I’ll kick your balls off.” From then on, Jimmy kept his distance.

A florid, beefy fellow named Sandy laughed at all of Jimmy’s bad jokes. Though jovial and easy-going, Sandy had gotten his nickname, “The Sandman” because “I used to put people to sleep wit’ dis!” He’d hold up a solid fist. Sandy had owned massage parlors before being busted out of business. He was now a road rep for east coast accounts.

S and L’s general manager, Morry, was an unlikely ladies’ man. He was thickset and jowly, with grey-white hair like steel wool. His speech was dead-end Bronx. Yet he’d date up to a half-dozen women in a single weekend. He liked to orate his fantasized epitaph: “When I’m dead and in my grave, no more fucking will I crave, but on my tombstone can be seen: ‘Here lies a fucking machine.’” Tony explained Morry’s success: “He’s a professional cunt-sucker. He’s good. The word gets around.”

Morry was S and L’s most valuable employee. In a duplicitous business, he took pride in being scrupulously honest with his employers. Tony had nicknamed him “Dombrowski” and used him as a “straight man:” When Tony was long in the bathroom, Morry called out, “Whatcha doin’ in there, Tony? Havin’ lunch?” Tony retorted, “I’m makin’ yours, Dombrowse.”

Two of the crew were atypical: they had college degrees. Roger‌—‌the “gnome”‌—‌didn’t tell us why a man with a Masters and a taste for Vivaldi was selling Butt Plugs. And Phil the bookkeeper could never practice law again after his conviction for “attempting to defraud the city of Chicago.” (He avoided the details with “That’s history.”)

Most appreciative of his refuge was Jacky, the warehouse chief who floated on his toes, his dark eyes moving, as if perpetually sneaking up on someone. Working for a Florida massage parlor string, he’d stalled cops long enough for others to escape. Threatened with felonies, he’d refused to reveal who backed the operation. Soon, he’d been bailed out and was flying first class to L.A. and a new job at S and L. “That’s how this organization takes care of you,” Jacky said, his eyes shining.

But there were hints that this refuge was in trouble.

x x x x x x

Phil the bookkeeper acted more like a boss than an employee. In front of customers, he’d harangue Marv about unpaid bills. He had the only private office‌—‌and its only key. While the others drove last year’s Cadillacs, Phil arrived in a Bentley, Excalibur or Aston Martin. They dressed slob casual; Phil wore tailored suits. His silvering hair was expensively styled. Yet he made only $50 more a week than my three hundred.

Another puzzle: why were the partners together? They hated each other. Tony was waiting for Marv to die. Typical exchange: Tony, hurrying out the door with Marv exclaiming, “Romano, we gotta talk about dis!”

“Later, Duke. I’ll see ya later.”

“When?”

“I’ll probably see you at Forest Lawn!”

Time and again, Marv would grimace and sink into an available chair. People would tell me, “You know, Marv is a very sick man.” A boxing career had ravaged his face and alcohol his brain. Tony recalled their booze binges. “I’d get home at 3 in the morning, and a half-hour later Marv would call and want to discuss the evening, ’cuz he don’t remember a fuckin’ thing.”

Marv’s new sobriety hadn’t helped his memory. Employees tired of explaining things to him over and over. He’d want top dollar for a film he thought was a new hit; it was two years old. “Marv lets people run up big bills, then forgets to collect,” Ziggy complained. “Then they get busted and we can’t get a cent out of them.”

The brains of the company was Tony. He dickered with suppliers, determined mark-ups, tabbed inventories, and even designed the artwork of best-selling magazine series. I saw him put phones to each ear and close two deals at once. Everyone who dealt with S and L respected “The Italian Prince.”

The problem was that each partner cut his own deals without consulting the other. “If the company was all mine,” Tony said, “that bald-headed chicken-fucker wouldn’t get within ten miles of this place.”

I asked Tony why he didn’t split from Marv. His furrows fell further and he explained as much as he dared. “Davey, this ain’t like most businesses; most businesses are autonomous.”

“’Autominous?’” the Sandman interjected. “Listen to dis guy, usin’ words nobody knows. What’s ‘autominous’ mean, Tony?”

“Sandy, let’s say me and you start a company. It’s all ours, and it’s nobody’s business what we do. We’re autonomous. But say there’s a third party involved. Now we’re not autonomous, we’re connected.”

“Ah!” Sandy understood. The key word was “connected.” I knew better than to pry further.

Tony’s weapon against Marv was sarcasm. He’d hook a finger through a belt loop of the rumpled slacks hanging beneath Marv’s belly. “Hey, Duke, yer wearin’ yer shiny wino pants. What’s the occasion?” Marv’s ongoing dental surgery left his gums bleeding, so he walked around with a paper cup hanging from his lip. Tony got laughs by parading with his coffee mug clenched between his teeth.

Resigned to ridicule, Marv padded about the office in bedroom slippers and shirts missing buttons. Someone observed that he had no shame. “If you looked like Marv,” said Jimmy, “you wouldn’t have no shame either.”

“Not if ya wanted to be seen in public,” Tony cracked.

Marv’s revenge was to keep on breathing. Many blamed his fiancée for helping him do so. Anna was 24, blonde, and pretty in a big-boned way. The ex-hooker from Hawaii was the company’s titular president (for legal reasons). It seemed fitting at S and L that its highest-paid employee was also its least productive. When being polite, Tony called Anna “Cinderella.” Otherwise, he called her “The Douche-bag.”

Marv’s support came from the east coast. One day, a 3D visitor Marv was huddling with sneered and rasped, “How ya gettin’ along wit’ Tony Blue-Ice dese days?” The way he said “Blue Eyes” stuck in my mind.

That day I stayed late, editing my loops, so Tony could resell them later that night. We were the only ones in the building. Returning from the bathroom, I spied Tony in the sales office with his back turned. I crept up to the doorway and, in my best guttural imitation of Marv’s crony, I muttered, “Tony Blue-Ice…”

Tony whirled around with terror in his eyes. Taken aback, I could only stammer,

“I’m‌—‌ I’m sorry, Tony. I didn’t mean to… startle you.”

Tony’s jaw clenched. But all he said was “Davey, just finish them fuckin’ numbers, willya?”

x x x x x x

“Screen every movie in the place,” Tony ordered. He was “educatin’ Davey.” What seemed a pornophile’s fantasy soon became tedious‌—‌even with the shopping cart projector cranked up so bodies humped in double-time. In a week of watching 300-plus films, I saw Veri Knotty tie her elongated labia in a bow, Terri Hall and Jean Jennings (then 16) “fence” with a serpentine double-dong in Dueling Dildos, and chubby anal queen Candida Royalle‌—‌later a svelte “feminist sexvid” magnate‌—‌with her “backdoor open like the Holland Tunnel” (trailer narration) in The Analist.

I saw enough John Holmes to know the legendary stud had lied about being in only one boy-boy film. Roger the gnome wanted to know if a new loop had Holmes in it. We couldn’t tell whether one of the men fondling each other was Holmes until one sucked the other to a foot-long erection. “That’s Johnny Holmes alright,” Roger chirped, and hurried back to his phone.

I saw loops supposedly starring Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand, both just blurry enough to create uncertainty. Adult film historian Jim Holliday later identified “Barbra” as C.J. Laing, whose similar schnozz made her a dead-ringer in grainy 8s.

I saw the underground stag “classics”‌—‌poorly-shot and untitled‌—‌starring Jayne Mansfield and a young woman reported to be Marilyn Monroe. (Biographer James Hatfield, author of Young Marilyn, claimed the actress wasn’t Monroe but “Arlene Hunter.”) An athletic Mansfield romped with a stud on zebra-skin, and a pudgy, more passive Monroe (or Hunter) at least matched hardcore standards.

Box-cover blurbs in bizarre English seemed to be clumsy translations done by European pornographers. But a loop with a lead-in (opening “story” that leads into sex) at the Santa Monica Pier read “…at last the sucking girls hardly drown in a sea of sperm that the horse-cocked men blows into their exciting faces.”

“It’s so the customer thinks the number is European,” Morry explained. “They work hard on that weird English.”

A legitimate enterprise in Europe, loops were shot on sound stages, with professional crews, lavish sets and studio lighting. Germany’s “grandmother of porn,” athletic 60-year-old Beate Uhse, a former Luftwaffe pilot, said, “It is no longer good enough to have a film showing a couple locked in a motel room for two hours. Now you’ve got to have a story line and production values‌—‌exotic settings like a yacht on the Mediterranean or a castle on the Rhine.”

I put my education to use, changing a “he-she” (male pre-op transsexual) loop to “straight boy-girl.” I cut out shots of the he-she’s limp genitals and left enough anal for penetration needs. I cleaned the director’s “action” and “cut” instructions off the mag (magnetic sound) track of an atrocious boy-boy feature called Sins of Love, adding my own voice as narrator so the story made sense. Tony didn’t mind the Suzuki I recorded for the sounds of Harleys; he’d bought the film for $800. Now he felt he could sell it for $5,000.

My weirdest task was writing a synopsis of the underground “classic” Animal Lover for a Dutch client. “The guy’s too sharp for hype, Davey,” Tony said. “Just do a, uh, blow-by-blow description.”

I wrote: “After saying she prefers animals to humans, a plumpish Danish girl tries to kiss a pig‌—‌a big boar hog‌—‌on his jowls but he keeps moving his snout away and snuffling (probably thinking, ‘Yuck. Imagine, kissing a human’). Finally, she sucks the pig’s skinny pink penis. It wriggles like a worm. But the pig won’t fuck…”

Illegal all over America, Animal Lover was novel enough to have S and L’s entire jaded crew crowd into the bullpen.

x x x x x x

In the wake of the crackdown on the kink of the mid-’70s, L.A.’s police and pornographers had forged a truce: the LAPD wouldn’t bust porn manufacturers if they’d refrain from urination, defecation, bestiality, child sex, fist or foot insertions, flagellation with penetration, bondage with penetration, and shooting in L.A. County.

Among my duties was snagging “illegals”‌—‌some of which strained my vow to keep my eyes open, my mouth shut, my pen ready, and my judgment reflex off.

I learned that fingers could enter but not knuckles; if they did, you had a “fist-fuck.” The trick was determining the cut point. Daring directors “teased” with knuckles on the verge of entering. In the notorious Lesbian Orgy, you KNEW the whole hand went in, but the film cut to coy “soft” angles before knuckles disappeared.

Tony and I spent an hour on a Linda Lovelace loop, trying to decide how much of a foot entering her was “legal.” Toes only? Half of the ball but no more? We both agreed that Linda sitting on the foot and easing the heel inside had to go.

Shops in Chicago, New York and San Francisco still wanted the “hot” stuff. L.A.’s biggest volume loop manufacturer, Teddy Gaswirth, said, “I’m tempted to call my accounts and say, ‘I got this series with all these little kids in it’ and have ’em put in their orders pre-paid. Then they get their films and see all these baby goats running around.” Teddy and others now suffered a glut of “straight” product. “I’d never print more than two thousand of a number on a boy-girl series any more,” he said.

In a crowded business, S and L wasn’t efficient enough to prosper. The company was deeply in debt. I felt the results firsthand at a lab where I was to pick up prints. The receptionist treated me like a cockroach that had just crawled in. After an hour’s wait, I asked about the delay. “Everybody’s out to lunch,” she said. “They’ll be back sometime today.” I called Tony. “I can’t get anything done here. The whole fucking crew is gone.” I returned to S and L.

The lab’s owner wanted me to apologize for using foul language around their receptionist. “Tony,” I said, “people use that word down there a thousand times a day.”

Tony closed his eyes. “Just make the man happy, OK?”

I called to apologize, and the man said, “We’ve treated your company very well. We’ve bent over backwards to tide you over the rough spots…”

“Why didn’t you tell me we owed them from last leap year, Tony?” I said. “Then I would’ve understood.”

Later, I heard Tony on the phone, telling the receptionist, “Davey was too busy to wait for the prints. Why, he coulda been down there the whole fu‌—‌ the whole day.” Tony’s look at me said, “Don’t say it.”

My first paycheck bounced. But Marv pulled a roll of bills out of a baggy pocket and paid me from that. Neither partner dared leave a cushion in the company bank account for the other to siphon off. Suppliers arrived to get paid as I had.

For the first time in years, Tony didn’t go to the annual pornographers’ convention in New Orleans‌—‌creditors were there.

I felt like a waste of the company’s money. After taking care of the backlog of film work, I spent most of my time doing nothing. Tony wouldn’t let me help with shipping or run errands. But he couldn’t use me as he’d hoped.

“Duke, we gotta get into production.” Tony staged the arguments in the middle of the warehouse, so we all could hear. “Every piece of film we buy for $5 is money we’re wastin’. Say we buy 500 pieces; that’s enough money for us to shoot a series. Then we print up 3,000 of a number. That’s 18,000 pieces, Marv.”

Tony said we could sell them all. Phil the bookkeeper told me that volume meant $40,000 net profit. I could easily shoot two series a month (as Robby had in S and L’s early days).

It grated on Tony to hear Teddy Gaswirth boast of his “12 new series in the can” and how one of his 27 race horses “paid a $70 exacta last week.” Teddy drove a new Mercedes annually; Tony’s battered old 280 SL sat dormant in the warehouse.

So why wasn’t I out shooting? What was Marv’s problem?

Maybe Marv had a hidden agenda. As the company sank deeper, so did Tony. He drank heavily and would stumble into S and L late in the morning, his pale eyes red and watery. Marv‌—‌who now arrived with the sun‌—‌might bellow, “You cocksuckah! Where da fuck ya been?” He knew Tony’s head would be throbbing.

Ziggy (Tony’s “homeboy” from Boston) was concerned. “You don’t wanna be the one to die, do ya, pal?”

“Hey, I’m still a young man,” Tony croaked (he was 38). I heard the line again and again. It meant: have patience, when Marv is gone, we’ll prosper.

Maybe Marv didn’t mind going broke; he’d done it several times before. Yet he always surfaced at the head of another porn company. Why? People would shrug. “Connections.”

What entanglements had created this company’s situation? I didn’t dare ask questions. But soon someone would give me some answers.

x x x x x x

“If I hadn’t saved Marv’s life, I’d be a rich man today,” said Robby’s ex-partner Larry. We were at his hangout, Tony Roma’s in Beverly Hills, to discuss my shooting a loop series for him (with Tony’s consent). “But here I am, starting over, and Marv wants to have me killed.”

An unlikely hit candidate, Larry had a reputation for paying his bills, keeping his word, and refraining from rip-offs. Articulate, with bulging eyes behind gradient glasses, the Canadian émigré seemed more grad student than pornographer. His self-admitted flaw was talking too much (especially with his new shooter plying him with beer).

According to Larry, he and his girlfriend had started S and L (Sheila and Larry) Distributors, relying on a strong cash trade in Hawaii to capitalize themselves. An “east coast faction” wanted to penetrate the same market but didn’t know how. These New Yorkers offered to set Larry up in a huge operation. “Giant warehouse. Credit galore. Accounts I was having trouble collecting from would pay promptly. Labs that were screwing me would kiss my ass.” If he turned the offer down, they’d drive him out of business. “It was ‘the deal you can’t refuse.’” The catch was Larry would have to accept their man Marv as an equal partner. He agreed to.

“At first, things were great. We were turning numbers you wouldn’t believe. Every night we’d be out partying. I honestly believed Marv was like a brother to me.”

“So what happened?”

As Larry told it, Marv was dying of cirrhosis. His last whispered request was to see a hooker he’d known in Hawaii. Larry found the woman and paid her well to visit Marv. “His eyes lit up like he’d gone to heaven. Anna stuck around for a few days. That stretched into a week, then a few weeks, then a few months. Then Marv is up and walking around, and the doctors are saying it’s a miracle.”

Larry had been in Hawaii again, when he got some bad news. “Sheila called and said we’d been fired. I said, ‘How can we be fired? We’re half the partnership.’” But not on paper. “In those days, you didn’t want anything the cops could pin on you.” Larry didn’t dare fight back.

“So Marv screwed you. Why does he want to kill you too?”

Larry stared off. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

Larry’s ex-partner Robby‌—‌who had no reason to defend him‌—‌had a theory: “When Marv wants to screw someone, he needs a reason. So he dreams one up. Over time, he comes to believe the reason is true, because he forgets he invented it. Then he gets pissed and wants revenge.”

“Jesus.” I started getting worried. I was about to shoot for a man one boss wanted dead. If I didn’t, the other boss (who was “loaning” me in return for product) would be unhappy.

x x x x x x

Larry later told me how Tony and Marv got “hitched.” Tony’s company Starlight News had been highly successful. Then he suffered one of the worst busts in porno history. What the Feds didn’t take, the lawyers did. Tony was broke. His wife left him. He did prison time.

All he had left was a storage room containing $90,000 worth of hardcore magazines. Eager to get his hands on them, Marv offered Tony a partnership in S and L.

Then Marv learned that the IRS had seized the merchandise and he flew into a rage. By the time Tony could explain to Marv that a few thousand dollars would pay off the tax lien, his former partners had done so, getting the magazines and leaving Tony with nothing but Marv and S and L. Before the two could tear each other apart, another party stepped in, who thought the partnership was perfect: Marv provided loyalty to the back east organization, and Tony provided the brains to keep S and L going. Neither dared to disagree.

Larry was just about to reveal the party’s name when a waitress, hovering nearby, suddenly “tripped.” A dish of mayonnaise she was carrying landed in the lap of my best pants. Apologizing and promising to pay for the cleaning, she pawed at my crotch with a wet rag. I sent her off before she did more damage.

The waitress was the sister of Larry’s girlfriend. He took the hint. “If you work there long enough,” Larry said, “you’ll know who he is.”

x x x x x x

S and L’s “godfather” turned out to be Mickey Zaffarano, a caporegime in the Bonanno/Galante mob. He oversaw Cosa Nostra porno operations, mediating disputes between the familias. With a reputation for fairness and honesty, he brought a semblance of order to the rough world of Mafia porn. Without Zaffarano’s protection, independents such as the Mitchell brothers got chewed up by parasites; pirates beat the brothers to Miami, Dallas and Las Vegas with Behind the Green Door. After losing thousands on their next feature, the expensive Sodom and Gomorrah, the Mitchells met with Zaffarano, who bought advance distribution rights to Autobiography of a Flea.

The Mitchells liked Big Mickey. In the 1989 book Burning Desires by Steve Chapple and David Talbot, Artie Mitchell said, “All’s he wanted was maybe a girl down on her knees in the back of the limo in Las Vegas blowing him. He was a real gentleman.”

Zaffarano’s influence made S and L immune to the extortion ring that was busted in the 1977 Forex sting. Preying on the less “connected” porn companies, the gangsters made the mistake of demanding $20,000 from Teddy Gaswirth. The portly porn potentate, on good terms with both Zaffarano and local authorities, reported the extortion attempt to the police.

In the sting operation, the FBI set up Forex Distributing, stocked with product from Gaswirth and other extortees. The hoods took the bait, demanding $7,500 in “protection” money.

Indicted for conspiracy and extortion were Michael Rizzitello, Dominick Raffone, Thomas Ricciardi and future mob turncoat Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno. My quip, “They tried to step on the Gas, but it backfired,” was passed around the office.

x x x x x x

On this January evening at Tony Roma’s, I felt like a prized race horse. Larry was showing off his new shooter to Billy Kay, a young, fast-rising distributor from New York. Also gathered for dinner at the long table were Larry’s bleached-blonde girlfriend Sheila, S and L’s young salesman Jimmy, and my boss Tony. Away from Marv, he looked almost happy‌—‌maybe because he was already drunk. Earlier, he and Jimmy were at a comedy club, where Jimmy had sought an audition.

“This fat comic was really bombing, stinkin’ up the place,” Jimmy said. “So Tony walks right up on the stage and pisses on the guy. Audience fuckin’ loved it!”

Tony smiled. “The manager wanted to know if I could appear on a regular basis.”

As Tony attacked a hefty prime rib dinner, I saw a chance to compliment my boss. “Tony, how can you eat like that without gaining weight?”

The sagging eyes rolled in my direction. “You have your wife throw ya out, that’s how.”

Larry passed around a budget I’d typed up on a printed form left over from Michigan. The detailed, multi-page form was geared to impress agency clients; this porno crowd had never seen anything like it. “Davey’s got everything,” Larry said. “Black on black (currently outselling black on white loops), Oriental, anal, group scenes and huge tits.”

“How can you charge $675 a loop?” Billy sniffed. “In New York, we pay $500.”

Tony quelled all arguments when he pronounced my budget a good one. He also quelled my fear of Marv’s reaction to the upcoming shoot; Tony’s influence back east had squelched Marv’s hit contract on Larry.

I now felt a different kind of pressure. I was the new kid in town. This would be my first full series. So many things could go wrong. I numbed my angst with Rob Roys on Larry’s tab, thinking, “Eat, drink and be merry. Tomorrow…”

The shoot was a contrast of good and bad. It featured a sex fiend’s paradise, a successful directing experiment, a couple of porn legends and‌—‌as Larry said‌—‌some of the hottest action ever photographed. It produced my first business partner. But also, the shoot would almost ruin my reputation before I had a chance to make one.

Micki, the call-girl/agent, came through on her end of the bargain: she lined up cast and location in time for me to write lead-in scripts to fit both. The house where shooting would take place was custom-made for orgies. Used for films (such as the acclaimed Sex World), Rajneesh weekends, S and M “workshops” and swingers’ parties, it was on a hillside too steep for voyeurs who weren’t rock climbers. Visitors entered on the upper level and found a casual Northern California ambience of hardwood floors, a wood stove, hanging plants, and semi-antique furniture. Those admitted downstairs saw a different setting: Stockinged feet (no shoes allowed) sank deep into a tan carpet that covered two inches of foam rubber. An alcove off the living room was an elevated stage, covered with the same rug-and-rubber cushioning. Heavy beams held spotlights with brackets for colored gels. Studding the beams were hooks and pulleys for supporting chains, straps and other “restraints.”

Beneath a mirrored ceiling, an enormous playground of a bed filled most of an airy bedroom that opened to a hot tub with a raisable hammock slung over it. Fat, colorful pillows lay everywhere. Closets held “toys,” lotions, and more towels than the Oakland Raiders’ locker room.

The owner was a pleasant little satyr with goatee and gleaming eyes, who looked younger than 53. Joe Loveland was a professional musician, a sex hobbyist, a secret investor in porn films and a gracious host. He suggested we abandon the Motel 6 and spend the entire weekend at his home.

My two assistants had never crewed on a porno. Darryl, the still photographer, was established in the advertising world.

Mike Ranger (comforting to have ready if a stud failed) wanted to learn what went on behind the camera.

The first day would rate a grade of C-plus. Tina Wong, veteran of Beyond Shame, Teeny Buns, China Sisters and A Formal Fawcett, was cold, if compliant, giving no more than demanded. I had to remind her to put her gum aside before shots. I wondered how a man as bored as thin sexual automaton Jon Martin could get an erection. Their perfunctory massage table performance was interrupted by a power failure; Mike had put all the lights on one circuit. All Martin could manage after the delay was a “dribbler.”

The next models got lost, called for directions, and got lost again in the ten miles from Oakland. They arrived belligerent, blaming us for poor directions. Buxom Desiree West, “the Black Panther porn star” (she really did belong to that radical political group), had to suck her boyfriend Dashiell hard for every shot; he kept losing his erection. Better with punches than penis, he practiced Kung Fu during breaks.

Sucking Dashiell for the come-shot, Desiree warned, “Better not let a drop of that shit land on my face.”

“Take it on the tits, then.” I wanted to feature them anyway. It was another dribbler.

If I’d said, “No periods”, Micki would have replaced herself. But I hadn’t. And she was flowing. There was to be anal sex, so I said, “Let’s do it all that way.”

“I’ll need $25 more, then,” Micki said.

“You never told me your period was coming.”

We dickered; we compromised: $12.50 extra‌—‌enough to satisfy Micki’s down-to-the-penny ethic. Her partner, a big dumb hunk of a garbageman, was too huge for comfort. (Why did she always cast herself with these behemoths?) With rump upthrust to keep the flow in, Micki grunted in stoic “passion.”

“Ol’ Micki’s a real trouper,” said Mike.

Seeing my disappointment in the day, Micki assured me that “the best people are coming tomorrow.”

x x x x x x

The hottest loop of the shoot happened that way because I wasn’t there to plan it. My hands were in a black changing bag, fumbling with a cantankerous camera magazine, when the three models arrived. And a last-minute innovation I’d concocted the night before proved valuable. Worried about choreographing group scenes, I’d sketched figures in sex positions on posterboards, hoping pictures would be worth more than a thousand stammered words. Still preoccupied with loading the magazine, I told the three models to choose the pictures of positions they wanted to perform and arrange them in a sequence.

Despite taunts of “Hey… sexy!” “Whatcha want for ’em, Leonardo?” the trio huddled over the drawings. By the time I fixed the magazine, the models had positions lined up in order along the wall opposite the couch they would work on.

The impish veteran Don Fernando quarterbacked their frenzied scrimmage. His receiver was leggy, dreamy-eyed Dorothy LeMay, a legend-to-be for her performance in the 1981 porn cult hit Nightdreams. Her husband Flip, a thin, quiet man, let Fernando call the plays.

Freed of depending upon director’s instructions, the three models built a momentum not often seen in start-and-stop loop gymnastics. After they’d completed their cue-card positions, their frenzy carried them through several more. For the first time, I saw the “Fernando plunge.” He’d pull out and plunge back in, watching the action in a carefully-placed mirror. With a cock stuffed in her cheek like a wad of tobacco, Dorothy entered a new realm. Her eyes rolled up‌—‌lids fluttering‌—‌looking inward to some fantasy world. (I wanted to call the loop “The Girl with the Exorcist Eyes.”)

The two men were so pumped up that their ejaculations were long-range artillery shots. After I stopped the camera, the set stayed silent; we knew we’d witnessed a “Hall of Famer.”

The toughest scene was the last, complicated by two men who hated each other. The reason was Kenny the Agent. Considering Jesse Adams no longer reliable, Kenny had booted him out and replaced him as “house stud” with Mike Ranger. (John Seeman, one of the dozen or so men hogging all the work, told me Mike was on the verge of joining that group.) Micki and Kellee didn’t ease the tension. Giddy on Quaaludes, they chortled over the cue cards. (“Hey, Mr. Director, got one of me with 3 balls?”)

Guessing that Mike would show off to make Jesse look bad, I paired him with the prettier Kellee, hoping Micki and Jesse‌—‌two tired old pros on the way out‌—‌would provide cutaways.

I guessed right. Mike took Kellee into standing doggy, jackknifed so her long torso almost paralleled her legs. “All I’ve been doing is sitting around all day!” she shrieked, “I’m horny!” Feet spread for balance, Mike stood on the bed, thrusting into his doubled-over partner. He decided to show off his strength as well as his tumescence and began lifting her off the bed, tossing her like an impaled rag doll. Kellee’s legs flew up and scissored Mike’s waist. She screamed like a kid on a roller-coaster, laughing and mugging at the camera.

“We have to get serious,” I ordered.

“Serious?” Kellee squeaked, upside down with mascara running down her forehead. “How the fuck do you get serious in a position like this?”

Mike got serious enough to deliver his “money shot” on Kellee’s cheek. Then it was Jesse’s turn to come. He pounded away in missionary, with Micki putting on a show of snorting, panting and moaning. Feeling patronized, Jesse sent everyone into laughter again with “Yell when you’re gonna come.”

He wanted some help. “Could I get some head from Kellee?”

“Sure,” she said.

I had an idea. “Jesse, would it help if Kellee stood in for Micki in missionary too?”

“I think so.” In case Micki felt insulted, he added, “It’s hard for me to come with a girl having her period.”

Jesse spewed what seemed a gallon; he hadn’t been working much.

Later, Mike said he thought Jesse was out of line for requesting Kellee’s help. I had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Mike asked.

“Kellee’s a hired model, Mike. She wasn’t your date. I’m the director. It’s my decision who goes with whom.”

Mike smiled slowly. “Yeah,” he said, “this business can sometimes play tricks with your head.”

It had a big one in store for mine.

x x x x x x

I felt the hand on the nape of my neck and knew who it belonged to. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite Mexican bandido, Mano,”‌—‌the hand left immediately‌—‌“I mean Manny.” I swivelled on my editing stool to face a dark, trim man with an alert, parrot face. I gestured toward a chair, “Sientese your butt, por favor.”

When I’d met Manny, he offered me “a lot of money” if I’d dance nude on a table. I took no offense at his chirpy propositions. He was one of Tony’s pals‌—‌and a prospective shooting client, even though he dealt in gay films. (When working for Telsman, I’d found shooting boy-boy action no different from shooting boy-girl.) Manny made a disturbing statement: “They say you’re not a good shooter.”

“Who says that?” I suspected Reed Michaels.

But Manny showed me an 8-millimeter print of one of the loops I’d shot for Larry. It was muddy and greenish. “The lab says it’s a bad original,” Manny said.

Fortunately, I still had the film trims from editing the series. Manny peered at them through the Agvalupe. “It’s bullshit,” he said. “They’re feeding Larry a line of bullshit.”

The lab might also feed any print runs Larry rejected to “dupers” (film pirates). Manny explained the scam: the lab processes its top priority work first, when the “soup” (chemical batch) is fresh. Small‌—‌or “unconnected”‌—‌clients like Larry are last in line‌—‌when the soup’s gone sour. These clients feel they have to accept dull, off-color prints unless they’re so bad that even the dupers would reject them.

Why wouldn’t Larry use a different lab? “They’ll all ‘backdoor’ you,” Manny said. “This is the only place that’ll give him credit.”

These shoddy labs owed their existence to the LAPD. Shooting for Telsman in 1971, I’d opened an account with that respected giant, Consolidated Film Industries, and got beautiful XXX-rated images. Then Ad Vice paid CFI a visit. The lab dropped me, and I was back to green shadows and rust-colored reds from a dump the cops ignored. No wonder pornographers suspected a Hollywood conspiracy against them. Ad Vice spokesman Captain Jack Wilson ignored the police role in driving porn into the hands of criminals when he said in 1975 that the Mafia forced certain producers to use mob-run labs if they wanted their films distributed nationally.

Bad processing alone wouldn’t have doomed Larry’s series; bad box cover shots did. Darryl, the still photographer, had pocketed the money I’d advanced him for film stock, using outdoor film left over from a ski race. He’d filtered his lens, figuring the end result would be the same. It wasn’t. His shots were under-exposed (especially in the Desiree/Dashiell loop: two blacks against dark wood).

“The word is getting around,” gloated Larry’s enemy Marv. “It’s a shit series.”

I felt horrible. I needed to redeem myself. “I want to take everything I’ve learned, and shoot three well-made loops,” I told Tony. “But I won’t do it without your approval. You’ll have right of first refusal, of course.”

Tony nodded. “To be a good shooter, you’ve got to shoot, Davey. If it’s in L.A., don’t tell nobody‌—‌me included.”

x x x x x x

Taking the risk of shooting in my own Van Nuys apartment allowed me a full week to prepare the sets. The living room, bedroom and bathroom would each have lights in place, wall outlets marked with circuit numbers, and two jars of Albolene Cream. The dining room table held everything from gaffer’s gloves to position-drawing placards. One corner was piled high with extra power cables. My own “Murphy’s Law”: WHAT BREAKS IS WHAT YOU HAVE NO BACKUP FOR.

Kenny the Agent, who’d shot many magazine spreads with his Hasselblad, would do stills, motivating him to put effort into the casting. I wanted women who weren’t used enough yet to be jaded. No tired hooker types. They’d have to be attractive and clean, with hair nicely done, and arrive with any feminine equipment they’d need. I emphasized to Kenny that these were to be my showcase loops; if the model didn’t meet my standards, I wouldn’t hesitate to cancel.

Kenny must’ve listened: Deedee made me forget my disappointment that Gayle Monica wasn’t available. The lissome 18-year-old inner-city high school dropout was pretty enough for the high fashion modeling she aspired to. Like most new models, she was nervous, sexually adventurous, and eager to please. And naive enough to think hardcore stills would be useful in her “straight” portfolio. When I said I’d call the loop “A Taste of Brown Sugar”, she responded, “Awwriight!”

Working with Deedee was Ric Lutze, a veteran from the Telsman days. When I told the old pro I wanted the lead-in to be erotic and sensual, he said, “Yeah, I know: kissee kissee, feelie feelie, sucky sucky, fucky fucky.”

I followed the notes I’d reviewed with Tony. Deedee had a nice ass: LOTS OF DOGGY POSITION. She had a pretty face: FEATURE COCKSUCKING AND REACTION SHOTS. The loop went well. Ric was pleased by the lack of delays. “When you keep stopping and starting, the pre-ejaculatory fluid backs up. Then when you finally come, it’s painful.”

Deedee was wide-eyed. “Geez. Are you putting us on?”

“My dear,” said Ric, “you have much to learn. Why, you probably haven’t even been fist-fucked yet.”

“Do people actually do that?”

“Sure,” I said, in a joking mood. “Lemme show you.” I pretended I was about to demonstrate on her. Instead of giggling and recoiling, she thrust her crotch forward in anticipation. All talk ceased. I backed off, “Just kidding.”

Ric was staring. Deedee’s response had made him erect again. “I can do another wet shot,” he said. And he did.

“A Hall of Famer!” I exclaimed. Ric, the old pro, had heard it all before but Deedee basked in the praise.

My luck held. The stars of the mid-day girl-girl loop were at that right stage: experienced but not burned out. Jo wore a silver, winged cock-and-balls pendant. She lived with her boyfriend, a Harley and a go-cart that could go 80. I facetiously suggested shooting sex on the cart; Jo said she’d work on it.

Janine and her husband were swingers who “hid nothing” from their three young children. She also taught yoga.

USE ANY TALENTS THE MODELS HAVE. IN GIRL-GIRL, YOU’RE FREE FROM THE TYRANNY OF ERECTIONS SO YOU CAN PUT THEIR BODIES IN CONTORTIONS YOU CAN’T DO IN BOY-GIRL.

Sexually frustrated, Ace watched the ladies’ nude bodies gyrate on the bathroom counter-top. He made a remark and their carefully-crafted pose collapsed like a house of cards. “That set us back ten minutes,” said Kenny the Agent.

I liked the way Kenny thought, even if he did put his hands all over the ladies, forget to bring his light meter but not his beer, and limit his directions to “C’mon, honey. Expression.”

Kenny had followed my rule to MAKE SURE MODELS ARE COMPATIBLE BEFORE PUTTING THEM TOGETHER. “Mike Ranger is the only man who can really make me come in sex films,” said Jo.

Mike’s ejaculation was voluminous but Kenny wanted even more in his still shot of the semen glistening on the ladies’ bodies. So he dribbled some “come-shot helper”‌—‌Tame Creme Rinse with a dash of water‌—‌into the ejaculate, from which Kenny’s concoction was indistinguishable. He also suggested removing the clock from a dresser beside the bed. “If they know how quickly you shot the loop, they’ll want to pay you less.” It pays to hire experts.

x x x x x x

Tony, Larry and Robby were all too broke to buy my well-made loops. Teddy Gaswirth didn’t need any new numbers but he asked me to bring them to his Van Nuys headquarters anyway.

At first, I thought the young (about my age) Israeli peering over my shoulder at the Moviscop was one of Teddy’s employees. But Charlie Brickman was already established as the manufacturer of the popular Diamond Collection line. I didn’t know why Teddy would let a competitor peruse new numbers at his place. The porn business was a complicated entwining of alliances. Charlie liked what he saw; we settled on $600 a loop.

At Charlie’s garage-sized warehouse, I met a valuable future client. Charlie’s partner Jerome Tanner, a short, good-looking Israeli in his 30s, would later become one of the kings of adult video.

I’d made $654 net profit on the loops, more than two weeks’ pay at S and L. I was tempted to shoot again, but I knew my employers wouldn’t want me creating more product for competitors unless they asked me to.

An after-hours conversation at S and L dissuaded me from doing anything that might make my bosses unhappy. An associate of Marv’s had been shot and he was keeping his ear to the radio. The talk in the office turned to hit victims. I was surprised at how casually they were discussed.

The most well-publicized had been Jack Molinas, former Columbia University basketball star, convicted basketball point-shaver, disbarred lawyer (like Phil the bookkeeper) and pornographer. He’d been gunned down in the backyard of his sumptuous Hollywood Hills home. According to LAPD Chief Ed Davis, Molinas “owed a quarter of a million dollars to an organized crime-controlled (film) processing facility specializing in obscene materials.”

“Molinas thought he could get away with lettin’ the debt slide,” said Morry. “He thought he was too big to get hit.”

“Anybody can get hit,” the Sandman added. “At one time, YOU were supposed to get it, Marv.”

Marv scratched his belly. “ME?”

Morry gave a dry chuckle. “See? They’re always the last to know.”

I would soon be too busy for any kind of shooting, freelance or otherwise. Marv walked into the bullpen and made the declaration that would determine destinies: “Dave, we’re going into Betamax.”

x x x x x x

Chapter 5

“DIS VIDEO THING”
Spring 1978

“Davey, keep that fuckin’ door locked at all times!”

Tony didn’t want visitors entering the bullpen and finding four Betamax VCRs knocking off rival TVX’s best features: Count the Ways, Marriage and Other Four Letter Words, The Journey of O, The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street, Deep Throat, and The Devil In Miss Jones.

Uneasy with the piracy, I asked Tony, “Can you get in trouble for doing this?”

“Only if you get caught, Davey.”

Side by side in the bullpen, we stuck counterfeit black and white, crack-and-peel TVX labels on cassette boxes. “My packaging is better than his,” Tony said. (Pirates often rationalize that they’re improving on the product they’re duping.) “He don’t bring the cellophane all the way around the spine like we do.” “He” was Dave Friedman, president of TVX, Inc., adult video’s early leader with the biggest 35-millimeter features.

The fledgling home video industry wasn’t yet big enough for the major studios to release their titles on tape; pornography led the way. According to Video magazine, a pioneer publication in this new market, almost 70% of pre-recorded tapes sold in 1977-1978 were X-rated. Mark-ups were huge: a blank that cost $14 would be worth $55 wholesale with sex recorded on it. Those who could afford the $1,200 VCRs paid $100 a tape retail, for the novelty of Marilyn Chambers performing in their bedrooms.

“In five years, Davey, there won’t be no more 8s,” Tony said. “Just video.” Determined to get into the market, he had neither funds nor titles to compete with the likes of Mitchell Brothers Home Video, Astronics, or The Wonderful World of Video, Inc. Marv was no help. “If ya wanna mess wit’ dis video thing, Tony, you do it on yer own money,” he said. “I don’t see it goin’ no place. It’s just too easy to dupe. Everybody’ll be knockin’ off everybody and we’ll all get fucked in da ass.”

Besides piracy, Tony used his VCRs for copying “special” tapes for associates. When he ran the recorders with the TV off, he wanted no one to turn it on. Once, when he was away, I turned the set on out of curiosity and saw a woman rolling with a collie. There was no sound; an audio cable had come loose. I re-plugged the cable, rewound the tapes, and started the recording anew, making sure both picture and sound were there. When I told Tony what I’d done, he gave me a sour look. “I don’t appreciate that, Davey.”

x x x x x x

I began to believe in Tony’s vision. “Remember the magic words, Davey,” he’d say. “‘Home entertainment.’ That’s the future.” Knowing we were at the start of something big, I decided to watch‌—‌and learn from‌—‌The Italian Prince. He was no mentor; he’d spend hours working beside me without saying a word. One time, he tried to explain his silences. “A couple years ago, you would’ve seen a different Tony Romano,” he said. “I was a lot more upbeat, a lot more fulla shit, y’know?”

“Don’t worry, Tony,” I said, “you’re still full of shit.”

I expected him to chuckle. Instead he clammed up. Surely, I thought, he couldn’t have taken my remark seriously‌—‌not with all the rough banter slung at S and L.

Another time, he interrupted a long silence with “Davey, what do you think of life?”

“Oh, I dunno,” I answered carefully, “it has its ups and downs… what do you think of life, Tony?”

“I think it sucks.”

I turned to look at him. “Why?”

“It just does, that’s all.”

Ziggy and Larry blamed Tony’s depression on his estranged wife. In her early 30s, Claudia was tan, trim and stylish, one of those blonde Italians with cheekbones out of Vogue ads. When she’d prance into S and L to get money for things like “our daughter’s school clothes,” it was as if all the lines in Tony’s face were responding to a magnet held over his head. When she’d prance back out, the magnet lost its hold.

Claudia kept saying the time wasn’t right yet for them to get back together. Tony knew when it would be: when he was making piles of money again. He, too, measured a man’s worth by his ability to earn wealth. When he proved he could still do that, maybe he’d deserve Claudia back again.

I found out where Tony’s money worship came from at an impromptu office birthday party for him in March. He called his father in Boston, then passed the phone around for others to say hello. I treated the father of the Italian Prince with the respect due a Don Corleone. Tony was so pleased, he hugged me and kissed me full on the mouth. I felt like I was in a Godfather parody. Later, Ziggy told me the Romanos had always been dirt poor.

Tony volunteered nothing of his history, but didn’t balk at answering my questions. He’d been smart enough to be put ahead a grade in grammar school, yet he was a high school dropout. “I became a hoodlum,” he said. “I got in some trouble with the law and had to take a straight job.” His “straight job” was in a porno bookstore. “I looked at the shit they were selling and decided I could produce better.”

In his company’s heyday, there were $500 dinner tabs, vacations on the French Riviera, limousines on birthdays, Hermès handbags for his wife, and private schools for his daughter.

Now the grandeur was gone, except for reminders like Tony’s Cartier watch and his knowledge of French (which he used in designing the popular Je T’aime, Je T’aime [I Love You, I Love You] magazine series).

All he’d say about his legal disaster was “Five years in court. Five years of being broke. Five years of gettin’ fucked.”

One afternoon, I found on Tony’s desk a newspaper clipping about a raid on a Boston distributor; the cops had confiscated everything in the company’s warehouse. “I thought they could only take three of a number‌—‌enough for evidence,” I said.

On Tony’s face was a look of resignation I’d see again and again in the faces of career pornographers. “They can do whatever they want to, Davey.”

x x x x x x

Starting their VCX (Video Cassette X-rated) line with the few low-buck features S and L owned, how did Tony and Marv become the world’s biggest pre-1980 manufacturers of video movies? I watched Tony make it happen. Eventually, what I learned would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to me, when I too started a video line with little more than pocket change for working capital.

As Tony’s “voice” (my diction was better than his Boston street accent for dealing with “techies”), I called electronics suppliers, seeking the cheapest way to set up an expandable video duplication studio. Puzzling over phrases like “the head servo is driven by the ramp sampling taken from the op amp,” my boss and I entered a Brave New World of BNC connectors, XLR plugs, flying erase heads, signal-to-noise ratios, wave-form monitors, chroma levels, and sync generators.

I learned the value of porn in barter. With perspiration fogging his thick glasses, the fat videographer I dubbed “The Horned Owl” charged only $90 (going rate: $200) to transfer our films to 3/4-inch videocassettes; he ran an extra Beta copy for his private collection. The manager of an electronics supply house gave us distributor prices that saved us thousands. He bought VCX tapes at $35 each “for my friends.” (It’s always for friends, relatives, etc. Nobody admits to buying porn for themselves.)

The most effective use of S and L’s lures came in landing “Neanderthal Man.” As the duplication system grew beyond a dozen Beta and VHS dubbers, it became a maintenance nightmare. Switchers shorted out, cables pulled loose, heads clogged, belts broke. Adding a dubber, monitor, switcher or distribution amp meant hours of fiddling, head-scratching and cursing over why the damn thing didn’t work. The shop that sent Neanderthal Man to fix things charged over $100 for even the briefest of his visits.

Neanderthal Man was thick, furry and fierce. He quenched his anger at the world through drugs and beer (Tony made sure the ’fridge was well-stocked before his visits). He was especially fond of “poppers,” vials of amyl nitrate popular among gay orgiasts for enhancing orgasm. When crushed and inhaled deeply, poppers gave a heart-thumping “rush.” Flashing his evil grin, Neanderthal Man described romping through Magic Mountain amusement park with his biker “bros,” shoving amyl nitrate-soaked rags under people’s noses, sending them staggering.

He found that S and L’s little brown bottles of Locker Room held a similar rush. Ostensibly for the purpose of providing the odor of a men’s gymnasium, Locker Room, which contained the not-yet-illegal butyl nitrate, was actually used by its customers for the same kind of kick that the illegal poppers gave. Neanderthal Man’s visits became “freelance”‌—‌$35 plus video parts. I always slipped him a couple bottles.

Marv, of course, was the biggest threat to Tony’s tight allocation of video funds. Now fully committed to the taping operation, Marv found we could get tapes for $11 each from Panasonic (we were paying $14) if we bought 2,000 pieces. He put in an order.

“Duke, that’s over twenty thousand dollars COD,” Tony protested. “Even if we could scrape up the money, we’d have no bucks left to run the shop. We gonna close up?” The order went unclaimed.

When we were short of blank tapes, Marv wanted to peel off the labels of finished Winnebango cassettes and dub over the show with Bad Black Beulah, which he needed to fill an order. “Why don’t we send someone to pick up tapes?” I asked.

“Dat takes money.”

I pointed out the waste of previous machine time, labor and labels. “We’ll need Winnebango soon, anyway.”

Marv thought for a moment, then reached into his pocket. “OK, go down to Muntz and get a case.” He peeled off $150. “Wait a minute–” He peeled off another $150. “Get two whatchamacallits‌—‌ get two boxes.” Hundreds of dollars in his pocket, and he wanted me to waste a full day’s work.

x x x x x x

Unlike Marv, who never planned beyond immediate needs, Tony was following a long-range plan. He began by buying video rights to as many 16-millimeter hour-long features as he could afford. Paying a few thousand per film instead of the standard $10 per cassette royalties for the big-budget 35s, he accumulated quantity instead of quality. “He’s nuts,” said Robby. “All they’re gonna want is the big features. He’ll die with that 16 shit.”

Instead, Tony flourished. He released the best of his new films first, to build as good a reputation for the line as possible. Of these, Teenage Fantasies became the best seller. Its format was tailor-made for television. After sucking a penis to orgasm again and again between the loops about adolescent sex experiences that comprised Teenage Fantasies, sweet-faced Rene Bond says into the camera, “Think I can make it come again? Betcha I can…” With a bedroom’s TV screen a few feet away, a viewer could easily imagine the fortunate penis to be his. (I later copied the idea in Teenage Playmates.)

Marv contributed to VCX’s growing catalog by pirating some of Steve Scott’s early boy-boy films. Later acclaimed for his Harry Reems/Ginger Lynn hit Trashy Lady, Scott was then a small independent without recourse against a Mafia-backed bully. “Maybe the reason Marv never dies is they don’t want him in Hell or Heaven or Purgatory,” the sharp-tongued little gay remarked. “Maybe he’s doomed to live forever like some sick old vampire, until someone finally puts a dildo through his heart.”

Tony’s next move seemed needlessly extravagant. VCX became the first adult video company to package its tapes in full-color laminated boxes. If a film’s producer didn’t give us a one-sheet (poster) for the cover picture, I’d snip an appropriate frame (no nudity) from the film, splice the print back together, and return it with no mention of the damage done. For one gay film, Tony pirated a naked male torso from a Calvin Klein magazine ad.

I had the damndest time writing back-of-the-box synopses for such epics as Wet Wilderness in which sex occurred at the demand of a masked maniac waving a machete. Then, the inevitable reefer made the rounds. I was trying to explain the influence of pot on my prose. “After a couple tokes of weed, I find myself writing with less artifice and more… more…”

“Orifice,” said Tony.

In these early days of home video, the big question customers asked was, “How’s the quality?” For good reason: some manufacturers dubbed from Beta and VHS masters instead of the 3/4-inch professional standard. Some sold 6th-generation knock-offs. The respected Caballero still transferred off a movie screen with a single-tube industrial video camera. Tony wanted better film transfers than The Horned Owl gave us, and here I made my biggest contribution to VCX.

One of the best film chains (transfer units) was at Compact Video’s tall, sleek building in Burbank. I wondered if the fast-growing young company was too new to know about how the LAPD harassed production facilities doing porn.

“They’ll never take our work,” Tony scoffed.

“Won’t hurt to ask. Worst they can do is say ‘no.’”

They did‌—‌despite my conservative-hip, Midwest media man image of tan slacks, checked sport-coat, Florsheims, and monogrammed leather briefcase. They couldn’t risk offending such stellar clients as Disney, Paramount, and Donny and Marie Osmond. “Too bad we can’t work something out,” I said. “We have almost 100 full-length features ready to go immediately (a lie‌—‌at that time). And we’re willing to work on a COD cash basis…”

The eyes behind the desk widened.

Tony was surprised when Compact agreed to do VCX transfers on the graveyard shift.

Despite Compact’s superb 24-hour buffet (I learned to go there on an empty stomach), the place gave me fits. The late-night apprentice telecine operator would get so transfixed by the image on the screen that he’d let labia go green. To keep VCX videos literally in the pink, I had to keep reminding him, “Flesh tones, Bill. Flesh tones.”

That was the least of my problems there. During transfers, the studio would fill up with men who seemed to materialize out of the glowing walnut paneling. “We get engineers in here we didn’t know we had,” said Bill.

“How do they know what’s going on in telecine?” I asked.

“They punch up the router.”

“The router? What’s that?”

I was horrified to learn that the router was like a channel switcher that let those with access to it monitor what was running in every one of the tall building’s studios. They could also copy what they saw. I didn’t need to confer with Tony before demanding that our shows be kept off the router. The engineers, of course, resented my move. Many joined with the factions at Compact who wanted VCX ousted. I learned to tread carefully; the “resident pornographer” couldn’t demand the same treatment as other clients.

I tolerated getting “bumped” from my scheduled session if another client came in with a rush job. Remarks from technicians that would send “straight” clients raging to management, I ignored‌—‌up to a point. A tape vault flunky was dollying a stack of masters out to my car when he declared that for him to work in pornography, he’d need a much higher salary than mine. I was about to shrug off his statement when I thought, wait a minute, the vault guy? “Well, Smitty,” I replied. “I guess that just makes you a bigger whore than I am.”

x x x x x x

The value of putting video profits into expensive quality, expensive packaging and cheap titles became clear when Tony began to advertise where porn had never been: in electronics trade publications like Merchandiser, Dealerscope, and Electronics Wholesaler. He knew that new VCR owners would look for movies where they bought their machines.

If you sold VCRs in your store, you’d hear buyers ask in hushed tones where to get X-rated tapes. You’d see a full-page color ad in a trade magazine featuring attractive cassette boxes tame enough for you to display. You’d send for the catalog and be impressed by the number of titles listed. Calling the 800 line, you’d order Deep Throat, The Devil In Miss Jones, and a few other titles the order taker suggested. When you put one of the tapes into a VCR, you’d be amazed at the quality. Soon, you’d be relying on VCX for your adult video needs.

During five days of June, 1978, this new video retailer market made my bosses rich. VCX was the first adult video company to exhibit at the annual Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where Tony installed his infamous “black booth.” Behind a black veil, scenes from VCX movies ran continuously. It didn’t matter that The Partridge Family showed more skin than the tame show tape; crowds of retailers, lured by the promise of lascivious delights behind that black veil, jostled for a peek. Like rubes at a carnival, they went into a buying frenzy. Orders piled up.

Tony returned from Chicago with a smile usually reserved for his wife Claudia. Marv’s smile was more forced; he’d bought new shoes for the show and five days of standing made his feet swell like ballpark hotdogs. Tony shot him a cupid’s-bow grin. “Now you can afford better shoes, Duke.”

“I hear da show made youse guys millionaires,” said a 3D visitor.

“No doubt about that!” Tony confirmed.

There were orders for over 180 thousand tapes. Our dubbing capacity at the time was 2,000 tapes a month.

Forgetting his initial objections, Marv gushed, “Who woulda thought dis video thing would ever be so big?” He turned to me. “I guess you’ll be workin’ seven in da mornin’ ’til midnight from now on!” He expected me to be thrilled.

x x x x x x

With money pouring in from the “small” titles, Tony set out to land rights to the “big” ones. He began with the two best-selling pornos of all time: Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones. No longer would VCX be one of the many companies selling shoddy dupes of the hits; as the official manufacturer of DT and DMJ, VCX could strike pristine video masters from fresh prints and pressure other companies to cease dubbing and selling the titles.

The producers of the two films, the tough Peraino clan‌—‌whom Harry Reems described as “having no socially redeeming value”‌—‌were quarreling. My bosses saw an opportunity. They flew to New York, then returned with exclusive video rights to the films and new 35-millimeter prints to transfer from.

During the obscenity trials that made Deep Throat a hit, Marv and his partners had paid $28,000 for the Boston theatrical rights. The very next day, the papers headlined: “BANNED IN BOSTON: DEEP THROAT.” “We couldn’t play ‘D.T.’ for a month,” Marv said, “but eventually we got to.”

“Did you make a profit?” I asked.

“You kiddin’?” Marv grinned. “Wit’ all dat publicity, we made a fortune!”

With many other companies selling shoddy dupes of D.T., Tony wanted a distinctive new box picture. In most close-ups, Linda Lovelace’s snaggle tooth caught on her lower lip. I finally found a shot with a hint of character behind her dull eyes.

In her autobiography Ordeal, Linda (Lovelace) Marchiano claimed her (then) husband/pimp Chuck Traynor beat her during shooting and that make-up men had to cover her bruises. Co-star Reems said there were no make-up men on the Deep Throat set. While studying each shot of the film, I noticed the dark blotches beneath the white surgical stockings Lovelace wore in almost every scene. Was she an unwilling victim or “into S and M” as many claim?

“One needs only look at the film to see the amount of pleasure she was having,” Reems said. I agree. I don’t believe Lovelace was talented enough to portray that level of enjoyment unless genuinely experiencing it. Also scoffing at Lovelace’s claim she was forced into performing in Deep Throat was my future housemate, erotic superstar Juliet Anderson. “You cannot force people into this business,” she said. “It’s hard enough to do it when you have all your faculties.”

Made for $25,000 in 1972, Deep Throat grossed over 25 million, cueing pornographers to the vast potential audience for better-made films. Like D.T., some of these “Golden Age of Porn” 35s I was transferring at Compact became classics through controversy. At a time when initial title sales rarely broke a thousand, VCX sold over 3,000 of the 1978 hit Debbie Does Dallas, a title that became part of the American lexicon. (When NBC sent Deborah Norville to interview Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in 1993, the San Francisco Chronicle headlined the story, “Debbie Does Nicaragua.”)

The film became infamous when a small town in Texas flew into fury over an orgy scene shot in its high school’s locker room. (Director Jim Clark had passed the production off as an educational film‌—‌not entirely a lie.)

When the Mitchell brothers discovered the star of their 1972 film Behind the Green Door nuzzling an infant on Ivory Snow boxes, they touted Marilyn Chambers as “99 and 44/100 percent pure” and made a fortune. (20 years later, a Beverly Hills ladies auxiliary auctioned off a box of Ivory Snow Chambers had given them for $600.)

1980’s Taboo became a hit after anti-porn groups railed against its mother-son incest theme. Ten years later, video sales of Catalina Five-O: Tiger Shark took off after Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens was busted for masturbating while watching the film in a Florida theater. And in 1978, VCX stocked up on The Italian Stallion, a cheap nudie starring a destitute young actor named Sylvester Stallone.

Ziggy, the porn salesman/aspiring character actor, made a personal crusade of selling that title. He had a grudge against Stallone. Several months earlier, Ziggy had sneaked past the guard at a studio lot, made his way to Stallone’s trailer and delivered portfolio photos of himself to the star, in hopes that Stallone would get him some work.

Ziggy said Stallone accepted the photos graciously. But, Ziggy said, when he’d later peeked in the window of the trailer, he saw the star and his associates laughing at the pictures‌—‌then throwing them into a trash basket. “I wanna sell the shit out of this film,” Ziggy declared, “so the whole world can see this asshole with his putz hangin’ out.”

Most Golden Age films didn’t have controversy to carry them, and hardcore sex alone wasn’t enough to satisfy rapidly bored audiences. Many of those “raincoat crowd” regulars were alienated, angry and misogynistic. Filmmakers learned what appealed to them. “It’s a unique irony,” wrote the historian Holliday in the 1990s, “that under Nixon’s presidency adult films were rougher than they are currently.” That was an understatement. A popular genre of Golden Age features was what I call “rape films.”

These appealed to that segment of porn’s all-male audience of the 1970s who got their kicks watching women being violently abused. (Later, in the video age, legal restraints and the need to appeal to couples brought an end to the shooting of rape films.) In Alex DeRenzy’s Pretty Peaches (1978), real-life mental patient Desiree Cousteau plays a car accident amnesia victim who is raped by the men who hit her. A quack doctor treats her amnesia with enemas. She’s gang-banged at a job audition.

Though personally repulsed by these types of films, my job didn’t include refusing to work with material I didn’t like. (I’d learned not to ask questions about the tapes Tony dubbed in his private, night-time sessions.) At Compact Video, I supervised the transfer of Defiancé, with underaged (16-year-old) Jean Jennings gang-raped by the staff and inmates of an insane asylum; Expensive Tastes, in which a prostitute plays decoy to help bust a gang of rapists; and The Seduction of Lyn Carter, in which future rock singer Andrea True plays a housewife with a compulsion for further and further debasements from kinky sex researcher Jamie Gillis.

For real physical brutality, boy-boy films were even rougher. I often had to delete fistfucks. But gay “rough trade” films showed only a fascination with physical extremes; the heterosexual variety revealed a gender-based hatred.

x x x x x x

“It’s a whore market!” the Sandman exclaimed. “Fuckin’ business ain’t six months old and already it’s a whore market.”

On Sandy’s sales trip to the east coast, wholesalers had laughed at his $40 and $45 prices. They could get our titles for $30 and $35. From dupers.

Lumbering past the bullpen, Teddy Gaswirth lamented, “What can ya do? They know we don’t have copyrights.”

“There’s ways of protectin’ it,” Tony replied, “that everybody understands.”

One who now did was in a hospital bed after an encounter with a .38 slug. “Sweetheart…” Tony purred into the phone. “Just called to see how you were doin’. They treatin’ ya OK in there? … We’ll be conversin’ witcha when ya get out.”

Spreading the understanding by phone, Tony remained polite. “Believe me, sir,” I heard him say, “I’m as interested in your protection as you are.”

VCX became known for having the clout to “deal directly” with the video industry’s biggest problem. A parade of pirates paid homage in the company’s lobby where all could see them‌—‌the “public pillory” effect. Returning from lunch, I paused to watch. A tough-faced man with stains spreading under his armpits sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair, though across from him was a comfortable couch. On each side of him‌—‌like Scylla and Charybdis‌—‌sat Marv and Tony.

Flashing big new dentures that made him look like a square-toothed shark, Marv leaned in and thumped a thick finger on the man’s catalog, spread out on a coffee table. “Blackmail for Daddy. Dat’s ours.”

“But I just bought da rights,” the man protested.

“Not from us, ya didn’t,” Tony said.

The man’s head swivelled to Tony. “Maybe we bot’ could–”

“WATCH MY MOUT’!” Tony cut him short. “WE own the rights. The EXCLUSIVE rights.”

The man sighed and put a red X through the title with a felt pen. His catalog looked like an extended tic-tac-toe board.

New York’s boldest duper, “The King of 42nd Street,” who’d knocked off all of VCX’s tapes, boxes, one-sheets and labels phoned to ask for a legitimate distributorship.

“Glad ya called, pal,” Marv said. “I was about to come visit ya wit’ four big niggers.”

x x x x x x

Success brings changes, good and bad. Some lottery winners find freedom and dignity. Others lose it. The denizens of VCX did both.

The company image improved with wall-to-wall carpeting, leather chairs, big-screen TVs, and Permaplaques of VCX’s best title posters festooning the reception area. Carpenters banged and sawed. Glowing walls soon enclosed plush offices and conference rooms. The mess hall-sized dubbing studio in the warehouse got its own climate control system.

Upscale visitors outnumbered the 3D crowd. Coarser folk like Manny the Bandido and Neanderthal Man now used the rear entrance. TDK execs, who’d requested that we cover their logo on our finished tapes, now wanted us to advertise that we used the brand. When Tony told a woman from Scotch 3M that we could use three thousand 3M tapes a week, she did a double-take and quoted him an unheard-of low price of $8.00 a tape. Instead of just Marlboros, he now puffed premium cigars.

The scams went upscale, too. After a visit by Japanese businessmen, the dubbers turned out thousands of tapes that went back in their original boxes, unlabeled and shrink-wrapped to look like unopened blanks. Tony wouldn’t say why. Remembering Mickey Zaffarano’s reputed contacts in Japan where hardcore tapes were illegal, I whispered, “Too bad we can’t dub these in Japanese.” Tony didn’t reply, but just nodded.

Success saved marriages. Morry’s ex-wife Julie showed up to help package and shrink-wrap. The angular, 40ish brunette featured her large breasts with T-shirts that read “Good and Plenty,” “Handle with Care,” “Mounds” and “The Happy Looker” with cartoon eyes for Os. I imagined the jowly, woolen-haired manager suckling those breasts and smiled. “What are you grinning at?” Morry growled. Julie retorted, “Maybe he just likes my shirt.”

A compulsive reader, she was no intellectual. Julie complained to me and a shipper that she’d bought a copy of Fear of Flying to get over hers. “Instead,” she said, “there were all these smutty passages.” The shipper and I looked at each other, not daring to laugh.

Claudia now arrived at VCX almost daily and that seemed to give Tony a permanent face-lift. The couple’s giggly pre-teen daughter whizzed about the warehouse on the company forklift, ignoring explicit images on TV monitors. She was used to the company’s wares, having wrapped them for Christmas presents.

Claudia discussed the complications of parenting in the porno business. When their child had started kindergarten at a strict Catholic school, the teacher asked the class to name their parents’ occupations. The girl couldn’t remember the right word and said, “Playboy.” Later, she told Claudia the word she’d forgotten was “pornographer.” The child then learned she should never use that word in public; her father “distributed educational materials.”

Claudia joined Julie in packaging tapes. I knew success had arrived big time when I came in one day and stopped short at the sight of Claudia sweeping the floor.

To keep up with other spouses, Marv’s fiancée Anna actually tried to earn her salary as company president. She wasn’t good at it. One day, we were running short of blank tapes and Sandy complained, “You shoulda sent someone for cassettes, Tony.”

“I sent the fuckin’ douche-bag, but you’re right. I should’ve sent somebody.”

Tony shook his head in disgust as Marv flashed his new postage-stamp smile and padded about in his slippers like some benign paterfamilias, accompanied by Anna and her two tiny ratlike terriers. “Marv bein’ healthy like this…” said Ziggy in a confidential tone. “It’s just gotta piss the livin’ shit out of Tony.”

Whether due to Marv’s robustness or having the money for primo sinsemilla, Tony got stoned more often. With mean, glinting slits for eyes, he increased his taunting. “I see ya got yer red wino shirt on again, Duke.” Always the straight-man, Morry said, “That’s a pink shirt, Tony.” “It was red,” Tony said, “but he hadda wash the puke out of it so many times.”

These days, Tony did the puking. Success hadn’t diminished his drinking, leaving plenty of hangovers for Marv to exploit with skull-splitting rantings.

At a time when success could bring harmony to the company, I wondered if Tony was trying to keep people polarized against Marv. Ziggy, Sandy and I were closing up one night when Marv called in. As I was on the phone, I heard, “Hurry up, Davey, we wanna get out of here!”

“I’m talking to the boss!” I called back.

“Don’t make no difference!” They began turning out lights.

Marv sighed. “Call me when you get home.”

To keep up with the growing workload, VCX needed to do a lot of hiring. Would new employees be split into “Tony’s people” and “Marv’s people”?

x x x x x x

If I didn’t have a firm rule against affairs with co-workers, I’d have done everything possible to steer Jennifer into bed. Men looked at her and thought of sex. Jennifer was lean, blonde, long-legged, large-breasted, flared-hipped, wide blue-eyed and “bee-sting”-lipped. She’d lived the saying “anatomy is destiny.” She’d worked in the Sandman’s massage parlors, hung on the arms of porn kings, suffered an outlaw biker gang rape, and tried to write a book about pornographers‌—‌until they tore up her apartment searching for her manuscript, warning her that if it were ever published, she wouldn’t live to collect royalties.

Jennifer had been on the back of a porn baron’s Harley when what she’d thought was a backfire had shattered a mirror. Then came weeks at his Encino mansion with his associates and an arsenal. “They had these big black dogs patrolling the grounds,” Jennifer told me while I massaged her neck in the bullpen. “They wouldn’t feed the dogs to make them meaner. It was creepy to be sitting there eating dinner with these black heads looking in the window and drooling.”

Jennifer fancied herself refined‌—‌she’d say “hahnd” instead of “hand”‌—‌though she came from Bakersfield. She answered the mail-order 800 line, and each day was “shocked” by what she heard.

Jennifer was part of what I called the UPWA‌—‌United Pornography Workers of America. They’d goof off, screw up, cheat, lie and steal, yet always be able to find jobs in porn companies. With the industry’s us-against-the-world mindset, they’d established their credentials: they had no qualms about porn and they weren’t cops.

Tony knew better than to trust his new employees. He had me rig up surveillance cameras throughout the building. His cynicism was justified; a new salesman was caught stealing tapes.

I wasn’t sad to see Little Jimbo get fired. The hard-faced runt had sauntered into the bullpen wearing a cowboy hat and an oversized belt buckle with the word “MASTER” in its brass. “I’ve tried every kink there is,” he bragged. “You name it, I’ve done it.” The mini-master hooked his thumbs in his belt. “Let’s see, what should I try next? Maybe I oughta get myself a ten-year-old fat boy.”

“Presumably you’ve already had a skinny one.”

The sarcasm went right past him. “Oh yeah, I’ve done everything.” (Years later, I wasn’t surprised to see Little Jimbo once again working for Tony.)

Ready to go on strike was the newest member of the UPWA: me. I was through justifying 14-hour workdays as making up for the time when I had little to do at the old S and L.

Something had to give.

x x x x x x

“Flowing pussy, squirting pussy, smoking pussy, enema fight. It was an average day.” My journal entry ended there; I’d been too exhausted to elaborate.

Hell is where you constantly witness the wildest sexual shenanigans imaginable but can’t even get a warm hug for yourself. That summed up my life in the summer of 1978.

I had no time to hang out in bars; besides, they always made me feel even more alone. Ironically, I spent half of my long work hours in a natural place to meet women.

The young-and-ambitious lucky enough to work at Compact Video or for its entertainment establishment clients hustled each other for show-biz contacts and romance. But young women working their way up the towers of Universal learned what slips could bring careers tumbling down. One would be to date Compact’s resident pornographer.

Ever since the puritanical Hays Office of the 1930s terrorized filmmakers into showing husbands and wives sleeping in twin beds, Hollywood has tried to hide its prurience, slipping titillation in behind “messages.” But hardcore pornography hides nothing. So Hollywood takes the moral‌—‌and political‌—‌imperative of bashing the porn industry in films like Hardcore, in which every pornographer runs a snuff film factory.

Compact’s crew joked that S and L stood for “sex and lust” (as if they didn’t practice any). The head of Telecine Scheduling lobbied for VCX’s ouster, yet borrowed tapes from me to show at Elks Club meetings. A great favorite was X-Rated Cartoons; its spoof of Snow White showed dwarfs springing erections longer than their bodies. Hollywood’s fledglings inherited its hypocrisy.

During a long wait for a transfer delayed by a “straight” client’s overtime, I chatted with a green-eyed Texan who was excited over her new job at the reception desk. As I listened to her soft drawl, a tape operator who’d been pestering me for inside info on his favorite porn stars motioned her aside. She returned to her desk wearing permafrost; she’d been told what I was. I immersed myself in Newsweek.

Then a yuppie from Paramount pulled up outside the glass in his BMW Six-thirty-something. He began putting his patter on the receptionist. Learning she was from Texas, he mentioned an article he’d read about the drug problems of teenagers in Houston.

“Oh, it’s statewide,” I cracked. “I hear that out on the range, they’ve taken to carrying their cocaine in their six-shooters.”

She burst out laughing. At a loss for words, the yuppie mumbled something about his appointment and hurried off. I returned to the Newsweek: the pornographer who knew his place.

Compact’s well-stocked liquor cabinet became my sleep aid. I’d just begin dreaming when the alarm would blast. I’d stagger into VCX, hoping Jimmy had brought some cocaine to perk up with.

I decided that to continue this gauntlet I’d need a substantial raise. But getting one proved tricky. “I know it looks like we’re makin’ lots of money,” Tony said, “but we got lots of arrears to catch up on. We got a huge overhead.” He showed me a full-page color ad in Hustler. “That cost me thirty thousand dollars.” He pointed to the Permaplaques on the wall. “Those cost eighteen hundred each.” Then he added, “We’ll take care of ya. Don’t worry about it.”

Weeks passed. No mention of a raise. Tony’s response was, “I gotta talk it over with Marv.”

I thought of the veiled job offers I’d gotten from competitors: “What’re they payin’ ya here? I know Tony’s got a reputation for bein’ tight.” “If you worked for me, I’d give you a car…” “Whatcha doin’ for lunch today, Davey?” But I didn’t want to work anywhere else; the action was here.

I was perceived as the genius behind VCX’s quality but Tony knew the technical operation as well as I did. He no longer needed a shooter, Neanderthal Man could fix breakdowns and Tony could train one of his relatives in shipping to babysit transfers. He saw me as expendable.

Marv didn’t. Without me there, he’d be totally reliant on Tony’s expertise. But pointing this out would put me in the middle of their blood feud.

The most important part of my job was being trusted with transfers. My bosses knew that rivals might slip out of the night and offer me thousands to make extra masters for them. With his chilling, big-toothed smile, Marv kept saying, “Remember, you’re workin’ for us!”

Using my integrity as an argument for a raise might make my bosses think I’d compromise it if I didn’t get the money I wanted. After all, they saw everyone as whores.

So I began acting like one. Arriving at 3 PM, I told Tony I slept in. After the previous night’s transfer, I’d had a few drinks with Bill the operator. Tony said, “You should limit your activities to the job, Davey, and refrain from socializin’.”

“Lemme make a note of that.” I grabbed a pen. “Limit activities to job… refrain from socializing…” Instead of helping Julie, Sandy, Anna and Marv with a tableful of tapes to be labeled, I thumbed through a Playboy magazine. I complained about needing someone to push the door buzzer before exiting. Tony replied, “Be glad you still got a door to exit, Davey.”

My petulance ended when I got a brainstorm. I called a former colleague in Grand Rapids who agreed to help me in exchange for some Swedish magazines. While waiting for his letter, I did my work with enthusiasm‌—‌to Tony’s growing discomfort.

“Imagine,” I said to Ace, “putting your boss’s mind at ease by going back to pestering him for more money.”

The pestering ended when a letter from Grand Rapids offered me a job. Tony studied it with narrowed eyes. “They gonna pay yer way back, Davey?”

“We can’t pay you no five hundred a week,” Marv added.

“I don’t expect you to.” I told them I’d take less, just to be out here where the action was. Tony nodded. “Me and Duke will give you an answer tomorrow.”

The next day, my bosses pulled their Scylla and Charybdis routine, so I had to rubber-neck to converse. Their final offer: a raise of $100 a week. They agreed to pay me as an independent contractor, almost doubling my take-home. Only Morry and Anna now earned more than my $400 a week (a good salary in 1978, when my rent was only $210 a month).

I was now ready to work long hours without complaint‌—‌and even commit a felony to keep Marv and Tony out of jail.

x x x x x x

Turning from Sherman Way onto Varna, I saw Jimmy on the corner, waving me into the Hungry Fox parking lot. Marv was on the outside pay phone.

“I just knew this was gonna happen,” Jimmy said. “I mean, how many times did Elliot tell us to clean up the warehouse?”

The harbingers of a bust had been there: a headline had blared, “MOB STRANGLEHOLD ON ADULT VIDEO.” The California Crime Control Commission had declared Marv an “organized crime figure.” News articles described the Mickey Zaffarano-VCX connection and linked Tony to mob bosses Sam DeCavalcante and Ettore Zappi. Journalists pestering VCX reported Tony’s retort to questions about organized crime: “Who’s organized?”

Two days before the raid, Elliot, VCX’s attorney, had walked through our warehouse pointing out “dirty” items in phrases such as “This one has manual penetration of the vagina, i.e., ‘fist up the cunt.’” He’d pointed at some boxes of Lasse Braun loops. “Those are ‘pissers.’”

Marv had responded with a sound of pain. “Teddy brought dem in just dis mornin’. Said he was overstocked. I bought da whole fuckin’ shitload for t’ree bucks a number!”

Tony did his sardonic, cupid’s-bow smile. “Teddy stuck ya with ’em, Duke.”

Instead of removing the items immediately, Marv had tried to peddle them to New York accounts. He hadn’t succeeded with the Lasse Brauns. Now it was too late.

We crowded into a rear booth at the Hungry Fox. Marv absently diddled a half grapefruit with a spoon. Tony was relaxed enough for a cherry pie a la mode. Jimmy, Ziggy and I ordered coffee, while Morry described what had happened.

The vice cops had struck at sunrise. They didn’t know that at S and L, the early bird gets the shaft. The highest-ranking employee there had been Morry. “I told them I wasn’t in charge,” he said, stirring his coffee with a donut. “I told them I swept the floors and helped clean the place up.”

“Shouldn’t you say that you want to confer with your attorney before answering questions?” I asked.

“Naw, naw, don’t tell ’em dat,” Marv said. “Don’t get ’em mad. Tell ’em ya sweep da floors, ya clean da air conditioner.”

“They wrote down everybody’s name and address,” Morry continued. “They didn’t have no arrest warrants, so they let us go. But they took three of a number on Dungeon of Pain, House of Christina and Blackmail for Daddy.”

Marv turned to me, eyes heavy with worry. “What’s in Dungeon of Pain, exactly?”

The only pain in the film was the irritation models suffered having sex on the straw in the barn that passed for a dungeon. (A more apt title would’ve been Dungeon of Discomfort.) But a character got acid in the face and there was a pisser.

“Why didn’t you cut it out?” Marv moaned.

“Tony said it was so obviously fake, it was passable. The girl pisses in close-up, then in the shot where it lands on the guy, the liquid isn’t even the same color.”

Marv sighed and muttered, “Tony…”

Three police cars with lights flashing and sirens blaring careened onto Varna. “Shit!” Ziggy exclaimed. “They’re probably bringin’ that projector. They said they were gonna get an open warrant and look at every film in the place.”

“Ziggy, where’d you put them Lasse Brauns?” Tony asked.

“They’re still in the van.”

Tony winced. The van was in back of the warehouse. “Think you can get the van out of there?”

“I can try.”

Tony addressed the group. “Anybody here whose name and address the cops don’t have?”

“Me,” I said, adding, “I think…”

“Davey,” Tony said, “I’m gonna hafta ask a big favor. If you don’t wanna take the risk, I’ll understand…”

I listened to his plan and volunteered. Ziggy walked up Varna toward our building.

As Marv was scoffing, “He’ll never get through,” the van zipped past, running the light turning yellow on Sherman Way. I dashed out to my car and took off after the van. Following instructions, I turned left on the second street after Sherman Way and parked ahead of the van. Ziggy and I jammed the boxes into my trunk. It took the weight of us both to close the lid. I drove a couple of blocks further‌—‌to put distance between my car and the van‌—‌then parked and walked back to the restaurant.

When I entered, I sensed something wrong. The group in the booth sat stiff and silent. In the next booth sat two burly men, dressed casually. I’d heard that plainclothes cops wear rubber-soled shoes. These men did; ready for instant traction should one of the Mafia porn kings make a dash for the door and have to be brought down with a flying tackle.

I learned later that these vice cops were “The Smith Brothers” notorious for hassling pornographers.

Avoiding eye contact, I sat in a booth across from my cohorts. I ordered coffee, then‌—‌reflecting that coffee alone might look suspicious‌—‌added pecan pie. I tried to tune in on the vice cops’ conversation but all they talked about was taking their boat out to a lake. Just another day at work.

Tony coughed softly. I glanced over and caught his eye. He was rubbing his forehead, shielding his gaze from the cops. Tony’s eyes moved toward the door, back to me, and to the door again. He made a barely perceptible head motion toward it.

I wolfed the last of my pie, chugged it down with lukewarm coffee, rose and headed for the cash register. The cops didn’t follow me.

After some weeks of who’s-at-the-door hysteria, life at the office returned to normal. Marv moaned that legal costs would run over $20,000, but admitted that the figure would be spread over a couple of years.

In the short term, the bust provided ammunition for Tony’s sniping at Marv. “When they send ya to prison, Duke, whatcha got to negotiate with? Me, I got nice legs. I got somethin’ that’s worth somethin’. But you, Duke… what’re them faggots gonna do with you?”

Marv tried to ignore him, but‌—‌egged on by the laughter in the office‌—‌Tony kept digging. “I mean, yer bald, ya got a face like a roadkill…”

Marv suddenly wheeled around and snarled, “I’M DA ONE DAT’S GONNA FUCK YA IN DA ASS!”

We were all taken aback by the viciousness in Marv’s voice. We’d have been even more shocked to know his declaration was prophetic.

With the Lasse Braun loops stashed in my storage locker (I didn’t want them in my apartment), I basked in new respect at S and L/VCX. I’d proven myself a good soldier. But I’d soon go from hero to villain‌—‌by competing with my bosses.

x x x x x x

Chapter 6

LIGHTS! CAMERA! ORGY!
Summer 1978 - Winter 1979

Blame it on Muntz Electronics. That was where I stared in amazement at my image, recorded by a Panasonic consumer camera. It showed the yellow-beige flecks in my not-quite-blue eyes and the beginnings of grey in my brown hair. It captured the ruddiness of Scandinavian skin exposed to southern California sun. The quality was even better than the film transfers I’d been supervising. I realized that with cheap video gear I could shoot a hardcore feature for under a thousand dollars.

I didn’t plan to, though. I was a good soldier now, following orders. I had my refuge, my raise and my red RX-7, one of the first in Los Angeles. But when I got the chance to make my very own full-length X-rated movie for less than $250, I couldn’t resist.

The opportunity came from Phil the bookkeeper. His real job at VCX had been to watchdog a loan to S and L. That was why he’d been the only one with a private office before the VCX days, and why he’d constantly harangued Marv and Tony over money. Now that the partners were almost ready to pay off their loan, Phil’s desk was at the back of the warehouse. He was the only original employee who hadn’t received at least a token raise. “I got a feeling I ain’t long for this place,” he said.

Phil planned to start his own porn company, and he wanted me to shoot its first product, a loop series. I stalled on giving him an answer, fearing my bosses’ wrath over discovering me shooting for a potential competitor‌—‌especially one who might be leaving their company under sour circumstances. Then I thought of that day I was surprised by the quality of that consumer video camera at Muntz and I got a wild idea. If it worked, I’d have my very own video feature movie‌—‌shot with Phil’s money.

I told Tony I felt I was getting rusty as a shooter and was thinking of doing a couple of loops. We now had enough people working in dubbing and labeling to get my hours down to about 50 a week; my weekends were free for shooting. Once again, Tony said, “To be a good shooter, you’ve got to shoot, Davey”‌—‌an “OK” I could quote if I had to.

I told Phil I couldn’t appear to be shooting for him directly; I’d have to “freelance” the loops. Then he could “buy” them from me. If Marv and Tony later queried me about the loops, I could shrug and say I’d sold them for a quick buck; I had no control over who they ended up with. Phil agreed to these machinations.

He took me to meet his “financial angel, Aaron,” who’d bankrolled S and L. This shylock, powerful enough to lend money to the likes of Marv and Tony without fear of getting stiffed, was a kindly, snowy-haired Jewish grandfather who ran an auto lease agency in Beverly Hills. He owned the exotic cars that Phil drove.

Years later, an FBI report alleged that Phil told an undercover agent he’d been placed at S and L by Mickey Zaffarano to ensure that the partners made their payments. Could Aaron be one of the “independent” businessmen used as fronts for underworld investors who wanted to keep their names off contracts?

Over thick steaks and stiff drinks at Phil’s favorite hangout, the Polo Lounge, I began to worry about being involved with him. Toasting Phil’s new venture were Jimmy, who was leaving VCX to head Phil’s sales office, and Joey G., a hard little thug with sharp, aggressive features. Joey, a partner in the enterprise, brought protection from “back east.” But those blessings came from a different familia than VCX’s. My apprehension increased when Phil announced that as soon as the phones went in, he’d have 26 major X-rated features on tape, ready to sell. I immediately knew he would be dealing in knock-offs.

As he handed me the money for shooting the loops, Joey G. said, “Wit’ me in da picture, nobody’s gotta worry about broken legs or nuttin’.”

I didn’t feel reassured.

x x x x x x

The risks: shooting in L.A., in my own apartment to save money, with a storage locker full of illegals; a client who was at odds with my employers; and secretly making my own video movie out of his production. The caper looked even riskier now that Phil had a scary underworld partner.

I tried to purge the possibility of disaster from my mind and focus on what I was pioneering. To avoid the usual harsh, flat look of 3 or 4 1000-watt quartz lights blasting a loop set to prevent shadows, I rigged a canopy of 250-watt photoflood lamps, resembling oversized household bulbs, that hit each set from all angles. It gave the living room, bathroom and bedroom that sculpted, lighting-in-the-round glossiness of sound stages with full lighting grids high overhead.

Other innovations: I myself would shoot both the 16-millimeter film and the 2-and-1/4 inch ’chromes, since I alone would know the best angles. On the two Arriflex S movie cameras, I’d use 9.5-to-57 zoom lenses that focused down to 2-and-1/2 feet, instead of the standard 12-to-120s that needed four feet of distance from a subject. (The extra telephoto length wasn’t needed in the close confines of a loop set.) As before, Ace would load cameras I wasn’t using so I could shoot without delays.

The two videographers weren’t there for the money. Like most viewers, they were curious about what goes on behind the scenes on a porn shoot, and what the women were really like. Denny, a quiet, detached man, lived on a trust fund and could afford better toys than most videophiles‌—‌such as his Sony 1610 camera and Sony 2850 Umatic (3/4-inch) VCR. He was a natural cameraman: an observer. I was surprised by his skill.

Denny’s assistant, Patrick, was a big, open-faced kid, with Black Irish humor and a fondness for beer. He worked as an apprentice engineer at Compact. I was paying him $50 for the weekend. Denny was getting $125‌—‌including his equipment.

I gave the videographers 25 hours of Sony KCA 60 cassettes and instructions to keep the tape rolling.

My lighting experiment proved disastrous. I’d forgotten how much heat incandescent lamps put out. The apartment thermometer on that August weekend soon reached its upper limit of 110 degrees. The air conditioner didn’t help.

Patrick had brought a case of beer, augmented by Ace’s own supply. The brew brought out the differences between blasé, well-paid professionals and my horny, cut-rate voyeurs.

The first object of their leering attention was Megan, a 19-year-old Southern belle with curly Carolina charms: brown ringlets, long lashes, and pubic hair shaved in a heart. This was only her second porn role. Eager to please, she’d end up ready to kill. Her nemesis was Ace. Loathing himself for still resorting to porn for rent money, he was also frustrated by his non-sexual role.

Mike Ranger, a favorite of most porn women, was a problem for Megan. She was too embarrassed to tell me why until pain forced her to. With her back to the intruding camera, she murmured, “It’s his size.”

“Try me! Try me!” Ace boomed. I resisted the urge to make a “smallest cock in Hollywood” crack.

I gave Megan a break from intercourse, having Mike thrust between her breasts. She’d made the mistake of revealing that her boyfriend called them “puppies.” Ace sang, “And they call it puppy love…” Patrick gave snorts of ragged laughter. For a still shot, I said, “Megan, look at me,” and Ace crooned, “Look at meee… I’m as helpless as a kitten in a treee…”

“Just what is your problem anyway?” I asked Ace during a set-cooling break.

“Tell you what, Dave,” he said, blinking sweat from his eyes. “Next time, I’ll work for free but I want to get laid.”

“Fine. I’ll give your salary to one of the ladies and film her trying to get you up.” The heat was getting to me, too.

As the shoot lurched along, my innovations failed. Twisting like a pretzel, I’d shoot all those revealing angles of a position in 16-millimeter, then want nothing more than to rest my back while the still photographer took over. But I was the still photographer. Numbly trying to shift from one kind of camera to another, I was slowing things down, not speeding them up as I’d thought I would. And those 250-watt bulbs kept snuffing themselves out in their own heat.

The temperature and delays made Mike do what he never did: lose his erection. Megan’s jaw got sore from sucking him up. She resorted to doing it by hand and Ace called out, “Let’s have some deep throat!” Megan pointed Mike’s penis at him like a pistol. “You’re gonna get it!”

Mike was going for his wet shot when the flimsy stand holding what Ace called a “pussy light on a stick” toppled over. Its bulb exploded against the couch. Megan twisted out of the way with Mike’s penis still inside her. He yelped in pain.

After that, he had trouble climaxing. He pounded into Megan, her face too contorted to take notice of his perspiration raining down on her. After Mike came, she went limp. “I died,” she said. “Did you catch it on video?”

x x x x x x

Angel arrived on the set after a night in jail for the crime of not shaving her pubic hair. She’d been dancing at a strip joint in Torrance and was busted when she’d taken her bottom off. A local ordinance forbade showing pubic hair. Anything else was OK. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Can you dance nude with no pubic hair and they won’t bust you?”

“Right,” she said, bringing an eruption of laughter.

“Then how come you didn’t shave?” Ace asked.

“I thought I was OK.”

“Let’s see!” exclaimed Patrick.

Angel pulled off her shorts and let the men examine her fine blonde razor stubble.

During her girl-girl loop with Megan, Angel‌—‌a veteran of strip shows‌—‌ignored the men’s comments. But Megan was fed up with them. She was examining a Porcu-pecker to make sure its rubber quills were soft enough to enter her without causing pain, when Ace made one remark too many. Watching her face on the monitor, Patrick had said, “Food for thought…” To which Ace replied, “Food for twat?”

Megan shot him a middle finger. “Up yours!” Ace sat back with a smirk of triumph.

Megan sat, too. “That’s it. Enough. This whole damn thing is crazy.” She told me that the heat, the crew, her body parts in big detail on the TV screen‌—‌everything‌—‌were all too much. She was quitting. She didn’t care if I didn’t pay her.

As I was pleading with Megan, the phone rang. It was Phil’s partner, Joey G. “I’m leavin’ the office, kid,” he said. “I thought maybe I could come down and lend ya a hand.”

Then he’d see the video set-up. I tried to dissuade him but couldn’t. I asked to speak to Phil.

“Why can’t Joey come over?” Phil asked. “He’s never seen one of these being shot before.”

I had an idea. “Remember those Lasse Braun films?”

“You don’t still have that shit, do you?”

“Right here in my storage locker.”

“Christ.” When Phil told his partner that the police were still looking for those films, Joey decided to stay away.

While I’d been on the phone, Ace had realized he’d messed up. He’d apologized to Megan and had persuaded her to finish the loop.

After the Porcu-pecker sequence came my parody of a male come-shot. Megan reclined in an easy chair while Angel stood over her wearing a Piss-tola, a strap-on rubber penis that squirted liquid from a squeeze-bulb. As the cold stream of water hit her perspiring body, Megan jerked about, squealing.

“Feels goood!” breathed Patrick, swaying before the monitor like a snake before its charmer.

The last shot was of Megan sucking the Piss-tola, to be cut in before the “come-shot.” After I said, “Cut,” Megan bit into the rubber penis so viciously that Patrick‌—‌watching the action in one of Denny’s close-ups‌—‌went “Wuh!”

“Ohhh!” said Megan. “I’ve been wanting to do that all day!”

x x x x x x

A conflict was building inside me. As loop-maker, I wanted a smooth shoot with hot, well-photographed action. As video producer, I was glad the hassles were making the documentary interesting. I was almost disappointed that Saturday’s last loop, starring a dull married couple, went so smoothly.

Sunday’s didn’t.

On the first loop, a girl-girl bubble-bath scene, the heat, steam, and cramped camera positions made me feel faint. I went out to get some fresh smog in the courtyard. While I marveled at how normal life seemed outside my apartment, Ace, whom I could count on in a pinch, was doing a video interview with a “porn model from Hell.”

On tape they made a bizarre pair: twirling a two-foot-long, double-headed dildo, Rita sat next to her agent, Kenny, his features hidden by mirrored shades and a shaggy beard. Rita had jet-black hair falling straight to her waist, large breasts, and an oval face prevented from exotic beauty by a hard, glazed look. She spoke in the languid manner of a veteran hooker.

“What was the kinkiest scene you ever did?” Ace asked. Rita turned to Kenny and whispered, “Should I tell him about… you know…?” Barely audible, lips still, Kenny whispered, “No, no.”

“What do you like about working in sex films?” Ace asked.

“The money.” She was making only $50 for the loop.

“And what don’t you like?”

“Fucking,” said Rita, and Kenny made gagging sounds.

Ace asked Rita what made her climax. She gave Kenny an intimate look. “Ask him. He knows.” When Kenny turned away, she looked irritated.

I wondered whether sex would happen at all. Rita was woozy with Quaaludes and her co-star, John, a rugged ex-lumberjack, was a “weak model.” I’d seen him in action‌—‌or inaction‌—‌in films at S and L.

Before we could begin, Phil called. “Just wanted to see how things are going,” he said. “By the way, how’s the video?”

“The video?” How did he know about that?

“Yeah. You are shooting video, aren’t you?”

I sat down on the couch. “You mean the… the experiment?”

Rita’s naked body passed in front of me, followed by Denny’s camera. She raised a breast toward the lens. A nipple protruded between long auburn fingernails. She parodied a sigh.

“Well?” Phil pursued. “Is the video usable or what?”

“I don’t know, Phil. I’m concentrating on the loops.”

Rita sat next to me. Ace sat on her other side. He began kissing her and fondling her breasts. Sedated, she didn’t care who did what with her. Denny widened out to show all three of us while I assured Phil the loops were looking fantastic.

Ace plunged his hand between Rita’s legs. She spread them wide, and one landed in my lap, followed by her hand. “Speaking of fantastic, Phil, I got some of that right here. Rita, give Phil a kiss.” She made an exaggerated smooch into the phone, adding a long sigh. I told Phil I’d call him later.

“OK,” I said, “let’s make a movie”‌—‌leaving Ace grumpy about being denied his quickie. Rita flashed Denny one last split beaver shot, prompting Patrick to sigh, “I should’ve gone into gynecology.”

“This is the next best thing,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

We didn’t get very far before friction between Rita and Kenny erupted. “Take a picture of me, Kenny,” she said, “NOW!”

“OK.” Kenny raised his Hasselblad. “Expression, Rita.” She remained impassive. “Rita… expression…”

“I gave it to you, Kenny,” she snapped.

“I didn’t see it, Babe.”

“I gave it to you and you missed it.”

“Oh, come on,” Kenny pleaded. “Let’s do it.”

“No! Wait. I’ll tell you when.”

Kenny lowered the camera. Rita shook a long fingernail at him. “No! You keep that camera over your face!”

When pornographers have sex with models they’re shooting, the women often feel used and become belligerent. I couldn’t let this ruin my shoot. “Rita, let’s have you give John some head.”

“When I’m ready,” she pouted. “I’m pissed off right now.”

I hated playing whoremaster. Sometimes you have to. “Rita, if you want to get paid, you’ll do what I tell you when I tell you. Do you understand me?”

For a long moment, she glared at me. I felt the urge to explode boiling up inside. Then Rita chose to obey, proving she could suck and sneer at the same time.

When John was hard, Rita began to straddle him in “cowgirl” position, then exclaimed, “Stop! Stop right now!”

Her period had started. We turned out the lights and Rita inserted sponges. “Let’s do missionary,” I said. “That way the blood will mostly stay inside. How’s that sound, Rita?”

She flipped a middle finger at the monitor. “Huh? I was looking at that picture over there.”

I asked Ace to turn the lights on. Still sulking over his aborted quickie, he said, “No. I’m just the loader.”

I crossed the room to turn them on myself. “Fuck you, Ace.”

“Try it.”

In missionary position, John began to build momentum. Rita’s eyelids opened and closed as if they weighed ten pounds each. “I’m gonna give you an expression of pain,” she said, “’cuz it hurts.” Not listening, Kenny chirped, “Expression, Rita.”

John lost his erection. Rita went for the Albolene, with Denny behind her. He had decided she was the story. “This guy’s driving me crazy,” she said.

“He’s doing his job,” I growled. “Pretend he isn’t there.”

“I can just ignore him?”

“Please.”

Instead, she spread her legs to Denny’s camera with a comic expression of glee.

John kept going soft through spoon and doggie positions, needing Rita’s trance-like fellatio. Bothered by Denny’s zoom lens hovering next to her, Rita tossed her long hair over her head so it blocked her face. Trying to shoot from her other side, Denny pulled his cables taut and shorted out his audio.

Later, I’d scream curses when the screen suddenly went silent, just before four photographers‌—‌Ace, Kenny, Denny and me‌—‌scrambled for shooting angles as John, without warning, pulled his flaccid penis out of Rita’s mouth and began coming.

After taking so long to get up for each position, he’d finished by ejaculating prematurely.

Afterwards, I felt sour enough to deny Rita the multi-speed vibrator she wanted. I told her it cost $30 (it retailed for $16.95). Rita offered me her body but I wasn’t interested. Kenny was; he steered Rita into my bedroom for a quickie. Ace wasn’t invited, adding to his petulance.

x x x x x x

In that circus of a video feature, which I would call Lights! Camera! Orgy! one thing was missing: genuine erotic passion‌—‌until the last loop. It proved the wisdom of putting models together who like working with each other but don’t have an off-screen relationship that makes sex between them become routine.

Mike Ranger had been yearning to work again with Gayle Monica, the teenaged blonde with breasts like scoops of vanilla ice cream. She felt the same about him.

Gayle needed no Albolene with Mike, preferring to rely on “natural.” He delivered three climaxes; she had two herself and would’ve had another had I not butted in.

During a bedroom-cooling break, I’d gone to the living room to check on the Cincinnati Reds game. Pete Rose was trying to tie the National League record of 44 straight games with at least one hit. Meanwhile, Denny was taping Gayle straddling Mike, her face pressed against his neck, her hips pounding against him in the kind of frenzy that can’t be faked. Oblivious, I walked right into the video wide-shot and announced, “OK, Mike, we can go for your second come-shot now.”

Mike looked up at me. “She was going for hers.”

I’d interrupted the very act of spontaneous eroticism I wanted the video to capture. “Uh, OK,” I stammered. “Let’s go for… let’s do that.”

Gayle shook her hair out of her face. “What’s the next position?”

I was still hoping to revive the lost magic. “Well, if you wanna go for yours, then… you know…”

She laughed. “Too late now.”

Ace passed through the background. “Hello, sports fans,” he said. “This is Pete Rose. This is my fifth straight come-shot.”

x x x x x x

“It’s just like you knocked us off, kid. Ya shot your own show on our dime. We can’t have dat shit.”

I tried to remain calm, glad that phones didn’t have video so that Joey G. couldn’t see my hands shaking.

“Now, if da stuff is any good, maybe we can work somethin’ out. Otherwise…”

I offered to put a rough cut together for him. That would take a week. Maybe in that time I could figure out how to deal with this. One thing I’d resolved: I wouldn’t hand over my video, threats or no threats.

In the meantime, I gave the 16-millimeter film and the ’chromes to Phil. He said he had a deal for them and that I’d soon be paid $600 for my weekend work. I should’ve known that none of Phil’s deals were without kinks.

A distributor had agreed to give Phil finished product he could sell immediately in return for the loops. Phil and Joey found a better deal and reneged on the first one. By then, the first distributor had already paid an artist for box designs and had solicited orders for the loop series from his accounts. He called me to complain. “I’m out money, I’m out time, I’ve been shit on and I’m pissed. I’m going in there and raise hell.”

“In where?” I asked.

“VCX.”

The next morning, Phil called me before I left for work. The distributor had carried out his threat to “raise hell” at VCX. “He says, ‘Oh, Phil and Dave are partners, and they’re screwing you, Marv,’” Phil said. “So I picked up a chair and I waved it at him. I said, ‘You’re fuckin’ crazy. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’”

“What did Tony and Marv do?”

“Nothin’. But then they fired me, y’know. That’s why I’m calling from the Hungry Fox. Just thought I’d let you know what went down, so you’ll be ready for the, uhm, atmosphere when you go in today, y’know.”

“Christ.”

I entered the bulletproof door, braced for the worst. But Marv looked past me as if I weren’t there. Tony’s eyes narrowed, but he slouched past without a word. I crept into the bullpen and pretended to be busy tidying up.

That afternoon, Phil returned to empty his desk into his briefcase. I heard his voice rise in competition with Anna’s high-pitched yelling. “You low-life slut! Just ’cuz you made fifteen hundred a week with that hole between your legs, don’t mean you know how to run a business!”

“Get him out of here!” Anna shrieked. “Get him out of here!”

Tony hurried over to calm her down (Marv was out). Phil slammed the last of his papers into his briefcase and stormed for the door.

Tony called a meeting of all employees. “EVERYBODY WATCH MY MOUT’!” he railed, without his usual attempt to banish his Boston accent. “Now, anybody fuckin’ wit’ me behind my back gets dere ass booted out da dahr! No exceptions!”

Morry, puzzled, whispered something to Julie.

“You, Mahry! Dincha heah me? Dis is fah you too!”

The general manager straightened his thick torso. His jowls shook. “If you’re questioning my integrity in any way–”

“MAHRY, DON’T EMBARRASS YERSELF! I ain’t singlin’ you out. Dis is meant fah everybody!”

I felt bad for Morry, the good soldier. Later I thanked Tony for not aiming his lecture specifically at me.

“No, no,” he insisted. “It was meant for everybody.”

I also had Tony to thank for Phil and Joey giving up their claim on my videotape. “You’re livin’ a charmed life, kid,” Joey said. “Ya got your own fuckin’ video show for next to nuttin’. Somebody loves ya, pal.”

Emboldened, I asked, “How did you guys know about my video?”

“That kid from Compact,” Phil said. “He was shootin’ his mouth off about working on a porno. It was all over the street.”

So were Phil’s knockoffs of VCX titles. His mob contacts must have protected him; he didn’t get beaten up. But his head salesman, Jimmy, did. He hobbled into VCX on crutches. Marv flashed a big-toothed leer. “I hear ya never learn.”

Jimmy assured Marv he did indeed learn. He and Phil stopped selling VCX dupes and preyed instead on less protected lines.

x x x x x x

New rules made life tougher at VCX. Those coming or going had to sign the logbook of a security guard at a desk next to the front foyer. Employees arriving later than 9 AM were docked, ending the S and L tradition of tolerating stragglers with hangovers. Sick days were limited to four a year.

My bosses never again mentioned my dealings with Phil, but Marv revealed the grudge he bore with a game he played on paydays. When he handed out the checks, mine was never among them. I’d ask him for it and he’d answer, “I coulda swore I gave it to you.”

I’d have to remind him that he hadn’t and he’d say, “I’ll have it for ya tomorrow.” The next day, I’d have to remind him several times; he’d keep forgetting. Finally, I said, “Marv, I feel it’s beneath my dignity to beg for my pay.”

“Why?” He couldn’t understand the problem; to Marv, dignity had no meaning.

One payday, I resolved to say nothing. Two days passed. No check. Then, I was in the bathroom when I heard Tony say, “Davey…” I looked toward the door and saw my check slide in under it.

Life away from work wasn’t much better. Despite a new car and money to spend, I had no luck with the kind of women I wanted to date. I never had so much trouble meeting women before.

Depressed, I started seeing a therapist. When she told me I came across as hard and tough, I was shocked.

“When you work in shit,” said Ace, “you won’t smell like roses.” While I thought I had no moral or ethical qualms about pornography, I had to admit I was embarrassed to reveal I worked in it. “You got a self-image problem,” Ace said.

My escape from everything was working on my video project. Studying Beta copies of the master tapes for future editing, I noted how vividly life-like the images were compared to film transfers. Penetration close-ups made one feel like Gulliver in a land of exhibitionistic giants.

I treated my video project as a hobby, with no particular marketing plan. Then I made that trip up north to visit Joe Loveland, the little satyr whose pleasure-dome home had been my location for Larry’s loops. The trip was meant for rest and relaxation, to bring Joe 8-millimeter copies of the loops, to attend a cast and crew party for a new 35 feature, and to enjoy a weekend on the sex revolution’s wild frontier. I hadn’t planned on starting a pioneering business venture.

x x x x x x

It was good clean fun. When a woman on the screen licked a clitoris in time to music, they laughed because the scene was comical, not because they were embarrassed. They cheered popular John Seeman and director Bob Chinn‌—‌doing a cameo as John Holmes’ business partner. There were no sleazoid, Los Angelish remarks like “Stick it up her asshole!”

I was at the Sound Stage, San Francisco’s porn production center, for the cast and crew screening of Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls. I was the guest of Joe Loveland, who’d invested in the film.

I was also his house guest, as was Donna, one of the more active of Bay Area swingers. She’d met Joe at one of his parties, while hanging naked and blindfolded from the hooks over his elevated stage. Joe had sex with Donna before knowing her name or even seeing her face.

She’d left eighteen years of marriage behind in Ohio and come west seeking freedom through bondage and domination. She had a square-faced midwest directness, a chunky body with big, soft breasts, and an eager smile. She was‌—‌as Joe said‌—‌a “hands-on woman.”

Watching an excerpt video I’d made from the tapes shot on Phil’s production, Joe and Donna pulled off their clothes. Unsure whether three was a crowd, I tentatively touched her nipples. She responded with a big wet kiss. Joe’s upstairs phone rang. He went to answer it and I found myself engulfed in voracious fellatio.

Joe’s Sunday visitors were fellow members of the Society of Janus, a group promoting safe S and M (not safe sex; founder Cynthia Ann Slater would die of AIDS). A plain woman in granny glasses, whose clients paid her $75 an hour, had made Joe some leather cuffs. “The trick,” she said, “is to pad the inside surface so you can cinch them tight enough to suspend the body, yet not cut off circulation to the hands.”

She owned thirty whips and “cats” (cat-o’-nine-tails). Some could bruise but not infibulate (cut skin), some did the opposite. “I’ve got this one cat that can draw blood and fifteen minutes later you won’t see a mark.” Its tiny spikes made pinprick wounds that healed quickly and invisibly.

“You mean,” I said, “your client can look like a refugee from a Turkish prison and by the time he’s ready to go home to his wife, his skin is like a newborn baby’s?”

She laughed and nodded.

Another dominatrix, Mistress Elena, soaked her delicate alabaster body in Joe’s hot tub and spoke of men as predictable Pavlovian beasts. “When the man comes in, he’s usually very hyped. So it’s important to establish control. The best way is to begin with a massage to relax the man and to establish body contact. When he feels her fingers upon him, the man knows the mistress has total command. He will begin fantasizing heavily at this stage. The mistress will then put his hands in restraints so he can’t indulge in his natural urge to masturbate. A skilled mistress will keep the man just below the point of orgasm throughout the entire session.”

What kind of men sought Elena’s services? “Businessmen, executives, mostly. That type of man is running around his office all day long giving everyone orders. And he gets to the point where he cannot give another order. He needs to have decisions taken out of his hands.”

x x x x x x

Joe didn’t consider the weekend unusual. For him, a sexual smorgasbord was as much a part of life as a varied diet. Twisting his goatee, Joe explained his philosophy. “There’s something tragically flawed about the human species,” he said. “When other animals fight for territory or mating rights, they rarely kill each other. When one is clearly the victor, it lets the other live.” Drinking mulled cider beside the fireplace on that crisp fall evening, Joe spoke of humanity’s history of cruelty, genocide and rapaciousness. “With all life on this globe threatened by pollution, mass extinctions, and nuclear war, there’s a good argument that the human critter is the worst thing that ever happened to the planet Earth.”

Joe believed that humanity’s redeeming factor was the capacity for giving, receiving and sharing pleasure. “Restrictions against any form of sensual pleasure people engage in without harming one another, whether the restrictions are through religion, creed or law, are in themselves evil.”

Before I left for L.A., Joe made a comment that led to our three-year business partnership. I’d complained about the hassles of shooting porn, and Joe said, “I think you’re very fortunate. For fifty years I’ve wanted to make pictures about sex.”

He had script ideas, a great location, and knew northern California models. He wasn’t rich but had a few thousand to invest. I had movie-making skills and access to distribution. We discussed collaboration. There was one caveat: Joe said, “If I can’t get laid out of the deal, then this venture isn’t worthwhile for me.”

x x x x x x

It would start as a mail-order operation. Joe would finance two titles and we’d edit two more out of the videotape shot during the production of Phil’s loops. Orders would come to Joe’s San Francisco mail drop. We hoped that by the time the city orchestra discovered the sideline of its choir conductor and my bosses learned of my role, we’d be ready to make full-time livings from Love Television Enterprises.

The first of the two productions bankrolled by Joe, The Perfect Gift, was even more absurd than that beer-addled shoot in my apartment. Joe had written his swinger friends into the shoot‌—‌as hood-wearing “gifts” from a generous gangster to his sex-crazed moll. She doesn’t want to see faces, just cocks. Despite their anonymity, these sex party stalwarts became camera-conscious and couldn’t stay erect. Fortunately, the reliable Don Fernando stunt-cocked enough penetration close-ups to add hardcore to all the “sim” (simulated) action.

Joe’s excuse for his buddies was that they thought they’d be working with the dreamy-eyed star Dorothy LeMay who’d cancelled due to vaginal injuries inflicted during a stage-show at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater by Annette Haven’s over-zealous dildo work. Instead, the men were stuck with lanky, horse-faced Liza, another of the Bay Area’s Jill-of-all-sex-trades call-girls.

Shotgun microphones quit because of trampled cables. Our rich-boy videographer, Denny, hadn’t brought any backups. A model with a reputation for heavy drug use couldn’t even get semi-erect. Torrential rains drummed the roof and windows, making audio‌—‌now recorded on weak in-camera microphones‌—‌unusable. Joe was finding that being a first-time porn director was like laying bricks during an earthquake: you put one up and two fall off.

Then Denny went on strike. He’d made a deal for six percent of gross profits instead of cash. Now he concluded that the miserable shoot would never make a profit and he wanted cash instead. I was mad enough to punch him out but I didn’t know how to work his gear. We agreed to pay him cash.

On Sunday morning, something put the shoot into perspective. In the continuing downpour, the 220-volt line clamped into the main power box on the side of Joe’s house fell off. The set went dark. Standing in the water rushing down the steep hillside, I said a prayer. Despite gloves and boots, the rain could create an unbroken surface of water from the box to my feet. A 220-volt zap meant instant death. I let the spring clamp snap onto the electrode and pulled my hand away just as a fat blue spark erupted. It felt wonderful to be alive. I wedged a bucket over the box to protect it.

Maybe the calm I felt afterwards helped make Sunday a success. So did Juliet Anderson, one of porn’s three classy older women (along with Kay Parker and Georgina Spelvin). After seven years of teaching English in Finland, Juliet became a porn star as Swedish Erotica’s “Aunt Peg” character. With short, swept-back blonde hair, patrician features, and a figure kept trim through compulsive exercise, Juliet was every young male’s fantasy of erotic instructress.

On Joe’s elevated stage that Sunday, she demonstrated her “famous Aunt Peg blow job.” “She doesn’t seduce men,” wrote Gary Giddins in Home Video magazine, “she inhales them.” Juliet’s blur of mouth manipulations and head movements kept Joe, in his porn debut, as hard as men half his age.

With a burnoose hiding his face (“a very carefully anonymous Arab,” wrote an Adam Film World reviewer), Joe also did well with “slave girl” Kay Buckley, a bold-featured masochist with an “A” carved over her solar plexus. A star of S and M master Jay Magus de Tauroc’s rope bondage demonstrations, Kay performed a belly dance with clamps pulling her nipples, sending Juliet into squeals of squeamishness. Juliet had a phobia about even the thought of breasts treated roughly.

We were pleased that the vignette had gone so well. But the skit that would make Bound a perennial best-seller came on Sunday night.

x x x x x x

They arrived at midnight, wearing black. He had the craggy grace of a Shakespearean actor, which he’d been. She had high, delicate cheekbones and a strawberry sheen in her blonde mane which made skin that rarely suffered sunlight seem even whiter. They might have been a vampire (which he’d played in Dracula Exotica) and his mistress. Instead they were porno legends.

Examining the rectangular, leather-covered frame hanging from the ceiling above the stage, Jamie Gillis tested its strength to make sure it would support Serena, nude and spread-eagled, with her hands and feet tied to its corners. On the past Halloween, he’d tied her naked in a bay window of their Polk Street apartment, displayed to the crowd below. Even revelers as bizarre as San Francisco’s could only stare upward, open-mouthed.

Before their scene, which would become an S and M classic, Serena sat at Gillis’ feet and answered Joe’s questions: her giddy struggles against her father’s bearhugs had led to her love of bondage. She thought her kinkiest act had been having a photographer follow her around New York City while she guzzled beer and urinated in public places. “What’s really kinky,” she said, “is when I haven’t had sex for a couple of days. Then I become a bitch… The whole concept of being feminine is being dominated and being a wild animal that goes into rut, and someone just pounces on you and fucks you.”

Following that philosophy, Gillis treated Serena like a dog. In a skit the couple had concocted themselves, he made her beg, lick his hands and feet, and crawl on hands and knees wearing a collar and chain. If she was slow to obey his commands, he’d strike her with his hand, a riding crop or a cat-o’-nine-tails. It looked brutal, with Serena’s yelps and the cat landing in her face, but she said later, “Jamie’s never given me a bruise, ever.”

Her only real discomfort came when Gillis laid a cold chain across her heated body, making her shriek, and when Serena failed to follow the script. Hitting her buttocks with the crop, Gillis taunted, “Say ‘Please stop.’ Say ‘Please stop.’” She laughed. “I don’t want you to stop.”

“You’re not supposed to say that!” To punish her, he had her spread her buttocks and take a sharp whap on the anus. “It definitely wakes up my body,” Serena said. “All my nerves are at attention. That pain just puts you somewhere.”

The couple’s genuine enthusiasm made the tape a hit. Gillis stayed fully erect for all three hours of shooting… with Serena begging for her “bone.” And sometimes getting it.

When the scene appeared over, I started to call for a wrap when Joe whispered, “This is important! This is important!” So I kept shooting. Gillis was lying on top of Serena. The weak camera microphones barely picked up his words: “Gimme a kiss… gimme a kiss…” Serena pushed him off, laughing. “Say please…” (Audio “sweetening”‌—‌enhancement‌—‌later made the words audible in the finished tape.)

“For just a moment at the end there was role reversal,” said Joe. In subsequent films, Serena played the dominant, putting Gillis through a similar “ordeal.”

Despite hit-or-miss lighting and scramble-for-the-action camerawork, Adam’s reviewer called Bound “the hottest specialty tape I’ve ever seen,” and in 1985, Adult Video News listed it among the top 30 specialty tapes of all time.

But early in 1979, such attainments seemed impossible. The problems of shooting the videos were spring breezes compared to the typhoons of editing them.

x x x x x x

I wondered why Compact Video would rent me a sophisticated “joystick” editing system for only $250 a week. Their stone-age basic Sony RM 430 setup went for almost twice that. And they wouldn’t let me take the RM 430 home.

I found out the reason when the Convergence ECS10B (“Connie”) “ate” the first blank Sony KCA 60 3/4-inch tape I put in one of its Sony 2850 VCRs.

The Love TV magazine ads were to begin appearing in mid-April. It was now early March. I thought I had plenty of time to edit the four features before orders started arriving at the San Francisco mailbox. Wrong. Connie would squeal and grunch and damage tapes. Edits I tried to make would explode in electronic “noise.” The recorders went back to Compact at least twice a week for “re-tweaking.” When Compact tired of sending its sullen, hulking flunky to fetch the 80-pound VCRs, I transported them myself. My back went bad. I’d get out of bed and feel like a giant vise had clamped around my ribcage.

Fortunately, I had my “electronic shrink.” Ted, Compact’s telecine manager, was a squat man of quiet intelligence and wry wit. Over dinner and good wine with him and his wife, I’d discuss the porn industry. “We need laws that regulate porn,” I said. “Without any, they’d be throwing people to the lions.”

“Hopefully,” Ted replied, “lions who could get it up.”

Ted told me that Connie was made for a generation of 3/4-inch VCRs that hadn’t arrived yet. Her Sony VO 2850s were heavily modified but she still pushed them beyond their design limitations. Through Ted, I learned about rugged Scotch MBU editing tapes and the delicate sequence of button pushes and joystick nudges that agreed with Connie. When she heated up after a couple of hours, it was time to take a coffee break, go for a walk, or punch walls. Without the money for less finicky equipment, I’d have to spend extra time instead.

Then I didn’t even have that. Compact was switching from Type A format one-inch machines to the newer Type C. All of VCX’s shows had to go on the new format‌—‌within two weeks. After that, Disney would monopolize the system for months. Now, I had to spend every waking hour supervising the transfers. Fortunately, Ace was between jobs. I hired him to edit. But first he had to learn the quirks of Connie.

Love TV’s ads appeared. I waited as long as legally possible before mailing catalogs to the hundreds who’d sent in two dollars. Joe and I braced ourselves for a deluge of tape orders we were nowhere near ready to fill. Then the unexpected happened: there were no orders.

Why? VCX took in over a thousand dollars in mail orders on each eight-hour shift of its 800 line. “You can’t compare yourself with VCX,” Ted said. “Who in their right mind would send $70 to a porn outfit they never heard of with cheap little ads and a tiny circular for a catalog? It looks like a rip-off.”

Ted made sense. Disappointed, I let the editing meander into mid-May.

Then came a letter from the U.S. Post Office warning Love TV about the penalties of mail fraud. Customers had filed complaints; they’d sent money and received no tapes. Running a gauntlet of arrogant bureaucrats at the San Francisco Post Office, Joe finally found orders for over 120 tapes‌—‌misplaced in a dusty bin.

Under the sad-eyed mug shots of David Houstle, wanted for interstate commerce in obscene materials, I stood in the Van Nuys Post Office putting stamps on hasty letters of apology.

x x x x x x

We’d created a monster. Like the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors braying “Feed me! Feed me!” Love TV demanded full-time nurturing. There were ad contracts to fill out, previews tapes to send, business licenses to obtain, publicity to write, complaints to answer, defectives to replace, artwork to order, tapes to buy, and‌—‌always‌—‌orders to fill, sometimes flooding in, sometimes trickling.

The four VHS and two Beta dub chain in my living room ran constantly when I was home. I had cables to replace, circuits to reset, VCR heads to clean. There were glitches, power surges, blown fuses and bad connections.

Joe was so busy with catalog mailings that he didn’t have time for what he’d wanted out of the business: sex. “I was so horny,” he said, “that I watched Jamie and Serena and masturbated so hard I got an attack of herpes.”

Serving two masters, Love TV and VCX, I did well by neither. I wanted an assistant at the office but couldn’t just place help wanted ads in Videography. Not at a closed-door company like VCX.

Then I found a helper. Thirtyish, educated, ambitious, intelligent, and freshly fired from Compact Video. “I was too much on your side,” said Norwood, who’d been VCX’s champion in Telecine Scheduling. “That’s why I got canned.”

“Not true,” cautioned my electronic shrink. “Norwood was trying to usurp the head of scheduling’s job. If you hire him, he’ll be gunning for yours.”

“Between you, me, and this bottle of sauvignon blanc, Ted, he can have it‌—‌eventually.”

Norwood set out to prove his superiority. He watched Neanderthal Man change a VCR belt and did the next one himself. He devised more efficient ways of putting VCR racks together and obtained high-quality copies of Star Wars, not yet legally on the market, for Tony and Marv. He set up a mini video studio for Marv and Anna in their den. After work, he’d smoke dope with Tony, while I’d slip away to deal with Love TV.

Our bosses were thrilled with Norwood. I wasn’t. At first, he’d say, “Dave, could you do me a favor?” And I’d run an errand for him. Then it was, “Dave, I need you to…” He left a message on my answering machine: “Dave, I need a recording of the Dick Clark Show at eight tonight. Could you do that please?” I didn’t. “It wasn’t work-related,” I shrugged, while he glared.

When Marv wanted space cleared in the bullpen, Norwood asked, “Did Marv tell you to restructure your thinking regarding the film area?”

“Restructure my thinking?”

Norwood backed off. “You know, move this stuff aside.”

“Yes, but he said nothing about thought processes.”

I gladly let Norwood take on the heavy work‌—‌like the 15-hour-a-day job of editing a VCX “previews” tape. I didn’t mind people thinking I was Norwood’s underling. I had bigger hassles.

x x x x x x

They were there again. The men in suits. Feds? LAPD? I didn’t dare drive into my carport until after they’d left. I blamed Screw magazine. In their glowing review of the four Love TV shows (“excellent in every aspect”), they’d printed my home address instead of the mail-drop. Screw hadn’t printed the apartment number, which was why the men in suits had been startling my neighbors, peering in windows, looking for signs of a porno operation.

In the summer of ’79, I experienced the antagonism toward erotic enterprises in America firsthand. The San Francisco Police Department sent Love TV an “invitation” to contribute to their athletic league. We sent $100. A lab I used for catching up on orders bumped me to the night shift “due to the nature of the material,” then wanted $80 an hour extra. I got them down to $40.

In dealing with adult tape clients, video magazines played “screw the little guy.” One wouldn’t let us list titles and prices in our ad but let a competitor do it. Another nixed our drawing of a woman in a bikini but let someone else run a photo of a nude with her hands over her breasts. A third objected to our “Squirmingly real flesh tones” but let another outfit advertise a “Blowjob Contest.” I realized that bigger companies wined and dined editors, paid extra for “favors,” and offered drugs and girls. Love TV couldn’t compete.

One technique worked though. When I found that the “Blowjob Contest” ad had pulled 400 responses to Love TV’s 30, I exploded. “I’m putting my lawyer on this!” I yelled, pounding my fist on the ad rep’s desk. “I don’t care what it costs! I’m gonna SUE! And SUE! And SUE!” The man caught his phone before it fell off the edge. He promised me a freebie in the next issue, with any written copy I wanted that wasn’t obscene.

We competed with the big companies by advertising our “live video” picture quality. Then, along came Scorpio, Etc. with three half-hour hardcore shows shot directly on videotape. The scripts were insipid. In Football Widow, Bill Margold pounds a football and yells at a TV, “Play! Play! Play!” instead of something real like “Slant pattern up the middle, Bubba! The safety out there can’t outrun my grandma!” But the shows starred the popular blonde Seka. They were shot on one-inch Ampex VPR 1s with top-of-the-line Hitachi SK-70 broadcast cameras. And they were crammed with special effects. Their image quality made ours look like dupes. I was in despair. Joe wasn’t. He reminded me that a purchaser of Bound had written back, “What you have is unique and unavailable elsewhere.”

x x x x x x

Late summer is the Death Valley of the porn business. Love TV limped along, barely covering expenses. We still didn’t have the cash saved for the color one-sheets and boxes needed to wholesale our tapes. Mail-order alone was no way to make a living.

At a time when I needed more than ever to hang onto my job at VCX, Marv and Tony learned about my sideline. Every day, one of them would ask, “Are you workin’ for us or are you workin’ for you?” They were enraged when employees learned the business under them, then became competitors. Norwood kept gloating, “Marv and Tony could shut you down so fast…” He stopped when I retorted, “Have you asked them to?”

I sold my RX-7 and drove my old gas-guzzler Pontiac‌—‌at a time when a fuel shortage meant half-hour lines at the pumps.

The strain of being embattled in both job and business was getting to me. I needed Valium, Dalmane or half a bottle of wine to get to sleep. I’d wake up groggy. Once, I put some eggs to boil, lay down to wait for them, then woke to find the eggs black and the pot glowing. Another time, I mixed instant coffee in my orange juice. Ace remarked on the heaviness in my manner. Joe said, “If I go a week without hearing from you, I start to worry.”

Something had to give. The way it did was the scariest experience of my life.

x x x x x x

Someone had been sneaking VCX masters out of Compact Video’s vault. Norwood had gone there to get one-inch tapes of Little Girls Blue and The Legend of Lady Blue. They were missing. The next day, the masters were back in the vault where they were supposed to be. Both had glitches in them that weren’t there the last time we made 3/4-inch submasters from them. Someone had taken them out, run them, and put them back.

Then a well-connected New York mobster started his own adult video line in Los Angeles, dealing in three films that were VCX exclusives: Little Girls Blue, Expensive Tastes, and Debbie Does Dallas. The man claimed he got permission to do so from Mickey Zaffarano.

Tony conducted an inventory of all VCX film and video master materials. He and Norwood found mistakes in my record-keeping. No surprise, with all I was trying to juggle. I found out later that Norwood had been trying to implicate me in the rip-off, making cracks at Compact like “Keep Dave out of the tape room.”

I knew I was under suspicion when Marv said to me in a low voice, “Be careful.”

“Be careful? Of what?”

“People are dying.”

A suspected video pirate had collapsed and died after a handball match. A heart attack, they said. Was Marv just trying to scare me, or…?

I hoped my employers didn’t know that I’d been using a lab set up by their underworld rival. All I’d known was that Harry, a telecine operator at Compact, had started his own video studio. Seeking new clients, he’d given me a low price on duplication and I’d quit the tedious process of dubbing in my living room. If I’d known the man behind Harry’s operation was Marv’s mortal enemy, I’d never have gone near the place.

My fears turned to panic when VCX sent me up north to oversee a 35-millimeter feature the company was producing. My job was to make sure the director wasn’t shooting a second film for himself. “Da guy wanted 55,000 feet of film,” Marv said. “Da finished feature is only 10,000 feet long. Don’t dat make ya wonder?”

To me, a five-and-a-half to one shooting ratio didn’t seem excessive. Was there a darker reason for my trip? They wouldn’t give me a company credit card or cash voucher (which I’d have to sign for). “Use your own money,” Tony said. “We’ll reimburse ya when ya get back.”

If I got back. Suppose a hit man was waiting for me up north? There’d be nothing to connect my trip to VCX. The rest of the crew‌—‌Norwood included‌—‌was off to Las Vegas for an Ernie Shavers fight, an alibi for all. If I refused to go, I’d be fired. Was I being paranoid? Ace and Joe thought so.

Normally, I’d welcome the chance to watch Anthony Spinelli, maker of the X-rated classics Sex World and Portrait of Seduction, direct John Leslie and Annette Haven. But now I could only wonder if two hunting knives, a billy club and three years of karate would be enough to protect me.

x x x x x x

Spinelli was a great, warm, bearded bear of a man. His wife, who kept track of shots and continuity, watched him with concerned eyes; twice he’d suffered heart attacks on sets and twice his family-like crew had finished films for him. Listening to their loose banter, I wished I’d had a crew like them.

I never did get to see their work on High School Memories. On the night before shooting, a loud noise woke me up. My eyes shot over to the door where the chair was still wedged beneath the knob. The phone was ringing. It was Tony, telling me to come home. “I forgot we had a transfer,” he said.

Norwood could babysit transfers. Marv had done it. But I was too relieved to ask questions.

When I walked into VCX, Marv looked up from the copy machine and said, “Dave, be careful.”

Oh God, not again. “Of what?” I asked.

Marv told me that a video technician we knew had committed suicide. His wife had come home and found him in their bedroom, his .45 in his hand. “He had everything to live for,” she sobbed. His friends were puzzled. He had been celebrating, having just landed the job he’d dreamed of getting. His income had increased by half and he’d bought a new car.

He’d been hired by Compact Video.

Now, I couldn’t wait to leave VCX. But Joe and I still couldn’t afford color materials. Then I had an idea: suppose we devised color flyers that could be cut for box covers and save us 50%. I met with the best one-sheet artist I knew (he designed VCX flyers) and told him to go ahead.

On December 14, 1979, Marv called me into his office. He explained in a calm, tired voice that he knew I was dubbing at Harry’s and had ordered the color material to compete with VCX in wholesale. There was none of the shouting and threats I’d expected upon Marv’s discovery. Instead, he seemed hurt. “Why’d you wanna do it?” he asked. Hadn’t the job, the refuge, and the “family” he’d provided been enough? Marv fired me quietly. Almost anticlimactically. Maybe, after all their bluster, my bosses realized that my pipsqueak operation was hardly competition worth getting agitated about.

After paying for the new flyers/box covers, LTV Enterprises (we dropped “Love” as too easily recognized as porn) had $400 left with which to start our empire.

x x x x x x

Chapter 7

DAVEY AND THE PIRATES
Winter 1979

“Aha,” I said, studying the blurry image on the Trinitron. “That schnozz. It’s Bette Midler alright.”

“OK, OK, so The Rose isn’t my best number.” Ben Rakoff hit the button that paused his ten VHS and five Beta dubbers. “With this ‘public domain’ shit, you take what you can get.” He popped the second half of The Rose into the Sony VO 2800 playback deck, started it up and unpaused his dubbers. “You oughta see my Electric Horseman. It’s straight from the source.”

The “source” was a projectionist who slipped film prints to a transfer technician, who sold 3/4-inch masters to dupers. After selling all the Beta and VHS they could of a title, these dupers made 3/4-inch masters from their masters to sell to other dupers, who, in turn, repeated the process. Some dupers ended up with 5th or 6th generation “masters” that were barely viewable.

I was at “Video Cassette Services” to show Rakoff the four LTV shows, which he was interested in distributing. Why link up with L.A.’s biggest video pirate? Because Rakoff had wide distribution in the U. S. but few titles that he owned legitimately. We needed each other, and he was no worse than the rest. In the 1979-1980 period, the only adult video manufacturer I knew who didn’t trade in dupes was me.

This was the time of the outlaw: consumer video’s “Wild West” era. I would soon feel like a settler in the Arizona Territory. My biggest clients would knock off my tapes; my ex-boss would steal my masters; the FBI would decimate the adult industry; and LTV’s survival would depend on a star salesman’s lack of dentures.

Rip-offs were happening in all sectors of the new home video industry as its decade of Reaganomics began with the Year of the Pirate.

x x x x x x

The “lending” of film prints for transfer to pirate tape masters came through labs, projectionists, couriers, theater managers and even high-level executives. Dressed to Kill, Fun House, The First Deadly Sin, Divine Madness and Superman II were available on dupers’ cassettes even before they were released to movie theaters. Gary Graifman of Overseas Televideo Corporation said that the U.S. Army was buying pirated cassettes of first-run movies and showing them on their foreign military bases. Video Action magazine called piracy “the biggest problem facing the film and home video industries.”

Hollywood fought back‌—‌sometimes absurdly: Walt Disney Productions and MCA, Inc. (Universal Studios) sued Sony Corporation, trying to get video recorders banned as “criminal devices.” Twentieth Century Fox released Nine to Five and The Stunt Man on video ninety days after their theatrical release, giving dupers only three months with the titles before facing studio competition. But movie theater owners playing the films complained that the studio was hurting their business, and Fox decided to “re-evaluate” the policy.

Most effective against what the FBI called “the fastest growing white collar crime in America” was the agency’s alliance with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They netted sixty convictions in 1980, publicizing them through listing the names, addresses and sentences of these dupers in Video Business magazine and Video Software Dealers of America (VSDA) Reports.

In the 1980s, penalties escalated from the thousand-dollar wrist-slaps of the late ’70s. Thirty-six counts of piracy got Ralph Smith of Houston, Texas four years and a $100,000 fine. Using theft statutes and consumer fraud laws, Hialeah, Florida police closed down the Hialeah Video Club and confiscated its entire inventory‌—‌before going to court. With the FBI/MPAA alliance also using mail fraud and conspiracy laws, Leisure Time Electronics Reports called 1981 “a very bad year for bootleggers.” In 1984, MPAA investigator Ed Murphy announced, “Piracy on the major releases is the exception rather than the rule.”

Adult video manufacturers had no MPAA or FBI to act as supercops. In 1985, the show business trade journal Variety reported that 10 to 15% of all adult video sales were pirated cassettes. At the VSDA’s Las Vegas trade show in August, 1986, Universal Video of Akron, Ohio, openly sold dupes of almost every adult title in existence. Universal’s Mark Reigel told me that only fear of his rough-and-tumble associates kept the angry adult video exhibitors around him from getting violent. He pointed out that none of the titles he was selling had been registered with the Library of Congress‌—‌which adult manufacturers shied away from doing. A month later, twenty-two adult video companies won a restraining order, barring Universal from dealing in their titles until their class-action suit against the pirate was settled.

Only the biggest companies could afford civil suits that dragged on through the ’80s. Cal Vista won $110,000 and $16,000 in legal fees from Western Video of Georgia and Texas in 1982. Caballero won a judgment of $90,000 in damages and legal costs from Houston-based Movieland Entertainment Centers in 1987. And in 1986, Caballero and the Mitchell brothers finally forced a $150,000 settlement with alleged longtime pirate Jim Sicilia of Worldwide Video.

These victories didn’t faze King of Video of Las Vegas. When business reverses put that company’s assets up for auction in 1989, over a thousand adult movie masters belonging to other companies were found in King of Video’s vault.

Some manufacturers installed signal encoders such as Copyguard on their dub chains. But these devices only foiled the small fry who dubbed deck-to-deck. Big-time pirates stripped off the modified signal and added a new one with sync generators and time-base correctors.

“This business is good news and bad news,” said a tape supplier. “The bad news is they’ll buy ten pieces from you and sell fifty. The good news is they’ll all buy from you once.”

x x x x x x

“I can do numbers with this shit!”

Ben Rakoff was admiring the four LTV boxes on his desk. Their cover photos and color-coordinated borders made the white cassette albums look like candy boxes. Teenage Playmates featured Gayle Monica in an auburn babydoll on blue satin with her “come hither” look. Lights! Camera! Orgy! showed a woman on a bed, lost in ecstasy, with a movie camera hovering over her. The Perfect Gift had Juliet Anderson in a merry widow, tying a red ribbon around one of her long, black-nyloned legs. Bound’s cover model, “suspended” in silver wristlets, showed her nude back and just enough below it to tease without being relegated to under-the-counter sales. Rakoff had nothing like them among his dull, photocopied knock-off covers.

Rakoff did “do numbers.” Within a week, Video Cassette Services had sent out one-sheets, made sales calls, and given me an order for “20 and 10 across the board”: 20 VHS and 10 Beta of each title, a total of 120 tapes.

“There’s just one problem,” I said. “I don’t have the bucks to dub that quantity right now.”

“Well, hell.” Rakoff shrugged. “Let’s run ’em right here.”

I was uneasy about leaving 3/4-inch submasters with a duper like Rakoff for the 24 hours he requested but I didn’t have much choice. I needed immediate cash for rent, food and gasoline as well as for LTV.

By the end of the second week of January, LTV had over $3,000 in the bank. “We’re finally rolling, Dave,” said Joe.

I became part of another outlaw clan‌—‌much different from my first one. Like many quasi-legal operations, the one headed by the lean, sly-faced Rakoff was literally a family affair. I came in one day to find Rakoff, his daughter, his nephew, and his nephew’s girlfriend dividing a mountain of Quaaludes into piles that each would peddle separately. Rakoff laughed at my expression of surprise. “Hey, the family that dupes together dopes together.”

I began to like these “goniffs.” They had some kind of wry Jewish soul, lively and irreverent, abrasive yet warm. I hoped they weren’t ripping me off too badly so that I could go on liking them.

Twenty-year-old Ruth had the same lean slyness as her father but was blonde and pretty. She was a “Valley girl,” a daddy’s girl, who admitted he spoiled her rotten. Ellie, a middle-aged, self-described “yenta”, sat at the front desk, disguised as a receptionist. She was actually Rakoff’s partner.

Most flamboyant of the crew was Johnny Day, the full-time salesman, paid by commission as an “independent.” Tall and greying, with large, soft eyes that contrasted with the hard history in his face, he liked to toss his cowboy-booted feet on his desk and invite you to share in a “tootski” from the silver vial of cocaine around his neck.

Johnny liked to hobnob with porn stars, claiming to have been intimate with Serena. One day, I found him sharing his vial with John Holmes. In person, the slim star seemed more solid and sinewy than he did on the screen. I’d thought him an exception to my observation that porn studs are jocks. But now I could see how Holmes made cat-like leaps from twelve-foot-high roofs in the Johnny Wadd films. When the nephew’s girlfriend walked in, Holmes went into his act: wondering where she’d been all his life and pretending to paw her without touching any of the no-nos. Privately, he claimed to be bored with sex and in it only for the money. But Holmes had his image as a Lothario to maintain. The giggly young woman could spread the word that the notorious John Holmes had come on to her.

Unlike the VCX crew, Rakoff’s bunch flaunted their lawlessness‌—‌kind of “nouveau criminal” instead of “old school.” Rakoff would say to visitors, “Wanna see an Italian boxing glove?” Then he’d pull from his desk a snub-nosed revolver and make punching motions with it. Maybe this was his “friendly” way of warning people that he had a weapon within reach. At VCX, his conduct would have been considered amateurish. I never saw a gun displayed there, although I’m sure they were in the building. Rakoff confided to me that the gun was a “throwaway. Use it, then lose it. It’s untraceable.”

Rakoff was prepared for his enemies’ moves. I arrived at VCS one day to find the VCRs, proc amps, CVS 504 time-base corrector, Trinitrons, and even cables all gone. “What happened?” I asked. “Was my stuff so hot it burned out the system?”

Rakoff laughed into the phone at his ear, then explained to the listener, “Jennings just walked in and cracked a funny.”

Daughter Ruth, standing in the doorway biting her lip, explained that U.S. marshals had just seized the equipment and many tape masters at the behest of the brothers Warner and Mitchell. (Behind the Green Door was one of VCS’s best-selling “public domain” titles.)

“Don’t worry,” Rakoff said. “We’ll be running again by this evening.” He kept backups of equipment and masters in storage.

Rakoff’s protection against the rougher parties he pirated was the well-connected man he bought his X-rated masters from‌—‌the same mobster VCX was suing over Little Girls Blue, Expensive Tastes and Debbie Does Dallas.

For his safety, Rakoff also exploited a physical disability. Harry Steinman of the Select/Essex Steinmans, barons of the big-budget 35, was itching to punch him out. But he wouldn’t dare even raise the back of his hand to Rakoff’s “ugly weasel-eyed punem” for fear that Rakoff’s pacemaker would quit, resulting in a murder charge.

In this environment of duplicity, cunning and rip-offs lay my dubbing masters, on Rakoff’s shelves and under his control.

Realizing how easily VCS could be cheating me, I let Rod, the shipper and main dub chain operator, know how I’d feel about being duped. “If someone pirated me so badly that I couldn’t stay in business, I’d feel honor-bound to pick up a piece and blow that person’s head off.”

Rod looked at me like I was crazy. “Do you really feel that extreme about it?”

“I got my whole life, my whole future tied up in this,” I said. “This may be my one chance‌—‌ever‌—‌to get in on the ground floor of what is going to be a giant industry. If I fail through my own mistakes, I’ll accept that. But I won’t let someone else shoot me down.”

During the time I was part of Rakoff’s “family,” I didn’t believe he was making sales of LTV tapes that I wasn’t aware of.

Months later, Ellie, who had by then severed her ties with Rakoff, confirmed that during the time I had been one of his “people,” he hadn’t been ripping me off.

He had a kind of Robin Hood complex. As the poor relation in a family with a history in show business, Rakoff hated the fat cats of Hollywood, considering them worse crooks than he was. He felt justified in preying on their films‌—‌and those of the X-rated establishment. VCS was the refuge of his clan‌—‌me included. In the dangerous game of duping, his cunning and foresight helped all of us prosper.

I knew that if I moved out from under his roof and he perceived me as becoming successful, Rakoff wouldn’t hesitate to pirate me too. It was a risk I had to take.

Inevitably, other distributors learned of my tapes and wanted to buy from me directly, not from Rakoff. By early February, 1980, I was selling to about a half-dozen distributors, doing more dubbing at Harry’s lab than at VCS. My sales volume was growing rapidly. But dealing with the business practices of my new clients made me feel like a minnow who hung out with sharks.

x x x x x x

The drab little building on Cherokee near Hollywood and Vine hardly seemed fit for TVX, the dean of adult video companies. The quarters were cramped with low ceilings and a maze of narrow hallways and cubicles. Localized lighting illuminated only desk surfaces and work areas, like the lamplit hold of a pirate ship.

It was rumored that the managing partner of TVX had obtained his position through knocking off the company’s titles. “He was selling more of their product than they could,” said VCS’s Johnny Day. “So Dave Friedman made him a partner.” (When I heard that, I felt TVX was doomed. You don’t neutralize a cancer by trying to make it your ally; you eradicate it, as VCX had done with the piracy of its titles. I was to hear rumor after rumor of TVX personnel “backdooring”‌—‌selling on the sly‌—‌TVX tapes. In his book, A Youth in Babylon, TVX founder Friedman claimed he’d lost a fortune in his video enterprise.)

Lounging in TVX’s dim clutter when I delivered my first order of LTV tapes was another of my distributor clients, “Wally the Wolf,” who also sold his titles to TVX. I (privately) called Walter Gernert that because of the lupine nastiness in his face. He had once collected debts for S and L Distributors. Stretching his lanky, powerful frame in a tilt-back chair, Gernert joked about being accused of duping. “I keep fantasizing about getting this license plate for my Mercedes that says ‘DUPER 1.’” He pondered the idea for a moment. “I think I’m really gonna do it.” Fined $25,000 each for copyright infringement in 1982, Gernert and his partner Russ Hampshire made such a success of Video Company of America that two years later they offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone duping their own VCA tapes.

It wasn’t just the spectre of duping that made me uneasy dealing with my new clients. They’d constantly try to beat down my prices, implying that if I didn’t give them “sweetheart deals,” they wouldn’t push my tapes. I delivered all orders COD; they’d get their “30 days credit” by giving me checks they knew would bounce. Then they’d take their time making good on them. I was at their mercy. I had no control over the marketing of my product.

I wished I could afford to set up a sales office and build up a phone list of stores and wholesalers nationwide that I could count on for moving a steady stream of tapes.

Promising to give me the marketing control I sought was a young man named Stuart Karl, who would become a legend in home video with his Jane Fonda’s Workout tapes. Karl later became video chief for giant Karl Lorimar, then was ousted from that company for conflicts of interest, and indicted for illegally funneling almost $200,000 to Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. After his death of AIDS at age 37 in 1991, former associates would eulogize Karl as “a real visionary,” “the consummate entrepreneur,” and “a long-shot gambler.”

When I first met him in 1980, I thought he was a cop. He said he wanted to review the LTV line for a trade magazine he’d started called Video Store. The cherubic blond beach boy met me in a restaurant in North Hollywood, accompanied by a dark, tense-eyed man named George who claimed to be a barber. As we discussed the adult industry, George suddenly asked, “Dave, what do you know about organized crime in the porno business?”

A chill went down my spine. The word “cops” popped into my head. I back-pedaled that I had no knowledge of who was behind the companies I dealt with and I didn’t send Karl any tapes.

He called again, inviting me to be wined and dined and to meet the staff of Video Store in Newport Beach. I decided, why not?

In a Cadillac borrowed from Karl’s father, one of the biggest car dealers in southern California, we breezed past beachfront mansions worth three million each. Karl was between exotic cars, having rid himself of a red Ferrari that got six miles per gallon, blew a transmission synchro, and attracted cops. They weren’t a problem on Karl’s home turf, though. When stopped for running a red light in his previous Porsche, he’d avoided a ticket by explaining that he let the police chief park his boat in the Karl harbor.

“I have two girlfriends,” Karl announced. “Both live in houses that I own.” And his own personal dwelling swarmed with young women, the staff of Video Store. The magazine occupied the ground floor of Karl’s manse.

There was a reason I got the red carpet treatment. “I’m starting a distributorship,” Karl told me. “Video Store reaches three to five thousand new dealers every month (an exaggeration). I’d be a fool not to follow up with something else to sell them.”

We’d both benefit from starting Karl’s wholesale agency with LTV tapes: He’d get low distributor cost, not based on any set quantity. I’d drop-ship the orders straight from Harry’s lab so he wouldn’t need to stock product. Since I had no in-house sales staff, we wouldn’t be competing to sell the same titles to retailers. Karl’s own staff would be devoted solely to selling my tapes. (The maxim in video was “what gets pushed gets sold.”) Plus Video Store would advertise LTV continuously at no cost to myself. A benefit to me that I didn’t mention to him was the list of dealer accounts I’d accrue through shipping to them‌—‌and use for opening my own sales office later.

The deal looked great. Unfortunately, as I and others dealing with Stuart Karl would learn, he made a dozen new business plans every day before lunch‌—‌and forgot half of them by dinnertime. But on that day, he boosted my ego when he closed off a long phone call with, “I gotta go. I got the king of live video porn right here in my office.”

x x x x x x

The king of live video porn found himself at war with a much bigger potentate. I went to Compact Video’s vault to get more dubbing masters, only to find them gone. “Norwood cleared everything out,” was the explanation.

“But that was my stuff. It didn’t belong to VCX.”

A shrug. “It all got lumped together.”

I called VCX and got Norwood. “The feeling around here,” he said, “is that anything you did while working at VCX rightfully belongs to us.”

“LIKE HELL!” I tried to compose myself. “Lemme talk to Tony.”

“He’s out.”

“Then lemme speak to Marv.”

“He’s out too.”

“Look, Norwood, I wanna come in and pick up those masters RIGHT NOW!”

“You’ll have to speak to Marv and Tony.”

I slammed the phone down; my mind was racing. I knew that VCX was suing my client TVX to cease and desist from dealing in Debbie Does Dallas, so I called TVX. They invited me to join a pow-wow about to take place at their building on Cherokee.

The war drums were beating. Adult video’s “old school” was polarizing into two factions: VCX and those opposed to VCX. I kept my distance from the figures huddling in the murk of TVX. I just wanted my tapes back; I didn’t want to join any vendetta.

Maybe I had no choice. “Look,” the attorney said. “Somehow, they got the idea you’re involved with…” He pressed his lips together. “I’ll do what I can.”

Before I left TVX, a heavy Sicilian-American with lizard eyes, who was with Wonderful World of Video, said, “If the legal route doesn’t work out for you, give me a call. We have other ways of dealing with Marvin and Tony.” Reassuring.

I called Compact and said I’d sue them for helping VCX put me out of business. Recalling how screaming worked with the magazine rep, I escalated to a shriek. I brought up the coming power struggle in porn. “But that’s nothing compared to the stink I’m gonna raise in letting the whole world know that COMPACT VIDEO IS AIDING AND ABETTING THE MAFIA’S LARGEST PORNOGRAPHY OUTFIT IN TIGHTENING THEIR STRANGLEHOLD ON THE ADULT VIDEO INDUSTRY!”

That afternoon, phone calls ricocheted between attorneys, VCX and Compact Video, ending with the message on my answering machine: “Davey, you can pick up your tapes at any time.”

I did. I’d let others worry about gathering storm clouds.

x x x x x x

Joe’s way of celebrating January’s net profits of over four thousand dollars was to throw an orgy. It would be my first. Joe had lined me up a choice of two dates. Lone men weren’t allowed; lone women were. I had to laugh. “Up there, I got a choice of women to take to a sex party. Down here, I can’t get a date for a cup of coffee.” I wasn’t sure I’d want to get involved in the action. Joe said I wouldn’t have to. The swingers’ credo‌—‌repeated enough to become a cliché‌—‌was “It’s a non-pressure environment in which you’re free to participate or not to.”

Joe had another reason to celebrate: he had a new 19-year-old girlfriend he described as “a total masochist, a perfect submissive.” “Stephanie Bonds”‌—‌her later nom de porn‌—‌was a Cal Berkeley math prodigy. The names of the special courses she was taking made quantum physics sound like Arithmetic 1A.

Stephanie was a brunette with angelic features, large, luminous eyes and sagging breasts from having lost thirty pounds. She was nervous and insecure, punctuating her speech with little self-effacing laughs.

Her servitude to Joe was total: part fantasy role, part eagerness to please. “Stephanie, would you go get me a cup of tea,” he’d say, “and make it medium-strong.” She’d scurry up the stairs. She vacuumed, cooked, cleaned, and attended to Joe’s penis while he played in real life the pampered sheik he’d played in Bound. “Stephanie gives the best head I’ve ever experienced,” Joe announced as she sat at his knee. “Darling, why don’t you give Dave a demonstration.” To her relief, I begged off.

Stephanie’s first movie role was in a test Joe and I conducted of shooting video with only one camera. She fantasized undergoing the athletic abuse taken by Marilyn Chambers in the Mitchell Brothers’ brutal Never a Tender Moment: being suspended by wrists and ankles while butch lesbians beat her with whips and hung upside down while they insert all of a dildo the size of a baby elephant’s leg in her rectum.

Like most S and M fans, Stephanie was more turned on by the thought of the extremes than by actually experiencing them. She flopped about in giggly hysterics as Joe put his limited heft against ropes and pulleys, trying to hoist her into some semblance of upside-down suspension. Trying to synchronize small, middle-aged joints and sinews with the giddy floppings of a large, upside-down teenager, Joe made feeble attempts at whipping and penetration. Catching the scene with his consumer camera was futile. Watching the tape, we concluded that video sex should be shot only with two or more cameras. “We missed a lot of the spontaneity,” Joe said. Thank God, I thought.

I was surprised at how quickly the orgy that evening became boring. The real action at those group affairs is in the heads of those turned on by the idea of being observed. Stephanie tried to demonstrate her fellatio skills on me but I was put off by the two men hanging onto her like lampreys on a shark. I concluded that orgies weren’t for me.

But northern California sure was. The logical place to open LTV’s sales office would be Los Angeles, where the porn industry was headquartered, but then I’d be stuck there. “If I’m going into this business on a long-term basis,” I told Joe, “I want to do it on my terms, living where I choose to.” He agreed.

I couldn’t move up north immediately. I planned to wait until the summer dead period. But suddenly, a place became available. When I saw it, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.

High on a hillside in the East Bay garden spot called Piedmont, the house had been built for Jack London. It seemed as sturdy as the clipper ships described in his writings, with a view to die for and London’s young wife had‌—‌on a bed beside the living room window. It framed an eagle’s panorama of the entire Bay Area, rendered flawless by distance: the blue jewel of Lake Merritt set in the surrounding green of Lakeside Park; the grey Alameda Naval shipyards below the mosaic of traffic on the Bay Bridge; San Francisco, mystical in the fog drifting off dark Marin Headlands; and the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge stark against the colorless Pacific.

Juliet Anderson, who’d starred in LTV’s last shoot, couldn’t afford the rent herself; her roommate had just moved out. I agreed to share in the maintenance of the antique furniture, the surrounding garden and the hot tub: luxuries fit for the King of Live Video Porn.

I’d keep the apartment in Van Nuys for another couple of months, making U-haul trips on weekends. The business was clearing almost a thousand a week; I could easily afford to rent both places for a while.

Until the porn industry’s Valentine’s Day massacre.

x x x x x x

“54 Indicted in FBI Pornography Drive”

The Los Angeles Times headline of February 15, 1980, heralded “the largest crackdown on pornographers in FBI history.” On St. Valentine’s Day, 400 agents nationwide pounced on video pirates and pornographers who’d been selling tapes to Golde Coast Specialties, an FBI mail-order business front in Miami, Florida. The two and a half year “Miporn” (Miami pornography) sting snagged a who’s who of the porn industry, including my ex-bosses Marv and Tony.

With $400,000 in federal funds and MPAA money, agents purchased over 200 titles and forty-five M-10 machine guns with silencers. They allegedly bought Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and Smokey and the Bandit from my future client Ruben Gottesman; boy-boy child porn, with participants as young as eight years old from Le Salon of San Francisco; and bestiality loops and videos of men having sex with pre-pubescent girls from Marv’s and Tony’s associate in Hawaii, Alvin Nunes.

The busts went routinely, except for the biggest: Mickey Zaffarano reportedly tried to elude FBI agents by running down an underground passage that connected his New York Pussycat Theater to an office across the street. En route, the portly Mafioso‌—‌not a jogger‌—‌collapsed. Later, in his office, he died of a massive coronary.

“Before the body was even cold,” according to an employee of VCX, Marv’s attorney drew up papers putting the company in his own name. Marv softened his ouster of Tony by giving him one hundred of the lesser titles to start anew. They’d never had a formal partnership; they’d remained together only through the will of Big Mickey.

Why didn’t Tony fight back against Marv? Years later, he said he didn’t dare confront “Marv’s people.” Why did Marv’s people keep backing him despite his history of bankruptcies? “They’re loyal to him because of services he rendered.” What services? Tony wouldn’t say.

At S and L/VCX, Tony had been like a smart-mouthed little kid who taunts a slow-witted bully, knowing he can run to his big brother for protection. Now Big Brother was gone.

With Zaffarano’s death, more than VCX threatened to divide. Calling him “the smut umpire,” columnist Jack Anderson cited “knowledgeable law enforcement sources” as saying that the capo’s death “will touch off a gangland war among Mafia chiefs seeking control of the multi-billion-dollar porn industry.”

The Fareses of New York were at odds with the Perainos of L.A.’s Arrow Film and Tape over Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones. VCX, TVX and “Joe Black” Arieno’s group were in contest over rights to The Legend of Lady Blue and Debbie Does Dallas. If some kind of war broke out, smaller companies like LTV would be forced to choose a side.

But war didn’t break out‌—‌not with FBI attention focused on the industry. As my client Phil Teri of Four Star Video said, the Feds were gunning for people like himself, “who went back a little ways.” He said that each defendant’s legal costs could exceed $200,000. They wouldn’t have that money to pay attorneys if the Feds carried out their threatened RICO seizures.

Under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, Ruben Gottesman lost his $250,000 home and got an 18-month prison sentence. Most of the others faced the same racketeering, interstate transportation of stolen property, and copyright violation charges.

Some negotiated plea bargains. Joe Black agreed to get out of the porno business in exchange for having the charges against him dropped. My ex-boss Marv also agreed to get out‌—‌and accept a $30,000 fine and a five year prison term.

The plea-bargainers capitulated too soon. As the Miporn cases dragged on for years, the government’s key witness, undercover agent Patrick Livingston, was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky for shoplifting. Psychiatrists testified that Agent Livingston had a propensity to lie. His FBI colleagues expressed doubts about his mental and emotional well-being. The United States District Court in Miami ruled that Agent Livingston presented the Grand Jury with tainted information. Finally, a Federal judge in Miami dismissed the remaining fourteen Miporn pornography indictments.

Though the anti-porn Meese Report in 1986 called Miporn “an example of effective utilization of law enforcement resources to combat the trade in obscenity,” it was more like what Ben Rakoff called it: “Another case of cops getting so deep in shit that the stink won’t rub off.”

x x x x x x

Miporn’s immediate effect was to shut down the adult tape trade. In the last ten days of February, LTV wholesaled a total of eleven tapes. Norwood told people at Compact that VCX sales had fallen eighty percent.

“The Feds are trying to scare off the legitimate video dealers,” said Rakoff. “They want to keep X-rated tapes in the little bookstores with the eights (8-millimeter loops).”

I tried to assure Stuart Karl that the Feds only wanted to nail organized crime figures (which I didn’t believe myself). Ironically, Karl’s panic made others think he was a cop. A distributor responded to the Video Store ad requesting a sample LTV tape. The woman he spoke to at Karl’s production and distribution company, Chapman Filmworks, didn’t want to ship the sample (to avoid a record of the transaction). She delivered the tape in person and wanted cash with no receipt. “No way,” the distributor said, “I don’t do business like that. Take the tape back.”

In trying to avoid a paper trail, Karl’s employee had acted like a police informant. Cops treat porn like drugs: they’ll buy but not sell‌—‌at least not on the record. At the very time a full-color ad for LTV tapes was about to appear in Video Store, the word was spreading in California’s porn community that Karl’s operation was a police sting.

There were good reasons for paranoia. Shortly after Miporn erupted, a “mail-order company” called Unique Video Specialties revealed itself to be an LAPD sting. Thirty adult video companies in the L.A. vicinity were raided. Rakoff showed me a copy of a search warrant for Little Girls Blue, now contraband under a new L.A. law proscribing the depiction of females under 18, even if the actress is actually thirty. I was glad that the only mention of age in my Teenage Playmates was in the title itself.

The anti-porn forces were starting to focus on video, and I got suspicious about certain mail orders: one from an office in the State Department; ones from “stores” buying at mail-order prices; any “business” with check numbers indicating a newly-opened account. I’d return their orders with a cover letter stating that the tapes were “no longer available.” I began to return all orders from Texas, Florida, Utah, Tennessee, parts of Oklahoma, and that bastion of anti-porn prosecution, Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Ohio. “When you go to your lab,” said Four Star’s Phil Teri, “take an extra spin around the block to see if you’re being followed.”

I wasn’t going to the lab often. Orders for March totaled only 178 tapes. And conspicuous by his lack of contribution to even that meager total was Ben Rakoff. I no longer dubbed at his place; I’d gotten a low price on dubbing, tape-boxing, shrink-wrapping and shipping from Harry, who was desperate for enough work to keep his lab open. His big client had been one of the Miporn plea-bargainers and had left the business.

I wondered if Rakoff was pirating me. A tape supplier, angry because Rakoff hadn’t paid him in months, agreed to help me find out.

I visited VCS, pretending to be taking an inventory of LTV tapes clients had in stock. I noticed that Rakoff had no VHS of Lights! Camera! Orgy! on his shelves. The next day, the tape supplier visited VCS and purchased a VHS of the title Rakoff supposedly didn’t have in stock. The tape had a legitimate box cover. (Rakoff evidently stocked up on them at the time he’d been doing my dubbing.)

At Harry’s lab, I was amazed that the tape’s video quality looked identical to what Harry was producing. “He must have made 3/4-inch dupes of your masters while he had possession of them,” Harry said. “You won’t see much loss with one extra Umatic generation.” Harry, a trained engineer, showed me that the tape couldn’t possibly have come off his own chain; its color bars didn’t line up with the correct vectorscope markings.

I began to realize the situation I was in: almost out of cash, without my own sales set-up, in competition with a big-time pirate who could saturate the market with my own titles before I could get to it. I had a wild impulse to go to Rakoff’s with my .357 Magnum and blow his head off before he could grab his throw-away.

“Do you need any more proof?” Harry asked.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “80 proof.”

x x x x x x

I didn’t take “Maggie” to VCS and blow Rakoff’s brains out; I became too busy filling orders.

It started when sales of Bound suddenly took off. In the first two weeks of April, each day brought orders totaling between fifty and a hundred pieces of the title. The other titles, too, began to move.

Joe and I wondered why. Was it the magazine raves about the Gillis and Serena scene? The color ads in Video Store? Serena’s appearance as a Hustler centerfold? It was none of those reasons.

Noticing that most of the orders Harry was shipping went to Four Star, I delivered the next 60-pound box of tapes there myself‌—‌and met “Supertoad.” I’d secretly call him that because “Bob Jackson” looked like he could camouflage on a rotting log. He was round and fiftyish, with pock-marked skin.

The reason the skilled phone salesman had chosen Bound as his lead item was his lack of a top row of front teeth. He didn’t need teeth to pronounce the word “bound.” I wondered aloud how the sales ace had racked up such totals. Jackson said, “Watch.” He punched up his next phone number.

It wasn’t so much his pitch as his delivery. He rammed the title into the mouthpiece like a punch. “Bound! Ya gotta have Bound! This tape is taking the country by storm! Bound! This is the hot one! BOUND!” The surface of Jackson’s desk began undulating. Oh God, I thought, an earthquake. Then I realized it was the desk riding on the salesman’s knees, pumping with his adrenaline.

I treated my new sales champion to pasta at Emilio’s on Melrose. When I mentioned my plans to shoot more titles, Jackson emphasized the need for stories with women playing “heroine” roles. “The audience isn’t just guys with their putz in their palm any more,” he said. “It’s couples. There are more and more women watching these tapes. That’s the trend of the future.”

x x x x x x

Chapter 8

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD PORNOGRAPHER
1980 - 1981

The Bay Area’s spring rains came full force during my heaviest spell of moving. But I felt revitalized, despite a bad cold and the loss of fifteen pounds from lugging boxes up fifty-six hillside stairs to the house. (No wonder Juliet’s legs were so trim.)

Pulling my last U-haul load, I listened to the rhythm of the windshield wipers and mused, “Here’s the King of Live Video Porn, heading north to share a mansion with a beautiful blonde sex star.”

That fantasy was far more exotic than the reality of life with Juliet Anderson. My first dose of the day-to-day doings in porn’s Hollywood came when my new housemate introduced me to the industry’s elite sex stars‌—‌all at one time.

x x x x x x

“Half the top studs in the business are in this very room!” squealed Juliet.

They didn’t act like studs; there was none of the edgy banter that marked most gatherings of young single adults. Billy Dee and Richard Pacheco lay sprawled beside the fireplace, concentrating on the chessboard between them. Paul Thomas listened wearily as motor-mouthed Annette Haven talked at him. Blair Morris sat in lotus position, opening his eyes only to partake of the joint making the rounds, then returning to his meditation on the “malevolent energies” in the part of the living room where the young wives of both Jack London and our landlord had died.

At this housewarming party Juliet had thrown to introduce me to northern California’s porn acting elite, only Michael Morrisson seemed to be trying to impress a lady. The corpulent Texan was regaling a starlet with his rodeo exploits. When Morrisson lumbered off to refill his glass, the starlet asked Herschel Savage, “Was he really a bull-rider?”

“I don’t know,” Savage answered. “But he definitely is a bull-shitter.”

The lack of lust here was no surprise. Those present knew one another far more intimately than they’d have chosen to without payment involved. Most preferred keeping their private lives separate from the business. They regarded each other with quiet, polite dispassion.

At this party, heads wouldn’t have turned if a naked lady walked into the crowd‌—‌and one did. Holly McCall, fresh out of the hot tub, saw no reason for modesty on this warm spring day. Juliet mentioned that I was looking for someone to do housecleaning for $4.00 an hour, and suddenly‌—‌like the opening image of a loop‌—‌this lovely naked redhead with steam rising from her breasts stood before me saying, “I’ll clean your house for $4.00 an hour.”

The image of Holly making her offer would come back to me years later, when ladies of less porn stature than hers routinely made over $100,000 a year; when parties like Juliet’s would have as many photographers as guests; and every publicity-hungry porn princess there would be grabbing body parts, trying to be the slut of the ball.

The years immediately following that casual spring gathering in 1980 would bring cataclysmic change to the adult movie world, including the demise of the northern California X-rated Hollywood I’d just moved into. But “the video revolution” was not yet a topic of discussion for those gathered in Juliet’s hillside garden. Instead, I heard about a popular adult actress rumored to have been a male, a lady‌—‌famed for anal S and M‌—‌whose rectum was so stretched she needed enemas daily to move her bowels, and that I shouldn’t hire Johnny Keyes, who liked to ram his long erection into women’s cervixes, enjoying their pain.

At the time of Juliet’s party, her guests regarded video as a mere curiosity, a strange medium used by her new housemate. Of more importance to them was my upcoming shoot over Memorial Day weekend; they all wanted me to hire them.

x x x x x x

The Memorial Day shoot began with a “wet shot” of a different kind: convinced that Joe’s minor suggestions during the opening scene of her porn career meant that she was screwing up, Stephanie Bonds dissolved into tears. Playing both director and father figure, my partner conceded that his 19-year-old love slave “might be a tad sensitive for this business.”

Like so many newcomers, the Berkeley math prodigy was nervous only about the acting; once the sex began, she relaxed. Our “docudrama” Chained, about a neophyte guided through her S and M fantasies by an experienced friend, was a scenario that turned her on.

The chubby Texan, Michael Morrisson, was fascinated with Stephanie’s pendulous, milk-white breasts. Like a huge hairy baby with new toys, he kneaded, pinched, slapped and bit them. He stung them with a cat o’ nine tails, leaving criss-crossed red marks. Morrisson was so excited he began to come prematurely. Pulling out, he clenched his penis at the base. “No, let it go,” I said. “Then put it back in so we can get more strokes.” As I’d hoped, Morrisson stayed hard through three more positions and delivered a second wet shot.

I thought he’d committed the sin of having a third one inside Stephanie when fluid shot out of her. Instead, she’d experienced a spurting vaginal orgasm, the first one I ever shot. Flushed with afterglow, she basked in our praise. Stephanie Bonds went on to work in about half a dozen more productions until bad experiences with porn’s cruder moviemakers drove her out of the trade. She even turned down a New York producer’s offer of $7,000 for five days work in a 35.

I’d been as nervous about the Memorial Day shoot as Stephanie. We didn’t know any good Bay Area videographers and our budget for three features in three days was only $5,000. So I undertook the learn-by-doing task of chief engineer and left the script-writing, casting and production management to my partner Joe, who was as green at these jobs as I was at videography. Believing the Murphy’s Law corollary that whatever you aren’t prepared for will happen, I had backups for every light, cable, and connector; extra tools, tapes, head and lens cleaners; and written plans for every foul-up I could anticipate. I strained the rental shop manager’s patience, rehearsing the details of equipment operation until I could white-balance the Hitachi SK-80 cameras and align their color tubes in my sleep. The video gods rewarded my preparation with the only shoot I’ve ever been on that didn’t have a single technical problem.

The only cast hassle was Lysa Thatcher. The prima donna-ish star of American Pie refused to go into Montclair village for a box-cover shot at a bus-stop bench. Instead, we had to haul one of Joe’s benches into his driveway for a shot of Billy Dee trying to peek up Lysa’s skirt as she ties a shoelace.

Despite skimpy stories and production values, our new features Chained, Peach Fuzz, and The Awakening of Emily were among the first adult videotapes with broadcast-camera video quality. “The fact that this was shot on video makes you feel like you’re sitting right next to the porn stars,” wrote a reviewer in Video magazine. “Don’t be surprised if your glasses steam up.”

I worried aloud about legal heat after Al Goldstein wrote that in Peach Fuzz Lysa Thatcher “looks more like a 15-year-old high school baton twirler than a porn star.” But “Supertoad” Jackson said, “You should be celebrating. In my sales pitch, that line will be money in the bank.”

x x x x x x

Returning from another business trip to L.A., I found a note from Juliet on the door: “Living room is reserved for a mini-orgy Harvey and I are having tonight. The cats have been fed.”

Great, I thought, another night with Juliet’s shrieks resounding through the house. A Hustler review of Aunt Peg’s Fulfillment described the world-class “screamer’s” “explosive lovemaking… there are times you feel almost embarrassed watching her. It’s as if you’d just opened the door to her bedroom to see what’s the matter, only to discover that everything is more than all right.”

My housemate was a professional sex workaholic‌—‌always hustling. If her date for the evening didn’t mind the publicity, she’d have someone photograph him fondling her breasts over a plate of sushi. At San Francisco’s annual Exotic-Erotic Ball, Juliet made sure a Penthouse photographer got a good full-page shot of Billy Dee about to suck her nipple. Always fretting about money problems, she juggled porn work, stage shows, mail-order items, phone sex recordings and “fantasy sessions” with sugar daddies. I encountered a fat old man in a bathrobe breaking our “no smoking in the house” rule, puffing a pipe in our living room. Juliet whispered to me that he was a big fan of hers who’d made a fortune in medical devices. One weekend I had to sleep on Joe’s padded floor, consoling myself with my $80 split of the rental of our house to a Rajneesh group.

Compulsively thorough in everything she did, “General Juliet”‌—‌as I privately called her‌—‌presented me with a thirteen-page list of household chores: everything from “take shoes off before walking on hardwood floors” to “frequently take hair and fuzz off brush while vacuuming rugs.” But I wasn’t as diligent as the pleasant, passive young men who worshipped Juliet and hopped to do her bidding. Though she’d scold like the schoolteacher she had been, she couldn’t get me to share her housekeeping standards.

Once I was about to leave for L.A. on the same day Juliet was scheduled to come home from New York. I’d spent the morning in a cleaning frenzy and thought the results quite presentable. I was walking out the door just as she arrived. Juliet took one look at the place and let out a shriek that echoed in my ears as I hurried down the fifty-six steps.

x x x x x x

I’d envisioned running my business by phone during the summer of 1980, while looking out at deer grazing on the hillside. Instead I felt like a tennis ball, whizzing up and down a 400-mile-long court between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I planned on editing the three new shows in one long weekend at Harry’s L.A. lab; it took four weekends. There was always some technical problem with the editing gear, rented for the one-day weekend rate, or with Harry’s own proc amps, monitors, and cables, poorly maintained by his sloth-like flunky. After sorting out the problems, I’d work til exhaustion each night. Before unrolling my sleeping bag on the lab floor, I’d unwind by smoking a joint and taking a stroll past the seedy motels and closed fast-food diners on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, mumbling my apologies to bedraggled hookers angling for one last “date.”

Then my distribution outlets went sour, beginning with Stuart Karl. His sales lagged far behind the others; all those young women he hired were loath to call dealers and push pornography. To help motivate him I set him up on a date with Juliet, whose name he didn’t recognize until I said she played Aunt Peg. “Aunt Peg?!” Karl’s eyes went wide. (Over candlelight he gushed to her, “This is like a fantasy come true!” Aware of his wealth, she purred back, “I like making fantasies come true…”)

As Karl bought more tapes from me, his checks began bouncing. He apparently kept his wealth out of his company bank account. He reneged on giving me a promised list of over a thousand dealers who’d responded to the Video Store ads until I threatened to sue. Then his John Lennon: Interview With a Legend videotape took off and Karl lost all interest in selling porn.

Next came the Four Star fiasco. Company manager Honi (pronounced “Honey”) Webber kept assuring me I’d get the $3,997 they owed me “by tomorrow.” Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until the company filed for bankruptcy‌—‌stalling all creditors.

Supertoad, who’d been selling as an independent from his apartment, joined Marty Krause’s Video Home Library. His success with my titles inspired the rest of Marty’s staff to push them. But just when I thought I could count on my last remaining distributor to move enough tapes to keep me in business, Marty’s checks started bouncing. I’d let him pay for COD orders with post-dated checks, in lieu of the 30 days credit he got from better-capitalized manufacturers. I found out the hard way that the law treats post-dated checks as promises rather than payments, without imposing the usual bad-check penalties. I learned the best way to collect on my stack of bad paper from Marty was by following him through his Beverly Hills offices whining, “Marty, you’re killing me! I can’t pay my lab, I can’t pay my rent! You’re putting me out of business! All my money is in your bad checks!”

By the end of the summer, I was a wreck. Having no social life whatsoever didn’t help. Juliet’s visitors, making moonlit love beside the hot tub below my bedroom window, heightened my loneliness. Concerned about my state of mind, Juliet kept insisting that I go on a singles club’s Labor Day weekend Yosemite trip, which I kept arguing I was too busy and broke to afford.

I would owe my happiest moments over the next six years to Juliet’s persistence.

x x x x x x

It was lust at second sight.

When I first saw Shelly, I wasn’t impressed. I was poking my head out of my sleeping bag, scanning the group huddled in the morning chill around the camp stove she was fussing over. Owlish in huge glasses, hair pulled back rendering her face wide, Shelly looked roly-poly in her baggy, colorless sweater. I pulled the flap back over my head for a final round of sleep. Looking for all the help she could get preparing breakfast, Shelly too was not impressed by our first sight of each other.

The next one was much better. Shelly had her “eyes” (contact lenses) in and her hair brushed out, framing her face. Red shorts revealed long, tapered legs. Firm breasts bounced in her green tank top, followed by the eyes of the men in the group gathering for a hike to Vernal Falls.

Shelly asked if anyone knew the way to the ranger kiosk. I volunteered, having visited it several times the night before‌—‌I’d arrived after midnight and couldn’t find the group’s darkened campground (Shelly forgave me for sleeping in). I noticed how well she sorted out the camp documents and explained their contents to the rookie ranger at the window. This woman was organized.

Sipping from a can of 7-Up, held with long, graceful fingers during the entire hike to the Falls and back, Shelly told me her job as chief administrator for Berkeley Mental Health was driving her insane. She had no power to fire lazy, insolent workers who knew that even stern reprimands were subject to city union board reviews.

Once, a large, violent “client” had attacked Shelly and she had to fight him off alone. “My breasts,” she said, “were discolored for a month.” She needed this outing as much as I did.

It’s a good stimulus for conversation when a woman you’ve just met points to Indian Caves, as you ride past on rented bicycles, and says, “Some of my ancestors might be in there.” Shelly was proud of having as much Cherokee as Scotch and Welsh in her lineage of Colorado pioneers. From one side came high cheekbones, a broad forehead and prominent dark eyebrows. From the other came a small nose, thin lips and freckles. Her eyes went from gray to black, depending on the light, which brought out reddish highlights in her dark, wavy hair. When this tall, strong woman gazed into the distance, I perceived an aura of nobility in her eclectic features.

Her impression of me was also improving. Subject to constant rudeness in her workdays, Shelly said she was especially moved when I spread out my jacket for her to sit on at the top of a huge boulder we’d climbed. She said that when I first put my arm around her waist, a thrill passed through her body.

We’d both been without sex for a long time. We made love everywhere: by the fireplace, in the garden, in the hot tub, on the divan beside the wide front window‌—‌on the spot where the two young wives had died. After intense orgasms, Shelly would fall asleep almost immediately. I would leave her draped in comatose bliss over couches, tables, stairs and on the rug near the fireplace.

“I don’t know quite what to think of a relationship that starts with this much sex,” Shelly mused while watching a Pacific fall sunset from a Marin Headlands trail. “I love it!”

x x x x x x

On our long weekend car trips, Shelly would brace herself whenever we passed a mall. I’d usually spot a new video store and pull a hard turn into the parking lot. Then I’d dash inside and grab a business card to toss into the box of leads I was collecting to start my sales office. New video stores were popping up everywhere. “It’s like found money,” I told Shelly when she warned me about the dangers of whiplash.

Between 1980 and 1986, according to Video Store magazine, the number of video specialty retailers grew from under 5,000 to over 25,000, following the proliferation of VCRs. (In 1979 there were approximately 750,000 VCRs in American homes; by 1985 there were 17 million.)

And what were these suburban entrepreneurs offering their educated, middle-class customers? “It is generally acknowledged that porno films are the biggest current sellers in the VCR market,” noted the show biz journal Daily Variety. In 1981‌—‌before the Hollywood studios released their vast film libraries on tape‌—‌about half of all videos sold were X-rated.

Sometimes with reluctance, the “mom-and-pop store” pioneers of home video became purveyors of hardcore. “The only way you can make any money in home video is through pornography,” said San Francisco retailer Billy Bragman, quoted in the Chronicle, “and we don’t want to be pornographers.”

Nevertheless, Bragman dealt in X-rated movies; he wasn’t about to drop 40% of his sales and rental volume. You either dealt in porn or stayed out of the video business.

These new dealers needed a source of information about X-rated tapes other than sales hype. And in 1983, two young Philadelphians, Paul Fishbein and Barry Rosenblatt, started an eight-page, black-and-white newsletter called Adult Video News. AVN would grow with the industry and become a slick, full-color publication running over 150 pages an issue. Retailers, manufacturers, producers, distributors, and performers would come to depend on what they began to call “Bible of the Adult Video Industry.” In 1989, a possibly envious Hustler editor would write that AVN had “its nose so far up the industry’s ass, they can smell what it had for lunch.” AVN’s reply: “We had zucchini with a cheddar cheese topping, cabbage, tacos and baked beans. Take a whiff of that one, my friend.”

Three years before AVN’s debut, I was planning to start my own phone sales operation in a tiny spare bedroom, but the lease expired and our landlord told Juliet and me he wanted the house for himself and his new bride. To find a new place and be set up in time to get in on the fall selling season, I’d have to move fast.

x x x x x x

I was in L.A. when Juliet heard footsteps downstairs and dialed 911. The Piedmont police, proud of their low crime rate despite the proximity of Oakland, arrived in minutes. They searched everywhere‌—‌downstairs, upstairs, in the basement and surrounding gardens. No intruder. All windows and doors were still closed and locked. “I heard the footsteps clearly,” Juliet insisted. “I wasn’t imagining things!”

Other peculiar things happened. Every night, Juliet and I made sure the basement door was dead-bolted; every morning we’d find the door wide open. The “death spot” in the living room was distinctly colder than the rest of the house.

One night, while Juliet was away, I turned out all the lights, lit a single candle, smoked some sinsemilla, and bade the spirits appear. For long minutes nothing happened. Then the candle flickered wildly and my cat Belle, a good-natured tabby, suddenly arched and hissed.

Our stories about the ghosts of dead young wives spooked the new bride into balking at moving in but the landlord, a persuasive attorney, prevailed. Juliet stayed in the East Bay and I chose the less-crowded Marin County. I needed to house a sales operation, dubbing lab, and possible shooting location without hassles from neighbors and authorities. I settled on an airy‌—‌if cheaply constructed‌—‌3-bedroom home in the funky flatlands of Tam Junction, where folks thumbed their noses at the lordly homes in the Mill Valley hills above them. Here, many lawns remained unmowed: my kind of neighborhood. Shelly chuckled over the wording of a fortune cookie message I got: “You will be surrounded by elegance” (emphasis hers).

The peak video phone sales months are October and November, when dealers stock up for the Holidays. By the time I got moved in and set up, it was already December. Joe Loveland and I had about a week of 1980’s sales season left.

I have no talent for sales, but a marvelous, slim paperback called How to Outsell the Born Salesman helped me construct a pitch. On the weekend before Joe and I hit the phones, I noted in my journal, “The only time the cold apprehension goes away is when making love with Shelly.”

Our goal was for each of us to average ten tapes a day. I stammered through my first sales call‌—‌to Video Video in Beverly Hills. Before I could get to my “close” (asking for the order), proprietor Hal Brush interrupted to order a dozen tapes. Elated, I plunged into a flurry of calls. I took a break to add up the figures and a thrill skittered up my spine. In less than two hours, in the quiet of my own home, I’d sold thirty-seven tapes, grossing almost $1,500! Joe enjoyed similar success.

x x x x x x

I knew the caller was a cop when he asked for “Dave Jennings.” Respondents to my Chronicle and Independent Journal ads for sales help couldn’t possibly know my nom de porn. His questions also gave him away: “How do I know I want the job until I know what I’ll be selling?” True boiler-room pros don’t care what the product is. “Is there something you’re trying to hide?” he asked as I dodged his aggressive inquiries. “Are you doing something illegal?” When I thanked him for calling and promised I’d get back to him, he finally said. “You’re peddling pornography, aren’t you, Dave? Well, don’t think you can keep it a secret. The shit will hit the fan, pal!”

Did it ever, but not from cops. With the hassles of running a boiler-room, I didn’t have time to worry about some police agency preparing to pounce. I had enough problems with the salesmen themselves.

I avoided UPWA (“United Pornography Workers of America”) types who thought like Jeff Stell of Video Team; he smirked that the real reason for titling videos Eat My Pussy and Please Lick My Tits was to hear women order them over the phone. “What were those titles again, ma’m?” Applicants would try to impress me with their porn industry credentials, not knowing that the more extensive their experience in the field, the lower my opinion of them. I didn’t want people whose ethics were forged in the old 3D school, when sales managers shipped out floods of small COD packages that hadn’t been ordered, gambling that busy retailers would accept the parcels, thinking they’d forgotten making the phone purchase.

But porn background or no, gypsy sales pros in general are professional liars. Making sales is tough enough without the handicap of honesty. All’s fair in love, war and getting the order. Al Goldstein panned Peach Fuzz: “The sex action, though reproduced with excellent clarity, has all the vitality of a cockroach floating legs up in a toilet bowl.” My sales pitch: “Al Goldstein said the action has excellent clarity and vitality.”

Without even the “smile and a shoeshine” of Death of a Salesman huckster Willy Loman, phone pros mastered persuasion beyond the power of words alone. One applicant might sell ten tapes before his first coffee break; another, with the same written pitch, would sell two in a day. “Sales is all personality,” said my new sales star “Craig White.” When calling retailers who’d bought from him before, Craig didn’t remind them who he was with. “I sold you some tapes last month.” Instead, he came off as a consultant or advisor: “We got together over some tapes last month…” He racked up big numbers on my elongated version of the Gillis/Serena skit Submission of Serena. “Why, Serena herself was in here just the other day,” he’d say. “She saw the final, edited feature and said, ‘That’s exactly the message of sensuality I want to send out to all my fans.’”

Finding the Craig Whites meant constantly sifting through the types attracted to phone sales. The best of them were artists and musicians unable to earn a living from their crafts. Others dodged creditors, arrest warrants, alimony and child support. Some had rap sheets longer than VCX order forms. Some slept in their cars. Some had histories of mental illness. Few stayed longer than a month.

A Harvard-educated musician arrived on time every morning, put up good numbers, then suddenly disappeared. Months later, I saw him at Fisherman’s Wharf, playing a violin for tourist dollars. He explained that he’d only wanted to work long enough to earn the money for a new fiddle after his old one had been stolen.

Another musician disappeared after collecting his commission check for an outstanding sales week. Then, a couple weeks later, his UPS/COD orders began bouncing back from stores he hadn’t even called. Through her Berkeley law enforcement contacts, Shelly learned the man was on parole. I threatened to file a complaint and the musician, who’d already spent his commission, “repaid” me with music tracks for future productions.

A bug-eyed salesman who perspired heavily became angry over five dollars he thought he’d been shorted. When those present (I was away at the time) wouldn’t give him the money, he pulled a knife, then appeared confused. He turned to the group and shouted, “Now see what you did? YOU made this happen!” He stabbed a wall, then ran out the door.

A distinguished older man seemed like a pillar of the community until I visited his home and met his “sons”: runaway boys he took in who stole things that the salesman fenced. Before I could fire him, the “sons” were caught pushing a restored ’55 Chevy down a street. The man immediately left town.

Salesmen were often absent because they had to show up for court dates. Some came in too drunk or stoned to work. Videotapes that weren’t locked away would disappear. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere, fist-fights erupted over who “owned” a particular store.

On the way to my place, Shelly had been moaning again about the frantic pace at Berkeley Mental Health. Then we entered my front door, and the sales staff deluged me with questions:

“They want 50% COD and 50% in 30 days. Can we do that, Dave?” “No way. ‘Credit’ is a dirty word around here.”

“This store wants ten one-sheets with every tape.” “Right, so they can cut box covers for ten dupes of a number. Give ’em three slicks per tape; that much duping we can live with.”

“He says he’ll buy 100 pieces from us if we don’t sell to Video Warehouse.” “Tell him he’s got it. Then, when his check clears, call Video Warehouse.”

“She paid $45 a tape and she’s bitching ’cause Video Village paid only $42.50.” “Tell her Video Village bought more tapes than she did.” “But they didn’t.” “So lie already.”

Shelly said that entering my living room/sales office was like walking into a buzz-saw. She vowed she’d never again complain to me about her “madhouse by the Bay.”

Out of the human flotsam drifting through my sales office in early 1981, came one of the most reliable and trustworthy people I’ve ever known. Joe Farmer (nom de porn) would be more of a partner to me than Joe Loveland. Fit and energetic, he liked to start each day with an early morning run of several miles. Though almost my age (34), Joe had the youthful face of a college student‌—‌which he was, studying television production in the evenings. He was eager to work on video productions‌—‌of any kind.

Articulate and quick-witted, this former social worker had an easy smile and natural empathy that let people relax and confide in him. Those who’d always told Joe he’d be good at sales had been right.

Joe took on the voluminous paperwork I always hated to deal with. Soon, he understood the entire operation as well as I did. His enthusiasm motivated others during sales meetings, which he’d end with the directive, “Battle stations!” After wheedling an order out of a difficult customer, Joe would hang up the phone, grin and say, “Biff! Boom! Pow!”

Without Joe Farmer, I’d never have made it through that crucial spring of 1981, when sales success nearly destroyed my business.

x x x x x x

“This is like sitting on a gold mine without a goddamn shovel,” I moaned.

“All businesses have growing pains,” Joe pointed out. “They say that John D. Rockefeller used to lie awake nights wondering how he was going to pay his debts.”

“Debt! I’d love to go into debt. But how can you do that when you can’t get credit?”

Joe laughed. “That’s what you get for always paying cash.”

“Well, I can’t do that now.”

It’s a business truism that four out of five new companies fail not through lack of commerce but through under-capitalization. Teddy Gaswirth once told me not to think about starting even a small manufacturing-sales operation without at least $50,000 in cash or credit. Now I knew what he meant. $33,000 worth of orders had piled up and I had no money to buy tapes.

I could turn to the porn industry’s old school shylocks and “factors,” who lent money secured by accounts receivable, but their rates were usurious‌—‌sometimes amounting to over 50% per year. I borrowed $2,000 from Shelly (with my 240Z as collateral) and $5,000 from Joe Loveland at 20% per annum. Joe Farmer agreed to take post-dated paychecks. But spring orders kept coming in‌—‌with sales commissions to be paid immediately‌—‌faster than I could afford to fill them.

Then one of the oldest, largest and most respected corporations in America came to my rescue. Scotch 3M Company was eager to have video movie manufacturers try out its new VHS and Beta formulations. Their first consumer-grade videotapes had a reputation for poor quality. With the home video market growing so quickly, 3M was anxious to make amends.

I was surprised at the excellent quality of the sample tapes the 3M rep gave me. But they would’ve had to be very shoddy indeed for me to turn down the 30 days credit he offered.

The tapes got dubbed; the orders got shipped. Then I got a nasty surprise: most of that UPS/COD windfall I expected went out to meet overdue expenses. The business seemed like a gigantic bellows‌—‌the more money it sucked in, the more it blew back out.

Joe Farmer pointed out that the $7,000 dubbing system we’d shoehorned into a small bedroom represented our “profits.” “Considering that you’ve been paying Harry $4.00 a tape for dubbing,” he added, “those machines should pay for themselves within a couple months.”

They didn’t, because we couldn’t afford to produce the new spring releases needed for a company with a small catalog of titles to keep sales up over the summer dead season. As I said to Joe, “This is like crossing the Sahara with your canteens empty.”

Sales plunged. One by one, the staff quit, leaving only me and the two Joes‌—‌and one of them wanted out, too. My partner wanted to sell the business, or at least his half of it. Joe Loveland hadn’t made his investment back and hadn’t had much luck bedding porno queens. After his Perfect Gift sex scene with Juliet Anderson, he’d proposed an encore in private.

“I never have sexual relations with the producers I work for,” she told him.

“You had sexual relations with me,” Loveland said.

“But that was work.”

Later on, he told me, “I’ve never been so insulted in my whole life!” I decided that any future business partners would have to be less libidinously involved in the product development process.

Both Joes agreed with me that the market was saturated with our titles. Without new ones, the fall season might not be much better than summer. At one of our Sunday “last brunches” (because we wouldn’t be able to afford a next one) on the deck of Sam’s Anchor Cafe on the bay of Tiburon, Shelly said, “If this business stumbles along like this for five more years before going under, you’ll be forty years old, with an ulcer, and it might be too late to start over.” I tried to savor my eggs Benedict and champagne; next Sunday’s brunch might be McMuffins.

My partner and I tried to sell the company; no takers. Then I got the idea of selling it piecemeal. I called all the adult video manufacturers I knew and offered the non-exclusive rights to our titles at $1,000 apiece. We’d supply new 3/4-inch masters and dupe ’chromes for making one-sheets and cassette boxes. Marty Krause of Video Home Library and Charley Brickman of Cinderella Distributing bought rights to all of the features; Jerry Deming of Bizarre Video bought the bondage titles Bound, Chained and Submission of Serena.

Loveland and I split the money and dissolved our partnership. I now had $15,000 and a rented house full of used video equipment‌—‌worth, perhaps, another couple of thousand. Maybe it was finally time to write about my porn adventures, which now seemed over. Or were they?

“We could shoot a feature on videotape as good as any 35, for under ten thousand,” Joe Farmer said. “With the accounts we’ve acquired, we could sell enough pieces to make our production costs back in a couple months. Then we could shoot another and do it again. The whole thing would snowball: the more titles we accumulated, the bigger our volume of catalog sales would grow. Look at all the new stores still opening. And we haven’t begun to tap the foreign market. Look at cable. Dave, we don’t have any idea how big this industry is going to be. This shouldn’t be an ending; this should be a new beginning!”

All the adult video manufacturers I knew agreed that the market was not yet big enough for a 35-type feature without 35-millimeter theatrical distribution. Several articles about the adult video industry in 1981 carried TVX president Dave Friedman’s declaration that an “A”-line feature would gross $350,000 in theaters and $35,000 on tape. Subtract a couple of months overhead and cost-of-product expenses from that latter figure, and making your $10,000 investment back seemed a long-shot gamble.

“I’m tired of crap-shoots, Joe,” I said. “The sane thing is to just put the money in the bank and live a normal life for a change.” But part of me felt that would be a cop-out. Was this how the whole thing would end? With neither a bang nor a whimper?

Joe Farmer sensed my indecision. “I think you’ll really be missing the boat, Dave, if you don’t give it a shot.”

One night in late July, I dreamed the story line of an elegant erotic movie. When I woke up, I wrote down every detail, including the title: All the King’s Ladies.

I decided to roll the dice one more time.

x x x x x x

Part II

THE VIDEO REVOLUTION

Chapter 9

SHOOTING IT
Early to mid 1980s

I came out of Brooks Camera in San Francisco, loaded down with photographic supplies. My car was gone! Who’d want to steal a brown Rabbit with a faded right rear quarter panel? Evidently, no one. I found out from a liquor store clerk that the City tow truck had taken it to the impound yard, instead of issuing a parking ticket. Visitors weren’t known for rushing to pay them.

If you ever managed to get through the busy signals to the city garage, you’d be glad‌—‌by then‌—‌to pay the $135 ransom. But I was in a time frenzy: production was due to begin on All the King’s Ladies in only two days.

Shelly and I had just seen the pyrotechnic Raiders of the Lost Ark; it gave me an inspiration. I called the information operator and said in a deadly calm voice, “I don’t want you to panic, but this could be a matter of life and death. I’m on the demolition team of a movie crew. That car is carrying explosive materials, which could become very unstable if you look at them the wrong way. If they go off, it would be the equivalent of 500 pounds of dynamite.”

“Oh, my God!” the operator exclaimed. She gave me the garage’s emergency number. I got through immediately, gave the same spiel and got the same “Oh, my God!” response.

I ran fifteen blocks through the bowels of “San Fiasco” and arrived at the garage, panting and sweaty, clutching my packages like a running back hugging a wet football. Two dark suits flanked me into the parking structure. Upon spying the Rabbit, I halted so quickly that one of the suits, trying to do the same, nearly sprawled headlong on the concrete. Cautiously, I approached the car. As I’d hoped, the suits stayed back. I jumped into the Rabbit and took off. In my mirror I glimpsed the suits‌—‌not yet aware they’d been had‌—‌dive behind a van.

The “Rabbit rip-off” episode was the first of the misfortunes that would make the production of “The First Big-Budget Erotic Extravaganza Shot Entirely on Videotape” seem jinxed. On the day before shooting started, the production company renting me cameras and recorders cancelled out; their client, Bank of America, had threatened to drop them if they got involved with porno. Only one other outfit in the Bay Area owned the Ikegami HL 79 cameras that Joe and I insisted on using. Compared to other broadcast portables of the time, the “Ikki 79” was like a Mercedes among Mavericks. Specializing in shooting rock concerts, this outfit had no compunctions about porn. They agreed to rent their gear for the standard one day rate for a full weekend. But when Joe and I arrived for the equipment early Saturday morning, the owners demanded two days rental‌—‌paid in advance.

The male leads pulled a similar rip-off. Looking like the obese southern sheriff I’d always imagined casting him as, Michael Morrisson splayed his cowboy-booted feet, hooked his thumbs in his belt and drawled, “Me and Jon only agreed to work a HALF day for $500, not a full one.”

Even porn’s top male, John Leslie, didn’t charge more than $750 for a full day, and these guys weren’t stars. Morrisson’s expanding gut was getting big enough to block penetration, threatening his porn career. He’d been feasting on the excellent cooking of the porn actor who shared his new Mill Valley home, skinny Jon Martin, who looked to me like a butch Rosanna Arquette. Some referred to the duo as “porn’s Laurel and Hardy.”

Voices rose, anger flared. Morrisson turned to his sidekick and snapped his fingers, “C’mon Jon, we got a house to paint.”

Martin hesitated. He seemed perfectly willing to accept $500 for a day of sex with beautiful women, but he followed his partner. It was too late to find replacements. I gave in to their demands and frantically rewrote the script during breaks, so the two studs would be out in half a day.

The hassles continued: Perry Mann, co-producer of that voyeur’s delight, the annual Exotic-Erotic Ball, couldn’t get erect, even with the exotic-erotic Mai Lin. And his memory retained dialogue like a sieve holds rain. Juliet Anderson, making her debut as a director since I was too busy with production details, had to feed him his lines:

Juliet: Your soft, downy pussy gives me spasms of ecstasy.

Mann: Your soft, downy pussy… what?

Juliet: Your soft, downy pussy…

Mann: Your soft, downy pussy…

Juliet: …gives me spasms of ecstasy.

Mann: …gives me …ecstasy.

Juliet: OK, that’s good enough, Perry.

I blamed the equipment screw-ups on our snide little snot of an engineer, one of the few local technicians familiar with the new Ikkis. To him, working on a porno was like slumming. He neglected to clean the Sony BVU 110 VCRs, causing a head clog that wiped out the first twenty minutes recorded on one of the decks. A bad audio line rendered all the tapes from the other VCR soundless. After a fit of panic, I found I could transfer audio from deck to deck and stay in sync. As the second day went into overtime, the little engineer left to catch a flight to an out-of-town shoot. He assured me the gear was working fine; we should have no trouble. Right after he left, one of the Ikkis went out of phase. Joe the tape operator and I fiddled with the adjustments for hours to get an approximate color match with the other camera. But every time we changed angles during the climactic orgy, more “tweaking” was needed.

We finished under the sun of Monday morning. With all the delays, unanticipated expenses and hours of overtime, my ten thousand dollar budget had ballooned close to fourteen. I was almost broke.

With everything that had gone wrong on the All the King’s Ladies shoot, it was easy to overlook what went right. Those Ikkis captured the beauty of the flowers, fruit trees and forested hills on the Fairfax estate. We’d packed the cast with stars: Sharon Mitchell, Holly McCall, Mai Lin, and the winner of a Farrah Fawcett-Majors look-alike contest, Rhonda Jo Petty. At Juliet’s behest, Serena had come out of retirement for the movie. In addition to Mann, Martin and Morrisson, the male cast included Mike Horner, Don Fernando, newcomer Paul West and good-looking, muscular Ed Lincoln‌—‌son of veteran porn director Fred Lincoln.

Even with hasty rewrites, the plot, about a stud mutiny at “Eden,” where rich ladies pay to experience their fantasies (establishment motto: “An Adam for every Eve”), still made sense. Adam Film World’s 1987 X-rated Movie Handbook listed All the King’s Ladies among “The 500 Best Adult Movies of All Time.”

There were nine sex scenes: two-somes, three-somes and group orgies shot in beds, gardens, couches, gazebos, hot tubs, recreation rooms and on rooftops. “I used to struggle to complete three sex scenes a day,” I told Joe Farmer, as we sorted out the production paperwork on the unfinished doors that passed for desk-tops. “And those were little more than loops, nothing like the feature story we just shot.”

Joe smiled and scratched the curly black beard he was growing. “Television production techniques will revolutionize the shooting of sex. Remember, you heard it here first.”

I’d been skeptical about all the added equipment: a roomful of diabolically sophisticated gizmos, all itching to foul up. But once sorted out, they made shooting sex easy.

I had to “unlearn” my filmmaker’s training and see a sex scene as Joe did: an event to be captured “live,” not a series of shots. Everything was different from shooting “film style,” which I’d done on earlier video productions. The director would sit at a console, watching monitors, and give instructions to the cameramen through a microphone feeding the headsets they wore. “Camera One, you’re ‘hot,’ hold on her face. Camera Two, get a medium penetration shot‌—‌tell him to move his knee to his right. OK… get ready Camera Two… you’re hot. Camera One, pull back for a long shot…” With the tape operator switching back and forth between the cameras, recording the intercut video onto a third VCR, a videomaker could “edit” the scene as it was taking place, capturing the spontaneity, saving hours of expensive post-production time.

Without the constant interruptions to change film magazines and batteries and to wait for the camera operator to line up each shot, performers could build momentum‌—‌and stay hard. That semi-mythical creature of big-budget 35 shoots, the “fluffer,” an off-camera lady whose job was to suck the men up for each shot, became obsolete in the video era. The erotic intensity that surprised me in All the King’s Ladies became routine in later productions.

Not only could video be shot in a fraction of the production time of film, it could also be shot for a fraction of the money. At just $25 for a 60-minute 3/4-inch Sony Broadcast cassette, many hours could be shot for only a few hundred dollars. In film, the volume of footage alone on All the King’s Ladies would have cost almost twice my $14,000 production total. Still, Joe Farmer and I were left trying to figure out how to market All the King’s Ladies on a budget of nothing.

x x x x x x

If you do something well, goes the show business saying, you won’t do it just once. With All the King’s Ladies showcasing her directing skills, Juliet Anderson secured financing for Educating Nina. The feature also launched the Superior Video line that established Joe and me as the first producers of quality adult features shot on video.

We met our need for immediate cash by striking a co-manufacturing deal with Select-a-Tape, a small but respected producer of quality 35s directed by company president Alan Roberts, a thin, energetic film artist whose skills would lead to the R-rated features Young Lady Chatterly and The Gore-Gore Girls. We supplied Select-a-Tape with 3/4-inch masters of All the King’s Ladies, one-sheets at cost, plus one thousand box covers at a license fee of $10 each. A second thousand would be sent COD for $9 each, a third thousand at $8, and so on until bottoming out at $5 for anything beyond 5,000 box covers.

Immediately, I had $10,000 of my $14,000 investment back. Between Select-a-Tape’s staff and Joe on the phone for Superior, sales were brisk. And another influx of cash came from an unexpected source.

Adult manufacturers who’d guessed that All the King’s Ladies cost between fifty and eighty thousand to produce were surprised when I told them we’d made the picture for only thirty-we didn’t want them to know it cost half that. Honi Webber, now managing a new company called Silver Fox Video, wanted us to shoot a video feature for her. “Nothing quite as ambitious as All the King’s Ladies,” she said. “We only have $18,000 to spend. Can you do anything decent with that amount?” Joe and I got a chuckle out of that‌—‌and a $9,000 profit after shooting Sizzle with Samantha, starring the delightful Samantha Fox.

I put the profits into a Sony RM 430 editing system, with Sony 2860A VCRs that could double as location recorders. Joe and an outside partner bought two brand new Hitachi FP 21 broadcast cameras‌—‌new generation competitors for the Ikegami HL 79. By the spring of 1982, Superior was ready to shoot again.

“I sure hope we can maintain the level of quality we established in All the King’s Ladies,” I said to Joe.

“If things go right,” he replied. “All the King’s Ladies should be the worst movie Superior Video ever makes.”

x x x x x x

The sales of our second release, Physical, were astounding: between Select-a-Tape (under the same contract terms as All the King’s Ladies) and Superior, over 6,000 pieces were shipped within half a year. Appealing to the growing home video audience of women, Physical put female protagonists in positions of prestige and power‌—‌Juliet Anderson played a magazine mogul who exposes a phony contest called “The Erotic Olympics”. All of Superior’s future titles would be aimed at the “couples’ market.”

For the next two years, Joe and I felt we had the secrets of shooting expensive-looking adult movies cheaply on videotape all to ourselves. Except for our lavish rock and roll spectacle Deviations, which went $15,000 over its $20,000 budget, none cost more than $19,000, including the acclaimed Night Moves, Running Wild, and Chocolate Cream.

During these years of Superior Video’s peak prosperity, our crew became skilled and efficient. Legal pressures were so unheard of that Shelly lent her cooking skills to our productions without fear of jeopardizing the security clearance needed for her new job as “ergonomics specialist” with a large defense contractor. The rigors and rewards of running a thriving enterprise pushed my original goal of writing about the business into the “future projects” category. But this halcyon period didn’t last into the latter half of the 1980s. The decade was still young when the upheavals of the Video Age began.

By 1983, our competitors had begun shooting on tape. AVN later called 1984 “The Year of the Video Company.” In ’84, shot-on-video releases for the first time outnumbered those shot on film. Freed from the snail’s pace and expense of the celluloid medium, the number of adult features made rose from roughly 200 a year before ’83-’84 to almost ten times that for each year thereafter.

The new technology should have eased the work of performers and improved relations between casts and shooters. Instead, the opposite happened. On the fast-forward video productions of the mid-to-late 1980s, the underlying tensions between directors and actors exploded into war.

x x x x x x

An authority on pornography and its effects, psychologist Neil Malamuth of UCLA, said, “Our research shows that every time there is a satiation of themes, people to some degree lose their ability to be aroused by it. Therefore, newer themes are introduced, breaking new taboos.” Filmmaker Alex DeRenzy put it more simply: his biggest problem, he said, was “beating audience boredom.”

My sales manager said customers complained about the sex in Superior’s Dirty Pictures because it all took place in beds. “Have people screw on a rooftop,” she suggested. “We already did that in All the King’s Ladies,” I answered. We also used cars, hot tubs, beaches, barstools, pianos, nightclub stages and marijuana fields. In Physical, Herschel Savage and Linda Shaw performed in a sea of Flo-Pak, bits of styrofoam packing material that made obscene crunches and raised a stench of polystyrene that made Savage worry about carcinogens. Sharon Mitchell said her strangest scene ever was in a vat of spaghetti with Eric Edwards (“It took me weeks to get the pasta out of my ears”).

Pornographers must always find novelties. DeRenzy’s gimmick in Babyface was young-looking Cuddles Malone. “With her shaven vagina, cute ponytails and underdeveloped chest,” went an AVN review, “The tyke looks like she’s not old enough to cross the street by herself.” Angel Cash literally milked the early part of her porn career by squirting her lactating breasts fifteen feet in a “shootout” with another new mother.

With a claimed $10,000 prop budget, producer/director Paul Norman created “gorgeous hermaphrodites with handsome, large and functional male equipment perched on top of female genitalia” for Bi and Beyond. Norman also mounted penises in new places in Paul Norman’s Cyrano and Edward Penishands.

For my outer space epic E.X., I attached blackout curtains to long black dildos which double-penetrated Lilly Marlene. My effects generator imposed multi-colored electronic “noise” over the black areas, so it looked like Lilly was being taken by aliens composed of pure energy.

Enamored with the unusual, pornographers don’t know when they’ve ventured into the absurd. In a Hustler interview, actor/director/writer Ron Jeremy described a scene he wanted to shoot: “I’d like to do a hang-gliding scene in an X-rated film. I see this great shot of me standing on a hill with my dick sticking straight out, hard as a rock. Then I take off and start gliding downward. There’s this gorgeous girl at the bottom of the hill pointing her little butt right at me. The master shot would look as if I’m going to dive right into her ass at top speed. But the final shot would cut to a camera zoom of my dick making a safe rear-entry landing right smack in the middle of her pussy. I’d like to see James Bond do something like that.”

Pornographers are stuck with the fact that 70% of a hardcore movie is comprised of repeats of the same half-dozen positions. In the struggle to create the unusual within this structure of conformity, the speed and cheapness of shooting video in themselves became novelties to be exploited‌—‌along with the performers.

x x x x x x

Serena’s retirement (before working in All the King’s Ladies) came after a shoot that nearly led to her death. In Mai Lin Versus Serena, a filmed contest to see which actress could take on the most men, the compliant masochist was penetrated not only by forty or more studs but by the microbes they carried. “My doctor said the germs ganged up,” Serena told me. “My belly swelled up like I was pregnant.” Delirious from septic shock, she spent months hospitalized with severe pelvic inflammatory disease (PID)‌—‌epidemic in the wake of the libertine ’70s. The filmmaker didn’t even send a get-well card.

“Whatever anybody’s natural inclinations are, they play on them,” said an anonymous actress in a 1980 Adam Film World interview. “They’ll take an actress like C.J. Laing and beat the shit out of her because she’s into this S and M thing… If they can get two cocks in one cunt, they’ll do it. If they could stick a cock down someone’s ear and film it, they would.”

Pornographers push performers to their limits‌—‌and beyond. “If you can take four cocks at once,” said black superstud F. M. Bradley, “Jerry will want five.” Maggie Randall agreed to do just that for Jerry Tanner, as long as none of them belonged to Ron Jeremy.

Cheered on by the crew, the slim blonde was enmeshed in bodies when Tanner sent in the fifth man: Ron Jeremy. As Maggie seethed through the scene, Tanner filmed her anger as passion and boasted later, “Only for me will Maggie Randall work with Ron Jeremy.”

After enough unpleasant surprises, actresses come to regard all directors as exploiters. Some play the game of balking at every request and negotiating every detail. And directors come to expect actresses to be lazy whores, out to get maximum dollar for minimum effort. Both parties arrive on a set ready for combat, perceiving politeness as weakness. “The nicer you treat the performers,” observed porn historian Holliday, “the more likely they are to shit on you.”

Sometimes, underlying sexual frustration complicates things further. Henri Pachard admitted “choosing actresses I’d like to fuck.” He hastened to add, “Not that I ever have sex with them (especially with his fiancée/script girl around) but… If they turn me on, I hope it shows through in my direction and the various situations I put them in.” For some directors that translates into “If I can’t screw these girls, at least I’ll make them jump through hoops.” AVN quoted Constance Money: “Anyone that squirts someone else in the face with K-Y gel and cottage cheese for ten hours has got to be, you know, doing it for more than just the film.”

Electronic media increased the stress between shooters and performers. Before video, AVN journalist Joe Daniels pointed out, “The amount of sex never became a burning issue because in a big-budget film you would generally never have more than one sex scene a day.” With video technology, Pachard said, “You can shoot two sex scenes an hour.”

Unhappy with the way muscle-builder Biff Malibu used actresses in his Gang Bang Girls series, model agent Jim South complained, “Producers offer a new girl a seemingly large sum of money like $1,500 to $3,000 to work with as many as fifteen to twenty-five partners in one or two days. On a per-scene basis, the girl is getting short-changed.”

x x x x x x

“I got into the business because I knew I could make better movies than the ones I was seeing,” said Jim Enright, Michael Craig, Bruce Seven, Rinse Dream, Henri Pachard, Anthony Spinelli, Gail Palmer, and my ex-boss Tony Romano. But new porn directors, bristling with erotic visions, are disappointed by how little real control they have over the action. If the chemistry between models is bad, not even the most imaginative moviemaker can create a genuinely hot scene.

Conversely, “Almost every film or tape has one hot, erotic scene,” wrote Jim Holliday in his AVN column, “…the result of accidental chemistry between cast members that even an inept director could not ruin.”

At best skilled documentarians, pornographers hasten to declare their individuality. Scotty Fox, director of Sex Trek: The Search for Sperm, Ass Backwards, and My Bare Lady became porn’s “King of Comedy.” “We want to achieve a ‘Rocky Horror’ feel with Sin City,” declared F. Lee. “Sort of a ‘Fellini goes to Transylvania.’ Noting that Nelson Rockefeller, John Garfield and Peter Sellers died during sex, Gail Palmer proclaimed that with Shape Up for Sensational Sex, “I’m going to be the Jane Fonda of porno. I’m going on this crusade to get people in shape.” Estelle Ferrand had an even grander vision: “My dream has always been to have one big orgasm with everyone out there in videoland.”

Paul Thomas, specialist in “sensitive” couples’ movies, said Hal Freeman’s Caught from Behind anal epics were “lurid junk.” Raunchmeister Greg Dark attacked Thomas for “dialogue diatribes that are stupid.” Dark said that audiences “want to see people being fucking animals… You will not find one sensitive moment in any of my work.”

Joe Farmer said that Superior’s distinction was “making Ferrari movies at Pinto prices.” Through experience on both our own and others’ shoots, Joe and I brought Superior’s production methods from chaos to science. Our technical efficiency evolved from our growing knowledge of videography, and we learned the tricks of getting competent performances out of inept, insecure or lackadaisical actors by observing masters like Henri Pachard and Anthony Spinelli.

x x x x x x

Henri Pachard pointed to the “D” on his ever-present Detroit Tigers cap. “Know what that stands for?” asked the winner of 1985’s Adult Film Association Best Picture award (for Taboo American Style).

“Director?”

“Close.” In the resonant tone of an attorney or politician‌—‌his aspirations before being expelled from college for gambling, Pachard said, “It stands for ‘directator’: part director, part dictator. I’m tough; I’m very demanding. I’ll ask a lot out of you, and you’ll have to work hard.” Then he said the magic words: “But if you follow my directions and do exactly as I say, I promise you I’ll get you out of here on time.”

I’d hoped to witness “The Captain of the Commode” engineer one of his toilet scenes‌—‌famous not for bodily excretions but for the gymnastics involved in choreographing positions on bathroom fixtures. The industrial-sized sink, set in a counter-top splattered with chocolate (in Harlem Candy, rival candy-makers seek an ancient formula for aphrodisiac chocolate), proved equally challenging.

Ensconced in his director’s chair, Pachard began with Angel Kelly sitting on the edge of the sink, while Honey Malone‌—‌in her hardcore debut‌—‌sat inside it, her head leaning against Angel’s ebony belly. F. M. Bradley went back and forth from one to the other, standing on the floor to get sucked by Honey and stepping onto a chair to get the same from Angel. Honey showed off her ability to deep-throat, coordinating her breathing to inhale and exhale on his out-thrusts. Not to be outdone by a newcomer, Angel did the same.

Like a coach on the sidelines pep-talking his team, Pachard put the trio through twisteroo positions with a running commentary: “Oh, yeah! That’s beautiful! That’s sensuous. Sensuous! (to a cameraman) Get that expression on Angel’s face. Lookit that! No, don’t turn your head, Honey. Stay exactly like that. Oh, that’s beautiful! What an angle! What an angle!”

Pachard had worked out a distinctive climax, for which Brad pulled both ladies’ panties over his head to stimulate himself further. It was a surreal tableau: a naked six-foot-three black man, feet planted on each side of a kitchen sink, head crooked to fit under the ceiling, huffing like an overloaded freight train through red and white pairs of panties pulled over his face, while chocolate-smeared ladies, teetering in high heels on chairs, labored on his erection. When Brad was ready, Honey and Angel were to lay their heads back in the sink so that, as Pachard envisioned it, “We’ll get come cascading all the way down and landing right on their kissers!”

It happened just as the Directator had decreed.

x x x x x x

Having survived two heart attacks and lost an enormous volume of weight, Anthony Spinelli appeared to have found the wry peace of a grizzled Buddha. On a shoot bedeviled by a beeping audio pulse nobody could identify, I turned to him and blurted, “Maybe it’s your pacemaker.” I immediately wished I could swallow the remark but the great, bearded bear of a director roared. Cinderella Distributing’s Jack Stephan said of Spinelli, “I’d love to be a first-time comic with 500 like him in the audience.”

Spinelli’s talent as an “actor’s director” was no joke. He consistently elicited believable performances from models whose idea of “acting” was to vary the pitch of their moans. With the persistence of a stage mother, the classically-trained thespian would rehearse a scene over and over until fine-tuned to his satisfaction. Spinelli saw intonations, beats, flickers and textures in a scene that I never could. Unable to get away with sloughing off a single line, even the laziest performers soon realized that the better they followed his directions, the faster things would move. (The oft-repeated Spinelli line: “What’s your motivation? … To get outta here by 9 PM.”)

Spinelli knew just how much direction to add with each run-though so novice actors wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. He’d explain the significance of each line and gesture, acting them out himself for expert demonstration, and praising each positive step a cast member made. Knowing when a performer was reaching a peak, he’d always start rolling tape a rehearsal or two before the best takes.

On Spinelli’s shoots, I saw the importance of a good crew. Their dedication and competence put pressure on models to do their best. His script supervisor wife Roz, writer/assistant director (and later director) son Mitch, and others who’d worked with them long enough to be part of the family offered Spinelli moral support, and few cast members would balk at the maestro’s meticulous molding of their performances‌—‌though bosom queen Wendy Whoppers reportedly whined to Spinelli, “I’m not here to act, I’m here to fuck and get my ass out of here!”

Unlike Pachard, Spinelli was no sex coach. After his usual meticulous direction of a long dialogue scene, Spinelli turned Kay Parker, Herschel Savage and Helga Sven over to his cameramen, Joe Farmer and me and left the set. We were pleased with the hot sex we shot. Before spot-checking the video, the tape operator called out, “Sam? (Spinelli’s real first name) … Sam, you wanna see this? … Sam?” We went looking for the man whose livelihood depended on the kind of action we’d just taped and found him in the green (utility) room, snoring soundly.

Spinelli thought more like a moviemaker than a pornographer. For directors like him, erotic cinema provides the opportunity to mount stage plays, tell stories and elicit emotions from both cast and audience. For some directors, however, the “story” in their movies is nothing more than filler between sex scenes. I believe a maker of sex cinema should think like both a moviemaker and a pornographer. Trained as a filmmaker, I entered the porn business thinking that being good with a camera was all that mattered. I was wrong; I had to learn to think like a pornographer.

x x x x x x

Thinking like a pornographer meant making sex with an invisible man look real by first having the actress dilate her vagina with a dildo. It meant magnifying genital action to look like The Blob Versus the Fifty-Foot Banana Slug. It meant “nude extras”‌—‌who don’t perform sex‌—‌tantalizing the audience in lingerie; preceding sex action with strip-teases; studying fashion magazines and swimsuit layouts for box cover ideas; and accumulating a “library” of penetration and come-shot close-ups to be cut into scenes in which a male can’t “get wood.” You learn to shoot bosoms in wide-angle to enhance their size and faces in telephoto to hide blemishes. You see how nicely big breasts float in hot tubs and swimming pools.

A distortion mirror covering a nightclub wall in Deviations had a spot that magnified objects passing before it, so I had nude dancers thrust their breasts and crotches at it, making the body parts jump out at the camera.

As a director, I lacked Spinelli’s genius with actors, Pachard’s choreographic abilities, and Jerome Tanner’s whoremaster talent for imposing his will on porn’s more belligerent ladies, whom I tried to avoid hiring. Superior’s approach to directing was so low-key that Joe Farmer (under the screen name Domingo Lobo) and I would trade off on directing chores with no disruption of actors’ concentration.

Joe always said that Superior’s strength was in the screen-writing, which was my job. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a script to fit the locations and the cast we’d lined up. Those logistics always came first‌—‌with attention to whom models would or wouldn’t work with and what they would or wouldn’t do.

No low-budget picture, porn or otherwise, can be planned well enough to avoid the unexpected. Pachard was only half-joking about writing a Shot-stopper’s Textbook, listing all the different ways he’d seen scenes screwed up. Since each production is a voyage into the unknown, I chose the screen name “J. D. Blackthorne”‌—‌after John Blackthorne, the intrepid English sailor in James Clavell’s Shogun. Traveling the world under sail, he knew his “rutters” (maps) couldn’t prepare him for the squalls, pirates, mutinies, diseases, sea monsters, acts of God or hostile peoples he’d encounter.

Pornographers, too, are wary of intrusions from an often hostile outside world.

x x x x x x

Joe Elliot’s presence on the set of Diary of a Bad Girl violated the terms of his probation. The agent/photographer had already served a year in Santa Rita Prison for unwittingly casting underaged models, and he was nervous about being reported. Peeking under a flap of blackout window curtain at a procession of little girls arriving at an adjoining condo for an eight-year-old’s birthday party, Elliot said tensely, “What are they? Auditioning?” Cindy Carver, who’d been needling her agent over the underage thing, shot back, “You wish!”

Pornographers prefer to work in secret but sometimes that’s impossible. Lisa DeLeeuw had been in the midst of action at an isolated area of a national park when a herd of campers, including wide-eyed children, came stomping through. Rangers caught Mad Dad Dan and his Fresh Video team shooting on a Palm Springs Indian reservation and confiscated his footage‌—‌which they returned for a hefty “retroactive permit fee.”

Twice I’ve been on shoots visited by cops. On a Spinelli production at a plush Mill Valley home, a glass case housing a megabuck antique vase was wired to alert police if touched‌—‌and it was. Local cops, tolerant (at that time) of the frequent porn shoots in their community, did nothing more upon their arrival than ogle naked Kay Parker who graciously supplied them with autographs. A passing San Rafael cop screeched to a stop upon recognizing Jamie Gillis, whom I was shooting in my 240Z as he pulled to a curb to pick up micro-skirted Mauvaise De Noire. “You wouldn’t happen to be shooting a dirty movie by any chance?” the cop called out. We gave him our cover story of shooting model’s portfolio footage for De Noire.

More painful intruders than cops invaded Superior’s scenic Running Wild locations on a remote Sonoma County pot farm. A hoard of yellowjackets threatened to turn our sex scenes into bug-bangs until chunks of hamburger placed well away from the cast and crew diverted the insects.

Production problems too offbeat to prepare for require impromptu solutions. On the rustic Running Wild shoot, a hundred miles from repair facilities, a generator that ran a table full of video gear turned balky. A mechanically-inclined grip earned the shoot’s Most Valuable Player award by dribbling gasoline into a finicky carburetor float, maintaining the precise level required for smooth running during two straight 12-hour work days.

During one of Marin County’s rainiest winters, the bay of San Rafael suddenly gurgled up through the sewers of the low-lying Canal District, turning Kerner Boulevard into a river and killing our electricity. Superior Video’s seasoned crew switched the cameras to battery power, pulled the blackout curtains off the windows and shot by natural light, thankful that the flooding kept passers-by away.

The fiancé of blonde Scandinavian beauty Connie Lindstrom gave her genital herpes just before her debut in Deviations. She was embarrassed about revealing to her screen partners the reason she was limited to fellatio, so I told them, “In the script, Connie’s character only gives blow jobs.” In gratitude for my explanation, she gave me virtuoso performances.

With all the problems of porn production, few directors sanction the use of drugs on a shoot. During the making of Prisoner of Paradise, John Holmes was allegedly wired on cocaine when he slugged director Gail Palmer. Seka and her husband also brawled with Holmes at the pig farm location where the aroma made all present a bit cranky. Many ladies “prepare” for screen sex by snorting coke, sometimes causing impotence in men whose penis glans have been numbed by the drug in their partners’ saliva.

I regretted the only time I allowed dope to be used during a sex scene. A French couple playing marijuana buyers in Running Wild swore their scene would go better if they smoked real pot instead of tobacco. They were wrong; the man’s penetrations and come-shot had to be cut in from my “insert library.” A model whose brain is buzzing with drugs can’t concentrate on both his screen partner and the words of the director. For the big “dope orgy” in Running Wild the pipes being passed contained pure, unadulterated Bull Durham.

Through skill, experience and hard work Superior Video overcame problems encountered on the shooting set. But those attributes weren’t as successful in dealing with the ones caused by other porno companies.

x x x x x x

Chapter 10

HONCHOS OF HARDCORE
Mid 1980s

My ex-boss Marv played a dirty trick. He organized an adult video manufacturers’ boycott of a trade show that had been treating them badly. Then, Marv secretly signed up to exhibit at the show. By the time the others found out, it was too late for them to sign up also. As the only X-rated tape company at the show, VCX did booming business. In most trades such tactics would get one ostracised. But Marv’s associates acknowledged that he’d pulled a beauty and vowed not to be suckered again. He was still invited to their poker games.

The porno industry operates as a series of fast-buck hustles. Video didn’t change that. The new, electronic age entrepreneurs like myself learned to be as wary of our peers as of the outside world. Both were treacherous.

“Running Superior Video is like piloting the starship Enterprise,” I said. “Zap! Enemy lasers on the left! Rowr! Gargantuan monster on the right! Waah! Meteor coming straight at you!” Joe Farmer nodded vigorous agreement.

x x x x x x

The misfortune of Noel Bloom illustrates the vulnerability of pornographers to the outside world. The Swedish Erotica chief promoted his Family Home Entertainment line of children’s videos with a float in the Pasadena Rose Parade. It cost him the helm of the porn giant, Caballero Control Corporation. A journalist reported Bloom’s adult industry involvement. In the spotlight of scandal, police nosed out some hard bondage (graphic penetration of a model in restraints that prevent escape‌—‌raising the question of coercion) in Caballero’s Bizarre Video line. As part of a plea bargain, Bloom agreed to sever all contact with pornography‌—‌at least “officially.”

Pornographers are constantly reminded of “real world” antagonism. When Superior Video’s headquarters (not the sales office) moved into a suite of funky offices above Whole Earth Access in San Rafael, I found out that a few blocks away at 40 Belvedere, police had raided a warehouse full of hardcore books and magazines. Like S and L Distributors a half-decade earlier, we put no identifying signs on our doors. Joe put up a memo: “Keep doors and windows closed at all times. Remember, sound carries in the hallway.”

You can’t keep the nature of your business a total secret. UPS drivers, mail carriers and phone repair personnel find out. You try to get those around you on your side. I bought VCRs from my landlord who owned Whole Earth Access and car insurance from the independent agent in the front suite. We never complained about the screaming from the acting class across the hall‌—‌they didn’t believe in underplaying‌—‌and sold them blank VHS at our own distributor cost. When the police department solicited donations for their charitable activities, Superior responded quickly.

I maintained the same policy away from the office. I lent my next-door neighbors X-rated tapes. After they sent their eleven-year-old daughter over to fetch Deviations, I told them I’d feel much more comfortable giving the tapes to them directly. I was the toast of the ski club Shelly was president of when I supplied the entertainment for “Porn and Pizza Night.”

Despite precautions, all pornographers expect trouble eventually. Then, your non-industry friends will shun you and reporters will hound you. The charge of the press corps up the Berkeley courthouse steps had so frightened the slightly-built Joe Elliot that he maced them. With an “us-versus-them” outlook on the world, many porn kings stock their companies with family members, who wouldn’t sic the authorities regardless of what quarrels developed. Without clan members at Superior, I was at risk for episodes like the “Bob H.” affair.

x x x x x x

As the sales staff grew and files bulged with new dealer accounts, the constant hassle over which store “belonged” to which rep reached the crisis stage. A retailer would complain he’d been pestered that morning by four different callers from our office, and he never wanted to hear from Superior Video again.

The sophisticated computer system we installed to keep accounts and leads organized never worked right. It became my sales manager “Bob H.’s” Frankenstein. He’d researched the system, worked out the lease details and helped write a custom software program. Bob became obsessed with making “his baby” work. He’d fail to process new leads and distribute them to the staff, neglect to call his own accounts and snap at anyone who disturbed his hunched concentration over his keyboard. Office morale plunged.

I tolerated his deteriorating mental state as long as I could, until he began bolstering his own lagging commissions by stealing the orders of others‌—‌calling their accounts, offering lower prices and writing up the revised orders as his own. Finally, I had to call him into my office and terminate his employment. I felt terrible about it, after all the effort he’d put into the computer. But Bob accepted it stoically. Or so I thought.

The next day Joe became tense and silent after answering his phone. He turned to me and said in a flat tone, “Bob H. just called. He said he was going to put us out of business.”

I called Bob back and felt a chill of adrenaline as I heard him say, “A lot of powerful people in this community would be very interested in knowing the details about a hardcore smut ring operating right under their very noses.” He demanded a month’s severance plus two weeks paid vacation time to keep him quiet.

Joe wanted to capitulate. “Just give Bob what he wants. We don’t need the aggravation. Let’s just be rid of him.”

“But what if he comes back for more?”

I thought of how my ex-mentor Tony Romano would’ve handled the problem and decided to try some “old school” tactics. I met Bob at a noisy Canal District bar. “Let me think this out,” I said, staring down into my Rob Roy. “If I give in to your extortion, what’s to stop you from using the same threat to get more and more and more?” He began to protest but I interrupted. “But if I resist, every anti-porn yahoo in the county will be out to shut me down.”

Bob feigned sympathy. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Dave.”

I stirred my drink. “I’ve got everything tied up in my business. This is my LIFE. If I lose it, I’m ruined. My one shot at success, down the fucking toilet!” I raised my Rob Roy and downed it in one gulp. It burned all the way to my stomach. I waved the waitress over and ordered another.

“Dave, Dave, this can all be worked out to our mutual–”

“Fuck!” I took another stiff gulp, slammed my glass down and shook my head. “I won’t give in to you, so I guess I’m screwed. Everything I’ve worked for‌—‌turned to shit!”

“Dave, Dave–”

“And then I’m supposed to live with myself knowing that the guy who fucked my life is still around to laugh about it?” I stared off, trying to look distracted and maybe a bit unhinged. “That wouldn’t be tolerable…”

For a moment Bob was silent, then he leaned forward. “Look, if you’re trying to threaten me, I’ll have you know there are people concerned about my welfare. If something happens to me, they’ll know who to come after. So you better hope I lead a long and healthy life!”

“I hope so.” I sipped my drink. “But if that becomes unfeasible…”

For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Then I looked into Bob’s eyes. “You do what you feel you have to, Bob, and I’ll…” I gave a slow Tony Romano nod of tragic resignation. “I guess I’ll have to do the same.”

We left the bar and went separate ways into the night.

Weeks later, I got a small claims court summons. I immediately counter-sued Bob H. for the amount of his fouled-up orders. As I’d hoped, the judge ruled that the two suits cancelled each other out. Bob didn’t once mention what kind of products Superior Video dealt in.

x x x x x x

Allyssa Hampton was no instant success. Trying out for one of Superior’s phone jobs, the future adult video marketing legend would deliver the pitch, hear responses like “Who the fuck cares?” and go home in tears.

But Allyssa persisted, studying books on sales techniques. “Lissy is five times a Scorpio,” said her best friend and roommate Alana. “Birth, moon and several other houses. When she sets her mind on mastering something, she is very much the all-conquering, unstoppable force.”

It took a while to find that out. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the short, compact woman with the greying page-boy hair and intense brown eyes. But I began to notice Allyssa’s weekly sales totals compared to the rest of the staff. Theirs kept dropping; hers kept rising. She’d picked up on a shift in the marketplace that the rest of us weren’t yet aware of.

With all the new adult video manufacturers starting up in 1984, retailers became swamped with sales calls. To avoid spending hours on the phone each day, dealers turned to “one-stops.” Instead of buying 100 adult tapes from forty different callers, a retailer bought them all from one source. After hearing the often-repeated line “I only buy from my distributor,” Allyssa would solicit the name of that distributor, whom she would then call. She was soon selling Superior tapes to every distributor in the nation, from local buyers’ groups to the eight General Video giants that were part of Reuben Sturman’s empire.

Operating on slim profit margins and high volume turnovers, distributors had a hellbroth of tricks in store for beating down phone reps’ prices. At Superior, only Allyssa developed the wiles to deal with them:

“I’m not supposed to sell Running Wild to anyone else in the New York area because you’re buying 150 pieces? Come on! If you take 500 maybe…”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t move all the Dirty Pictures, Al, but company policy won’t let me exchange previously-sold titles for new ones. I’ll tell you what I’ll do: if you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll give you a price on Bad Girl that no one else is going to get until after CES…”

A General Video manager liked to browbeat lower prices out of sales reps by denigrating their titles. “Physical II is a piece of shit!” Allyssa: “Come on, Earl, you know it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen.” Earl (to his staff): “Hey guys, what do you think of Physical II?” Background voices: “Garbage!” “Piece of shit!” Allyssa: “Come on, Earl. You don’t have to pull this act on me…” After Earl had his fun, Allyssa would get her 100-piece order‌—‌giving no special discounts.

Allyssa said many people bought from her because they were tired of being “harassed,” which she did with a bouncy, upbeat sparkle that could perk up people on the verge of suicide. She’d laugh at bad jokes, trade bonhomies with melodic enthusiasm, scribble an order, gracefully sign off, then hang up the phone and mutter, “Now let’s see… which asshole can I call next…”

Her friend and confidante Alana helped Allyssa bring a semblance of order to the sales office in the wake of Bob H.’s mismanagement. A sophisticated, unflappable Englishwoman of middle age, Alana was well-traveled and educated in fine arts. She kept the office organized and gave the company an aura of refinement when she answered the phones with her clipped, upper-class accent.

Alana had no trouble handling the occasional obscene calls on the mail-order 800 line. A voice panted “Hey, baby, I’m masturbating,” and Alana responded, “So you’ve seen some of our movies. Well, good. They can definitely help you with your problems.” I was at the sales office when a teenaged girl called and said, “My panties are wet.” Alana replied, “That’s what happens when you forget your diaper.” The girl didn’t call again.

Alana became passionately involved in the constant search for new movie concepts. She came up with the title and script idea for Diary of a Bad Girl. Clipping ads from Vogue, she said, “I’m getting so I can’t look at things any more without thinking of the commercial possibilities.”

With Joe Farmer and I at the San Rafael quarters and Allyssa and Alana at the Sausalito sales office, Superior Video now had a family better able to run an adult video company than most of those based on genealogy. One such company, owned by the world’s biggest and most powerful pornographer, plunged into a marketing crisis, due in part to the practice of hiring family and friends.

x x x x x x

A friend of mine, part of the brain trust at Reuben Sturman’s new company Vidco, told me Sturman kept moaning, “I’ve never had this much trouble meeting my numbers with anything I’ve ever done before!” Sturman was right; his business history had been a string of successes.

His erotica enterprises had begun in the early 1950s when this son of a Russian immigrant and neighborhood grocer in Cleveland added nudie magazines to the comic books he’d been peddling to news stands from the back of his car. Sturman’s own news stands became porno bookstores, in which he pioneered the quarter-slot peep-shows that became the foundation of his empire.

Behind a tangle of intertwined corporations, the secretive “Howard Hughes of porn” accumulated over 300 bookstores and peep-show arcades nationwide, large warehouses in most of America’s big cities, and outlets in forty foreign countries. Amused at being called “the world’s kingpin of porn,” Sturman named his fortress-like, barbed wire-encircled Cleveland distributorship Sovereign News Company. He’d let small operators who bought Sovereign’s films, magazines, rubber goods and Doc Johnson “marital aids” run up huge debts. Then he’d sue with blitzkrieg swiftness and take over their businesses. When informed that his new San Francisco General Video branch faced competition from the long-established Now Showing, Sturman had laughed and said, “They could easily become ‘Now Closing.’”

Charged with leading the mid-’70s excursion into animal, “kiddie,” “pisser,” and “crapper” porn, Sturman beat a half-dozen major prosecutions. In 1991, he was finally convicted of racketeering after an FBI agent and a former employee testified that Sturman’s “X-rated supermarket,” Talk of the Town, shipped the Golden Showers loop series, the feces-eating video You Said A Mouthful, and films of women having sex with “horses, pigs, ponies, dogs, a mule, a cow and a chicken.”

Before I first met Sturman in 1986 to discuss shooting for him, I was apprehensive. My experience with his tactics hadn’t been pleasant. Early in 1985, the king had decreed that the peep-show arcade rights to every X-rated video in the land be granted to him for the princely sum of one dollar each. Non-complying adult manufacturers would be barred from selling to Sturman’s General Video distributorships, losing roughly a third of their sales volume.

Most manufacturers signed Sturman’s contract. They knew arcades were running their tapes anyway, despite the box phrase “Not for Public Exhibition.” If Sturman wanted to make it legal and official, fine. I, however, read the fine print. Couched in legalese, the contract stipulated that if one of my tapes was in a Sturman arcade booth that got busted, I would be responsible for the cost of his legal defense.

Sturman’s self-described “contract doctor” Jerry Greenberger was willing to drop the clause. He seemed surprised it had slipped past other manufacturers. But by the time attorneys finished hashing out the details, months had passed. At first Allyssa had been frantic for me to sign the contract. But then the General Videos, uneasy about partaking in a restriction of trade conspiracy, began buying from her on the sly.

Waiting 45 minutes for Sturman in a brittle chair in the lobby of Vidco in North Hollywood, I wondered if he’d remember my contract holdout. I determined not to be intimidated by the fearsome porn mogul, as my Canadian client had been: “He punches a button that locks his office door behind you,” said the Toronto distributor, “And you sit there with this surveillance camera trained on you. Instead of looking at you during the conversation, Sturman watches your face on his video screen.”

Sturman arrived with apologies for being late; he’d been caught in traffic. His face had lost some of the angular hardness of earlier photos, but he still seemed much younger than sixty-one. My friend at Vidco said Sturman put on a jogging suit every day around noon and went out for a run. He was still tough‌—‌when he’d caught a man breaking into his car, he’d punched the thief out‌—‌but the built-in sneer of the news shots was gone. I couldn’t believe this friendly man in designer jeans was the fearsome Sturman of legend.

No camera was trained on me in Sturman’s office. He offered me a comfortable chair and a cigar‌—‌which I declined. “I usually don’t light one up before four o’clock,” he said, striking a match. “But it’s already been a long day.”

From the blond wood and silken fabric of the furnishings to the delicate vases on the shelves, the theme of Sturman’s office was light and Oriental, with none of the oppressive ostentation of most porn potentates. I remarked on the beauty of three gleaming Chinese figures, each about two feet high, on a shelf behind Sturman’s desk. “I bought them when I was in China,” he said. “They’re a little over a hundred years old. The Chinese are very superstitious, and these figures often appear in businesses and homes to bring good fortune.” Sturman explained that the old man with the long white beard represented longevity, the richly-dressed middle-aged man stood for prosperity and the laughing man with the baby in his arms meant fertility.

A chubby greying man surprised me by rushing into the office without knocking. He had an urgent problem he wanted a solution to. Sturman didn’t have it. “We’ll discuss this when I’m back in Cleveland next week.” But the man kept persisting and Sturman finally said, “Look, I’m not God.”

The man acted shocked. “And all this time…”

After he left, I said, “I thought you were God, too.”

Sturman laughed. “If I were God, maybe I could tell when people are lying to me, but I can’t.”

“Well, that’s something we both have in common.”

“If you had to be God, everyone would be coming to you to solve their problems.” Sturman laughed again. “I get enough of that already.”

He gave me a tour of his premises, and I began to see why he was courting new video talent. The warehouse racks were stacked to the rafters with tapes. Either Vidco needed a deep inventory to meet heavy demand, or their titles just weren’t moving‌—‌which I concluded upon seeing that none of the 160 new dubbing machines were running.

Sturman read my thoughts. “We do all of our duplication at night. During the day, we get too many power surges.” I found it hard to believe that whoever installed the sophisticated system had neglected to add a transformer, one of which had solved VCX’s surge problem eight years earlier.

One reason for Vidco’s sales problems was the box designs. Some featured the garish red and yellow lettering that the artist who designed Superior’s boxes called “the kiss of death in video because it smacks of old-time sleaze.” Fake shadow outlines made bodies look fat. The black cover model on the A Dark Side of the Moon box was almost invisible against a blacker background.

Vidco’s Amber Lynn’s Personal Best had an ill-chosen title name. The high-dollar feature could be too easily confused with the “Best of…” compilation rip-offs (Best of Seka, Best of Sharon Mitchell), in which old scenes of a popular star are slapped together for a quick buck. Lynn’s body, lifted from the original still and imposed against a blue background, only enhanced the misconception; wary customers would assume the original backdrop had been a cheap, low-class setting, such as a motel room.

My friend at Vidco said the in-house art department was headed by the boyfriend of a Sturman family member. Instead of coordinating color and prop elements with movie themes, he’d make comments at product meetings like “We tried a yellow background last time and that didn’t sell, so let’s try blue this time.” The porn tradition of hiring friends and relatives should be limited to positions that don’t require talent.

I never did shoot for Sturman. The Vidco manager whose projects I was to produce got fired. The new manager brought in his own producer. “When Sturman likes you, you can do no wrong,” the fired manager said. “Then he’ll turn against you and you can do no right. Then, he’ll reverse himself and you’re on top again.” The manager had twice worked for Sturman, and his replacement was also on a second stint. Somehow, that fit the contradictory nature of this porn titan who could alternately intimidate or charm, who collected exquisite artworks, yet dealt in the raunchiest smut imaginable.

In contrast to the long-established Sturman and his problems catching up to the video age, the upstart Jerome Tanner was leading the way. The volatile little Israeli was the exact opposite of the orderly, emotion-hiding, fitness-conscious Cleveland magnate, whose main vice was his afternoon cigar. Over twenty years younger, Tanner was surrounded by clutter, and his emotions were always “in-your-face.” Hyperventilating Marlboros, his main form of exercise was dashing from emergency to emergency in his M. C. Escher nightmare of catwalks, shrunken hallways, partitions, and monk-cubicle offices nooked at angles odd enough to make invading vice cops feel like rats in a maze. But the main difference between porn’s king of kings and the man who would be was that Sturman’s Vidco was losing tens of thousands, while Tanner’s Western Visuals was making him a fortune.

x x x x x x

“Daveet,” said Jerry Tanner, “we’re supposed to get six hours. My editor says you shorted us.”

I always hated haggling over the dupe masters of Superior’s sex scenes that I sold to Western Visuals for their loop series. “Jerry, it comes to exactly 328 minutes, that’s–”

“We can’t give ya more den t’ree grand for dis.” The sardonic New York voice at the other end of the long conference table in the smoke-filled office belonged to Jerry’s partner Elliot Siegel, a thin, sallow man with thick lips and pimples, twenty-eight years old going on fifty.

“Elliot, the deal was for four–”

“For six hours, Daveet! Six hours!”

“Where’s a calculator?” I dug under the papers and one-sheets scattered over the conference table. “OK, 328 is what percentage of 360 minutes? Lemme figure this…”

“What’s ta figure? T’ree grand. Dat’s it.”

The meeting was skewered with phone interruptions. Jerry, on his end of the long table: “I don’t pay more than $300 for a D.P. She’ll take it, you watch. That’s more money than she’s made all week… No, pay ’em only for a half day… You have the second half-day girl arrive an hour before the first one leaves. Then you shoot them together for the box cover. Should be no problem.”

And Elliot, on his end: “Uh-uh. We get da money, den we send da order. No more of dis COD stop-payment shit… Right, tell ’im it’s our way or da highway… OK, squeeze his big tits for me an’ tell ’im I love ’im.”

“Allright, 328 is exactly 91.1 percent of 360. And…” I furiously punched calculator keys. “91.1 percent of $4,000 is… $3,644.44.”

“What? Yer chargin’ by da minute?”

“$3,500, Elliot. That’s as low as I go.”

“What? Yer gonna walk away from t’ree grand? Dat’s like found money for ya.”

“I don’t give a shit, man. I don’t like to feel I’m being screwed.”

“Nobody’s screwing you, Daveet.” Jerry endured a coughing fit and muttered once again that he would quit cold turkey. “OK, 3,500 it is. I’ll write you a check–”

“Jerry, the deal was cash!”

“Shit, we got no money here. Elliot, we got anybody free to go to the bank?”

I always made sure a bottle of Scotch and some reefers were waiting in my motel room to unwind with after these sessions.

I didn’t make my own loop series of past Superior sex scenes because the art and printing costs of roughly $5,000 couldn’t be absorbed by a loop compilation title that sold a couple thousand pieces for under $10 each. (Features, at that time, wholesaled for $25 to $35 per tape.) So how did Jerry do it?

His shrewdest move had been to build his entire operation around a printing business. After his rancorous split with his Diamond Collection partner Charlie Brickman, Jerry started Western Visuals in 1982 with product most adult tape manufacturers would consider a drawback‌—‌loops, lots and lots of loops. Cost-of-product expenses‌—‌art, color-separations, and the printing and laminating of one-sheets and standard “Caballero-style” cassette boxes‌—‌would make the low-buck product unprofitable. But having these services under his own roof, Jerry paid only a printer’s operating costs. He defrayed expenses further by taking in outside work. When Western Visuals expanded into A-line features, Jerry’s graphics works became even more vital.

With some of L.A.’s best artists and printers in his employ, Jerry could design the critically important feature box covers (one-third of all video rentals are based solely on what the box conveys to the customer) as an ad agency would‌—‌creating a concept and carrying it through production. Instead of the standard semi-nude model on seamless paper with a few props, Jerry’s boxes suggested worlds of opulent decadence: Born to Run put Careena Collins in furs, standing with columns of Grecian marble, red mist swirling at her feet. Thrill Street Blues featured Joanna Storm in studded leather and handcuff belt buckle, before a sound stage French Quarter brothel. For the box shot of Hot Cars, Nasty Women, Gina Carrerra lounged in a spangled cocktail dress on the fender of a Mercedes roadster, against a set-designer sunset glowing behind palm trees.

The many low-dollar product lines Jerry and Elliot could afford to crank out let Western Visuals continue selling directly to video stores. For Superior Video, among others, the few dealer-direct sales we could still make didn’t offset the thousands in long-distance bills. But Jerry’s commissions-only sales staff in their rows of partitioned work stations could counter “I only buy from my distributor” with “Can he get you the Huge Bras line for only nine bucks?” At that price, which at least paid for the phone call, dealers couldn’t resist stocking a tape for their customers who wanted to see how the thrice-siliconed Beverlee Hills steered her sixty-inch bust through sex positions.

The order would open the door for the salesman to call back with Oral Majority I, II, III, and IV; the Blacks and Blondes volumes; and the kinky Fantasy Club line with titles like Bootlicker, Backdoor Butler, The Cuntortionist, Baby Oil, Anal Canal and Dyke Dreams. For anal fans there was Girls of the A-Team, with Sahara’s bottom painted like a face, as she takes on a series of “back-door” entries. For couples, there was the “romantic” Club Exotica and other premium-line features such as Sex Fifth Avenue, Sinset Boulevard, and For Your Thighs Only. “We offer every kind of sexual fantasy imaginable,” said Elliot Siegel. “Whatever the customer wants, we have. Diversity is the key.”

With new numbers being churned out for sixteen different compilation lines, a phone pro always had new products to rake his list of store accounts with. Dealers came to accept Western Visuals as one of the handful of one-stops they dealt with. “I have 8,000 to 9,000 accounts,” Jerry boasted in AVN. “Most video companies have a hundred or less.” He pointed out that if most companies lost the General Videos, they’d be paralyzed. When Jerry had received Sturman’s arcade contract, he’d tossed it away.

With capital for six-picture deals with directors Ned Moorehead and Henri Pachard and exclusive contracts with popular stars Taija Rae and Samantha Strong, the little Israeli boomed as I was leaving Western Visuals, “Daveet! Next time, don’t insult me by not taking my company check!”

x x x x x x

“What if they gave a porno show and nobody came?”

That line was no joke to adult video exhibitors at the 1985 VSDA (Video Software Dealers of America) Show in Washington, D.C. Trying to placate those who wanted adult tapes banned from the show while not losing the revenue from adult exhibitors, the VSDA shunted X-rated video companies to the basement of the Shoreham Hotel, a block away from the main exhibit halls in the Sheridan. To make sure the anti-porn vigilantes didn’t find out about the adult exhibits, show management printed no announcements of them. AVN’s October, 1985 issue summarized the result:

“One Video retailer from St. Louis, who said that adult comprises 40% of his business, had trouble finding the adult displays, and he actually stumbled upon it by accident. The walk from hotel to hotel was up a steep ramp or a three-block walk around, unless you knew the unmarked shortcut that led you on a serpentine to the exhibits. Many retailers complained that they had a very difficult time finding the Shoreham exhibits at all. It was a major effort on their part to discover where the adult exhibits were.

“The result was two empty rooms, with little patronage for the four days of the convention. In the Sheraton, it was so crowded that you couldn’t move. In the Shoreham, it was so quiet that the blaring music from the Essex booth was a welcome relief.

“…Essex Video sent their crew of girls to the Sheraton to give out catalogs and invite people to visit their booth at the Shoreham. They were expelled. The exhibitors instituted a petition of complaint, which most of the manufacturers and distributors signed.

“But VSDA’s response to all of this was that of a cold shoulder. When Russ Meyer and Joe Farmer of Superior Video spoke to Stan Silverman (VSDA president) about the state of affairs, his response was ‘Perhaps this shows the state of the adult industry.’”

Further insult-to-injury appeared in the only printed mention of the adult section, a tiny news blurb in the VSDA Show Daily titled “SERENDIPITY RULES UNIVERSE”: “The Society for the Study of Social Problems, a professional group of concerned sociologists, is meeting in the Shoreham Hotel, directly above the VSDA’s adult entertainment exhibit.”

“In my opinion,” said the breast-film baron Russ Meyer, “the ‘social problem’ is between Stan Silverman’s ears.”

We counted on these shows for lucrative foreign contacts, enough new accounts to boost sales for months, plus enough floor-traffic business to pay for the show itself. The ’85 VSDA Show gave Superior nothing but a loss of $17,000. The biggest VSDA loser was Select/Essex, which had bet the show was going to be a big one. Each day, in Select’s huge booth, Gail Palmer, director of Shape Up for Sensational Sex, led a group of nearly nude starlets through erotic aerobic dance routines before an empty house.

Reportedly losing $100,000 on the show, Select/Essex threatened to sue, as did 4-Play Video. But the traditional disunity, distrust of each others’ motives, and fear of “real world” retribution kept the adult magnates from acting. Caballero president Al Bloom had even been afraid to sign our mild petition of protest, though we pointed out to him that one of his employees already had signed for his company. All threats of legal action and demands for redress came to nothing. Jerome Tanner commented at the show, “If I rolled a bowling ball down the aisle, all I’d hit would be other exhibitors.” At the 1985 VSDA Show, porn’s kingpins stood up for their rights like tenpins.

x x x x x x

During my years in the adult movie trade, I always liked to think I could walk away from the business any time I wanted to. In early 1985, I had an offer that would’ve terminated that option but it would have made Superior Video one of the industry’s “giants.”

The offer came in the sleek, sunny conference room of a hot new computer software company, one of those hi-tech darlings of the mid-’80s. Around the polished table sat the company’s bright young technocrats, articulate in the jargon of bytes, bits, chips and kilobauds. At the head of the table sat their financial backer, a fat, coarse man of late middle age, with a big nose, baggy eyes and the 3D rasp of a old-school loop king‌—‌which was what he’d once been.

“Do you know Blackie?” he asked me. I didn’t. I recognized none of the porn industry names he rattled off from the early 70s, except for Reuben Sturman, who‌—‌the man said‌—‌dealt in “Garbage. Kids and animals.” “I ain’t surprised you don’t know ’em,” he said. “I done some checkin’. Dem guys ain’t in da business no more.” He reminisced about the days when he and his cronies controlled the west coast porn industry. Operating out of Las Vegas, they’d take over the top floor of a casino for a solid week of loop shooting. He was surprised nobody had control over video.

He wanted to invest in Superior Video because “youse guys got a good product and good people; all ya need is capital.” He wanted me to draw up a business plan before he committed money and I said I would.

But I never did.

If Superior Video did as well as this computer software company, there’d be no problem. But what if business turned sour and I couldn’t repay this man’s investment, much less make him a profit? I didn’t have enough confidence in the future to risk obligating my life to old-school money.

Considering what was about to happen in the X-rated movie industry, that turned out to be a wise decision.

x x x x x x

All The King’s Ladies

(First big-budget adult movie shot on videotape.)
Serena

All The King’s Ladies

Serena

Chocolate Cream

Jamie Gillis   Mauvaise De Noire

Chocolate Cream

Mauvaise De Noire   Billy Dee   Lisa DeLeeuw

Chocolate Cream

Mauvaise De Noire

Deviations

Shanna McCullough   Connie Lindstrom

Deviations

Shanna McCullough (at the mike)

Deviations

Connie Lindstrom        Shanna McCullough   Robyn Everett

Deviations

Adrienne Bellaire                 Robin Everett

Connie Lindstrom                        Shanna McCullough

Deviations

Connie Lindstrom   Shanna McCullough

Adrienne Bellaire                Robyn Everett

Diary of a Bad Girl

Cindy Carver

Dirty Pictures

Tom Byron   Cara Lott

Dirty Pictures

Amy Rogers   Tom Byron

E.X.

Don Torretta   Barbara Dare   Billy Dee

E.X.

Barbara Dare

E.X.

Cindy Carver   Lilly Marlene

E.X.

Nina Hartley

Night Moves

Willem Lowen   Cindy Carver

Night Moves

Shanna McCullough   Lilly Marlene

Physical

Linda Shaw   Billy Dee     Juliet Anderson

Physical

Juliet Anderson   Billy Dee

Physical

Billy Dee   Juliet Anderson

Running Wild

Willem Lowen  Billy Dee

Cindy Carver  Joe Elliot

Sizzle with Samantha

Samantha Fox   Billy Dee

The Reincarnation of Don Juan

Shanna McCullough

The Reincarnation of Don Juan

Don Fernando   Nina Hartley   Mike Horner

Chapter 11

THE SMUT GLUT
Mid to late 1980s

It was Superior Video’s first flop and I didn’t know why. Dirty Pictures had all the right ingredients: a box picture of Traci Lords on black satin wearing red underthings and her famous pout; plenty of hot sex with group, girl-girl, and inter-racial action; and a fast-paced story, based on a case described to me by Lieutenant Lex Zabel of the LAPD Administrative Vice unit: a couple hires a pornographer to shoot them having sex so they’ll be able to watch their own young bodies in action when they grow old. Then they find that the pornographer has made extra copies and sold them to porn shops. Despite its attributes, Dirty Pictures only sold 1,100 pieces.

Then Physical II, released in the fall of ’85, sold nearly 4,000 pieces out the door‌—‌a smash hit. (The popularity of the original Physical helped.) Maybe, I thought, the failure of Dirty Pictures was just an aberration. When Diary of a Bad Girl also reached the desired 3,000-piece mark, Joe, Allyssa, and I expected our next release, E.X., to be a smash. The sci-fi flick had a classy cover of Nina Hartley’s soft-lit beauty against a night sky with spacecraft and starbursts. The box also had photos of the large cast cavorting with glowing, phallic aliens. How could the title fail?

It did. Only 1,062 pieces out the door.

The strong market that had brought growth and prosperity to Superior Video between 1982 and 1985 had become like a car starting to run out of gas‌—‌its smooth running interrupted by missing and stuttering. We were entering “The Smut Glut,” a crowded marketplace of porn company sales veterans, small-time shooters, “Mafia poor relations,” and industry newcomers, who began manufacturing and marketing their own X-rated videos in 1984. In ’83, there had been only about a dozen adult video manufacturers; by 1985, according to Video Business magazine, there were four times that many. Of the 96 California video software distributors listed by the VSDA in August of 1985, 45 were also adult tape manufacturers.

The number of porn video releases escalated‌—‌as noted by AVN‌—‌from 400 in 1983 to 1,100 in ’84 and 1,610 in 1985. The home video industry wasn’t growing fast enough to assimilate them all. “There used to be 25 new titles a month and the store owner would buy 15 or 20 of them,” lamented VCA’s Russ Hampshire. “He’s still buying the same number of tapes but now he has hundreds to choose from.” The adult movie industry was on the brink of chaos.

We were entering a time of rip-offs, lawsuits, arsons, and even murders; a time of bitter price wars, when even large, long-established companies would go bankrupt; a time when the production of big-budget X-rated motion pictures would end.

I had known production would increase when Superior’s competitors discovered the low-cost ease of shooting video but I didn’t anticipate the full impact of what Ted, my “electronic shrink” at Compact Video, called “the pornographer’s rapacious peasant mentality.”

x x x x x x

The summer of 1985 reminded me of the proverbial cartoon image of a tattered soul crawling across a desert. Superior Video’s sales for July reached a record one month low of only 394 tapes. Our catalog of past pictures no longer sustained Superior between new movie releases.

I thought Allyssa would be happy when I told her she could drop the price of catalog titles from $19 to $15. Instead she frowned. “I don’t think that will help much. Some companies are dumping older titles at $12.” She had just returned from the new General Video branch in San Francisco where the manager had shown her a foot-high stack of one-sheets for new titles. “There’s already too much new stuff out there,” he’d said. “The last thing I need is catalog shit.”

When Joe said that Superior needed a new release every two months, Allyssa scoffed, “Maybe if you came out with Taboo Number 10 (referring to Kirdy Stevens’ popular series of incest features) you’d have a sales life that long. What you really need is a new title every couple of weeks, like AVC (Adult Video Corporation) is doing.”

“They aren’t really making money on all those releases, are they?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Allyssa answered. “They’re just trying to hang in there.”

x x x x x x

Despite the plunging prices, out-the-door sales quantities kept falling. AVN estimated that sales of new adult releases were down 40% in the first quarter of 1987, compared to the same period in ’86, despite an overall market growth of 16%. By 1989, adult tape companies were lucky to move 2,000 pieces of a new title. Many retailers refused to pay $20 for a new tape when they knew that in a month they could get the same title for $10.

Distributors, in turn, limited the number of pieces they would buy brand new at $12 -$15; a month later, they’d get it for half those prices.

Caught in this downward vortex, manufacturers lost money on each release (Sturman said that a wholesale price under $20 was unprofitable) but had to keep pumping out product faster and faster to keep their cash flow numbers up. Some cut back by using cheaper tape brands, which often jammed in VCRs or clogged playback heads. Some cut sales commissions‌—‌and ended up with the dregs of the boiler-room gypsies. None dared lower package and one-sheet quality‌—‌those were what sold the tape. But there was one place where cut-backs could be unlimited: the production costs of the movies themselves.

When production budgets began to fall in the mid-’80s, director Bruce Seven groaned, “What kind of quality can you turn out in two days?” By 1993, the “one-day wonder” had become standard, and AVN editor Gene Ross recalled Seven’s earlier complaint: “Seven, as any other director in the business, would probably kill for that kind of latitude nowadays.”

x x x x x x

“What’s the difference between the old silent 8-millimeter loops and the video features of today?” asked reviewer Steve Austin in the February ’91 AVN issue. His answer: “The guys take their sox off now.” Publisher Paul Fishbein scolded, “At this crucial stage in the history of adult video, the industry should be ashamed of itself.” “The overall quality in the adult genre has been steadily going into the toilet the last two years,” went an editorial by Fishbein and editor Ross, “…and these cheaper videos are the flush handles.”

Veteran producer and AVN columnist Les Baker called it “a Gresham’s Law of porn,” applying the economics aphorism “bad money drives good money out of the marketplace” to the barrage of cheap videos forcing producers to lower their standards.

Some refused to. Cal Vista’s feisty president Sid Niekerk had once drawn himself up to his full five-foot-four and proclaimed in my face his hatred for the shot-on-video look. But the theatrical market was dying: from over 2,000 adult theaters in the mid-’70s it would drop to 500 in ’85 and to 200 by 1993. Since the tape market couldn’t support the high-quality 35s Niekerk had built his company with, he left the adult video business, selling to Caballero the American video rights to Cal Vista’s entire catalog of 150-plus major X-rated features.

“God, it’s a ballbuster!” said Anthony Spinelli in the March, 1989, issue of X-Video Review, describing the shooting of one-day wonders. “You start at seven in the morning, or eight, and you’re not through‌—‌for me‌—‌until three the next morning.” When Joe Farmer and I ran cameras for Spinelli’s Plum Productions, the director/ manufacturer‌—‌in a budget squeeze‌—‌asked us to work 24 hours straight for our normal day rates‌—‌no overtime.

By the beginning of the 1990s, budgets had become so tight that the acclaimed Henri Pachard was forced to crank out three features in one day! (Not as impossible as it sounds: the trick is to shoot three separate dialog scenes with the same cast on each setup, to fit three different stories.)

Budgets plunged so low that the production of the cover photo and the printing of the box literally cost more than the movie itself. Directors complained about being limited to shooting four quick sex scenes with a cast of a half-dozen and calling it a feature, but many of porn’s new CEOs didn’t care how shoddy their product was. Video Exclusives’ Mark Curtis told AVN his “philosophy” was “Give the people a wall-to-wall sex program that’s light on story, big on action, star-packed, and they’ll be happy.” On a four-month shooting binge of ten sex scenes a day, Curtis reportedly got models to work at the 1970s loop rates of $125 a scene for females and $75 for males.

The demand for tons of titles at micro-budgets led to the Stallion Productions debacle of 100 videos in thirty days, after which the producers and their tapes disappeared without paying cast and crew. AVN’s Ross made the sarcastic prediction that “thanks to new Japanese technology that actually condenses time, some adult video company will hit on the brilliant concept of producing 100 videos in thirty minutes.”

x x x x x x

To feed their fast-track release schedule, many companies bypassed shooting entirely.

Desperate for a new title but unwilling to throw money away shooting one, I did something that would become a trend: create a new movie out of old footage. The premise of The Reincarnation of Don Juan was that Don Juan, languishing in Hell, would be allowed into Heaven if he does a good deed for womankind whom he had so cavalierly used in his lifetime. His task is to return to Earth and give a woman an orgasm. The catch is that he is reincarnated as a flea.

That story angle allowed me to disguise recognizable sex scenes by surrounding bodies with “flames of Hell” created by my “little black box” effect generator. I used change-of-camera-position travel over floors, rugs, and ground as the flea’s point-of-view shots. And I had a good excuse for lots of gynecological close-ups, as the flea narrates his frustrations with the logistics of his task.

You can fool some of the people some of the time: a reviewer for Adam Film World’s Adult Video Guide wrote, “Lots of pluses here: storyline, sex, camerawork, editing‌—‌it all comes together. Shanna McCullough and Traci Lords stand out, as always.” But savvy viewers and distributors weren’t fooled. The Reincarnation of Don Juan got so many complaints and threats to drop the Superior line‌—‌not to be taken lightly in this dire business climate‌—‌that I didn’t try the scam again. But other companies pulled recycled footage rip-offs more blatant than mine.

In mid-’85, Hollywood Video came up with Seka’s Teenage Diary, boasting “exclusive, never-seen-before footage of the platinum blonde beauty when she was just a teenager.” Two years later, VCR released The Lost Episodes of Seka, similarly hyped as “never before seen on video.” The footage in both cases was actually from those old Scorpio Etc. half-hour shows that had worried me in 1978 by beating my own shot-on-video shows to the marketplace.

Producer Perry Ross excused the use of the same three sex scenes in both The Autobiography of Herman Flogger and Hanna Does Her Sisters, saying they were “edited differently.” Desperate manufacturers pumped out “wraparounds” (new footage ‘wrapped around’ old) and compilations‌—‌if you had three or more scenes of some obscure model named Connie Lingus, you released The Best of Connie Lingus. Some simply retitled old movies, put them in new boxes and sent them out as brand new releases. AVN called companies such as Limelight Releasing, notorious for retitling old product, “pariahs, predators and scum.”

Running out of title names for all their new releases, producers looked to outside sources. The Reverend Jim Bakker/Jessica Hahn affair inspired PTL (Pay The Lady). English literature, patriotism, comic strips, and network television begat Great Sexpectations, Yank My Doodle, It’s a Dandy, Bedman and Throbbin’, Vasoline Alley, Gonad the Barbarian, The Twilight Moan, Genital Hospital, and Leave It To Cleavage. Even commercials played a role, with Mikey Likes It and This Butt’s For You. Among the rip-offs of Hollywood titles were Backside to the Future, All That Jizz, The Load Warriors, Jane Bond Meets Thunderballs, The Poonies, Romancing the Bone, Pumping Irene, Poltergash and The Sperminator. There were Bimbo: Hot Blood, Part I and Ramb-OHH!; Beaverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cox, and Beverly Hills Copulator; and Sister Dearest, Daddy Dearest and Mommy Queerest. A full-page AVN ad for Executive Video’s Butts Motel II featured a woman in a shower being assaulted by a figure in a granny wig brandishing a dildo.

And then there was Debbie. After the sequels to the original hit reached Mark Curtis’ Debbie Does Dallas IV, producers branched out with Debbie Goes to College, Debbie Does ’Em All, and Night of the Living Debbies. Bob Vosse directed Debbie Duz Dishes, and Spinelli couldn’t resist And I Do Windows Too, inciting Dishes distributor Adult Video Corporation to complain “WE WERE RIPPED OFF!” Debbie Does Dishes III producer Richard Aldrich announced in AVN his plans for Bang the Debbie Slowly. Wanting their own “Debbie” title to cover as much porn turf as possible, Essex Video called their 1987 release Debbie Does the Devil in Dallas. Walt Disney Productions sued Ventura Video, fearing the public would confuse the hardcore In and Out in Beverly Hills with Disney’s Down and Out in same. Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie company, sued Soho Video over Victoria’s Secret the porno. Mitchell Brothers Film Group won $160,000 in remunerations and punitive damages from Essex, plus an order restraining that manufacturer from using “Green Door,” “Censored Door,” the word “Door” in green colors, or “a visual depiction of a green-colored door.”

“I shot this picture with Shanna McCullough called Ecstasy,” Spinelli told me. “So just when I release it, this schmuck (Lawrence T. Cole of Now Showing) releases this cheap piece of shit under me called Xtasy‌—‌spelled with an ‘X’‌—‌with Shanna on the box. All I could move was 1,500 pieces.” Spinelli swore he’d never again mention the name of a title he was working on until the day it was ready to hit the street. Years later I was doing sound on a Spinelli set and asked him the name of the movie we were making. Spinelli replied, “Number 1027.”

Desperate over dwindling sales, companies concocted off-beat promotional gimmicks. Intropics pushed the safe-sex angle in The Huntress with a condom in every cassette box. An order of any size for Caballero’s Stiff Competition came with an exploding penis slinky in a can. Naked Scents included a vial of cologne. Fifty Fashion Fantasies boxes hid gift certificates from Fredericks of Hollywood. Twenty lucky people pulled out their Beverly Hills Copulator cassettes and found a gift certificate for “the dream date of a lifetime with Traci Lords.” Howard Farber of Video-X-Pix complained that things had gone too far when he was offered cassette boxes that were supposed to contain human pubic hair.

My ex-boss Tony Romano tried to bring a fast and dirty buck into his failing Visual Entertainment Productions (VEP) by appealing to pedophiles with Little Kimmi Johnson. The giggly, coltish Kimmi’s disclaimer that she is really 19 years old and merely “re-living” on videotape the adventures and fantasies of her girlhood didn’t stop police agencies from busting the tape.

Scenes of the gamine in parochial plaid skirts and bobby socks, seducing her science teacher, her mother’s boyfriend and the mother herself clearly violated the L.A. ordinance against depicting underaged sex. With no other companies willing to risk competing in this “market,” Kimmi did well enough for the daring Romano to bring out “her kid sister,” Little Muffy Johnson.

With all the price wars, product dumping, scams, gimmicks and rip-offs, the video market in the latter half of the 1980s became a battlefield. When the elephants fight, goes a business saying, the ants get stomped. As one of the smallest competitors in the adult video field, Superior Video was getting crushed.

x x x x x x

More maddening than the falling prices and low sales figures were slow collections. Some of Superior’s clientele had legitimate reasons for bad checks and late payments. Larry Field, one of our most reliable customers, lost his warehouse to arson. When Allyssa asked a New York distributor to please pay his bill, he flew into a rage; Allyssa hadn’t known that two days before her call, the man’s partner had been murdered, with sixteen .22 slugs in his head. Ferris Alexander, head of AB Distributors in Minnesota, was preoccupied with the aftermath of an anti-porn demonstrator immolating herself in one of his bookstores.

With their profits squeezed by falling prices, Superior’s 30-day distributor accounts were taking 60, 90, and 120 days. I couldn’t help but laugh when a General Video check came with the instructions, “Please don’t deposit until April 1.” Without Allyssa to browbeat them, some accounts wouldn’t pay at all. “They’ll only pay for their last order when they want your next title,” Harry Young of Select/Essex told me. “If they want your next title.” Hollywood’s major studios, also feeling the crunch, were putting pressure on one-stops to maintain sales quotas. So some of the one-stops were dropping the smaller adult lines.

I found myself sinking the money I’d made from Superior Video back into the company: $8,000 here, then $3,000, then another $5,000‌—‌all on paper as “loans”‌—‌just to stay afloat.

The financial crisis made a bad check from Tony Romano for $10,525 all the more infuriating. As my attorney dunned VEP, I’d lie awake nights fantasizing about bursting into my ex-boss’s office with Maggie spewing .357 slugs‌—‌especially after my attorney gave his opinion that Romano and his partner Norm Berkoff were “raping their company” of cash. But I didn’t think they were gloating about screwing me; they were in such a money crunch that even their in-house bill collector turned against them. That story was one of the industry’s few current chuckles. The collector, a muscular tough named Ron, had ended an argument with Berkoff by punching him out. According to a VEP saleslady, “Tony came in, drunk as usual, and goes, ‘What’s Nahmy doin’ layin’ dere on da flahr?’ Someone tells him Ron punched Norm out. Tony just shrugs and says, ‘Hey, dese t’ings happen.’ Then he goes into his office and locks the door. A couple hours later, his secretary looks in. There’s Tony with his head on his desk, fast asleep.”

My attorney managed to get only $4,000 of the bad check amount out of VEP before the company filed Chapter Eleven‌—‌joining my ex-clients Select/Essex and Marty Krause of Video Home Entertainment in bankruptcy. There were rumors that even the conservatively-managed “General Motors of Porn” Caballero was about to go under. Caballero president Al Bloom insisted the company only suffered “temporary cash flow problems,” but the leviathan had fallen so deeply in arrears that for a brief time AVN stopped running its ads.

VCX, too, took refuge in Chapter Eleven. My bankrupt former boss Marv was in far worse shape than my bankrupt former boss Tony. Serving his five-year Miporn prison sentence, Marv received some devastating news: his ex-wife Anna, the former hooker from Hawaii, had killed his two young daughters. Unable to adapt to single motherhood after her generous divorce settlement, Anna had suffered a nervous collapse. She set out to kill herself and her two children by running her car’s engine in her enclosed garage. Reportedly, the engine stopped running, and Anna woke up; but the little girls didn’t. Days later, police found Anna wandering about her house, incoherent. The girls’ tiny bodies were propped up in bed like dolls. When Marv got the news, he reportedly went berserk and had to be kept under heavy sedation.

Superior Video wasn’t yet ready for Chapter Eleven but the company was in trouble. We’d run out of boxes on a catalog title and the printer would refuse to print more until we paid for past work. So we’d simply stop selling that title. Old dubbing VCRs needed replacing but we’d just keep running tapes through their clacking innards. UPS threatened to suspend service unless we paid a stack of past-due invoices.

I refused to lend the company another penny. But I didn’t cash my paychecks, so there’d be enough money in the account for my employees to cash theirs. I checked out a library book on do-it-yourself bankruptcy.

The company couldn’t continue poking along. As Joe Farmer said, “You’ve either got to plunge in, invest some money, shoot a lot of product and slug it out, or sell Superior Video and move on to other things.” It was a decision I felt incapable of making. As the company was falling apart, so was its owner.

x x x x x x

I couldn’t believe I’d made such a hideous mistake. A softcore edition of Physical II that I’d sent to Superior’s Canadian licensee for submission to the Ontario Board of Censors came back “Not Approved.” The Board rejected anything risqué‌—‌like a character in Physical II uttering the phrase “choice pieces of meat.” (They even interdicted Andrea Dworkin’s anti-porn books Woman Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women). I’d taken great care to make the sex in the Canadian version almost as non-explicit as that found in American movies rated PG.

The Board’s rejection document listed among the objections, “nine minutes of black and white hardcore pornography.” Puzzled, I screened the cassette and saw to my horror that after Physical II ended, a scene from the 1953 stag film Smart Alec appeared, with stripper Candy Barr, then 16 years old, performing graphic fellatio. Worse yet, following that short bit was El Perro Masajista, also known as Mexican Dog. That “classic” starred a manic little pug-nosed mutt whose appendage appeared longer than his flailing legs as he tried to mount bored-looking women.

Instead of dubbing the soft Physical II onto a blank cassette, I’d somehow used a copy of a bunch of vintage “smokers” I’d purchased from an octogenarian collector for my Blue Memories historical porn compilations. A film I wouldn’t have dared put in an American hardcore series had actually crossed the border and appeared before strict Canadian censors. I was lucky I wasn’t in prison. But I wondered if the slip-ups I’d been making meant I was ready for a nuthouse.

I was totally burned-out. Even though I took my Tenormin hypertension medication daily, I was often startled by the sensation that my heart was leaping up into my throat (Alana said that if there was no pain, it was “just stress”). I had constant heartburn.

Lying in the dark, unable to sleep, as usual, I heard Shelly wake up and shift her position. “Dave,” she asked, “how much longer do you want to stay in this business?”

“Oh, maybe another five minutes.”

“You’re finally getting out?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I felt her hand rub my back. “Suppose you took the money you’ve made over the past few years and used it to crank out one movie after another, just to keep Superior going. What if the business never again became profitable? Your money would be gone, and your health might be, too. You could be just like those bitter old pornographers you were telling me about, the ones with the lines of resignation in their faces.”

Since using her nurse’s knowledge of anatomy to make the transition from Berkeley Mental Health to working in ergonomics for a large defense contractor, Shelly had been hoping I’d quit the business. The requirements of her security clearance made her uneasy about being involved with a pornographer, especially one with whom she’d been discussing marriage. “Dave,” she said. “Remember when you told me that a porn business cliché is the guy who keeps saying he’s going to get out but is making too much money to do it?”

I laughed. “Not quite my situation, is it?”

“Exactly. Now’s the time to use your money as you planned: so you can write your book without having to work full-time.”

x x x x x x

It was a tough time to sell a used porno company. For one thing, there were a lot of them on the market. Like the cartoon of a little fish being eaten by a bigger fish being eaten by a huge fish, Sturman’s Las Vegas “porn emporium” Talk of the Town gobbled up 4-Play, Masterpiece, Lipstik and Now Showing; then Sturman’s 300-title Vidco got swallowed by Caballero. (By then, in 1988, Sturman was too busy battling major tax evasion charges to continue fighting on the video front.)

Superior’s only real assets were a room full of well-used video hardware and twenty-six adult feature movies. But if the titles couldn’t keep a small outfit of half a dozen people in business, the package wouldn’t add much to bigger companies that were also struggling.

The offers I got were laughably low. Nobody had any cash to spend (which is all I would take for the titles), except Jerry Tanner.

He called to cuss out the last series of sex scenes I’d sold him: “I throw better stuff away all the time, Daveet.” He asked if I had any more to sell.

“Jerry,” I said. “How’d you like to get the whole works: lock, stock, and barrel?”

x x x x x x

Perspiration rolled down Jerry Tanner’s face. “My wife says I’m crazy to carry around this much cash.” I discreetly looked away as he turned the dial of the combination lock on his briefcase. He opened it to reveal neat stacks of hundred dollar bills. (I promised Jerry I’d never divulge the amount.)

We sat on packing crates in my storage vault, away from the eyes of the crew that was loading Jerry’s rented furniture van with my nine years of edited masters, camera originals, color separations, artwork, and cartons of finished VHS and Beta tapes. I concentrated on the crisp bills Jerry counted out in rows of ten each on top of a trade show poster for Diary of a Bad Girl that we were using as a table. Jerry finished counting, sighed, and mopped his forehead with a sleeve. “You are making the right move, Daveet. It’s hard to make a buck anymore.” He was pensive as I filled my own briefcase with the money. “I’ve got to tough it out,” he said. “Everything I have is tied up in this business.” Jerry was gambling that when the crunch ended, the survivors would become industry giants.

My heart was pounding as I drove to my bank, eyeing every car around me for thugs waiting to cut me off and demand the briefcase. I mentally rehearsed pulling Maggie up from the Corvette’s door pocket. I almost collapsed with relief upon reaching the bank, where the manager and her assistant ushered me into a rear suite and took turns solemnly counting out the bills. Except for several thousand in severance pay for my employees, I put the money into a certificate of deposit. The amount wasn’t what I’d envisioned selling all rights to my movies for, but at least I could spend the summer of ’86 lying at the pool, perusing investments and transcribing the audio tapes that filled a VCR box‌—‌my journal of almost ten years in the porno business.

I had less time to relax than I’d thought. Joe Farmer kept calling with camerawork and sound recording jobs. He and his partner were using their Hitachi FP 21 cameras and Superior Video experience to do a thriving business shooting for all the adult video producers chased up north by a police crackdown in L.A.

Allyssa, too, was doing well. She’d gone from being the sales manager for one of the smallest porno companies to filling that post for one of the largest: when Reuben Sturman found she was available, he immediately hired her to help straighten up the mess at Vidco.

Allyssa didn’t forget about all those deadbeat accounts she’d left me with. “As I live and breathe,” she vowed, “we WILL collect!” She said she’d use the clout of her new position. “If they don’t pay up, I’ll put them out of business.”

To my surprise, the checks came dribbling in. One distributor, squirming under Allyssa’s “Scorpio stare,” said, “Why are you still concerned with this? You’re not working for them anymore.” “Right,” she replied, “but I have an obligation. And when I have obligations, I stick with them.” The man, who was trying to get better credit terms from Vidco, immediately wrote out a check for the $2,006 he owed Superior.

“Take all the problems we had at Superior and multiply them a thousand-fold,” Allyssa said over wine and pasta at L’Express, in Sherman Oaks. “And what you’d have is Vidco. You got out just in time.”

I felt like an ant who’d escaped a stomping and had climbed a tree to watch the elephants slug it out.

x x x x x x

Consumers finally rebelled against the garbage videos flooding the market. A new generation of porn fans discovered‌—‌to their delight‌—‌the high quality of the 35s from porn’s 1970s “Golden Age.” And the hundreds of old titles in Caballero’s catalog began striding on “legs” (strong long-term sales) that the content-crippled cheapies couldn’t keep up with.

After announcing the purchase of Vidco‌—‌which created a 700-title monster, Caballero’s Bloom said, “catalog is the strength today. And now we have, without a doubt, the largest adult video catalog in the world.” Caballero was now the dominant bull elephant, the X-rated king of the hill, rivaled only by another strong beast, VCA.

Video Company of America had made a bigger commitment to the future of adult video than any other manufacturer. Russ Hampshire, a former Texas McDonald’s restaurant manager, brought a new kind of efficiency to the adult industry. His partner Walter (“Wally the Wolf”) Gernert brought to VCA “old-school” connections and backing. Their shared belief in a glorious future for the fledgling home video industry drove them to invest their savings, raise money through piracy‌—‌for which they were convicted, and go deeply in debt to become adult video’s first big one-stop. They signed $10-per-tape royalty contracts to land as many quality 35s as they could.

By the beginning of 1985, Hampshire claimed he had over 150 films “in the can” that had yet to be released on videotape. VCA reportedly paid $400,000 for the exclusive video rights to The Devil In Miss Jones II. Hampshire said he needed to sell 40,000 copies of that blockbuster title just to break even on it.

He’d moved about three-quarters of that number when the full impact of the Smut Glut hit VCA. “I’ve made commitments based on what the business was a few years ago,” Hampshire said in an AVN editorial on the crunch. “Then all of a sudden you get all these other Tom, Dick and Harrys coming into the marketplace. What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to stop putting out product? … If I go down to one (title per month) like the small companies, what good does that do me?”

To improve its cash flow, VCA leased out part of its vast West L.A. warehouse and stalled payments to small creditors like Superior. The company persevered, boosted by the same kind of resurgence in catalog sales that helped Caballero. A reputation for quality helped establish VCA as the dominant adult video manufacturer (before Caballero’s purchase of Vidco). In early 1988, Allyssa told me, “Russ Hampshire is like a god in the industry right now.” VCA was the second bull elephant to emerge victorious.

Also thriving in the depths of the Smut Glut were a host of small companies that filled niche markets. VCR ownership had proliferated to the point where viewers with off-beat erotic tastes formed large enough market segments to provide a limited but steady profit for companies putting out “specialty” tapes, such as Kinky Midgets, Black Anal, She-Males, The Enema, Foot Worship, Latex Slaves, National Transsexual, Pregnant Mamas, and Anal Nation. A popular new genre had lone women taking on groups of men, such as Biff Malibu’s Gang-Bang Girls 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Both large and small companies pumped out “amateur tapes,” comprised of “your neighbors’ home videos” and “pro-am” videos of sex stars performing with non-professionals. If videographers like myself weren’t available to shoot for Joe Elliot’s Girlfriends, the agent/actor simply locked his consumer-grade camera on a tripod for one continuous long-shot of himself having safe sex with a lady who’d answered one of his ads.

Bespectacled, big-nosed, nerdish-looking Ed Powers ostensibly picked up women in streets and bus stations, then taped himself having sex with them. Actor/author Jerry Butler wanted to know why every time Powers “picked up” a girl, agent Jim South got $50. “I DO pick up girls on the street,” Powers protested. “I really do!”

Anthony Spinelli’s Plum Productions survived because he had something to sell that nobody else did: himself. The rotund, balding, self-described “old Jew” hardly seemed a porno attraction, but many of Spinelli’s fans didn’t even know what the esteemed director looked like. The Spinelli clan had adapted well to the age of the micro-budget. Like haiku, the short stories of H.H. (“Saki”) Munro, and Twilight Zone re-runs, their spare, interior dramas appealed to the cerebral end of the market. Plum’s “one-act morality plays”‌—‌as AVN’s Joe Daniels called them‌—‌gave couples a springboard for more elevated post-coital conversation than “Was it good for you too?”

Perhaps the biggest success among the new niche companies was John Stagliano’s Evil Angel Productions, started in 1988 during the very depths of the market glut. Oozing oily charm, the cheerfully sleazy Stagliano introduced himself to Superior Video at a 1985 trade show. Like an anorexic John Travolta, with gold medallions bouncing off his thin chest, bared by a shirt buttoned at the navel, the former dancer/model hoofed off a few pirouettes in the crowded aisle. Stagliano was seeking work as a director. He might have made a better impression on us had he not also introduced his buddy/cameraman Bruce Seven. A sneering, grey ghoul of a man, cadaverous with emphysema, Seven got into an argument with Joe Farmer and me. He swore that sex couldn’t be shot using a video switcher; Joe and I maintained you couldn’t shoot without one. At the height of the discussion, Seven threatened to unzip his pants and urinate on our booth. And I threatened to make him lick it up.

Like Russ Meyer a generation earlier, who parlayed his fixation with mammoth breasts into a fortune, Stagliano exploited his fascination with the female posterior. As “Buttman,” he approached women in public, begging them to bare their bottoms before his camera. With little more than that documentaire shtick and lots of rump-romping sex shot from low, ant’s-eye angles, the Buttman series found a ready audience of males disgruntled with the bland, couples-oriented drift of the overall market.

“Eliminate the middle-man” goes the standard cry during price wars. As one-stops found their profits crunched, many produced their own X-rated videos. There were Model Distributors’ Coast-to-Coast line, CPLC’s Video Team, International Video Distributors’ Pleasure Productions, and General Video West’s Sin City Video. Metro Home Video purchased the already-existing Intropics Video and Paradise Visuals lines. “I didn’t want to become a manufacturer,” Larry Field, owner of Pipeline Video, told AVN after starting Fat Dog Productions, “I was forced into it by companies that kept lowering and lowering their prices and putting out shit product.”

With their own product lines, one-stops could trade for each other’s tapes instead of paying wholesale prices. I began to wonder if I’d left the business too soon. Perhaps I could’ve traded Superior tapes and become a Marin and Sonoma Counties one-stop.

But any doubts I had about leaving porn video manufacturing disappeared when the tenacious Jerome Tanner himself quit the adult business. In 1988, he sold his interest in Western Visuals to his partner Elliot Siegel. Now, Jerry would deal solely with his Happy Face Video line of children’s films. Under the logo of a smiling sun, Yankee Doodle Daffy, Porky’s Bear Facts, the Three Stooges’ Sing A Song Of Six Pants and Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater would appeal to what Jerry anticipated as a growing market from a late-1980s baby boom among thirty-somethings.

Not only had Jerry suffered the Smut Glut and been busted for shooting in L.A., but two months after he’d bought the rights to my titles, three of them‌—‌Physical II, Dirty Pictures and The Reincarnation of Don Juan‌—‌officially became child pornography. So did several other titles in his lines, along with hundreds of videos, films and magazines produced by other companies.

Porn’s top star, Traci Lords, became the industry’s biggest single disaster when she was revealed to be underaged. Hers was a saga of greed, child exploitation, broken homes, burnout, sex slavery, threats, fast-track investments, and finally, Hollywood success based on notoriety. A child of the Sex Revolution coming of age in the “Me Decade,” Traci was also an inspiration to a new generation of porno queens who saw an opportunity to become rich.

Chapter 12

THE GODDESS
1986 - 1990s

“She’s perfect,” sighed lovestruck stud Tom Byron. “I mean, every girl in this business has some kind of flaw. Like she might be a bitch, or does too much coke, or has a saggy ass‌—‌something. But Traci… she doesn’t have a single fault. She’s perfect in every way.”

Except two. For one thing, she didn’t have a smile. Something in her cheek lines made it almost a sneer‌—‌a “snile.” Traci Lords’ second flaw was much worse; it nearly destroyed an industry. It caused busts, bankruptcies and losses in the millions. It brought a Federal push to throw most of America’s adult movie producers in prison.

It was commercial pornography’s worst scandal and it came at the worst possible time: with Attorney General Ed Meese urging anti-porn activism and the industry mired in the “Smut Glut.”

The news that porn’s top star was underaged “went through the industry like a plague through the Middle Ages,” said Adult Film and Video Association attorney John Weston. There was a scramble to remove hundreds of thousands of videotapes, films and magazines from circulation before the police could pounce on them.

“Coming as it does on the heels of the Meese Report,” Weston said,“it’s hard to believe the two are not related.”

“Talk about timing,” wrote Mitchell Brothers star Missy Manners in her Spectator column, “I’m not so sure it’s just a coincidence.”

For the Meese Commission, it was “proof” of their contention that child porn was a major part of the commercial industry.

Under Federal law, anyone connected with a Traci Lords shoot was guilty of a felony. Hundreds of grips, gofers and gaffers, as well as producers, directors, agents, writers, make-up artists and caterers faced long prison terms, loss of assets, and fines guaranteed to keep them poor for life.

“If the Traci Lords case is lost,” Weston said, “with the strictest liability of the law enforced, the government would then have the power to wipe out the industry.”

Was the industry at fault? Could a fifteen-year-old girl rise to the top of the porn world without anyone suspecting her true age? Was she sophisticated enough to bamboozle Penthouse, the U.S. Government, and the entire porn industry? To spend two years dashing from set to set, yet find time to invest her earnings wisely enough to be “set for life?” To beat alleged IRS and forged passport felony violations? And, finally, to parlay the age fiasco into Hollywood success?

Questions about adult “advisors” knowingly promoting a minor in porn went unanswered. Was she really a runaway from Ohio whose mother turned her in after seeing her picture in a TV special on the Meese Report? Or did she live in Redondo Beach with her mother who secretly managed her career?

Industry skeptics, including her agent Jim South, didn’t believe she was really underaged. They saw the whole thing as a ploy to prevent all existing Traci Lords tapes from competing with the products of her new company (shot after she supposedly turned eighteen).

What is the real Traci Lords story?

I caught a glimpse of it: my experience directing Lords and my trade with her business partners reveal a saga of mutual exploitation, of a driven, ambitious beauty hell-bent on getting rich, and of those who misused her and forced a devastating showdown.

x x x x x x

Traci started at the top. Her first job: Penthouse centerfold (September, 1984). But unlike women who use these “high class” spreads to launch legitimate modeling and acting careers, Traci went in another direction. Blame Tom Byron. His meeting with her became a legend.

It happened on the set of Richard Mailer’s What Gets Me Hot. Traci was “testing” porn work as a “nude extra,” a woman who provides window dressing but doesn’t perform sex.

Mailer hadn’t needed her but “Traci was so beautiful I just had to have her in the picture.”

Byron first saw her in the kitchen, away from the cameras. “I felt like I’d been hit by a ton of bricks,” he said. “I’ve worked with a lot of beauties, but when I saw Traci… it was like a wet dream come true.”

Mailer came upon the two of them writhing on a butcher block. The veteran pornographer wasted no time; Traci lost her “screen cherry” but gained a boyfriend and a new career‌—‌one she plunged into.

As one of the first stars to capitalize on the enormous volume of videos shot in the mid-’80s, Traci Lords worked in 105 movies in less than 20 months. Her presence made hits of Those Young Girls, Battle of the Stars, Sex Fifth Avenue, Aroused, Talk Dirty to Me, Part III, Educating Mandy, Bad Girls III, and my own Physical II. The Dark Brothers’ punk rock epic New Wave Hookers, with its flash-trash cover photo of Traci, became the number one renting adult video of all time. It stayed in the top ten for 52 weeks‌—‌until the scandal hit.

There were good reasons for her popularity: creamy skin, a perfect 36-23-36 figure, large hazel eyes, and waves of hair that were light chestnut or dark blonde, depending on the light or hairdresser’s tint. The nipples on her “balloon breasts”‌—‌as Jerry Butler called them in his autobiography Raw Talent‌—‌puffed up when she was aroused. “It’s like her tits have tits,” panted my attorney, who traded $300 in legal fees for copies of my two Lords titles Physical II and Dirty Pictures.

Traci’s trademark feature was The Pout, a full, lower-lipped challenge to all red-blooded American men (and to plastic surgeons whose clients wanted the look too).

Along with her beauty, Traci brought to the screen a genuine enthusiasm. This child of the Sexual Revolution took pride in her work, free of the martyred shame that haunted so many porn women in the past.

“They represent a new breed of performer in our industry,” said Harry Reems in an AVN interview after working with both Traci and her leading rival Ginger Lynn. “They walk in without all these inhibitions that we all grew up with and to them it’s a celebration of life that sex is supposed to be. I found that when I got into films, most performers wouldn’t even tell their parents what they were doing. Today, the parents are their agents and managers.”

x x x x x x

Curiosity about this sensational new star brought me to the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater early in 1985 to see their film The Grafenberg Spot. What I saw convinced me that my career in erotic movies wouldn’t be complete without shooting a Traci Lords picture.

A porno theater is the last place you’d expect to see male bonding. The men sit as far away from each other as possible, ashamed of their masturbatory intentions. They don’t dare draw attention to themselves with vocalizations‌—‌only a few heavy breaths now and then. But for one brief moment, Traci Lords created a bond among these lonely men.

The scene was on a cabin cruiser that rocked to a three-some of Traci, Rick Savage and Harry Reems. The first ripple of response from the audience came with the sheer delight Traci took in slapping Rick’s erection around between her breasts.

Then, while Reems and Savage performed double vaginal penetration, something that was as much a Traci trademark as The Pout rang through the theater: the hyperventilating Traci Lords Love Call.

This seesaw of whistling inhalations and exhalations was best‌—‌if unflatteringly‌—‌described by my audio engineer. “It’s the sound of a Missouri mule on fast forward,” he said. As proof, he slowed the tape. Everyone in the mix studio burst into laughter. The alternating squeals and brays could have come out of the stables of a Sam Peckinpah western.

To the theater audience it was a Mozart concerto. I had just seen the movie Amadeus and had the weird notion that‌—‌like Mozart’s rival Salieri‌—‌I was listening to “the Lord’s music.”

Traci claimed her on-screen orgasms were real. In AVN, she said, “If the guys have to go through the job of getting a hard-on, I feel that in a sense the girl should get a hard-on too… I try to have a come-shot just like the guy.”

Porn queens’ claims of real screen orgasms are mostly hype but Traci’s climax in The Grafenberg Spot made a believer out of me.

My seat was moving. I thought it was an earthquake. Then I realized that the fault-line ran from the knee to the crotch of the guy behind me. He wasn’t the only one masturbating. Though they tried to be quiet, the men were given away by the ancient seats, squawking like censorious old prudes.

When the scene ended, the audience lapsed into a silence deeper than usual. Then someone breathed, “Wow!” Followed by “Yeah!” “Woooh!” Someone called out, “Encore!” And the men actually laughed.

x x x x x x

“You’ve never seen anyone like her, Dave,” drawled porn’s super-agent Jim South. “She’ll know all her lines and everyone else’s too. She’ll hit her marks perfectly every time.” The lanky Kentuckian leaned back in his swivel chair, momentarily ignoring the flashing phone lines in front of him. As usual, South’s cramped suite of offices above Van Nuys Boulevard was a madhouse of harried producers, naked starlets and eager studs, all vying with the phone lines for his attention. South was in his element. “And when you’re done with the dialogue, she’ll fuck like a mink in heat.”

South went back to his phones and Rick Savage took over. “When she comes, you better have extra sound blankets,” he said into my face. (I was scrunched on a couch between Rick and the bare bottom of a lady who was seeking work despite her stretch marks.) “She’s such a screamer they’ll hear her six blocks away.”

“Sometimes it’s so intense she starts crying,” added Tony Martino, another of the studs South kept on hand in case a “field unit” malfunctioned.

In South’s kitchen, the only spot available for my casting session, Tom Byron tugged on his penis to lengthen it before I took a Polaroid of his skinny body. “If she’s still horny after a scene is finished,” he said, “she might grab a crew guy, slam him on his back and start in on him.”

“Shit!” South exclaimed. “I fucked up! I forgot I already had Traci booked on the 28th.”

I’d planned on starring Traci in two movies, shooting her footage on March 28th and 29th (1985). “How about April?” I asked. “Can I get two days in there?”

South shook his head. “She’s booked solid. And May is closing fast too.”

“May’s too late anyway. I need at least one of these titles in time for CES.”

“Dave, can you shoot everything you need on the 29th alone?”

“Well, maybe if it’s a long marathon day…”

“Wait a minute,” interjected a producer I called Ferrari Mike. (His prized 308GTB was always parked near World Modeling’s front door where nobody could miss it.) “I got Traci on the 30th and I’m shooting down here.”

“Shit, that’s right.” South ran his long fingers through his slicked-back hair. “Dave, could you possibly move your shoot to L.A.?”

“No way!” With pornographers shooting in Los Angeles again to save lodging and travel expenses, the LAPD was cracking down. I did all my shooting up north, where I felt safe.

While we puzzled over the schedule, Traci herself called from Hawaii where she was taking a needed vacation. She always wanted to meet in advance those she’d be working for. But by the time she returned to L.A., I’d be back home in Marin County. South handed me the phone; this was our meeting. I had to persuade her to fly 400 miles to have sex for a director she never heard of.

“Hi,” I began. “How’s your vacation?”

“Wonderful! All I’ve been doing is lying in the sun, and when I get back I’m gonna be so nice and tan and rested. I’m gonna look great! All my fans are gonna be so pleased…”

As Traci went on, I had the weird feeling that this star who was in such demand was actually trying to sell me on hiring her. She wasn’t. It was just her way of coming off as eager to please.

I wondered how eager she’d be when she saw the schedule we concocted. It was‌—‌as Tony Martino observed‌—‌“tighter than a gnat’s asshole.” After working a full day on March 28th, Traci would fly up to San Francisco, work a full day on my set on the 29th, then fly back down to L.A. to work a third straight full day for Ferrari Mike on the 30th. A “full day” in the sex film business was 12 hours; most days ran longer.

“It’s a good thing Traci likes to screw,” said South.

x x x x x x

Tom Byron pursued Traci’s naked rear over a snake orgy of black power cables. “Traci, for the last time, will you marry me?”

She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Not again…”

Byron’s unabashed pining for his ex-girlfriend was an industry chuckle. But he was also one of her favorites to work with. So I hired him. With my impossible schedule, I couldn’t risk unpredictable cast chemistry.

I was sticking with my original plan to shoot the main footage of two features, even though I now had only one day to shoot in. And Traci absolutely, positively had to leave for San Francisco Airport by 10 PM.

Traci had only the script for Physical II. I hadn’t told her about Dirty Pictures; I was afraid the total amount of sex indicated on paper would scare her off or have her demanding much more than her $1,200 day rate. “I put a lot of energy into a sex scene,” Traci said in her AVN interview. “So I don’t like to do two in a day. I don’t want to be called a dead fuck.”

I wanted Traci to do two elaborate sex scenes. Only Tom Byron knew how the couplings and switchings would be chopped up to look like six full scenes in the two movies but he wasn’t telling‌—‌three of the sexual permutations put him together with Traci.

Pleased that I’d teamed her with her two favorite men‌—‌Byron and Marc Wallice (sic)‌—‌Traci agreed to the “two” scenes. She also liked working with the second woman, Cara Lott.

I prayed that the video gods would take mercy on my cramped schedule and hold back those dreaded Murphy’s Laws. But of course they didn’t.

x x x x x x

Marc Wallice sabotaged his own brain. While Traci posed for box cover stills (shot first, while make-up is fresh), the vacuous blond actor‌—‌kind of a Dan Quayle of porn studs‌—‌snuck off to an unused room in the spacious Mill Valley house to smoke pot. By the time we were ready to roll tape, Wallice was in no shape to remember his name, much less his lines.

Sitting in front of a blue backdrop‌—‌a “bluescreen” that could be electronically replaced with bodies in action, Lords and Wallice played emcees at an event called The Erotic Olympics. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Wallice began, “and welcome to the second annual… ah… ah…”

I’d wanted to start the sex after lunch. Instead, we stayed mired in dialogue.

“Our next event is… is…”

“‘Masturbation,’ Marc.”

And so on.

Juggling the usual barrage of details, I couldn’t give Wallice the attention he needed. Thank God for Traci’s diligence.

Though she’d picked up her script from South’s gofer at the airport and read it for the first time on the plane, she knew her lines perfectly. And Wallice’s too.

She coached and coddled him through the dialogue with a patience she didn’t extend to herself. When she finally muffed a line‌—‌“‘All our finalists will now be competing for’…” Traci snatched up her script, glowered at it and slammed it down. “‘For the grand prize of fifty thousand dollars.’ See how easy that was?”

She had the ability to snap into character on “Action.” When her bitch-queen role required her to rebuff Wallice’s pass at her, Traci did it so viciously that after the take, Wallice was still looking confused. She patted his arm. “What a bitch, huh?”

She always strove to be perfect. Told that the next scene involved cunnilingus, she dashed into the bathroom. Ten minutes passed. I glanced at my watch; we were running three hours late. “What’s she doing in there? Fixing the plumbing?”

Byron laughed. “Yeah. Hers. When she comes out, she’ll be clean enough to eat off of.”

“And I have often done so,” Wallice announced, missing Byron’s sour glance.

x x x x x x

Was it my deceiving Traci that displeased the video gods?

Was that why Murphy did his worst?

Wallice couldn’t follow directions for a “sim” (softcore) cunnilingus shot. Traci tried to help. “You’ve got to hide my pussy with your head.” She grabbed his hair and pulled his face into her crotch. “Oww!” Wallice sprang back, grabbing his nose. Blood seeped between his fingers.

“Shit.” My watch read 6:36.

Then came the problem of Traci’s dress, a red mini covered with sequins that went everywhere. As director, responsible for visual details, I assigned myself the task of picking them out of her pubes, enduring taunts of “Tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.” Lying on the bed with her legs spread wide, Traci went into her press-release bio: She was 22 years old. She was from Las Vegas. Her stepfather had introduced her to the business.

The spiel seemed rehearsed but that didn’t strike me as odd. Everything about this young woman was prepared and polished. Except for her work schedule.

“This business really burns you out,” Traci said. “You don’t have any kind of life for yourself. All I’ve been doing is movie after movie after movie. I find myself going, like, ‘Oh God, do I have to fuck again?’ And I really like sex.” She added that in the past year she’d caught VD three times.

But then there was the bottom line. “I’ve been clearing over twenty thousand a month. This year I’ll make over 250 grand!” Traci wanted to know if I personally made that much. I said I didn’t. She seemed satisfied.

7:18 PM. Less than three hours to shoot all that sex. No dinner break tonight. Just cold cuts between takes.

x x x x x x

Whap! Whap! Whap!

Traci had slammed Marc Wallice on his back and was slapping his face. “Come on, bigmouth!” she taunted. “Come on, bigmouth!”

I’d protested that even mild S and M was now legally risky but Traci said Wallice needed this to get turned on. I hoped she’d miss those weakened nasal membranes.

Wallice’s erection showed why he was the ladies’ choice for anal sex; it was slim and curved. South’s rival, Reb Sawitz of the Pretty Girl International modeling agency, made sure women working with Wallice knew they were choosing comfort over safety. Reb would reach his beefy arm into a closet, pull out a magazine and slap it down on his desk. It was paper-clipped open to a full-page photo of Wallice taking an erection up his rear.

“I’m no butt-boy,” Wallice always protested. “I only did it that one time. I was twenty years old. I was broke and desperate.”

“What about the other ones Reb keeps in his closet?” I joked.

Wallice’s eyes went wide. He began to sputter.

(In 1998, actresses Tricia Devereaux and Brooke Ashley became HIV-positive after working with Wallice. [See Chapter 20])

Traci had been dreading getting naked. “I fucked up,” she said. “I fell asleep on the beach.” Her midriff was crimson. She seemed about to cry.

“Not to worry,” said Kerri, the make-up artist, who quickly turned the red into a nice, deep tan.

8:07. With four of porn’s best in action, the gods finally smiled. Traci slapped, Wallice rose (though his cheeks looked like they’d vacationed with her), and the two emcees played musical fornicators with the winners of the Erotic Olympics, Tom Byron and Cara Lott.

(Cara got her stage name from a producer who observed that she really does “care a lot.” The slim, blonde pixie, still looking teenaged after ten years in the sex trade, was a woman of many hustles. Impressed by the intensity she put into the action, I joked, “We got so turned on watching you that now the whole crew wants some.”

“You know,” Cara said hopefully, “I give group rates.”)

x x x x x x

8:42. The crew rolled up the blue backdrop to reveal the living room set behind it. No slowdown. No lost hard-ons. A whole new scene for a different movie. But just when I thought we were going to breeze to the finish, that damned sunburn beneath the cosmetic tan began to peel. Traci was mortified. She pulled off flaps of skin as soon as they came loose.

“Traci, don’t!” Kerri exclaimed. “I can’t match the skin underneath.” But Traci continued picking at it, and Kerri’s frantic cover-ups looked like skin grafts by med school dropouts.

Joe Farmer had a suggestion. “Instead of this blotchy look, why don’t we let it look like what it really is: peeling sunburn?”

Kerri washed off the make-up. The only one unhappy with the result was Traci. “I look like shit! And I never look bad in my movies.”

She wanted to do her remaining sex lying on her stomach. I wanted “reverse cowgirl” (straddling the man, facing away from him) and “spoon” (lying on her side, her back to the man). These are the best positions for showing off a gorgeous body.

“But I look best on my stomach. This snakeskin is gross!”

“It’s fine. C’mon, let’s do it.”

“IT LOOKS UGLY!”

“C’mon, Traci. We’re wasting time. Let’s do it.”

Traci glared at me. I had a sudden fear she was about to explode.

“C’mon, Traci… please?” A time-honored porn directing technique was begging. I didn’t want a power struggle at 9:05 PM. Traci must’ve been thinking the same thing. “OK,” she said stiffly. “It’s your movie.”

This scene was to be an erotic climax. It required energy and rapport between Tom and Traci surpassing that of previous scenes. But now, I was afraid her performance would be stilted and mechanical.

Tom Byron to the rescue. He’d been like a schoolboy waiting for a last dance with the prom queen. And he did what a porn stud is never expected to do. He didn’t just fuck Traci; he made love to her. He knew exactly how she liked to be kissed, nuzzled, touched and tongued. He knew how to angle his entry, to time his thrusts to hers, to keep brushing his fingers on her clitoris though his shoulder looked like it would pop out of its socket. He didn’t shut his eyes to enter his own fantasyland; his concentration was always on her.

Traci became oblivious to her “snakeskin.” The Love Call built up, then caught inside her, coming out in bits and bursts. Byron grabbed Traci’s hips and gave a final series of fast strokes. Traci screamed her climax, then settled back into his arms. Byron pressed his face into her neck. I let the shot hold long.

Finally, Byron opened his eyes, blinked, and asked, “Do we have anything else?”

“Yes. Your come-shot.”

“Oh, yeah!” An unlikely oversight for a veteran stud.

After Byron did his professional duty, the couple embraced, their hair and arms hiding their features. I let them have their private moment, shutting out the lights and cameras.

“OK… great… Cut.”

Traci immediately sprang up. In a moment, she was on the phone to a cab dispatcher. “I need to be out of here in fifteen minutes! My plane leaves at 10:30!”

Actually, it left at 11. I thought she was just rushing the cabbie but her next call got her an earlier flight. All that worry about time, and she’d leave a half hour early.

Traci snatched up her $1,200 cash, scribbled “Kristie E. Nussman” on the model release, and pulled on some jeans, all in one continuous motion.

The cabbie honked and the most competent, mature and sophisticated 22-year-old I’d ever met hurried off into the night.

If someone had told me she was only 16, I’d have answered, “You better stay out of Marc Wallice’s stash.”

x x x x x x

“They’re saying, ‘Aw shit, not another Traci Lords title,’” said my sales manager Allyssa. Dirty Pictures was proving a flop. All those movies that had elevated Traci’s net worth were now clogging the market. Traci herself was disgusted with the results.

“I’m seeing myself in all these crappy little videos,” she was saying to another starlet as the two of them teetered on stiletto heels through the crowded aisles of the June ’85 CES Show. Returning to my booth, I found myself behind them, listening in. As we reached my Superior Video display, the Love Call sounded from my big speakers. Traci glanced at her image on my Trinitrons, groaned and covered her eyes. “See what I mean?” I was tempted to rush up behind the pair and cackle, “Now I’ve got you forever, my pretty.”

That summer, Traci tried to break into legitimate films but couldn’t get past the “blue curtain” that keeps porn stars out of Hollywood.

She next tried to follow the example pioneered by Ginger Lynn: the “exclusive.” Ginger had joined Vivid Video as a partner in producing her own movies. Instead of dashing from one production to another, working for a day rate of $1,000 to $1,500, Ginger would make one movie a month and take a percentage of the profits. Each monthly release would have no other new Ginger Lynn pictures to compete with. The deal worked. At a time when manufacturers were struggling to sell 2,000 pieces of a new movie, Ginger on the Rocks, Poonies, and The Ginger Effect averaged over 6,000 each. Ginger was doing so well that she turned down Ferrari Mike’s offer of $5,000 a day to break her exclusive contract and appear in his movie.

Early in 1986, Traci announced the formation of TLC (Traci Lords Company) Productions. She said she’d finally have control over her career. “When someone hears the name Traci Lords,” she said in AVN, “I want them to think that this is going to be a good film. It has to be a good film.”

Then her first release, Traci Takes Tokyo, appeared. It was so shoddy that voices directing the cast were left on the soundtrack. Reviewers were disappointed… and puzzled. What happened?

A month before the picture was released, I got an inkling that Traci was in trouble, when one of her new business partners gave me a call.

x x x x x x

“Sweetheart…” The purr of Honi Webber filled the phone. “It’s been a long time…”

“Too long,” I said, wondering if whatever she was calling about meant I’d lose money or make some. When she’d convinced me that the Four Star Video check was actually in the mail, I’d wound up stiffed for $4,000. But I made a lot more than that when she’d hired Superior to shoot Sizzle With Samantha. Honi was slick; it was wise to regard her proposed deals with wariness‌—‌and wise to listen to them.

She wanted to make a product trade: 100 pieces of my new hit Physical II in exchange for 100 of Honi’s new exclusive release Traci Takes Tokyo.

During Honi’s sales hype about this first product of her exclusive distribution deal with Traci’s new production company, I began to feel something was wrong. “It’s got the hottest scene ever shot,” Honi said. “It’s super high tech. The process is still experimental.”

The scene she described had been shot with a snorkel camera, used as early as the mid-’70s to give a penis’s point-of-view of entering an orifice. Now, with lighting by fiber optics, that cyclops eye could peer even further. “You can actually see the come spurting down her throat!” Honi enthused. “It’s erotic as all hell!”

Globs of gloop dripping down membranes didn’t strike me as sexy but I understood Honi’s perspective. She thought like a pornographer. She’d once concocted a title called Love Under 16”, pitching it to stores as a hot renter‌—‌fans would think it portrayed underaged girls. It didn’t. Actually, the title was Love Under 16 Inches but the “Inches” (”) was so small as to escape notice. Always seeking gimmicks, hustlers like Honi take the bizarre for the erotic.

I pictured Traci, mouth agape, deep-throating a cock, a lens, and a light tube trying not to choke while videographers hovered over her like deranged dentists. “How did Traci take to this scene?” I asked.

“No problem there,” Honi said. “We got Traci under control. We got her locked up for seven years. We own Traci Lords. We are Traci Lords.” “We” meant Honi and industry veteran Sy Adler. “We’re teaching Traci things she never dreamed of. We give her two weeks of training for every production. We’re gonna make Marilyn Chambers look like Julie Andrews.” Honi hastened to add, “Of course, we’re not gonna do anything illegal.”

There was no law specifically forbidding the scene in Traci Takes Tokyo of a Japanese woman getting a real octopus tentacle shoved into her vagina. But it didn’t seem what Traci had in mind for her own productions. It became no secret that she was unhappy with her new partners. Many predicted a clash but none could foresee the result.

One man, however, had his suspicions about Traci.

x x x x x x

“Daveet, I don’t know about Traci Lords,” said Jerome Tanner. “I think she is very young.”

“Why do you think that?” I was negotiating to sell Jerry my business, and I suspected this was a ploy to beat down my price.

“Ever seen her without make-up, Daveet? She looks about thirteen.”

“Lots of ladies look young.”

Tanner leaned back under the spotlight that gave his small form dramatic presence against the dark wood panelling behind him. “Almost fifteen years I have been in this business. I have seen lots of women’s bodies. I know baby fat when I see it. And those tits. They have grown in the past year. You know why they defy gravity like that? Because gravity has not had long to work on them. I tell you, Daveet, even if Traci Lords was still available (she’d already signed her exclusive), I would not use her ever again.”

Two months later, neither would anyone else. On July 17, 1986, Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that Lords had been under eighteen during her entire two-year hardcore movie career. Adult Film and Video Association attorney John Weston didn’t wait for proof. He called for the immediate removal from circulation of all Lords material. To keep the newly contraband tapes out of the hands of prosecutors, all manufacturers took them back for refunds or exchanges, though some of the movies had been on the rental market for over a year.

The biggest Lords loser I knew was a loops director trying to prove he could handle features. He’d put his life savings into a handsome 35-millimeter production. Lords was in every scene; he lost everything.

I came out unscathed. By the time three of Superior’s titles became illegal, I’d already sold them to Jerome Tanner. All I lost was $1,276.50‌—‌Honi Webber never made good on her last check after her own company, HBO (Honi’s Big One-stop), and Sy Adler’s VIP (Video International Productions) were raided and forced into bankruptcy.

The anger came next. One producer was supposed to have hired goons to “hang her by the tits.” Traci disappeared into the minors protection programs of the LAPD, leaving the story behind the age disclosure to the conflicting accounts reported in AVN:

“An industry source said the entire situation stemmed from a money dispute between V.I.P., T.L.C., Lords and Stuart Dell, Lords’ reported boyfriend/manager. Lords and Dell were given $25,000, a new Mercedes and $1,000 a week salaries, the source said, and were sent to Paris to make a picture. But when Lords and Dell returned, the source said, they had no movie nor any of the $25,000. It was soon after an ensuing dispute that questions about Lords’ age were raised, the source said…

“Other reported causes for the raid centered on Lords’ mother, who some said turned her daughter in after hearing about the Meese Commission’s report earlier in the month.

“Other sources said her mother had been handling her affairs and went to the police following a dispute with Lords over money. (Unlikely: a stupid move for someone pimping a minor in porn.)

“However, a close associate of Lords, who wished to remain anonymous, said her mother, whose name was not available, was not involved in any way. They said Lords had been a runaway from Ohio, and that her parents had been notified of her whereabouts and were on their way to California.”

They wouldn’t have far to drive according to the Los Angeles Times: Lords was a high school student in Redondo Beach when she began posing nude in 1984; she moved there with her family from Steubenville, Ohio in 1982.

An unauthorized biography in the form of a comic book from Personality Comics, Inc., of Massapequa, New York, had Traci coming west with her mother who’d just divorced Traci’s alcoholic father. Traci subsequently ran away from her mother’s home in Redondo Beach, California.

All reports concurred that Traci was not Kristie Nussman, born on November 17, 1962, but Nora Kuzma, born May 7, 1968. She allegedly purchased a birth certificate and used it to get the driver’s license and passport that talent agent South showed copies of to the L.A. District Attorney’s office.

(Traci said she chose her stage name because of her childhood crush on Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. [Traci Lord was the name of Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story.])

Skeptics‌—‌South included‌—‌didn’t believe Lords was really underaged. They saw the whole affair as a scam to eliminate that glut of existing Lords tapes from competing with her new releases. If that were true, the scheme backfired; Traci too got blown out of the business.

Was the whole thing an act of desperation? There were rumors that Traci and her lover/co-producer Stuart Dell had fabricated the story that they’d blown all the production money on cocaine while in Paris and hadn’t shot a movie there. Wanting to break away from Lord’s partners, the couple was hiding the video, hoping to market it themselves. And the partners, smelling a scam, didn’t buy the coke story; they told the couple to turn over the videotapes‌—‌or else. According to that scenario, Traci and her mother went public with her age to put the partners under too much scrutiny to carry out their threats. If that scenario were true, the strategy worked.

There was another heavyweight in the ring. The IRS wanted its share of the money Lords had made. Was the age announcement meant to save Traci from being prosecuted as an adult for tax evasion?

Whatever the reasons for it, Traci‌—‌or her adult “coaches”‌—‌used the scandal skilfully. Porn star/AVN columnist Ron Jeremy wrote, “Isn’t it nice that such a sweet kid can make so many career moves, make so much money, beat her IRS rap, her fake passport felony rap, and at the same time bury an entire industry! Only in Hollywood!”

To Jeremy and others with ambitions in the non-porn film world, the most grating result of the Lords affair was how it opened Hollywood to her. No longer was Traci a scarlet woman too steeped in shame for the wholesome sponsors of American television and silver screen. Now she was an innocent, a child-victim. As usual, Traci played her role well. “At that age, you don’t really understand what you’re doing,” she said. “You don’t really understand the consequences.” She claimed that producers kept her stoned on drugs and her agent got most of the money she made.

Hollywood bought her act. Aaron Spelling was reported to have paid $100,000 for the rights to her life story. Traci appeared in the TV series’ Wiseguy, MacGyver, and Married with Children. She starred in the sci-fi/horror film Not of This World. She got roles in the feature films Fast Food, Shock ’Em Dead, A Time To Die, Raw Nerve, The Object of Desire, Laser Moon and the John Waters comedies Nutty Nut and Cry Baby‌—‌ which AVN editor Gene Ross called “a poetically apt title.”

To the industry that made her show biz success possible, Traci showed no gratitude. Instead she made the most damaging claim of all: that those she had worked for knew she was a minor. “She tells us that she was told to just get some kind of I.D.,” D.A. Reiner said. “And that was done with more a wink and a nod than any serious effort to determine what her real age was.” Was this allegation true?

With the strict penalties‌—‌forfeiture of assets, long prison terms and six figure fines‌—‌for using underaged models, pornographers run like hell from those whose age is questionable. In the wake of the Lords mess, young-looking starlets Nikki Charm, Ali Moore and Kristara Barrington were ostracized upon the first hints of rumors that they too were underaged. The positive long-term effect of the Lords crisis was the increased awareness within the industry that porn video’s lure of quick riches attracted sexually precocious kids. As minors immune to prosecution, they had nothing to lose if discovered.

Pornographers could lose everything. Contending that knowledge of Traci’s age was irrelevant, Federal attorneys initiated felony prosecutions. The adult movie industry braced for battle.

x x x x x x

By the early 1980s, a bond of good faith had formed between L.A. legal authorities and sex moviemakers who’d agreed to refrain from depicting rape, scatology, hardcore S and M, bestiality, use of minors and the depiction of minors by adult performers.

Consequently, when the Lords bombshell exploded, L.A. authorities gave the adult industry a chance to escape prosecution by immediately removing all Lords products from commercial circulation. To the amazement of police and prosecutors, the gargantuan task was completed almost overnight.

Government prosecutors went ahead with their test cases, under the Federal child pornography statutes. Agent South and producers Ronald Kantor and Rupert McNee won acquittals but the Government got a conviction against Ruby Gottesman of Xcitement Video. Then Gottesman’s conviction was overturned and the statute that allowed conviction without proof that the defendant knew the performer was underaged was ruled unconstitutional. The Government appealed. In the 1990 United States v. Thomas case, the Ninth Circuit Court had ruled that even if a defendant thought that the performer in question was of legal age, the Government could obtain a conviction.

Finally, on November 29, 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Federal child porn law, while ruling that prosecutors must prove defendants had prior knowledge that a performer in question was underaged. The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief‌—‌but Rubin Gottesman didn’t; his conviction was upheld. The prosecution had presented evidence that Gottesman had sold hardcore Lords tapes to an undercover L.A. vice cop in 1987, by which time Lords’ former underaged status had become common industry knowledge.

There have been at least two more underaged actresses since the Traci Lords affair. I videotaped one of them. Flushed with the afterglow of her sizzling debut in a Blacks and Blondes loop, a cute newcomer named Gigi (porn name Penny Nichols) gushed that she could now afford a $1,500 pearlescent paint job with burgundy pinstripes for the ’69 Chevelle she’d just bought. Then she let it slip that her big concern now was passing her driver’s test.

Gigi’s mother complained to police that the girl was only 16 years old. On March 9, 1987, charges were filed against Jerome Tanner and agent Reb Sawitz. The veteran agent produced copies of a birth certificate and temporary driver’s license which showed Gigi’s age as 19, exonerating Sawitz and Tanner under California law.

An underaged model scandal almost on the scale of the Traci Lords affair erupted in 1991, when Diane Stewart, a Canadian girl with the porn name Alexandria Quinn, appeared in over 70 videos before her 18th birthday. Once again, tapes and magazines were frantically yanked from the market. Once again, real-appearing fake IDs precluded California prosecutions. And once again, the industry had proven vulnerable to the deceit of a beautiful teenager.

x x x x x x

The Traci Lords scandal and the Government’s “War on Porn” did for sex movies what controversy always does. Adult tape sales soared from a wholesale value of $350 million in 1985 to almost $450 million in ’86. (With the uproar dying down in ’87, sales fell to $390 million.) It must have rankled the members of the Meese Commission to read Jerome Tanner’s taunting, “We need another report like that one.”

The industry needed another Traci Lords too‌—‌a legal one. With the entrenched copycat ethic, it was only natural to find a clone.

“She’s a dead ringer for Traci Lords,” said Jack Michaelson of Cinderella Distributing. “Barbii has the fabled Traci pout down to perfection. Everybody’s crazy about her look.”

Barbii even spoke like Traci: “I’m a perfectionist and I don’t feel comfortable looking at myself.” In less than two months, out came Introducing Barbii, Lusty Desires, Backdoor to Hollywood, Barbii’s Way, and Spend the Holidays with Barbii. Penthouse lined her up for four different spreads.

Barbii’s wasn’t the only nouveau pout. In 1987 it seemed like half the new adult video box covers fixed the customer with a petulant stare and the best bottom lip the cover model could manage. One actress‌—‌whose career was brief‌—‌even called herself “Staci Lords.”

The industry’s love-hate affair with Traci continued. Surfacing a half-year after the scandal erupted was the only hardcore Traci Lords movie made after she’d turned eighteen. It was that phantom Paris production Lords and Dell had denied shooting. Released by Caballero Distributing, the sardonically titled Traci I Love You provoked calls for a boycott but instead became the best-selling and renting adult tape of 1987. “When a statuesque French blonde named Monique uses her mouth to shove a black dildo into Traci,” wrote reviewer Thomas McMahon, “it seems like old times.”

That old warhorse Honi Webber galloped back into battle with her High Times Video release Traci’s Big Trick which “tells the whole truth for the first time… from high school to Penthouse to her agent’s office.” Lords, played by Jacqueline Lorians, is shown having sex with “Guy Sadler” (Sy Adler) and with Honi Webber‌—‌played by slim Sharon Mitchell in a bit of casting against type.

In Traci Who? “it’s 1991 and President Meese wants to outlaw pornography,” went Peter Keating’s December ’86 AVN review. “Traci Who? may be the only title on the adult market to exist simply so that someone could get a dig in on that wretched turncoat Traci Lords.”

The rancor lasted for years. When Lords promoted her exercise tape at the 1988 VSDA Show, AVN quoted an “industry director” as saying, “I’m surprised she wasn’t met with a chorus of Uzis.”

When I last saw Tom Byron, he was at a 1989 trade show looking for work behind the cameras, not in front of them.

“What’s Traci up to these days?” I asked him.

Byron shrugged. “Who the hell cares?”

x x x x x x

Chapter 13

OVERNIGHT SEXATIONS
Mid to late 1980s

The cocaine being snorted by the starlets gathered in the restroom at the 1986 Winter CES Show didn’t bother Alana, Superior’s receptionist/Jill-of-all-trades. After all, drugs had been just another of the pleasures savored by the adventurous Englishwoman during her years as a world traveler and bon vivant. What offended her was that the ladies were discussing the most efficient way to divide up the space in their hotel suites, so they could turn the maximum number of tricks that evening with customers they met during the show.

“Most of the girls here were in on it,” Alana exclaimed when she returned to the Superior Video booth. “I thought they were supposed to be actresses, not tawdry little whores!”

Most actresses in the film age of the 1970s hadn’t behaved like street hookers. But by the era of electronic erotica, AVN’s editors began to take delight in publishing each year’s CES “Vegas Bad Girl Award.” In 1991, Trixie Tyler beat past winners Samantha Strong, Lynn LeMay, and Angela Summers by going through “anywhere between 20 to 200 guys in room 2054 at the Tropicana.” When I showed surprise that the eternal pixie Cara Lott had agreed to sign one-sheets in one of the booths for only $350 a day, she replied, “But look at the money I made after the show!”

The age of video porn gave pretty young women an unprecedented opportunity to make lots of money fast. This new breed of porn queens bloomed into womanhood during Reaganomics, when, according to the Congressional Budget Office and IRS records, the average income of the richest one percent of Americans rose from $280,000 in 1980 to $550,000 in 1989, while the annual earnings of working families dropped by $2,000. These new stars weren’t going to wait for wealth to “trickle down.”

Theirs was a world of fierce competition: of “sex coaches” and “porno stage mothers”; compulsive plastic surgery and multiple breast enlargements; a world where 19-year-olds became cottage industry corporations. In AVN’s Tenth Anniversary Supplement (1993), Holliday wrote, “The former free-spirited hippies and love children of the seventies have been replaced by career-oriented performers.”

Stardom now came much more quickly. In 1981, before the video revolution took off, Veronica Hart, “the Audrey Hepburn of porn,” lamented in a Playboy interview, “I think I’ll have worked a year before any of my movies are out‌—‌there’s such a backlog of films that you sometimes have to wait eight months for a theater date. Then I’ll work another year before any one really knows me.”

In contrast, videos arrived in stores the same month they were shot and new women could rocket to stardom in weeks. Or sooner: CDI’s Traci Lords clone Barbii and Vidway’s Heather Hunter, promoted at trade shows, became mini-celebrities before they appeared in a single feature!

The enormous volume of video productions meant an attractive newcomer could work non-stop for months on end. In 1981, Veronica Hart worked in only eleven features during a nine-month period; a decade later, lovely English blonde Taylor Wane starred in over 80 videos in the same length of time.

A performer’s videos built her a nationwide base of fans who’d pay to see her on the dance (strip-show) circuit. As a featured act, she could make five to ten thousand for a week’s engagement. Established top-draw Amber Lynn could command up to $24,000 for a week of naked prancing. From $200 a week serving hamburgers, teenagers soared to $200,000 a year serving their bodies. But some who reached these heights fell to crash landings, as did Megan Leigh.

x x x x x x

“I have a weakness for petite blondes,” the tall, soft-eyed Megan Leigh said to Ariel Knight, who was one. As Knight disrobed, Leigh approached her from behind. “Ooh, a wire bra. I love it!” Leigh reached around and cradled Knight’s large breasts. Their girl-girl scene on this Spinelli shoot would be a hot one.

Joking with crew and co-stars, Leigh seemed happy and at ease. When she died of a gunshot wound police said was self-inflicted, it came as a shock to those who knew her. Leigh’s northern California agent, Joe Elliot, told me she had bought her mother a $500,000 home and a Mercedes. According to Elliot, Leigh had wanted to marry her boyfriend and leave the business but her mother’s opulent lifestyle required her to continue. Elliot speculated that in one of their heated arguments, the mother had shot her daughter dead, then arranged the scene, complete with a seven-page note, to look like a suicide. (As of this writing, police consider Leigh’s death to be a suicide.)

Whatever really happened, the relationship between the tragic starlet and her mother was an extreme example of Harry Reems’ statement that parents of video-age stars managed their careers. Other mother-daughter porn partnerships were less stormy: In Bringing Up Brat, Northridge, California “Valley girl” Jamie Summer’s screen mom was also her real one, delivering parental advice on the techniques of oral sex. Sabrina Dawn’s mother (stage name Delilah Dawn) assisted her daughter on dance tours and did four sex scenes in Grandma Does Dallas. And the casting of Tami Lee Curtis and her own mother was a big selling point for Limelight’s The Naked Truth About Tami. Veteran adult actress and stage performer Lee Carroll reunited after fifteen years with her long-lost daughter who was dancing at the same club in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Mothers seem far more accepting of daughters’ porn career than fathers. Both Tiffany Million and Blondi said their mothers supported the careers they hid from their fathers. Million said, “My dad will find out when the Hard Copy piece on me airs.” Christy Canyon also said her mother accepted her career but her father would “flip out.” Few dads are like photographer Ron Vogel, who rented out his sound stage for sex movies and shot his daughter Alexis’ nude spread in the February, 1979 Playboy. Most are like Barbara Dare’s: she told me he was mad enough to kill her while her mother only offered advice on financial planning. In a scene right out of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore in which George C. Scott wreaks revenge on pornographers who filmed his daughter, a drunken Italian Catholic with mob ties threatened to have Jim South killed after the agent cast his runaway daughter in porn. South’s client Tony Romano had to use connections “back east” to get the pissed-off poppa to back down.

“Family Values.” That Republican rally cry did a lot more for the ratings of the fictional TV anchorwoman Murphy Brown, chastised by Dan Quayle for having a baby out of wedlock, than for George Bush’s re-election campaign. The America of Ozzie and Harriet was history. Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, quoted in the New York Times, said that those between the ages of 15 and 25 in 1990 were “the first generation to feel the full impact of the great rise in divorce”‌—‌the fate of over 50% of marriages during the 1970s and 80s.

Cherokee-Irish beauty Hyapatia Lee was raped by her stepfather at age 12. Christy Canyon and Careena Collins were runaways. Young women flocked to the west coast to live in the sun, party, chase rock idols and become porn stars. They were the children of the ’70s when a publisher as respected as William Morrow produced David Hamilton’s The Young Girl and Angelo Cozzi’s Innocence in the Mirror with little girls in saucy nude poses. A 1988 federal survey concluded that 51.5% of young women aged 15-19 had premarital sex‌—‌up from 28.6% in 1970. In AVN interviews, Ginger Lynn said she had sex “ten times a day” at age 13 with a boyfriend three years older, and Melanie Moore said that as a Catholic schoolgirl she used anal sex as a way to preserve her virginity for marriage. And a sweet-faced blonde from rural North Carolina told me in South’s offices that she was 13 when her mother recommended anal intercourse as “hillbilly birth control.”

A generation of kids suffering a 27% higher poverty rate in 1988 that those in 1970, saw the money to be made in the erotic entertainment industry and said, “Why not?”

x x x x x x

Patti Plenty said her breasts grew huge after she’d discovered a secret potion in Malaysia. Kascha said her newly-enlarged bosom was the result of an auto accident in which her breasts bashed against the dashboard. But Lynn LeMay was honest. I was on a shoot, fetching a Dr. Pepper in the kitchen, when the hearty blonde rushed in, grabbed my hands and shoved them into her breasts. “Don’t they feel natural?” she enthused. She bubbled on about the slits in her armpits where the silicone gels were slipped in being almost invisible. “Not bad for only $5,000, huh?” Conducting my own assessment, I agreed that the added material was delectably soft.

LeMay liked her first implants so much she had her breasts enlarged two more times, including a whopping 800cc insertion‌—‌about twice the average volume. Even at her largest, however, Lemay couldn’t match the frontal tonnage of Gina Gianetti, who revived her flagging porn career by becoming Beverlee Hills, with a 60-inch chest, or Wendy Whoppers whose basketball-sized bumpers gave her a claimed 81 inches.

Why would women ignore the mounting evidence of immune system damage from silicone leakage to become freaks in need of wheelbarrows for bra cups? The answer is the money they can demand for dancing before red-blooded American males with breast-fetishes as fevered as their hormones. Jeanna Fine nicknamed her bolstered boobs “Cash” and “Flow.”

The implant craze was indicative of the fierce competition in erotic entertainment. Women who’d never have considered a porn career in ages past clamored to get on the fast track. There were former cheerleaders such as Alicia Rio, Ashlyn Gere and Dominique Simone; Playboy and Penthouse models Gere, Teri Weigel, Nina Alexander and Kascha.

Among the college graduates was at least one magna cum laude, Nina Hartley.

Ladies sought to hone themselves to perfection, becoming what director Greg Dark called “plastic surgery junkies.” Though already established as stars, Shanna McCullough and Bianca Trump got nose jobs and Victoria Paris had her eyes and teeth reworked and her breasts lifted.

In the frenzy of competition, actresses expanded their sexual repertoires. Ashlyn Gere and Raven tried anal sex, popular among viewers in the age of AIDS, and gave up on it; Stacy Nichols persevered, following her first-ever anal scene with a double penetration (she recalled driving home later as uncomfortable).

Quotes in AVN hinted at ordeals the performers didn’t dare admit to, fearing complaints would label them “difficult”: admitting that sex with some of porn’s over-endowed men felt like “they’re going to puncture a lung,” Jennifer Stewart added, “But I love big guys. I feel like I can’t breathe but I sure like it.”

Like mainstream stars, they hired publicists, went on autograph junkets, booked talk shows, and invented “exposés” for TV tabloids Hard Copy and A Current Affair. They formed fan clubs, set up 900-numbers and appeared on baseball-type player cards. Via mail order, they sold autographed photos, tapes, newsletters and the ever-popular “unwashed” panties. (A lady who requested anonymity told me that she kept up with the demand for her used undies by recruiting girlfriends to “break in” new pairs.) Teri Diver made a deal with Doc Johnson Enterprises for a plaster cast of her body, to be used as a template for foam-rubber sex dolls.

These ladies could turn a trip to a car wash into a news item; if a photographer were present, they’d strip and frolic in the suds. During the “Desert Storm” military offensive in Iraq, Brandy Alexandre mooned anti-war protesters at the Los Angeles Federal Building. At the ’91 VSDA Show, the “dudes” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costumes got in trouble for spreading Nina Hartley’s legs while shutters clicked.

Flashing her thousand-kilowatt grin, adult video’s ill-fated (suicide) post-Seka blonde bombshell Savannah revealed her romps with rock stars (Axl Rose rated a “1” and that favorite date of many porn starlets, Billy Idol, rated a “10”). A couple of years later she rekindled her former rock-groupie notoriety by having sex with another member of Guns ’N’ Roses, Slash, amongst the patrons of a Greenwich Village bar.

With all the hype and hoopla surrounding these stars, fans might be surprised to learn that most of their careers began, not in sleek penthouse suites, but in a rundown apartment-turned-office above Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, California.

x x x x x x

Jim South, the super-agent of the sex stars, was explaining to me the science of responding to calls from women answering his newspaper ads. “You don’t mention ‘X-rated,’ or ‘sex’ or even ‘erotica.’ When they ask about the work, you say, ‘About 80 percent of our business is in artistic figure modeling, nude modeling.’ You have to pause. You can’t just say ‘artistic figure nude modeling,’ because they might not hear the word ‘nude’ and it’ll come as a surprise to them later. If she’s still on the line, you say, ‘May I ask your age?’ You don’t ask, ‘How old are you?’ because a girl who is 24 or 25 might not want to tell you, or she might take offense.

“I always tell them that World Modeling is in an office building. I describe the building, and the large sign out front. Otherwise, she might think you’re some sleazeball operating out of a motel room.”

Those last words were pointed at South’s longtime rival Reb Sawitz, whose Pretty Girl International was in two dingy rooms of a defunct motel converted to storage rooms and cheap office space. Reb was of the old school, keeping a furtive low profile. South operated boldly and openly, suffering the expected Ad Vice raids.

A former salesman, with a smooth Kentucky drawl full of Dixie charm, South had taken over most of the erotic agenting trade. “If there are 250 women in this business,” he once boasted. “I have 200 of them.”

A first-time visitor to World Modeling might be intimidated by the pandemonium. She’d find producers, directors, models and photographers swarming around the lanky, pompadoured South as if he were the queen bee in a hive on speed. She’d scan the couches and chairs for nonexistent sitting room. She might hear Greg Dark drone, “I need two black girls who do ‘A’, and maybe one of them for a DP too!” And another voice: “The bitch told me she’d do boy-girl commercial and now she only wants to work with women!” “A?” “DP?” “Commercial?” Rick Savage, one of the genuine nice guys among porn actors, might give the newcomer his seat. She’d ask him in a low voice what the terms meant. Savage, paid to update files and answer phones (his real function was to be on hand in case a stud out on location suffered penis limpus), would explain that “A” meant “anal,” “DP” meant “double penetration,” and “commercial” meant “hard”‌—‌graphic genital penetration.

If the lady didn’t get up and leave at that point, she’d see South in action. I privately called his method “musical clients.” He might punch up one of the blinking phone lines and report that he’d booked one of the models requested, then put that line back on hold and flip open a massive, loose-leaf photo album to show Dark a hot new lady. You waited your turn, knowing that round by round, piece by piece, your business with South would get done. At the new lady’s turn, South might point to the glamor shots lining the walls and say, “I’ve been able to place most of those ladies with Penthouse.”

Right, she might think. And then on to DP.

The neophyte’s skepticism would be justified: there was no longer the steady volume of nudie magazine work to ease a woman’s entry into the business with single-girl posing. “It used to be 80% magazines and 20% film,” South told me. “Now it’s 80% video and 20% magazines. If I can’t get them started with ‘nude extra’ roles in movies, sometimes the only thing available for them is to start right in with commercial scenes. It’s like getting tossed off the deep end for their first swimming lesson.”

x x x x x x

The hottest “screen cherry” scene I ever shot was with a girl who didn’t belong in the sex business at all. Gigi (“Penny Nichols”), the 16-year-old whose mother’s complaint brought charges against Reb Sawitz, epitomized the term “cute as a button” in every detail of her face and body. She was so petrified before her debut in a Blacks and Blondes loop that she couldn’t retain a word of dialogue; director F.M. Bradley had to read off each line, which she’d then parrot for the camera.

Gigi had no such problem with the sex. Because of her newness, Brad started her off gently: “Go for the pearl-tongue, guys (cunnilingus and digital clitoral stimulation).” Under the skilled touch of Ray Victory and Robbie Dee, Gigi’s clitoris bloomed out like an extra digit on her body. She giggled at their exclamations of surprise. When Ray flicked his fingers against it‌—‌the little “pussy-spanking” bit that turned him on‌—‌her legs began quivering. “I can’t help it,” she said. “It’s my nerves or something.”

Ray’s huge penis usually came up in segments, like a telescope: the base “got wood” first, and the tumescence would work its way up to the glans. Not this time; he was ramrod hard as soon as he took his pants off. So was Robbie. Rarely did they encounter a lady so turned on by the idea of being worked over by two black studs.

Brad abandoned the slow, gentle approach and let strong, dark arms hold Gigi in every position imaginable. At one point they held her petite form upside down, as she deep-throated Robbie with Ray pounding on the other end. During the frenzy, the Albolene sat neglected; Gigi produced plenty of “natural.”

She convulsed in orgasms and her eyes glazed over, reminding me of the “exorcist trance” of Dorothy LeMay in the Body Language loops.

Both men delivered high-pressure ejaculations and wanted to go for seconds. Each would pump away‌—‌“I’m close! I’m close!”‌—‌then tail off: “Gimme a little more time.” The loop was becoming a marathon. Robbie confided later he’d been afraid the lengthy action would make Gigi freeze up. “But she stayed loose and wet and hot!” Finally, Brad said, “I know what kind of game you guys are playing. You get close, then you back off. You’re just tryin’ to get as much extra fuckin’ as you can. You muthafucks just don’t want it to end!”

But end it finally did. As Gigi lay in a matted heap, the crew sung her praises. “All-time!” “Mind-blowing!” “A Hall of Famer!” Joe Elliot, shooting stills, said he got an erection. Brad said he did too. “Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I was too busy getting all those great angles.” “Yeah,” Brad retorted. “But your lens grew a couple of inches!”

Pornographers love new ladies. Their newness gives them sales value: jaded fans tire of seeing the same old faces and bodies and hearing the same old screams. Plus, they’re nervous, eager to make a good impression, and fearful of screwing up. They’re afraid to say “no” when pornographers add on more sex.

“They don’t know the limits of their obligations,” Spinelli said. He told me about directing one neophyte’s screen cherry scene. “After the guy delivers his pop shot, she looks at me and asks if she’s done. I kept a straight face and said, ‘Not yet. For new girls it’s a long-standing tradition that the entire crew gets in on the action.’ She ponders this for a moment, then asks, ‘I get extra for that, don’t I?’”

Anticipating sex before a camera can be more nerve-wracking than the experience itself. In her first six months, Ginger Lynn would only do nude modeling, turning down one lucrative “commercial” gig after another. The exquisite brunette, Nina Alexander, was so nervous before her first on-screen sex scene that she threw up. Fortunately, her partner was Kevin James, one of the gentler men in the stud game.

A new lady’s first series of screen sex scenes are often her hottest. The combination of fear, anticipation, and the thought of all those people watching can be intensely stimulating. In the debuts of Nina Hartley (Educating Nina) and Shanna McCullough (Deviations), I videotaped each of these future great ladies of erotica having several genuine orgasms.

One newcomer almost had one before her first sex scene: on a Spinelli shoot, I shot an erotic dance performed by a buxom amazon named Morgan who became a cause célèbre when the San Francisco Fire Department fired her over her budding porn career. They rehired her when feminists pointed out that a male firefighter there had acted in porn for years without departmental flak. Moving with her, I explored Morgan’s body in wide-angle. She became so turned on playing to my probing lens that when I congratulated her on a hot performance, she grabbed me in a killer hug and smothered me against big, sweaty breasts.

Despite the initial thrill and the promise of big money, few prospective porn queens stay in the business long. A few movies after her debut in the martinet Svetlana’s Surrender in Paradise, the statuesque, black-haired Raven abruptly quit porn acting. She returned six years later only to earn enough money, she said, to go for her masters degree in marine biology. On page 20 of the September ’84 issue of Adult Video News, Desiree Lane was hailed as a new starlet with “the potential to become the new Seka”; on page 22 of the same issue, Ron Jeremy’s column announced her retirement. John Holmes, whose career spanned the entire history of American commercial hardcore, said that periodic attempts to unionize sex performers failed because 95% of them were gone after less than five movies.

Even ladies established as well-paid porn celebrities seem only a bout of PMS away from quitting. AVN’s dutiful reports of industry comings and goings say it all: “Samantha Strong… saw agents and producers, got booked solid, then decided to quit every other month.” “Tracey Winn announced on video camera for a Moonlight Video shoot that it was going to be her last sex scene, ever, in the XXX business. Several days later she did a sex scene for another video company.” “Christy Canyon, who walked out on last year’s award show because she didn’t win anything, promised all was forgiven and that she would be on hand to present an award this year. Lo and behold, Christy took another walk.” “Erica Boyer, from all reports, has met another guy and is out of the biz once again. Gentlemen, place your bets.”

In porn’s Film Age, when actresses knew they might spend weeks‌—‌or months‌—‌between movie roles, they’d “retire” as a way of raising their day-rates, hoping some producer would sweet-talk them into “returning” with an offer of higher pay. But in the Video Age, holding out just meant missing a lot of paydays. For actresses whose huge volume of movies glutted the market, “retirement” meant trouping the dance circuit until they were in demand again. But for most, saying goodbye meant that producers would turn to new faces and they’d risk being forgotten.

Why do they give up a livelihood far more lucrative than any most porn actresses could ever hope to attain outside the business? Because of the traumas of being a porn queen, beginning with the screen sex itself.

x x x x x x

On the set of Chocolate Cream, Lisa DeLeeuw related into a tape recorder the experience of working for the notorious Svetlana (“Sweatlana”) Marsh on the 800 Fantasy Lane shoot. Living on “stale donuts, coffee and hot dogs,” spending 20-hour days shivering in an unheated sound stage, the voluptuous red-headed actress came down with a bad cold and conjunctivitis. “Jamie Gillis was an animal trainer, Serena played a pony, I played a leopard and this other girl played a tiger… Jamie just had to do the old face-come thing, and sure enough, he came in the eye that had pink-eye.” By the fifth day, “I just couldn’t go on like that. All of a sudden, I passed out. For half an hour. When I came to, Svetlana says, ‘You just sit there in the corner and snarl; you’re background.’ Fine.

“Well, I’m doing that and all of a sudden Jamie comes over and decides to pull me into the scene, grabbing my arms and yanking me in. So I’m playing the scene and Jamie has this stupid cattle whip that he’s holding in the middle so the handle is on one end and the cat-o’-nine-tails on the other. And he’s slinging it like a double pendulum and he catches me‌—‌whack!‌—‌right across the bridge of my nose, which he breaks. I just freaked! I blew up and grabbed the whip and started yelling, ‘I’m gonna kill you!’ And the cameraman is up above us on a beam, and he goes, ‘Oh, this is great! Keep goin’!’”

Everything on a porno set caters to King Cock. If a lady interrupts the scene because her leg is cramping, she risks causing a lost erection. If it can’t be retrieved, the blame is hers. Once that vital shaft is ready for action, no one on the set wants to be what Pachard calls a “shot-stopper.” After the king spouts his final decree, all his subjects offer him congratulations. The queen’s “come-shot”? If she can fake it on cue, the director is satisfied‌—‌even if she isn’t.

Ladies hot enough to become genuinely aroused during porno sex such as Annette Haven, Lilly Marlene, and Vanessa Del Rio have all complained about being left high and wet. “The guy’s hitting your spot,” said Angela Summers. “Then the director calls for another position. You want to tell him where to go, but you can’t.” Haven and Marlene recruited crewmen to help them reach a climax; most actresses just live with the frustration.

“No matter how much you love sex,” Ona Zee told an AVN interviewer, “you have to separate your emotions from what you’re doing in front of the camera.” It’s best not to get too aroused, not only to avoid physical frustration, but to prevent directors from exploiting your enthusiasm. If a lady likes anal sex, a director will push her limits by teaming her with a human pile-driver such as Randy West or the horse-like Italian stallion Rocco Siffredi.

Then there are the de rigueur pop-out-and-plunge-back-in penetrations such as Don Fernando did years before they became standard repertoire. (An erection rudely pulled free of a dilated anus lets a videographer show his skill at illuminating rectal walls, revealing how well an actress has used her Fleet enemas.)

Compounding the physical challenges are the non-stop months of serial 14-hour work days needed to build a six-figure nest egg. “By the time they get to me, a lot of the performers are half-dead from over-work,” Bruce Seven complained to AVN’s Gene Ross. “There’s nothing worse than using a girl who’s been fucked in the ass twice the day before, works till 1 a.m., then comes on your set the next morning and you’ve got to put a dildo up her ass and make it look like it feels good.”

Porn’s rough road to riches is strewn with casualties. A self-described “total emotional, mental and physical wreck,” Nina Alexander suffered a breakdown. Taylor Wane spent two weeks “in a sick-bed… covered with bruises.” Self-acknowledged “nymphomaniac” Mai Lin, whose porn career lasted from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, said it took her three years to fully recuperate from a rectal injury (“Even now, it hurts when I get fucked in the ass.”)

In the March 1989 issue of Erotic Film Guide: X-Video Review, veteran pornographer Bill Margold said that under current working conditions “the women will be literally screwed to death. It’s the worst kind of burnout, not only physical but mental.”

In the less harried days of 1982, in an Adam interview, Margold said that he and his porn director wife Drea left the business on the movie set “and then we go home. Just as if we were working in K-Mart or Dunkin’ Donuts… You can only live in a fantasy land just so long before it starts driving you crazy.” And those who were stuck in this “fantasy land” found crazy ways to cope.

Some, like Shauna Grant, couldn’t cope at all.

x x x x x x

One of the few things actor Richard Pacheco, agent Jim South and the late Shauna Grant’s porn-hating mother shared was the belief that adult video’s first mega-queen didn’t commit suicide: she was murdered. According to Pacheco, she’d told him and others, shortly before her death, that her life was in danger.

Did the shy strawberry blonde, whose creamy Minnesota small-town innocence intrigued jaded porn fans, get caught in the middle of a quarrel over drugs? Was she shot by someone who came to the plush Palm Springs home on the night of March 21, 1984 seeking revenge against her boyfriend, who was serving a five-year sentence for dealing cocaine? How could she have pulled the trigger of the rifle that sent a .22 slug through her temples from a distance‌—‌according to ballistics tests‌—‌of six feet away, asked Pacheco.

The real world media was using the suicide scenario to pillory the porn industry, citing Shauna’s previous attempt with sinus headache pills and her reported unhappiness. I could never imagine the sad, passive teenager (she died at age 20) leading cheers for Farmington High, much less releasing her inhibitions on a movie set. Her real name, Colleen Applegate, fit her image better than her porn moniker.

There was one thing all her porn associates agreed on: Shauna had a major cocaine addiction. In her career of 30-plus movies, she became known for flakiness, no-shows and frequent nosebleeds, earning the nickname “Applecoke.”

“I lost five of my top ladies to cocaine,” South told me. He blamed Shauna’s former agent/manager Bobby Hollander, who worked off a drug sentence in a community services program, for introducing several of them to the drug. AVN’s Scott Allen described Hollander as appearing to be “the kind of guy who hangs out at local bus stops to greet new girls in town.” Skinny and quick-witted, with a fast street-wise patter, Hollander had that same kind of wired, pop-toaster jauntiness that John Holmes displayed after snorting a few lines. In a PBS documentary on Shauna Grant (Death of a Porn Queen), her best friend among performers, Laurie Smith, said Hollander could “talk a nun into doing porn.”

“There’s a certain breed of men in the business,” said photographer Suze Randall in an L.A. Times story on Shauna Grant, “who can’t get laid by beautiful women without putting dishes of cocaine in front of their noses.”

Stressed-out actresses often find that on a porn set, things do go better with coke, at first. It dulls pain, creates euphoria, gives a feeling of boundless energy and‌—‌many ladies claim‌—‌makes them horny. They can work longer hours, earn more money, and chase off all the bad feelings waiting in ambush after the action ends.

For Shauna Grant, performing without the drug was an ordeal. She “fought against sex,” wrote Jerry Butler in his autobiography, Raw Talent. “Working with Shauna was always strained: stop… proceed… halt… I felt almost as though I were raping her.”

Everyone, said Ginger Lynn, suffers a drug stage (hers, she said, lasted only two weeks). Lynn the second, Amber, credited agent Reb Sawitz with helping her get clean, letting her stay at his home where he and his wife made sure she stayed straight.

The saddest drug case I ever saw was Linda Wong. By the time I shot her in a Spinelli production, she’d spent many years in the sex business, softening its hard edges (a drunken stud once reportedly bit off one of her nipples) with a pharmacologist’s cornucopia of uppers and downers. Linda had been in a bathroom at the location two hours before someone finally forced open the door to find her unconscious in the tub, water rising to a level that could have drowned her. In white geisha make-up, she looked and acted like death. “It was the most challenging sex scene I’ve ever had,” Eric Edwards, who worked with her, said later. “It was as close to necrophilia as I ever want to get.” His words were eerily prophetic: less than a year later, Linda Wong died.

Like Shauna, Linda was sad, shy, and passive. She’d once protested against the stereotype of porn actresses being hard, brazen hussies, saying that the greatest compliment anyone ever paid her was, “Linda, you really are a nice person.”

“Nice” isn’t a quality for survival in this harsh business.

x x x x x x

As models gain experience, they get hip to the games pornographers play. Blondi, who was working only with her boyfriend Tony Montana, agreed to a girl-girl scene. Then the producers tried to add another man to the action. When she refused to comply, according to her story in AVN, “They told us, ‘You’re way out here and where are you going to go? What are you going to do?’ That’s when I tell them I won’t sign a release.”

As ladies become stars, and a demand builds for their movies, they develop clout. They realize the only way they’ll be able to continue working without cracking up is to take control of their on-set experiences. Secure in her stardom, Ginger Lynn followed a simple philosophy: “If I don’t get my way, I don’t do it.”

In porn’s distorted world of ego clashes and power struggles, some ladies push their hard-won rights to the extreme and become prima donnas. The late (suicide) blonde beauty Savannah became notorious for her demands. Shooting schedules had to be arranged so that all her scenes were shot back-to-back as soon as she arrived on a set‌—‌even if she breezed in four hours late. She explained, “They know I can’t stay there all day and still be in a good mood.” AVN credited Savannah with coining “a new industry phrase”: “I’m on break‌—‌NOW!”

Even bit players learned to be pushy. Petulant little Purple Passion arrived at San Francisco Airport by late flight from L.A. on the night before her afternoon scene in Dirty Pictures. She woke me up at 3 AM with a call from the “porn star inn,” the Mill Valley Howard Johnson’s, to demand that I drive over and give her a pay advance for a late snack and breakfast. I explained that I was fighting a cold and had to be on the set at seven in the morning; she’d have to use her own money or starve. “Shit!” was her response.

The increased acrimony between actresses and moviemakers in the video era reached the flash point even at companies ladies had signed exclusives with. After Samantha Strong refused to work with Jeff Stryker, whose long history in boy-boy pictures raised the spectre of AIDS in some actresses’ minds, Vivid Video accused her of breaking her contract and wanted her to return the car the company had given her. Said Strong: “I had my lawyer call Stevie (Steve Hirsch, president of Vivid) and he said, ‘Well, let’s just take one of these tapes before a judge and see what he thinks.’” Strong said she kept the car. To prove they weren’t patsies, Vivid responded to her story in AVN with the claim that they not only repossessed the vehicle but got her to work with Stryker in The Heiress.

The squabbles between producers and stars reached comic proportions. Brandy Alexandre sued John Stagliano on People’s Court, then went on radio talk shows urging fans to boycott Evil Angel videos. The lucky Stagliano couldn’t have bought better publicity than that.

The biggest flap of all was the Holly Ryder affair. “Sex Star Seeks Ban on Porn” read the August 19, 1993 headline in the San Francisco Chronicle (the story first appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News). Lisa Marie Abato, AKA Holly Ryder, sought one million signatures for an amendment to the California state constitution banning the adult entertainment industry. Why? What had the industry done to the petite, 26-year-old blonde who’d just ended her three-year porn career? Had she been tied up and paddled?

Yes, but that was because she deliberately specialized in bondage videos such as The Latex Dungeon and Diabolic Demands, which suited her professed “S and M lifestyle.” She told AVN’s Mark Kernes, “I like the pain that hurts and then turns into a real sensual pain, one that involves your whole body.” She reportedly enjoyed having safety pins stuck in her right breast (the left was saved for a “special lover”). Hadn’t she entered the business telling producers, “I’ll do anything!”?

She may have been irked at not being chosen for more box cover shots, despite her reconstructed nose and breast implants. Abato’s most distinctive physical attribute, a bulbous, marble-sized clitoris, wouldn’t be seen in “pretty-girl” box cover shots that could be displayed in video stores.

Many believed her crusade stemmed from the politics behind the funding of the Holly Ryder Foundation she had set up to help homeless runaway kids. She had been one. Failing to secure financial backing through adult industry sources, she allegedly turned to religious right-wing zealots, whose money came with the stipulation that she trumpet the anti-porn cause.

Some‌—‌who knew Abato personally‌—‌felt the whole debacle could have been prevented with a motorcycle. Bikes were important to the former waitress. She’d become engaged to future porn director E. Z. Ryder at the outlaw enclave of the 1989 motorcycle convention in Sturgis, South Dakota. Her original motivation for getting into porn was to earn enough for a custom Harley (hence her choice of stage name). Reportedly, the company producing her bondage videos promised her the expensive bike. But, as Abato complained in the L.A. Daily News article, “I never got that motorcycle. I never got anything from that industry except the shame.”

Perhaps the whole Holly Ryder anti-porn affair can be summed up with writer Jack Eagle’s quip: “Hell hath no fury like a biker chick scorned.”

x x x x x x

Gayle Sterling had the attributes that were in great demand: shapely body, pretty face, easy-going demeanor, long flaxen hair, and a love of sex. She wasn’t hired more often because of “Dennis,” who usually accompanied her on shoots. He wasn’t the helpful sort of on-set mate, like Nina Hartley’s husband Dave, who’d run errands, string cables or hold pussy lights. Dennis would sit there watching, with an aura of menace. During the Chocolate Cream shoot, he lit up a joint. “I like smoke as much as anyone,” I said, “but I have a policy against drugs on my set.” The tall, bellicose man glared at me. I stared right back. If there was to be a contest of wills on my production, I wasn’t about to come out second. After a few tense moments, he snuffed it out.

After we wrapped, I found out why Gayle hauled Dennis along like excess baggage. She motioned me to a stairwell, away from the crew packing up equipment. Like a cop about to frisk a suspect, Gayle leaned Dennis against the rail. Chattering about how well-hung he was, she unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants. I wondered what this was all about; Dennis didn’t work in porn movies. Then I recalled how the couple had kept telling me about their exploits swinging with third parties‌—‌both male and female. Gayle alone I might have considered, but I wanted no part of this scene. To this couple, Gayle’s porn work was part of their elaborate fantasy life.

Other off-screen relationships of porn queens also depended on strange forms of symbiosis. A common phenomenon is the beautiful porn star, who could have her choice of gentle, caring men, yet sticks with a brutal boyfriend who beats her silly.

Masochism alone doesn’t explain that kind of relationship. I’ve known many a mentally healthy masochist, who indulged her fantasies in controlled settings, such as at my former partner Joe Loveland’s soirées, but would leave her man in a whiplash if he bashed open her forehead with a vase‌—‌as Porsche Lynn’s boyfriend did during an argument in their hotel room at a trade show.

Many, such as adult film historian Jim Holliday, cite low self-esteem among porn ladies. Declaring he’d no longer date sex pros after “more than half a decade of romantic frustration and grief”, Dave Patrick, editor of the Bay Area sex tabloid Spectator, quoted a rock musician who’d written in to agree with Patrick’s decision: “Strippers and porn stars are a lot like rock ’n’ roll groupies. More often than not, they come from similar backgrounds of sexual and emotional abuse. They don’t have much self-esteem. Treat ’em good and they’ll walk all over you; treat ’em like shit and they’ll worship the ground you walk on.”

At lunch one day, four of us were discussing the sobbing ladies who call South to cancel appointments due to black eyes and chipped teeth. “They’re beautiful and they’ve always had men bust ass to do them favors,” said Richard Mailer. “So they play ’em for chumps. They only respect the dude who treats them like dirt.”

“Maybe,” I conjectured, “They find it easy to leave the responsibility for their affairs in the hands of a guy who dominates them. When they step out of line, he clouts them to establish his control. Maybe they take that for love.”

South wisely refrained from offering his own theories. He had to deal with these ladies every day and didn’t want anything he said getting back to them. But the problem of the meddlesome mate was so common that South‌—‌and others‌—‌had a word for it: “boyfriendinitis.”

x x x x x x

My soundman Bill married his fantasy. The way he told it, he’d finally summoned the courage to go skydiving. Still “high” from the experience, he went to watch his favorite porn star Annette Haven at a stage show. Bill felt confident enough to introduce himself to the raven-haired beauty during a break. A strong, quiet, agreeable man, he proved a good listener for the compulsively verbal Haven, who continued talking at him for the next two years. Bill had no problem with his new wife’s already-established career. Other porn matings weren’t as trouble-free.

I’d hired stunning, voluptuous Robin Cannes for Dirty Pictures, only to have her husband decide at the last moment that he didn’t want his wife in pornos. (I replaced her with equally voluptuous Amy Rogers, whose boyfriend, porn actor Kevin James, was glad to see her getting work.) Actor T.T. Boy divorced actress Sandra Scream, then took up with actress Dominique Simone; she soon dropped him, citing, in AVN, his jealous comments: “Did you like it? Was his dick bigger than mine? I’ll bet you liked getting it from that big dick!”

Samantha Strong claimed she got into porn to spite her boyfriend; then she left the business to please her new one, a wealthy Israeli. He reportedly walked into South’s office with $250,000 in cash, wanting to buy up all her movies and take them off the market‌—‌he was told the task was impossible. Then Strong decided her new love had a drug problem, dropped him, and returned to porn.

Other relationships were even stranger: AVN reported that a newcomer named Leena was so ecstatic about her heart-throb Peter North coming on her face that she left it on to show her boyfriend. The magazine quoted giddily sardonic Nikki Wilde’s assessment of her marriage: “I hate him! We’re still married… I hope he dies soon. You hear this, (name withheld)? I’m gonna get you, ’cause I’m a Scorpio and you fucked me over.”

AVN reported a divorce proceedings stemming from a “background” actress telling her spouse she was going to a church festival when actually she was heading for the set of Oriental Treatment II. One of my favorite screen ladies, whom I won’t name in the interest of preserving her domestic tranquility, married a wealthy man who demanded she leave the business‌—‌which she did. Yet, she snuck off to perform in one of Superior’s features. Maybe she was bored.

Kristara Barrington lamented, “When I come home to my boyfriend and we make love, I think of it as work almost.” Musing over why industry love affairs were so short-term, Juliet Anderson said, “When you drive a bus ten hours a day, you don’t want to spend your vacation on a Greyhound.”

Pursuing porn’s promise of wealth, many actresses would echo Samantha Strong’s declaration upon signing a 15-picture contract with Western Visuals: “I do not have, nor do I want a personal life right now.” Alice Springs put it simply: “I don’t have a boyfriend, thank God.”

x x x x x x

During a break on the Chocolate Cream shoot, Lisa DeLeeuw was describing her first unplanned public encounter with porn fans. “I was in the frozen food section. I’m trying to decide whether it will be fish sticks tonight or pizza, and suddenly some little Jewish guy comes running up and goes, ‘Oh, I saw you last night on the video. You were fucking Jamie Gillis!’ And all these little old Jewish ladies‌—‌the store is right in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood, Ralph’s Market on Sunset‌—‌they all drop their matzo balls and go ‘What?’ And they follow me all around the store and I hear, ‘Oh I really like you!’ ‘I watch you every week!’”

Porn fame can be a heavier burden than Lisa Lipps’ 50-inch chest. At best, adulation means a fan painting his apartment in New York to match Nina Hartley’s pubic hair and a tank in the Iraq “Desert Storm” offensive with “Ginger Lynn II” painted on the gun barrel. It means fan letters like the one from the “assistant principal” who used Broward County, Florida school board stationery to request autographed photos from Lee Carroll and Brandy Alexandre‌—‌praising her as a “prominent American.”

At worst, fame means gross encounters of the worst kind: Grandpa (Al Lewis) Munster posing for photos at a trade show and‌—‌to quote AVN‌—‌“goosing the smut starlets.” An inmate sent Debi Diamond a plastic baggie of semen. Someone posing as a cop called porn companies, trying to get the address of Kelly O’Dell. Obsessed fans stalked Selena Steele and Ashlyn Gere from one club date to the next.

Holliday calls them the “Toad Patrol,” these porn fans who steal starlets’ purses at trade shows, whisper lewd comments as they sign autographs, grab flesh and later brag to their friends that they actually bedded the star they hunger after. Who’s to disprove them?

At Juliet Anderson’s movie premier party for Nina Hartley’s first video Educating Nina, a drunken neighbor kept returning after being steered back home, braying his need for “just a little pussy and then I’ll leave.” Threats by Nina’s husband Dave to punch the guy out didn’t faze him until I marched the drunk right into his own bedroom, plunked him down and told him that Nina’s husband was a former Green Beret whose specialty had been interrogating Viet Cong. If the neighbor showed up one more time, I said, I’d let Dave amuse the crowd with his skill at torturing victims into involuntary unleashing of bladder and bowel functions.

There are toxic contradictions in the American male’s attitude toward the porno queen: his frustrated lust for her versus his impulse to condemn her; desire to meet her and impress her versus his fear of her scorn for his inadequacies. He hides his conflicts behind rough, macho swagger.

During the bustle of booths going up before the opening of a CES show, a forklift pulled up to the Superior display. The driver leaned out, gazed at a poster of Juliet Anderson and mentioned he’d seen some of her movies and thought she was a good actress. He seemed a pleasant fellow. While talking with him, I mentioned that I’d shared a house with Juliet for a year. At this admission, other laborers suddenly materialized out of the jumble of flats, boards and sawhorses for lurid details. Surrounded by leering buddies, the forklift man changed. He struck a pose, leaning against his machine’s safety cage, and asked, “What’s the bitch like?”

I looked straight into his eyes and said, “She’s a lady.”

The self-conscious chuckles reminded me of what Juliet once said about men staring transfixed at her spread crotch during stage shows as if they’d never seen female genitalia before: “They’re like a bunch of little boys.”

But these “little boys” don’t stop at pulling pigtails.

x x x x x x

You can’t go home again. The saying is especially appropriate when an adult movie career becomes like a stink that won’t wash off. Kristara Barrington said former school friends in Illinois now called her a slut. On finding out Ginger Lynn was a porn star, her bank manager stopped treating her as a respected customer and even refused to validate her parking. Locals pasted sex magazine photos of Shauna Grant on her former high school locker. Relatives and spouses of porn stars become resigned to receiving anonymous packages with hate messages scrawled on pictures of the star. I delivered a script to Lilly Marlene and was reviewing its highlights with her when something crashed against the back door. “It’s those kids again,” she sighed. They’d bang on the door and leave obscene messages.

Quitting the business doesn’t mean leaving it behind. Serena Robinson dated Michael (“Batman”) Keaton for two years after she played the dead blonde he finds in bed with him in Clean and Sober. Then she told him of her past porn career as “Rachel Ryan” and Keaton dumped her. Joanna Storm’s retirement didn’t stop a rock band called “The Sporting Bachelors” from producing an album called Love Letters to Joanna Storm. Since the actress had left no forwarding address, the band made requests in The Hollywood Free Press, Screw, Adam Film World and Hustler for information on the whereabouts of the object of “love letters” such as the romantic album cut “.38 Caliber Kiss.”

Death often establishes the immortality of images etched forever in celluloid or in magnetic particles of videotape oxide. After Shauna Grant’s death came a wave of retrospectives on the star. The “previously unreleased stills” in Gourmet’s $40 (cover price) magazine Inside Shauna Grant featured harshly-lit “out-take” shots. Cinema Blue magazine put together a “Shauna Grant Memorial” issue, digging up enough old photos of the late star to fill 16 pages.

Less than a year after Savannah’s suicide on July 11, 1994, Sin City Video released the bio-pic Little Girl Lost, with Rebecca Wild playing the temperamental, troubled star. In a last drunken ride in her Corvette, Shannon Wilsey (Savannah’s real name) had crashed into a fence, breaking her nose and cheekbones. Then, in the garage of the Universal City home she’d paid cash for, she put a 9-millimeter pistol to her temple. The free-spending blonde beauty was being hounded by the IRS. She was reported to have been addicted to booze and heroin. She was said to be sick of working in the adult business and desperately longing for stardom in the “legit” entertainment field. Perhaps she felt her notoriety as a porn star had forever closed that venue to her.

Few porn queens ended their careers like Rachel Ryan. After her relationship with Michael Keaton ended, Ryan married Empty Nest star Richard Milligan (they’ve since separated). Most ladies find X-rated stardom a lonely road, strewn with broken relationships, leering fans, hostile media, angry relatives, menacing cops, back-stabbing competitors and exploitive agents, managers and producers. They suffer the smirks, snickers and sermons of a society quick to condemn, slow to forget. Behind their tough-girl act of demands, tantrums, vendettas and lawsuits, many of these “prima donnas” barely into adulthood are terrified.

After the suicides of Savannah and male star Cal Jammer, the industry’s lobby group, the Free Speech Coalition, established a 24-hour hotline for performers to discuss their problems.

Despite the pitfalls on the porn-star path, there are ladies I’ve known who’ve reaped rewards from the business beyond the financial ones. As porn queens they flourished, emerging from the experience stronger, more mature, self-confident and with few regrets.

Each of these ladies represents a different answer to the question, “What does it take to be a winner at the porn star game?”

x x x x x x

Chapter 14

THE BITCHES, THE SWEETHEARTS,
AND OTHER GREAT LADIES
Mid-1980s to early 1990s

“We were tied up,” Kristara Barrington said in Erotic X-Film Guide (June, 1985). “I was connected to Desiree Lane… All of a sudden Jamie and three other guys came in and started whipping us. I took out his dick and sucked him. And he started getting really rough, took off his belt and choked me… At first, Greg (Dark, director of the scene in New Wave Hookers) said, ‘What are you doing? You’re hurting her.’ I said, ‘No, no, don’t stop the scene,’ because just from doing that he turned me on… He beat the shit out of me. It was great. I had bruises on my tits. You can see them in the film.”

Barrington’s quote sounds like the kind of hype porn stars spout to titillate their fans. But in more than one publication the exotic Eurasian 19-year-old from Illinois named Jamie Gillis as her favorite screen stud. He did things to her, she said, that moviemakers wouldn’t dare include in the final cut. Directors allow male performers certain liberties in getting aroused.

Mauvaise De Noire also named Gillis as a favorite screen partner. In my Chocolate Cream he repeated his Serena skit, pretending Mauvaise was a dog and he was her trainer. I cut out his cuffing her for such things as not licking fast enough.

The porn milieu is perfect for masochistic women. They can release themselves totally to the whims of directors and other models, knowing that in the controlled environment of the movie set, no genuine psycho is going to really maim or kill them. The bumps and bruises, contortions and contusions are all part of their fun.

A woman doesn’t have to be a masochist to thrive in porn but it helps. It also helps to be an athlete, a lesbian, an exhibitionist or a “crusader”‌—‌my own term for those using porn as a forum to make a sexual/social statement. But of all the different kinds of women performing in porn, those best suited to the trade are those rare ladies who enjoy every bracing minute of it.

x x x x x x

The word “nymphomaniac” is passé; too sexist, too judgmental. “Promiscuous” is still used and “sex addict” has its pop-psych adherents.

These “high-tech, new-wave sex athletes,” as Harry Reems called them, not only don’t feel abused after gang-bangs like Dallas Cowboy scrimmages, they take pride in their performance undergoing them. During a Blacks and Blondes loop, a team of studs put the tall Mill Valley sex pro, Deejay, through more gyrations than the Harlem Globetrotters do with a basketball. She made sure a dildo you could hit home runs with disappeared inside her mouth, vagina and anus. “Know what that proves?” the sinewy blonde asked. “It means I can take John Holmes all the way up to the balls in any hole of my body!” She added, “Ginger Lynn can only do that in her pussy.”

These are the ladies who try pornographers’ imaginations. The diminutive Fallon spurted “G-spot” orgasms at will. So did British carrot-top Sarah-Jane Hamilton. At Plato’s Retreat in New York, Tara Alexander went through over 80 men in a five-hour period (Midnight Blue, Volume 1), claiming she had 24 orgasms.

Sometimes directors have to say, “Enough!” After Wendy O. Williams shot ping-pong balls out of her vagina in Candy Goes to Hollywood, the future Plasmatics rock star wanted “to pop bananas out of her butt.” Director Gail Palmer declined the offer.

Miss Sharon Mitchell‌—‌as porn’s grande dame wants to be called after more than fifteen years as a performer‌—‌wouldn’t let a spent Mike Horner leave the rooftop set in All the King’s Ladies, even as the crew was packing the gear after shooting Miss M.’s forty-second status orgasmus (sustained female orgasm). She related the story of going into a theater to watch one of her films for the first time and unzipping the pants of an elderly gentleman next to her. When the startled patron saw that the lady going down on him was the same one as on the screen, he suffered a seizure. As he was being wheeled to the ambulance, he croaked, “Thank you, Miss Mitchell.”

Lilly Marlene was awesome. I’ve never seen anyone, male or female, with such a voracious sexual appetite. She was long-limbed and hard-bodied with a beautifully flared rear and high, apple breasts. Her billowing hair, dyed light blonde (pubes, too), framed angular features of sharp, Teutonic beauty. In a review of Superior’s Night Moves,
AVN’s Dick Goldhaber called Lilly “the most gorgeous pussycat I have ever seen in an adult movie.”

Lilly’s exotic image dissolved when she spoke; her deliberate, down-home Midwest twang branded her a hick‌—‌until she’d begin to discuss the nuances of a subject like Jungian psychology. She worried endlessly about her dialogue scenes. But she could’ve spoken in tongues and still be sought after.

Tales of Lilly in heat abounded. She’d routinely exhaust fifteen men at a time and then, with hunger glaring in her usually soft eyes, grab any man who was left. Without so much as a “hello,” she’d unzip your pants and swallow you up. I was making out Lilly’s paycheck in the office of an Oakland nightclub used in Deviations when, under the desk, I felt my pants being unzipped. Lilly said she was still horny‌—‌after a long, difficult DP scene that would’ve sent most women screaming to a convent.

If I’d known Lilly before the age of AIDS, I’d have taken her up on her invitations to come over and play; her over-matched, take-my-wife-please husband didn’t seem to mind. Finally, with AIDS a growing concern, he forbade Lilly to strip at any more bachelor parties; he knew she’d end up taking on every half-way willing male on the premises.

Even sexually open women tend to recoil instinctively when a man comes on too overtly; Lilly would meet his onslaught head-on. No need for cooings, cuddling or commitments; the action itself was its own reward.

Lilly Marlene was one of a kind. But ladies who thrive best in porn have things in common with her: they, too, like the action for its own sake, taking pride in athletic performance, in a game where points are scored or deducted according to form, intensity and stamina.

It’s no coincidence that so many porn actresses have participated in rigorous physical activities. Some were “jocks”: Porsche Lynn‌—‌basketball, volleyball, school records in track (without a date for the prom, she went bowling instead); avowed tomboy Nikki Randall‌—‌softball, soccer, gymnastics; Jennifer Scott‌—‌ballet; Blondi‌—‌stock car racer and bodybuilder; Brandi Bosworth‌—‌bodybuilder (1987 Georgia state champion). Victoria Paris, Vanity and Tiffany Million were pro wrestlers.

Chelsea Manchester, whose stage name came from a road sign for two towns off I-94 west of Detroit, was a Michigan construction worker. The late Alex Jordan (suicide), who competed with girlfriends to see who could lay the most men, and Tracey Adams were both commercial divers. Rowdy as roustabouts, these ladies are more than capable of planting a punch‌—‌as Jordan did‌—‌in the faces of those who get out of line.

In the competitive world of video sex, pumping iron, nutritional supplements, physical trainers and tanning salons are as much a part of the scene as silk panties and Albolene Cream. These ladies are determined to excel at porn’s circus acts. In an AVN interview, balloon-breasted blonde lioness (“I’m a sexual beast”) Danyel Cheeks said, after deep-throating the immensely-endowed Rocco Siffredi, “I started like anyone else, choking and hitting teeth. But within a year or so, I learned how to breathe in and breathe out at one time to make everything easier. I was very determined to learn to do it after seeing Linda Lovelace in action.”

x x x x x x

Barbara Dare came running down the sidewalk barefooted, clutching a spike-heeled pump in each hand. “I wanna ride in the Corvette!” As she fumbled with the shoes and the door handle, I realized I’d been about to commit what any red-blooded American auto buff would consider an unnatural act: let one of the most beautiful women who ever bared all before a camera scrunch into a production assistant’s beat-up Falcon loaded with reflectors and camera gear instead of inviting her to settle into the black leather of my yellow Stingray. But after a morning of non-stop friction with Dare on the set of E.X., I would’ve consigned her to ride in a garbage truck‌—‌and not in the cab section.

Barbara Dare was my all-time worst directing experience. When I cast her in E.X., she was not yet a star but already acting the prima donna. With her soft auburn curls, fashion model features and near-perfect proportions, she knew she’d be in demand (she became the new sensation of 1986).

Dare began by refusing to work with anyone but Billy Dee. “What girl ever works with three people in one day?” she wanted to know. I rattled off a list of ladies who had, including Traci Lords. “But Traci likes fucking!” I knew then it would be a tough shoot.

Dare consented to a three-way with Billy Dee and a man making his porn debut, as long as everything with the new guy was simulated. I agreed to her terms; new guys usually can’t get it up anyway. But he surprised us, to Dare’s consternation. When he tried to touch her breasts, she pushed him away, afraid that if he got a full erection there’d be pressure on her to let him use it. After that debut, the new guy decided he didn’t really want a porn career after all.

As the day progressed, Dare made a game out of saying “no.” I told her to indulge her two-pack-a-day habit only on the outside patio. In response, she blew smoke in my face. At the end of a break, I requested her presence on the set. “As soon as I’m done with my apple,” she said, taking a slow, insolent bite. She refused to move from one side of the bed to the other for better shot framing until I moved to scoop her up and toss her there; then she scrambled to comply.

I sat staring into space, trying to make a decision. I could either spent the rest of the shoot snarling and threatening to manhandle her or I could cancel the shoot and pay everyone except Dare for a half-day. She saw I was at the breaking point. Like most seasoned bitches, Dare knew when she’d pushed too far. “You don’t seem to like my New Jersey sense of humor,” she laughed.

“If New Jersey humor means making a complete cunt out of yourself, you’re right.”

On the ride to the park where stills would be shot of Dare posing with the ’Vette, the auburn-haired beauty melted into friendliness. Fancy cars have that effect on certain kinds of women. I learned that Dare was raised in New Jersey but was born in Texas. Her father, a “Jewish dentist,” was distraught over both her porn career and her renouncing of Judaism. She’d failed to achieve her childhood dream of being a high-fashion model, blaming her height of only five-foot-three. “I don’t want to stay in this business longer than a year,” she declared, “and when I leave, I want to have a hundred thousand dollars socked away.”

The course Barbara Dare followed was an effective roadmap to porn’s pot of gold. Starting with Pachard’s Lilith Unleashed and The Oddest Couple, Dare made enough movies‌—‌including E.X. in January, ’86‌—‌to establish who she was but not enough to be “overexposed” or “burned out” (in so many pictures that fans got tired of her). In the spring of 1986, Dare signed an “exclusive” with Select/Essex, claiming later she got $10,000 for each of the ten movies she agreed to star in for the company over a year’s time. With each release heavily promoted, Dare became the hottest star in the industry during 1986. She incorporated herself, formed a fan club, wrote for Swank magazine, and commanded top dollar on the dance circuit. Through serial exclusives (Dare re-signed with Select/Essex in 1987 and later with Vivid) she made no more than a dozen movies a year over her five-year career, staying in demand and maintaining a six-figure income. Tough and demanding, she had the chutzpah to do it her way. In many ways, she was the archetype of a certain genre of porn actresses I’ve had the hardest time working with: the Bitches.

These ladies are belligerent, always late and ignorant of their script dialogue. They are likely to have been hookers. Nevertheless, some are in great demand, with huge fan followings so they keep getting hired‌—‌especially by directors who don’t mind doing a bit of yelling.

The Bitches have certain strengths: they tend toward the lesbian end of the bi-sexual spectrum (Dare’s long-term lover was a slim, pretty brunette) and work more easily than “straight” ladies in girl-girl scenes. They are less troubled by the unpleasant aspects of boy-girl sex scenes too, because they approach the action without any of the emotional involvement that affects so many straight ladies. Analyzing the very sophisticated version of the Bitch that she played in Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone told San Francisco Examiner writer Ovid Demaris, “I never thought the character (a bi-sexual author who flashed her bare crotch to a room full of cops) really cared about sex at all. That’s why it was so easy for her to use her sexuality‌—‌it had no value.”

To these ladies, the malady of boyfriendinitis is irrelevant. “I don’t need men…” Dare told an interviewer from the lesbian magazine On Our Backs, “I need women.” They trade tales among themselves about seducing both the boyfriends of straight ladies and the girlfriends of screen studs.

To Dare, screen sex was strictly an acting job, but one she took pride in‌—‌winning the 1988 AVN Best Actress award for her role in the Vivid feature The Naked Stranger. She could snap from her brittle, businesslike self to a gushy screen persona convincing enough to inspire the Talk Radio monologist Eric Bogosian to write in Esquire, “Barbara Dare, in her effusive, bubbling orgasmic womanhood, is the purest antidote to pin-headed porno haters, Left and Right.” Regardless of the demand for the actress, I told her agent Jim South, “Jim, if I ever shoot Barbara Dare again, it won’t be with a camera.”

x x x x x x

A supremely successful Bitch, whose career lasted much longer than Dare’s half-dozen years, was Amber Lynn. I used to wonder why this second of the “Lynn line” was so popular with fans despite her indifferent screen performances and reputation as an irresponsible, foul-mouthed slut. Something about Amber’s appeal went beyond her physical attributes of shapely body, explosion of blonde hair, and prettily pugnacious, jutting jaw (a characteristic not so prettily shared with her brother, porn stud Buck Adams).

I saw the Amber Lynn mystique close up on Pachard’s Harlem Candy shoot. In the scene, the “Goddess Amber” materializes in front of a window to offer Herschel Savage her divine wisdom. Standing on a chair hidden behind a couch, Amber revved herself up for the scene, rubbing her clitoris. On “action,” she vaulted the couch with the ease of an athlete and sashayed with the insolent grace of a jungle cat over to where Savage sat. She slid in next to him and her toes dug into the rug like outstretched claws. Those few seconds of action bristled with her electric physicality.

I tried to see her as a fan would: the hedonist, whose parties in her beachfront home were legendary; the exhibitionist, flushed with excitement at a CES show after Chicago’s famed wind had blown up her skirt, mesmerizing a construction crew with a flash of her bare bottom; the thrill jockey, hustling in late for a convention appearance after an all-night romp through Vegas, with yesterday’s make-up looking like a death-mask; the brat-goddess, bipping off to chat with a girlfriend, ignoring a long line of fans waiting for her autograph. Her admirers watched Amber strut through life with philistine insolence that enhanced her bad-girl image as a hardcore, white-trash, juvenile delinquent.

After her impressive entrance in the Harlem Candy scene, Amber had nothing to say: she didn’t know her lines. But she had an excuse: “You shouldn’t give someone a script the day before shooting.”

“Honey,” said Pachard. “The script was waiting for you at Jim South’s office for a whole week.”

Amber wrinkled her nose. “I don’t go there any more.”

“I wanted to deliver it to your house,” the production manager said, “but you were never home.”

I volunteered for the task of taping Amber’s dialogue into the pages of a Hustler magazine, which she would appear to be idly perusing during her conversation with Savage. As they waited for me to finish, Amber, Pachard and the crew recounted one of the director’s wilder toilet scenes, shot in an artist’s studio-loft. “We fuckin’ trashed the place!” Amber crowed. I glanced up at her and was startled by the ferocity in her eyes.

There was another actress on Pachard’s shoot that day who’d also just received her script. Shanna McCullough, available due to a cancelled production, had been recruited as a last-minute replacement for a no-show. Though she had only minutes to study her dialogue, Shanna didn’t botch a single line. One of the classiest ladies ever to grace the set of any rating of movie, Shanna McCullough exemplified the genre of actress totally opposite the Bitches. If it were possible, the only ladies I’d ever hire would be the ones I called the “Sweethearts.”

x x x x x x

A buzz went through the audience. The singer on the stage had stopped singing but her voice was still pumping through the big speakers.

It was the sixth take (so the two cameras could record all possible angles) of the four-girl rock band’s opening number, “We’re the Deviations.” The “singer,” Shanna McCullough, had been lip-syncing to a recorded professional’s voice so well that, until she stopped mid-song to point out that the audio operator had lined up the wrong take, the audience had thought she really was doing the singing. Realizing that this lady‌—‌a porno actress, no less‌—‌was giving a remarkable performance, they burst into applause.

It seemed a big risk, casting a first-timer in the lead role of my most expensive production. But when I met Shanna at a Joe Elliot casting session, I’d had a hunch this was one special lady. The redhead with creamy alabaster skin and luminous eyes was a professional actress, starring every Saturday night in a Berkeley stage production of The Rocky Horror Show.

Shanna and her husband were swing-party enthusiasts. In her early 20’s, the East Bay sophisticate had a wardrobe of kinky outfits and an eight-foot boa constrictor that would later crawl all over her naked body in Deviations. She had that wholesome enthusiasm of a sex player absolutely free of guilt about her erotic adventures.

Like most of the ladies I called the “Sweethearts,” Shanna was more hetero than bi-sexual. Her “screen cherry” debut with Mike Horner was so sizzling hot that during a break, I swore I saw steam rising from her bottom. The Sweethearts really care about doing a good job. They’ll know their lines, follow direction and give the best performances they possibly can.

In nearly seven years and roughly 200 movies, Shanna McCullough established herself as one of the adult industry’s all-time great stars. She worked with dedication both on and off the set. When I shot her in a Blacks and Blondes scene, years after her debut, the pudginess in her thighs‌—‌evident in Deviations‌—‌ was replaced by lean hard muscle from hours of working out; she sported a careful tan that skin like hers could attain only in a salon.

She was an inspiration to others: In his speech at the 1991 AVN Awards, Rick Savage said, “I want to thank the first actress I ever had sex with in a video. Because if she hadn’t been so hot and such a fucking inspiration, I may not have ever made another video. So thank you, Shanna McCullough!” When Shanna arrived at the Harlem Candy location, she didn’t wait around like one of South’s prima donnas for production assistants to tote her heavy wardrobe bags. If I hadn’t been available to grab one of them, she’d have cheerfully hefted them inside by herself. After she’d performed with her usual excellence, collected her pay and left, one of the little L.A. chippies exclaimed in puzzlement, “So that was Shanna McCullough. She’s a big star. But she didn’t act like a star.”

Director Pachard sighed. “The real ones never do.” (Well, almost never.)

When Shanna McCullough decided to pursue her mainstream career exclusively, her retirement from adult movies was yet another class act. Unlike most adult actresses who skulk away licking their wounds and snarling invective, Shanna wrote a letter to AVN (May, ’91 issue), thanking readers for voting her into the magazine’s Hall of Fame. “I had such a good time when I made my first movie, Deviations (May ’83)” she wrote, “that I wanted to do it again!” She praised directors: “I know I improved my acting skills over the years due to their coaching”; Hyapatia Lee: “my first real experience with a woman… and I couldn’t have had a better teacher”; the men she’d worked with: “they were so good at what they do and were always very nice to me”; and the movie crews: “we felt like a family together and had lots of fun.” “I got a chance to live out many of my fantasies, and do things I never imagined I would do. I met a lot of great people, made some close friends and got to travel around the world. What more could you ask for in a job?” Shanna closed by thanking the fans‌—‌“Without them there would be no adult industry!”

The adult industry owes Shanna McCullough a lot of thanks, too.

x x x x x x

After a UCLA Film School screening of his offbeat feature The Ruling Class, director J. Lee Thompson told the student audience that directing the great actor Peter O’Toole was like shopping at a bargain basement. It was as if the star were laying his wares out on a table: he’d play a scene first one way, then another, and another, leaving the choice of which approach to use up to the director.

I was reminded of that UCLA seminar when rehearsing scenes for Sizzle With Samantha with Samantha Fox. She, too, could play a scene many different ways‌—‌each equally believable‌—‌making directing as straightforward as answering a multiple-choice question.

Like Shanna McCullough, Samantha was a skilled professional actress without the qualifications “adult” or “X-rated” added. She won the Adult Film Association of America’s Best Actress award two years in a row for Jack ’N’ Jill (1980) and This Lady Is A Tramp (1981). Samantha was a favorite of the late adult movie craftsman Chuck Vincent, starring in Roommates which was acclaimed as more closely resembling Hollywood fare than porn. Though no classic beauty like Annette Haven, the compact curly-haired brunette had an attractive, ethnic mystique, like the Eastern European gypsy fortune tellers she claimed were her ancestors.

Samantha retired from porn before the Video Age got into full swing, her long-term relationship with ex-porn actor Bobby Astyr‌—‌one of the industry’s few great love affairs‌—‌still intact.

x x x x x x

“That’s my butt!” the new lady announced to the audience admiring her racehorse rump, which filled the projection screen. “How do you like my butt?”

This was no shy ingenue, uneasy about the throng at Juliet Anderson’s premier party for Educating Nina staring into her body crevices. The star of Juliet’s first effort as a producer was proud of her debut. Nina Hartley would soon be showing the whole world a lot more than her shapely behind. Network TV viewers would stare into her other remarkable physical feature: elegant pale blue eyes that transfixed the audiences of talk shows where Nina spread her message that erotica could do more good than evil. On Donahue, she said adult videos opened sexual communication among couples and did much less social harm than slasher movies. “I’d rather have my child watch someone making love, even if it’s a little mechanical, than watching a woman getting decapitated or mutilated.”

Addressing groups as diverse as the Lifestyles conventions, the National Sex Symposium and Expo, and the National Organization of Women, the articulate registered nurse became a valuable spokesperson for the adult industry. Like her mentor Juliet Anderson, Nina was one of the sex industry’s crusaders, those rare women who use erotica as a forum to discuss social concerns. “Most people have either mercenary reasons or sexual reasons for entering the adult film industry,” said Annette Haven in an AVN interview. “There are very few of us who are involved in it for idealistic or sociological reasons. I think I’m one of the only maniacs like that.” Many actresses, such as Ginger Lynn, Ona Zee, and even Traci Lords have declared erotica valuable in enhancing people’s sex lives but few would clash with virulent anti-porn groups in public arenas as Haven and Hartley did. America may not yet be ready to elect a porn-platformed politician like Italian Parliamentarian/sex star Ilona Staller (“La Cicciolina” or “Little Fleshy One”) who offered to help win peace in the Middle East by making love to Saddam Hussein. But should the call go out for an American sex star/legislator, Nina Hartley would be the prime candidate.

Nina practiced her message of erotic freedom in her private life. This daughter of Berkeley intellectuals claimed to have both a husband and a wife, as did porn actress Nina Alexander. Unlike the similar setup tried by Roseanne and Tom Arnold, Nina’s worked; 1994 marked their twelfth year as a trio. Husband Dave often accompanied her on shoots. He enjoyed watching Nina in action and she enjoyed being watched by him. Their mutual “wife,” Bobby Lilly, heads the anti-censorship group, Californians Against Censorship Together (CAL-ACT).

Like others with successful long-term careers, Nina chose her roles on her own terms, refusing those involving rape, domination, coercion, or pain as pleasure. A Nina Hartley character, she told the Donahue audience, “wants to be there. She’s in control, she knows what’s going on and she’s having a good time.”

Her face was too angular for what she called the “classic California look” of Lynns Ginger and Amber and Nina worked for about two-thirds of their high-end day rates. But she worked steadily, appearing in 310 films and videos over a career spanning a decade by 1994. In addition to acting, she now produces and directs features and sex-ed tapes.

Nina was no sex athlete like Lilly Marlene but she was a “screamer” who enjoyed the action for its own sake. Health-conscious, she distrusted some of the ingredients in Albolene Cream and used her own white plastic squeeze-bottle of water-based lubricant. She advocated the use of the spermicide Nonoxynol-9 as protection, along with the external come-shot, against AIDS. She helped other ladies with everything from hygiene to mental well-being. Australian starlet Alice Springs said her first vaginal orgasm came during a scene with Nina. Having started in porn at the ripe old age of 23, Nina said that at 19 she’d never have been able to undergo the demands of porn stardom. With Angel Kelly, Porsche Lynn and Jeanna Fine, Nina established The Pink Ladies Social Club to help adult actresses cope. Eventually the Pink Ladies shot their own productions.

I found Nina Hartley to be one of the most cheerful performers I ever directed, bantering easily with cast and crew. Her enthusiasm could brighten a somber set better than a 5-K arc light. She once arrived for a scene in a problem-plagued Spinelli production, and Spinelli’s wife Roz exclaimed‌—‌as if Nina were a good-luck charm, “Ah! Here she is! The most wonderful woman on this whole shoot has arrived!”

“I’m not the most wonderful woman here,” Nina replied. “You are. But I’ll take second!”

Nina called herself “a sex industry worker. I’m a feminist. I enjoy my work and I don’t feel exploited. A person who works in a bank and hates it is being exploited. My job isn’t for everybody. I’m a bi-sexual exhibitionist making a good living.”

Having had the pleasure of working several times throughout the latter 1980s on movies in which this great lady performed, my personal opinion is that anyone who ever says anything bad about Nina Hartley is lying.

x x x x x x

Lady Paree was pissed. Contrary to rumor, she declared in AVN (September, ’93), she was no transsexual; she had never been a man. “I’m a woman, I was born a woman, I’ve had a child and I have a monthly period.” Offering to take doubters straight to a gynecologist, she added, “The business says it wants black women and I’m a black woman who doesn’t have hangups like some of the other black women in the business. I do anals and DPs on top of everything else. My phone should be ringing off the hook and it’s pissing me off.”

Rumors or no rumors, a tall black beauty with a 34-24-34 figure would’ve had no trouble finding work half a dozen years earlier. But she fell victim to the more vicious backstabbing among porn starlets of the ’90s reflecting the increased competition. Just as the ease and cheapness of shooting video had brought on the “Smut Glut,” the promise of wealth that attracted young women to porn created a “girl glut.”

By the early 1990s, getting rich quick was becoming more and more difficult for adult industry actresses. The trend of a porn career being nothing more than a launching pad for a dance career increased. There was a new ecdysiast market of “gentlemen’s clubs”‌—‌upscale establishments for a growing number of successful middle-aged businessmen born in the post-World War II baby boom. Here, they could make deals over steak and lobster in raunchy good-old-boy style without regard for the sensibilities of female associates who usually stayed away from places where nearly nude “lap dancers” rubbed bare breasts against Armani suits. The men had money, spent money and the dancers made money.

Parsimonious porn companies began paying actresses by the scene instead of by the day (such as Teri Weigel’s dozen scene and box cover deal with Video Exclusives in 1991). A lady could spend five days on five separate shoots and not make more than a thousand dollars total.

In the early 1990s, AVN writers and respondents noted the declining quality of porn’s ladies: “They really don’t have any personality today,” said Chuck Lockhart of American Video, one of several retailers concerned about the paucity of saleable “names.” “Seka, Amber or Ginger‌—‌there’s nobody like them in the industry today. The stardom isn’t there anymore.” Director Jim Enright echoed Lockhart’s concern. “You get girls who come in off the street, they’re pretty and they get the lead. There was Ginger Lynn and Amber Lynn for awhile, but as far as the names that would run off your tongue like water‌—‌Marilyn Chambers, Seka, Veronica Hart, Samantha Fox‌—‌the consummate actresses who always knew what they were doing and delivered sex to the screen for the viewer and did it well. Now it’s just sex for pay.” “I came in and left at a good time,” said Ginger Lynn. “And I would not go back with the way things are right now.”

Beautiful and curvaceous, Sandra Scream entered porn a few years too late to reap the megabucks of superstardom that would have been her due in the last half of the 1980s. She set out working only with her husband but planned to branch out with other men and get on as many box covers as possible. Then she decided to limit herself to a few girl-girl scenes and still shoots. Sandra explained in an AVN interview that she was tired of being paid for one scene but waiting around on the set all day to do it. She decided, like most other erotic entertainers in the early ’90s, to concentrate on her dance career instead. “…I realized that there’s not going to be another Ginger Lynn or Amber Lynn. The pool of talent is so large and there are so many new girls.”

“The girls in this business are so replaceable,” said Kristara Barrington. “You’re well-known for a certain amount of time and there are new girls coming into the business every day who are going to take your spot.”

The extremely transient nature of female porn stardom wrought by the video age contrasts with the world of the male star, where long careers are more the rule than the exception. But studs, too, had to contend with the perils of change.

x x x x x x

Chapter 15

A FEW GOOD MEN
1980s to 1990s

Driving over the Bay Bridge to his first porno acting job, Richard Pacheco kept an eye out for cops as he practiced stroking himself erect. Filled with anxiety over his debut in the 35-millimeter feature The Candy Stripers, he’d broken out in hives several days before‌—‌cured by a doctor’s prescription for Valium and extra sleep.

In an Erotic Film Guide article, Pacheco described the humiliation of his first performance. At first, he had no problems getting hard in Nancy Hoffman’s mouth each time the cameraman was ready to shoot another angle of the action. Then Pacheco began to notice her wincing from 45 minutes of kneeling on concrete. When director Bob Chinn said, “Okay, now, I want you to come,” Pacheco saw her grimace and “my cock turned into a dead slug.” After a lunch break, and another three and a half hours, “People were lying around sleeping, snoring, and just plain waiting for me to get it up. The pressure was short-circuiting fuses in my brain. Nancy even fell asleep on my thigh while we were just sitting there during a break. I sat there masturbating myself and praying for the Russians to launch a surprise attack.”

Most new men, no matter how horny, can’t “get wood” when faced with probing cameras, harried directors, hot lights and cold ladies. With thousands of dollars at stake, producers‌—‌myself included‌—‌preferred to hire only the “reliables.”

The actress Raven complained, “You work with the same five guys over and over again.” In the January, 1985 AVN issue, columnist Darla Hewitt wrote that Jamie Gillis, John Leslie, Ron Jeremy and Eric Edwards have “done way too many films.” Four years after Hewitt’s column, the manager of an Arizona video store with a large female clientele wrote to AVN with the same question Darla had asked: “Where are all the new men?”

There’s no shortage of would-be screen studs. Companies with published mail-order addresses like mine received frequent letters from men eager to break in. “I can have up to five orgasms at fifteen minute intervals,” wrote a 27-year-old Vancouver, British Columbia man with “eight inches when aroused.” A “veteran of many orgies” and “very good at sex,” a 22-year-old Missourian was free to devote himself to stud work. “I am single, I don’t even have a girlfriend”‌—‌which might account for his next line: “I just always think about sex.” Soon to be honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy, a 23-year-old sailor in Miami wrote, “I’ve traveled around the world in the past 4 years and became quite experienced in a bedroom atmosphere.” This came from a middle-aged (33) male “above average endowed” from Salt Lake City: “I am very much tired of living my life working in some stupid job. My whole life ambitions (sic) is to become a X-Rated Movie Star.” The ladies in Superior’s office would pass around nude photos‌—‌some with erections‌—‌sent by the wanna-bes‌—‌and grade them on a scale of 1 to 10.

What does it take to be one of the “reliables” who hog most of the stud work? How do they stay erect for hours and deliver orgasms on cue?

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Almost any healthy male filled with lust for his screen partner will be able to perform but men who rely on the ladies they work with for inspiration are headed for failure. Some of porn’s most beautiful women have attitudes that make them as sexy as Medusa on a bad-hair day. In the midst of a nasty divorce, Chase Manhattan let everyone on the Sheepless in Montana shoot know how much she hated men. The best studs develop internal cues, fantasies they can count on in un-sexy situations. The technique, as John Leslie pointed out, is a form of “method acting.”

On that first shoot, Pacheco finally did what a stud is supposed to: “I closed my eyes and started all over… I was back on the couch in some rec room with the first girl who ever let me finger her. I could hear the Kingston Trio on the record player. There was life in that old memory yet.” Pacheco reached his climax and “heard the cheering of millions.”

During a break on the Harlem Candy shoot, Henri Pachard insisted he wasn’t joking about the best way to treat penis limpus. “Forget this bullshit of everyone talking in whispers and mincing about on tiptoe so as not to distract the guy. Hell, it makes him feel like he’s at his own funeral. No, the way to do it is to ridicule his ass. Point a finger at him and go, ‘Ha ha ha! Look at this wimp! Look at that shrivelled little putz! Guy thinks he’s a stud; he couldn’t get wood in a lumberyard!’

“You get the guy mad, get his blood pumping. Next thing you know, it’s ‘wood city.’ Works every time.”

“Didn’t work for you!” said Amber Lynn, starting a bout of laughter that left Joe Elliot choking on his potato salad.

The Pachard theory reportedly worked when Matt Daniels couldn’t function for a doggie-style scene in Spinelli’s The Party, even though it was with his off-screen girlfriend, Heather Lere. After she cussed him out in front of cast and crew, according to witnesses, the agitated actor slapped her butt and proceeded to‌—‌in Lere’s term‌—‌“spring board.”

I learned by accident the best way to deal with a non-functional actor. Women described Christian Chase as “gorgeous.” The Chippendale-type male stripper had dark, curly hair, a matinee-idol face and a chiseled physique. But he also had a small penis‌—‌by porn’s distorted standards. He’d overheard Mauvaise De Noire saying she liked Jamie Gillis’ “big hard cock.” When his turn came to work with her, Chase couldn’t produce.

Fortunately, Gillis himself arrived for a later scene. He agreed to provide hard inserts with Mauvaise for $50, after I shot her sex “sim” with Chase. But in the midst of the softcore action, Chase got hard, did the penetrations and delivered a pop-shot. “I expected that to happen,” said the veteran Gillis. “I didn’t want to say it because I was hoping to cop an extra fifty, but you were doing the right thing. When you tell a guy you don’t care if it’s soft, you take the pressure off him. Then he gets involved with the girl’s body and his natural response comes through.” (That’s why it’s best to break in new men in group scenes‌—‌where more experienced studs can “carry” the action.)

The technique didn’t work with porn’s Burt Reynolds clone, Sasha Gabor. The Norwegian native arrived at the Dirty Pictures location in his black Trans Am with the “BANDIT” license plate, wearing his bright red “Bandit” jacket and a Stetson. Waiting for his scene with Amy Rogers, he kept telling me he was raring to go. When she began to undress him, his erection threatened to split his zipper. Then his jacket sleeve got snagged on a shirt button. In the time it took to free the garment, his erection disappeared. The sponges holding back Amy’s period turned him off further. We had to shoot the scene sim; Sasha’s penis stayed dormant. The only thing “stiff” was his attempt to maintain his Bandit bluster. I was glad I had those Herschel Savage close-ups.

Most porn stalwarts have done “stunt cock” work. John Holmes said he was on a shoot where none of the men could perform. He provided the hardcore close-ups for nine scenes, creating a film with eight men who all appeared to have foot-long erections.

Sometimes non-actors, assured that their faces won’t be seen, get to play hero. Ace Walker had shot a sim feature he couldn’t sell. A distributor offered to buy it if Ace put in hard inserts. Ace hired me to run the camera while he himself did the stunt cocking. I hired my UCLA buddy “Ross” as my assistant cameraman. Like most of Tinseltown’s broke and unemployed single men, Ross was also impoverished sexually. He stared hungrily at the naked ladies. Distracted with directing chores, Ace couldn’t get hard. “Uh… could I try?” Ross offered. Ace was happy to let him.

That day, Ross became a legend. Bursting with pent-up horniness, he provided every inch of footage Ace needed to sell the film, including five come-shots. He even put a camera on his shoulder and captured one of them as a point-of-view.

Word of Ross’s feat spread and Steve Scott hired him to star in several hour-long 16s. Though he performed well, Ross quit what could have been a glorious career and returned to his pin-ups and his right hand. “I guess I have a hang-up,” he told me. “I started feeling really uncomfortable having sex with girls who don’t like me.”

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Adult movie actresses traditionally complain about everything on porn shoots being geared solely for the men’s pleasure and not theirs. But the voluptuous British redhead Sarah-Jane Hamilton found that being treated like a man was also unsatisfying. The green-eyed beauty with the remarkable talent for having gushing orgasms at will complained in AVN, “They’ll say, ‘Okay, Sarah, do a cumshot in three minutes…’ I’m not like a man; I’m emotional; I’ve got to get into it; I’ve got to feel good… As long as I squirt at the right time in the right direction, I could be a potato. It doesn’t matter to them at all… I hope when directors read this, they’ll know from now on not to treat me like a potato that squirts.”

Like a potato, a porn actor must have a thick skin. Jerome Tanner liked to slip Ron Jeremy into scenes at the last moment, knowing the women’s protests wouldn’t turn Ron off. On one of the occasions Jerry sent Ron into a scene I was shooting for Western Visuals, I was sure disaster was imminent. “I will not work with Ron Jeremy!” screamed Carol Z. She finally agreed to do so for an extra $100, loudly proclaimed she was selling out cheaply. When Carol complained that his nine inches were penetrating too deeply in doggie position, he said, “Well, you do the moving then,” remaining courteous and concerned for her comfort while he continued to perform.

There’s some truth in the cliché of the porn stud as an unemotional jock with a Pavlovian penis response. Such men have an advantage in the porno business. They enjoy the action of sex with the unself-conscious kinesthesis of a basketball star sinking a three-pointer from 25 feet to win a championship just before the final buzzer. To porn’s athletes, a king-sized bed, like a gridiron, is just another place to exhibit physical prowess. A second come-shot is akin to hitting a grand slam home run.

Many porno studs have backgrounds in competitive sports. Billy Dee was a tennis instructor, Jerry Butler an amateur hockey star, and Buck Adams was a professional prizefighter. A tradition among performers living in the San Fernando Valley, home of the porn industry, is the Saturday morning touch football game. On a shoot at a popular Novato, California location with a huge lawn, studs waiting for their scenes played tackle. Skinny Tom Byron (a skilled pass receiver) almost had to drop out of a sex scene after one too many collisions with the ground. Whenever three or more studs are waiting for their scenes, the inevitable wrestling matches and karate demonstrations occur. Butler and Adams, buddies and intense competitors, felt comfortable enough in their friendship to bash each other silly playing boxers in Rocky X: The Final Round. Butler broke his hand and Adams was hospitalized with a concussion. Tales of real-life brawls involving porn studs are legion.

In contrast to the jocks, there is another group of men who form a much higher proportion of porn studs than their numbers in the American male population would indicate‌—‌a group not known for athletic accomplishment.

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Jewish boys and Catholic girls. Out of the Catholic school system, which AVN writer Jackie L. Watt likened to “a network of porn-star training camps,” came Candida Royalle, Shauna Grant, Tiffany Million, Stacey Donovan, Melanie Moore, Teri Weigel and Kelly O’Dell, among others. The stricter the rules‌—‌goes the explanation‌—‌the greater the rebellion against them.

“If one of the thinnest books in the world is Professional Jewish Athletes,” said Paul Thomas, “then one of the thickest is Famous Jewish Porn Stars.” The list reads like a stud Hall of Fame: Thomas, Herschel Savage, Jamie Gillis, Ron Jeremy, Jerry Butler, Marc Wallice, Richard Bolla, Richard Pacheco, William Margold‌—‌and many more. In one of the articles in the November, 1981 Playboy on the still-new adult video industry, Harry Reems cited his “classic Jewish, repressed upbringing,” but American men in all religions and ethnic groups suffer restrictive morality. “Maybe Jewish guys are good in bed,” says AVN publisher Paul Fishbein.

Savage, Jeremy, Butler, Gillis, Bolla, Pacheco and Reems all pursued mainstream stage and screen careers first. While waiting for his big break, Jamie Gillis became tired of driving a taxi‌—‌as did another struggling Jewish actor who later took the name Anthony Spinelli.

What motivates those with solid careers outside the industry‌—‌such as Mike Horner, an established white collar professional‌—‌who don’t need to depend on porno money? Is stilted, choreographed screen sex, with hot lights, intruding cameras, nervous directors and grumpy ladies really satisfying? Or is there an identity factor? Before he soured on porn, Ace Walker used to boast, “I get paid to get laid.” It was a certification of studhood. A self-styled “nerd” before joining porn’s elite fraternity, the Clark Kentish Jonathan Morgan was watching a porno with a girlfriend who chided him, “I’ll bet you couldn’t do that.” After pestering Jim South for weeks, Morgan finally got a chance to prove himself in a scene for Paul Norman. Morgan reported his triumph to the girlfriend who, he said, “dropped me like a bad habit.”

With the newly re-attached penis his ex-wife Lorena had severed, John Wayne Bobbitt readily admitted he got into porn to prove his prowess. He perceived the need to do so while enjoying a lap-dance administered by Tina Tyler in a Vancouver, British Columbia strip club. According to AVN’s “Tales From The Crack” column, Bobbitt asked the pornstress if she knew who he was. She didn’t. When he identified himself, Tina retorted, “No wonder you didn’t get a hard-on!”

Upon the return of tumescence, the ex-Marine rose to the challenge of stud-dom. He capitalized on his tabloid fame to star in Leisure Time Entertainment’s John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut. In a review of Leisure Time’s new best seller (a claimed 60,000 pieces!), AVN’s Gene Ross reported that Bobbitt performed adequately. Ross saluted the surgeons who left nothing more than “a faint scar encircling his stalk.”

Extending the lucrative theme of penis-blade encounters, Bobbitt opted for penile enlargement surgery, to be videotaped by Leisure Time for a feature titled Frankenpenis. Then, like that other celebrity-for-more-than-porn, Traci Lords, Bobbitt cut a record, singing the old Chuck Berry tune My Ding-a-Ling.

The danger with assuming a macho stud self-image is the horrible crash-landing of the ego when the penis takes a nosedive. For Randy Potes‌—‌AKA Cal Jammer‌—‌that stud image was everything. “Cal obsessed about his erections,” wrote AVN’s Gene Ross. “…he told me that after 20 years of living a wastrel’s existence, sex was about the only thing he had left going for him.” Able to perform 16 scenes in four days, the dyslexic Potes wasn’t hired for his dialogue readings. Then, plagued by marital problems and that bane of porn stars, the IRS, Potes began failing. He fell into the funk of impotence anxiety, worsened by watching his estranged actress wife Adrian continue her career in porn. With the O.J. Simpson murder case as “inspiration,” Potes set out on the night of January 25, 1995, to murder her. Adrian locked herself in her bathroom, heard a “pop,” and emerged to find Potes lying on her lawn amidst his splattered brains.

The men with perhaps the best attitude toward stud-dom are those who aren’t in it for the money, the image, the chance to show their acting skills or the need to prove something. For them, the worst day of sex is better than the best day without it.

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On a ledge near the ceiling of the armory-sized building, a five-foot long iguana sleepily observed the bustling crowd below. “He thinks he owns the place,” laughed Willem Lowen, the owner of the huge vivarium. “He’s big enough so that nobody tries to convince him otherwise.” Lowen, who called himself the biggest reptile and amphibian dealer in the country, was giving me a tour. Among the 10,000 live creatures were frogs the color of fire and snakes the size of fire hoses. “How big do these get?” asked a woman pointing to a small tortoise crawling in the sand of a terrarium. Lowen spread his arms like a fisherman about to tell a lie. “In a hundred years, they’ll reach 300 pounds. They’re often mistaken for Volkswagens.”

The affable, busy herpetologist didn’t need to work in pornos. But when I called on him to act in Night Moves, Deviations, Running Wild and E.X., the reliable stud always took the time to do it. He was in it for the sex. In the ’81 Playboy, Pacheco said that most adult film actors get the majority of their sex action on the job.

Some men are horny all the time. After a three-scene day on a porn set, John Holmes was known to go looking for a prostitute. Working as a production manager and photographer, the frail-looking porno renaissance man Joe Elliot would be a bundle of nerves‌—‌which never stopped him from getting it up when called on to be in a sex scene. (“He’s big in only one place,” said my girlfriend Shelly.) Joey Silvera was notorious for “recruiting” new ladies into the business. So was Don Fernando, an inveterate prowler of bus stations. On the set of E.X., he told other interested men about an East Bay shopping mall with a staircase he would stand under to stare up women’s skirts.

I asked Gillis during a busy week of shoots if he ever got sick and tired of sex. He thought for a moment, then said, “The way I look at it, sex is like food. After a heavy meal you might swear you’ll never eat again, but a few hours later, you’re hungry.”

For some men, it’s not a matter of hours, but of minutes. Right after Mike Ranger ended a long day with his fourth come-shot, his eyes followed a shapely waitress in the pizzeria where I treated the cast and crew to a late supper. “I can’t believe you’re still horny, Mike,” I said.

“Well, I got a problem…” Reminded that his “problem” was making him $500 a day in features, Mike added, “Well, maybe it’s not a problem.”

Among porn’s satyrs, one man is in a class by himself. Ron Jeremy reminds me of the pudgy Australian marsupial mouse that goes into a sex frenzy and fucks itself to death. But those who wish Ron would do that might be in for a long wait. Like the pink Energizer Bunny in TV commercials plugging the endurance of batteries, Ron Jeremy keeps going and going…

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“He’s doing it!”

The call brought everyone not involved with dressing the set for the next scene into the den to watch Ron Jeremy suck his own penis. The combination of spear-like, nine-inch erection and short, squat torso let him do it without contortions. Jeremy said he discovered the talent, showcased in Fascination, Centerfold Fever and The Devil In Miss Jones II, when he was in the third grade. Jeremy won $10 betting fellow Boy Scouts in Queens, where he grew up, that he could do it. “As a kid I’d masturbate three or four hours a day,” he told Hustler writer Lonn Friend. “When I got horny in school or in a grocery store, I’d run to the ladies’ room and get myself off in two minutes.”

Women at porn industry gatherings say Ron still can be found in ladies’ rooms. His public couplings‌—‌and attempted public couplings‌—‌are legendary. Jerry Butler wrote that Jeremy’s persistence in pursuing seduction “brings women to tears.” According to AVN’s L.R. Goldman, the late New York orgy club Plato’s Retreat was Jeremy’s “home away from home.”

Despite being a skilled actor, articulate writer, competent director and reliable stud, Ron Jeremy is one of the most reviled of porn figures. Porno scribes have made a cottage industry of reporting “the rotund one’s” transgressions: from AVN: “(Jeremy) keeps track of his on-screen stats the way Pete Rose counted base hits…” “From the ‘I worked for Ron Jeremy for 10 cents an hour club’… He stipulated that everyone show up on the set at precisely 9 AM. Ron came trickling in at 11.” “Jeremy’s picture is in the dictionary under the definition of ‘cheap’,” wrote Gene Ross. AVN told Jeremy they’d lay off him when he stopped making “shit videos.” In the Hustler Erotic Video Guide, an unnamed source says, “Jeremy could give bubonic plague to rats.”

On the backs of the Polaroids I took of naked models at Jim South’s casting sessions, I’d list what the performers wouldn’t do and who they wouldn’t work with. As often as “no anal,” ladies said “no Ron Jeremy.” I was surprised when South told me I could hire Ron for only $350 a day. In 1986, the range for established males was $500 to $1,000. AVN gleefully reported the rumor that Jeremy had paid $100 of his own money to work with Trixie Tyler. An often-repeated industry gag-line was “If the director never said ‘action,’ Ron Jeremy would never get laid.”

The jowly, beaky actor was no face out of Gentlemen’s Quarterly but neither were most porn studs. Jeremy had the wit and delivery to play the stand-up comic circuit in the Catskills. He’d been a teacher of retarded and emotionally-disturbed children. He played the piano and violin, and enjoyed art and poetry. When ladies complained that he was plowing too deeply, he’d always back off. Kristara Barrington called him “the best at giving head.” He was pushy, obnoxious and egotistical but so was John Leslie‌—‌a ladies’ favorite. What was the problem, I wondered.

“He smells,” Misty Regan told me. “I love Ron as a person, but maybe all that body hair… Well, you know…”

Before announcing the many winners at the 1993 AVN Awards Show, Angela Summers got “the anticipated guffaws” with “AVN has more categories than Ron Jeremy has back hair…” “Jeremy’s pubic hair reminds me of Macbeth,” said Jerry Butler, regaling a captive on-set audience with one of his fast-patter riffs of serial insults. “It’s like Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane; Ron’s pubic hair spreads all over his body… Wanna save the rain forest? Plant some of Ron’s follicles in the Amazon.” I don’t recall if it was Butler who said, “Ron Jeremy looks like a frog that fell into a vat of Rogaine.”

It took a lot of chutzpah to be Ron Jeremy. I saw that when Jerry Tanner sent him into a Blacks and Blondes loop I was shooting. The athletic blonde, Deejay, was having her usual wonderful time with Ray Victory and F. M. Bradley. As expected with Ron’s arrival, she stormed off to haggle more money out of Tanner. As expected, Ron seemed impervious.

Directors complain about Jeremy trying to wrest control of a scene from them. But it had been a long day, and I was tired enough to let him take over. Jeremy wanted to engineer “triple penetration.” He arranged himself and Ray so they lay on their backs with their heads at opposite ends; their legs scissoring each other. The idea was to put their erections together so Deejay could squat down and put both into her vagina. Then she was to lean forward so Brad could straddle the three of them and penetrate her rear.

After wilting again and again from the contact with Jeremy’s body, Ray finally got hard enough to join Ron in Deejay’s vagina. But they stretched her too much for Brad to make a rear entry. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said. “It’s like trying to get my dick in a coin slot.”

Irritated by the failed stunt, Deejay insisted on spending some time working with only the two black men. I took a cutaway shot of Ron stroking himself in the background and saw alarm in his eyes. It struck me that maybe he tried to control group scenes because he feared that if he didn’t, he’d be left out entirely.

Ron Jeremy’s pushiness gained him some success in making the transition to a non-porno acting career. He had an uncanny knack for showing up at every media-reported gathering in both the adult and mainstream entertainment industries. He was a good friend of the late comedian Sam Kinison (a dedicated porno fan). He hobnobbed with Corey Feldman, Weird Al Yankovic and Rodney Dangerfield. Actor/comic Eddie Murphy (another porn fan) knew the hirsute stud well enough to include a Ron Jeremy routine in his stage act.

A member of SAG, Jeremy landed work in the Don Johnson movie Dead Bang and Charlie Sheen’s upcoming The Chase. He became a regular in drive-in “B” movies. In a review of They Bite, Joe Bob Briggs mentioned seeing Jeremy in a non-porno for the second time in two weeks. Lauding Jeremy’s persistence in his quest to cross over to “legitimate films,” Briggs wrote, “Ron, if you’re reading this, nobody deserves it more.”

Ron Jeremy has been called cheap, crude, pushy, obnoxious, egotistical, and gross. But no one can call him a production liability. Even his worst detractors concede that Ron is a professional who can be counted on to conduct himself as such. The same can’t be said for all of porn’s leading men.

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Anyone can have a bad day. On Pachard’s Harlem Candy, the usually reliable Ray Victory couldn’t get wood after a night of indulging in cocaine (which he swore not to do again). John Leslie, two-time winner of the Erotica Award for Best Actor (Talk Dirty to Me and Wicked Sensations), reportedly blew seventeen straight takes making a cameo in Lethal Passions. Everyone screws up now and then. But there are some guys who make screw-ups a habit.

The alleged cause of Wayne Summers’ frequent bouts of penis limpus was his inability to abstain from sex before a scheduled acting job. After a heart attack from smoking crack cocaine, Buck Adams included anti-drug messages on his videos; then he suffered a second coronary‌—‌reportedly from the same cause. After establishing himself as a talented actor, Randy Spears began stiffing productions. Denying rumors of a blood disease, drug abuse and positive AIDS tests, Spears promised Paul Thomas he’d finish his role as “Prince Stallion” in P.T.’s Cinderella. Instead, Spears pulled another no-show and his part in the climactic “grand ball” had to be played by a stand-in who kept his back to the camera at all times.

Then there are the real bad boys of porn.

Jerry Butler was good-looking, well built, sexually reliable and a talented actor. But I was afraid to hire him. “Jerry’s like having Dennis the Menace on the set,” said Rachel Ryan. Among his antics were sneaking doggie biscuits into a gourmet food spread for the cast and crew of Moonlusting II and masturbating himself to the point of climax, then squirting on director Ron Jeremy who‌—‌Butler thought‌—‌was proceeding too slowly. He also urinated on Jeremy for taking too long in a shower. Suspecting Hal Freeman’s wife and daughter of whispering remarks about him, Butler agreed to work for Freeman while secretly planning to stiff the shoot.

For one so sensitive to slights, Butler took great delight in inflicting them. On the set of Oriental Treatment, he taunted Aja for make-up that looked like “a face by Pillsbury… the Poppin’ Fresh dough girl… she’s either that or an ‘Eskeemo’ woman doing porn.” On the same shoot he reportedly never let up on Steve Drake: “Oh, Mr. Pectoral, stop flexing… ‘Mr. Director, Mr. Director, stop the cameras, I think I’ve got a follicle out of place!’” Butler admitted to having a compulsion to poke and prod people to find their weak spots. In his autobiography Raw Talent, Butler wrote, “…I have my hammer and chisel. I want to find out where the veins and arteries are hiding. So there I am, chip, chip, chip. And they’re saying ‘No. No. No.’”

I always felt there were more than enough things to go wrong on a porn shoot without having someone deliberately trying to create them.

Raw Talent was supposed to be Butler’s bridge-burning goodbye to the porno business. He insulted half the people he worked with; instead of mentioning Shanna McCullough’s acting professionalism, he dwelled on his disgust with the texture of her wet pubic hair. He “guessed” that 70% of performers have herpes‌—‌and hide it. He predicted that the industry was heading for an AIDS holocaust. But the book didn’t do what Butler anticipated. It didn’t make him rich. It didn’t lead to multi-tome publishing contracts or a glorious career in Hollywood. Instead Butler came crawling back to the adult industry, apologizing. And got hired by the very producers he’d bad-mouthed. AVN reported Butler’s regrets about Raw Talent: “’I hurt a lot of people with that book and I’m sorry,’ Jerry repeats over and over like some mantra.”

Butler always said he wanted to die of a heart attack: “I want my last heartbeat to come because I pushed myself too far.” While awaiting his own coronary, he doesn’t mind giving a few to those around him.

Porn’s baddest bad boy, John Curtis Holmes, was also its most famous actor‌—‌due to his 13-inch erection. His career spanned the entire history of commercial hardcore sex in America‌—‌until his death of AIDS in 1988. He claimed to have been in over 2,200 features and loops and to have had sex with over 14,000 women. In the early part of his career, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Holmes was clean-cut, soft-spoken, and polite. His face and manner nurtured the misconception that he was, in reality, the actor Ken Osmond, who had played Eddie Haskell in the TV series Leave It To Beaver. (It amused Holmes to let people believe the identity mistake.) In the micro-budget, 16-millimeter Johnny Wadd detective series, which catapulted both Holmes and director Bob Chinn to X-rated fame, he cheerfully worked long days and helped construct sets and rig lights. He seemed to embody the work ethic of his Ohio origins. Pioneer hardcore actor Ric Lutze remembered Holmes as “a puritan against smoking and drinking,” who delivered food to the needy.

By 1978, according to Joe Elliot who worked on Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls, Holmes had become a “wild man,” who burned down a set trying to cook on a prop stove and totaled a bus he took for a joyride. He became known for dominating a production‌—‌refusing to show up on time, follow scripted dialogue or even change positions (once he got those 13 inches pumped up, he didn’t want interruptions that might deflate them). He’d lock himself in bathrooms to freebase cocaine. He’d fly into paranoid rages, throw temper tantrums and pick fistfights.

Then came the bludgeon murders. In 1981, Holmes allegedly set up wealthy L.A. nightclub owner and reputed drug dealer Adel “Eddie Nash” Nasrallah to be robbed at gunpoint by a gang of heroin and coke addicts. The enraged Nasrallah, who’d considered Holmes one of his best friends, forced the actor to lead a group of thugs to find the robbers. With a gun to his head, Holmes was forced to witness Nasrallah’s goons bash four people to death with steel pipes.

Charged as an accessory to the “Four on the Floor” murders and afraid to testify against Nasrallah, Holmes went on the lam. He was apprehended in Florida and brought to trial in California. He still refused to testify and a jury in 1982 found him innocent. Holmes returned to porno work.

According to Holmes’s ex-wife Laurie, he first tested positive for AIDS in 1985. She recanted after being told that if Holmes passed the disease to others, her knowledge of his condition might make her an accessory to murder. Holmes himself certainly was aware of his illness while working in his last two films, the 1987 releases The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress starring the Italian Parliamentarian porn queen, Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and the aptly-titled The Devil In Mr. Holmes. Reportedly, none of his co-stars have tested HIV positive.

Laurie Holmes alleged that her husband caught AIDS from his porno work. But with his lifestyle, he could have picked up the virus in many ways. Holmes was bi-sexual, a swinger, an intravenous drug user and a frequent customer of street hookers. Porno didn’t destroy John Holmes; it was just another outlet for his uncontrolled compulsions.

Pornographers’ reluctance to hire new men lets proven “woodsmen”‌—‌even troublesome ones‌—‌keep working until middle-aged. But even the greatest of ballplayers must finally retire when their bats no longer connect.

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John Leslie was telling me, his best industry friend Anthony Spinelli and Spinelli’s crew how he managed to do two come-shots in one day‌—‌he’d start the first one between heartbeats. “That way the initial surge isn’t quite so forceful,” Leslie said. “You have a reserve left over to build on for the next one.” Was he putting us on? Could he actually coordinate ejaculations with heart rhythms?

If anyone had the experience to do so, it was Leslie, porn’s number one leading man for almost a dozen years. Now past 40, he was using his clout as a star to insist on doing the first scene of a shooting day and the last‌—‌putting as much time between come-shots as possible. Ten years earlier, he’d been able to perform on par with F.M. Bradley, who would do three to five wet shots a day for a week straight.

Porno performing may seem a young man’s game. But for top male stars, careers lasting well into their graying years are more the rule than the exception. The steadily-working men of the mid-70s‌—‌Leslie, Gillis, Eric Edwards, Joey Silvera, Paul Thomas, Mike Horner, Billy Dee, Don Fernando‌—‌were still the “name” performers when video production began to proliferate in the mid-’80s. Randy West and Ron Jeremy, who began at the end of the ’70s, were still performing in the middle of the 1990s.

Moviemakers feel comfortable hiring these seasoned studs. They need little choreography, knowing exactly how to place themselves and their female partners for the best camera angles. They know how to put nervous ladies at ease. Their years of constant work have made many of them better actors than so-called “serious” mainstream thespians who don’t get nearly as much on-camera experience.

Though aging like good wine, however, these “grand old men” of porn can’t maintain the hardwood of youth, especially with the demands of video. In the two-scene-a-day pace of the celluloid era, there was less pressure on men like Richard Pacheco who was a better actor than stud. But video’s frenzied one-day wonders favor multi-spurt capacity over acting talent. Bill Margold didn’t like the trend. “You can only expect the standard two orgasms from a man in a 14-hour day,” he said. “You can only go to the plate so many times before you start striking out.”

And strike out they did. In 1988, Lynn LeMay said the frustration among actresses over men failing to perform had reached “epic proportions.” With the increased number of shoots in the mid-1980s, the same guys, used over and over, were faltering. Yet, as LeMay complained, producers are unwilling to give new men a try. Even after proving himself in the New York productions Angels with Sticky Faces and Awakening in Blue, Ron Hightower, 6’5”, with an athlete’s body, came to California and “sat around for a few weeks with no work at all… (as if) my erections in New York didn’t count in California.” Both LeMay and Ona Zee, conducting talent tryouts in Ona Zee’s Sex Academy, proclaimed themselves on “manhunts.”

The popular new “amateur” and “pro-am” (established stars having sex with newcomers) genres gave new men a chance to prove themselves in action before producers risked money on them, easing the entry into the business. The demand for new male talent increased, now that an estimated 40% of the adult video audience was female. This new viewership forced producers to add another criterion for evaluating male talent besides sexual prowess: looks became important, too. Screen studs were no longer just identity objects for male viewers but sex objects for female fans.

This new audience, enjoying the luxury of watching porn at home, not only demanded a better breed of stud but‌—‌some say‌—‌forced the sex movie industry to re-invent itself.

x x x x x x

Chapter 16

LADIES' CHOICE
1980s to 1990s

It was a typical night game at Candlestick Park, the stadium from Hell Frozen Over. The infamous icy winds had once blown pitcher Stu Miller off the mound in the midst of his windup. They were now turning hotdog wrappers, napkins, Giants caps and anything else not clutched in numb fingers into crazed satellites, making the rounds of our seating section.

Wrapped in a blanket, Shelly and I sat huddled together, arms around each other. It was so cold that Shelly’s favorite San Francisco Giant, Chili Davis, ignored his standard post-strikeout ritual of breaking his bat over his knee; he ran back to the dugout. The Giants were behind by five runs.

We were more excited from shivering, hugging and rubbing together under the blanket than from the events on the diamond.

Shelly said, “I’m getting horny as an old cat. Let’s go home, turn on The Scene and trounce around.”

The Scene, in Night Moves, was Shelly’s favorite video stimulant. It came at 3067 on the digit counter of the Panasonic VCR in the bedroom. We always shuttled the tape back to that point after we were finished. The Scene was actually two: Lilly Marlene, Mike Horner and Robyn Everett in a living room, intercut with Billy Dee and Shanna McCullough in a hot tub‌—‌where the low-key lighting brought out the definition of Billy’s muscles and the bubbling water made Shanna’s white skin glisten. By 1983, when Night Moves was made, it was common practice to switch back and forth between sex scenes in a feature. It kept audiences from becoming bored with too much of one scene and avoided the loops-strung-together look of cheap titles.

What really made that section of videotape come alive was the chemistry between Mike, Lilly and Robyn. When taping the scene, there was no need for the “hurry up and use the erection before it goes away” approach. I let Horner and the two blonde actresses take their time. There was lots of caressing, kissing, tonguing and fondling, more like real life than structured screen sex. The intensity built to a frenzy, and when Mike pulled out of Robyn‌—‌to be taken in Lilly’s waiting hand‌—‌he produced such volume that she exclaimed, “So much come!”

He had plenty left. We were disassembling the gear when Mike and Robyn started up again. I grabbed a camera and taped her fast, cowgirl position bouncing and Mike’s second orgasm. Then Mike and Robyn took a shower together‌—‌and had sex yet again.

During the long drive from Candlestick Park to San Rafael, the anticipation was an aphrodisiac. Shelly and I were still “trouncing around” long after the tape had ended.

Then we caught the late news: “The Giants’ six-run ninth inning rally was capped by Chili Davis’s three-run homer in a dramatic come-from-behind victory…”

“Oh no!” Shelly exclaimed. “Look what we missed! It’s all my fault!” I gave her a kiss. “We didn’t miss a thing.”

Before video, Shelly never considered sex movies a turn-on. She’d seen Deep Throat‌—‌in a theater, with a boyfriend‌—‌but she’d still considered X-rated movies as something for creepy men who were too coarse or perverted for normal relationships. But now Shelly was part of a generation of middle-class women discovering a whole new world of erotic entertainment‌—‌in their own bedrooms.

Simon Hoggart of the London Observer News Service called it “smut’s embourgeoisement.” With the new respectability of porn, video retailers reported a sharp increase in women renting X-rated tapes. An ’85 AVN poll of 100 store owners gave percentages of female adult tape customers ranging from under 5 to nearly 70% (Video Trader, Hermitage TN), with an average of 24%. After a 1986 survey of stores, AVN concluded that 63% of adult tape rentals were made by women or couples. The magazine’s 1990 Buyers Guide broke down the demographics of people renting adult tapes: women with men, 29%; women alone, 15%; women with women, 3%; men with men, 13% and‌—‌still the largest single category‌—‌men alone, 40%. Women were involved in making 47% of adult tape rental decisions.

Most of these lady customers weren’t swingers. In the August, 26, 1984 VSDA Show Daily, Alan Hinman of American Home Theater in Colorado Springs said, “I’d say 80 to 90 percent are married and are renting the movie to watch with their spouses.” Retailers across the nation reported a pattern that Video Shack president Arthur Morowitz called “the standard starter kit.” Mike Galasso, general manager of the southern California Video Depot chain, said that a typical customer, male or female, picked up a show for the kids, one for the entire family and an X-rated title. In the August ’84 VSDA article, Duke Kreps, owner of Video Room in New York City said, “She’ll get two children’s cassettes for the kids, maybe one full-length feature or action film the whole family can watch, and then one or two X-rated movies for after the kids are asleep.” The Marin Independent Journal, April 22, 1985, quoted Kate Gluck of one of Superior’s local customers, Captain Video in San Anselmo: “We have families that come in and take out one movie for the kids, a hot new first-run film for the whole family and an X-rated for themselves.” Reporting the same three-genre pattern in the ’85 VSDA Show Daily, Patricia Wilson of Video Cassettes Sales and Rentals in Gilroy, California, added, “We don’t carry the far out ones, it’s just a family type adult line‌—‌if there is such a thing.”

Spinelli made an appearance at a video store in Oak Park, Illinois, where “The women were picking out the shows and the old man is standing there, ready with the credit card.” If a man who was already a porno fan wanted to interest his wife or girlfriend in the genre, he knew he’d have a better chance if he let her do the tape choosing. For the first time in the history of the sex movie, pornographers tried to appeal to women‌—‌and it wasn’t as easy as mixing hardcore with Harlequin stories.

x x x x x x

Manufacturers tried to reach the new audience without alienating the old. When Charlie Brickman of Cinderella Distributing asked me to shoot “couples’ movies” for him, he wanted each video to contain “black guy-white girl, three-some, anal, double penetration, girl-girl, a big-tit lady,” and “don’t do anything that demeans women.”

“Couples’ movie” was the buzz phrase of the late 1980s, applied to anything less raunchy than Cycle Dykes in Bondage. Vidco general manager John Arnone said couples were his company’s largest audience‌—‌and his best title was Young Nympho. On the freight elevator set of Latex Submission, where a shipping crate full of slave girls labeled “Danger! Livestock!” was about to be opened, director Henri Pachard told AVN’s Pearl Chavez, “I’m one of the few feminists in the X-rated business. I think that’s why I’ve lasted so long.”

Throughout the mid-80s, producers touted their products as “sensitive love stories” for couples, while winking at the raincoat crowd. “You guys know what that (‘couples tape”) means, right?” wrote Joe Bob Briggs in his review of Playboy Home Video (“actual stories… Thirty breasts”). “That means you tell her, ‘Hey, it’s for couples,’ so she’ll feel guilty if she doesn’t watch it with you.”

Viewers looking for genuine “feminized” porn were mostly disappointed. Shanna McCullough’s 1988 editorial in the Pink Ladies Social Club Newsletter rebuked the industry for “resisting the changes taking place in the market.” McCullough wrote, “I think they (producers) should allow for other styles and ideas, namely building up the couples and women’s market which so desperately needs material.”

Not all adult moviemakers were lip-service hypocrites. Some earnestly sought to break with old formulas. In 1982, Chuck Vincent was already aiming at the “crossover” market‌—‌between “XXX” and “hard R”. Widely acclaimed as equal to a good R-rated feature, Vincent’s Roommates garnered a “Half Erect” rating from Hustler, whose reviewer sneeringly wrote “the raincoat gang will find more titillation in a Laverne & Shirley rerun.” Despite the sacrifice of sex in favor of plot, however, Roommates still contained scenes many female viewers would find offensive: an ex-hooker, Samantha Fox, blackmailed by an ex-john into sleeping with his ad agency clients; a fashion model, Kelly Nichols, drugged by a pervert (Jamie Gillis‌—‌naturally) and subjected to a violent gang-bang.

The late Hal Freeman’s 1984 Hollywood Video production X-Factor contained no such scenes of degradation. With its gimmick of Eric Edwards and Pamela Mann curing the wounds or diseases of those they think about during orgasms together, the feature was deliberately marketed for a female audience. Its plain white box showed a fully-clothed Edwards nuzzling a fully-clothed Mann over the phrase “A Beautiful Love Story!” Under the much smaller “RATED XXX” was “ADULT NON-VIOLENT.” In his December, 1984 review of X-Factor,
AVN publisher Paul Fishbein wrote‌—‌tongue in cheek‌—‌“Why do these people kiss and fondle each other when they’re through making love? Don’t they know we have to get to the next swarmy sex scene?” Freeman’s pioneer effort paid off: retailers afraid to carry other explicit titles took a chance on X-Factor. It became Hollywood Video’s biggest hit‌—‌8,400 pieces out the door.

Though spiced with prolonged tenderness, the sex in X-Factor was conventional: multi-positions, graphic angles, and come-shots. Some of the new pioneers in “feminized erotica” wanted to change that. They believed that the “language” of cinematic sex for female viewers had yet to be invented.

x x x x x x

Candida Royalle and her Femme Productions pioneered the search for that new language. The former adult film actress has become to women’s screen erotica what Elvis Presley was to 1950s rock ’n roll. The slightly pudgy anal queen of the 1970s metamorphosed into the svelte, sophisticated leader of “feminist porn” in the ’80s. She proved a genius at attracting media coverage for a product that was genuinely different.

Royalle describes her sex scenes as “dreamier, sensual, lush… lots of backlights.” The emphasis, she says, “is off the hardcore and on the emotional.” Performers‌—‌often real-life lovers‌—‌proceed as they would off-screen. Scenes build slowly, languidly, with no rush toward penetration which occurs without close-up emphasis. Videographers don’t interrupt for unnatural penetration poses. Without the standard head tilts and tautly splayed legs that reveal gynecological “money shots,” cunnilingus proceeds to naturalistic orgasm, providing instruction viewers could find valuable. To “eroticize safe sex” women often put condoms on their lovers with their mouths. The men “come inside.”

Femme’s female characters don’t dress like tawdry trade-show starlets. They favor silk kimonos and fine lingerie. They tend to be upper middle-class. Yuppies. They have the “empowerment” to enjoy sex on their terms, often playing the role of initiator. Their men‌—‌of the same social and professional caste‌—‌are “sensitive to their needs.” In her mixture of pro and amateur performers, Royalle didn’t shy away from love handles, stretch marks and cellulite. She felt that casting only the porn industry’s enhanced, hardbodied sex jocks would “intimidate” her audience.

How well have Femme’s egalitarian videos sold? In Royalle’s first year in business, Femme, shot with $25,000 borrowed from her husband Per Sjostet’s parents who were film distributors in Sweden, did well enough marketed by VCA to launch Urban Heat and Christine’s Secret. Unhappy sharing her profits with VCA, Royalle decided the only way to make money was to do her own distribution. But Femme Distribution, Inc., has not trod an easy path.

In the five years after those three 1984 releases, Femme produced a total of four videos: Three Daughters, Taste of Ambrosia, Rites of Passion and Sensual Escape. Four more years passed before Royalle shot Femme’s eighth title, Revelations.

To me, that production history indicates out-the-door sales too weak to support rapid accumulation of titles. But Femme has enjoyed healthy long-term sales, stimulated by Royalle’s publicity-seeking. She was interviewed on every channel from CBS to CNN. She appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. On Kelly and Co. in Detroit, she debated Michigan senator Alan Cropsey who was pushing a controversial state obscenity bill. Royalle’s sparring with director Milton Ingly (the former actor Michael Morrisson) over his “raunch” videos versus her “feminist porn” produced a Boston TV station’s highest ratings ever. Speaking before MENSA, The American Psychiatric Association and other groups, profiled in the New York Times and countless other newspapers and periodicals, Royalle emerged the official spokesperson for First Amendment feminists.

Still, her business was not making her rich. Suffering through the Smut Glut of cheap videos along with other manufacturers, she cried, “These sleaze meisters have killed the videocassette market.” But in this same hostile sales climate, Stagliano introduced his gleefully “raincoat”-oriented Buttman series and became successful enough to run full-page color ads in AVN and turn over more titles in one business quarter than Femme did in its entire history.

Porn’s traditionalists began to protest the attention paid to what AVN’s Gene Ross called “cotton candy sex pics.” On the college lecture circuit, Ron Jeremy refuted the idea that porn was becoming a couples phenomenon. “This is a male fantasy,” he insisted. “Most people want to see the same old raunch that the guy in the raincoat watches.” One of Holliday’s “Cardinal Rules of Porn” is Porn Is, Was And Most Likely Always Will Be Primarily The Province Of The Lonely Guy. Some even found “sanitized, politically-correct” sex a threat. “Porn has to stay dirty,” said Bill Margold. “Once people find out sex isn’t unclean, we’ll never survive.” Former head of the defunct TVX, Inc., David Friedman, whose own First Rule of Porn is “Give the Customer an Erection,” stated in Video Buyer’s Review, “The day a videocassette or videodisc of Deep Throat is sold without an eyebrow being raised, is the day our business will wither on the vine.” It wasn’t just jaded industry veterans who thought porn needed to stay dirty. Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the Kinsey Report, said, “If we ever got over our hang-up about how terrible this stuff is, it wouldn’t be big business anymore.”

Must sexually explicit movies for female viewers be flowery, delicate and devoid of the traditional hard salty action? Can pornography be “dirty” and still appeal to women?

x x x x x x

Sigmund Freud never did find the definitive answer to his plaintive question, “What do women want?” But in erotic media, plenty of people think they know.

Actress Annette Haven, in Home Video magazine: “Women in general have softer, prettier ideas of sexuality, if that doesn’t sound sexist to say.”

Porn renaissance man Bill Margold, in Adam: “They want to see well-built men; they buy the John Holmes films and they buy the John Leslie films, the two biggest men in the industry.” (Margold, too, is noted for equine dimensions.)

Margold’s wife (at that time) porn director Drea, in Adam: “Loving, and people kissing. How many porn films have kissing? Tenderness?”

Actress Teri Weigel, on the Jane Whitney Show: “I think the majority of women want to see raw sex. Don’t we, women?” (smattering of applause)

Robin Morgan, contributing editor of Ms. magazine: “Women are interested in relationships, in intellect and emotion as part of eroticism, not fetishized individual body parts…”

Chrissy Slocum, midwestern video retailer, AVN writer: “I like the sex scenes where the men are boffing the women close-up and believe other women do as well.”

Director Anthony Spinelli, in AVN: “They want a story.”

Slocum, on women video customers who say, “Give me something with a story:” “It’s a coverup. They don’t want anyone to know they get off watching sexvids… If I want story, I’ll watch Chinatown.”

The flowers-and-poetry camp clashed with the slam-bang action school on the Jane Whitney Show, after the audience had viewed a romantic, softcore, shot-through-gossamer-curtains featurette called Cabin Fever, billed as “female erotica.” A lady in the audience stood up and said, “You could tell the woman was turned on, but the man… I wanted to see more…”

“You know what they always say about us as women,” Whitney interjected, “that we don’t like that real graphic stuff.”

“I like it,” the woman said, and there was strong applause.

The New York Women’s Erotic Film Festival in 1985 reflected this diversity of tastes with the plot-heavy Roommates, the bondagey Story of Joanna, and the all-male gay film Falconhead II.

Many women would agree with Hyapatia Lee that they like to see two men together.

Polls in AVN and Adam Film World Reports showed that nearly a quarter of all male homosexual tape rentals involve women. The taboo against boy-boy acts in boy-girl films, observed throughout the history of explicit American erotica, was broken with Video Tape Exchange’s Going Both Ways in 1984. That movie’s success spawned a new genre of “bi” movies, such as Bi Bi Love, Bi-Ceps and Switch Hitters I and II. Gay movie hunk Jeff Stryker made the crossover to working in heterosexual films with great success. The popularity of gay male tapes and male strip shows among women equalled men’s traditional fascination with girl-girl action and burlesque. People in the industry began to wonder if women’s tastes in explicit sexual media were the flip side of men’s.

x x x x x x

In the February/March 1990 issue of Mother Jones magazine, Laura Fraser wrote that Anais Nin’s traditional, commercial pornography turned her on more than Royalle’s Sensual Escape. “I’d rather imagine myself as Linda at an artist’s erotic masquerade party, pursued by two men while drifting in a champagne daze, and whisked off through the woods by a powerful, fiery workman, than watch Jessica and her stockbroker eating Chinese food and talking in clichés.”

In the Nin-inspired fantasy, the man might tear off Linda’s clothes, press his coarse-whiskered face to all parts of her body, then squeeze her against his muscular chest, panting like a frenzied animal.

Men wonder why women can find such rude fantasies appealing yet remain repulsed by the images in hardcore pornography. They might try imagining what it’s like to be the women in the pictures. In her series of AVN columns under the heading I Know What Girls Like, Chrissy Slocum wrote “How does a wet shot in the face feel to women out there? I hate it.” “Racquel and Sharon Kane have a food fight that turns into a lesbian scene. My stomach turned looking at Racquel with wet smears of food on her face licking jello from Kane’s toes.” “Cara Lott gets a dick shoved in her mouth when she’s not ready. Well, how does that feel?” About women having sex while “swinging from chains and other gadgets” in Paul Norman’s Lace, Slocum wrote, “I can’t imagine being put in an abnormal position… and liking it… A woman gets fucked by a woman wearing a dildo with her head under a toilet seat; the list goes on and on.” A member of Jane Whitney’s audience said hardcore porn turned her off because “for one thing, it looks painful.”

Viewers can’t help but identify with characters they see on the screen and experience vicariously what these characters undergo, which is why horror shows are scary and why so many men like the external come-shot. AVN’s Slocum put a female perspective on the hardcore shots she liked to watch: “It adds to the thrill when I can clearly see him entering her… I love to watch a woman getting fucked because I know what it feels like when a man takes it nice and slow, and also when he pumps hard and fast.”

My girlfriend Shelly, who liked the slam-bang action in The Scene, was not atypical. My next door neighbor liked to watch John Holmes tapes, imagining herself experiencing his thirteen inches.

In a 1992 San Francisco Examiner article on Bay Area women producing erotica, Nina Hartley, who’d just directed her first feature, Nina Hartley’s Book of Love, said, “Women will get into the hottest sex if they believe it’s honest. Women just want a reason for the sex being there… It can be revenge, anger, and not just romantic. But it has to have a level of emotional authenticity.”

Are men really satisfied with the emotionless, mechanical couplings of traditional pornography? Before joining the staff of AVN, Gene Ross was interviewed by the magazine as a typical devotee of sex movies. Ross complained about the foreplay missing in the films. “You like to see the couples interact, you like to see them play with each other a little bit.” He found the “romance” in Italian sex films preferable to the American variety which he called “crude.”

Ross wasn’t alone in his complaints. Hyapatia Lee sent out a questionnaire to members of her predominantly male fan club and 97% of respondents “wanted more build-up to sex scenes.” Another one of AVN’s fan interviewees, “Don Federico,” said, “My wife and I would like to see some good soap operas.”

American male porn fans, long treated as an underclass by both the “real world” and the sex industry, have been conditioned to settle for whatever is available. Holliday derided their passive acceptance of shoddy product with another of his “Rules of Porn”: Whatever You Give Them Is What They Feel They Should Get. When the average male porn fan encounters a sex scene that repulses him, he doesn’t become incensed; he hits “fast-forward,” hoping the next scene has something he likes. AVN asked Ross, “Will this constant disappointment turn you away from adult films?” “No,” he replied. “I’ll always give it a shot.” Women who haven’t developed the weary tolerance of the veteran porn fan would not be as charitable.

x x x x x x

Compromises were made. In 1986, Jerome Tanner, known for long, clinically graphic sex scenes with many wet shots, chose to concentrate more on character development, fantasy scenes, and prolonged foreplay. He planned to shoot only six sex scenes per feature, with only one including an external come-shot. In 1992, Paul Thomas, known for poetic scenes that emphasized love more than sex, was getting feedback that his shows were‌—‌as AVN put it‌—‌“too willy-nilly.” He vowed to go “hard, hardcore with a vengeance” and make his upcoming House of the Sleeping Beauties his “test case for hot and kinky sex.” AVN’s writer couldn’t resist adding, “Yes, but will it have a compassionate storyline about sensitive, New Age people who truly care for one another?”

To reach the broadest possible market of lone men, couples and lone women, pornographers had to choose from both the raunch genre and the soft school. Some things were obvious: sex with a naturalistic buildup was in; characters like the enema rapist Jamie Gillis played in Waterpower were out. At Superior Video, we not only avoided rape scenes but also those based on any kind of coercion.

Though making porn less crude, the feminine influence didn’t bring the sweeping changes adult video visionaries predicted. After reviewing the work of Royalle, lesbian pornographer Susie Bright and sex star/performance artist Annie Sprinkle, the Mother Jones writer Laura Fraser concluded, “By depicting women as people with healthy sexual appetites who have no need of sheltering or permission to make love, feminist pornographers are also pointing out that women are not quite as different from men sexually as we have been led to believe.”

As porn movies became more accepted, old school raunch moguls weren’t the only ones worried about screen sex losing its shock value. So were porn’s enemies. Cable and pay-per-view TV, as well as videocassettes, were expanding the audience for X-rated cinema, and the anti-porn forces sounded the alarm. At the very time that sex movies were becoming tamer and less offensive, the United States Government called the armies of Old Time Morality together for the most massive assault on erotica in American history.

x x x x x x

Chapter 17

OF MEESE AND MEN'S MAGAZINES

I was getting ready to head for a Marin County shooting location to work a half-day for Jerry Tanner when his production manager called. Her message: stay home. The shoot‌—‌already in progress‌—‌was now “postponed.”

A production assistant had reported “people in the bushes.” Thinking the neighborhood kids were once again trying to sneak peeks at naked ladies, Jerry went outside for a look. He saw “cops everywhere.” Was this connected to his recent bust for shooting in L.A.? That was why he’d spent the extra money to shoot up north‌—‌where these things didn’t happen.

Jerry ordered his cast and crew to pack up the production and move everything to the Sound Stage in San Francisco, where he was scheduled to shoot the next day. The converted warehouse in the industrial section south of Market Street had been the Universal Lot of porn since the 1970s.

The police were there, too. “There were guys on rooftops with walkie-talkies,” said Joe Elliot, who was working as a grip. “There were ‘construction workers’ sitting in cars. There were two helicopters circling overhead.” Jerry‌—‌gutsy as always‌—‌wanted to lock all the doors and shoot anyway but Bob Vosse, Sound Stage proprietor, begged him to cancel. Jerry did, estimating his loss on the aborted shoot at $10,000.

Elliot figured the cops had spent at least that much to harass the production‌—‌at the very time Bay Area police departments were grousing about cutbacks and thinly-spread manpower. Were the pornographer’s worst fears being realized? An L.A. producer, interviewed on TV, had said that San Francisco was “wide open… The only way to get busted would be to shoot in the middle of Union Square.” “What an asshole,” Elliot had said. “Might as well send a telegram to the Moral Majority.”

In essence, that’s what happened. The anti-porn forces had been called to war.

This was no longer the old cat-and-mouse game of L.A. police pouncing on productions on their “turf,” but stopping the chase at their borders. Now, the L.A. District Attorney’s Office was requesting help from other local police departments to bust shoots all over California. Ron Jeremy was “popped” shooting in both San Diego and Ventura Counties. The long arm of L.A. law even reached out of state. Vice cops told one Hawaii-bound producer, “We called Honolulu. They know where you’re staying and the address of your location. Have a nice shoot.”

These mid-’80s police actions were just the initial skirmishes of a massive War on Porn that would rage through the rest of the decade and continue‌—‌less fiercely under the Clinton Administration‌—‌through the ’90s. Like a major military campaign this war had many fronts: battles were fought in streets, businesses, churches, courtrooms, convention halls, police stations, prisons and private dwellings. Spies infiltrated enemy camps and compiled hit lists. Troops with assault rifles smashed into homes. Fortunes were plundered; children taken from their parents. Buildings were burned and government forces threw volumes of books into bonfires. Laws were passed against freedoms previously taken for granted.

No single chapter can cover the magnitude of this war; these pages will detail only some of the battles of most significance to the adult industry, beginning with one waged against material most Americans wouldn’t consider obscene.

x x x x x x

The august bunnymeister, Hugh Hefner, had won his battles against censorship decades ago. Now, in the spring of 1986, he wanted to enjoy his long-yearned-for retirement. But thousands of convenience stores, supermarkets, and drugstores had dropped Playboy, along with Penthouse, Hustler and other magazines containing photos of bare breasts and buttocks. They had done so in response to a letter on U.S Justice Department stationery sent to the headquarters of 23 major American retail chains from Alan E. Sears, Executive Director of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. The letter from the Kentucky federal prosecutor informed recipients that the Commission had “received testimony alleging that your company is involved in the sale or distribution of pornography.” With the letter were ten pages of testimony from an unnamed witness who was the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the National Federation of Decency. Sears invited recipients to answer the allegations, adding “Failure to respond will necessarily be accepted as an indication of no objection (to the charges).”

Calling the Commission’s tactics “a serious abuse of power,” Hefner pointed out that the Reagan White House was making “clearly a politically motivated move to appeal to the right-wing fundamentalist bulk (of Reagan’s most active support).” Televangelists had stumped for Reagan and raised millions for his campaign. The president, as First Amendment attorney Clyde DeWitt put it, “was handed a hefty invoice from the Religious Right for his re-election.” Part of the payment called for undoing the “damage” done by the 1970 President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which had infuriated the Nixon Administration with its recommendation that all obscenity laws be abolished.

In the early 1980s, after California’s adult movie industry had agreed to accept restrictions mandated by the LAPD and to shoot outside L.A County, a kind of pax pornae existed between the police and pornographers. The Religious Right watched in alarm as home video and cable television increased the public’s acceptance of erotic movies. A concern shared by both the Religious Right and porn moguls‌—‌for opposite reasons‌—‌was that Hollywood’s big studios would begin slipping hardcore sex into their multi-million dollar features. In 1981, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione had released his gran guignole extravaganza, Caligula. This Hollywood production contained snippets of hardcore action in its non-stop orgy of castration and other atrocities that the commercial porn industry itself no longer dared depict. Though Caligula inspired many protests, Guccione encountered no major legal threats.

For the anti-porn forces, it was the eleventh hour. But they had a new champion. His appointment stalled almost a year over “allegations of improprieties,” Edwin Meese III was finally nominated Attorney General early in ’85. He wasted no time in carrying out his predecessor William French Smith’s mandate that a commission be chartered to study “the problem of pornography.”

Unlike the 1970 commissioners who began their study with a neutral attitude, the eleven-member “Meese Commission,” named in March of 1986, was fervently anti-porn: Chairman Henry E. Hudson, a U.S Attorney, had driven adult theaters and bookstores out of Arlington County, Virginia; Dr. James C. Dobson, a psychologist who railed against smut in his Focus on the Family radio shows, later made a media splash with his “porn made me do it” video interview with execution-bound serial killer Ted Bundy; Father Bruce Ritter, a priest who founded the Covenant House, a chain of crisis centers for homeless and runaway youths, commanded national attention as a vocal foe of child pornography‌—‌until allegations in the later 1980s of sexual misconduct with young boys in his charge forced him to relinquish his executive and ecumenical positions.

With an operating budget of $500,000, the Commission began with a road show that was part inquisition, part big-tent revival, part voyeur’s sideshow and all media circus‌—‌as paparazzi flocked after the bandwagon like seagulls after a bait barge. The Commission held public hearings in a half-dozen large U.S cities from coast to coast. Calling the trek a “surrealist mystery tour of sexual perversity,” Time magazine ran a photo of Chairman Hudson emerging from a dark den of peep-show booths in a Houston porn shop, shoulders slumped, tie askew, lips a thin hard line and his sweaty pate gleaming with reflected neon. During their visit to three Houston arcades, the Commission’s vice cop tour guide had yanked open the door of one of the booths to expose two startled patrons in the midst of fellatio. “And here,” droned the guide, “we have two men engaged in the act of oral copulation.” Before leaving, the group bought one magazine: Young Girls in Bondage. “It is as if by finding the single most despicable scene of sexual conduct ever photographed,” said ACLU legislative counsel Barry Lynn, “the commission would be justified in urging the suppression of all sexually oriented material.”

Lynn, the legal eagle among the flock following the tour, proved a sharp observer and commentator on the bizarre proceedings, as the Commission reviewed graphic depictions of sex between children and adults, bestiality, self-castration and “real life rapes.” Witnesses behind translucent screens testified to the horrors of smut: Larry Madigan, 38, said that a deck of pornographic playing cards he found at age 12 led him to an obsession with stealing Playboy, to sexually abuse the family dog, and to descend into a life of solitary masturbation and drug addiction. Linda (Lovelace) Marchiano, now a demure housewife, speaking in barely audible tones, once again related being forced at gunpoint to have sex with a dog.

The Commission focused on rare deviant aberrations; asphyxiation, excretions, torture, necrophilia, sweat sniffing, toenail clipping collecting, etc., using them to target sex in general. Executive Director Sears’ now infamous “7-Eleven letter” knocked Playboy, Penthouse and other mainstream “men’s magazines” out of almost 17,000 retail outlets, including the 4,500-store 7-Eleven chain. Fortunately for Hugh Hefner, his publishing empire was now in the hands of an able new leader‌—‌his daughter. Playboy Enterprises president Christie Hefner would take the magazine, which was losing subscribers in the mid-’80s, into the 1990s stronger than ever. She wasted no time in suing the Meese Commission‌—‌as did Penthouse International, Ltd. Joining their own suits with the Playboy action were the Magazine Publishers Association, the American Booksellers Association and the Council for Periodical Distributors Association. In response to the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn ordered the Commission to retract Sears’ letter to the stores. The judge also ruled, on July 3, 1986‌—‌a week before the release of the Commission’s report‌—‌that the Commission couldn’t publish what Christie Hefner called a “McCarthy blacklist” of distributors of allegedly obscene material. A disgruntled Alan Sears quit the Justice Department for the Department of the Interior. On the eve of the grand unveiling of its conclusions, the Commission had suffered a major humiliation‌—‌a month after voters in Maine had nixed the state’s first proposed obscenity law.

The aura of farce continued during the ceremony in the Great Hall of the Justice Department on July 9, 1986. Chairman Hudson presented Meese with two huge blue volumes of the Commission’s Report. A journalist asked the Attorney General if the Report would condemn the Spirit of Justice statue behind him as obscene. Meese turned to look at the aluminum female figure with one bared breast. He stammered that he didn’t know; he hadn’t yet read the report (which had been available to him for over a month).

A month before the presentation ceremony, ACLU counsel Lynn had read the report; he’d obtained advance galleys by suing the Justice Department under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Lynn declared that every one of the 1,960-page document’s 92 recommendations violated the First Amendment. “Some of these recommendations are so draconian,” he said, “that it appears the Commission wants to send this country back to the sexual Dark Ages.”

Some of the sanctions the Commission advocated: forfeiture laws against obscenity on both federal and state levels; all second obscenity offenses prosecuted as felonies; a minimum of a year in prison for those convicted a second time on federal obscenity offenses; laws allowing “identified victims” to sue for monetary restitution over “harms attributable to pornography”; pandering statutes, bankruptcy laws and alcoholic beverage control laws used for prosecuting and fining porn producers and exhibitors; and a federal law making it an unfair labor practice to pay someone to participate in commercial sexual performances.

If passed into law, the Commission’s recommendations would allow a local prosecutor to clear out the entire contents of a store over one allegedly (proof not required before trial) obscene videotape. Someone claiming sexual harassment by a person who’d read Penthouse could sue both the store that sold the alleged perpetrator the magazine and Penthouse International, Ltd. A jury in a small southern town could find a softcore tape obscene and have the federal government seize the assets of the tape’s manufacturer in California without having to show that the California company was involved in transporting the tape to the locale. With so many different agencies allowed to file charges against pornographers, adult movies could no longer be shot and distributed in the United States. “If they have their way,” Lynn said, “they will terminate the adult film industry.”

People far removed from the adult tape trade were alarmed about the Report’s guidelines for forming “watch groups” to pressure local prosecutors, file complaints and coordinate boycotts. The Report emphasized the rights of citizens to condemn material protected by the First Amendment. “The notion of citizen vigilanteism against magazines, books, films and videocassettes is something I think conjures up visions of Nazi Germany,” Christie Hefner said, “not the United States.” Waldenbooks, one of the recipients of the Sears letter, put up displays of banned or censored books, including Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Brave New World and The Living Bible‌—‌burned in 1981 in Gastonia, N.C, as a “perverted commentary on the King James Version.”

The Commission justified its recommendations by claiming that exposure to most pornography “bears some causal relationship to the level of sexual violence, sexual coercion or unwanted sexual aggression.” To reach that conclusion, the Commission divided erotica into four groups: sexually violent, degrading, non-degrading but still sexually explicit, and “mere nudity.” The long arguments among Commissioners over which movie or magazine fits in which class, Lynn said, showed “one of the absurdities of regulating sexual material.” The only scientific evidence of possible harm caused by pornography came from the widely-cited experiments of University of Wisconsin researcher, Dr. Edward Donnerstein, in which young men who’d watched sexually violent movies before judging a simulated rape trial were less likely to convict the rapist than those who hadn’t seen the films. The Commissioners spread this concept of harm to include erotica that was “degrading” in addition to that categorized as “violent.” Any depiction of sex that exposed peoples’ genitals could fit the category. Consequently, the Commission found the amount of sexually-explicit material that was “non-degrading” to be “quite small”‌—‌and even that was not entirely blameless:

“That there does not appear from the social science evidence to be a causal link with sexual violence, however, does not answer the question of whether such materials might not themselves simply for some other reason constitute a harm in themselves, or bear a causal link to consequences other than sexual violence but still taken to be harmful.”

That mouthful‌—‌in the Commission-speak prose style‌—‌raises the possibility that non-violent, non-degrading erotica might be harmful‌—‌just as the lack of proof to the contrary makes it possible that mountain air causes cancer. The Commission concluded that all porn causes harm.

It was too much of a reach for two of the Commissioners. Columbia University instructor Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, editor of Woman’s Day magazine, issued a widely-quoted protest: “Efforts to tease the data into proof of a causal link… simply cannot be accepted.” The two women also included in the Report a rebuttal to most of the Commission’s recommendations. Representative Don Edwards, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Constitutional and Civil Rights, said, “They stacked the panel in their favor and still couldn’t find the evidence of a link between depictions of sex and violent behavior.”

They also ignored evidence of porn’s possible beneficial effects. Dr. Donnerstein, emphasizing that it was media violence‌—‌not sex‌—‌that caused social harm, cited studies showing that nonviolent, sexually explicit material acts to reduce (emphasis his) aggressive behavior. Johns Hopkins therapist John Money told the Commission he used erotica to help patients “release without acting out” their sexual frustrations. Listing the possible benefits of sex education for couples and release for the lonely, unattractive or disabled, Money suggested that sexual media might prevent crimes more than promote them. Noted therapist and author Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld testified that people used porn to put “zest into their marital sex,” lessening the temptation to have outside affairs: “these people are using pornography to strengthen their marriages.”

The Commission’s Final Report ignored testimony that child molestation dropped 67% in Denmark between 1967, when all porn was legalized, and 1973. And that between 1972 and 1980, the total number of sex crimes fell 11% in the liberalized Federal Republic of Germany. And the testimony of psychiatrist Richard Green, founder of the International Academy of Sexual Research, who said, “The common male reaction to pornographic pictures is masturbation… It may permit the person to experience vicariously or in fantasy what would otherwise have been acted out as a crime with a victim.” The Commission omitted from its Report attorney John Weston’s statement that “most of the serial killers in the United States come from rural, right-wing, fundamentalist Protestant backgrounds.”

The Commission ignored an obvious question: is it sexual repression and hysteria that give diabolic life to socially destructive compulsions?

The Report contained page after page of accounts from victims of sexual monsters who had pornography in their possession, deleting expert testimony that these predators would have made their assaults even without books, magazines and movies. Questioned about the lack of proof for the Commission’s conclusions, Chairman Hudson told journalists, “If we relied exclusively on scientific data for every one of our findings, I’m afraid all our work would be inconclusive.” Hudson said the Commission used “common sense,” which San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Carroll pointed out was also used by the Inquisition: “Common sense tells us that the sun moves around the earth, so let’s fry Galileo.”

At $35 per two-volume tome, the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography became a Government Printing Office best-seller, going into a third 1,500-copy run. It was more explicit than Psychopathia Sexualis. Barry Lynn called it a “national bibliography of pornography complete with descriptions of every conceivable‌—‌and some inconceivable‌—‌sexual practices.” The Report listed 2,370 movies, 2,225 magazines and 725 sex books; scene-by-scene descriptions and dialogue from Debbie Does Dallas, The Devil In Miss Jones, and Biker Slave Girls; graphic descriptions of pictures in a Danish magazine, Lisa, 10 Years, and her dog, of a prepubescent girl and a dachshund; and the same kind of run-down for Pregnant Lesbians, Asian Slut, and Big Tit Dildo Bondage, Vol. #1, Number 1, among others.

Columnist Mike Royko was puzzled. “The crux of the Report is that great numbers of Americans are so easily turned into loathsome creatures that we must be protected from porn by strict laws and busybodies… But if it is really that dangerous, isn’t it possible that it will turn people who read the Report for the purpose of being well-informed into fiends themselves?” “Although I personally find much of the material in this volume highly offensive,” quipped Lynn, “I would nevertheless defend absolutely the federal government’s right to print it.”

A Los Angeles Times editorial called the Report “a joke. Not funny, but a joke. The Commission’s scholarship is ludicrous, its conclusions unsupported, its methodology zany.” The editorial concluded, “Now that this silly episode is over, it should be quickly forgotten. The commission’s report should be consigned to the trash.” “Little Official Alarm Over Porno Report” went a headline in Video Extra magazine, which quoted Art Ross, a VSDA director: “It’ll remain a hot topic and a nine-day wonder until something else comes along.” “Absurd, but not threatening” was The Washington Post’s assessment. “The real purpose of government commissions is not to provoke action but to avoid it‌—‌to make smoke, not fire.”

The pundits were wrong. This commission was different. Barry Lynn and Christie Hefner knew it. In her keynote speech at the VSDA Show in August, 1986, Hefner spoke of a push by conservative religious groups adapting the anti-porn feminist rhetoric that erotica demeans women. Observing that more people rented X-rated tapes than voted for Reagan, she urged video retailers to “fight back” and not “buckle under the pressure from special interest groups.” Lynn, too, saw a siege coming: he called the Report “an absolute declaration of war.” The adult industry, unaccustomed to cooperative action, and video retailers, afraid of being labeled porn-lovers, wouldn’t organize their defenses until it was almost too late.

In October, Meese announced that the Justice Department would implement a “seven-point” (based on the Commission’s recommendations) attack on porn, including movies on cable TV and videocassette. It would be the blueprint, from the grass-roots level to the highest echelons of government, for a massive anti-porn crusade. On February 10, 1987, Meese unveiled the campaign’s “Pentagon,” the Justice Department’s new Center for Obscenity Prosecution. Its hundred-plus lawyers would coach local and federal prosecutors throughout the nation. The National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), a strike force of lawyers and federal agents, would spend billions to prosecute hundreds of businesses from mom-and-pop retailers to international conglomerates.

Meese’s vow that “the cancer of pornography” would be “pursued with a vengeance and prosecuted to the hilt” sounded like some grand mullah’s call for a holy war.

Those fighting in the War on Porn’s trenches already knew that’s what it was.

x x x x x x

“Jeez!” The salesman exhaled as he hung up the phone. “This lady just lost $15,000 worth of inventory. The cops were in the store when I called.” He turned and called out, “Hey, Alana. Big red one for North Carolina. The state just went dry.” Superior’s Jill-of-all-trades pushed another red, round-headed pushpin into the wall-map of the United States.

In response to a new state obscenity law that went into effect in October of 1985, 80% of North Carolina’s video dealers dropped X-rated tapes. Similar things were happening all over the nation. For years, the red pins in the wall map had stayed in the same places: Texas; Utah; Florida; parts of Oklahoma; Memphis, Tennessee and Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Ohio. Now, there were pins in sections of Washington State, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Virginia, Michigan, Kentucky, Hawaii, Arkansas and upstate New York. The salesman went over to the coffee machine, glanced across the room at the map, peppered with red, and observed, “It looks like America has a rash.”

In Alabama, there were 134 indictments against video stores for selling the non-explicit “cable versions” of adult movies that previously had been allowed in that non-hardcore state. In April of 1985, before the Meese Commission had even started its road show, FBI agents raided 17 Tennessee video stores. It was the first Federal action against individual stores, significant because there’d been no local complaints against adult tapes. There had been none in St. Louis either, before three prosecutors, dubbed in local papers “The Three Meeseketeers,” launched a series of raids in 1986 and ’87 against retailers.

The St. Louis campaign was significant because the Justice Department was aiding local crusaders using a subjective interpretation of obscenity, one not based on guidelines established in Federal cases. St. Louis circuit attorney and “Meeseketeer” George A. Peach said, “Any time you see a vagina or a penis or somebody getting a blow job or someone’s vagina being sucked, the film is obscene.” When retailers asked Peach for a list of contraband titles, he responded, “We’ll tell you when we bust you.”

Most of St. Louis’ video stores complied with his directive to drop X-rated movies. “I don’t want to get arrested,” said Verna McMullen of Mr. T’s Video. “A lot of our customers were very upset about it. Some of them said we were celebrating the 200th year of our Constitution and one of our freedoms was being taken away.”

Dick Leopold, one of the Arizona retailers under attack by local prosecutor Tom Collins told a panel of his fellow dealers at the ’87 VDSA Show that it cost between twenty and thirty thousand to defend a single title in court. “We should not tell everyone to fight until you have no assets left and are forced to move 3,000 miles to clear your name,” said First Amendment Attorney Jeffrey Cunard. Barry Lynn added, “You hope that Disney films make up for your loss.” Unprepared for the onslaught, dealers wouldn’t organize effective class-action suits until late in the ’80s.

For Superior Video, it was tough enough competing with the glut of product on the market. Now our distributors were cutting their orders because stores they sold to no longer carried X. At first, only the small, financially limited, retailers gave in. Then the 668-store National Video chain dropped the 15% of their business that was comprised of adult tapes. So did our big accounts, Commtron and Video One Video. “They won’t fight back,” Allyssa said. “It’s like they’re embarrassed to admit they were dealing in X-rated tapes.”

The Religious Right began to see how easy it was to abolish porn. After a 1986 obscenity conviction against a Butte County, California bookstore (the first such conviction in the state in ten years), the prosecutor’s request that local video stores drop adult movies brought meek compliance. The Citizens for Decency under Law (CDL) trumpeted the victory as “the first conviction in California in many years involving general sexually explicit, non-bizarre materials.”

Other anti-porn groups took their cue, even in “liberal” Marin County, where Superior Video came under attack.

x x x x x x

I didn’t tell Shelly about the threatening phone calls. She was already worried about being connected with a pornographer. As she worked her way up the corporate ladder of a large defense contractor, her security clearance was subject to periodic scrutiny. “Maybe we shouldn’t be seen together where people know us,” Shelly suggested. I was afraid that if she knew some anti-porn yahoos were harassing Superior Video, she might be afraid to have us both in the same county.

I stopped staying overnight at Shelly’s condo. I slept at my apartment near the San Rafael office, making sure Maggie was always loaded and within reach. I never got a chance to confront my tormentors. But evidently they put a scare into the owner of the Sausalito building that housed my sales office.

He served notice that he wouldn’t renew our lease; he said he wanted to use the edifice for himself. It was the same story Joe Elliot received from his landlord after the Berkeley press had headlined his bust. Allyssa and Alana found a new office in Mill Valley; I decided the company name wouldn’t even go on the mailbox.

Vigilante groups nationwide were responding to Meese’s call for “grass-roots action.” “Video stores will be the next major focus of our efforts,” said Brad Curl, president of the National Christian Association, quoted in the August ’86 issue of Video Store magazine. The article listed threats to landlords among the tactics of “New Right groups,” such as Citizens for Decency through Law (actually an “Old Right” group), the National Federation for Decency and Morality in Media. Retailers like Terry Logan, whose Iowa mall store had carried adult movies since 1981 without receiving complaints, were told by cowed landlords to drop X-rated tapes or face eviction. Pharmacist Ed Dippold of Gillespie, Illinois, received a letter from the Gillespie Ministerial Association advising him to remove “pornographic” magazines that “degrade men and women, turning them into objects of sexual pleasure” and violate “the law of God.” Dippold complied‌—‌in a big way: he pulled every magazine from his shelves, from Newsweek to Better Homes and Gardens and replaced them with the letter. He did it “to make a point. What is pornographic to one person might not be to someone else.”

The National Federation for Decency picketed 7-Eleven stores nationwide when the chain brought back Playboy and Penthouse after receiving the retraction of Alan Sears’s letter, as ordered by Judge Penn. Headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, the home and birthplace of its leader, Baptist preacher Donald E. Wildmon, the N.F.D., with 350 branches nationwide, was the largest single anti-porn group in the nation. Reverend Wildmon, a slight, 50-ish man, described in an article by former Senate investigator Bruce Selcraig as “a balding, pink-faced father of four,” who doesn’t mind being called “an ignorant bumpkin,” was a veteran anti-smut crusader. He monitored “sex incidents per hour” on network television. His joint effort with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Coalition for Better Television, got Proctor and Gamble to drop sponsorship of over 50 shows. Wildmon got 50 Holiday Inns to drop late-night, soft-X movies (a parishioner supposedly became a “full-fledged porn addict” after spending a night at one of the Inns). He organized nationwide pickets at theaters showing The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed Jesus as having sexual desire. In 1989, Wildmon’s mass-mailing campaign protesting funding for art containing homoerotic scenes and “blasphemy” (Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ”‌—‌a crucifix immersed in urine), helped Senator Jesse Helms spearhead the well-publicized attack on the National Endowment for the Arts.

After the Meese hearings, Wildmon zeroed in on a new target‌—‌home video. In 1987, he changed the name of the N.F.D. to the American Family Association (AFA), “a Christian organization promoting the Biblical ethic of decency in American society with primary emphasis on TV and other media.” Skilful at using that same media, the AFA ran full-page ads in daily newspapers putting the blame for violence, crime and teen pregnancies “where we think it belongs”: on a consortium of TV, motion picture and music industry moguls deliberately targeting America’s children with filth. The ads contained clip-out “petitions”‌—‌with a request for donations‌—‌and the AFA’s promise to give the corrupters of youth updates every two months on the number of petitions received. The contributions provided the AFA with an annual budget of more than $5,000,000, including a $101,000 salary plus $1,200 a month “housing allowance” for Wildmon.

Followers of Wildmon called Playboy “a breeding ground for rape” and saw subliminal cocaine messages in Mighty Mouse cartoons. They counted the number of times words like “whore” and “damn” were uttered in the miniseries Lonesome Dove. The AFA Journal was called by former fundamentalist preacher Skipp Porteous “the National Enquirer of the religious right” for headlines like “Wrong Baby Aborted” and “Man Listens to Rock Music, Kills Mother.” Cheers was found to be “a putrid potpourri of perversion‌—‌bestiality, child and teen sex, a stripper, a stag party, bondage.” “Golden Girls continues its open attack on moral values, marital fidelity, prayer and respect for the Christian faith.” The Journal blamed women crowding the work force (instead of being housewives) for high unemployment among black men. Wildmon wanted CBS to fire a camera operator who shot a crowd during a football game and caught a fan with a T-shirt that read, “Forty Fucking Niners.”

Not surprisingly, people with such an agenda find the adult movie industry “fraught with child abuse, kidnapping, drug abuse, prostitution and even murder.” And Michigan AFA director Bill Johnson equated the viewing of explicit videos to the use of crack cocaine.

Vigorous letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations, boycotts and threats to “expose” politicos and CEOs (whose addresses the AFA provides to its members) who don’t agree to their demands as “supporters of child exploitation,” give the AFA power far in excess of its numbers‌—‌89,000 members according to TV Guide. Their threats of a boycott got the Blockbuster Video chain to remove movies rated NC-17, such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Henry and June. And for stores with movies that showed real sex, the Religious Right really moved in for the kill.

x x x x x x

In Upland, California, Communities Against Pornography set up cameras to photograph customers of T and A Video. CAP leader Dick Fortyune thought the pictures important because “many of these people are later involved in crime.”

Ed Chamblee, a Mobile, Alabama retailer, told the VSDA of the humiliation of being arrested, fingerprinted, and labeled in the local newspapers as “The Porno King of Mobile.”

Busted on Florida racketeering charges, John Turner was “paraded before the cameras.”

Both Chamblee and Turner were found not guilty, but they’d already been punished by public humiliation. In addition, the county sheriff had seized all Turner’s inventory and records. His business had closed down and the whole experience had nearly bankrupted him.

Smarting from their dismal track record in obscenity trials, smut-busters know they must do as much damage as possible outside the courtroom. Police waited until alerted TV stations had three minicams set up before raiding a Philadelphia video store; the publicity could drive the store out of business. Frustrated by her inability to get newspaper racks offering sexually oriented materials removed through legal channels, Pomona, California mayor Donna Smith and her husband tossed the racks into the back of a pickup truck and dumped them on the steps of City Hall. Neither Mayor Smith nor her husband were arrested for their actions. Thomas Haynie of Virginia Beach, Virginia, was not so lucky. The technician for the Christian Broadcasting Network was convicted of TV piracy after he interrupted soft-X movies on the Playboy Channel and the American Exxxtacy Channel with messages telling viewers to repent and heed God’s word.

At an AFA-backed meeting at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, William Swindell railed that “the explosion of pornography in the U.S. is as dangerous as the explosion of a nuclear bomb,” then added, “We need to confront the businessman, not to whether it’s legal, but if it’s right (sic).”

But unlike countries run by royal decree, religious revelation or the will of a generalissimo, America is a nation of law. Any fight that can’t be settled otherwise will end up in court.

x x x x x x

Jerome Tanner showed Allyssa and me his private little joke: the “court jacket” he wore during his obscenity trial in L.A. The busy, checked pattern of the sport coat kept causing crazy-quilt moiré distortions in the news minicams. The little showman could enjoy his spectacle, confident that California’s obscenity law, which resembled the federal statute, would exonerate him. “My attorney laughs at the charges,” Jerry said.

In the “peaceful” period between 1979 and 1984‌—‌when the War on Porn began‌—‌the Justice Department saw fit to file federal obscenity charges in fewer than 100 cases. The targeted materials were mostly “pissers,” “crappers,” “fisters,” and other aberrations that mainstream commercial pornographers no longer dealt in. The government won 71 of these cases.

Federal guidelines were based on the Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller Decision, which established three tests, all of which must be met, to determine obscenity:

(1) The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

AVN publisher Paul Fishbein discussed with me the industry’s disagreements with Miller. He pointed out that the images on videotape are not publicly exhibited. “The law is based on community standards, but what does that have to do with what one watches in the privacy of one’s own home?” Imposing the tastes of an ill-defined majority upon the private viewing choices of an individual would seem at odds with the First Amendment. But neither the industry nor its enemies, both puzzling over applying these standards to specific materials, expect the law to be changed.

It had taken the nation’s finest legal minds years to arrive at the “three-pronged test,” and even the Meese Commission wasn’t about to suggest that the Court undo the result. The Meese Report itself stated, “Virtually every word and phrase in the Miller test has been the subject of extensive litigation and substantial commentary in the legal literature.”

To avoid clashing with the Court’s definition of First Amendment protections for erotic materials, states patterned new obscenity laws after Miller or updated older laws to resemble the Federal statute. (Miller’s Constitutional tests DO NOT apply to child porn. It’s a Federal felony to create or distribute sexually explicit material involving a performer under the age of 18, to take a minor across state lines for the production of such material, or to advertise to buy or sell child porn. Penalties are jail terms up to ten years, fines up to $250,000, and forfeiture of profits plus property used in the operation. FBI Director William Webster testified before the Meese Commission that he didn’t need any new laws to combat child porn. The Adult Film and Video Association offered a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the conviction of child pornographers. Commercial pornographers no longer even cast adults to portray minors involved in sex.)

In practical terms, commercial pornographers interpret Miller to mean you stay away from the “no-nos”; you don’t portray cops, religious figures or politically recognizable characters in a sexually derogatory way; and you fit the sex into a “story” of some kind. You also edit “soft” or “cable” versions for communities (mostly in the Deep South) where hardcore is “against community standards.” And the more careful among us (Superior included) never shipped anything to Texas, Florida, Utah or Cincinnati.

For years, complying with those guidelines meant commercial pornographers could conduct business like any other law-abiding Americans. Dr. Richard Green, director of the Program in Psychiatry, Law and Human Sexuality at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, wrote to the L.A. Times after his testimony had no influence on the Meese Commission’s Report, “It was after all, the unwillingness of juries to convict in pornography trials during the past decade that led to inaction by government prosecutors.” Ohio attorney Louis Sirkin noted that 97 percent of obscenity convictions obtained in “porn-free” Cincinnati were reversed in appellate court.

The New Right sought different ways to interpret Miller. At a 1991 meeting of the Wayne County (Ohio) Family Committee, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Getz said that “prurient” could mean “erotic, amatory, amorous, abnormal, aphrodisiac, impure, dirty, immoral, unhealthy or unclean,” and that “community standards” means acceptance not endurance. “What you tolerate is not what you accept,” Getz said, urging anti-porn activists to “educate” local police and state’s attorneys and encourage law enforcement personnel to regard explicit materials “just as a gun or a knife or an icepick.”

Even in their harshest interpretations, Miller and its clones were not pure enough for those who followed only “God’s law.” To quote Reverend Donald Havrilla, whose 50-member Southampton Decency Committee got police to bust The Movie Store in Hampton Bays, New York: “Jesus said, if you look at a woman with lust, you’ve already committed it (sex); you don’t have to carry it out… the crime is still in the mind.” And New Jersey Assemblywoman Marion Crecco, unmindful of her state’s toxic dumps and high cancer rates, called for laws to combat “mind pollution.”

Juries didn’t see obscenity where religious conservatives did. So New Right smut-busters used prosecutions themselves‌—‌not convictions‌—‌as punishment. The idea was to keep the heat on: one court case after another. Having supplied Pennsylvania prosecutors with a list of 300 titles to go after, James Hanak, president of that state’s chapter of the AFA, suggested that a distributor could determine that a title he handles is obscene by the number of prosecutions against it. Not convictions. Prosecutions.

The ploy could work as effectively against Schindler’s List as Sizzle With Samantha‌—‌ not implausible with the AFA attacking World of Disney, Murphy Brown, Murder, She Wrote, Golden Girls, The Wonder Years, and Full House in addition to the previously-mentioned The Last Temptation of Christ and Mighty Mouse. Smut-busters were indeed going after non-X-rated fare: prosecutors in Kentucky used a 15-year-old boy to bait a video store into renting R-rated movies, and Florida cops sent a 14-year-old girl to obtain the unrated John Waters film Pink Flamingos.

Volume prosecutions bring publicity‌—‌and donations‌—‌to groups like the AFA. And the threat of bankruptcy to their targets. According to Adam Film World, retailers Linda Lauer in Phoenix and Jack Messer in Cincinnati “found that the first of what may be a string of prosecutions has already cost them a total of $144,000.” The two dealers won their cases but had no way to sue their persecutors and recoup $200-an-hour legal fees. Jerry Tanner said that his “easy to win” obscenity case would cost him $90,000. Crusading district attorneys don’t have to worry about expenses‌—‌they get their funding from taxpayers.

In the words of Reverend Wildmon, those who believed the First Amendment would protect them were “as crazy as a Betsy Bug.”

x x x x x x

According to L. M. Boyd who collects obscure bits of trivia for The Grab Bag, which appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s against the law to kiss longer than one second in Halethorpe, Maryland; to sleep in your kitchen in California; or to go to bed with your boots on in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One can imagine what sparked legislators to make it against the law to make love on a motorcycle in London, England or to do so in a walk-in freezer in Newcastle, Wyoming. And throwing a snake in Toledo, Ohio, probably became illegal because of where the serpent landed. Perhaps dog-lovers were behind the Michigan ordinance that forbids hitching a crocodile to a fire hydrant. But what precipitated an old Los Angeles law against bathing two babies in the same tub simultaneously?

Peculiar laws grow out of peculiar situations. In 1991, a Miami appeals court ruled it illegal to sleep with alligators. Wisecracks about “gator-AIDS” aside, the ruling came after police found John M. Butler bleeding in bed from gator bites and confiscated his two reptiles.

Since no one tries to enforce them, laws such as Charlotte, North Carolina’s ordinance against a woman appearing in public unless covered with “a minimum of 16 yards of cloth” remain in dusty legal tomes unchallenged‌—‌though the New Jersey legislature in 1972 found the law against a woman being “a common scold” too embarrassing to keep on the books. Complaints about deadwood in California’s code books induced the state legislature, in 1994, to expunge four dozen laws, some a century old, including regulations that required the winner of a duel to compensate the surviving spouse of the loser; horses, cattle and donkeys living in towns to do their procreating behind enclosures; and farmers to be allowed to wipe out beaver populations on their lands.

Sometimes, however, old laws are resurrected by new adherents. In 1990, Florida trailer park owner William Watson sued to have a 122-year-old law prohibiting “lewd and lascivious behavior” enforced against unmarried couples living together. Why? “Some people are very religious,” said a resident of the park who refused to give his name to reporters. “If they can poke their business up your nose, they’ll do it.”

The anti-smut forces pored over musty old law books for weapons other than the obscenity laws they found inadequate. Designed to curb burglaries, the Criminal Instruments statute of Dallas, Texas was used to tear down peep-show booths and to confiscate VCRs, computers, and business papers. Obscenity in Texas is a misdemeanor but the use of “criminal instruments” is a felony. Prosecutors used Indiana’s Indecent Nuisance law to smash up adult bookstores, rip open arcades with crowbars‌—‌while customers were still inside‌—‌and confiscate everything in the stores, including cash. In Houston, “plainclothes police have arrested store clerks for soliciting,” said Lou Berg, owner of Audio Video Plus. “They ask the clerk, ‘Is this movie any good?’ and if the clerk says, ‘It’s good,’ he’s soliciting.”

If the anti-porn forces didn’t have the laws they needed for shutting down adult businesses, they lobbied to get them passed. In amending obscenity laws to include videotapes, some legislatures went beyond the spirit of Miller. A new Tennessee law prohibited the sale or rental of tapes with an MPAA-issued X rating‌—‌banning Midnight Cowboy. New Jersey’s updated law against selling or displaying obscene materials defined obscenity as “any description, narrative, display or depiction of sexual activity.”

And on March 19, 1995, news services for the San Francisco Examiner reported a muddled Missouri measure that appeared to outlaw sex‌—‌of any kind. Attempting to stretch a law governing sex between consenting teenagers to forbid homosexual practices, the state legislature came up with “a person commits the crime of sexual misconduct in the first degree if he has deviate sexual intercourse with another person of the same sex, or he purposely subjects another person to sexual contact (emphasis added) or engages in conduct which would constitute sexual contact except that the touching occurs through the clothing without that person’s consent.” The measure became law before anyone thought to analyze what it really said.

In defiancé of the IRS rule against tax-exempt groups engaging in politicking, religious groups put enormous pressure on elected officials. A National Coalition Against Pornography-sponsored media blitz in Kansas City included posters on buses featuring a child’s face. Johnson County district attorney Dennis Moore said that “serious crime‌—‌homicide, rape, robbery” had a higher priority with his office than pornography. He was swamped with complaint letters from “concerned citizens” (many of them “similarly worded,” according to the New York Times). In response, Moore proposed a change in state law that would make it easier to prosecute obscenity cases in Kansas.

The Michigan AFA pushed for legislation to increase the penalty for a first obscenity offense to $100,000 and to have obscenity defined local community by local community‌—‌as California legislated in 1988.

Locally-defined obscenity‌—‌instead of a statewide standard‌—‌is a major victory for porn-busters. To distribute their tapes statewide, without making specific editions for specific communities, manufacturers must make them conform to the strictures of a state’s most conservative locale. Claiming the California law was meant to stop “gross, sickening stuff like child pornography,” Assemblyman Tim Leslie revealed its true purpose when he added, “and actual intercourse.” In urbane Marin County‌—‌home to Superior Video‌—‌soft versions began to replace explicit adult videos‌—‌to howls of protest from customers.

In North Carolina, home state of arch-conservative Jesse Helms, legislators amended the state’s obscenity law to include videos; they knew that most adult tapes wouldn’t be viewed in theaters so they removed the reference to dissemination in “any public place.” To enforce the suggestion that cops could invade homes to confiscate tapes, they classified obscenity as “contraband,” allowing suspect videos to be seized without warrant. Striking down the “statewide” standard of the original law left that area undefined and open to interpretation by local zealots. They raised obscenity from a misdemeanor to a felony. Disseminators of material involving underaged actors could be prosecuted for child pornography whether or not they had prior knowledge of the performers’ ages. After a 21-year-old divorced mother, working as a sales clerk, was sentenced to six months in prison for selling anal-sex magazines, most of the state’s retailers dropped explicit materials.

On December 30, 1986, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the law but one justice dissented, obligating the state Supreme Court to hear the case of those making the challenge. The dissenting jurist, Associate Justice Charles L. Becton, wrote, “When a statute peers into the bedrooms of married couples, for example, to close over-the-counter ‘Joy of Sex’ type books, or even clearly obscene books, the statute must yield to the Constitution which protects the people from their government.”

The New Right found that obscenity laws oppressive enough to keep adult tapes out of stores often died when challenged. Both Tennessee’s law banning tapes rated X and Michigan’s tough new AFA-backed obscenity law were declared unconstitutional.

In their quest for a porn-free America, censorship advocates had to turn elsewhere. They exploited the fear of many women that pornography confronts them with a personal threat.

x x x x x x

Roxanne, the tape operator, sat stiffly before the monitor, watching for glitches in the playback master of the early VCX film Winnebango, ignoring the comments and chuckles of the men behind her. Occasionally, one of their remarks would be addressed to her. “Hey, Roxanne, you ever tried that?” I hadn’t yet realized I could bar the inevitable peanut gallery of Compact Video technicians from gathering to ogle the screen at late-night VCX taping sessions.

After the taping was finished, Roxanne helped me wheel a stack of fresh submasters out to my car and complained about the leering audience. “You just feel their eyes on you, comparing you to the naked bodies on the screen. It’s very unpleasant.”

A passing engineer overheard her. “What’s the big deal, babe? It’s just good-natured fun. It’s not like anybody’s gonna rape you.”

“It gets tiresome,” I said to the engineer. “Say you’re the tape op on a boy-boy transfer, and there’s a room full of gay guys behind you, giggling and making lewd comments, and looking your body up and down. How would you feel?”

“It’s not the same. I’m not gay, so‌—‌sure‌—‌I’d find the whole thing repugnant. But for a normal, heterosexual woman… hey, what’s wrong with a little male attention?”

“It is the same,” I said. “In each case, you’re trying to do your job, and the last thing you need is a bunch of horny yahoos giving you a bad time.”

As we loaded the masters into my trunk, Roxanne said, “You know, Dave, sometimes I find it hard to believe you’re a pornographer.”

Ever aware of men’s eyes on their bodies, many women fear pornography as a stimulant to leering, to lewd remarks, or to sexual assault. Exploiting this fear, two militant activists gave the anti-porn armies a new angle of attack.

“All pornography is violence against women!” boomed radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin. “It’s about RAPE! It’s about PAIN! It’s about HUMILIATION!” Her premise was that even pictures and descriptions of gentle, consensual couplings can spur men to sexual assault. Violence, she asserted, is “the prime component of male identity.” How did she feel about men reading details of the graphic, flesh-tearing rapes suffered by her heroine, Andrea, in the first ten chapters of her novel, Mercy?

Dworkin’s collaborator in the legal arena, University of Michigan law professor, Catharine MacKinnon, continues the “men as monsters” theme in her 107-page anti-porn jeremiad Only Words. It opens with “You grow up with your father holding you down so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. When you are older, your husband ties you to a bed and drips hot wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you smile through it. Your doctor will not give you drugs he has addicted you to unless you suck his penis.” Later in the book, MacKinnon writes that some doctors “enjoy watching and inflicting pain during childbirth.”

In America, as perceived by Dworkin and MacKinnon, sex is a tool of oppression used by everyman against everywoman. “Romance,” writes Dworkin, “is rape embellished with meaningful looks.” Explaining their insights to a Lingua Franca reporter, MacKinnon said, “What you need is people who see through literature like Andrea Dworkin, who see through the law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women’s visual vocabulary.”

The pornography they “see through” would be hard to find in your local video shop. “Unfortunately, when it comes to pornography,” writes feminist erotica author Susie Bright, “few Americans, especially women, know a damn thing about it except that it’s ‘bad,’ and MacKinnon can get away with making statements that are right out of the War of the Worlds.” To MacKinnon, who relied on the Meese Report for her “evidence,” porn actresses are “poor desperate homeless pimped women who were sexually abused as children,” and “Only for pornography are women killed to make a sex movie…” She acts, writes Bright, “like it’s just business as usual to go down to your corner video store and pick up a copy of an X-rated movie depicting a cinema verité murder.” (The 1975 “slasher” film Snuff contained a semi-realistic, simulated knife murder. Many people, including police, have claimed they’ve seen real snuff movies but the FBI, which investigates all the allegations, has never found one commercially available in the United States.)

The heavy-set, coverall-clad Dworkin and the lean, smartly-tailored MacKinnon “make headlines because they’re feminists” said author Anne Rice. “If they would have been Bible Belt ministers, they would have been laughed out of the public arena.”

They weren’t laughed out of Minneapolis or Los Angeles, where legislators tried to ram through the laws concocted by the duo. Or in Indianapolis and Canada, where the laws were adopted. Or in the United States Congress where lawmakers were still trying to pass some form of the Dworkin/MacKinnon legislation into Federal law.

The main premise of the “Model Antipornography Law” is that pornography discriminates against women and is a violation of women’s civil rights. The law provides a template for a woman injured by someone who has read or seen pornography to sue both the seller and the manufacturer of the pornography. It also allows a woman “coerced” into performing in a pornographic item to sue those involved in making it, even if the actress was paid for the performance and signed a model release.

Twice the Minneapolis legislature passed such a law and twice Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed it. In retrospect, that city might thank their mayor for saving them the costly fate of Indianapolis where the measure became law in 1984. After radical anti-porn feminists in San Francisco warned that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment “contributed to the real use, abuse, and sexual manipulation of children,” the book industry realized that if someone raped a little girl after reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the publishers could be sued. A half-dozen media trade groups including the American Booksellers Association and Video Shack, Inc., challenged the constitutionality of the Indianapolis law and won; the city was ordered to pay the plaintiffs over $95,000 in court costs.

Though struck down in Indianapolis in 1986, another incarnation of what attorney/author Nadine Strossen calls “the MacDworkinite laws” surfaced in the United States Congress in the 1990s, pushed by conservative Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell. His proposed legislation was dubbed the “Bundy Bill,” after former Meese Commissioner Dr. James Dobson wangled a videotaped confession out of serial killer Ted Bundy that porn made him do it. (Dobson made a handsome profit selling copies of the tape for $30 each.) McConnell’s Pornography Victims Compensation Act, aimed specifically at makers of erotic media, has bounced around Congress for the past three years‌—‌tweaked here, reworded there‌—‌never quite getting enough votes to become law. At the time of this writing, conservative Republicans are still mulling over it, trying to make it mild enough to satisfy moderate legislators, yet keep it tough enough to be a major weapon against porn.

Warnings that MacKinnon-style ordinances would work against feminist factions as much as for them proved prophetic: after it was passed in Canada, one of the first uses of the new law was to raid a lesbian and gay bookstore. In a final irony, the Canadian censors banned Andrea Dworkin’s books Woman Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women for “eroticizing pain and bondage.”

Though damned or defended with great vigor in the press, the Dworkin/MacKinnon laws have yet to have an impact on the commercial porn scene. But a far more mundane, less-publicized group of laws have literally taken the porn battles to the streets all over America.

x x x x x x

Chuck’s Books had nowhere to go. A new regulation in National City, just outside San Diego, stipulated that no adult business could operate within 500 feet of residential areas. In the city of 57,000, that left one parcel of land available for an adult bookstore or theater, and it was already occupied by another type of business. Faced with literally being run out of town, Chuck’s Books sued the city and won in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Then, on October 4, 1993, the California Supreme Court, rendered conservative through a decade of appointments by Republican governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, reversed the lower court decision and upheld the National City ordinance. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and First Amendment attorney Clyde DeWitt, in his AVN “Legal News and Views” column predicted that cities all over America would “start photocopying the National City ordinance.” They have.

Throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, the Supreme Court struck down zoning ordinances regulating the location of adult businesses as unconstitutional restrictions of First Amendment rights. Then came the Court’s 1986 decision upholding a Renton, Washington ordinance that barred adult businesses within 500 feet of residential neighborhoods and within 1,000 feet from other adult businesses, parks, churches, schools and playgrounds. Renton had argued that the law wasn’t intended for censorship purposes but to uphold the quality of life in its residential neighborhoods. Speaking for the Court’s majority, conservative Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the ordinance was “a valid government response to the serious problems created by adult theaters and satisfies the dictate of the First Amendment.” DeWitt’s predecessor at AVN, the noted First Amendment champion John H. Weston, wrote that a spate of new zoning laws would relocate adult businesses to sites where access required “using scuba or mountain-climbing equipment or a four-wheel-drive vehicle.” To patronize peepshows, watch big-screen X-rated movies, or buy hardcore magazines, patrons had to skulk through dark, foreboding industrial waste-scapes, or brave the potholes on the way to places like “the Red Barn Theater, out on the end of the old county line road.”

At first, video stores with less than 50% of their inventory in adult tapes and no on-premise viewing booths were unaffected by zoning ordinances. A 1992 Supreme Court decision struck down the inclusion of video stores in a Tukwila, Washington adult zoning ordinance, noting that the mere sale or rental of videotapes doesn’t cause the kind of “undesirable secondary effects” on a neighborhood that justify special restrictions. These kinds of cases kept popping up throughout the 1990s, as smut-busters continued trying to widen their definitions to include businesses carrying any adult product.

The zoning zealots, civil-suit feminists, religious groups and publicity-seeking prosecutors brought the War on Porn to communities throughout America. They were the shock troops. To attack the high command of the adult movie industry‌—‌the manufacturers, producers and distributors‌—‌required heavy artillery: a pimping and pandering law aimed at stopping the shooting of sex movies in the United States; millions of tax dollars squandered on FBI and Postal sting operations; multiple Justice Department prosecutions that defied legal protections against double jeopardy; and the nuclear weapons of the anti-porn arsenal: the RICO and forfeiture laws.

Unprepared for the blitzkreig, commercial pornographers were late in mounting a defense. But as the war dragged on, the adult industry developed its own crafty guerrillas and seasoned generals.

x x x x x x

Chapter 18

FIGHTING BACK

I never thought of Hal Freeman as the hero type. To me, the president of Hollywood Video was just another paunchy middle-aged pornographer with lines of patient resignation in his face. I rarely saw him except at World Modeling, where his Buick looked hopelessly conservative and frugal next to the Ferraris, Corvettes and Porsches of other producers.

“You pay new girls too much, Dave,” he’d tell me at trade shows. “They’ll work just as hard for $100 less. You could save five, six hundred dollars a shoot. Are you so rich you can afford to kiss off $600?”

Though tight with money, Freeman was known for his skill at helping nervous ladies relax. Insecure with dialogue, Cindy Carver listed him among her favorite directors to work for‌—‌along with Bob Chinn and myself.

In one of the last two battles of his life, Freeman went way out of character, spending over $280,000 on something he could’ve resolved for less than $10,000. He left the adult movie industry forever in his debt.

The saga that made Robert Harold Freeman a legend began in 1983. L.A. vice cops, led by seasoned smut-buster, Sergeant Don Smith, watched the cast of Freeman’s Caught From Behind II pile into two vans, which the cops followed to “an exclusive residence overlooking the Pacific.” After watching the location for three days, they tailed five actresses to their homes and got the ladies to testify they’d each received $350 a day (the cheap SOB!) in exchange for “sodomy, oral copulation, and sexual intercourse.”

Then the cops busted Freeman for pandering. The penalties for pimping and pandering, section 266i of the California Penal Code had been increased in 1982. A first offense carried a mandatory prison term of three years (as jurors who later convicted “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss were shocked to learn). The cops had chosen CFB II for the test case; an all-anal movie might be easier to convict. If that happened, the statute could then be used against anyone shooting commercial sex scenes in California. Other states would follow California’s example and the end result would be that no commercial pornographer would dare shoot sex anywhere in the United States. Ad Vice lieutenant Dennis Conte said the law could even be used against Hollywood’s major studios. In a court affidavit, Freeman listed Bolero, The Last Tango in Paris, and 48 Hours among mainstream films vulnerable to the interpretation of the law because they contained scenes with actors touching bare breasts, hips and genitals.

Richard Aldrich, a producer of erotic cinema since the 1960s, said, “I don’t know if I’ll be shooting any more adult films.” Les Baker, president of Gemini Film Corp. added, “No sensible person would dare stick his head into that meat grinder.”

The prosecution argued the actresses were prostitutes because they were paid to have sex. The defense countered they were hired for acting performances, to portray sex for purposes of screen entertainment, not gratification. The jury concluded the acting was secondary to the sex. On May 22, 1985, Freeman was convicted on five counts of pandering. But his sentence was a wrist-slap. To the dismay of prosecutors, Superior Court Judge James Albracht decided the mandatory three-year prison sentence would be “cruel and unusual”; he sentenced Freeman to 90 days in jail, a $10,000 fine, and five years probation. Most producers would’ve breathed a sigh of relief and let stand a precedent that would cripple the adult movie industry. Freeman didn’t.

Like so many adult enterprises, Hollywood Video was a family business. “If I lose, the whole industry goes,” Freeman had said before his conviction. Could he leave his wife and daughters with that legacy? “I will appeal and appeal and appeal,” he declared, “until we get to the Supreme Court!”

In the meantime, vice cops began a campaign of spying on shoots, following actresses to their homes, threatening them with arrest or exposure of their careers to their families, and persuading them to turn state’s evidence. (Cops rarely pick on the men; studs have a macho code‌—‌they’d sooner face a firing squad than “sing to the heat.”) Even before Freeman’s conviction, Mark Curtis of Video Exclusives was busted and actress Lana Burner was “persuaded” to testify against him. Actor Steve Hammond, allegedly caught with drugs, also testified in return for having the drug charges dropped. Agents Reb Sawitz and Jim South were busted but only Reb was charged with pandering.

With the looming spectre of draconian punishment, more than one deal was cut. Kelly Howell‌—‌porn name Stacey Donovan‌—‌said the cops paid her $3,000 for her testimony against both the Zane Brothers and Charlie Brickman. Brickman, in turn, agreed to cop to a charge of conspiracy to pander to have the charge of pandering itself‌—‌and its three-year sentence‌—‌dropped.

Video companies had to keep cranking out titles to survive. A number of them shot outside of California. Those of us who shot in-state revived the old cops-and-robbers tactics: we’d meet our performers at restaurants. Then we’d take detours on the way to our shooting locations, making U-turns and doubling back to see if we were being followed. Sometimes, we’d employ a “paymaster.” He’d arrive at the end of a shooting day, pay the cast and leave. That way, if there was a bust and the model was asked in court, “Who actually paid you the money?”, she could honestly say, “I don’t know.”

With L.A. “stockpiling” cases to prosecute if Freeman’s conviction was upheld, the industry tensely awaited the result of his appeal. On January 7, 1987, California’s Second District Court of Appeals upheld Freeman’s conviction. “I’ve spent $280,000 fighting this thing,” Freeman told Film World Reports, “and I’m willing to spend $280,000 more.”

On August 25, 1988, five years after his ordeal began, the California Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, overturned Hal Freeman’s pandering conviction. Justice Marshall Kaufman wrote, “The prosecution of defendant under the pandering statute must be viewed as a somewhat transparent attempt at an ‘end run’ around the First Amendment and the state obscenity law.” “Had this decision gone the other way,” said Freeman’s attorney Stuart Goldfarb, “every single adult film producer in the state would have been arrested.”

The state prosecutor petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, an unusual request after a state’s top court makes a unanimous ruling. The Court declined.

A gaunt but smiling Hal Freeman (he was dying of cancer) stood beside his wife Jean, as shutters clicked and reporters scribbled. “I just thank the adult industry for not falling apart‌—‌it almost did,” he said. “Everybody stood fast.”

Suddenly, Administrative Vice had no law to use against producers shooting explicit sex between consenting adults. Obscenity charges only applied after a movie had gone into distribution. Overworked judges no longer had patience for non-cases. When vice cops hauled Jim South into court again, shortly after they lost a case against World Modeling, South laughed, “The judge said, ‘Are you going to waste this court’s time with something like this again?’ Those were his exact words. It’s in the transcripts.”

Freeman pointed out after his victory that any further police raids on shoots in L.A. would constitute harassment. The industry wouldn’t hesitate to sue. With the nation’s attention focused on the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, the last thing needed at Parker Center was more bad publicity.

The remaining weapon against pornographers was the requirement that commercial motion picture producers shooting in L.A. County obtain a permit. Without one, a shooter risked the confiscation of tapes and equipment. The permit cost only $100 a day but to get one, a producer had to carry a million-dollar liability insurance policy‌—‌at a cost of roughly $2,000 a year. For shooters like John Stagliano or Paul Thomas those costs could easily be absorbed. For the less prolific, a new avenue opened. Hollywood’s sound stages carried their own insurance, permits, and fire-code requirements. They began opening their doors to X-rated productions.

Producers accustomed to back entrances and blackout curtains were now given the tour of Panther Studios’ “17,000 square foot shooting space, three warehouses of props to choose from, a complete woodworking shop in-house, and carpenters available for set building.” Paul Thomas framed his newly-acquired permit to shoot in Beverly Hills and hung it beneath his Oakland arrest warrant.

In June of ’91, at the fourth annual Adult Video Association (AVA) legal fundraiser, the Night of the Stars Dinner-Dance, Al Goldstein presented the Hal Freeman “Freedom Isn’t Free” Award to Barry Freilich, president of the Florida Friends of the First Amendment.

Florida was one of several entire states that had become battlegrounds.

x x x x x x

“If someone had told me five years ago I’d be standing in front of groups of people talking about anal sex, I’d have stayed away from this business,” said Linda Lauer, “But I’m a video retailer and I have to stand up for both my rights and the rights of my customers. If people label me a pornographer, I won’t like it but I’ll deal with it.” The owner of Arizona Video Cassettes and founder of the Arizona Video Tape Rights Coalition and her husband Art were among the people whose lives were changed forever by the War on Porn. With 33% of her business in X-rated tapes, she chose not to give in to threats.

Those who had given in and dropped X-rated tapes lost a lot more than the 20% average of their business labeled “adult.” When 80% of North Carolina video retailers pulled their adult inventories in response to the state’s harsh new obscenity law, their revenues fell 50%. The 20% of dealers still carrying adult were rewarded with a substantial increase in business. Surprised by the number of tape renters who asked for their deposits back after vigilantes forced The Movie Store in Hampton Bays, New York to pull adult tapes, manager Jim Clayton said, “They can still get X-rated cassettes 10 miles from here so that’s where they go.” Those “perverts” who rented Debbie were also renting Disney. Stores in Margate, Florida, dropped adult tapes upon police request. Then they sued the city over prior restraint, reporting business losses as high as 80%. Indicted in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Al Hotard, Jr., co-owner of the three store Al’s Video chain, estimated that dropping the 5% of his inventory rated X would cost him 36% of his gross monthly income. He chose court.

Dealers all over the country began organizing to fight back. Besieged with felony arrests and threatening letters from “Meeseketeer” prosecutor George Peach, more than 200 of St. Louis’ nearly 250 video retailers formed the Video Coalition Against Censorship in 1987, and began mailing the zealous prosecutor postcards signed by store customers. Peach had targeted smaller retailers without the funds for a long, costly defense. The Coalition pooled the cost of hiring First Amendment attorney Errol Copelovitz and prepared for battle.

Before the end of ’87, St. Louis County’s obscenity ordinance was declared unconstitutional. Though unable to get convictions with the state’s obscenity laws, St. Louis smut-busters kept up the attack. The Coalition, which had once numbered 300 stores, dwindled to what AVN called “a precious few.” Those who planned to stick it out needed pockets as deep as the taxpayers’.

General Video, the largest volume distributor of adult tapes to retailers in America, became alarmed by the number of customers dropping X. The wholesale giant set up a toll-free legal hotline, sponsored clinics at trade shows, and published a periodic White Paper with news, warnings, and lists of the “safest” titles to carry‌—‌chosen by a panel of attorneys. They gave advice on fighting back and the best strategies for staying out of trouble. And the distributor spent hundreds of thousands helping individual retailers with legal costs.

While attending a trial in Phoenix, General Video President Steve Assid became friends with Linda and Art Lauer. The three decided to go partners in General Video of Arizona; the Lauers might as well have the potential to pay their legal bills. Scheduled to speak at the January, 1987, CES Show, Linda Lauer had to cancel because she wasn’t allowed to leave the state. While preparing her children for hostility from classmates and teachers, Lauer endured a gauntlet of trials initiated by Maricopa County prosecutors, using a 1986 statute with a mandatory jail sentence of 22 months on a single felony conviction, plus fines of up to 1.3 million dollars.

Four new bills were before the state legislature, backed, Lauer believed, by Citizens for Decency Through Law, the old Keating-founded group. They put obscenity under RICO statutes, taxed each adult tape sold in the state an extra $2.50, allowed a citizen to obtain an injunction against a store as a “moral nuisance,” and changed a state-wide obscenity standard to locally-defined ones. The measures died, Lauer won her cases, and the obscenity prosecutions petered out. A case that had dragged on since 1985 ended in 1989, with Eugene Volmer, Sr., of Arizona Video pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge and being fined a total of $1.37.

In other states, the War on Porn raged much longer. Fanning the flames was H. Robert Showers, executive director of Meese’s Justice Department legacy, the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, staging rallies and seminars to coach local officials. They gave obscenity the same priority as organized crime and illegal drugs. (The Supreme Court’s 1986 P.J. Video ruling allowed judges to issue warrants for tapes they hadn’t viewed, relying on police conjectures that the titles might be obscene‌—‌the same “probable cause” premise used in searching for guns and crack.)

On a state level, the fighting was fiercest in Florida. In AVN’s state-by-state listings of legal hot spots across the nation, Florida’s ran the longest, with details such as Fort Lauderdale police scraping the walls of peep-show booths in search of evidence of sexual activity and the Reverend Stan Sparkman of the First Baptist Church in Venice praying for God to wipe out Blue Video, which specialized in adult tapes.

Among the bustees listed was Barry Freilich, an Ormond Beach retailer. Like the Lauers, his life was dramatically altered by the War on Porn. Leading a coalition of video store owners fed up with constant police harassment, Freilich formed The Friends of the First Amendment. Membership spread from Ormond Beach to other communities across Florida. Filing with the state as a political action committee, the FOFA could raise money to endorse or oppose ballot issues and candidates for public office. As president, Freilich became a target of State Attorney John Tanner, the anti-porn crusader nicknamed “Crazy John.” Tanner botched a highly-publicized case against Freilich. The state attorney showed the wrong tape in court; those assembled were treated to the Adult Video Association’s First Amendment Rights message. Then he filed a civil suit seeking to prohibit Freilich from selling or renting The Devil In Miss Jones I and II.

Tanner-inspired prosecutors got “victories” by offering light punishments. The three principals of Mike’s Bookstore in Orlando pleaded “no contest” to obscenity and were fined $565, $365, and $165, with no probation or arrest record. For not contesting charges, video retailer Danny Milstead received no fine, no jail time, no probation and no criminal charge on his record.

Other stores called Tanner’s bluff. Glen Rose of Mega Movies in Daytona Beach requested a trial so a jury could decide what was obscene; Tanner dropped the charges. After he busted Mary Marvin, the owner of Marvin’s Movie World said Tanner “has picked the wrong woman to mess with.” She said that since Tanner had started his crusade, her adult tape business, primarily to customers over 60, had doubled. Again, charges were dropped.

In the meantime, the FOFA began to score wins. Freilich exposed the hypocrisy of Joseph Coors’ involvement in Morality in Media while using sexy commercials to sell beer. Held up to public scrutiny, Coors, who’d given the pro-censorship group over $185,000, severed his ties and the Coors Foundation “decided to discontinue funding Morality in Media.” AVN editor Gene Ross credited FOFA with “knocking 15 anti-smut office seekers out of the box this past November (1990).” Freilich’s stated philosophy, “the best defense is a good offense,” was working.

The biggest FOFA victory was Tanner’s surprise 1992 loss to little-known Steve Alexander in Florida’s 7th Judicial District Republican Primary. “We negatived him to death,” said Freilich’s FOFA co-leader, attorney David Wasserman. “Every time he got bad press, we announced it far and wide.”

The thousands of news photocopies the FOFA handed out in video stores exposed the fundamentalist Tanner’s contacts with the American Family Association of Florida and reported the alleged secret payments to Florida prosecutors made by the National Coalition Against Pornography. They revealed Tanner’s misuse of a grand jury to declare tapes obscene‌—‌which only a judge and court-appointed jury could legally do. They demanded Tanner make public the “citizen complaint forms” behind his grand jury scam; his claim that he’d destroyed them created a bigger scandal than the revelation that there’d been only four complaints. When Tanner came out against thong bikinis, FOFA members dressed in 1890s beachwear handed out “violation notices” to thong wearers. The FOFA didn’t let people forget that Tanner had set up Meese Commissioner Dr. James Dobson’s video interview with Ted Bundy and had tried to save the serial killer from execution because “porn made him do it.”

According to Freilich, the gaffe that gave Alexander his winning margin of 43 votes was Tanner’s attempt to subpoena the names of customers who’d rented X-rated videos. The FFOFA (adding “Florida” since FOFAs were forming in other states) made sure voters knew about the Privacy Act of 1986, protecting the confidentiality of video rental lists (enacted, ironically, after stores had made public the viewing habits of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork).

After the defeat of Tanner, Freilich and Wasserman began working with the adult video industry’s newly-formed Free Speech Coalition, turning their talents to fighting censorship on a nation-wide scale.

I’d expect trouble in Florida‌—‌that’s why Superior didn’t ship there. Superior did ship a lot of product to Michigan, because the north end of the Bible Belt didn’t have the “fire-and-brimstone” vituperation of parts of the South. Michigan’s attitude was more “mind your own business” than “mind thy neighbor’s.” But the state also had the largest chapter of the American Family Association. The clash with adult video was inevitable.

Denying he was influenced by a 3,000-signature petition from the AFA, Ron Franz, Ottawa County’s new prosecutor, less than 6 months on the job, sent the usual letter to video stores warning them to remove “obscene” materials he defined as “real hardcore.” The Grand Haven-based Friends of the First Amendment immediately collected 4,000 signatures on a petition to support retailers’ rights and mounted a drive to oust Franz. The beleaguered porn-buster went ahead with prosecutions against four stores; he quickly lost three. The fourth went all the way up to the Michigan Supreme Court. Along the way, the state’s obscenity law was declared unconstitutional, then reinstated. One of the defendants billed the county $2,800 in “overdue rental charges” on tapes the cops never returned. The flustered Franz blurted that the tapes would be returned after the police had made copies of them‌—‌stirring up a bees’ nest of copyright infringement charges. Though he pledged to continue prosecuting obscenity, Franz quietly dropped his campaign to clean up home video. He shrugged off angry missives from the AFA demanding more prosecutions, claiming that judges must view tapes before issuing an arrest warrant and the judges just weren’t watching them.

The state-level pattern of sudden anti-porn flare-ups that subside just as quickly when challenged was not the model for Federal actions. The smut-busters in Big Government weren’t about to be intimidated by public opinion. The government set out to stop the Free Speech Coalition, which‌—‌by 1993‌—‌had finally become an elite fighting force. Divided by their traditional distrust of one another, porn video manufacturers hadn’t organized effectively against their common enemy until it was almost too late.

x x x x x x

In 1987, the Adult Film and Video Association of America had neither offices nor paid staff. When a retailer asked AVN columnist and AFVAA member Linday Flora what the Association would do to help stores in trouble, she replied the organization didn’t have the resources to do much more than offer sympathy. “So, video retailers,” she wrote, “please know that by sipping the wine you risk a hangover and nobody can experience the headache for you.”

Then came the Justice Department’s onslaught. The 1989 Post Porn sting almost ended all adult tape mail orders. Six of the biggest direct-mail companies left the business under plea bargains. Their alternative would have been a gamut of serial prosecutions, hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and possibly millions in fines, years in prison, and forfeiture of property and assets. Using methods established in Post Porn, the Feds zeroed in on adult tape manufacturers. There was a flurry of emotional AFVAA meetings, with the common consensus that if the industry didn’t unify‌—‌and fast‌—‌it would cease to exist.

Under the co-chairmanship of videomakers Perry Ross and Ron (Henri Pachard) Sullivan, the Adult Video Association (AVA), born in 1987, began a massive membership drive. “A SLEEPING GIANT HAS BEEN AWAKENED” was the headline in full-page ads in publications as diverse as AVN and The Washington Post. The AVA sought members among “manufacturers, distributors, producers, directors, performing artists, graphic designers, printers, publishers, technicians and YOU‌—‌the individual video store.” The Association put on fund-raising activities during trade shows, such as a “lingerie auction” at the Pleasure Principle in Las Vegas where the audience bought raffle tickets and winners got to strip clothing off stars such as Nina Hartley, the only porn actress on the AVA’s founding board of directors.

$50-per-year AVA memberships poured in. They helped fund petitions, thousands of calls and millions of post cards to Congressmen, lawsuits against the Government, a public service trailer that appeared on most adult videos sold in the U.S., and a telephone hotline for legal advice prepared by First Amendment attorneys.

But it wasn’t enough. Calling the American Family Association “a well-tooled, well-oiled lobbying machine,” AVN editor Ross chided the AVA in a 1990 editorial for not registering as a lobbying group and going after politicians, as “the Friends of the First Amendment are doing in Florida.”

In 1991, a group of video manufacturers, distributors, dealers and magazine wholesalers formed The Free Speech Legal Defense Fund and hired a Washington lobbyist. Fresh from his FOFA victories in Florida, Barry Freilich came aboard in 1992 as Director, and immediately set up a hotline for keeping apprised of busts and anti-censorship activity throughout the country. With the new FSLDF competing with the AVA for the anti-censorship dollar, however, neither group was meeting its funding goals. They joined forces, merging as the Free Speech Coalition. At the first annual meeting, during the January, ’93 CES Show, Executive Director Freilich outlined an agenda of continuing lobby activities, anti-RICO arguments before the Supreme Court, declaratory judgment suits to determine the legal status of videos before they went on sale, alliances with other free-speech groups across the country, and the development of state-specific strategies.

Attorney Jeff Douglas gave an update on the massive Know Censorship database being prepared to help defense attorneys throughout the country who had little experience defending adult tapes. A compendium of legal details on every First Amendment case ever tried was already available from the Justice Department to every prosecutor in the United States.

The Feds had a five-year head start. By the time the industry became an effective fighting force, many cases with fortunes‌—‌and even lives‌—‌at stake were already lost or in their eleventh hour.

x x x x x x

If anyone was at the top of the Government’s “shit list” it was Philip D. Harvey. The Harvard graduate and one-time deputy director for CARE in India had built PHE, Inc, AKA Adam & Eve, into one of the largest sex-product mail-order firms in America‌—‌right there in North Carolina, home turf of Jesse Helms. Harvey had beaten the state on eight counts of obscenity in the first jury trial under the state’s stiff new 1985 statute. When New York customs confiscated and declared obscene two Femme tapes Adam and Eve was sending to an A.P.O. (Army Post Office) address in Europe, Harvey sued the government. Faced with a number of therapists and Candida Royalle herself testifying on Adam and Eve’s behalf, the government backed down.

Meese’s minions in the Department of Justice knew that every product Adam & Eve sold was first examined by independent experts to determine its defensibility in terms of Miller. They also knew Harvey was prepared to go to court. Since their cases lacked quality, they substituted quantity. The Government initiated multiple criminal prosecutions against PHE, Inc., in porn-hostile areas such as the Western District of Kentucky. They threatened Adam & Eve and the company’s employees with a non-stop battery of charges and RICO proceedings unless the company ceased to do business.

With Federal indictments against him materializing like mushrooms after a cloudburst, Harvey sued the U.S. Department of Justice. “If the government can prosecute in two, ten or a hundred jurisdictions for the same offense,” said Bruce Ennis, Adam & Eve’s attorney in the March, 1990 action, “the power to indict will be the power to destroy, regardless of guilt or innocence.” The District Court for Washington, D.C. ruled in Harvey’s favor; all of the existing indictments were withdrawn.

So the Feds put their efforts into an eleven-count indictment in Utah, on September 20, 1990, based on Adam & Eve tapes seized there in 1986! PHE argued that the new indictment was part of the same forced-bankruptcy-through-litigation scheme. After the case bounced from federal court to federal court for over a year, PHE won. At the AVA’s annual summer dinner-dance on June 19, 1992, Phil Harvey received the Hal Freeman “Freedom Isn’t Free” Award.

The Feds weren’t done with Harvey yet. In December of 1992, 30 postal inspectors raided Adam and Eve’s headquarters and seized business records, in response to alleged complaints by parties on the company’s mailing list. The Department of Justice got its Utah indictments reinstated, then worked out a deal with Harvey. The government withdrew the Utah charges, agreed not to prosecute Adam & Eve for “any crimes committed before November 18, 1993,” and agreed not to engage in its “multi-jurisdictional prosecution” program. In return, PHE pled guilty to one count of violating Alabama postal regulation and agreed to a $500,000 fine. Adam & Eve had spent over $3 million fighting the DOJ (Department of Justice) including almost $1.5 million on the Utah charges alone.

Entrepreneurs like Harvey resigned themselves to ongoing litigation as part of the cost of running a sexually-oriented business in the U.S.A. But things got worse. The DOJ gave itself the power to render citizens penniless without even going to court.

x x x x x x

Dennis and Barbara Pryba of Lorton, Virginia and Pryba’s sister-in-law Jennifer Williams, who worked for them, lost three bookstores, nine video rental outlets, their cars, bank accounts, homes‌—‌well over $1 million in assets. Plus, Dennis Pryba was given a three-year prison sentence. All for the “crime” of selling $105.30 worth of videotapes and magazines.

None of the materials featured children, bestiality, rape, excreta or snuffs. Henry E. Hudson, the new U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia‌—‌a reward for his Meese Commission work‌—‌justified the 1987 sentence by a Reagan-appointed judge of six weeks: the Prybas’ Educational Books, Inc., had been convicted of violating the state’s obscenity codes in the past. That, said Hudson, indicated a “pattern of racketeering” that permitted the use of RICO in prosecution.

The Federal RICO statutes were the most effective of the Republican Right’s new laws against erotic media. Senator Jesse Helms had managed to get obscenity included among the crimes punishable under RICO in the Crime Control Act of 1984.

The rationale behind the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations laws, first passed in 1970, was that organized crime kingpins accumulated their wealth through illegal activities. Therefore their assets should be taken away upon conviction just as a burglar’s stolen loot is confiscated by police.

These state and Federal “forfeiture laws” also permitted law enforcement agencies to confiscate a suspect’s assets before going to court, if there was “probable cause” to believe crimes had been committed. That would prevent arrested crooks from hiding assets in the names of relatives and closing out bank accounts‌—‌the old “trunk full of bills buried beneath the oak tree” routine. Critics believed the real agenda was to prevent newly-pauperized defendants from hiring expensive and talented attorneys who could make fools of plodding government lawyers.

This second aspect of forfeiture laws aroused great controversy. It contradicted the basic American principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The worst fears of skeptics came true:

Willie Jones, a horticultural nurseryman, bought flowers and shrubs with cash, because that was what small growers preferred. At Nashville Metropolitan Airport, Jones was apprehended by police who’d been tipped off by a ticket agent that “a large black man” had paid his fare in cash. The cops said Jones fit the “profile” of a drug dealer, confiscated $9,900 and let him go. He was never charged with a crime but the police refused to return his money.

Dick Joyce of Marin County, California made a standard legal purchase of a jet aircraft for his small air freight service, Pacific West Airlines. Nine months later, Feds seized the $275,000 plane; the previous owner of the jet had been busted for drugs. Joyce estimated that the adverse publicity cost him $600,000 to $700,000 in revenues, not to mention legal expenses and the cost of his plane. Joyce had done nothing wrong but he couldn’t get his plane back.

Federal drug agents seized the $3 million beach house of Southern California attorney Terry Fields, alleging the house had been bought with drug money. The Feds never accused Fields but a client he had defended was convicted of dealing drugs. The Feds seized the property because Fields was paid legal fees by clients whose money allegedly came from dealing drugs.

In a case that raised a huge outcry in Southern California, police burst into the home of wealthy Malibu area landowner Donald Scott. Hearing his wife’s scream, the 61-year-old rancher ran into his living room with a revolver. The cops promptly shot him dead. They later claimed a surveillance plane had spotted marijuana growing on the 200-acre property; no drugs were ever found. Federal officials had been trying to buy Scott’s ranch and merge it with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. He’d refused to sell. The attorney handling the dead rancher’s estate commented, “This was not about drug seizure; this was about asset seizure.”

Conservative Senators Helms and John Heinz tried to put video in the same pre-trial forfeiture class as drugs with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, allowing the Federal government to seize the entire assets of retailers, manufacturers and distributors, without having to first undergo that maddening process of proving obscenity. Then, if no charges are filed, those whose assets were seized would be allowed to buy their own property back. The Adult Video Association, the American Library Association and several other trade groups won their ferocious battle to get the Act declared unconstitutional. But Helms and his cohorts passed the Child Protection Restoration and Penalties Enhancement Act of 1990. In 1994, the Washington, D.C. Federal Court of Appeals affirmed the legality of the revised Act, and a year later the Supreme Court refused to hear further arguments. The Act imposed the Labeling and Record-Keeping Law, a new weapon against the adult industry that could endanger the very performers it was ostensibly designed to protect (see Chapter 21).

Early in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled in Fort Wayne Books versus Indiana that pre-trial RICO seizures in obscenity cases were unconstitutional; obscenity must first be proved in court‌—‌a small victory for the adult industry. Next came a big defeat. Roughly a year after its Fort Wayne Books decision, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of Dennis and Barbara Pryba, establishing obscenity convictions as predicate to RICO forfeiture.

The Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit changed its name to the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Unit after some members of Congress wanted it eliminated. It took aim squarely at the adult video industry, needing only those elusive obscenity convictions.

The government had already begun its master plan for getting them.

x x x x x x

Regan Pendleton had been assigned a staggering task. The Assistant Solicitor in Greenville, South Carolina had to watch all 428 adult videos confiscated by the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office. At about 70 minutes per tape, AVN estimated she had approximately 500 hours of viewing to do. After the 45th tape, Ms. Pendleton observed, “They’re all the same sex acts over and over again. The characters change and that’s about it.” That didn’t make her job of choosing which tapes to prosecute as “obscene” any easier.

It was a numbers game. If you throw enough darts blindfolded, you’re bound to hit a few bulls-eyes. Throw enough titles at a jury, and they might think that at least some of them must be obscene‌—‌especially if that jury is in a conservative community.

Beginning in the spring and summer of 1990, Federal agents and local SWAT police staged blitzkreig raids on most of adult video’s manufacturers and distributors. Cops and FBI agents with assault rifles smashed into the home of Allyssa Hampton’s friends Elliot and Judy Levinson, who made phone sales for manufacturers from their house as Equs Distributing. The invaders “tore the place apart” looking for records of sales made to a company called Video Wholesalers, which the Levinsons had been selling to for a year. “It could’ve been me,” Allyssa said as she and I walked on the beach near her home/office. “I have the same accounts.” Once again, I was glad I’d sold Superior in 1986.

The Feds had been plying the CES and VSDA trade shows in the guise of video dealers and wholesalers. Many adult tape salespeople, with business languishing in a glutted market, were only too happy to take big orders from new accounts, even if they were based in the “danger zones” of Texas and Oklahoma.

Dallas, Texas is one of the last places a pornographer would want to be tried for obscenity. But even there, Federal prosecutors had a hard time coming up with a conviction. After two days the jury was hopelessly deadlocked on the 8 counts of obscenity against C.P.L.C. (California Publishers Liquidating Corporation), Video Team and Great Western Litho. The judge cited the Allen Rule, which allowed him to force the jury to try harder. On the final day, one juror was crying; others said they’d do anything to get the trial over with. Another sent a note to the judge that she was being coerced into a decision against her will.

Finally, the jury decided the compilation tapes Interracial Anal and Anal Sluts were obscene‌—‌amounting to one count.

Under the stiffened sentences for obscenity established in the late 1980s, Judge Barefoot Sanders (no misprint), Chief Judge of the Northern District of Texas, fined C.P.L.C. and Video Team $60,000 and Great Western Litho $30,000. He sentenced C.P.L.C. and Video Team president Don Browning to a year in jail, two years of probation and a $30,000 fine. Great Western president Michael Warner got 4 months in jail, 4 months of electronically-monitored house arrest and a $20,000 fine. Susan Colvin, general manager of C.P.L.C. and Video Team got six months of electronically-monitored house arrest, a fine of $15,000 and several hundred hours of community service.

It could have been worse. Under the compromises hammered out to force the RICO-obscenity statutes through Congress, two or more obscenity convictions would be required for the Government to impose full forfeiture of a defendant’s assets. On a single conviction, the amount would be left to the discretion of the presiding judge.

With a hint of disgust in his voice, Judge Sanders described how the Dallas Police Department and the FBI assumed control of Good Vibrations and had dozens of sexually-explicit videotapes shipped into Texas from the California companies. The Feds wanted real estate, buildings, inventories, bank accounts and all of Great Western’s printing facilities. The jury had recommended an asset forfeiture figure of $10 million. Judge Sanders imposed a RICO forfeiture total of $10.40‌—‌the actual cost of the two videocassettes.

The government appealed. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit U.S Court of Appeals struck down Judge Sanders’ RICO ruling. Judge Edith H. Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote the Fifth Circuit’s opinion that there was “probable cause” to believe that among the 72 unindicted tapes still in the Dallas police vault must be some that are obscene. Those tapes, AVN’s legal columnist Clyde DeWitt pointed out, were left unindicted for a reason: “If the jury had failed to find obscene any of the original eight tapes with which the defendants were charged, the government would have sought indictment on another handful of the 72 they had in their ‘green room,’ so to speak. And had that handful also been found protected, another small number would have been charged, and so on, until all 72 were exhausted.” The Fifth Circuit recommended forfeitures in line with drug crimes. DeWitt wrote that the case is probably headed for the Supreme Court.

The Cal Vista case was settled quite differently. In the 1991 trial in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the courtroom spectators and jury laughed like a Jay Leno audience during the viewing of Sorority Pink II, in which Joey Silvera plays “Easy Ed,” a frontal-lobotomized institution case who becomes U.S. Attorney General. In this community, where the leading tourist attraction is Oral Roberts University, the jury of “faithful church-goers,” none of whom had ever before seen an adult movie, remained hopelessly deadlocked over four tapes featuring anal sex. Cal Vista worked out a plea-bargain. In return for a guilty plea, Cal Vista agreed to forfeit $100,000 in company assets‌—‌not the personal property of principals Sidney Niekerk and Jack Gallagher‌—‌and pay a judge-imposed fine of $5,000.

Defendants in other trials stemming from government stings agreed to even stiffer penalties. Vivid Video settled before going to trial in Mississippi and agreed to forfeit $500,000 over three years. In Hand Video settled for a fine of roughly the same amount and agreed to cease all distribution activities (in essence, to go out of business). Just before jury selection began in Mobile, Alabama, VCA agreed to a two million dollar fine.

If obscenity is so hard to prove, why cop to an early plea‌—‌and pay staggering fines? Granted, the Government zeroed in on successful companies with deep pockets, and gave the defendants years to pay off their debts. But still, the $500,000 forfeiture that Vivid’s attorney Louis Sirkin called “an excellent result” isn’t exactly pocket change.

Defendants faced a hard choice: to gamble or not to gamble. All it took was one interstate obscenity conviction. And no pornographer could count on getting a judge like Barefoot Sanders. By the time Bill Clinton took the Presidential Oath of Office, 70% of presiding Federal judges in America had been appointed by the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Commercial pornographers had an example before them of just how badly you could lose. Then at the mercy of an increasingly anti-porn Supreme Court was a stubborn old man who’d fought the Government all the way.

x x x x x x

Ferris Alexander never looked comfortable at trade shows. Dressed Lutheran plain, wispy white hair wafting in the air-conditioned breeze, he seemed as bemused as a minister visiting the X-rated section to see what the devil was up to.

But no one mistook the Minnesota distributor for a clergyman. When Alexander appeared, sales reps rushed from their booths and swarmed around him. The septuagenarian never wasted time with small talk. “Whatcha got?” He’d listen to the new-title hype and order right there on the spot, knowing exactly how much of a particular genre of tape he could use. When you sold to AB Distributors you knew you had Minnesota covered. And you knew that a month after you shipped you’d have his AB Distributors check in hand. Allyssa always waited at the edge of the crowd. She’d return to the Superior booth with a 100-200 piece order. With gruff patience, Alexander dealt with each rep in turn, though he looked stiffly distracted, as if the Mexican buffet he’d eaten for lack of a lutefisk hotdish was doing La Bamba in his stomach.

I hope prison food agreed with him better: he had a long time to get used to it. In 1992, at age 73, he began serving a six-year sentence. In the adult video industry, the name Ferris Alexander will be forever linked with RICO. To the “Unit,” he was a bigger catch than all the walleye in Lake Winnibigoshish.

Owner of the majority of adult product outlets in Minnesota, he was a prime target. The Government put its full effort into the “numbers game,” throwing video, book and magazine after video, book and magazine at juries in Federal courts. Finally, seven magazines and videos were deemed obscene. The Government immediately seized Alexander’s $25 million dollars worth of assets. Federal agents emptied his warehouses and his thirteen bookstores and literally burned thousands of books, magazines and videotapes that had never been charged as obscene.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Alexander’s appeal‌—‌not of the six-year sentence, which Alexander began serving‌—‌but of the RICO forfeiture: whether it applied to First Amendment cases and whether it violated the Eight Amendment’s protection against unreasonable punishment. In January, 1993, Alexander’s attorney, John Weston, made his arguments before the conservative “Rehnquist Court.”

Shortly before Independence Day, the Justices voted 5-4 to uphold Alexander’s RICO conviction and the full forfeiture. The last of George Bush’s Court appointees made all the difference: the stiff, dry David Souter and the reportedly more fun-loving Clarence Thomas, whose circus of hearings over sexual harassment made Long Dong Silver and his 20-inch penis known to middle America.

Justice Kennedy felt strongly enough about the dangers inherent in the Alexander decision to read the opinion of the dissenting four Justices in open court: “…What is at work in this case is not the power to punish an individual for his past transgressions but the authority to suppress a particular class of disfavored speech… The Court’s decision is a grave repudiation of First Amendment principles…”

Of all the industry’s casualties in the War on Porn, Ferris Alexander suffered the biggest defeat. But at least he came through alive.

x x x x x x

Chapter 19

CASUALTIES

The judge’s son told an interviewer from A Current Affair that it was a combination of the indictment, the charges, the way the case was handled and the media publicity that “pushed him over the edge.” Judge Kreidler’s doctor told prosecutors that the strain of a trial might plunge his patient into suicidal depression; the tapes were meant as therapy for a “sexual problem.” There were hundreds of other people on the Bean-Blossom Ltd. mailing list, including the husband of federal prosecutor and “pornography expert” Michelle Heldmyer. Yet U.S. Attorney Robert W. Genzman and prosecutor Steven Koontz, perhaps following directives from the U. S. Justice Department, picked the Duval County, Florida magistrate as their target.

In January, 1993, shortly before his trial, Judge Richard W. Kreidler took his own life rather than undergo the public humiliation of having the whole world know that among the tapes seized by the FBI agents who raided his home were such sadomasochistic titles as Journey Into Bondage and Hogtied and Spanked.

Every war has its wounded. Not all of them die. Florida’s anti-porn zealots also snared actor Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens for minding his own business, masturbating in a Sarasota porno theater. Reubens survived, but had to endure vice cop wisecracks like, “Now we know why they call you ‘Pee-wee’.”

Of the 161 men arrested in the U.S. Post Office’s 1987 Operation Looking Glass sting, said postal inspectors in the satisfied tones of exterminators who’d just zapped a den of cockroaches, at least four committed suicide. But Keith Jacobson didn’t. The veteran of both Korea and Vietnam fought his conviction all the way up to the Supreme Court. For two and a half years “Midlands Data Research” and “Heartland Institute for a New Tomorrow” (HINT), postal sting operations, had been sending him catalogs for material with “lusty and youthful lads and lasses.” The Feds had obtained his name after raiding a San Diego bookstore where Jacobson had once bought a male “nudie” magazine. Jacobson finally ordered Boys Who Love Boys, described as featuring eleven- and fourteen-year-olds. Right after the magazine arrived, so did four federal agents.

“The Constitution does not require reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing before the government can begin an undercover investigation,” wrote the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court, upholding his conviction. But the Supreme Court agreed with Jacobson that he’d been entrapped and declared him not guilty. “When the government’s quest for convictions leads to the apprehension of otherwise law-abiding citizens, who if left to their own devices, likely would have never run afoul of the law, the court should intervene,” wrote Justice Byron White. The middle-aged farmer had chosen to keep his sexual preferences “in the closet” on his farm near Newman Grove, Nebraska. But now he’d been “outed”, the whole community knew he was gay. Jacobson endured the whispers and snickers. “I guess I don’t have any privacy anymore.”

Jacobson, Reubens and Kreidler were minnows caught in a very large net. But the Feds also caught a shark who made even Ferris Alexander look like a guppie. After failing again and again to nail Reuben Sturman on obscenity charges, the Feds finally got the Cleveland potentate on tax evasion. Threatened with RICO forfeitures and long prison sentences, several Sturman associates copped immunity pleas by testifying that Sturman had skimmed millions in cash from his myriad arcade operations and had stashed the loot in Swiss banks. Federal marshals closed down Sturman’s retail and wholesale outlets in Nevada and California.

Then they had to find Reuben Sturman. Sentenced to a four-year term for racketeering to run concurrently with a ten-year sentence on the tax conviction, he’d begun serving his time in June, 1992, at the wall-less, minimum-security Boron Federal Prison in the Mojave Desert, where he helped maintain the motor pool. Early in December, a nightly bed-check revealed Sturman missing. A former employee of his told me “it tore Sturman up” to see his four-year-old daughter in tears during her weekly visits. At age 68, “he wanted to spend as much time with his family as he could, even as a fugitive.”

There were rumors that he’d used his international business connections to flee the country. Instead he was caught trying to collect money owed him by debtors who were making payments directly to the IRS. The Feds claimed Sturman’s methods of persuasion included pipe bombs like the one that accidently blew one of his alleged henchmen to bits back in April of 1992. With the revelation that he’d sent his beautiful young wife to seduce a juror, Sturman now had jury tampering, conspiracy to commit extortion and prison escape penalties added to his sentence. Sentenced to 19 years behind walls with guard towers, the formerly robust Sturman would die of heart and kidney failure at the Lexington, Kentucky, federal prison, on October 27, 1997, at age 73.

Not all of the casualties were on the industry side. Reverend Donald Wildmon suffered two heart attacks in 1992, a rough year for the American Family Association. After failing to obtain an obscenity conviction a year earlier against a video store in its home town of Tupelo, Mississippi, the AFA faced a $3 million lawsuit filed by 25 organizations, including the ACLU, People For The American Way, Foundation Arts Censorship Project and The Episcopal Missionary Society. And Wildmon was in the midst of an unsuccessful suit to block the distribution of the British documentary Damned in the U.S.A. because it included an interview with the Reverend himself‌—‌before he knew of the film’s “extreme pornographic and blasphemous content”. The 1991 Emmy Award-winning film had interviews with such people as artist Andres Serrano, creator of the now-famous Piss Christ, and included a short bit called Don’t Be A Dick with a penile caricature of Jesse Helms.

Of all the casualties in the War on Porn, none were more ludicrous than the smut-busters who were‌—‌in the post-Vietnam lexicon‌—‌“felled by friendly fire.”

x x x x x x

At the urging of Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahoney, the “Beverly Hills Cardinal,” the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors formed an anti-porn task force. Mahoney also wanted to establish a new film rating system, based on the old Catholic Legion of Decency code. He said Playboy and Penthouse led people to “harder stuff.” And he called for “people power” to “end the pornography industry’s legal exploitation of our fellow human beings.” But the Archbishop has yet to recommend what to do about the child molestation that has reached the point of scandal in his own church.

Father Andrew M. Greeley, a Chicago priest, sociologist and author of the book Fall From Grace estimates that 2,000 to 4,000 of America’s 43,000 active priests have abused children and the American Catholic Church pays almost $50 million a year to over 100,000 victims. (Each pedophile has between 50 and 200 victims, according to Jason Berry, author of Lead Us Not Into Temptation.) Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, estimated that 100 of the church’s 188 dioceses have experienced the problem of priests sexually abusing children. The Church’s traditional “solution” to what some call “the biggest crisis in the history of the Catholic Church” has been to shuffle misbehaving clergymen off to other parishes. The bigger the scandal, the farther away the offender is sent. Former Meese Commissioner Father Bruce Ritter was exiled halfway around the world.

This founder of the $87 million-a-year Covenant House program for street kids quit his $98,000-a-year post after three former clients accused him of homosexual molestation. The Franciscan Order conducted an investigation of Ritter. He continued to deny the sexual allegations but admitted to making large “loans” of Covenant funds to himself and associates. Unable to find another American diocese that would accept him, Father Ritter was allowed to join the Diocese of Alleppey in Kerala, India.

In 1991, the same year Ritter left for India, Roy Alan Yanke, pastor of the fundamentalist Covenant Alliance Church in Beverly Hills, Michigan, confessed to robbing 14 banks for the money he needed to pay prostitutes to satisfy his “tremendous” sex drive. Calling Yanke “a wonderful man,” church member June Badder said, “The Devil’s busy, I’m sure that’s what’s behind it. That’s the Devil.”

The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart didn’t blame Satan. Rival preacher Marvin Gorman, whose career Swaggart had destroyed with accusations of adultery, returned the favor by photographing Swaggart with hookers. Columnist Cal Thomas, a writer on evangelical matters, said on ABC’s Nightline that Swaggart’s Assembly of God clergy claimed their leader’s transgressions were not sexual but “pornographic.” In his sobbing plea for forgiveness, Swaggart confessed to a lifelong obsession with pornography, which‌—‌he’d written‌—‌“titillates and captivates the sickest of the sick and makes them slaves to their own consuming lusts… ensnares its victims in a living hell.”

His prose hinted at the psychological dynamic behind the sexual escapades of clergymen like Ritter, Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Religious Right smut-buster George A. Peach. (The “Meeseketeer” who’d driven adult-oriented businesses out of St. Louis decided not to run for re-election as circuit attorney after pleading guilty to offering $150 for oral sex to a “prostitute,” who was actually a police decoy.)

For those who’ve demonized their sexual urges by trying so hard to repress them, the slightest hint of the erotic can trigger an explosion of turmoil. Swaggart’s 1987 book Straight Answers to Tough Questions warns that all dancing‌—‌even ballroom, aerobic and kids’ ballet lessons‌—‌is “totally licentious,” because “the bodily contortions are such as to arouse sexual passions in those who observe.” To avoid being subjected to “skimpy bathing attire,” Swaggart and his wife would only swim at “a secluded spot where there are few, if any, people.” To those who believe mankind is born in sin and redeemable only through intense religious supplication, sexuality is a Pandora’s box. Once opened a tiny crack, it unleashes the Furies of Hell. In a Playboy article on Father Bruce Ritter’s downfall, Robert Scheer recalled asking the priest, then a Meese Commissioner, if he thought masturbation was a “victimless crime.” Ritter “lectured me on the domino effect that leads inexorably from whacking off to gang rape.”

Some anti-porn warriors are, of course, cynical hypocrites, using the crusade for political and monetary gain. But for True Believers, porn’s taunting tweaks of their own lusts make eradicating it all the more urgent.

x x x x x x

The National Obscenity Enforcement Unit wasn’t even two years old before its director, H. Robert Showers, became the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation. Department employees and FBI agents, who thought they should be fighting real criminals, not the adult tape industry, had complained that Showers was using federal funds to attend Baptist conventions in his home town of Raleigh, North Carolina and elsewhere. During the Adam & Eve lawsuit, he had ordered a diskette and printed memos shredded, because they contained questions by a staff attorney about the constitutionality of the Unit’s multiple-prosecution plan. FBI agents Raymond Bernard and Raymond Madden filed depositions describing Showers as “a fanatic, a zealot” who wanted the FBI to open an obscenity case against the 7-Eleven chain for “displaying and selling Playboy and other similar publications.”

Showers was “placed on administrative leave”‌—‌fired. But his successor, Patrick Trueman‌—‌like others in the Unit‌—‌was just as fanatical. Justice Department documents obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act after a year of dunning the Government revealed that nine NOEU staff members attended‌—‌on taxpayers’ money‌—‌the Religious Alliance Against Pornography, where speakers included ex-Watergate-felon-turned-minister Chuck Colson and Pope John Paul II and his diatribe against sex for purposes of pleasure. Though “sanitized” with deletions, the documents still revealed Trueman’s correspondence with Open Bible Standard Churches about setting up pornography prosecution training sessions in Iowa.

The ACLU investigation exposed covert government funding of radical right-wing anti-porn groups across the nation. Internal FBI documents revealed that the agenda of the NOEU was to wipe out all sexually-oriented material in the United States.

Unit members never faced any charges, despite playing fast and loose with the Constitutional separation of church and state and preparing to spend billions prosecuting non-obscene materials at a time when Federal budget cuts axed school lunch programs. But other smut-busters committed infractions too big to be ignored.

x x x x x x

There are scandals and then there are crimes. The Wedtech affair ran the full gamut of both. Four former officers of the bankrupt military contractor pled guilty to conspiring to bribe federal, state and local officials to obtain government contracts. Attorney General Ed Meese, proven to be the central figure in helping Wedtech land contracts, was not indicted. In what looked like a possible plea bargain, special prosecutor James McKay announced no charges would be filed against Meese who agreed to resign his post as Attorney General. Meese was no stranger to scandals; he courted them with his mouth. In 1980, he said an anti-war protestor shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy in the Vietnam era had “deserved to die.” In ’83, he declared there was no evidence of hungry children in America and that people lined up at soup kitchens only because “the food is free.” And in 1986, the year of his porn commission’s report, Meese asserted that government officials don’t have to abide by Supreme Court rulings as the law of the land.

According to their final report, the only reason Iran-Contra prosecutors didn’t file criminal charges against Meese for concocting a “false account” to cover up President Reagan’s role in the Iranian arms-for-hostages deal was that the damning evidence wasn’t revealed until 1992‌—‌after the statute of limitations had expired.

Nixon’s last-minute appointee to the 1970 porn commission, Meese’s predecessor became the ultimate symbol of 1980s white collar crime. Founder of the Citizens for Decency Through Law, Charles H. Keating, Jr. had thundered his support for the Meese agenda: “To bring America back to moral health, we need now to vomit these vermin out and let them roil down the gutters to the sewers where they belong with their evil merchandise.”

His words might apply better to investment scam artists like Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Keating himself. In the first two years of the 1990s, his long, solemn face got more film and video exposure than Nina Hartley’s tush as an audience packed with defrauded investors‌—‌some dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs‌—‌sat in the Los Angeles courtroom of Judge Lance Ito, who would later preside over the O.J. Simpson murder trial, to hear the details of a monumental criminal enterprise. As Keating’s Lincoln Savings was failing, branch managers got a directive to push the junk bonds of the California S and L’s equally moribund parent company, American Continental Corporation, onto customers wanting to invest in certificates of deposit. More than half of them were over 60, retirees who needed the safest possible investments for life savings they couldn’t afford to risk. Lincoln’s sales force assured them the bonds were “as safe as investing in the United States of America.” A company memo of a dozen selling points for salesmen to use ended with “Remember, the weak, meek and ignorant are always good targets.” When Lincoln and Continental folded in 1989, over 22,000 small investors, who thought their investments were federally insured, lost over $250 million.

There were heart attacks, suicides, and angry, destitute victims packing the courtroom. “You took all my money!” yelled 80-year-old Sarah Solomon, grabbing Keating’s lapels before bailiffs pulled her away. Three weeks before Christmas, 1991, bondholders cheered as Keating was found guilty on 17 of 18 counts of securities fraud under state law. That was only the beginning. The federal charges came next.

On January 6, 1993, Keating and his son Charles Keating III were convicted on a total of 133 counts of racketeering, fraud, conspiracy and transporting stolen property. The prosecution sorted out a tangle of money shufflings to conclude that the Keating clan had “looted” their S and L empire to “live like jet-setting royalty.”

On July 8, 1993, Keating was sentenced to ten years in prison. Assessed penalties of $122.4 million, he insisted he was broke. Jailed during his trial for want of $5 million in bail, he wore frayed shirts and socks with holes. He made one statement that many a commercial pornographer would agree with: “It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

x x x x x x

Who’s winning the War on Porn? It’s hard to say‌—‌too much is in flux. McKinnon-inspired “porn victim” laws such as the McConnell Bill are still kicking around in legislatures without the support for passage. Federal RICO statutes and many state forfeiture laws are under constitutional challenge. In 1989 and 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that jailing someone and then seizing their property for the same crime constituted double jeopardy (being punished twice for the same offense) banned by the Bill of Rights. But prosecutors‌—‌not about to give up either lucrative seizures or hard-won prison sentences‌—‌continued the practice. Then, drug-case attorneys began mounting successful defenses based on the Supreme Court rulings and suddenly the Justice Department found itself flooded with appeals from federal prisoners. The decisions apply beyond drug cases; folk singer John Denver beat a drunk-driving ticket because police had already seized his driver’s license. As a pornographer who requested anonymity told me, “They can take my assets or they can take my ass. But they can’t take both.”

The Clinton Administration became too busy battling Republicans over crime, health care, affirmative action, the Federal budget, welfare, environmental issues and the Kenneth Starr/Monica Lewinsky circus to pay attention to obscenity prosecutions. But government priorities can change rapidly.

If there’s anything I’ve learned while researching these chapters on adult video’s legal battles, it’s how vulnerable to change our laws are. Today’s courtroom victory becomes tomorrow’s defeat. Adult-oriented businesses in Los Angeles rejoiced when a zoning ordinance that would have literally driven them out of town was struck down. But the city council could quickly scribble up a new, harsher one to take its place.

That which appears to be engraved in stone for eternity can be dashed into dust with the stroke of a pen. The ACLU was horrified to discover that a majority of Americans believe the President has the power to suspend the Bill of Rights at will. If enough people don’t find such a scenario objectionable, one day a president will do just that. Lincoln’s statement “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” was never more relevant than in 1990s America.

Throughout this era of continuing legal upheavals in the world of erotica, two questions emerge that beg answers:

Does the public want explicit sex movies available?

If the smut-busters succeeded in banning pornography, would America be better off?

Enmeshed in obscenity trials, defense attorneys, prosecutors and public officials sought to answer the first question and got strikingly similar results. In 1986, the Porter County, Indiana Prosecuting Attorney telephoned nearly 400 people to ask if they wanted to see adult video retailers charged with obscenity. 68% didn’t. Six years later, Morley Swingle, prosecuting attorney for Girardeau County, Missouri, asked 237 local former jurors the same question. 70% didn’t want the stores busted. A 1993 survey of 500 residents by Ohio State University Professor Joe Scott found that 70% thought that adults should be able to legally obtain sex videos and magazines. Maine voters embarrassed the Meese Commission by voting down a proposed state obscenity law a month before the Commission’s Report was due 72% to 28%.

And in Texas, a Corpus Christi community survey showed that 88% favored adults having access to X-rated material. NOEU prosecutors reportedly told Adam & Eve’s attorneys that to them it made no difference “if the entire congregation of the First Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia would stand and vote that they (sexually oriented products) are not obscene.”

What should matter even to the NOEU are any statistical correlations between porn and rape, which, so far, even the most avid smutbusters haven’t been able to find. The question of possible harm to society can’t be answered as easily as determining public acceptance. But rape statistics do reveal startling geographic observations. American women in 1990 were eight times more likely to be raped than European women‌—‌despite far less restrictions on pornography in most European countries. Joining California, Michigan and New York as the states with the most reported rapes were porn-suppressed Texas and Florida.

An experiment beyond the scope of even the most lavishly-funded sociological researchers would be to wipe out pornography completely in a large American city, then study it in the ensuing years to see if sex crime rates dropped below those of cities with thriving adult businesses. There is, in fact, such a place.

Long before the Meese Commission was even a synapse between Republican brain cells, Solicitor General Hinson McAuliffe of Fulton County, Georgia, won his 12-year crusade to drive adult theaters and bookstores out of Atlanta. The February, 1982 issue of Video Review carried the complaint of local Video Warehouse owner Steve Goodman that he was warned to get rid of the R-rated Brooke Shields movie The Blue Lagoon and anything else that contained nudity. McAuliffe retired in 1981 but remained active against porn as a Baptist layman. His successor Jimmy Webb made sure anything more risqué than Playboy and Penthouse stayed out of the city. Both men won praise from the Meese Commission.

Has Atlanta become a safe haven for its female citizens? Hardly. In 1989, the FBI’s annual statistical summary, Crime in the United States, revealed that of all the American cities with a population greater than 250,000, the one with the worst rate of rape‌—‌one rape for every 617 people‌—‌was Atlanta.

The anti-porn siege continued. With the spectre of more RICO prosecutions looming, adult video manufacturers felt betrayed by their allies when the VSDA chose Dallas, Texas as the site of its Spring 1995 convention. An exhibitor openly taking orders for X-rated tapes in Dallas wouldn’t be running quite the same risk as Salman Rushdie holding a press conference in Tehran‌—‌but close. The Dallas District Attorney’s office refused to assure the VSDA that police wouldn’t play cowboys and porn-peddlers. Attorney DeWitt advised adult companies to cancel out. Most did (only Prestige Video and Glitz Video exhibited, with no explicit titles).

Future skirmishes between makers of erotica and their enemies will continue to attract more attention than a menace with the potential to do far more damage to the sex movie industry than the War on Porn. Unlike the publicized and pyrotechnic police actions, this enemy strikes in silence. No one knows who its victims are‌—‌until it’s too late.

x x x x x x

Chapter 20

AIDS AND OTHER FOUR-LETTER WORDS

In April of 1995, the year she won AVN’s Best European New Starlet award, Barbara Doll twice tested positive for HIV. The French actress insisted she’d caught the virus working in porn. “I don’t swing. I don’t fool around,” the 23-year-old blonde told AVN. “I have my husband and kids. I don’t do drugs.” Had it finally happened? A performer catching AIDS from working in sex movies?

The industry’s response was immediate. VCA head Russ Hampshire declared that all performers in VCA Platinum productions would henceforth wear condoms. Ed Powers, president of 4-Play said his company, too, would make condoms mandatory. Many performers swore they’d no longer work without them and most producers agreed to a “condoms optional” rule. The Free Speech Coalition allocated $10,000 to reimburse performers for taking the DNA test, the most accurate‌—‌and expensive‌—‌way of detecting the HIV virus.

Barbara Doll had tested positive through the “Elisa” method, which only detects the presence of antibodies. After the announcement of her positive results, she underwent two DNA tests, which detect the virus itself. Both tests came back negative. The earlier Elisa positives were explained as Doll’s immune system response to the removal of genital warts from her vagina two months before the testing. The DNA test results of her on-screen partners were also negative. The industry could now relax. Or could it?

The Doll scare pointed up the fallacy of relying entirely on AIDS tests for safety. The requirement that performers present recent test results (no older than a month) before having sex on a shoot ensured only that someone with the AIDS virus would not be able to continue working long, as John Holmes had in the mid-’80s. A test could be done before the virus is detectable. A performer could contract the virus between the time of the test and the day of the shoot. Tests could give false results. Papers could be fraudulent.

Marc Wallice was caught forging his name on someone else’s papers. The discovery of Wallice’s HIV-positive status came too late for Tricia Devereaux and Ashley Brooke, both of whom tested positive after working with Wallice. In her suit against the producers of The World’s Biggest Anal Gangbang, Brooke charged that Wallice knew he was positive at the time he worked with her.

A three-week-old test could be ancient history for a hot new actress running the gamut of end-to-end shoots, particularly if she works in gang-bang scenes or “pro-am” videos with non-industry “amateurs” who don’t have test records. Newcomers may be afraid to confront moviemakers or established stars over tests older than 30 days.

The semi-frequent testing does mitigate against the tidal wave of industry AIDS cases doomsayers like actor Jerry Butler have predicted. An HIV-positive actor would be stopped before spreading the virus to epidemic proportions. But even minimal proliferation is tragic. There’s no such thing as “detecting it in time;” a positive test is a sentence of death.

Beneath the surface of publicly-uttered assurances, an undercurrent of fear flows through the porn industry, sometimes rising in a wave of terror.

x x x x x x

In the wake of John Holmes’ death of AIDS in March, 1988, scared adult performers lined up for “mass testing” paid for by the Adult Video Association. AVA spokesman Ron (Henri Pachard) Sullivan told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, “It is a sign of confidence in ourselves that we are not afraid to be tested and we are responsible.”

Knowing how gleefully the outside media pounces on anything that connects AIDS with porno, industry spokespersons are reluctant to discuss the disease. Those who knew Holmes had the virus kept that knowledge to themselves, not sharing it with the women he was working with. (It might have helped that Holmes’s last two pictures were shot abroad with European casts.) Holmes stayed active in porn until physically unable to.

Have there been active HIV-positive performers in hetero porn besides Holmes and Wallice? It’s hard to know for sure. Those receiving bad test results are said to leave the business as quietly as possible, to face their fate away from the glare of publicity. Rumors of deaths, passed by lowered voices, spread faster than any virus. Some reports‌—‌as Mark Twain said about his own alleged demise‌—‌are “greatly exaggerated.” Reputed to be dead of AIDS, Lisa DeLeeuw and Brandy Alexandre, now out of the industry, proclaimed themselves alive and healthy. Those who haven’t‌—‌or can’t‌—‌remain subject to the worst assumptions.

The reluctance to apply the “A-word” pervades even the medical community. When Allyssa visited her close friend, director Steve Scott, in the hospital where she found him “tied to a million machines,” Scott said, “Every day they tell me it’s something different.” Allyssa had decided she wouldn’t mention AIDS unless Scott himself did. He didn’t. But Allyssa already knew the bacterial lung infection that he “couldn’t shake” was an “opportunistic” disease; it needed an impaired immune system to survive.

While director Paul Vatelli lay wasting away, associates explained his condition as lung damage from Agent Orange in Vietnam or from free-basing cocaine. After his death, however, no one disputed the fact that Vatelli, like gay film star Al Parker and bi-sexual 1970s porn actor Marc Stevens, had died of AIDS. Stevens and Parker had many male sex partners; Vatelli was known for promiscuity and heavy drug use. But when porn actors not known to belong to high-risk groups die, the industry does all it can to avoid the AIDS label.

Ron Jeremy refused to acknowledge the death of ’70s porn star and soap opera regular (Edge of Night) Wade Nichols as AIDS-related. “I’m not sure what illness he had, or how he died,” wrote the actor/AVN columnist. “And I’m not sure I’d print it even if I did know for sure.” Of actress Laurienne Dominique’s passing, Jeremy wrote, “The reasons for her death were medical.” The November, 1991 AVN issue reported that director Chuck Vincent died “after a lengthy illness.” Holliday angrily refuted the published claim of Jerry Butler, Robert Rimmer and Cathy Tavel that Sharon Kane’s boyfriend Michael Bruce, who performed in Devil In Miss Jones, Part II, had died of AIDS. The porn historian also asserted that screen stud Kevin Gibson (AKA Kevin James) had not died of AIDS: “I’m telling you it was cancer. A.I.D.S. victims don’t go through heavy chemo.”

In 1988, Candida Royalle said the only industry performer to die of AIDS was Holmes. In 1993, Holliday wrote that the only industry people who caught AIDS “were mostly homosexual in real life (Scott and Vincent)”; he said he knew of no AIDS deaths among actresses who had sex only with heterosexual men or with other women. The disease, he wrote, is “almost exclusively the province of those who engage in unsafe anal sex, intravenous drug use, or fall victim to tainted blood in the society supply.” Ron Jeremy cited a July, 1987 Playboy article in which AIDS researchers Dr. Robert Gallo and Dr. Joseph Sonnabend “both state that it is virtually impossible for a man to receive the virus from a woman through heterosexual sex.” After Magic Johnson’s very public affirmations that he did get the virus that way, AVN’s legal writer, attorney Clyde DeWitt took the industry’s defensive stance: “…critics will point to motion pictures that the industry creates and say, ‘that kind of unprotected sex is how Magic got AIDS.’ The public will believe those critics, no matter what is said in rebuttal. And the follow-up statement will be that AIDS is the reason why the motion pictures should be banned.”

Why not practice safe sex in all adult movies? For the most basic of reasons.

x x x x x x

The Mitchell Brothers used condoms and dental dams (latex sheets between tongue and flesh in cunnilingus scenes) in Behind the Green Door, The Sequel‌—‌and never did a safe sex movie again. After using condoms in Blazing Nova, Chi Chi LaRue complained about being ridiculed by reviewers. Bill Clayton of Falcon Studios said, “Everyone I know who has seen one of these safe sex videos wants to puke.” A new porno truism emerged in the late 1980s: Safe sex doesn’t sell.

“They don’t want no reminders of reality,” a distributor who requested anonymity told me. “They wanna see fantasy. They wanna see what they can’t go out and do.” Candida Royalle was defending her decision to put safe sex into her Ambrosia series of half-hour shows when she said, “Fans have been writing in and saying watching stars have sex is like watching a gun battle with loaded guns.” David Talbot, co-author of Burning Desires: Sex in America, put a different slant on Royalle’s observation: “…like a breed of sexual gladiators, they (porn actors) are performing to the finish for the delight of those in the gallery.”

Some performers refuse to be “gladiators.” Too mature to hide behind the delusions of invincibility that lead 18-year-olds to rush into orgies‌—‌or combat, veterans Richard Pacheco, Jack Wrangler, Annette Haven and Mai Lin left the business. After Holmes’ death, Amber Lynn limited her work to dance gigs and non-sexual movie roles. Vanessa Del Rio stopped doing anal scenes. Lauren Brice and Kelly O’Dell demanded their partners use rubbers‌—‌even if it meant far fewer acting jobs.

By the end of AIDS’ first decade, the virus had so decimated the gay community that condoms became as required on boy-boy shoots as Albolene Cream. But in the “straight” porn world, AIDS funerals were still unknown. Those who wanted to work steadily in boy-girl videos had to rely on semi-current AIDS tests, nonoxynol-9 spermicide (which also kills the HIV virus), the external male come-shot, and faith. “Porn is like a family,” said Ron Jeremy. “The performers that work a lot know each other, most of their sexual habits and who their partners are or have been.” “It’s a small circle,” Nina Hartley concurred. “We’re all conscious of disease.” But that small circle often invites newcomers‌—‌or impromptu debuts without test documents. In “probably the hottest sex scene I ever shot,” Paul Thomas videotaped Samantha Strong and Jeff Stryker in a bar surrounded by “real Hell’s Angels.” One of the biker ladies got turned on enough to join the scene spontaneously. P.T. didn’t stop the action to demand to see her AIDS test; his cameras kept on rolling. Actor Tony Tedeschi reported that director John T. Bone didn’t require tests for his infamous 251-man gang-bang that made a group of actresses demand regulations against such things.

To psych yourself up for an uninhibited performance requires more than faith in your partner’s health; it requires denial. Ona Zee, noted for anal and DP scenes, told an AVN reporter she didn’t smoke or drink, she ate healthfully, and she forced herself not to think about AIDS. “Disease is choice, I believe. I choose not to be ill… Though, I’ll tell you, there are times when I’ll wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat over a sex scene.”

As the decade of the 1990s reached its midpoint, whether due to frequent testing, the external come-shot, the use of nonoxynol-9 or some other factor, there had still been no reported cases of heterosexual transmission of the AIDS virus during the shooting of a sex film. Still, the fear was always there, ready to break through the facade of confidence. After Bunny Bleu starred in one of Catalina’s first series of bi-sexual videos, she had trouble getting work in straight porn because so many men refused to work with her. According to a model named Dusty, it was her estranged husband, trying to ruin her career, who started the rumor that led to the Los Angeles KCBS-TV news flash, “Porn Star with AIDS.” Before Dusty was able to get tested and prove negative results, actor Wayne Summers pulled one of his periodic retirements, saying the affair was “too close to home.”

Tabloids linked Angel Kelly and Heather Hunter with Magic Johnson; Hunter wanted to sue the publications for $5 million each. And Tom Byron threatened to sue if a boy-girl loop he did was put in a bi-sexual video.

In this jittery atmosphere, rumors grow like southern California brush fires in Santa Ana winds. Rick Savage, the straight-porn actor/director, had a hard time proving he wasn’t the gay-porn director with the same stage name. Under accusations that reduced him to tears, Jonathan Morgan finally pointed out that the actor who resembled him on a gay movie one-sheet had three facial moles he, Morgan, didn’t have. Actress Tianna Taylor replied, “You could have had them removed.”

Believing a prospective porn scene partner leads the life of a Trappist monk off-screen can be reassuring‌—‌even when you suspect otherwise. But the sudden evidence that the person you’re about to work with is in a high-risk group can fan your fear into five-alarm panic. That’s what happened on a Blacks and Blondes shoot.

x x x x x x

“Lauren” was a hard, angular bleached blonde with a street hooker’s penchant for shocking the straight world. Over breakfast at Denny’s, she pulled out her breasts to show the cast and crew how far she could squirt them. That wasn’t what made F.M. Bradley and Ray Victory afraid to work with her, though. It was what she said next: “Everyone says that drugs lead to birth defects. Well, I’ve been shooting smack for three weeks straight and I just gave birth to a beautiful, healthy and perfectly normal baby girl.”

At the location, Lauren caught up on her sleep in an unused bedroom. The rest of us tried to decide what to do. Neither of the men was willing to have unprotected sex with someone who shot drugs. We decided to find a replacement, pay Lauren a hundred-dollar kill fee (compensation paid to someone whose scene has been cancelled) and send her back to the motel. We’d have to give her an explanation other than fear of AIDS. In 1986, universal HIV testing among models was still several years away. It was a supreme insult to even hint you were afraid to work with someone for fear of disease. A month earlier, on my E.X. shoot, Don Fernando had refused to have anal sex with Lilly Marlene. After the scene was over, he told me it wasn’t because he feared the sexually prolific anal queen might have the virus. “It was because you were running late. I wanted to save you the overtime.” At my chuckle of disbelief, he kept insisting that was the truth. “Don’t worry, Don.” I said. “I won’t spread the word that you’re gun-shy.”

Hunched over a phone, Joe Elliot flipped through his address book, trying to find a replacement for Lauren. He’d been hired solely as a photographer. The northern California shoot was agented by Jim South; all the models had flown up from L.A. After his calls failed to land a replacement, Elliot closed his book and slammed it down. “There’s just no ladies left up here any more.”

Since productions were now put together in L.A., the few models still up north sometimes went so long between shoots that when they finally got work, fans who hadn’t seen them in videos for months would ask suspiciously, “Is this an old movie?”

The production manager called Jim South. The L.A. agent, constantly denying his models were at risk for AIDS, took the offensive. “Now, who’s been spreading all these rumors about Lauren shooting drugs? She’s been working steadily for me the past four weeks and I know she’s been straight as an arrow!”

“Rumors my ass, Jim!” the P.M. shot back. “She’s got tracks on her arms like moon craters!”

South couldn’t locate a replacement up north either; we were stuck with Lauren.

The make-up man, a self-described “bottom fag,” wanted the men to use condoms. He’d seen six friends die, including director Paul Vatelli, heterosexual and married‌—‌but notorious for paying starlets a “tip” to include him in their day’s work. “Paul was in his coffin wearing this starched collar that stood up rigid like a hoop,” the make-up man said. “And down there at the back of the collar was Paul’s neck, about as big around as a broomstick.”

“Jerry doesn’t want rubbers in these B and Bs,” the production manager said. “He wants ’em as raunchy as possible.” But Brad and Ray decided to use condoms. Elliot was sent out to buy some. “I got tons of rubbers at home,” Brad mused. “But you never think to bring them on a porno shoot.”

In the loop the two men played rock stars having sex in their hotel room with a groupie. In an orange fright-wig and wingtipped sunglasses, Brad looked like a cross between Ray Charles and Little Orphan Annie. He addressed the camera: “Everyone thinks us rock stars are always high on drugs and socially irresponsible but we want to stay healthy as much as anyone else does. So we want to promote safe sex.” He began peeling on a Sheik.

Brad wasn’t inside Lauren longer than five seconds before his face twisted in pain. “It’s crimping. This ain’t gonna work.” Off came the condom.

Stroking his unprotected penis, Brad eyed Lauren’s vagina like a commando about to drop into an enemy tunnel. “Well… I guess I’ll just go ahead and do it.” He managed a perfunctory performance.

Lauren was doing all she could to please the men. I think she was aware of their fear. She pinched Ray’s nipples the way he liked and his sculpted pecs danced like they did when he thrilled crowds of women during his strip act. Ray produced just enough strokes to establish hardcore between droopings, then he grimaced and his muscles bulged as he worked for his come-shot. Feigning ecstasy, Lauren tossed her head to dodge the sweat pouring from his face. Ray’s arms looked like bowed legs as he held himself away from the milk seeping from her nipples. Finally, he pulled out and completed his task. We ran the tape out on Lauren squirting her breasts while we all stood back a safe distance.

Brad wouldn’t sign his release before haggling long distance with Jerry Tanner in L.A. “I risked my life for you, my man,” he exclaimed into the phone. “That’s got to be worth an extra hundred dollars.”

x x x x x x

The rivalry between porn’s two biggest agents was never friendly. When an assailant waited for Jim South to come home, then broke both the lanky Kentuckian’s arms with a pipe, South blamed Reb Sawitz for the attack. Surrounded by his softball trophies, the burly, macho Sawitz called South a “fruitcake” whose best male models were “butt-boys.” Reb always had gay magazines of Marc Wallice and Peter North handy to prove his point.

For these two agents to follow suggestions that they cooperate to ensure the safety of the industry’s performers was impossible. But when one boasted that he never sent out a model without a recent HIV test, the other had to match the claim. That worked better than cooperation.

The industry’s assertion that the risk of AIDS among screen performers is smaller than among the general population may be true. In the question-and-answer sessions Victoria Paris held with audiences after her dance performances, she was surprised by the number of people who still had unprotected sex with strangers they picked up in bars.

A decade after the appearance of America’s first group of AIDS cases, heterosexuals‌—‌who hadn’t seen their associates getting sick‌—‌were becoming complacent. They’d come to distrust conflicting pronouncements that seemed prepared by the proverbial blind men describing the elephant: the World Health Organization’s 1990 statement that in major American cities the leading cause of death among women aged 20 to 40 is AIDS; the contrasting 1991 report of sociologists Michael Kimmel and Martin Levine that 90% of Americans with AIDS were men‌—‌over 75% of whom were gay, and many of the rest IV drug users. In 1993 federal health officials said that new AIDS cases had increased 204% in the previous 12 months. But that figure was inflated by a new definition of what constituted AIDS‌—‌based on the level of immune cells. By the new definition, California’s AIDS cases increased from 2,061 to 8,020; by the old definition, total cases rose to only 2,247.

Dismissing all reports as flawed, many Americans were reverting to their old ways of having fun. The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior, released in 1993, found almost two-thirds of respondents‌—‌among society’s more sexually adventuresome‌—‌having more sex than three years earlier; they considered AIDS “primarily a problem of the poor and gay communities.”

AIDS often brings out the closet puritan in Americans, blocking the dissemination of safe sex information in schools, the media and in X-rated movies. As adult video is vilified, its role in AIDS prevention could be lost.

There’s a need to find ways to make safe sex erotic. Heterosexual pornmakers might look to the gay movie community for inspiration. Gay producers have a head start in shooting safe sex. Catalina Video began putting a 3 and 1/2 minute safe sex clip on its gay features as early as 1986. If the industry adage that trends surface first in gay pictures holds true, then condom use will increase in straight porn. VCA has run a safe sex advisory before each of its features for years. More video manufacturers are inserting safe sex scenes in their boy-girl titles. If the New Right succeeds in driving adult movies underground, however, the rough breed of entrepreneurs who still dared to deal in X-rated tapes might forget about safe sex altogether.

The future of the erotic movie is being shaped more and more by forces outside the industry: politics, diseases, shifting demographics, and‌—‌increasingly‌—‌new technologies, such as cyberspace (the Internet), that will give old-morality censors future shock. In reaction, the push to restrict First Amendment freedoms will grow as well.

x x x x x x

Chapter 21

UPDATES

You can overdose on too much of anything. There’s the race car mechanic in Italy whose job was to work on and test drive Ferraris; his personal choice of transportation was a Volvo station wagon. The office worker goes rock climbing on weekends; the wilderness guide slumps in an easy chair with beer and TV football.

I didn’t experience porn’s peculiar form of burnout until long after selling my company. The business had kept things in a workaholic balance: three frantic days on a Superior shoot were followed by a month of other kinds of business hassles. I sold Superior at the time the Hal Freeman pandering case was scaring even the lowest-budgeted L.A. producers into shooting up north. I went through a period of serial porn shoots, working as cameraman, soundman, grip, go-fer or gaffer. For a while, all I experienced was the pleasure of putting extra money in the bank. Then came the downside.

“After working on one of these, I usually don’t feel like having sex for a few days,” a long-time San Francisco photographer named Vince told me. Wives and girlfriends complain about crewmen’s lack of ardor returning home from a hardcore production. Working on sex movies for months on end, I began to realize why impotence is sometimes called “pornographers’ disease.”

The common explanation among pornographers is that too much of the work “lowers your fantasy level.” Or obliterates it. You think about sex and get these gynecological images‌—‌stained sanitary pads, sponges leaking a puddle the color of vin rosé, the effluvia of enema and douche packs. The images remain: focusing your zoom lens on red patches of razor rash around labia, checking to make sure spermicide isn’t foaming out of a vagina. You think of couplings in terms of engineering and choreography, of passion in terms of audio levels. Ron Jeremy invited his friend, the late comic and avid porn fan Sam Kinison, to observe a porno being made. Jeremy said Kinison “found the shooting of these things so technical and mechanical, he’s found it difficult to turn on to adult films since.”

My burnout might have been aggravated by the break-up with Shelly. A few months before I sold Superior, her company transfered her to its home offices in the Pacific Northwest‌—‌a promotion with a substantial raise. For the next couple of years, we tried to carry on a relationship long-distance. We discussed marriage, we could afford a decent house‌—‌prices were a lot less than in Marin‌—‌and I could freelance or find a job with a local TV station. But Shelly fell in love with an engineer at her company. I’d seen it coming, so it didn’t hit me by surprise. Still, it hurt, even though I knew I didn’t really want to move to the Northwest.

Being without physical desire was a strange feeling. You’d look at a woman posing for a crotch shot and just think, “Yep. Standard issue pussy.” It was actually kind of peaceful. But emotionally unsatisfying. Women I’d meet and date on a casual basis might have been relieved that this pornographer wasn’t trying to get into their pants‌—‌maybe some were disappointed.

I decided to quit looking for porno work. When production shifted to L.A. in the wake of Hal Freeman’s victory, I didn’t make myself available to fly down for shoots. My very last one was an amateur loop for Joe Elliot in 1992. I was not among those who could thrive on porn work as a steady occupation, unlike Lasse Braun on the set of Penetration who said, “Let’s have one more anal scene, then we’ll have lunch.” His appetite wouldn’t be affected. He could go home to the two ladies he reportedly lived with and be raring for a nightcap.

Ace Walker said that after he left porn for good, it took two months for his sex drive to return to normal. Mine didn’t take that long. One thing has changed though: I’ll no longer continue a troubled relationship just because the sex is good. Maybe it’s middle age as well as jading experience, but sex has nowhere near the priority in my life that it used to.

Like me, several other people appearing in these pages have chosen to leave the world of porn. Some have changed their lives dramatically.

x x x x x x

Juliet Anderson’s video feature Educating Nina was supposed to launch her new career as a producer/director. But she had trouble collecting her royalties. She reportedly got screwed over on a couple of other directing jobs and she decided the business side of porn was too jagged for her to deal with. Instead of becoming a porn mogul, Juliet moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills to manage a bed-and-breakfast inn. There “General Juliet” found an outlet for her compulsive orderliness. She found peace in the Mother Lode pine forests and time for writing, reading, long walks, yoga and a hysterectomy. For a change of pace, she would still book an occasional stage show through Reb Sawitz.

In the mid-1990s, a rejuvenated Juliet moved back to the Bay Area to resume the juggling of multiple erotic enterprises: sex workshops, lectures on sensuality, a women’s erotic theater company and‌—‌as she told Kenneth Ray Stubbs in his book Women of the Light‌—‌clients with whom she experienced “mutual, full-body, non-intercourse, multiple orgasms. Wow!” She told Spectator interviewer Don Crane that she wanted to produce videos featuring “people who are over 40 years old… The only thing that’s stopping me is the financing.” Juliet then gave an address and phone number for potential patrons.

Some porn veterans made changes more extreme than Juliet’s. Harry Reems became a real estate salesman in Park City, Utah, where he got married, overcame a dependence on alcohol, and became a trustee in the Mormon Church. Religion also came to Billy Dee who began studying theology to become a minister. And to Sasha Gabor: the Norwegian stud reportedly joined a Florida religious cult, became “born again,” and had a face lift that left him looking less like Burt Reynolds. Sasha also kicked booze and reunited with his wife, who gave birth to his fourth child, Angelica.

Some leave porn, others get back in. Working as a deejay in northern California, where his loquacious charm made him an airwaves favorite, F.M. Bradley missed the X-rated stud game enough to come back in 1991’s Even More Dangerous. Tom Byron also couldn’t stay away. Nor could Shanna McCullough, returning only for select roles‌—‌as Annette Haven used to (Haven still did an occasional stage show in the 1990s)‌—‌until landing the starring role in a non-porn feature, Virtual Desire. Even Seka came back after ten years away from screen sex, enticed by “big bucks” to star in the VCA Platinum release, American Garter. The steadiest thing Ginger Lynn found in her quest for a Hollywood career was a relationship with film star Charlie Sheen. She returned to doing stage shows but not porn (yet).

Lynn’s old rival Traci Lords had much better luck. In one year, Lords appeared in John Waters’ Serial Mom (she became one of his “regulars”), the mini-series Tommyknockers, Roseanne, the made-for-TV movie Bandit and the Silver Angel, and the feature thrillers Intent to Kill and Ice, which Joe Bob Briggs called “her 20th movie of the year.” Lauding Lords for taking acting lessons, Briggs wrote, “she actually delivers every single line without once doing the corpse-like Traci Pout.”

Joe Bob Briggs’ assertion that she had “arrived” appeared confirmed when Lords made her debut on January 15, 1995 as a regular on Melrose Place, playing Rikki, a waitress and religious cult fanatic, who becomes the new roommate of the established series character Sydney (Laura Leighton). Touted as a rival for Heather Locklear, a sleeker (no more baby fat), blonder Lords announced on the tabloid show Entertainment Tonight that her “bad girl” image had been exaggerated; she was really a serious, dedicated actress. Then she flashed a genuine smile (no longer a “snile”), proving to those who’d known her previously that she really had been revamping herself. She had even cut a full-length CD, A Thousand Fires, described as “techno-pop.” Except for her reported lawsuit against the distributor of trading cards with photos from her past porns, Lords had nothing more to do with the adult industry.

Ron Jeremy certainly did, exposing himself to the latest wave of adult starlets. (At a December 3, 1994 AVN seminar, Rebecca Bardoux, asked who she wouldn’t work with, addressed the crowd: “You guys can answer that…” In unison, they replied, “Ron Jeremy!”) The Energizer Rabbit of porn‌—‌or “hedgehog,” as AVN began calling him‌—‌claimed to be the first performer to reach the thousand movie mark. John Holmes claimed over 2,000 but most of those were obscure ’70s loops that are hard to certify.

Old porno studs never die, goes the saying, they just become directors. Jamie Gillis joined Ed Powers in becoming “The Nasty Brothers,” putting on screen their mutual, real-life pursuit of new female talent. Gillis went on to shoot his own kinky “pro-am” series, and Randy West became Powers’ new “partner in slime.”

Some lives don’t so much change as continue farther on the same path. In 1991, long after his Visual Entertainment Productions was defunct, Tony Romano and his partner Michael Esposito bought the B-grade lines of retiring porn tycoon Teddy Gaswirth. The partners continued to survive in the industry’s post-Smut Glut recovery. In 1994, my other ex-boss, Marv, finally did what his enemies had been waiting almost two decades for: he died.

Running Infinity Productions, Allyssa Hampton tried producing big-budget adult movies for cable television but had to fall back on her talents at marketing videos. In 1993, I give her a job recommendation for a highly-paid post with an educational video distributor. I never heard whether she got the position.

Joe Farmer continued to build a reputation in Marin County as a skilled videographer. As his clientele increased, he eased out of porno work altogether. In the early ’90s, he got married and began spending his spare time working on the fixer-upper home he bought in the forested hills of West Marin.

The other Joe, my original partner Joe Loveland, retired completely from the music world and spent several years traveling around the world with his lady-love. At his home stage, I videotaped a body-piercing session conducted by a medical intern. In the orgy that followed, I was surprised that none of the participants paid any attention to safe sex. I asked Joe if he was afraid of catching the AIDS virus. He replied, “Dave, I’m 63 years old.”

The camera I taped Joe’s event with fit into the palm of my hand. A new generation of camcorders based on micro-chips instead of troublesome color tubes are producing yet another revolution in the world of porn. These small, low-light, self-focusing cameras made consumer videotaping cheaper and easier, but they also complicated the lives of some of their users.

x x x x x x

The sheriff of Morris County, Kansas, rented a camcorder, taped himself and his wife making love, then forgot to remove the cassette before returning the camera. Copies began circulating in Council Grove. The sheriff had to quit his job and the couple left town. Gary Offenburg of Fremont, Ohio, had extramarital sex in a pickup truck at the end of a dead-end street used as a lovers’ lane. A neighbor, incensed because his children could see what was happening, videotaped the action. A Current Affair paid $2,500 for the tape and played it again and again on shows months apart. Seeing no end to being forced to relive his shame, Offenburg killed himself with a shotgun.

Not all private videotapings of sex end in humiliation or tragedy. Some make their participants a fine income. “Jani,” an Indianapolis model and dancer described as “Linda Evans-ish,” marketed videos of herself doing stripteases, playing strip-poker, and engaging in other “soft” exhibitionist activities. Others got more graphic. Five foot tall “Nancy,” who vaguely resembled Barbara Dare, built a fan following with a series of “solo” masturbation videos in which she penetrated every orifice possible with “monster dildos” that would make an amazon blanche. “Mary Lou,” a 37-year-old Kentucky criminal lawyer, whose first tape was with two carpenters who were repairing her porch, told a New York Times reporter that growing up a “wallflower” and “ugly duckling” made her enjoy being lusted after.

There were amateurs performing in every category: solos, couples, lesbians, transsexuals, bondage, pregnant and nursing, anal, interracial, enemas, breast fetish, bi-sexual trysts‌—‌everything ever done by the “pros.” Sociologists lament America becoming a nation of voyeurs and exhibitionists‌—‌Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” turning into an electronic orgy. A joint survey in Details and Mademoiselle magazines found that twenty-something readers listed the leading “sexual enhancements” as videotapes. Marilyn Chambers taught Maury Povitch viewers how to make their own home sex movies. The magazine ads offering $500 to $1,000 for “your amateur videos” got plenty of applicants.

In 1991, Michael Savage of International Video Distributors said amateur tapes accounted for 30% of his business. Some said their popularity was a reaction against the shoddy professional product of the late 1980s. But quality adult features making a comeback on pay-per-view and cable in the early ’90s didn’t diminish the amateur craze.

Video customers bored with the mechanical predictability of the pros rent amateur tapes in search of that elusive “something different” or to watch the passions of people genuinely entranced with one another. Homegrown Video # 419 was “what amateur porn is supposed to be,” wrote AVN reviewer Ralph Goodsen: “Shawnee G. and Scotland are an attractive couple whose passionate, sumptuous lovemaking spree ambles through the sunlit rooms of a large house, climaxing in an outdoor jacuzzi. Along the way they enjoy‌—‌truly enjoy‌—‌a sweaty, squealing, gasping, butt-slapping, mouth-mashing, splashy-wet variety of sex.”

Camcorders turning wallflowers into superstars is only one of the ways technology is changing erotic media. Others have more profound consequences.

x x x x x x

The office clock struck 5‌—‌finally. John punched in the code that terminated his work day and watched the people around him fade away. Then it was his turn, and the entire office faded to black.

He took off his headset and his eyes and ears adjusted to the ambience of his own den. John was old enough to remember when you actually had to drive to work. Now, he charged up his 2019 Chevrolet Electrovette monthly instead of weekly. John got up and strode into his bedroom. He’d been waiting all day for this moment.

He skimmed the directions that accompanied the module, then plugged it into the bedroom’s Supermac terminal. He aimed the forcefield to encompass his bed, disrobed, and reclined on the bedspread, his heart racing. Within a few moments a lovely blonde woman faded in beside him. He reached out to the image he knew was only a hologram. His hand felt the texture of soft female flesh. It was working! The force-feedback sensors keyed to the contours of the holographic image created a sensation in John’s nerve ends of physical contact with a genuine flesh and blood woman. Impulsively, he reached out and hugged her. He felt the warmth of her arms around his neck, the rhythm of her breathing through the breasts pressed against his chest, and the heat of her voice in his ear. “I want to please you… I will do everything you want me to…”

Such a scene might become a possibility within the lifetime of today’s young adults. At the January, 1994 CES Show, AVN Managing Editor Mark Kernes put on a “virtual reality” helmet with an extra-wide TV screen inside to experience Image X’s ZyberFantasy. He saw a blonde, a brunette and a redhead‌—‌all played by Taylor Wane in different wigs. “When I muttered the magic words ‘Come here,’” Kernes said, “the blonde Taylor sort of drifted towards me, close enough to kiss. She then sank to her knees and as I looked down, her head was at my crotch, bobbing back and forth…” Kernes felt like he was “at the first Sputnik launching. That’s the moment you know men will eventually walk on the moon… but it may still take a while to get there.”

CD ROM is here now. 1994 was the year porn companies rushed into putting their material on Compact Disk‌—‌Read Only Memory (meaning the disks can’t be erased or re-programmed), just as a decade earlier they’d all rushed into shooting on videotape. These discs, either IBM or Apple-compatible, make porn “interactive.” Viewers not only can locate their favorite scenes instantly, without the hassle of shuttling videotape back and forth, but can create their own sequence of events. Virtual Valerie lets viewers decide which item of clothing she will take off next. Interotica’s Nightwatch Interactive offers a choice of which apartment of the building on the screen to peek into.

Players of Zane Interactive’s Virtual Vixens game try to figure out the best ways to undress the women they come across and stimulate them to climax. Voyeurs can snoop through Crystal Wilder’s diary in CD-X’s Model’s Memoirs and see what the starlet is up to at various times of her sexually frenetic day. If a viewer gets bored with a sex scene in Interotica’s The Dream Machine, he can click the command labeled DTCS‌—‌“direct to cum shot.”

These new forms of erotica raise new fears among opponents of sexual media. Susan Mooney of Women Organizing Against Pornography and Prostitution thinks interactive programs are more dangerous than photos or movies. “Here the man has even more control,” she said. “He is a real participant in the process of abusing all women…” (How ironic: a man trying to deal with his lack of women being accused of controlling them.)

Attorney Clyde DeWitt said, “Technology is the worst enemy of the censor.” State legislators were already ruminating over the wording of bills to make artificial images illegal if they are too realistic. No sooner did Americans begin traveling the “information highway,” than Senator James Exon (D-Nebraska) introduced The Communications Decency Act, a roadblock on the Internet to stop the racier traffic from passing before the eyes of cyber-smart kids (and adults). The bill didn’t pass.

Under Attorney General Janet Reno, smut-busters in the Justice Department were unsure whether to pursue pornographers aggressively. Former NOEU chief Patrick Trueman groused that the war against pornography “is over: the pornographer has won.” But while the Religious Right sparred with the Clinton Administration at the highest levels of government, they scored knockouts at the lowest.

x x x x x x

“It’s not a God-given right to walk around naked!” declared North Plainfield, New Jersey Councilman Michael Haggerty.

The Dallas, Texas, Park and Recreation Department affixed fig leaves to the pubic areas of three 1-foot-high nude sculptures on display at City Hall. “I hate immorality,” railed Representative Robert Dornan of Garden Grove, California, quoted in the Washington Times. “I hate womanizers, child pornographers, sadomasochists, bondage and dominance, all the kinky, weird perverted sex. Bi-sexuals, even if they can’t seem to make up their minds, it’s all the same to me. They’re all violations of one of the seven deadly sins: lust.”

In the early to mid-1990s, the Religious Right increased their political activities. “Religious politicos” isn’t quite the right term; most religious politicians don’t try to cram their beliefs down the throats of their constituents. For the zealots who want to abolish the Constitutional separation between church and state, however, I’ve coined the word “religicos.” No longer focused only on eliminating smut, they want to control the soul of America. After blaming the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny in the Rodney King riots on “public schools from which God and the Ten Commandments were long ago expelled,” former Presidential speech writer Pat Buchanan stated the religico goal: “We must begin to take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country.”

They found school board elections a good place to start: in 1992, twenty-two of twenty-seven board candidates in the United States endorsed by Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition won their primary races, where sparse voter turnout allowed their followers to overwhelm the ballot box. “We don’t have to worry about convincing the majority of Americans to agree with us,” Ralph Reed, the Coalition chairman said. “Most of them are staying home and watching Falcon Crest.”

These new educators worked hard to eliminate the Devil from classrooms: a Culver City, California elementary school pulled Little Red Riding Hood from approved reading lists because there was wine in the basket for Grandma. The Marysville, Washington, Halloween Task Force wanted schools to ban depictions of witches, ghosts, black cats and jack-o’-lanterns. Seeing old classics through Born-Again eyes, school districts in California, Texas and Florida banned Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Satanism was found lurking in a spelling game called Wizards and a safety-promoting dragon hand puppet named Pumsy. Seventh-graders in Hemet, California, were required to recite a virginity pledge. And the School Board of Purdy, Missouri outlawed dancing at its school dances.

Religicos want children to believe the assertion of South Carolina school prayer advocate, State Representative Becky Meacham: “Prayer is what our country was founded on.” Meacham’s ilk would purge history books of Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to keep religion out of government: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote, “but it does no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 Gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The religicos worked their way up the ladder of politics. In a 1990 Playboy article, Molly Ivins told of a Texas legislator’s bill to outlaw same-sex hand-holding and Washington State Senator James West’s proposal to outlaw “heavy petting” among those under 18. Texas Republican Steven Holtze wanted to execute homosexuals. Religicos began to dominate the Republican Party in Texas, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia, spreading their influence far beyond pedagogic spheres.

The fall, 1994, elections gave Republicans a majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years. Too preoccupied with their “Contract with America” to pursue a contract on adult entertainment, Republican legislators had yet to exploit a new weapon: the Labeling and Record-Keeping provision of the Supreme Court-approved Child Protection Restoration and Penalties Enhancement Act of 1990.

The “LRK Law” requires that all sexually-explicit media include “labels” (on box covers and recorded at the beginnings of movies) giving the address (not a P.O. box) where the records of the performers’ ages are kept. The records themselves must include the real names, stage names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of all sex performers, documented by copies of two forms of identification from among the following: drivers’ licenses, photo ID cards, passports, military IDs, or other government-issued forms of identification. The records must be made available for inspection upon the demand of “the Attorney General or his delegate.”

Will smut-busters make this information available to those who might use it to track down porn stars? Bet on it. After busting the “Pure Pleasure Anti-Censorship Show” during the 1993 Winter CES, Las Vegas police listed the real names of the ladies in local newspapers. In a letter to AVN, Jack Sutherland of the California Star pointed out the danger to performers inherent in the LRK Law: “This leaves them open to stalkers, would-be rapists or even sex murderers, not to mention assassins from the Religious Right. (Remember those doctors murdered by the ‘Right to Life’ people?) … With this new law, the eighteen-year-olds have now been put at probably a thousand times greater risk than the seventeen-year-olds ever were.” As AVN replied, “It will be interesting to see whose names and addresses get passed around by FBI agents.”

In the meantime, the adult video industry thrived. In 1993, the number of titles released reached 2,000 for the first time‌—‌then topped 3,000 in ’94. With VCRs in nearly every household, the overall market is big enough for manufacturers to create niche products for every fantasy.

With its migration from red-light theaters to homes all over America, erotic cinema almost became accepted as a legitimate business enterprise. But fast-buck products, the War on Porn and the reluctance to stand up and fight have kept commercial pornography a pariah among American industries.

Yet, regardless of social and legal pressures, as long as humans are sexually stimulated by the sight of each other’s bodies, someone will make money from the images.

Afterword

It’s Russian roulette. Your tapes circulate all over the U.S., and you never know when a bunch of backwater Bible-thumpers will find even the softest cable version of one of your shows obscene. Under forfeiture laws, the Feds could swoop in and take everything you own. One night your children are sleeping in a comfortable home; the next, they’re shivering in a rusted station wagon with frost seeping through its windshield cracks.

The way to try to prevent such a scenario is to determine in advance if a particular picture might offend a particular community. Under the Declaratory Judgment Act, the Adult Video Association sued to have a federal judge in Memphis determine if Pinnacle’s After Midnight (AKA Body and Soul) met the community standards of the Western District of Tennessee. Judge Jerome Walker ruled that it would be improper for him to make that determination.

“Public servants” don’t want to make these decisions. If they judge a sex tape non-obscene, there will be cries that they are “soft on porn.” If they decide a tape violates community standards, they will be derided as “puritans” and “enemies of the First Amendment.” No appointed or elected magistrate can predict political trends; a decision either way could damage a career. In his book PORNOGRAPHY, The Other Side, Canadian behavioral scientist F.M. Christensen likened obscenity determination to a law that “read simply ‘Don’t drive too fast’ and it would be up to the judge or jury to decide whether you have done so.”

The problem with the community standards test goes deeper than the absurdities of public officials playing politics to determine what’s dirty. A golden rule of modern jurisprudence is “the harm principle.” Laws prohibiting something must be justified by the proven harm that thing can cause. The “community standards” idea was concocted because no one could find “proven harm” caused by that undefinable chimera “obscenity”. “A plainer admission that nothing but popular prejudice underlies the statutes could hardly be asked,” wrote Christensen in his analysis of porn laws. “For it tacitly acknowledges what was true all along, that those particular standards have no objective moral basis that can be stated but are subject solely to the arbitrary and variable forces of socialization.”

“A ‘community standard’ already exists,” AVN publisher Fishbein points out on talk shows. “If the people in the community want it, they’ll buy it. If they don’t want it, the material will go away. The stores aren’t going to carry something that doesn’t sell.” (One could argue that child porn and snuff films would sell too. But those types of movies are irrelevant to “community standards” debates. Existing laws already make snuff films documentary evidence of murder and the conspiracy to commit it, and child porn is visual proof of sexual child abuse.)

A basic principle of our democracy is the protection of the individual from the tyranny of popular opinion. But popular opinion is the very basis for the “community standards” test. At least, this basis allows the majority of a community’s citizens to determine for themselves what meets these standards, doesn’t it? Not quite.

In 1989, defense attorney Lee Klein gathered 120 North Carolina citizens to review three movies and a magazine under prosecution as obscene. Klein had won a protective order in federal court to conduct the survey which was monitored for impartiality by recognized pornography research experts Edward Donnerstein, Dan Linz, and Joe Scott; and for accuracy by Dr. John Reed of Duke University and Dr. Kenneth Land of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The majority of the citizens reviewing the materials found them non-obscene.

Despite such painstaking attention, the survey was disallowed and the defendants were convicted of selling obscene materials. The conviction was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, sanctioning the absurdity of barring public opinion polls from the determination of “community standards.” The North Carolina prosecutor discouraged further attempts at such surveys by charging that showing the tapes and magazines to the community’s citizens constituted dissemination of obscene materials. As AVN’s Clyde DeWitt put it, “The Government wants to make sure that nobody finds out in advance whether a video is obscene.”

At a time when the United States Government was sinking deeper and deeper into debt, and politicians hesitated to foist more taxes on Americans already unhappy about being “gouged,” the Justice Department porn-hunters had established themselves as moneymakers. When new Attorney General Janet Reno began handing out pink slips to Department appointees from the old Republican Administrations, she left the hastily-renamed Child Exploitation and Obscenity Enforcement Unit in place.

The combined assets of the entire adult entertainment industry and its CEOs, if seized by the Government, would have little effect on the mounting national debt. But the road paved by obscenity forfeiture travels far beyond the doors of erotic media makers. “We have given Hollywood ample time and opportunity to self-regulate their media for offensive material,” declared Reno. “It is time for the government to come in and regulate.” That opinion crosses political party lines. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole’s May, 1995 blast at Hollywood for “mainstreaming deviancy” implied that if he were elected, he’d do something about that. Radio stations carrying “shock jock” Howard Stern paid over $600,000 in fines to the Federal Communications Commission. Who’s next?

If the adult movie industry were wiped out tomorrow, people would still cheer at football games and eighth-graders would still carry guns to school. Americans would still perceive themselves a free people.

I believe erotic media plays a role in our society similar to the canary in the coal mine. A fouling of the air that miners can’t detect will kill the bird first. Then, the miners know they’d better get moving, because they’re next.

A world-renowned religious figure has said, “Video has turned into one of the principal means of spreading decadence and moral corruption.” The speaker was the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spiritual leader of Iran.

Reverend Wildmon couldn’t have said it better.

The door burst open and three dark figures rushed into John’s bedroom. One yanked the module plug and his holographic lover vanished‌—‌replaced by a laser weapon held in John’s face by one black-gloved hand, while another waved a badge. The virtual police!

In court, shortly after the opening prayer, John was sentenced to be born again. He would undergo electronic soul redemption, then re-enter society purified, devoid of worldly trappings. Under the laws of Divine Forfeiture, his home, Electrovette, computers and bank accounts would revert to the State Church. John told himself it wouldn’t be so bad. They didn’t torture people. This wasn’t the Middle Ages. He’d emerge healthy, free of all physical desire, with that smooth, beatific grace that shines eternally in the faces of the redeemed.

x x x x x x

After graduating from UCLA Film School in 1970, David Jennings shot movies for the first theatrical exhibitor of hardcore pornography in America. Then he spent four years in Michigan making industrial and commercial films for clients as diverse as Magnavox, the State of Michigan and the Christian Reform Church. Many of the films he wrote and directed have won awards.

Jennings re-entered the porn business in 1977 to research and write about it. As the head of film and video for “the biggest Mafia porno outfit on the West Coast” (FBI claim), he helped make its VCX subsidiary the early leader in adult video.

Jennings left VCX in 1979 to pioneer the first X-rated features shot on directly on videotape. His company, Superior Video, Inc., was a leading video manufacturer in the 1980’s.

After selling Superior Video, Jennings spent three years transcribing 342 audio cassettes—his journal of 11 years in the business—before writing Skinflicks.