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

 

 

 

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.

A Strange Case of Porn Stud Failure

Lots of things can cause that porn set malady, penis limpus: hot lights, cold girls, bad drugs, poor hygiene, off-color secretions. But the oddest culprit I ever saw was a jacket. It belonged to porn’s Burt Reynolds clone, Sasha Gabor.

Amy Rogers, Tom Byron, from Dirty Pictures (no photo of Sasha Gabor)

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)  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.

Seasoned pornographers prepared for stud failures by accumulating an “insert library” of explicit, hardcore, jousting-genital close-ups that could be cut into scenes that had to be shot “sim” (simulated—no genital penetration). To match different colored pubic hair, I had close-ups for blond man/blonde woman, blond man/brunette woman, brunet man/blonde woman, black man/blonde woman, etcetera, etcetera.  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.

Sasha Gabor must have been able to perform adequately, since he appeared in about 120 pornos between 1984 and 2001. I just happened to get him on a “bad cock day.”  (I was sad to learn that he died of heart disease in 2008.)

Porn studdom can be a precarious profession.  That’s why the “reliables” kept getting hired again and again and again.  Female fans complain about seeing the same guys in picture after picture.  But the male fans—who comprise the bulk of the audience—don’t mind.  They just want to see new women.  To them, the familiar male faces are like old buddies.