The Rape Films of Porn’s Golden Age

Today’s “gonzo porn” includes many categories of women subjected to brutal sex.  But these are cheap and dirty “wall-to-wall (sex only, no story)” videos.  They can’t compare with the big-budget 35-millimeter epics of the 1970s and early 80s that featured elaborate production values and intricate stories that involved debasing women in the grossest possible ways.

The audiences for these theatrical films were angry, sexually-frustrated men who comprised a large portion of that era’s “raincoat crowd.”

My duties as film and tape manager at VCX, Inc., included supervising the transfer of these films to videotape.  Among these pictures were the following “classics”:

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

In Alex DeRenzy’s Pretty Peaches (1978), real-life mental patient Desiree Cousteau plays a car accident amnesia victim who’s raped by the men who hit her. A quack doctor treats her amnesia with enemas. She’s gang-banged at a job audition.

At Compact Video, I supervised the transfer of Defiance, 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.

A Dirty Western (1975) featured a gang of outlaws raiding a ranch and raping the owner (Barbara Bourbon) and her daughters.

In Waterpower, Jamie Gillis (You want kink? He’s your man.) played an enema rapist.

After I left VCX, my new business partner Joe Loveland (a nom de porn) gave me a tape that his S and M protege Stephanie Bonds wanted to emulate:  The Mitchell Brothers’ Never a Tender Moment starred Marilyn Chambers suspended by wrists and ankles while butch lesbians beat her with whips; hung upside down while they insert all of a dildo the size of a baby elephant’s leg in her rectum.

Serena (Blaquelord) in All the King’s Ladies

Before she appeared in my video feature All The King’s Ladies, Serena had retired from porn after a shoot that nearly led to her death. In Mai Lin Versus Serena (1982), 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.

“It’s a unique irony,” wrote the historian (Jim) Holliday in the 1990s, “that under Nixon’s presidency adult films were rougher than they are currently.”

Yet, even after home video brought an influx of female viewers in the mid 1980s, there remained an audience of disgruntled men who made best-sellers out of videos like Biff Malibu’s Gang Bang Girls series.

Today’s misogynist porn can’t match the budgets of yesteryear, but it’s just as brutal.  Anti-porn academic, Gail Dines, rails against this gonzo genre, blaming it for corrupting the sexuality of all American men.  Dines has produced one of the most inadvertently hilarious jeremiads against porn that I have ever read.

Next post: Pornland by Gail Dines: A Primer for Perverts

 

 

 

Shooting ALL THE KING’S LADIES Part 4: Screw-ups and Sizzle

Serena (left), Rhonda Jo Petty (right), Legs in pants: Michael Morrisson

The 1981 production of All the King’s Ladies, “the first big-budget erotic extravaganza shot entirely on videotape,” was both maddening and marvelous.

First, the screw-ups:

I made a package deal to use impresario Perry Mann’s lavish Marin County estate as a location and himself as an actor.  At least the property part  worked out–the location was gorgeous.

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 allegedly coke-addled memory retained dialogue like a sieve holds rain. Porn star Juliet Anderson, making her debut as a director, 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.

Next screw-up:

Our snide little snot of an engineer was one of the few local technicians familiar with the new Ikkis (Ikegami HL-79 cameras). 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.

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 (Ikegami HL-79 cameras) went out of phase.

So, what went right?

The really important thing: Sex! 

(Note: Scenes described  below are more intimately detailed in SKINFLICKS. )

First, I had packed the cast with female stars: Sharon Mitchell, Holly McCall, Mai Lin, and the winner of a Farrah Fawcett-Majors look-alike contest, Rhonda Jo Petty. These ladies took pride in their craft.

Serena Blaquelord in ALL THE KING’S LADIES

At  director Juliet Anderson’s behest, Serena had come out of retirement for the movie. She had quit porn after a scene that almost killed her.  A callous director had immersed the masochistic star in a brutal gang-bang that flooded her with enough germs to rival an ER in Afghanistan. Serena was hospitalized with septic shock.

I, too, used her in an S and M scene (what, me exploitive?).  Crude cowboy Michael Morrison whipped her like a mule. (I cut out most of the skit to avoid going to jail.)

The big lesson I learned was that video was tailor-made for porn. In spite of the equipment hassles, we shot ten sex scenes in two days.

“I used to struggle to complete three sex scenes a day,” I told Joe Farmer.  “And those were little more than loops, nothing like the feature story we just shot.”

Joe smiled. “Television production techniques will revolutionize the shooting of sex. Remember, you heard it here first.”

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…”

Switching between cameras, a director could “edit” the scene as it was taking place–live–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.

There was no need for a “fluffer,” an off-camera lady whose job was to suck the men up for each shot.

The final orgy scene, which would have suffered an epidemic of penis limpus if shot in film, went as slick as a pornographer’s wet dream.

Jon Martin, Michael Morrisson, Mike Horner, Don Fernando, newcomer Paul West and Ed Lincoln–son of veteran porn director, the late Fred Lincoln–all spouted spectacularly.

The sizzle reached its climax–so to speak–in a rooftop scene with Sharon Mitchell and Mike Horner.

From SKINFLICKS:

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).

With leftover videotape, we interviewed the porn Hall-of-Famer:

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.”

Despite “creative editing” to cover up All the King’s Ladies‘ technical difficulties, Adam Film World’s 1987 X-Rated Movie Handbook listed the feature among “The 500 Best Adult Movies of All Time.”

“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.”

Next post: Shooting PHYSICAL: Letting It All Hang Out in a Best-Seller

 

 

 

Shooting All the King’s Ladies Part 2: Terrorizing the City of San Francisco

The production of “The First Big-Budget Erotic Extravaganza Shot Entirely on Videotape” was jinxed.  It was as if I had walked under a ladder with a black cat circling around me.

The grim gauntlet began even before the shoot.

The following is from SKINFLICKS:

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.

Shot in 1981, starring Serena, Sharon Mitchell, Rhonda Jo Petty, Michael Morrisson, JonMartin, Mai Lin

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.

Next post: Shooting All the King’s Ladies Part 4: Ripoffs. Learning new lessons in distrust.

 

 

 

 

 

The “Smut Glut.” How the Porn Movie Industry almost Destroyed Itself Part 1: Stupidity

The distributor was screaming obscenities so fast in his New York accent that my office manager, Allyssa couldn’t understand him.  She had phoned to ask when Superior Video could expect overdue payment.  Between F-bombs, Allyssa managed to learn that the man’s partner had just been murdered. Sixteen .22 slugs in the head—the result of a much more serious unpaid debt.  Another of Superior’s distributors had just lost his warehouse to “arson.” (“For the insurance,” Allyssa guessed.)   And Ferris Alexander of AB Distributors in Minnesota, also in arrears, was preoccupied with the aftermath of an anti-porn demonstrator immolating herself in one of his bookstores.

In 1986, the porn video business became afflicted with three crises: the Traci Lords scandal (Chapter 12 in SKINFLICKS), the newly-declared War on Porn (the fried demonstrator being an extreme manifestation of the hysteria) and—the worst of the three—the “Smut Glut,” for which the industry had only itself to blame.

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

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 production of big-budget X-rated motion pictures would end.

The cause?  The same thing that had made Superior Video, Inc., successful.  We were the first to shoot full-length adult features entirely on videotape, with budgets of $20,000 instead of the $60-70,000 it would cost to shoot the same movies in 35 millimeter film.  For the first half of the 1980s, we produced hits like All the King’s Ladies, Physical, Night Moves, Running Wild, Chocolate Cream and our most lavish production, Deviations ($35,000 budget).   Our philosophy was to create adult movies as good as the 1970s “Golden Age of Porn” films. (Such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Sex World, and Behind the Green Door.)   When our competitors discovered the ease and economy of shooting in videotape, they didn’t share Superior’s philosophy.

Instead, they followed the pornographer’s dictum: If it works once, do it a thousand times. They began cranking out cheap videos.  Adult Video News noted that the number of porn video releases soared from 400 in 1983 to 1100 in ’84 and 1610 in ’85.  The market couldn’t absorb 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.”   Retailers began buying those 15 or 20 videos based on price alone.  As prices plunged, so did pornographers’ profits.  Companies had to crank out more titles to maintain their cash flows: a vicious cycle.  Something had to give, and that something was quality.

“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.”  

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.”   Then, even one-day wonders became too expensive.

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 separate stories.)  

The demand for tons of titles at micro-budgets led to the Stallion Productions debacle of 100 titles in thirty days, after which the producers and their tapes disappeared without paying cast and crew.  AVN’s Gene 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.”

As the downward vortex continued, porn companies resorted to cutting out production entirely.  The “Smut Glut.” Part 2: Scams will discuss “wraparounds,” re-titles, Hollywood rip-offs, Disney lawsuits, “borderline” child porn, bankruptcy epidemics, and desperate promotions such as pubic hair in cassette boxes.