The “Smut Glut” Part 2: Scams

As the porn video industry plunged into depression in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s because of too many titles clogging the market, shooting new movies became too expensive to be profitable. Still, porn companies had to keep cranking out releases to keep their cash flow numbers up.  The solution? Cheat.

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

Desperate manufacturers pumped out “wraparounds (new footage ‘wrapped around’ old)” and compilations—if you had three or more scenes of an 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.”  

Hollywood Video’s Seka’s Teenage Diary boasted of “exclusive, never-seen-before footage of the platinum blonde beauty when she was just a teenager.”  VCR’s The Lost Episodes of Seka was also hyped as “never-before-seen on video.”  Both titles used footage from 1978 shows released by now-defunct Scorpio Etc.  Desperate for a cheap new Superior Video title, I, too, was guilty of using 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” effects 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 plusses here: storyline, sex, camerawork, editing—it all comes together…”   But savvy viewers and distributors screamed in outrage, and I never tried the “old footage” scam again.

Running out of title names for their onslaught of new releases, producers took to ripping off Hollywood.   Among the gems filling a page in SKINFLICKS  were Gonad the Barbarian, Jane Bond Meets Thunderballs, Ramb-OHH!  and the incomparable Yank My Doodle, It’s a Dandy. There were also Sister Dearest, Daddy Dearest and Mommy Queerest.

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.

Pornographers are always worried that their competitors would beat them to something new—such as exploiting a hot new girl before they had a chance to overuse her.  “I shot this picture with Shanna McCullough called Ecstacy.” Spinelli told me. “So just when I released it, this schmuck (Lawrence T. Cole of Now Showing) releases this cheap piece of shit under me called Xtacy—spelled with an ‘X’—with Shanna on the box. All I could move was 1500 pieces.”  Spinelli swore he’d never again mention the name of a title…until it was ready to hit the street.  Years later I was doing sound for Spinelli and asked him the name of the movie we were making.  Spinelli replied, “Number 1027.”

Then there were the “Debbie” debacles.  After the sequels to the original hit reached Mark Curtis’s 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…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.

As sales numbers continued to drop like dead Debbies, pornographers resorted to gimmicks. An order of any size for Caballero’s Stiff Competition came with an exploding penis slinky in a can…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.

Unable to market his legal-aged videos profitably, my mob-connected, ex-employer Tony Romano toed the borderline of child porn 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 sox, 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 cutthroat competition came casualties.  When the elephants fight, goes a business saying, the ants get stomped.  Yet, as elephants crashed to the ground, enterprising ants crawled over them.  The “Smut Glut” Part 3: The Victors and the Vanquished will tell why some fell, while others didn’t, and how “ants” exploited outlier niche markets featuring such “specialties” as gang-bangs, transsexuals, midgets, enemas, and the female posterior.

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.

HOW TO THINK LIKE A PORNOGRAPHER AND WHY YOU SHOULDN’T

Ron Jeremy had a great idea for a sex scene.  As he described it in Hustler:  “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.” (excerpt from  SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry)

As absurd as Jeremy’s scenario sounds, it is indicative of how pornographers think.  In SKINFLICKS, I detail such pornographer’s brainstorms as sex in a vat of spaghetti and in a tub of chocolate; three-somes balancing precariously on toilets; prosthetic penises mounted in unusual places (Paul Norman’s Cyrano and Edward Penishands); scenes featuring octopus tentacles and snorkel cameras; and gang-bangs with one woman taking on up to one hundred men. When I produced E.X., I used my special effects generator to show aliens with three-foot-long members performing double-penetration on Lilly Marlene.

Why do pornographers go to such extremes?  Because they have to.  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.”  The late porn director Alex DeRenzy put it more simply. His biggest problem, he said, was “beating audience boredom.”

Regardless of how resourceful they are, pornographers are stuck with the fact that all sex scenes come down to the same half-dozen positions.  If the chemistry isn’t there, no director, regardless of competence, can make a scene sizzle.  On the other hand, when performers are hot for one another, even the dimmest of directors can end up with a great scene. Being at best skilled documentarians, pornographers hasten to proclaim their uniqueness.  (This was especially true when an avalanche of new titles descended upon the industry during the “smut glut” era of the late 1980s and early ‘90s.)  Thus, Scotty Fox, director of Ass Backwards and My Bare Lady, became porn’s “King of Comedy.”  The late Henri Pachard, famous for staging sex on bathroom fixtures, was dubbed “The King of the Commode.” With Shape Up for Sensational Sex, Gail Palmer declared herself “the Jane Fonda of porno.” The late Anthony Spinelli had no interest in directing sex, which he turned over to cameramen such as myself while he took a nap. Spinelli became famous for the miraculous acting performances he managed to wring out of even the most unmotivated of cast members. At Superior Video, my co-director Joe Farmer and I took pride in making low-budget videos look like more expensive ones (that special effects generator sure helped).

The downside of thinking like a pornographer is when it comes to dominate your outlook—especially when you’re cranking out one sexvid after another.  As veteran pornographer Bill Margold observed in a 1982 Adam magazine interview, “You can only live in a fantasy land just so long before it starts driving you crazy.”  When real life runs counter to that fantasy land, disaster beckons. “Pornographer’s disease” is another name for impotence.  My friend Ace Walker said that after he quit shooting and acting in porn, it took him two months before he could enjoy a normal sex life.  Actor Cal Jammer was not so fortunate. Said to obsess about his erections, he couldn’t recover from bouts of penis limpus. He wasn’t the only failed stud to commit suicide.    

Thinking like a pornographer extends beyond those directly involved in production.  Superior Video’s receptionist Alana told me, “I can’t read Vogue (magazine) without thinking of the commercial possibilities.” She provided the idea behind our video Diary of a Bad Girl.

Bristling with erotic visions, pornographers frequently clash with performers pushed beyond their limits. As actor/director F. M. Bradley said about bombastic little porn impresario Jerome Tanner, “If you can take four cocks at once, Jerry will want five.”

A constant battle in the world of pornography is the often rancorous, push-pull negotiation between porn directors and cast members. After weathering one struggle after another, both sides come to the set prepared to go to war.  But that is the subject of a future blog entry.