Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 9: The Split Hits the Fan

Apologies to my myriad fans, friends and followers for my week-long absence.  It’s good to be back.

Now, where were we?

Oh yes. This is the climax: the real reason for the whole Traci Lords trouble.  If she hadn’t made that one major misstep of choosing the wrong business partners in her carefully navigated porn career, she might still be revered as porn’s all-time greatest diva.

From SKINFLICKS, Chapter 12:

“Daveet, I don’t know about Traci Lords,” said Jerome Tanner. “I think she is very young.”

“Why do you think that?” I was negotiating to sell Jerry my business, and I suspected this was a ploy to beat down my price.

“Ever seen her without make-up, Daveet? She looks about thirteen.”

“Lots of ladies look young.”

Tanner leaned back under the spotlight that gave his small form dramatic presence against the dark wood paneling behind him. “Almost fifteen years I have been in this business. I have seen lots of women’s bodies. I know baby fat when I see it. And those tits. They have grown in the past year. You know why they defy gravity like that? Because gravity has not had long to work on them. I tell you, Daveet, even if Traci Lords was still available (she’d already signed her exclusive), I would not use her ever again.”

Two months later, neither would anyone else. On July 17, 1986, Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that Lords had been under eighteen during her entire two-year hardcore movie career. Adult Film and Video Association attorney John Weston didn’t wait for proof. He called for the immediate removal from circulation of all Lords material. To keep the newly contraband tapes out of the hands of prosecutors, all manufacturers took them back for refunds or exchanges, though some of the movies had been on the rental market for over a year.

The biggest Lords loser I knew was a loops director trying to prove he could handle features. He’d put his life savings into a handsome 35 millimeter production. Lords was in every scene; he lost everything.

I came out unscathed. By the time three of Superior’s titles became illegal, I’d already sold them to Jerome Tanner. All I lost was $1276.50–Honi Webber never made good on her last check after her own company, HBO (Honi’s Big One-stop), and Sy Adler’s VIP (Video International Productions) were raided and forced into bankruptcy.

The anger came next. One producer was supposed to have hired goons to “hang her by the tits.” Traci disappeared into the minors protection programs of the LAPD, leaving the story behind the age disclosure to the conflicting accounts reported in AVN:

“An industry source said the entire situation stemmed from a money dispute between V.I.P., T.L.C., Lords and Stuart Dell, Lords’ reported boyfriend/manager. Lords and Dell were given $25,000, a new Mercedes and $1000 a week salaries, the source said, and were sent to Paris to make a picture. But when Lords and Dell returned, the source said, they had no movie nor any of the $25,000. It was soon after an ensuing dispute that questions about Lords’ age were raised, the source said…

“Other reported causes for the raid centered on Lords’ mother, who some said turned her daughter in after hearing about the Meese Commission’s report earlier in the month.

Other sources said her mother had been handling her affairs and went to the police following a dispute with Lords over money.

(Unlikely: a stupid move for someone pimping a minor in porn.)

“However, a close associate of Lords, who wished to remain anonymous, said her mother, whose name was not available, was not involved in any way. They said Lords had been a runaway from Ohio, and that her parents had been notified of her whereabouts and were on their way to California.”

They wouldn’t have far to drive according to the Los Angeles Times: Lords was a high school student in Redondo Beach when shebegan posing nude in 1984; she moved there with her family from Steubenville, Ohio in 1982.

An unauthorized biography in the form of a comic book from Personality Comics, Inc., of Massapequa, New York, had Traci coming west with her mother who’d just divorced Traci’s alchoholic father. Traci subsequently ran away from her mother’s home in Redondo Beach, California.

All reports concurred that Traci was not Kristie Nussman, born on November 17, 1962, but Nora Kuzma, born May 7, 1968. She allegedly purchased a birth certificate and used it to get the driver’s license and passport that talent agent South showed copies of to the L.A. District Attorney’s office.

(Traci said she chose her stage name because of her childhood crush on Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. [Traci Lord was the name of Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story.])

Skeptics–South included–didn’t believe Lords was really underaged. They saw the whole affair as a scam to eliminate that glut of existing Lords tapes from competing with her new releases. If that were true, the scheme backfired; Traci, too, got blown out of the business.

Was the whole thing an act of desperation? There were rumors that Traci and her lover/co-producer Stuart Dell had fabricated the story that they’d blown all the production money on cocaine while in Paris and hadn’t shot a movie there. Wanting to break away from Lord’s partners, the couple was hiding the video, hoping to market it themselves. And the partners, smelling a scam, didn’t buy the coke story; they told the couple to turn over the videotapes–or else. According to that scenario, Traci and her mother went public with her age to put the partners under too much scrutiny to carry out their threats. If that scenario were true, the strategy worked.

There was another heavyweight in the ring. The IRS wanted its share of the money Lords had made. Was the age announcement meant to save Traci from being prosecuted as an adult for tax evasion?

Whatever the reasons for it, Traci–or her adult “coaches”–used the scandal skillfully. Porn star/AVN columnist Ron Jeremy wrote, “Isn’t it nice that such a sweet kid can make so many career moves, make so much money, beat her IRS rap, her fake passport felony rap, and at the same time bury an entire industry! Only in Hollywood!”

__________________________________

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 10: Ho’-ray for Hollywood  This will be the conclusion of this sordid story.  Then we can get back to more upbeat things like sex on a flying trapeze.

 

 

Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 8: Partners from Hell

From SKINFLICKS Chapter 12, The Goddess

“Sweetheart…” The purr of Honi Webber filled the phone. “It’s been a long time…”

“Too long,” I said, wondering if whatever she was calling about meant I’d lose money or make some. When she’d convinced me that the Four Star Video check was actually in the mail, I’d wound up stiffed for $4000. But I made a lot more than that when she’d hired Superior to shoot Sizzle With Samantha. Honi was slick; it was wise to regard her proposed deals with wariness–and wise to listen to them.

She wanted to make a product trade: 100 pieces of my new hit Physical II in exchange for 100 of Honi’s new exclusive release Traci Takes Tokyo.

During Honi’s sales hype about this first product of her exclusive distribution deal with Traci’s new production company, I began to feel something was wrong. “It’s got the hottest scene ever shot,” Honi said. “It’s super high tech. The process is still experimental.”

The scene she described had been shot with a snorkel camera, used as early as the mid-’70s to give a penis’s point-ofview of entering an orifice. Now, with lighting by fiber optics, that cyclops eye could peer even further. “You can actually see the come spurting down her throat!” Honi enthused. “It’s erotic as all hell!”

Globs of gloop dripping down membranes didn’t strike me as sexy, but I understood Honi’s perspective. She thought like a pornographer. She’d once concocted a title called Love Under 16″, pitching it to stores as a hot renter–fans would think it portrayed underaged girls. It didn’t. Actually, the title was Love Under 16 Inches, but the “Inches” (“) was so small as to escape notice. Always seeking gimmicks, hustlers like Honi take the bizarre for the erotic.

I pictured Traci, mouth agape, deep throating a cock, a lens, and a light tube, trying not to choke while videographers hovered over her like deranged dentists. “How did Traci take to this scene?” I asked.

“No problem there,” Honi said. “We got Traci under control. We got her locked up for seven years. We own Traci Lords. We are Traci Lords. “We” meant Honi and industry veteran Sy Adler. “We’re teaching Traci things she never dreamed of. We give her two weeks of training for every production. We’re gonna make Marilyn Chambers look like Julie Andrews.” Honi hastened to add, “Of course, we’re not gonna do anything illegal.”

There was no law specifically forbidding the scene in Traci Takes Tokyo of a Japanese woman getting a real octopus tentacle shoved into her vagina. But it didn’t seem what Traci had in mind for her own productions. It became no secret that she was unhappy with her new partners. Many predicted a clash, but none could forsee the result.

One man, however, had his suspicions about Traci.

___________________________

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 9: The Split hits the Fan

Lords, Lies and videotape Part 7: Overexposed

Uh-oh…

The non-stop gauntlet of shoots Traci Lords plunged into brought her more than a fat bank account:

She suffered from overexposure.

From SKINFLICKS, Chapter 12, The Goddess:

“They’re saying, ’Aw shit, not another Traci Lords title,’” said my sales manager Allyssa. Dirty Pictures was proving a flop. All those movies that had elevated Traci’s net worth were now clogging the market. Traci herself was disgusted with the results.

“I’m seeing myself in all these crappy little videos,” she was saying to another starlet as the two of them teetered on stiletto heels through the crowded aisles of the June, ’85 CES Show. Returning to my booth, I found myself behind them, listening in. As we reached my Superior Video display, the Love Call sounded from my big speakers. Traci glanced at her image on my Trinitrons, groaned and covered her eyes. “See what I mean?” I was tempted to rush up behind the pair and cackle, “Now I’ve got you forever, my pretty.”

That summer, Traci tried to break into legitimate films but couldn’t get past the “blue curtain” that keeps porn stars out of Hollywood.

She next tried to follow the example pioneered by Ginger Lynn: the “exclusive.” Ginger had joined Vivid Video as a partner in producing her own movies. Instead of dashing from one production to another, working for a day rate of $1000 to $1500, Ginger would make one movie a month and take a percentage of the profits. Each monthly release would have no other new Ginger Lynn pictures to compete with. The deal worked. At a time when manufacturers were struggling to sell 2000 pieces of a new movie, Ginger on the Rocks, Poonies, and The Ginger Effect averaged over 6000 each. Ginger was doing so well that she turned down Ferrari Mike’s offer of $5000 a day to break her exclusive contract and appear in his movie.

Early in 1986, Traci announced the formation of TLC (Traci Lords Company) Productions. She said she’d finally have control over her career. “When someone hears the name Traci Lords,” she said in AVN, “I want them to think that this is going to be a good film. It has to be a good film.”

Then her first release, Traci Takes Tokyo, appeared. It was so shoddy that voices directing the cast were left on the soundtrack. Reviewers were disappointed…and puzzled. What happened?

A month before the picture was released, I got an inkling that Traci was in trouble, when one of her new business partners gave me a call.
____________________

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 8: Partners from Hell

 

Shooting DEVIATIONS: Big-budget Rock-and-Roll Epic. Debut of Future Legend Shanna McCullough.

You know how a gambler gets on a roll and then bets his entire winnings on one toss of the dice?

Cover photo: Adrienne Bellaire and Robyn Everett. Side photos (top to bottom): Connie Lindstrom, Adrienne Bellaire, Shanna McCullough, Robyn Everett

That’s how I felt making Deviations. 

After the success of All the King’s Ladies and Physical, I upped the budget for Superior Video’s rock-n-roll epic.  But I didn’t figure on spending more than the cost of both those two previous pictures combined.

But that’s what I did. Somebody stop me!

And there was another gamble: giving a critical starring role to a brand new lady making her XXX debut.  That goes against all porn wisdom.

New girls might freak out. You want to break them in gradually.

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

Anticipating sex before a camera can be more nerve-wracking than the experience itself. In her first six months, Ginger Lynn would only do nude modeling, turning down one lucrative “commercial”* gig after another. The exquisite brunette, Nina Alexander, was so nervous before her first on-screen sex scene that she threw up.

*(“Commercial”: Industry term for hardcore sex.)

So when agent Joe Elliot introduced me to a lovely chestnut-haired ingenue, I knew that giving her the starring role as the singer in a babe-band-gone-dirty was a big risk.

Shanna McCullough’s incredible lip-sync performance

But I had a hunch that Shanna McCullough was one special lady.

Was I ever right! Deviations marked the “screen cherry” role of an adult movie legend.

I figured on doing some fancy sync editing to make it seem like Shanna was actually singing. But no trick editing was needed.

A buzz went through the audience. The singer on the stage had stopped singing, but her voice was still pumping through the big speakers.

Left to right: Connie Lindstrom, Adrienne Bellaire, Shanna McCullough, Robyn Everett. Plot: The Four Foxes seek fame, fortune and rent money by becoming The Deviations and going raunchy.

It was the sixth take (so the two cameras could record all possible angles) of the four-girl rock band’s opening number, “We’re the Deviations.” The “singer,” Shanna McCullough, had been lip-syncing to a recorded professional’s voice so well that, until she stopped mid-song to point out that the audio operator had lined up the wrong take, the audience had thought she really was doing the singing. Realizing that this lady–a porno actress no less–was giving a remarkable performance, they burst into applause.

Superior Video had the distinction of shooting Shanna McCullough’s first-ever screen sex.  Would it be immodest to claim that this was the scene that launched a legend?

Her “screen cherry” debut with Mike Horner was so sizzling hot that during a break, I swore I saw steam rising from her bottom.

Shanna was no dewy-eyed ingenue.  She was a professional actress, starring every Saturday night in a Berkeley stage production of The Rocky Horror Show.

In her early 20’s, the East Bay sophisticate had a wardrobe of kinky outfits and an eight-foot boa constrictor that would later crawl all over her naked body in Deviations. She had that wholesome enthusiasm of a sex player absolutely free of guilt about her erotic adventures.

Needless to say, the seasoned actress had no problem performing before a nightclub audience whose idea of fun was to get down-and-dirty with the cast.

Next post (within a few days, I promise): Shooting Deviations, Part 2:  A Sexual Circus.

 

 

 

 

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

For Superior Video’s second big-budget epic, I did what any right-thinking pornographer would do: recycle past porn.  But that opened up a good news-bad news conundrum.

The good news: After 3 years of porno-making I had a lovely library of  licentiousness.

The bad news: I had to make the old footage fit into a story that disguised the fact that it had been used before. So I came up with…(drum roll)…The Erotic Olympics!

I wanted that as a title, but Superior’s co-distributor, Select-A-Tape, was itching to use Physical.

So Physical it was.

Plot: A married couple puts an add in a skin magazine seeking  entries from amateurs for their contest, The Erotic Olympics. They offer a grand prize of $50,000. The couple plans to use the contest entries in a new porno without actually awarding the prize.

The magazine publisher (Juliet Anderson) figures out their scam and demands that they come through with the actual prize money. They don’t have the cash, so they enter the contest themselves, determined to win.

Juliet Anderson, Billy Dee

(Note: Graphic descriptions of sex acts are reserved for the pages of SKINFLICKS.)

Linda Shaw, Herschel Savage (between Linda’s legs), me (with camera), Juliet Anderson, soundman

I made my porn debut in Physical–pants on, no sex.  But I did take my shirt off.  (After seeing my image on video, I immediately signed up at Fitness USA.)

Maybe it was the humongous list of stars (mostly gleaned from past porns) or the hot cover photo  (in flyer above), that made Physical one of the best-selling X-rated tapes of 1982.

Superior’s general manager Joe Farmer and I had fun with the script.  He had one of the contestant entries coming from his home town in Massachusetts.  I had the scamming couple (Herschel Savage and Linda Shaw) hailing from “beautiful El Culito, California.”

To Anglo ears, that sounded like a plausible place.  But Hispanic viewers would get a chuckle: “El Culito” means “The Little Asshole.”

Next post: Superior Video Shoots Its Wad Big Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

“You’re Going to Make a Lot of Money with This Book” Yeah, right…

People who read early drafts of SKINFLICKS told me I was going to make a lot of money with the book. And at first it looked like they were right.

SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry had a great start: a publishing contract and a $7,000 advance from Zebra Books. Maybe this was the start of something big.  And why not?  After all, SKINFLICKS chronicled a revolution in the porn movie business in which yuppies replaced gangsters, porn queens became corporations, porn became suburbanized, and the U.S Government declared a massive “War on Porn” that threatened even R-rated movies with prosecution.

I was qualified to describe this revolution because I helped lead it.  After learning the business as a filmmaker for “the biggest Mafia porn outfit on the West Coast (FBI quote),” I launched Superior Video, Inc. and pioneered the first full-length X-rated movies shot entirely on videotape.  My story entwined with that of the porn video industry.  As the documentary filmmaker Alberto Cavalcante wrote, “To make a film about the post office, make a film about a letter.”  In SKINFLICKS, I became the letter.

When I first entered the porn business, I began an audio cassette journal with the goal of someday writing about my experiences.  By the time I sold the rights to Superior Video’s movies, after 12 years in the industry, my audio journal had reached 347 cassettes.  I put my money into high-interest investments that would support me while I wrote.

After I sent out book proposals to those who had responded to my query letters, things happened fast. Within a couple of months, I had an agent who almost immediately landed the book contract.  I bought a Mac Quadra (1993 version) and happily plunged into stories of fast-track superstars, porno stage mothers, porn-addicted vice cops, burnt-out studs, obsessed fans, pompous porn barons and other denizens of this twilight world.  I wanted to answer the most frequent question asked about porn:  What are these performers really like? My answers came from casting them, bargaining with them and directing them.

In describing the sex action, I tried to avoid wallowing in graphic details, some of which—of course—were unavoidable.  Above all, I reminded myself that SKINFLICKS was not a pornographic book; it was a book about pornography.  I thought I did a good job of making the distinction.  So did the editor at Zebra Books, who examined every word.

When the galleys (review copies) came out, one went to Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News, the “bible of the porn video business.”   Fishbein called SKINFLICKS  “…the best and most realistic depiction of the modern world of pornography written in book form to date…”  (Later, the Internet created a whole new “modern world.”) Adult superstar Nina Hartley also read the manuscript and made suggestions.

Just as I was anticipating book tours, readings, book signings and maybe even an appearance on Oprah, the publisher dropped the book. Why? The reason—I learned—was a storm of bad publicity in the wake of Madonna’s book, Sex.  Publishers were afraid of anything remotely suggestive of pornography.  My agent, who had so quickly landed the Zebra Books contract, spent many months trying again to sell SKINFLICKS with no success.

At least I got to keep the advance.

Next Post:  From Porn Pioneer to POD Pioneer: When Authorhouse Was a Baby

 

 

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.

Published!—not! SKINFLICKS’ tangled tale

SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry had a great start: a publishing contract and a $7,000 advance from Zebra Books. Maybe all those people in that writing class were right when they told me I would make a lot of money with this book. And why not?  After all, SKINFLICKS chronicled a revolution in the porn movie business in which yuppies replaced gangsters, porn queens became corporations, porn became suburbanized, and the U.S Government declared a massive “War on Porn” that threatened even R-rated movies with prosecution.  I was qualified to describe this revolution because I helped lead it.  After learning the business as a filmmaker for “the biggest Mafia porn outfit on the West Coast (FBI quote),” I launched Superior Video, Inc. and pioneered the first full-length X-rated movies shot entirely on videotape.  My story entwined with that of the porn video industry.  As the documentary filmmaker Alberto Cavalcante wrote, “To make a film about the post office, make a film about a letter.”  In SKINFLICKS, I became the letter.

When I entered the porn business, I began an audio cassette journal with the goal of someday writing about my experiences.  By the time I sold the rights to Superior Video’s movies, after 12 years in the industry, my audio journal had reached 347 cassettes.  I put my money into high-interest investments that would support me while I wrote.

After I sent out book proposals to those who had responded to my query letters, things happened fast. Within a couple of months, I had an agent who almost immediately landed the book contract.  I bought a Mac Quadra (1993 version) and happily plunged into stories of fast-track superstars, porno stage mothers, porn-addicted vice cops, burnt-out studs, obsessed fans, pompous porn barons and other denizens of this twilight world.

With experiences from over a hundred porn shoots, I wanted to answer the most frequent question asked about porn:  What are these performers really like? My answers came from casting them, bargaining with them and directing them. In describing the sex action, I tried to avoid wallowing in graphic details, some of which—of course—were unavoidable.  Above all, I reminded myself that SKINFLICKS was not a pornographic book; it was a book about pornography.  I thought I did a good job of making the distinction.  So did the editor at Zebra Books, who examined every word. She agreed that the book would be fun to read.  

When the galleys (review copies) came out, one went to Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News, the “bible of the porn video business.”   Fishbein called SKINFLICKS “…the best and most realistic depiction of the modern world of pornography written in book form to date…” (This was before the Internet created a whole new “modern world.”) Adult superstar Nina Hartley also read the manuscript and made suggestions.

Just as I was anticipating book tours, readings, book signings and maybe even an appearance on Oprah, the publisher dropped the book. Why? The reason—I learned—was a storm of bad publicity following the publication of Madonna’s book, Sex.  Publishers were afraid of anything even suggestive of pornography.  Was this true?  I didn’t know for sure.  But my agent, who had so quickly found Zebra Books, spent many months trying again to sell SKINFLICKS with no success.

About this time I began having a series of medical issues. Without going into detail, let me just say that at one point I couldn’t coordinate my hands enough to make a sandwich.  I couldn’t finish sentences.  I was talking about the President and forgot his name. (I’d like to forget Bush again.)  During these travails, I put the promotion of SKINFLICKS on hold.  Then came an offer from a brand new company called 1st Books Library.  1st Books was pioneering a new technology called POD—print on demand.  Books would be printed in response to orders, without the mass printings that risked the possibility of remainders.  1st Books was hungry to sign authors and was offering deals.  For much lower up-front charges than other vanity presses, 1st Books would manufacture, advertise and distribute SKINFLICKS, paying me a royalty that was roughly half the wholesale price of each printed book.

With SKINFLICKS in 1st Books’ able hands, I turned my attention to more basic needs, such as making a living and negotiating America’s so-called “health care” system.  Royalty checks from 1st Books came in quarterly dribbles: $40 here, $75 there, just enough to remind me that—yes—I had a book in publication.  I hadn’t the energy, money or desire to pursue the hassles of promoting it.  Medical costs, a business failure and investments gone sour proceeded to decimate my savings. Fortunately, Social Security kicked in before my landlord could kick me out.  Something else began kicking in—and kicking hard.  1st Books Library had become Authorhouse and had built an aggressive sales staff.  Authorhouse reps began peppering me with calls: Dave, we can promote your book at such-and-such where thousands of potential readers will see SKINFLICKS!  Sign up now for our special! You’ll save hundreds off our regular rates!   Sure. Save hundreds, while spending thousands. Oh, to be rich enough to afford the indulgences of authorship!

Authorhouse made one offer I couldn’t refuse.  For a couple hundred dollars the company would post SKINFLICKS on the new eBook websites being offered by Amazon, Apple and other Internet companies.  But when the dates arrived for SKINFLICKS to appear on these sites, the book wasn’t there. I called Authorhouse to complain, and my “account rep” blithely told me that the company had received so many requests for this service that they had cut it off—without notice to their paying clients. After my angry calls bounced around in their phone maze, I finally found someone who could “authorize” my refund.  I was relieved when Authorhouse replaced their sales calls with sales emails.

As vestiges of mental acuity returned, along with attendant energies, I decided to have one last go at doing something with SKINFLICKS.  Friends had told me it was too good a book to neglect (frequent comment: “well-written”).  I replaced my trusty but obsolete Mac Quadra with a new Dell and took to that PC like a duck takes to an oil slick. New technology and old brain: bad combo.  A local college kid set up a website through a URL provider with the jazzy name of Go Daddy. Www.skinflicksbook.com  attracted little notice outside of spammers offering “SEO optimization.” (Some day I’ll learn how to work that website. In the meantime, there is a detailed description of the book, plus sample chapters on that website, accessible through Google search. But Kindle orders still need to be made through the Amazon Kindle site.  Bear with me, I’m learning)

Through a referral, I lucked into a wonderful eBook expert named Barb Elliott, who patiently walked me through putting SKINFLICKS on Kindle. (I highly recommend the services of ebooksbybarb.biz.)   So, now I’m learning how to use Twitter and later (I hope), Facebook.  And then…?   I tend to move with all the speed of those turtles in the Comcast Xfinity commercials.  Like the narrator says, “Fast isn’t for everyone.”  But I’m working on it.