The Curse of “Boyfriendinitis”

Adult Video News 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 boyfriend’s reaction was not reported, but he must have been more tolerant of his lady-love’s new career than the men described below.  These worthies are examples of that pornmaker’s headache called “boyfriendinitis.”

(Excerpts from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

Amy Rogers (with Tom Byron) in DIRTY PICTURES

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.)

At one of Joe Elliot’s casting sessions, I hired a stunning new woman with the porn name of Connie Lindstrom.  She was every man’s fantasy of a flaxen-haired Swedish goddess.  Then, before the shoot, her fiance gave her genital herpes.  Unlike most porn stars, Connie was ethical enough to refuse to pass it along to screen partners.  She limited herself to fellatio–frustrating the studs who wanted a go at her cunny.

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.

Adult Video News 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.”

OK, so a private-life lover can sour a porn career.  What about when both partners work in porn?  Good? Bad? Disastrous?  All of the above?

___________

Next:  Screwings: On-screen and Off.  When Porn Careers Clash

 

Shooting DEVIATIONS Part 2: A Sexual Circus

No movie–porno or otherwise–gets made without some fancy behind-the-scenes work of agents who deal with whining stars, demanding directors, pompous producers, and–rarely–nice guys like me.

That’s why I always made sure to thank Joe Elliot for being like the oil in the engine of Bay Area porn.  And no flick required more lubrication (both figuratively and literally) than Deviations.

Consider Elliot’s feats:

• Lining up a nightclub whose owners didn’t mind their quarters hosting the mess of a massive orgy.
• Finding a lecherous audience through The Berkeley Party Hotline who accepting $1 each to sign releases allowing use of their images.
• Hiring professional musicians to record the songs he’d written for Deviations, playing his synthesizer and soothing the inevitable clashes of creative musical egos.
• Casting, including the debut of one of my all-time favorites, future porn Hall-of-Famer Shanna McCullough.
• And, finally, offering his photographic talents and the stud skills of his own scrawny self. (My girlfriend observed, “He’s big in only one place.”)

Joe Elliot gave something more to the making of Deviations: his heart and soul.  The movie provided a platform for exercising his passions for music, photography and sex with pretty girls.

The ingredients:  Funky nightclub on the uneasy border between Berkeley and Oakland; rowdy crowd of leering voyeurs; enough video, lighting and sound equipment to turn the place into a snake pit of foot-snagging cables. And, of course, the “Deviations” themselves: four young ladies ready to screw their butts off in the name of erotic art.

What could possibly go wrong?

For obvious reasons, I allowed no alcohol.  But the skunky aroma of pot smoke soon filled the club.  Some things you just can’t control. Especially things that come from “Berserkely.”

When I asked Joe Elliot who our security team would be, he replied, “Rudy.”

“Rudy?  Just one guy?”

“Rudy will be enough.”

I doubted that.  Until I met Rudy, an African-American mountain of muscle. His massive presence assured good manners like a deity from Smash-face Hell .

The Deviations: (Left to Right) Adrienne Bellaire, Connie Lindstrom, Shanna McCullough, Robyn Everett

The music went well.  The ladies had practiced enough with the recorded soundtrack to actually appear to be hitting the right frets, drumbeats and synthesizer keys.  As noted in the previous post, Shanna McCullough’s flawless lip-synching fooled the audience into thinking that the group was actually performing the songs.

Dancers in DEVIATIONS

The dancing was as wild as I’d hoped.  A bare-bottomed girl ripped the shirt off a gentleman whose grin indicated he didn’t mind  sacrificing the garment.  Women thrust themselves before a distortion mirror, making boobs and butts burst forth like 3-D explosions.  Willem Lowen danced with a boa constrictor curled around his torso. (He managed one of America’s largest vivariums, the source of both his boa and Shanna McCullough’s.)

One lady, transfixed by the snake, was about to touch its probing tongue with her own, until the watchful Joe Elliot rushed up to tell her to back off.  He was lawsuit phobic after being sued by a stoned woman who, during one of his many parties, had crashed through his patio glass door.

Passionately involved with every detail of Deviations, Elliot–a natural worrier–was more hyper-vigilant than usual.  I, on the other hand, slipped into my detached, director mindset that protected me from Oh-My-God anxiety.  A patina of calm is necessary for both battlefield commanders and over-reaching pornographers.

Keeping a cool head helps you think better.  Like when a couple of porn-hero wannabes complained to me that all Connie Lindstrom wanted to do was fellatio. They wanted more.

Connie Lindstrom (bottom)

( From SKINFLICKS) The fiance 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.

There are problems a director can’t experience.  Like when a lanky (in all anatomical parts) Charles Manson look-alike called Animal leaped onto the stage to tryst with Adrienne Bellaire and Robyn Everett.

Adrienne Bellaire in DEVIATIONS

He had hitch-hiked from a commune in Oregon just to perform in the movie.  As Adrienne later told me, “He probably didn’t have time to bathe.”  Both Adrienne and Robyn manged to hide their repugnance.  Real troupers, those girls.

Deviations became one of the top five best-selling adult videos of 1983.

Next Post:  How three movies I made in 1985 became officially child pornography.

 

 

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.