Classic porn company VCX will re-release one of John Holmes' signature movies, 1971's Johnny Wadd, in September. I reviewed the movie for an upcoming issue of the adult trade publication XBiz.
You should watch this movie for several reasons, all of them having to do with how different (and similar) shooting porn was in California three decades ago.
Johnny Wadd director Bob Chinn gives a great interview on the DVD. Holmes, then 26, walked into Chinn's office looking for a production job, and Chinn sent him away with an assistant.
"Then my assistant calls me and says, 'you should look at this guy's cock,'" Chinn said. "I said, 'That's the last thing I want to do.' But I saw it, and hired him. We shot the movie the following Sunday."
Chinn said that, because shooting porn was illegal, he would have to keep filming locations a secret from the actors lest they get picked up by the cops. The performers would arrive at a public place and then be shuttled to the location. The camera was never placed on a tripod outside, so that people could make a break for it if necessary. The film was never kept in one place for a long time.
"It was the producers or directors who were most likely to be arrested," Chinn said. "They'd be charged with conspiracy to commit prostitution, or conspiracy to commit oral intercourse." The conspiracy charges were why the actors were kept in the dark as long as possible.
My favorite line of the movie comes from the woman in the picture above. Protesting her desirability she says, "I ain't so hard to take!"
I won't give away the movie or the review of the movie (XBiz has to eat), but one other thing Chinn said about Holmes reminded me of a story I heard recently.
A contemporary director told me about a (with luck) former porn actor who modeled himself the "real-life Dirk Diggler," the Boogie Nights character based loosely on John Holmes.
"This guy would show up late to a set and then tell me he had to be done in an hour," the director said, "and then he'd want more money if I needed him to stay longer, even if he arrived late. He was an asshole."
Chinn said that Holmes had been hired for $50 for the $750-budgeted Wadd, but when he showed up that Sunday he demanded $75.
Here in George W. Bush's Judaeo-Christian America, we think of frogs as the stars of Number Two of the ten plagues that befell Pharaoh, the subject of a Mark Twain story, and the best shorthand imaginable for the feeling one is losing one's mind.
But Japanese pornographer Daikichi Amano uses them as low-cost scene partners in his new flick, The Frog Crawling on the Stomach Is Torn And Smiles.
Amano is not the first pornographer to use images of performers interacting with non-human carbon-based life forms; he has just made it very popular. His monthly column in Bizarre Magazine is as articulate and humorous as it is unapologetically ghastly. This is what Edward Gorey would be doing if he liked girls.
"Do you have a problem touching frogs?" Amano asked prospective actresses for the movie, produced by the company Genki-Genki. "Could you squeeze and crush one with your bare hands? Would you be prepared to insert one inside your body? How about biting into a frog while it’s still alive?"
After working as a graphic designer in San Diego, Amano only started making porn upon his return to Japan. He had answered a job posting while still in the states and was surprised on his arrival to find that the job was with an adult company. When he began making his own films, he was fond of casting eels, snakes, and the loach opposite quivering hentai actresses.
Amano, whose sense of humor some may describe as, oh, evil, has recently begun working with frogs.
"I’m going to tell you something you probably didn’t know about frogs," he said. "When they cry they sound like cats. It’s absolutely true. As soon as Ms Haruhi arrived on set, she heard the frogs crying. 'Do you have a cat in here?' she asked. 'Yes,' I said, 'several.' I didn't want to startle her."
And, though Playboy Bunnies don't insert peacocks into themselves, I was interested to note during a recent trip to the Playboy Mansion that peacocks sound like cats, too.
Amano doesn't believe that Japanese performers are the only ones capable of realizing his vision. But it is generally the case that Japanese audiences prefer to see Japanese performers, Amano's producer told me.
Amano's latest project is spare in that, instead of using several species of reptile and amphibian, he is restricting on-camera parts to humans and cow frogs. But there will be elaborate costumes.
"Although the costumes I had designed for my actors were inspired by the Cirque Du Soleil," Amano said, "the idea for the film itself came from 'Alice In Wonderland'. In my version of the story Alice gets lost in a supernatural world and, instead of a toadstool, consumes a feast of frog flesh fed to her by two mysterious guards who look a bit like Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
And don't tell me Lewis Carroll wasn't a porn fan.
But why food? Could it be that Japan's food culture makes Japanese performers more comfortable putting raw food in their mouths or other places? This was suggested to me by Amano's producer. I'm not sure about this, because I can count on one hand the times I've inserted steak, potato salad, and Jagermeister bottles into anything other than my mouth, and I love all those things.
A porn set anywhere else in the world might be awash in several stripes of bodily fluid, Diet Coke, and crystal meth when the cameras stop rolling, but Amano has to deal with frog remains.
"As you can imagine, every inch of the studio was covered in amphibian blood and guts," he said. "Quite a few of the frogs were still alive but in order to dispose of the bodies they needed to be dead. I split the crew up into pairs and we systematically exterminated them. It was like a production line. One person held the limbs of a frog, the other smashed it between the eyes with a hammer. There was no joy in it."
Describing the appeal of this material is tricky. Anyone who watches any kind of porn knows that it often defies description. "Well of course I like it," they'll say. "It's porn." And when faced with the pornography of another country, like the Germans' love of poo, the Swedes' love of Abba, or the Brazilian tranny-industrial complex, people wag their fingers.
But Daikichi's style might have something to do with cruelty which, if you've ever watched a Japanese game show, you'll know is as popular there as shows about angels and police are here.
"I loathe frogs," Amano said. "I can’t even look at them, let alone touch them. (But) I hired an all-female crew for this shoot. And as they were engaged in killing the frogs, they shrieked in horror. Just the look on their faces told me they were clearly not enjoying themselves. But, of course, I was having a ball."
See a gallery here (and, for some reason I feel compelled to tell you, aside from every other thing on this site, that it is NSFW).
Cancer benefit for Henri Pachard, veteran porn director
Donations to Henri Pachard's Cancer Fund are now being accepted. And, for the next 30 days, every adult store order of Not the Bradys XXX results in a percentage donation, as do purchases of Pachard titles from my store on Gamelink.
Like workers in any industry - but perhaps more so than mainstream entertainment, which they are often compared to - Porn personnel work from job to job and, if they're smart and lucky, put money away for rainy days.
Director Henri Pachard (born Ron Sullivan in New York), though responsible for hundreds of porn movies over five decades as well as dozens of Times Square grindhouse movies, is suffering from cancer and, because cancer is expensive and directors do not get residuals, has watched the disease eat through his savings.
Pachard wrote a regular column for AVNInsider called "The Pornographer's Journal" when I edited that website, covering his current projects but mostly talking about Porn's so-called "Golden Age" and before. He was always entertaining, compelling, and the kind of gentleman who would say "fuck" a lot, which made me trust him more than the gentlemen who didn't.
Here is one of his columns about his early days as a director and the making of the classic Babylon Pink.
At my first AVN convention, I asked 100 youngish (ages 18-21) porn performers what "Deep Throat" was and, aside from a number of people telling me it was a style of blowjob, only two knew that it was the standard-bearing porn movie.
Knowing that, it is easy to believe that the porn world and the world at large often forget pioneers in the porn business; there is no real objective journal and its employees are often all too eager to hide their roles in the business once they are done, making for a business with no solid institutional sense of history.
But Pachard is and was a walking history lesson. He is a reminder of a time when people got into porn because they were film fans and fast-talking east coast players and, in a way, radicals. He is a beloved presence to those who have been around long enough to see him at work.
And, like many of the adult world's established behind-the-scenes workers, Pachard got his son a job: Jason Sullivan shoots camera for most of Porn Valley's big productions.
But Pachard and his lovely wife, Delores, are struggling. If you are a porn fan of a certain age, chances are Henri Pachard has helped form some of your earliest impressions of the San Fernando Valley.
Henri Pachard Cancer Fund Mail: C/o All Media Play 1680 Vine St. #1118 Hollywood, CA. 90028 Ph-323.467.9900
"I think of it as a Resse's Peanut Butter Cup of Porn," said Matt Zane, the person to thank (or despise) if the recent wave of tattoos and piercings, a punk aesthetic, and the presence of musicians and "alt" in porn don't seem as revolutionary as publicists would have you believe.
Zane is a pornographer, musician, suspension artist, and "Trascendental Satanist." I checked this last job against the IRS'list of occupations and couldn't find it, yet another example of how our government discriminates against Satanists. Who has always been there when the phone rings at 3 a.m.? Satan has.
Zane, born Matt Zicari, is a second generation pornographer. His father, Chuck, is a producer and distributor and his cousin, Rob Zicari, runs the obscenity-skirting Extreme Associates under the alias Rob Black. His younger brother, Mark, is also a porn performer.
Zane's new project is the Tattooed And Tight series, involving women getting tattoos and fucked at the same time (most of the images on this page are from Tattooed And Tight 3, starring Scarlett Pain, Tera Wray, Nadia Styles, Jandi Lin, and Tricia Oaks). Though Zane has been in and out of the porn business for more than a decade, his current work is topical in that it reflects our need to multitask, even when having sex.
"I can only couple with women who are talented in that way," I told Zane while channeling the Prince of Darkness. "As I service them they often send and receive text messages, run away, and burst into flame."
Zane grew up in upstate New York and became a musician, forming and touring with bands around the United States. He now fronts Society 1, what Rapture theorists call the Anti-Stryper.
When Matt worked for his father, the two eventually disagreed about the type of porn they should produce, and how it should be released.
"I was the youngest director in porn at the time," Zane said. "It was 1996, I was 21, and there was rock and roll and tattoos in my movies (like the Backstage Sluts series) and I was pushing to release DVD and VHS at the same time, back before that was a burning issue."
Zane saw the rapper-turned actor Ice-T in a Melrose Ave. store, lending his visage to clothing for an MTV spot.
"I thought, 'Porn can go this way, too,'" he said.
And in the late 90's Zane was the alternative face of porn, even as companies like Vivid and Wicked were defining the contract system and developing high-end features, Zane was pioneering a porn style that incorporated fast-editing, music that he and his friends were making, handheld cameras, and a grunge/punk aesthetic similar to that filtered through MTV.
"I saw a hole where things could go," Zane said. "And applied that synthesis."
And now, Zane says, "nobody knows who I am.
"I quit for a while and went on tour," Zane said, "and ran out of money, and got money, and ran out of it again. And when I came back there were people showing up at the AVN show like Dave Navarro and Gene Simmons and people were talking about tattoos in movies like tattoos had just been invented."
Zane is the type of pornographer who fights porn's inherent disposability.
"And I don't want to be one of those old fucks who say, 'You don't perceive my level of importance? Don't you know who I am?' But I'm at the AVN show and they won't let me walk down the red carpet....I've just been gone a few years!"
Zane is also shooting Radium, a series that incorporates rock and porn. Like Tattooed and Tight, Radium stars Tera Wray. One of Wray's duties in Radium is to interview bands.
The porn ideal has always gone hand in hand with rock (unless you're Peter Cetera) and, like Joanna Angel does with Burning Angel, Kentucky Fried Wray only makes these bands look cooler.
"Tera is a hot rock chick who gets it. She likes the bands, she knows what to say to them," Zane said.
For publicity, "Anything we can do outside of porn we utilize," Zane said. "MySpace, Youtube, Bizarre Magazine, tattoo parlors..."
I asked if Zane was going for what would sell or what would interest him, and if he wondered if the two were exclusive.
"If Porn was the only thing I did," Zane said, "I'd slit my wrists. But if you look at any other industry, they all respect their history. The snot-nosed kids in punk respect Iggy Pop, all the metal kids know Slayer.
Why does everybody in porn think it started with them? They think they're these ground-breaking geniuses. Not knowing what came before you is native to the porn industry for some reason."
So many things work against Porn having a sense of its own history. Only fans can, and their memory is selective. If talent stays in the business, on average, for less than six months, if the workload required values quantity over quality - and the budget for both is the same - and since Porn is an industry where a much larger than average portion of its own employees seek a way to deny their involvement in it, of course there aren't many jobs for Porn Archivists.
This is why Zane relieves stress by hanging from hooks.
"I didn't set out to be a suspension artist," he said. "But it's fucking great."
In January, Zane beat by 18 minutes a record previously held by "Mind Freak"'s Cris Angel. Zane hung out in the middle of the AVN convention in Las Vegas for six hours, suspended by four hooks. I saw him during this time. He refused my request to pose as if he were inviting people to a barbecue.
"I was in a special space at the time," Zane said. "I hope you understand."
"Now I understand," I said.
"Four hooks," Zane said. "Angel had eight hooks."
I considered this for a few seconds, thinking that eight was better than four.
"...four hooks hurts more," Zane added. "because all your weight is on fewer points to distribute it.
"It took me a whole month to go back to the gym and do yoga again," Zane said. "But the suspension is more than a body feeling. It's more about psychological distress."
But even in hanging from hooks, Zane got other things done.
"There was a lot of pain over those six hours," he said. "I was going insane. But then I felt a mental split. I was fully aware of two people."
I wrote a porn screenwriting article for XBiz and it was published there a few months ago. Since then I got a complaint from a director who felt I misrepresented him, so I've left his name out of my edit of the article.
How do we recognize good screenwriting in a business that, sales show, has no need to value it? Porn's screenwriters say that there are more differences than the presence of the word "blowbang" between the scripts of Porn Valley and Hollywood.
EXT. CHATSWORTH APARTMENT - AFTERNOON
DICK knocks on door of Apartment 69. Shirt open to his navel, he carries bags of delivery food. He checks his watch, ad libs other impatient gestures (suggestion: watch passage of sun across sky, sigh heavily, look at watch again).
DICK Damn. I'm impatient.
Door opens to reveal AMBER. She is perfectly made up and in high heels. Otherwise, she is wearing a bathrobe that is threatening to fall open. We can see she is braless.
AMBER Hi.
DICK I brought your Indian food.
AMBER Oh, really?
DICK Yeah. Really.
THEY exchange smoldering glances.
AMBER Do they have blowbangs in India?
DICK I'm Lakota Sioux, baby. (And Yes.)
B/G SCENE ONE
The first rule of writing is to write what you know. This either means that fast food delivery personnel across Los Angeles are the luckiest men in the world or that porn screenwriters are breaking the first rule of writing. It is probably the latter, and that is because screenwriting for porn follows a different set of rules.
It is a cliche to deride porn's scripts in the same way it is fashionable to dismiss awards for acting in adult movies. But while it is a disservice to porn to make it play by the rules of mainstream fare - for budget reasons, if for no others - we will see that porn scripts face their biggest challenges when attempting the quality of the least Hollywood script.
This makes it difficult for screenwriters who know the expectations but who stalk the elusive quality porn script regardless; the script that seamlessly blends the required sex with a compelling reason to have it.
"I know that I can write the best porn script in the world and it will still be judged below the lowest piece of Hollywood crap," said director Eli Cross, whose "Corruption" (written with Alvin Edwards) won the Best Screenplay prize at this year's AVN awards. The grim tale of the moral unraveling of a U.S. Senator also picked up numerous acting awards from adult outlets, with Cross routinely recognized as Best Director.
Writing often seems at odds with the goals of porn producers, who strive to deliver as much sex as possible. Managers of several L.A. area video stores interviewed for this story reported that their top ten rentals were all all-sex titles, with couples movies like Digital Playground's "Pirates" far down the list.
Sales of scripted porn movies are far brisker on the Internet, said Ron Austin, buyer for Inglewood's Wildcat Distributors. "The stores are still the home of the raincoat boys," he said, "and they look for theme or girl or sex act, not script.
"People who come to the stores are obviously the ones who are not too embarrassed by it," he said. "But even people who want the tamer Wicked Pictures products tend to go online, as do the people who want the really nasty stuff we can't sell in stores due to local ordinances."
Purveyors of scripted materials also have to contend with the emerging pay-per-scene or, even more threatening, pay-per-minute VOD markets.
But that doesn't mean porn's screenwriters will be out of a job.
"The feature isn't dead," said Vivid veteran Paul Thomas, whose feature "Debbie Does Dallas ... Again" recently won top honors at Berlin's Venus Fair, "but it doesn't have the market share it once did."
Further, fetish stylemaker Ernest Greene, who directed last year's "O; The Power of Submission", points out that "every new technology and format convinces people of the death of the old ones, but that isn't always true."
So if the feature isn't dead and most studios, for reasons of prestige, boredom, or genuine interest, aren't planning to give them up, what are the secrets of a successful porn script?
The most important is that a porn script is a different animal from a mainstream script, a play, an infomercial, or a Powerpoint presentation; it is a genre unto itself.
"We ask, 'How does the sex find its way into this movie?'" said "Upload" co-writer Edwards. The sci-fi script called for a cast of more than 40, and the film was almost a month in production. "'What does the sex reveal about the characters?' 'How do we make sex and the story one and the same, where a deficit of one will mean the deficit of another, and vice versa?'"
Edwards said that "Upload"'s reported $375,000 budget helped preserve the creative elements that would otherwise get stripped away from a standard porn with a budget of $30k.
"The money made it happen," Edwards said.
Indeed, Paul Thomas' AVN acceptance speech for 1996' "Bobby Sox" thanked the money as much as the actors.
"If the right people had the right budgets, as I did here, there would be more great movies," he said.
As a large percentage of today's porns are gonzos with setups as limited in length and character development as the snippet that opened this story, many performers would rather not be bothered with dialogue.
"I show up on set and of course my agent hasn't told me that there's dialogue," said one female performer known mostly for gonzo roles but who lately has been showing up in features. "So I'm not motivated to learn lines; it's not like I'm being paid any more for it."
The actress, who chose to remain anonymous, makes a good point. She can earn just as much money in a gonzo with no dialogue, where she will be in and out, as it were, in a few hours, and possibly even make it to another shoot the same day, as she would in a feature that would require her to turn down other work.
Performers are paid by the blowjob, or the double penetration, or the race of their partner. These are notated as "BJ", "DP", and "interracial" on the various adult talent booking sites. Not one mentions "dialogue". Since performers are not paid to act in this most capitalist of businesses, it is not incredible that they don't.
"So sometimes, when I know it's a feature, I conveniently get sick," the actress said (and this is why she chose to remain anonymous), "and shoot web content instead."
"You have to think of the performers as dollie heads," said director Gazzman, production manager of London's Harmony Films and winner of AVN's Best Foreign Feature for "The Scottish Loveknot". "You're never sure if someone isn't going to be there on the day of filming, so you need to make the parts as interchangeable as possible."
Cross echoes this sentiment almost to the exact wording (except the American says "doll" rather than "dollie"). "One consideration when writing the script is being conscious of the real possibility someone won't show up."
Despite comparatively huge (for porn) budgets for "Corruption" and this year's "Upload", Cross still contended with the no-shows and flakes ubiquitous in the porn industry. "You can have someone locked and then suddenly she'll get a boyfriend who only wants her to do girls," Cross said. "So there goes your anal scene."
This does not happen in Hollywood, where performers would do double, or even triple anal scenes if the money was right.
Porn scripts, once written on doomed napkins the day of filming, are now computerized. Some even make it to the cast before the shoot.
"But it's not like they courier it over," said the actress.
Even though many porn screenwriters type their scripts into Hollywood-standard screenwriting programs like Final Draft and Movie Magic (and Cross and Edwards used the Hollywood term "pink pages" to describe one part of the revision process, which is understandably ambiguous in their chosen industry), most feature porn scripts are 15-to-20 page affairs saved in Microsoft Word.
"I write it down and have my secretary type it up," said one industry veteran who thought I wasn’t painting him in the right light so I took out his name, whose recent feature script ran to nine pages and was filmed in one day, along with most of another movie. "There were sex scenes going on all over the house."
But most feature directors bemoan the limited budgets and tight deadlines of a studio system afraid of breaking the formula of five-to-six sex scenes in a movie in which one needs to be girl/girl and another needs to be anal.
"I know a lot of people who end up putting their own money into their movies (directed for other studios)," said "O"'s Greene, "just so they can retain a semblance of honesty to the script."
Jim Powers makes movies for Sin City and JM Productions. Most are filmed in a day. "I know there are limitations," he said, "and I work within them."
Powers, who is a prolific moviemaker, is representative of porn's writer/directors who aren't aspiring to Great Art.
"Porn is what it is," he said on the set of a MILF movie. "Guys watch porn for five to seven minutes at a pop, then hide the DVD, then watch it the next day. I guess your dialogue needs to fit in there somewhere."
One way to handle dialogue that actors don't want to learn and that directors don't have time to direct is by layering on a blanket of voiceovers.
"It's a shortcut to at least approaching an effective narrative," said Rebecca Gray, whose script (with Ren Savant) for Vivid's "Seven Deadly Sins" won AVN's 1999 screenplay honor. "If you can't get actors where you want them to be, you can solve a lot of problems with a voiceover."
Gray recalls hiring out of work Hollywood voice talent for several films for this purpose. "They charge less than porn actors," she said, "and they're motivated to do a good job because a voiceover is the most anonymous thing you can do in porn and still get to brag about being in porn. It's all the glory with none of the consequences."
And as Hollywood has a fascination with porn, so does porn relentlessly attempt to go Hollywood. Wicked Pictures is the most earnest of the Hollywood wannabes, with director/writer/contract girl Stormy Daniels churning out high gloss porn versions of Hollywood movies, most recently "Operation Desert Stormy", a hybrid of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and the "James Bond" and "Austin Powers" series. The budget was reportedly $250,000, which Wicked used for screening parties, creative swag boxes for press, and both an airplane and a live camel in the movie.
Daniels, like Paul Thomas before her, maintained that the money was essential to the success of the movie. "This is an expensive movie because it needs to be expensive," she said on the first day of shooting.
Most of the writers and directors interviewed for this story highlighted workarounds like voiceovers and interchangeable characters, and each mentioned money as integral to the success of a feature. Working independently of studios, or working as autonomously as possible within studios, was also considered a plus.
"I appreciate the freedom Wicked gave me," Daniels said.
And it was only when constraints of time and budget were relaxed that some felt they could do their best work.
"We had money, so we could buy time," said Edwards. "And with the time, Eli (Cross) could direct, and the actors didn't have six other sets to go to that day."
"And we had people on set who weren't 'feature' types," Cross added, "who hadn't had the opportunity to do a lot of acting in porn before." Here Cross mentioned Eva Angelina, who he said not only auditioned (this is what a $375k budget buys) but also "did a brilliant job."
Another porn cliche is that of the failed artist who cannot get work anywhere else but who succeeds in porn as the smartest monkey in the zoo. This serves as a cautionary tale to screenwriters writing for their employers and not their audience.
"Porn has become more acceptable to educated people," said Wayne Hentai of Hentai PR, a marketing firm for porn companies and personalities. "The Internet has made porn safe for women and couples who don't want to go into the dirty bookstores. But they come to the picture with higher expectations."
Hentai mentioned misspelled boxcovers and movies with boom shadows and audible offstage banter.
"You can put on airs and talk about Nabokov all you want in your porn movie," Hentai said. "But if you can't get your lead actress to pronounce 'Lolita' properly, the jig's up."
A veteran director says porn movies need to be simple. "You need the hot girl, and everything else is just you winking at the camera. But the viewer is looking at the hot girl."
Everyone agrees that the porn script is its own thing; it has a structure particular to it. Whether that structure is populated with five or six simple setups and sex scenes or if it is, like "Upload", a film Edwards calls "a porn movie for sci-fi geeks, complete with a lexicon on disc four," the structure has to compell viewers beyond those five to seven minutes.
And the script is as important an investment as a perfect under the muscle boob job (though porn scripts are far less expensive).
Justin Kane, the writer/director of this year's comedy "Spunk'd", shopped around the treatment of his "Punk'd" parody to several studios but couldn't get the budget he wanted. So investors who also happened to be friends put up $90,000 for the project and Kane wouldn't have it any other way.
"I wrote (the main part) for Nick Manning, and I'm glad he agreed to it, because he was perfect," Kane said of the ensemble project, uncharacteristic of most porn. "But in retrospect I couldn't have made that movie anything but independently. I think it would suck the life out of me not to have the final cut or to do a job for hire. The extra time was important for the actors to get to know their lines."
Kane said that writing the script presented challenges one would not encounter in Hollywood.
"You'd think that writing a group sex scene would just be about the choreography, right?" he asked. "But each performer is contracted for a certain thing, so I can't have somebody get anal who was only hired for a blowjob, or I'd get their agents mad. I had to be precise in writing who got what, and where. A cock in the wrong place would have meant the difference of hundreds of dollars."
I spoke with Spunk'd: The Movie director Justin Kane at the recent XBiz Awards. As at the previous month's AVN Awards, Kane didn't win a goddamn thing.
"...yet it's one of the most torrented movies out there," Kane said.
Spunk'd has just been nominated for an XRCO Award. Luckily, porn's year-long awards season helps to keep a movie's name alive, though how much certain awards actually help sales is uncertain. By the time awards are announced, many companies lack either the money or the sense to buy those little stickers that video store owners would then have to stick on the box.
I thought Spunk'd was last year's best porn comedy - not to take anything away from Operation Desert Stormy, which won that category - but Spunk'd didn't pull punches by aiming at a couples' market, and everyone involved brought her or his A game. Standouts included Nick Manning, Penny Flame, Steven St. Croix, Marcos Leon, Katie Morgan, and a split-screened Hillary Scott.
Vivid Plus' has released its heavier women epic Curvaceous.
I went to the digital capture of this movie last August (I won't say "taping," I'd be embarrassed to say "lensing," and it would be inaccurate to say "filming") and there was so much flesh that producers allowed me to take home a to go bag of it.
I was reminded of a great line from "Honey White" by the late, lamented Morphine.
Anal scene accounting was a charge long-levied against former AVN editor Mike Ramone. Now, cooling tempers have set the stage for a tender rapprochement, with cum farts playing the part of doves.
There was a time when disgruntled AVN employees would leak information from their Chatsworth stronghold to the likes of Lurk Ford or Rock'n'Roll Gene "Pool" Ross, both of whom would gaily print anything negative or speculative about the company.
I arrived at AVN in the waning days of this distribution system and would occasionally read things about myself on blogs that could only have come from my co-workers.
To a lesser degree, Mike South would also print insider info about AVN. It was South who broke the news that I got fired, in fact, a a tidbit hastily e-mailed by someone in a nearby cubicle the moment I returned to clean out my desk.
Back then there were fewer porn industry news sites, but now the web is lousy with them. (And none is more lousy than mine.) Perhaps because of the competition, by all accounts AVN is a much happier place and more cohesive, with frequent company-sponsored feasts from In-n-Out Burger.
But when Mike Ramone edited the magazine, a put-down of sorts favored by one staffer was that all Ramone did was count anal scenes in movies. Ramone countered that his job was not limited to this. Now that Ramone has exited AVN and become a director, the press release for his Cum Fart Tsunami confirms that indeed Ramone kept a rectal tally.
“Throw in super hardcore ass fucking, d.p.s [sic], triple penetrations, and in Audrey (Hollander)’s case, so many penetrations at the same time that I lost count (emphasis added), leading up to the massive felchings, and wrap it all up in a hardcore BDSM package, with real fetishy sex, clothes and sets (including a seedy, graffiti and glory hole-ridden bathroom stall and a sleazy old school dirty book store), and Cum Fart Tsunami should be a cum farting fan’s ultimate wet dream," raved Ramone. "Raincoats will not be optional.”
I don't know what the significance of this is, other than it proves a softening of ancient rivalries like so much stool.
Of the thousands of awards AVN will be presenting at its annual honors January 12, none is so prestigious as its Performer in a Non-Sex Role trophy. When a viewer expects to see penetration, gaping, and creampies, there is nothing more provocative than someone in a porn film placed there to move the story along.
Because I was not even nominated for my own brilliant non-sex performances in 2005's Jack's Playground 27 (buy), 2006's Barbed Wire Kiss (buy), and last year's Cuckold 2, I have that much more admiration for someone who actually scores a nod. I talked with Rory Zacher who, as Johnny Lightning, was nominated for his performance as a weasely director in Spunk'd.
Read more about how I managed to not use the word "movie" after the gap.
GP: How did you hear about the project?
RZ: I got the Spunk'd gig from when I was an agent at Lighthouse (Talent Management), and (Spunk'd director) Justin (Kane) called the agency to book a few girls. I asked about the project and he said was going to be a parody of the MTV show Punk'd. I told him that I was a cast member of one of the seasons of Punk'd and I was one of the people who played the jokes on the celebrities.. He said that I had to be in his movie, and he gave me the part of the director in the "Grundle's Anatomy" segment. It was really cool and he let me improvise which is one of my favorite things to do, and he seemed to get a positive reaction to my acting, and encouraged me to do whatever I wanted. Justin was a great director, and I had a great time on the set.
Justin Kane: He is a fantastic actor, so I really didn't need to give him more direction than the initial "you're a cocky, flashy guest director on a TV show," along with his lines and the script.
As artists, we are most often concerned with a winged thing called Motivation. Motivation is what we seek when we first seek to inhabit a role and make it ours, trying to convey its complexity to viewers.
One of Rory's improvised lines in Spunk'd was, "You all smell because You're the Shit."
GP: Though Spunk'd is erroneously described as an original rather than an adapted screenplay AVN is loathe to add extra categories for fear of appearing to be pandering), you were fortunate to have worked with the source material before.
RZ: Being on Punk'd was amazing.. It was so cool to see how they went about trying to punk the celebrities and be a part of the action. I got to play an asshole waiter, a cop, a sleazy guy who gets thrown into the pool of a very posh hotel in LA, etc. The celebrities were very gracious and nice, although when we punk'd Chris Brown the singer, he wanted to punch me in the segment, but afterwards, he was a cool kid. I also freaked Kate Beckinsale out so much when I played a sleazy guy hitting on her, that she thought I was going to kill her. One big thing on the show is that it is good to have a very strong improvisation background because on the show, you only have two rehearsals without the celebrity, and when they arrive, you have only one chance to get it right otherwise (the celebrities) will figure it out, and you have ruined the segment and everyone's day, not to mention all the money they have spent on locations, crew, etc.
Several other actors are nominated for the Non-Sex award, including the great Bill Margold, probably the only genius we have left.
GP: To further prepare for your first porn role, did you screen the work of any of the other nominees?
RZ: I have not seen the work of the other nominees, and truthfully, I think it is time Ron Jeremy, Bill Margold, and everyone else pass the torch to me. I think this award should not be based on popularity and should be based on the talent involved and the way they performed. People have told me that I am their favorite part of the movie, and that I was the funniest part of it, and I think the voters should take that into consideration and give the award to the most talented, and not to the most recognizable name on the ballot.
Further proof of the non-existence of God was confirmed when the skies did not open up and rain fire on Zacher for implying someone could be more talented than Bill Margold.
GP: If you get the trophy for this piece, will it be a feather in your cap? Or will you be horribly ashamed?
RZ: I love being nominated for Best Non-Sex performance, and yes it did make me giddy to see my name on the nominee list. Justin said he submitted me, but you never believe it until you see it.
GP: Directors in this town can't build up our hopes half as fast as they can crush them. I am glad Kane didn't ruin your dreams.
RZ: And yes, if I win, I will have my friends all announce me as "This is my friend, AVN Award winning Best Non-Sex actor Rory Zacher AKA Johnny Lightning." I might just bring it with me wherever I go from now on, have people take pictures with it and stuff.
GP: Are you a member of any Indian nation or repressed ethnic minority and do you see this nomination as their victory
RZ: I am not a member of any Indian nation, but as a member of the Jewish faith, I look at this award as proof that a jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs can accomplish anything. However, I don't think this award will help my chances of being "Distinguished Alumnus" at my old high school's end of the year Awards Ceremony.
GP: Whatever happens, your Instrument's Interpretation was a credit to the Craft.
During a brief ceremony at the Lamplighter Restaurant this morning, the vaunted National Institutes of Pornographic And Pornotextual Arts changed the name of its annual awards from the Also-Rannies to its current title, the Excellence in Adult and/or Erotic Entertainment Honors. A simple nine-foot statue was wheeled across the parking lot.
"That looks like my Uncle Oscar!" someone exclaimed. "He is nine feet tall and also made of gold! You see, he was an alchemist and suffered from gigantism."
From that simple outburst (quickly repressed by police and clergy), a tradition was born.
Read the list of "The Oscars of Porn" after the gap.
"I believe in America," Beloved Porn Journalist Gram Ponante said at the quiet ceremony. "I believe that everyone should have his or her own adult awards show. And we are quickly reaching a point where the ratio of Americans to adult awards shows is 1:1."
Attendees wept and prayed as the awards were announced over strong cocktails and light salads. The spontaneous nature of the event kept any winner from attending, so in that way the ceremony was much like established awards shows such as the Adultcon Awards, the Temptation Awards, the FOXE awards, and the XRCOs.
Quintessence Award Dirty Harry "This award is presented to the person or persons who best represent the public's perception of adult entertainment. Dirty Harry often plays an incestuous scumbag who pimps out his daughter or seeks out women to beat him up. Harry truly is Dirty, and a scene in which he does not end up shrieking at someone or sobbing in his despair is uncharacteristic. God Bless You, Dirty Harry."
Self-Lubricating Arriviste Sindee Jennings "As R.E.M. said, 'Everybody squirts sometime', but Sindee Jennings squirts all the time. She squirts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and if she lived in London, she'd squirt for tea. She might even squirt tea. And unlike other squirters who have taught themselves how, Jennings' squirting is wild and untamed, as if ordained by God. It does not feel forced, and its consistency coats, soothes, and relieves. She is also from Texas, where my people live."
Sniffer Made Good Dave Navarro "Navarro circled closer and closer to porn until people started saying 'Red Hot Chili Who?' 'Jane's What?' While industry insiders might say that he has not paid his dues, remember that industry insiders rarely pay their cable bills. We look forward to a day when Navarro reaches 25,000 posts on porn chatboards like every other loser."
Best Intentional Porn Comedy Spunk'd "Porn should be funny, and often is. Sometimes it seems people bend over backwards to siphon all the fun out of it. But this ensemble comedy starring Nick Manning and a dozen or so others achieves the lofty purpose of making a porn movie funny on purpose."
Best Unintentional Porn Comedy Debbie Loves Dallas "A textbook case of reach exceeding grasp. Both the movie and its director (and we made sure to verify this beforehand) had no intention of being so abysmally, unintentionally hilarious."
Best Celebrity Sex Tape Amy Fisher Caught on Tape "A certified MILF who clings to her 'Long Island Lolita' roots, Amy Fisher, if I were a porn fortune cookie, would be 'Welcome at any gathering'. Without a doubt the best sex tape this year, because all the others were made to be watched by only a few people at most. This one was made for public consumption, even if half of the parties involved say it wasn't."
Concerted Effort Jenny Hendrix "As Pink Floyd said, 'I've got the obligatory Hendrix sperm.' Hendrix works wicked hard. She has three phones working overtime. She hasn't taken a break since July. She makes drinks for people on set. She works well with others. She's thrifty, clean, and reverent. I would definitely recommend her for employment, a home loan, or cabinet position (preferably Reverse Cowgirl Secretary)."
Male Performer Who Knows What Time It Is Nick Manning "For men who watch porn, watching other men is difficult, even impossible. And since no one will pony up for a greenscreen anytime this decade (despite porn being on the cutting edge of technology and all), the most we can hope for is that the male talent is entertaining. Nick Manning (close runner-up: Steven St. Croix) shows the perfect combination of acting and performing chops as well as a solid sense of where the male porn performer is in the firmament. He only steals scenes when there are no women in them. He doesn't overtalk, he shares the spotlight. And when allowed to do his thing, he displays the most sardonic character possible who still gets to 'wreck!' women onscreen. No one has a problem with Jack Nicholson playing the same character in every movie, so Manning should get an award, too."
The Kami Andrews Wish You Were Here Award Lorelei Lee "Who knows if she will be back, but Lorelei Lee is gone now, and we miss her."
Tony Conigliaro Award Nicki Hunter "This award, like its baseball counterpart, goes to the person who overcame adversity in style. Nicki Hunter was diagnosed with lymphoma one year ago and has returned to the adult business with equal parts vengeance and class. Congratulations also to the various fans and coworkers who got put personal gain aside to help out their friend."
Best Porn Set (tie) Cousin Stevie's Pussy Party (all) Barely Legal 75 "Usually I only spend a few hours in rooms full of naked women. Something changes when I'm there all day, as if I remember that there is an intrinsic value in spending the day with a room full of naked women. I feel like Caligula without the parts falling off. And Cousin Stevie and Erica Mclean run a very smooth, casual operation." Best Logline Cuckold - Chatsworth Pictures "Sometimes the only thing wrong with your wife is you."
Best Inevitable Title She Is Half My Age - Brandon Iron "Porn has always been about older men and younger women. It seems more like Sociology class to watch people the same age having sex (that's why I stayed in college so long). This movie puts a name on the giddy joy one feels when discovering that $900 and an agent's fee can buy you Faye Valentine." Biggest Comeback (Where "biggest" is the shortest intervening time between announcemment of retirement and retraction of retirement) (tie) Luke Ford Kurt Lockwood Belladonna "Luke Ford announced he was leaving the porn industry yet continues to show up at porn events, Kurt Lockwood announced his retirement, paternity, and a move to Spain in September and returned to work in October, and Belladonna announced her retirement from performing and three weeks later announced her retirement from her retirement. Needless to say, some comebacks are more welcome than others."
Most Satisfying Movie Naughty Flipside "When you get right down to it, the most effective porn format ever is the gonzo, in which setups are kept to a minimum and sex scenes get underway quickly. The scripted feature may showcase other talents of the cast and crew, but those are always exercises in diminishing returns, no matter how well-intended. Naughty Flipside Volume One presents the perfect combination of quick, fantastical setups followed by the lighthearted inevitabilities of Dana DeArmond, Sasha Grey, Adrianna Nicole, and Pinky Lee."
Ambition without Embarrassment Award Upload "Upload is a great movie. More than that, it is a movie that has high ideals. (Almost) nothing is worse than a movie that shows more of its creators' limitations than its creators' intentions, and this movie's intentions weren't grounded by budget, talent, or cast; every element shot for the sky. Also, there was sex in it."
National Institutes of Pornographic and Pornotextual Arts Director of the Year Award Jim Powers "Jim Powers is an effective porn director because he never forgets why the audience is there, so he keeps extraneous things like plot and guys' faces to a minimum. Despite this, he works so well within the limitations of the form that each movie is memorable and lightly-to-moderately sprayed with his own cultural references and cynical sense of humor. Watching a Jim Powers movie is the essence of a guilty pleasure, because you really do feel intellectually and spiritually ashamed afterwards. He's a genius."
Quote of the Year Alex Sanders to Julie Night, Upload "Get it wet or I'll stick it in you dry."
You know that the porn industry is built on the backs (and other parts) of the very young, but it was not always that way. Once upon a time, all someone had to be was willing.
The commoditization of filming someone new to porn and/or new to legal age is a phenomenon that has only been around for the past decade, and so many people are exposed to pornography that getting real reactions out of them when they get on camera is tricky.
That is why watching Vivid's Brand New Faces series is more of a lesson for us than it is for the people on screen for the first time.
Read more after the gap.
"We have a money back guarantee," said director B. Skow. "If you can find this girl anywhere else on film doing a scene before this one was shot, you get your money back."
"You mean a commercial video, or the Internet..."
"Yes."
Brand New Faces is both a website and a DVD series featuring women who have never before had sex on camera for pay. Why is this so important?
"Because after awhile you can see people phoning it in," Skow said.
Skow, who picked his porn name 15 years ago - in haste - and now wishes he had chosen something cool like Gram Ponante or Ronnie James Dildo, performs a lengthy interview segment with each girl as she prepares for her scene. Prior to this, Vivid vets the talent.
"Have you ever caught anyone lying?" I asked.
"We did," he said, "and we busted her." Skow said that he's hoping to start a "Busted" section on the site in which women who clearly have been in porn before, whether under a different name or (as was the case Skow mentioned) a day or two prior to the Brand New Faces shoot, get their comeuppance.
"I'll even call them on: 'Who told you how to put your finger in your mouth?' I really want people who haven't done this before."
As in America, there is a dwindling middle class in porn. But in porn the attraction is either being new or famous. In this case, the middle class is women who've been around for between a month and three years who will never be Tera, Jenna, or Belladonna. And the promise of someone new is intoxicating.
"You've got a tiny fucking pussy," Skow says to Taylor Jones. "Where's the hole?"
A 25-year-old hairdresser named Makali Chanel is new to the business but she clearly knows what she wants.
"I'm the Porn Princess," she says about a thousand times.
But the real find of the DVD is Courtney James, who mentioned she turned 18 last December.
"You'll be 19 pretty soon," Skow says. "You're getting old."
"Don't say that," she says.
Skow tells her how to hold her breasts for an upward camera angle.
"Hold your tits over the top of the nipple and push them together," he says.
James is from South Carolina, natural, and adorable. She arrives at the studio wearing khaki shorts and a t-shirt, like she just got off her job at the ice cream stand. She smiles toothily and has a great scene with Sascha, who can't believe his good luck.
"Sascha's one of those guys who really loves girls," Skow says at one point begging the question: Are there men in porn who don't like girls?
Like most gonzo porn shot by its director, Brand New Faces features a lot of Skow talking. He manages to walk a fine line between respectful distance, honest admiration, and sounding creepy.
"But there's a market for Ed Powers, too," Skow hastens to add.
Brand New Faces #1 features four women, some of whom seem more innocent than others. What separates them is their enthusiasm. There is at least one person in the movie I don't think we'll be seeing much of in the future, whereas James might get a contract.
What is especially valuable about Brand New Faces is that the women don't need too much coaching to appear like they've been doing this for a year.
Porn channels Gary Numan or: Here in my Carmen Hart, I feel safest of all
This is what I'm not saying: I hate couple's porn.
What I am saying is that a lot of couples' porn seems to scale back on the sex I find eye-catching (e.g.: sex with beings from realms where Euclidean geometry is an abomination) while filling the new space with the type of vapid pro-sex moralizing that preaches to the converted.
That said, I would watch Carmen Hart do anything, including eat a piece of pie, which she does in David Stanley's fun Pleasure Principle.
Classic porn company VCX will re-release one of John Holmes' signature movies, 1971's Johnny Wadd, in September. I reviewed the movie for an upcoming issue of the adult trade publication XBiz.
Chinn said that, because shooting porn was illegal, he would have to keep filming locations a secret from the actors lest they get picked up by the cops. The performers would arrive at a public place and then be shuttled to the location. The camera was never placed on a tripod outside, so that people could make a break for it if necessary. The film was never kept in one place for a long time.
My favorite line of the movie comes from the woman in the picture above. Protesting her desirability she says, "I ain't so hard to take!"
