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

 

 

 

Screwings: On-Screen and Off. When Porn Careers Clash

The all-time worst case of clashing porn careers has to be the tragic event that happened on the night of January 25, 1996.

From SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry:

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 dislexic 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.

Tensions between off-screen lovers who both have porn careers rarely reach the horror-show level of the Cal Jammer suicide.  At worst, they enter the realm of absurdity. (Note: Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

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.”
     Whatever gets the juices flowing.

Serena Blaquelord in SUBMISSION OF SERENA, a full-length version of the scene in BOUND

In my S and M video Bound, Jamie Gillis and Serena Blaquelord demonstrated their bizarre sex-style:

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’-9-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.”

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. 

Serena and Jamie were strong performers and established stars. (Maybe that’s why they eventually went their separate ways.)  But what about when a porn star has a partner who also performs but is known to be a “weak model?”  That was the case when a beautiful woman I hired for a loop series insisted that she work with her boyfriend.

Buxom Desiree West, “the BlackPanther 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.” (Maybe the implications in that warning were the reasons he practiced Kung Fu.)

“Take it on the tits, then.” I wanted to feature them anyway.
(Dashiell managed a “dribbler.”)

“He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she.”  –Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye

Especially in the fast-paced porno business.

So, were there any porn performer partnerships that worked?

Samantha Fox in my video production, SIZZLE WITH SAMANTHA

Yes. Bobby Astyr and the delightful Samantha Fox were a couple  from 1978 until Astyr’s death of lung cancer in 2002.  Bill Margold and his wife Drea were together from 1982 until their divorce in 1984.

 … in an Adam interview (1982), 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.”

Nina Hartley in my video E.X.

The best porn relationship I ever witnessed was that of Nina Hartley and her husband Dave, with whom she was mated for 20 years.  Their relationship was unusual in that Nina also had a wife.

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).

Dave was not a performer, but I was glad to have him on the set when I cast Nina.  He was an able crew member whose upbeat energy was welcomed.

Barbara Dare in E.X. (when she was still known as Kimberly Dare)

That supreme super-bitch, Barbara Dare, didn’t let a boyfriend get in her way.  Of course, it helped that she was a lesbian.

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.

Next:  The Rape Films of Porn’s Golden Age

 

 

 

Shooting Submission of Serena: A Real-life S and M Relationship

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 blond 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.

That passage from SKINFLICKS introduces Jamie Gillis and Serena who would demonstrate their own genuine rough-sex skit in a scene that would be featured in Bound and shown in its entirety in Submission of Serena.

From SKINFLICKS:

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’-9-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.

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.

————————————

The late Jamie Gillis went on to star in my videos Chocolate Cream and Running Wild.  His sexual versatility and acting skill made him a director’s dream.

In 1981, Serena Blaquelord came out of retirement for a feature role in my “erotic extravaganza” All the King’s Ladies.  She had left the business after an over-zealous director exploited her compliant masochism in a scene that almost killed her (grisly details in SKINFLICKS).

Next post: Shooting The Perfect Gift:  Hard Lessons Learned.  Eight guys with erectile dysfunction.  Killer storm. Near-electrocution.  Engineer dysfunction.  Juliet Anderson’s famous fellatio.  S and M master’s slave girl repulses squeamish Juliet.  All happening in a house built for kink.

 

Getting It Up the Hard Way: Odd tricks for “getting wood”

A pornographer’s worst nightmare is the actor who can’t get erect.  The moviemaker must then  either shoot  the scene “sim (simulated)” and cut in hardcore close-ups from previous shoots or pay the flaccid actor a “kill fee (a small goodbye payment)” and hire a replacement.  At least the pornographer has options.  But the poor guy who can’t perform suffers a worse fate: no more work.  Men have suffered nervous breakdowns over penis limpus and at least one (Randy Potes—AKA Cal Jammer) has committed suicide.  To continue in a lucrative career, porn studs develop unique ways to get aroused.

(Note: Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics)

Having a beautiful woman available may not work.  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.  But Gayle Monica’s patient fellatio didn’t “fluff up” her porn-partner husband.  He wasn’t looking at her. (Too familiar?)  Instead he stared at Boobs ‘n Buns magazine. It didn’t help. Then, male star Mike Ranger strolled into the room, sat on the bed and began fondling Gayle.  Her startled husband suddenly became hard.  Lesson: The unexpected can work wonders.

On the same shoot was a guy whom Ranger derisively dubbed “Right Sider.” He had to lie on his right side and masturbate in order to function.  When ready, he’d scramble to get in a few pumps with his female co-star before he lost it, then he’d revert to his right side.

Willem Lowen, Cindy Carver, voyeur in Nixon Mask, from NIGHT MOVES

With big bucks dependent on male performance, the “reliables” hogged all the stud work. (My favorites: Jamie Gillis, Billy Dee, Willem Lowen, Joe Elliot.)  One of the best, the late John Leslie, insisted that his craft was a form of method acting—drawing upon emotions and memories to play a scene.  In one of the first loops I ever shot (in 1977), Leslie demonstrated his “method.”  Ignoring his female co-star, he’d close his eyes and stroke himself up.

A man whose performance depends upon 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.

Billy Dee and Juliet Anderson. PHYSICAL

 

Richard Pacheco learned this lesson during his porn debut, in Candy Stripers.  In an Erotic Film Guide article, he described going limp after seeing Nancy Hoffman grimace from 45 minutes of kneeling on concrete: “People were lying around sleeping, snoring, just plain waiting for me to get it up…Nancy even fell asleep on my thigh…I sat there masturbating myself and praying for the Russians to launch a surprise attack.”  Finally, Pacheco had an inspiration: “I closed my eyes and started all over…I was back on the couch of 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.”  When Pacheco reached his climax, he “heard the cheering of millions.”

The late director Henri Pachard claimed that the best way to treat stud failure was through ridicule. “Point a finger at him and go, ‘Ha ha ha! Look at this wimp! Look at that shriveled 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.”

The Pachard theory reportedly worked when Matt Daniels failed during Anthony Spinelli’s The Party.  His screen partner—and real-life girlfriend, Heather Lere—cussed him out and according to witnesses, the agitated actor slapped her butt and proceeded to—in Lere’s term—“spring board.”

The most unusual hard-on aid I’ve ever witnessed was moi !  That’s right: yours truly.  I was working “boom.”  The job is physically taxing. You stand there with arms raised, holding one end of a boom, which is a long pole (“fishpole”) that has a microphone on the other end.  The mike is suspended over the scene, above the camera frame but still close enough to capture crisp dialogue. Holding the pole in position is damn tiring.  I was standing on a chair, near the ceiling, the hottest part of the room.  I was sweating, muscles straining. I had a weird feeling of being watched.  I glanced down and into the eyes of an actor (a known bi-sexual) who was furiously stroking himself. And staring hard at me!  I turned my gaze to the microphone, and froze in position, like a statue. (Literally a “statue of David,” but thankfully with pants.)  The actor was able to perform with his designated actress.

Glad I could help.

Starlets or Harlots Part 2: The Perils of Porn Stardom

Mauvaise de Noire, Billy Dee and Lisa DeLeeuw

Lisa DeLeeuw described one of her worst experiences.  Working for Svetlana (“Sweatlana”) Marsh, spending 20-hour days shivering in an unheated sound stage, living on “stale donuts, coffee and hot dogs,” the voluptuous redhead came down with a bad cold and conjunctivitis—“pink eye.”  (Passages from SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry are in italics.)
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…you’re background. Fine.
“Well, I’m doing that and all of a sudden Jamie (Gillis) 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’!’”

When a woman enters porn she faces two kinds of challenges: those on the set and those away from it.  On the set, a porn starlet quickly learns that what the male wants is gospel.  If she interrupts a scene because her leg is cramping, she risks causing a lost erection.  If it can’t be retrieved, the blame is hers. Once the stud has delivered, the director wants to hurry on to the next scene, regardless of how turned on an actress might be.  (Rather than be left high and wet, stars like Annette Haven and Lilly Marlene recruited crew members to help them “finish up.”)  Then there are the directors whose grandiose visions of sizzling sex push women beyond their limits.

“Whatever your natural inclinations are, they play on them,” said an anonymous actress in a 1980 Adam Film World interview.  The graphic details she added are recounted in SKINFLICKS.  Serena’s forced retirement came after a shoot that almost killed her. After a filmed contest to see if she could handle more men than Mai Lin, Serena not only took on more than forty studs but also their microbes. “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…The filmmaker didn’t even send a get-well card.

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 minimal effort…”The nicer you treat the performers,” observed porn historian Holliday, “the more likely they are to shit on you.”

New ladies were afraid to balk at pornographer’s directions for fear of being called “difficult.” Compounding the physical rigors were the non-stop months of serial 14-hour days needed to build a six-figure nest egg.  In Adult Video News, director Bruce Seven complained, “By the time they get to me, a lot of the performers are half-dead from overwork.” He followed that statement with a graphic description of what he meant.

One way for ladies to cope with the demands was through cocaine, which became epidemic in the frenzy of video shoots during the 1980s. 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.

The poster girl for cocaine addiction was the late Shauna Grant. Her whispered nickname “Applecoke” was a play on her real surname, Applegate.  Whether her death was a suicide, as porn critics claim, or murder by drug dealers, hers was a worst-case scenario of life away from the porn set, where a whole new world of challenges awaited.

Kristara Barrington said former high 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.

If porn haters weren’t bad enough, there were the porn lovers. Lisa DeLeeuw described 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 very week!’” Those were the nice fans.  There was also the kind that the late porn historian Jim Holliday called “the Toad Patrol.”

Porn fame meant 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…these fans stalk starlets from one club date to the next, steal their 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?

In the SKINFLICKS account of Juliet Anderson’s premier party for Educating Nina, a drunken neighbor, braying for sex, kept returning after being turned away,.  I finally told him that one of the guests was a former Green Beret interrogator who would subject him to “…involuntary unleashing of bladder and bowel functions.”  That statement made him stay home; he turned out to be innocuous. More diabolical was a rock band whose album Love Letters to Joanna Storm included the romantic .38 Caliber Kiss. The band kept pestering porn people to give them Ms. Storm’s address.

Having ruminated over the nature of porn fans, I came to the following conclusion:  There are contradictions in the American male’s attitude toward the porno queen: his frustrated lust for her versus his impulse to condemn her; his desire to meet her and impress her versus his fear of her scorn for his inadequacies.  He hides his conflicts behind rough, macho swagger.

Porn fans can be avoided (or at least relegated to limited exposure), but there are some people whom porn princesses can’t escape: their significant others.  Porn agent Jim South described a malady he called “boyfriendinitis.” Its sobbing victims would call him to cancel shoots due to black eyes and chipped teeth.  A rock musician, quoted in the Bay Area magazine, Spectator, said, “Strippers and porn stars are a lot like rock n’ roll groupies…They don’t have a lot of 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.”  His statement notwithstanding, there’s a simpler reason for “boyfriendinitis” violence.

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, Juliet Anderson said, “When you drive a bus ten hours a day, you don’t want to spend your vacation on a Greyhound.”  Picture the poor boyfriend, squirming with desire while waiting for his porn queen girlfriend to return from work. He can’t understand why his exhausted lover won’t give him the attention he thinks he deserves.  Not noted for their compassionate sensitivity, porn stars’ boyfriends often react with fists.

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.”

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.

Not surprisingly, many porn actresses decided to give up on a lucrative career. 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.  Adult Video News sarcastically noted the comings and goings: “Samantha Strong…saw agents and producers, got booked solid, then decided to quit every other month.” “Erica Boyer, from all reports, has met another guy and is out of the biz once again. Gentlemen place your bets.”

Leaving the business behind becomes especially frustrating when women find that a past porn career becomes like a stink that won’t wash off.  After dating Michael (“Batman”) Keaton for two years, Serena Robinson told him of her past porn career as “Rachel Ryan.”  Keaton subsequently dumped her.  There are ongoing debates about whether Megan Leigh and Alex Jordan actually committed suicide. Was Leigh shot to death?  Was Jordan’s hanging an autoerotic experiment gone wrong?   One thing both had in common was that they were soured on porn.  There is no question that superstar Savannah (Shannon Wilsey) killed herself.  The temperamental porn queen (Her infamous shoot-stopping declaration: “I’m on break—NOW!”) known for romps with rock stars, Slash and Axl Rose, was being hounded by the IRS. She had wanted to break into “legit” show business like Traci Lords (who used her “child victim” plea) had done, but feared her porn career prevented that.  On July 11, 1995, her drunken ride in her Corvette ended in a crash. Then, in the garage of the Universal City home she had paid cash for, Savannah put a 9-millimeter slug through her head.

Despite the potholes in porn’s road to riches there are women who prospered in porn, proud of their careers.   Part 3 of Starlets or Harlots? will examine what it takes for success without apologies.  I will discuss my all-time favorites, such as Nina Hartley, Shanna McCullough and Lilly Marlene.  I’ll include my worst directing experience ever, with a woman who became one of the biggest stars of the late 1980s.

My Favorite Dead Pornographers

You know you’re getting old when you keep putting the word “late” before the names of people you’ve known.  In the porn world there have been many who died of drugs, AIDS and—as porn’s detractors gleefully point out—suicides.  This isn’t about them. The subject of porn’s casualties will be reserved for a future entry.  This is about people who weren’t casualties, people who prospered through their work in porn, people I’ve enjoyed working with, people who unfortunately checked out before getting the chance to just slowly fade away.  In the order in which I came to know them, they are Jamie Gillis, Juliet Anderson, Anthony Spinelli, Henri Pachard, and Russ Meyer.  I won’t delve into their biographies; there are plenty of those on the Internet.  These are strictly my recollections from interacting with them, highlighted with details from SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry.
      
Jamie Gillis

You know those ads for erection enhancers—the ones that go “For an erection lasting over four hours seek medical attention.”?  Well, in a scene with Serena in my bondage video, Bound, Jamie stayed “up” for at least that long, with no apparent lasting damage.  In fact, for sustained penile performance, his member was one of the healthiest in history. From SKINFLICKS:  ”During a busy week of shoots, I asked Gillis if he ever got 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 in a few hours, you’re hungry.”

Jamie Gillis and Mauvaise De Noire

The craggy-visaged actor was known for playing sinister characters, and fans mistakenly thought he was some kind of diabolical entity in real life. (My girlfriend—who didn’t know him—exclaimed, “Jamie Gillis! Terrible man!”) On the set, he was one of the nicest, most agreeable people you’d ever want to meet.  Thoroughly professional. A director’s dream. Of course, when given the green light to do his own thing, he liked to treat women like dogs, cuffing them lightly when they didn’t lick fast enough—as he did with Mauvaise De Noire in my bi-racial video Chocolate Cream.  In SKINFLICKS, Lisa DeLeeuw relates a traumatic incident in which Gillis took his beastmaster persona a bit too far—and broke her nose.  His penchant for offbeat scenarios extended into his real life.  From SKINFLICKS: 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 crowds below.  Even revelers as bizarre as San Francisco’s could only stare upward, open-mouthed.
.  Despite his kinks, the real reason he got so many strange roles was because, as a polished Shakespearean actor, he could play them so well. In my videos Chocolate Cream and Running Wild, his portrayal of—respectively–an avaricious dating service proprietor and the head of a clan of orgiastic potheads was infused with subtle humor that went beyond the written dialogue. His sex scenes, limited (mostly) to the usual mundane positions, were performed with his customary expertise.  After a long career as actor, producer and director, Jamie Gillis (James Gurman) died of metastasized melanoma on February 19, 2010 at the age of 66.  

 Juliet Anderson

Juliet Anderson was a perfectionist.  I know that from the bracing experience of being her mansionmate.  When I moved in, she presented me with a detailed 13-page list of household chores (“frequently take hair and fuzz off brush while vacuuming rugs”). Her fastidiousness clashed with my neglectful housekeeping.  From SKINFLICKS:  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.
Juliet’s perfectionism showed in her image: patrician features, short, swept-back blonde hair and a figure trimmed through compulsive exercise. Her determination to succeed extended to her sexual skills, such as her “famous Aunt Peg blow job.” From SKINFLICKS: “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.
Juliet was also one of porn’s all-time great “screamers.”  Her crescendos could bring down chandeliers. From SKINFLICKS: 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.

Juliet Anderson and Billy Dee in Physical

Juliet’s years as a teacher (Among other things, she’d taught English in Finland.) prepared her for the role that brought her fame: “Aunt Peg” in the Swedish Erotica loop series, where her sexually sophisticated character taught eager young men the arcane secrets of pleasure. Juliet’s lifestyle was a sex workaholic’s frenzy of porn work, stage shows, mail-order items, phone sex recordings and “fantasy sessions” with admiring sugar daddies. From SKINFLICKS: 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.
Like so many of porn’s “lifers,” Juliet knew her future lay behind the camera, not in front of it. She made her directing debut with my Superior Video feature, All the King’s Ladies, where she kept her cool through this staggeringly problem-plagued production.  In my next feature, the hot-selling Physical, she played the lead role of a magazine publisher who uncovers a sex-contest scam. Juliet traded her work in Physical for my future services as videographer in a movie she planned to produce.  Her 1984 video feature, Educating Nina, turned out to have historical significance as the debut of future porn legend Nina Hartley. Unfortunately, Juliet didn’t have the steely, negotiator nerves required for dealing with porn’s inner-circle barracudas. After years of getting screwed in the best way, she got screwed in the worst, lamenting that the process of marketing Educating Nina was “an emotional and financial disaster.” Disillusioned with the world of porn, Juliet turned to less harsh pursuits, managing a bed-and-breakfast and running a massage therapy company.  She finally returned to porn in the mid-‘90s, focusing on videos of older people having sex.  All her life, Juliet had battled Crohn’s disease, keeping it at bay with a healthful lifestyle.  The disease finally won.   It came as a shock to those who knew this vital, energetic woman when she was found lifeless in bed. Juliet Anderson (Judith Carr) died on January 11, 2010. She was 71.

Anthony Spinelli 

From SKINFLICKS:  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.”
Anthony Spinelli was a unique pornographer; he had no interest in shooting sex.  From SKINFLICKS: 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.
Pornographers crave distinction, something that makes them stand out from the rest of the wham-bam crowd.  For Spinelli, it was his ability to wring outstanding thespian performances from “stars” whose idea of “acting” was to vary the pitch of their moans.  Spinelli had the tenacity of a Jewish mother (He referred to himself as “an old Jew.”) in not allowing even the most lackadaisical performers to slough off a single line.  Actors learned that the sooner they followed his directions, the faster things would move. (The oft-repeated Spinelli line: “What’s your motivation?…To get outta here by 9 P.M.”)
Spinelli saw intonations, beats, flickers and emotional textures in a scene that I never could. On his shoots, my co-director Joe Farmer and I saw the importance of a good crew, who were like family to Spinelli. (After he twice suffered on-set heart attacks, Spinelli’s crew took it upon themselves to finish shooting his films.) Their loyalty, competence and dedication put pressure on cast members to do their best, also.
After his movies won acclaim in porn’s “big-budget” Film Age, Spinelli’s Plum Productions prospered in the leaner Age of Video. From SKINFLICKS:  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 reruns, 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?”
Anthony Spinelli (Sam Weinstein) died of pneumonia on May 29, 2000, at age 73.  His son Mitch carried on the family tradition of high-quality cinema.

 Henri Pachard

From SKINFLICKS: 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.” 
In contrast to Spinelli, Henri Pachard was very concerned with the sex. Unlike so many pornographers who claim a lofty “professional distance” from their actresses, Pachard admitted to casting women he’d like to screw, hastening to add, “Not that I’d ever have sex with them, but…if they turn me on, I hope it shows in my direction and the various situations I put them in.”  He was proud of being called, “The King of the Commode,” gaining that title though the engineering of scenes on bathroom fixtures. One of the most athletic skits I ever witnessed—described in SKINFLICKS—was on Pachard’s Harlem Candy shoot.  It involved Angel Kelly, Honey Malone and F.M Bradley, teetering on the rim of a laundry tub, with the tall, black Bradley, his face enshrouded in red panties, tilting his head to fit under the ceiling, while Pachard played the “directator.”  From SKINFLICKS: 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!”
As budgets grew skimpier during the late ‘80s “smut glut” era of cheap videos clogging the market, the resourceful Pachard managed to shoot three features in one day (The trick was to shoot three separate dialogue scenes with the same cast on each setup, to fit three different stories).
One scenario the “directator” couldn’t control was his last one in life.  I don’t know if his fondness for vodka helped precipitate the cancer that killed him. On September 27, 2008, Henri Pachard (Ron Sullivan) passed away.  He was 69.  Some wag on a website posted the remark that the age number was appropriate for a pornographer.

Russ Meyer

When I think of Russ Meyer, I think of food. Good food!  Whenever Superior Video exhibited in trade shows across the America, Russ was there also, selling his RM Productions videotapes.  He made the decision of where to eat dinner after a long day of jawing with retailers easy. The well-travelled gourmand knew the best restaurants in every city of the United States (and in other countries, I presume).  His suggestions always kept Superior Video’s crew looking forward to our evening meals.  Russ was never wrong.
I include Russ here even though he was not a pornographer in the hardcore sense.  His celebrated films were more like Hollywood fare—with extremely buxom women: Extremely, extremely buxom women.  Russ didn’t put sex in his flicks—just plenty of bounce.  He would bristle at any suggestion that he was a pornographer, explaining that he made comedies, not pornos.  He was a true  auteur de cinema.  When I asked him what he would title his autobiography, if and when he wrote one, he puffed out his chest and proclaimed, “Russ Meyer: The Rural Fellini!”
For a non-pornographer, he helped the hardcore Superior Video make a lot of money. At every CES (Consumer Electronics Show) and VSDA (Video Software Dealers of America) extravaganza, we somehow had the great, good fortune of having Russ Meyer’s booth right across from ours.  Russ, truly a rugged individual, came to every trade show alone, his entire exhibit neatly compacted onto one hand dolly. Within minutes, he’d have his booth up and running. And attracting crowds. Russ had the perspicacity to edit a trade show trailer consisting entirely of damsels in distress.  Their screams would fill the auditorium, and people would come running like oglers at an accident. Of course, many of the retailers and distributors in these SRO crowds would turn around and order tapes from Superior.
My only contact with Russ Meyer came through trade shows.  After I left the adult video industry, I never saw him again.  I was saddened to learn that he had died on September 18, 2004, of pneumonia. He was 82. Since he also suffered from Alzheimer’s, Meyer was the only one in this article to come close to “slowly fading away.” 
Russ Meyer, the embodiment of rugged individualism, lived life his way: He got rich by exploiting his fascination with watermelon breasts.

We all want to go out as painlessly as possible.  My aunt, Margaret, a health food advocate who taught me to read at age three, did it right.  She was 89 when she went to bed with a cold and didn’t wake up. We should all be so lucky.