When it comes to an appreciation of vintage adult film posters, few are as insightful and engaging as Robin Bougie.

And we can think of nobody who writes more entertainingly about adult films than Dries Vermeulen.

So it was a no-brainer to ask Dries to review Robin’s new book, Graphic Thrills Volume Two: American XXX Movie Posters 1970 to 1985.

To buy Graphic Thrills 2, visit FAB Press or contact Robin via his website.

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If it ain’t broke…

That was the very first thought that came to mind as I began browsing through Robin Bougie‘s eagerly awaited follow-up to his bestselling adult cinema poster compendium Graphic Thrills which came out only last year.  My adulatory assessment thereof has led to my being quoted in the lion’s share of publicity materials preceding publication of this second volume.  On top of that, the Bougieman has seen fit to reference my IMDb writings on no less than four separate occasions.  Aw shucks!  Were this but an underhanded attempt on part of the author to butter me up (which prompts a really disturbing mental image all of a sudden…)  in expectation of another puff piece review, he really need not have bothered.  Whilst my critique could be concisely encapsulated as “more of the same” then rest assured that in this particular case this is a very good thing indeed.

Even before you crack the book’s spine to sample the goodies within, your eyes will feast on Ben Newman‘s brilliantly rendered cover design.  Appetite duly whetted, you should find your senses flooded with a superb selection of another 125 resplendently reproduced posters marketing movies made between 1970 and 1985, inarguably the genre’s greatest era.  All of these images graced the walls and marquees of the now long gone porno picture palaces and played an indelible part in captivating the curious and drawing in the doubters.

In twin prefaces charting both the history of adults only movie houses across America – with a brief sidestep into the author’s native neighboring Canada for good measure – and the evolution of its publicity to pull in the punters, Bougie paints a vivid portrait on crimson canvas of a once common pastime among consenting adults that has become all but alien to younger generations.  That point was driven home during a recent conversation conducted with colleagues at the office.  As the topic turned towards the valiant efforts by local independent Cinema Nova collective (staunchly supported by yours truly) to save Belgium’s last remaining – if sadly since 2013 no longer operational – adult theater, the Brussels ABC.  The very notion of ogling explicit sex on a cinema screen as a communal experience struck them without exception as an extremely odd pastime.  Allowing for a bit of holier than thou hypocrisy perhaps, I still found their unanimous response significant as to how times have drastically changed over a relatively brief period regarding the consumption of carnality.

Of course, these days the Internet has turned absolutely everyone into a casual voyeur but back when I began frequenting sordid sleazepits just over three decades ago, I was practically branded an irredeemable degenerate for doing so without shame or regret !  In fact, my very admission to all and sundry still manages to raise eyebrows in “polite society”.  Take it from me that I have literally spent the better part of my life in delightfully disreputable dens like the ABC and now long gone others of its ilk.

But let us move on to the fruits of Robin’s labor of love and the once again overwhelming wealth of pickings he has assembled.  Running the gamut from garish to gorgeous, with every conceivable permutation of either, GT2 inevitably lures both Bougie and his captive audience away from the predictable and instantly recognizable titles that spilled forth from the pages of its predecessor.  Although there are still a handful of universally acclaimed classics which had somehow slipped through the cracks first time around (the Mitchell Brothers‘ Autobiography of a Flea, Bob Chinn‘s ultimate hospital hardcore Candy Stripers, Damiano‘s Skin Flicks, Anthony Spinelli‘s The Dancers), most of the movies covered here might rightfully confound the neophyte wile reawakening fond reminiscence of many a guilty pleasure in the seasoned smut connoisseur.

Successfully sustaining the format that worked so well, Bougie has supplemented the awesome artwork with a mindboggling array of facts and trivia culled from both personal conversation and his vast collection of vintage adult magazines.  These are presented in bite-sized side bars nonetheless overflowing with tantalizing tidbits.  The Bougieman really knows his shit and even taught me a thing or two along the way !  Having covered most of the industry’s major players (on either side of the camera) in volume 1, the danger loomed large that he might repeat himself.  Aside from the odd establishing comment to provide a certain film’s context, this rarely proves to be the case however.  Digging deeper below the surface, Robin belies his shock jock Cinema Sewer persona by paying loving tribute to such unsung performers like Leslie Bovee and Sharon Thorpe and accurately assessing the body of work of overlooked talents like Carter Stevens (Pleasure Palace) and the late John Christopher (Hypersexuals).  The beautiful Bovee in particular is gloriously represented by classy one-sheets for Kemal Horulu’s double whammy of Feelings and Blue Ecstasy, the latter a personal all time high still sorely MIA in terms of DVD resurrection.

Coming from a graphic design background himself, it stands to reason that Bougie lavishes long overdue attention on several craftsmen (and women like Elaine Gignilliat and Nancy Villagran) responsible for the commercialization of carnality, most of whom toiled in the trenches of anonymity until now.  By far the most profusely present would be Chet Collom who turned to adult advertising once the well for hand-painted covers for dime store novels and rock albums had dried up.  Readers will soon come to realize this was a familiar trajectory for many of these allegedly “lower rung” artists.  An absolute highlight proves to be the stunning illustration Collom came up with for John Hayes’ jawdropping Baby Rosemary, all the more startling for its sunny teenybopper disposition bearing little resemblance to the actual film’s dark and depressing demeanor !

Ms. Gignilliat’s past life as a purveyor of passionate pictures to grace the dust covers of  heavy-breathing romance novels plays an unmistakable part in her delicate drawings for Michael Zen’s mesmerizing Reflections (a breathtaking view of bare-assed Annette Haven gazing into a mirror) and, almost on the far end of the sexual spectrum, Jim Clark’s bouncy Teenage Pajama Party.  The elusive “Penelope”, who may or may not actually be female, contributes one of the book’s most sumptuous designs : an almost dainty portrait of the indeed omnipresent Bovee, mixing the styles of Beardsley and Vargas (also clearly an inspiration for the art on Chuck Vincent’s Mrs. Barrington and Kirdy Stevens’ A Taste of Sugar), unfortunately waste don the undeserving cause that was 1980’s dreary Sugar Britches.

And while we’re on the subject of pearls before swine, what to make of Rudy Escalera?  This poor painter absolute needed all the colors of the rainbow to promote the sorry “epics” of Carlos Tobalina.  Now don’t get me wrong, I actually harbor a soft spot for the often chemically induced inanity of the average “Troy Benny” joint, at least if he manages to steer clear of orgy mode which is when they turn lethally lethargic.  Still, these are guilty pleasures at best and hardly choice picks when one wants to sway naysayers to the genre’s redeeming merits.  Making allowances for both Sexual Heights and Three Ripening Cherries, coincidentally (?) cursed with the weakest art, more characteristic dross like the incomparably inept Jungle Blue and the comparatively accomplished Casanova Part II (predictably predicated on star John Holmes’ most prominent part) needed every last ounce of help they could get.  Rounding out the “signed” section, as opposed to the herds of unknowns featured elsewhere, are pin-up princess Olivia De Berardinis (for Henri Pachard’s A Girl’s Best Friend, another personal fave) and Tom Tierney, whose Playgirl promo from Part 1 I initially mistook for an “Olivia”, so who gets to retaliate with an appropriately sophisticated image for Larry Revene’s exquisitely erotic Blue Magic.

Among the other premium eye-catchers, a few stand out for dramatically diverse reasons.  The hilariously offensive one-sheet for the 1976 interracial roughie Hot Summer in the City – by mob-connected mogul Harry Mohney rather than his mistress Gail Palmer as has long been assumed – has made the rounds as a non-PC in your face favorite of fans for decades.  Far less familiar is the stunning design composed by fleeting fornication film starlet Lorraine Alraune of herself as a wanton reincarnation of the Gorgon Medusa for Carter Stevens’ haunting In Sarah’s Eyes, an image mirrored by the arresting one-sheet for Damiano’s masterpiece Night Hunger.  Popping champagne corks and pink bubbles abound for David Worth’s breezy bit o’fluff Pink Champagne (natch) but equally in the way superior poster for Duncan Starr’s cult shouldabe Coming Attractions.

A decidedly non-adult angle was taken by the Mitchell Brothers, forever the iconoclasts, to push their Biblical box office bust Sodom and Gomorrah in grand Cecil B. DeMille fashion.  In sharp contrast there’s the elegant simplicity of a line drawing sketching the female form for Gary Graver’s Tangerine.  A final sock to the jaw is provided by the book’s very last image : a beautiful black and white chessboard composition for John Seeman’s 1985 Ten Little Maidens, concluding our journey through the annals of adult advertising on a pleasing high note.

Turning page after page, and this book benefits from being first read chronologically for overall impact, fans should gasp with wonder and delight at the inclusion of favorites and the unveiling of little-known rarities alike.  Backed up by a full bibliography of quips and quotes, Bougie masterfully navigates old-timers and newbies alike through the perilous streams of carnal cinema consciousness.  In what will hopefully turn into an ever expanding series of fuck film folios, he continues to establish himself equally adept at dishing the dirt as paying homage to those occasionally weird but almost always wonderful people whose sadly all too rapidly dwindling number we at the Rialto Report go to great lengths to commemorate.

The post The Art of the Adult Film Poster:
Graphic Thrills 2 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Lowell Pickett and Arlene Elster formed an unlikely but unique alliance in the world of early adult film in San Francisco.

Their objective was to deliver a new wave of artistic and creative pornography. They formed a production company – Leo Productions, and opened a theater – Sutter Cinema, to deliver this dream.

In this feature, Lowell Pickett and Arlene Elster are interviewed for the same article for the first time, and they remember the heady days of their partnership. Their story illustrates what hard-core films could have been if only they’d been more allied to the aspirations of the sexual revolution.

This is the second of a two-part article. You can read the first part here.

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10. The First International Erotic Film Festival (1970)

Lowell Pickett:

I went to a meeting of the Adult Film Association in Los Angeles in 1970. I remember when I first showed up there with some of our beaver films, everyone was amazed at how explicit the films were. They said that they couldn’t get away with showing that kind of film in L.A. It was just more liberal in San Francisco at that time.

We started talking with the other filmmakers and we all agreed that there wasn’t enough recognition of sexploitation films. We decided we needed to raise the profile of sex films.

Arlene Elster:

I went to a film festival in Amsterdam, an erotic film festival called the Wet Dreams Festival, in the autumn of 1970. I liked it, so we decided to sponsor a similar film festival back in San Francisco.  We wanted it to be a big deal. And it was.

In December 1970, the Sutter Cinema in conjunction with Leo Productions sponsored the six-day First International Erotic Film Festival “to elevate pornographic film to a higher level of respectability.”

From Evergreen Magazine, April 1971:

One of the reasons Lowell Pickett and Arlene Elster sponsored the Festival is that they cannot find many dirty movies that are any good artistically. They commission independent filmmakers, some of whom have done nice films, hoping to get something better than routine porno. They want to occupy a position like that of Maurice Girodias in Paris in the 1950s; many of the books he published were garbage, but he also published books of real literary merit. Most of what Arlene Elster shows at the Sutter Cinema is garbage but she is quite eager to find the cinematic equivalents of Beckett, Burroughs, and Nabokov.

Lowell Pickett:

I wanted the Festival jury to consist of three really interesting and respectable people. One of the first people we approached was Maurice Girodias who owned Olympia Press.

Olympia Press was a Paris-based publisher, launched by Girodias in 1953, that published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, and is best known for publishing the works of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and the first print of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It specialized in books that could not be published (without legal action) in the English-speaking world.

Lowell Pickett:

Another of the judges that we had at the film festival was Arthur Knight. He was a film reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature and he also taught at USC. Bruce Connor, who was a local filmmaker, was the third jury member.

Arlene Elster:

We announced total prize money of $5,000, of which $2,000 would be for the grand prize winner – which in 1970 was really something. And it was unheard of to award that kind of money to the maker of a sex film!

Lowell Pickett:

We hired a woman to do publicity for us. At first she wasn’t getting us much attention so she mentioned that she was going to get advice from a guy called Don Simpson. I went and talked to him, and we ended up hiring him to do publicity for us instead.

Don Simpson was a 27 year old junior executive working for a theatrical advertising agency at the time. He went on to be one of the most successful film producers and screenwriters of all time.

Along with his producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson produced hit films such as Flashdance (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), and The Rock (1996). Their films have earned over $3 billion worldwide.

Lowell Pickett:

Don was great. He got us tons of publicity. After he got involved, the festival really caught on and attracted a lot of attention.

To accommodate the unexpected public interest, the festival was moved from the Sutter Cinema to the 800-seat Presidio Theatre.

From San Francisco Chronicle, November 27th 1970:

The First International Film Festival which will slink noisily into the Presidio Theater on Tuesday has shaped up as a pretty interesting event. The 80 original entries have been winnowed down to 45 pictures – all of which will be shown during the festival.

Entries include films by James Broughton, Ben Van Meter, Donald Richie (who is the film curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), Connie Benson, the immensely talented Scott Bartlett, Arthur Meyer (“Guru You”), Blair Fuller, Pat Rocco, and Jerry Abrams (under an assumed name).

According to Arlene Elster, Festival co-director and 29 year old madam of the Sutter Cinema, several nights will have thematic continuity. “Tuesday night, opening night, represents the best in the opinion of the screening committee. On Wednesday the theme is beauty… soft, beautiful, erotic films. Thursday is more of… I don’t want to say deviant – I’ll say more avant-garde or far out.”

The festival took place from December 1st to 6th 1970, and by the time it began, publicity was all over the country, in newspapers and splashed across television channels.

From Morning Sun, December 2nd 1970:

The First International Film Festival opened here today to a packed house last night amid traditional Hollywood-style fanfare and the usual first-night trappings.

Special guests, including the producers and stars, were greeted by a man in a top hat and tails and escorted over the customary red carpet into the Presidio Theater.

Arlene Elster:

Some of the films in the film festival were really, really good. The range of them was really impressive.

One of the winners was this short film called ‘Orange’ by Karen Johnson. The film just showed a close-up of a person peeling an orange in slow motion. It was tremendous and showed that we could challenge what people thought was an ‘erotic’ film.

At the end of the festival, the judges chose not to award a single $2,000 first prize but they agreed that 4 films would receive $500 each, and a further 5 films would receive $200 each.

A final award of $1,000 was also given to the Canyon Cinema Cooperative “to encourage the production of more – and better – erotic pictures in the Bay area.”

From San Francisco Chronicle, December 7th 1970:

Within the nine prizewinning films, there is a fairly substantial range both in quality and style – but all demonstrate professionalism and taste. They were made by filmmakers not money-grubbers.

The 4 films that each won $500 ranged from:

‘Golden Positions’ – James Broughton’s lovely, poetic humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying,

Scott Bartlett’s exceptional ‘Love-making’,

Karen Johnson’s imaginative ‘Orange’,

Michael Zuckerman’s ‘Secks’ montage.

The 5 other prize-winning films each winning included:

The droll and bawdy wit of John Doles’ ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and Dirk Kortz’ ‘A Quickie’

Victor Faccinto’s bizarre animated film, ‘Where Did It All Come From? Where Is It All Going?’

Carl Linder’s rather extraordinary study of ritualists auto-eroticism, ‘Vampire… The Passion Of’

David Kallaher’s ‘Verge’, a view of hands on bodies

Lowell Pickett:

The Festival was really successful. We got some amazing publicity because of it. Arlene got a call from Dick Cavett to appear on his TV show. She was always very articulate so it was a good idea. Norman Mailer was on the same night with her.

It turned out to be funny. She’d secured permission to show the film ‘Orange’. She took it with her to New York. Cavett talked to her on the program, but they refused to show her… They kept the camera off of her. We joked about it. It was like when Elvis was on Ed Sullivan and they only showed him from the waist up! She wanted to be shown, but the bureaucrats at the network wouldn’t allow it.  And they wouldn’t show ‘Orange’ either.

Arlene Elster:

What did I know? Oh my god, I was so naïve. Oh Jesus. I don’t know who makes these decisions, but at the very last moment they wouldn’t allow that short film to be shown.

That was when my family found out that I was running the cinema as well. They had no idea. They must have been deeply offended and miffed. I sort of avoided my parents. My parents never told anybody what I was doing. I never talked to them about it explicitly.

Lowell Pickett:

Lou Sher owned the Presidio where we had the Festival. He was interested in distributing all of the films through his company Sherpix. The problem we ran into was that most of the experimental filmmakers thought that they should get the same payments and distribution deal as mainstream directors.

Arlene Elster:

We intended organizing further festivals but none of the filmmakers would let us distribute their films so we never did it again. We just couldn’t make any money on it. But that one International Film Festival was a great success.

*

11. ‘Love, Yolanda’ (1971)

Lowell Pickett:

Charles Webb was an example of a director who got his start with Leo Productions. His background was interesting. He worked for a company in Washington, DC that did political campaign films for Nixon. He was a cinematographer for them. He was southern, bright and pleasant.

Charles Webb (aka Charles De Santos) first used a film camera when he was working on a research degree in psychobiology. After leaving academia he joined a political advertising company. When he tired of the political scene, he moved to San Francisco in 1970, where, among other achievements, he became a prolific cinematographer and director of adult films – starting with ‘Love, Yolanda’.

Lowell Pickett:

Charles heard of us and came over to see us. He directed a few films that came out as Leo Productions. His first was a film called ‘Love, Yolanda‘ (1971).

‘Love, Yolanda’ was a very good film. We found a great mansion as a location and were meant to shoot a wild orgy scene there. However we had difficulties filming it because everybody had been partying and swimming all day and they were too tired for the orgy… As a result no one was able to actually have sex. We ended up adding all the ‘in and out’ scenes at a later time. We had to shoot them a couple days later.

‘Love Yolanda’ was threatened with legal action when the owners of the mansion alleged that they hadn’t known that the film shot there was pornographic.

Lowell Pickett:

If you read the court papers, it was interesting. It talked about all their outrage and everything. But basically it was all about money. They said the picture made so much money solely because we used their house, so they just wanted to get paid more money. It was such a shakedown lawsuit.

*

12. Mary Rexroth

Lowell Pickett:

Mary Rexroth was another actress who worked for us. She was a writer as well, like her father, Kenneth.

Mary Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth (1905 – 1982) was an American poet, and regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Although he didn’t consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the “Father of the Beats” by Time Magazine.

Lowell Pickett:

Mary was extremely bright. Very, very sweet. Sort of a sweet, little child at that time. She was good at acting too, dramatic and very good at improvising. Aside from the films, she did belly dancing in clubs and I think was a sex surrogate at the time too.

After appearing in smaller parts in numerous Leo films, Mary co-directed a film with local writer / photographer, Jann Burner, called ‘Intersection’ (1971). It was heavily promoted in the newspapers – and also by Sutter Cinema who gave it a big premiere.

Jann Burner (director of ‘Intersection’):

I was actually born in the Haight Ashbury area and graduated from SF State after a tour in the Air Force. And when I graduated in 1969, the place I was born was suddenly the center of the world!

I graduated from SF State in their film department (along with the Mitchell Brothers). Unfortunately there were many film graduates and no jobs.  Plus this was when the Affirmative Action program was taking effect so there were even less jobs for white male college graduates. I finally got a part time job at KPIX (CBS television) as a film editor but they couldn’t hire me full time because I was a white male. I met Lowell Pickett at a party one night and he mentioned that he was getting into making XXX films and needed an editor, and would I be interested?

At the time the XXX rated film business was pretty much just loops of women or couples. But Lowell had the idea to do longer, more involved films with dialogue and show them in a place where couples could attend together.  So he ended up hiring about six film makers and the instructions were: “Make the films about whatever you want – but you have to have 30% hard core sex.”

So we began to turn out some really creative little films.

Jann Burner:

I made ‘Intersection’. This was one of Lowell Pickett’s first feature length films. It sort of broke the mold in that it had lots of sex but it was also a little too Ingmar Bergmanesque. It was sort of a thinking person’s porno film and who wants that? So it never got released and I finally sold it to the Mitchell Brothers. They said that it eventually just rotted and they never transferred it to video. So, as far as I know, other than opening night, no one saw it and no copy exists. It did receive quite a bit of publicity though… mainly because Mary’s father was the famous Beat poet.

George McDonald (from his unpublished autobiography ‘A Pound of Flesh’ (1975)):

Mary was San Francisco’s first female porn star. She’d gotten her initial fame when she made a film called ‘Intersection’. It was played up heavy in the papers since she had used her real name, and everyone recognized her as the daughter of philosopher Kenneth Rexroth.

I had picked her up hitchhiking one night and I recognized her from ‘Intersection’. She recognized me from other films so we just went straight back to my apartment and got it on. Mary had a very honest approach to sex and was not only involved in the porn industry but worked as a sex counselor and was active in different sexual freedom organizations. She just plain liked to get it on.

Mary Rexroth (from San Francisco Chronicle, January 1971):

A lot of chicks claim they’re in it for the money. But there are a whole lot of easier ways to make money than that. I generally only make $50 a day.

The reason I do it – the reason a lot of chicks do it – is because I enjoy making the films. It’s a complete sex trip.

Mary Rexroth in ‘Intersection’

Lowell Pickett:

I went out with Mary for about six months, which included a trip to Los Angeles together for an adult film convention down there. After that I remember going to New York and meeting up with the film critic Arthur Knight, who took me to a party of fellow critics. Pauline Kael was there, and I remember she kept asking me all night if I knew the identity of Mary Rexroth’s mother. She seemed fascinated that Rexroth’s daughter had made sex films for us.

Kenneth Rexroth (from San Francisco Chronicle, January 1971):

She is a very good poet and a very good actress. This certainly doesn’t disturb me. This is the way the world is now. There’s no point in saying “let them do what they want to do” – they’ll do what they want to do anyway.

Mary Rexroth (from ‘Sinema’ by Kenneth Turan and Stephen Zito (1974)):

A lot of people have trouble with me. I don’t behave like I’m supposed to behave. Say I’ve been talking to someone for a while, and they’ve established “Well, she’s intelligent and she’s well-read, she’s read Proust twice, my God,” you know, and then you say something about “when I was working for Leo Productions” and they go “AARGH!” because that’s not something somebody like that’s supposed to do. If you’re an intellectual they don’t expect you to be a dirty movie star, that’s very disturbing to some people.

Lowell Pickett:

It was a really big deal that someone with her famous name was making adult films. It brought us a lot of publicity and a certain legitimacy too.

Mary Rexroth

*

13. ‘Cozy Cool’ (1971)

‘Cozy Cool‘ was the biggest budget film made by Leo Productions. It was also the longest shoot. It’s the saga of a flashy character, Cozy Cool, who inherits a crime mini-empire following the death of his father Silvio. Cozy’s right-hand man Mike plots behind his back to sell him out to the rival Vespuccis.

George McDonald (from his unpublished autobiography ‘A Pound of Flesh’ (1975)):

Cozy Cool, or the idea for it, was ripped off from ‘The Godfather‘ (1972), at least in so many words. Francis Coppola was just starting production on ‘The Godfather’ from his San Francisco office at American Zoetrope, and the publicity in the daily papers had given someone at Leo Productions the idea that maybe a porno version of the Mafia would be a hit.

Lowell Pickett:

I typically used my own money to make Leo films, but on ‘Cozy Cool’ I had a financial backer. She used the name Edna Perkins but her real name was Ellen Perkins. She’d inherited the money and she was interested in filmmaking. It was just a one-off for her. It was a more expensive film that the others we made, and that included a couple of trips to New York to try to find distribution for it.

In an attempt to improve the quality of the film, more experienced actors were brought in from Los Angeles – such as Jim Haynie.

Lowell Pickett:

The part of the writer, Clark Kent Rogers, was played by Jim Haynie; he was in quite a few of our films. He went onto Hollywood and was pretty successful. He was in the cop show, Hill Street Blues. He did several hardcore scenes for Leo Productions; he wasn’t very good looking but he did good sex scenes.

George McDonald (from his unpublished autobiography ‘A Pound of Flesh’ (1975)):

This was the first time that legitimate actors had been brought up from L.A. to work on a San Francisco porn feature. I figured that at last someone was trying to do a creditable fuck film.

Much of the film’s sexual content is provided by the amorous and violent adventures of Irma, played to the hilt by Maria Arnold. George McDonald plays a shakedown mob guy, and Mary Rexroth also has a role.

Maria Arnold

Lowell Pickett:

We found the female lead, Maria Arnold, in Los Angeles. She’d had done regular hardcore movies. She stopped doing the hardcore sex scenes half way through ‘Cozy Cool’ because she was having an affair with the sound-man on the movie, Mark Hofherr.

George McDonald (from his unpublished autobiography ‘A Pound of Flesh’ (1975)):

The female lead was a girl named Maria. She had also been brought up from L.A. Her father was an ex-vaudeville performer (or so the press release said) so she had been around acting and entertainment all her life. She hadn’t made the grade yet as a legitimate actress but felt that it was only a matter of time. She thought that porn movies might help her make it a little faster since none of her competition would even think about being in “one of those movies.”

I was glad to hear all of this since I had been predicting for some time that legitimate and hungry actors and actresses would make the jump into sex films as the films became more accepted and started getting more publicity. There seemed to be some truth to what she was saying because after finishing ‘Cozy Cool’ she was featured in articles in both Playboy and Cosmopolitan.

Mary Rexroth (from ‘Sinema’ by Kenneth Turan and Stephen Zito (1974)):

They hired two Hollywood actors. Oh, they were bad. The one guy wouldn’t fuck, and he spent some ten minutes trying to tell me that this was not a dirty movie; this was not a sex film. He said “It’s not, it’s not, it’s different”. Well, the trip was they were paying them union scale. I raised hell. I said, “So, you’re going to pay them union scale and they’re not even going to fuck?”

Lowell Pickett:

I remember ‘Cozy Cool’ very well, because it ended up being rather complicated and it seemed to be a never-ending process to make. We kept altering it after it was completed.

Part of the problem with the film was that three people wrote the screenplay! One was a Stanford film student called Dustin Holmquist. He was the guy who had the original idea and he was in charge of actually filming it.

When we finished it nobody could figure out what was going on, so we tried to find a device to explain the plot to the viewer. We added the character of a reporter that explained the whole thing!

‘Cozy Cool’ was eventually released in different versions, including the currently available ‘…Love You to Death.’

Lowell Pickett:

In the end there was more than one version of the film that came out, as it was re-edited to put in the reporter scene. There wasn’t a huge difference between the two – but I was only involved in the making of the film when it was called ‘Cozy Cool’.  Not that I liked that name however – it wasn’t a very good title as far as I was concerned for getting people interested in the film.

We tried hard to make it a bigger, better picture. We were innovative with the music – instead of using stock music we had a group of musicians playing while watching the film. We did this on several films and it became very effective. After we did it, the Mitchells started doing it as well. If the musicians were good they could liven things up, particularly during the sex scenes, and that was very effective.

*

14. ‘The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd’ (1970-1975)

In 1970, Lowell Pickett was approached about being the subject of a documentary. The resulting film had little to do with Lowell or Leo Productions, but instead was one of the most interesting, prescient and pioneering films of the era.

Gary Indiana (from ‘Inside Agitator’ (1999)):

A guy named Arthur Ginsberg showed up near the end of the Broderick Street era, in late 1969. He’d started a company called Video Free America, which had gotten the first Sony portapaks in the United States. He decided he wanted to shoot an “extended narrative,” a vague project that soon became an endless documentary about Ferd Eggan (director of Leo Productions’ ‘Straight Banana’) and his relationship with a woman named Carel Rowe, filmmaker and former paramour of Lenny Bruce.

Carel Rowe:

Ferd and I met working at Lowell’s. When Arthur Ginsberg’s documentary crew showed up on Lowell’s doorstep to make a documentary, we convinced them to make ‘The Continuing Story of Carel’ and Ferd on the spot instead.

Gary Indiana (from ‘I Can Give You Anything But Love’ (2015)):

Carel wasn’t much older, chronologically, but her weariness suggested she’d survived the Titanic and much else of historical significance. She had the vibe of somebody who’d lived the nightmare in a big, expensive way. Short, wiry limbed, her glossy auburn hair poodled in a perky cut, she seemed implacable enough to launch a military coup in South America.

Carel Rowe

‘The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd’ is a shot-on-portapak diary video directed by Arthur Ginsberg. It was filmed between 1970 and 1975 and follows the lives and marriage of Carel Rowe and Ferd Eggan.

The initial footage that was shot was shown in 1971 as a 3-channel video, 8-monitor installation including live feed of the audience for The Kitchen in New York. By 1975, it consisted of over 30 hours of footage that includes both the film of the marriage and subsequent consummation, as well as footage of Carel and Ferd talking to camera about the events.

Arthur Ginsberg (director):

Carel and Ferd, the ‘stars’ of our underground, video verite’ documentary soap opera, were struggling to escape from their lives and work as pornographic filmmakers for the world renowned Sutter Cinema when we first met. They planned to get married, paying off some debts with one last film – of their wedding night.

Carel said convincingly, “Why don’t you make a tape about the story of our wedding?”

On camera, the two kiss, interrogate one another, banter, argue, and have sex. The camera documents their intimacy as well as interrupts it, as they address the camera directly and answer questions asked by Ginsberg who remains behind the camera.

Arthur Ginsberg (director):

It was an incredible experience. They were witty, completely open, and had a great understanding of the media experience. Time and again in the midst of a heated argument, a heavy emotional moment, or an orgasm, they would turn to the camera and comment – much in the tradition of the Shakespearian aside – on what was happening psychologically or offer some insight into the media process that was occurring.

‘The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd’ questions reality and freedom, and the camera allows for Carel and Ferd to take on personas that are more exaggerated than their real selves.

It is often classified as cinéma vérité – but a strong case can also be made that it is the first example of reality television.

Carel Rowe:

In ‘Carel and Ferd’ there are many scenes that show Lowell’s production set-up in San Francisco and the participant’s commentaries about it.

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15. Distributing Leo Productions

Lowell Pickett:

When it came to nationwide distribution of all the films that had been made under the Leo banner, I worked with Stanley Borden in New York. I first met Stan in a film lab, Pacific Film Lab, which was owned by a guy named Burton Steiger. He was processing a lot of porn films for different people. He also did newsreel.

Stan was a really nice guy. One of the first films he bought was ‘Oona’. He was going to blow it up to 35mm, but I don’t know what happened to it after that. After that he bought just about everything that I had.

On my first trip to New York, I ended up going to about 10 different theaters all showing my films, which was sort of neat. This was in the early 1970s.

Stan’s wife Lorraine had an advertising agency called ‘Great Scott’. She did some of the ads for our films and many were very effective.

Stan had a large distribution operation. I once went by one of his offices and he must have had up to 50 people working there. He also had some connections to the mob. I knew that. He was a larger-than-life character.

One day Stan told me to be at his office by four o’ clock. I got there and there was a girl there that gave each of us a blowjob. That was what it was like being in business with Stan.

As for my other contacts around the country for distribution, there was a guy named Crosby in Indianapolis who had a couple of theaters there that I sold quite a bit of film to. One of his accountants ran off with a bunch of his money but he ended up paying me all the money he owed me when he got it back.

I also met Harry Mohney when he was first starting out. He started out in sex shops and I sold a lot of product to them.

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16. ‘Aphrodisiac’ (1972)

Lowell Pickett:

After ‘Deep Throat‘ came out in 1972, the mob thought that every film could become another ‘Deep Throat’ and they could make all kinds of money. I had just released a new film. It was a film which featured an orange that was injected with an aphrodisiac. So all these people had some of this aphrodisiac. That’s basically the plot of it. We made that film twice – once with Charles Webb as director.

Then I got a call from somebody who said that the guys behind ‘Deep Throat’ wanted to distribute this film for me. I knew that that would be a disaster because I wouldn’t see any money. Stan had already told me what happened to the people who made Deep Throat. He told me not to get involved with them.

I ended up suggesting that I’d sell them the film for $100,000. They flew me to the Bahamas where their contact man was named DeFlavio, I think. We ended up haggling back and forth. Finally they gave me $75,000 cash. They told me how to put it into a Bahamas bank and then how to get it back into the United States in a month. They told me to bring it back in amounts under $10,000 so as not to arouse suspicions.

I had another guy with me named Arthur Chang who was an associate of Charles Webb. He was working in the city of Monterey as a city planner then he ended up in the film business. We were partners for a short while and he had some experience with finance. He figured that $10,000 would fit in our pockets. So we carried $9,500 each on our flights back. We did that a few times until we got the money out of there.

I don’t know what happened to that film. I never heard anything about it after that.

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17. Arlene Elster and the Sutter Cinema – The Legal Issues pile up

Lowell Pickett:

Arlene faced many more legal battles than me, because the authorities would generally go after the exhibitors not the filmmakers. So Arlene faced constant battles with the city. She got arrested many times and a few of the cases dragged out for years.

Arlene Elster:

I was making lots of money from the theater, but we weren’t netting much because $1,000 a week went to the lease and then there were the lawyers… I started getting arrested pretty much all the time.

This was the era of Dianne Feinstein and she was always trying to shut us down.

Dianne Feinstein began her political career as a concerned housewife and crusader against the smut-ification of San Francisco. In 1969, Feinstein was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and she remained on the Board for nine years. She served as 38th Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988, and has been elected to the Senate since 1992.

Arlene Elster:

I never liked her because she used adult cinemas as a political stepping-stone for her own career. I couldn’t see that there was any other reason.

I was never really afraid that I might go to jail. San Francisco was too liberal. For a start, I was being arrested on misdemeanor charges. Artie and Jim Mitchell were also being arrested for the same thing. The main one was 311.2.

California Penal Code Section 311.2(a): Every person who knowingly sends or causes to be sent, or brings or causes to be brought, into this state for sale or distribution, or in this state possesses, prepares, publishes, produces, or prints, with intent to distribute or to exhibit to others, or who offers to distribute, distributes, or exhibits to others, any obscene matter is for a first offense, guilty of a misdemeanor.

Arlene Elster:

After a while it became exhausting because I was spending all my time defending the Sutter Cinema, and I was doing it all by myself.

In early 1971, Arlene was charged with exhibiting obscene matter after the Sutter Cinema showed an erotic animated feature.

To make matters worse, in January 1971 a new ordinance in San Francisco had given the police power to refuse a license to any theater operator who had been convicted of distribution of obscene matter.

This meant if Arlene lost the case, she would also be put out of business as soon as her license came up for renewal.

Arlene Elster:

My big trial came up – and I would have been better off breaking my leg rather than going to that trial… We had a woman judge… what was her name? It was her first trial… and the case also had a woman lawyer and I was a woman defendant. And it was still a disaster!

The big issue was that I was not allowed expert testimony.

We had Walter Lantz lined up to speak. Walter Lantz drew the original Woody Woodpecker. He was one of the guys who drew the animated cartoon ‘Eveready Harton’ that we were busted for showing!

‘Eveready Harton’ (aka ‘Buried Treasure’) is an animated short – and considered perhaps the earliest example of a pornographic cartoon made in the US. It was supposedly made in New York in the late 1920s by three studios. Each one drew a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Walter Lantz was the illustrator for one of the studios.

‘Eveready Harton’ (aka ‘Buried Treasure’)

Arlene Elster:

‘Eveready Harton’ was very funny. A little animated guy with a penis so large he had to have a wheelbarrow to carry it around. He got into all sorts of trouble. It was just a hysterical little thing. Anyway Walter Lantz was not allowed at my trial.

I also wanted Arthur Knight, who was the film critic for the L.A. Times, but he wasn’t allowed to testify either. And Dr. Jay Mann, who was a doctor who had been a part of the President’s Report on the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, was prevented from testifying too!

In 1969 the United States Congress funded the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography.

The Commission’s report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.

Arlene Elster:

Oh my god, that report was my Bible. I’m looking at a copy I have here. I’ve literally worn it out. I used the findings from it all the time to defend myself!

Arlene was convicted when a jury voted 11 to 1 against her.

Arlene Elster:

So I lost the trial. I faced six months in jail and a fine of $1,000. And I would lose my theater license.

My lawyer said, “Well, we’re going to appeal it.” We did appeal it to the state and it ended up going to the Supreme Court. The original decision was vacated and the case was remanded to the 9th Circuit. Although I ended up having to pay a $1,000 fine, everything had changed.

It was an important victory for us all. I was able to stay in business – which was huge. That didn’t stop the police harassment though…

Arlene Elster (from The Night Times, February 1972):

I feel as innocent as a new-born lamb about my theater. I have no guilt whatsoever about doing any harm to society, and yet I have to go through these ritualistic arrests.

The cop’s tactics seem rather desperate for a crime that doesn’t cause any danger to anyone. Actually the cops come in rather sheepishly and say. “Well Arlene, heh-heh, we have to arrest you.” It’s an “I’m just doing my job” deal.

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18. The Birth of Artaur Ego

Lowell Pickett (right):

I came across Reuben Sturman who was based in Cleveland. He had a fellow that was in charge of his film business called Bob Dolan. They wanted me to make films for them, so I ended up doing a total of about ten films for their company.

I did a lot of vignettes for them. The films I made for them were made using the name ‘Artaur Ego’ or ‘Howard North’ or a few other names. The production company Reuben and Bob set up for this was called Evelc Productions – which was ‘Cleve’ spelt backwards.

These were films like ‘Final Blow‘, ‘Erotic Fortune Cookies‘, and ‘House of Kinky Pleasures‘. The first one I made for them was ‘The The First Time I Ever…‘

At that time there was a book out called ‘My First Time’, which consisted of interviews with prominent people and stars, so I based it on that.

The film was a Leo Production in that I made it with my equipment, even though Reuben put up the money.

John Seeman is in it and he’s great. There’s a scene that John does that comes as close as possible to the old (improvisational comedy duo act) Mike Nichols and Elaine May routines. John Seeman was probably one of the better actors around. One of the brighter people too. I liked working with guys like him and Ken Scudder.

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19. ‘Erotic Fortune Cookies’ (1975)

Lowell Pickett:

‘The Erotic Fortune Cookies‘ was based on a movie that Jack Lemmon made in 1966 called ‘The Fortune Cookie‘. They shot it in San Francisco and it was a very popular movie at the time.

In ‘The Erotic Fortune Cookies’, I used an actress named Dory Devon. She was an interesting girl who was a musician and music major. Her father was a professor of astronomy at Cal Berkeley, but somehow she ended up in New York doing some off-Broadway acting there. She became friends with Stanley Borden and he put her up at the Paramount Hotel for a year, which is where Stan had his offices. She said there was nothing going on between them – who knows? But she lived there rent-free for a year. I started seeing her off and on for six months or so.

I also cast this Chinese man, Edsel Fong in the film. He was a Chinese waiter in real life and was often called the “world’s rudest, worst, most insulting waiter”. He worked at the Sam Wo restaurant. He was a well-known San Francisco character that was always getting written up in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Edsel was a person who would never shut up. I think we even filmed once or twice at the restaurant. He ended up financing a couple of my films as well.

The camera operator on Erotic Fortune Cookies was a guy called Ken Blakey who worked a fair amount on adult films in San Francisco, and went on to quite a long career in Hollywood as a cinematographer.

*

20. ‘Rendezvous with Anne’ (1976)

Lowell Pickett:

‘Rendezvous with Anne‘ was the last big Leo production. It was probably the closest we came doing an ideal film. The budget was about $25,000. That came from the Mafia money that I brought back from the Bahamas.

There were a number of good dramatic scenes in it. It was a takeoff on ‘A Street Car Named Desire’. The plot is about three women who get paged at the airport, all with the name of Anne. Each of them answer… and the movie is about what happens to them. The script was co-written with Wynne Mason. She’d just graduated from to the University of California.

I wanted to choose three unknown actresses for the parts of Anne. We advertised the casting calls in the Berkeley Barb. One of the girls was called Keri Carpenter. She had a background in gymnastics. She’d been working in a massage parlor in Berkeley. That’s the way I actually met her. That was quite a scene at the time for young girls who didn’t have much money. They would work in the massage parlor scene in Berkeley. They were often living in communes and places like that.

Then there was Cazander Zim. I was involved with her for a couple months after the film. She had a child, and the two were living in Marin County. She also was involved with a black poet who was fairly well known.

The third girl in ‘Rendezvous with Anne’, Lisa Troy, was interesting. She ended up marrying a major league baseball pitcher. They were married and had three or four kids. Her real name was Lisa Pritchett. I became friends with her sister who was a musician that stayed in Berkeley. She played in a rock and roll band. She was featured in a couple PBS features about garage bands.

In ‘Rendezvous with Anne’, there was a ‘special thanks’ credit to somebody called Margaret Evans. This was Maggi Rubenstein, who was involved in the sex information scene in and around San Francisco at the time. They had a hotline where people could call. She helped us in having a grand opening for the film.

Arthur Knight, who had been a judge at our erotic festival in 1970, started asking me to deliver lectures to USC students, a pretty large group each time. One of the films I always showed was ‘Rendezvous with Anne’.

His point to the students was that anyone could go out and make a film. He wanted to show that filmmakers don’t have to raise millions of dollars. They could get started this way. The response from the students was very good. A lot of them had good questions. Nobody walked out. Nobody really asked any kind of embarrassing questions or anything like that. They were a well-mannered group.

Arthur was very helpful with ideas, and gave us some good reviews we used in the publicity for the films.

*

21. The End of Leo Productions

Lowell Pickett:

I probably made over 20 Leo films – plus the 10 that were done for Reuben.

I decided to stop making films, but then I made one last film after I’d been out of it for a couple of years for a doctor in Lorain County. This doctor ran a bunch of quick weight loss clinics and put up the money for a film and he produced it. His name was not on the film. I don’t know whatever happened to it but it turned out to be a fairly good film.

Basically I started running out of money. If the last film with the doctor had been more successful maybe I’d have continued but it was getting more difficult for me to continue with the business model I had – which was financing everything, and making the films as well.

I ended up selling all the rights to somebody and I can’t even remember who or what that was…

*

22. The End of the Sutter Cinema

Arlene Elster:

I met some interesting people managing the Sutter Cinema. There was an organization called COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), started by Margo St. James, which advocated the decriminalization of prostitution. I just adored Margo St. James. She lived out in this wonderful place in Mill Valley.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to know other people like Mary Rexroth better. Some of the people that were in the films were really quite interesting. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I was always quite responsible about wanting to earn a living rather than be one of these people. I wanted to make sure that I was providing for myself. I wasn’t political or an activist, I saw myself as a business owner. And I wanted the product – the films – to be better. So I saw the court cases as a necessary evil to go through.

But the big problem was that interstate distribution was still illegal. This meant that the possibilities for erotic filmmakers to distribute their films were dramatically reduced. If you can’t distribute a film across a state line, you’re not going to find filmmakers interested in doing it, not ones that are legitimate filmmakers. It left the industry to the people that were willing to deal in… I shall call it trash and gutter porn, people willing to deal in the fringes of the law. I wasn’t willing to go there. I wasn’t willing to go the Jerry Abrams route. Or the Artie and Jim Mitchell route. What did they care? They didn’t share my principles and vision for a better industry. So the films just got sleazier and sleazier and sleazier. I got out of the industry after that. I wasn’t interested.

Ultimately the films just didn’t turn into the art that I hoped for at the beginning. The vision never materialized. So I got out.

From 1975 to 1976 Arlene sublet the cinema and it was used as a strip club. The cinema closed shortly after.

Arlene Elster:

I turned over my lease to John Kennelly and he took over the property from there. They were doing this live sex show thing at that point. Which I definitely didn’t want to be any part of. It just wasn’t me, not my thing.

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23. Where Are They Now?

Arlene Elster:

I opened up a plant nursery. I moved to Sonoma County and had a wholesale plant nursery for almost 20 years. I definitely moved on. I didn’t look back.

I never heard from Lowell after I moved out of town. You know, I’ve got a phone number for him. I thought maybe I’ll try calling him again some time.

Lowell Pickett:

After I got out of films, I started a small business helping others secure financing through government loans. After that I got married and my wife and I went into the catering business. We then started a business making dog treats. I sold the business when I retired and settled down in Cincinnati.

I’m always interested in hearing from anyone from the old film days. If they want to contact me, they can reach me via my email: topdog3647@icloud.com.

In 1983, Jeffery Poland, founder of the Sexual Freedom League, was charged with child molestation. Apparently, in 1980 a nudist couple had entrusted Poland with the care of their daughter while they were attending a swinger party while nude sunbathing on Black’s Beach in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego. The couple’s daughter accused Poland of having performed oral sex on her while her parents were away.

Poland fled the country and he lived for five years as a fugitive in Australia. In 1988, he was extradited back to the U.S. By that time he had changed his name legally to ‘Clit-lick.’ He pleaded guilty to a ‘lewd or lascivious act with a child,’ a felony. He served nine months in San Diego County Jail. Upon his release, he returned to live in San Francisco, where he is monitored as a registered sex offender.

Ferd Eggan, director of ‘Straight Banana‘, became a writer, activist, teacher, and tireless advocate for people with HIV/AIDS. Eggan was the Los Angeles’ AIDS coordinator, a position created in 1989 by then-Mayor Tom Bradley to spearhead the development of a comprehensive local approach to combating the spread of AIDS. Ferd was appointed to the position in 1993 and served until 2001, when he became too ill to continue in the job.

He died in 2007 in Los Angeles, aged 60, after a six-month bout with liver cancer, complicated by HIV and hepatitis C infections.

Carel Rowe went to graduate school at Northwestern and her dissertation was published as a key book on early New American Cinema: ‘The Baudelairean Cinema : A Trend Within The American Avant-Garde’ (1982). Since then she has made a series of documentaries, including an update to ‘The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd’ shot shortly before Ferd’s death called ‘Ferdish’.

Gary Indiana recently published his excellent memoir, ‘I Can Give You Anything But Love’.

George McDonald is still living in Sausalito just minutes away from where the opening scene of ‘Behind the Green Door’ (1972) was shot. He was recently interviewed by The Rialto Report.

Mary Rexroth still lives in San Francisco. In 2012, she retired from a successful career in consumer protection in financial services.

Jann Burner is a published author; one of his books called ‘Motor Zen‘ is about his experience driving a taxi on the night shift in San Francisco.

Bonnie (aka Grinda Pupic), star of ‘Straight Banana‘, became a nurse and moved to New York. (She was part of the psychiatric team caring for Truman Capote in his later years.) She returned to her home town of St. Louis where she maintained an interest in the arts, dabbling in singing and writing.

In her 40s, Bonnie had breast reduction surgery and liposuction. As a result of these operations, she contracted a Staph infection and passed away shortly afterwards. Her son, who she never knew, has carefully researched Bonnie’s life with the idea that the story may be published one day as a book, ‘Discovering Bonnie.’

The building that once housed the Sutter Cinema still stands today. The cinema space is now occupied by a graphic design company. The Rialto Report visited it in the summer of 2015, and took the following photographs:

The building that once housed the Sutter Cinema

Stairs up to the former Sutter Cinema

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The post Leo Productions and the Sutter Cinema:
The Untold Story of Lowell Pickett and Arlene Elster (Pt. 2) appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Our interview with Constance Money, star of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, was recently selected by NPR to launch their new podcast discovery app, Earbud.fm.

You can listen to the episode – Constance Money: The Re-opening of Misty Beethoven. And her father – here.

And you can visit Earbud.fm here.

Thnaks to listener Anthony Nesbitt, who nominated us!

The post NPR selects our Constance Money podcast appeared first on The Rialto Report.

April Hall of The Rialto Report writes:

Aaah… Billy Dee. It’s complicated.

I’d wanted to contact him for years. But accurate information about him was just difficult to find.

He was one of my favorite porn actors – who got started in the golden age of adult films in the 1970s and survived into the video era of the 1980s.

I heard he’d served in the armed forces during the Viet Nam years, or that he’d done time in prison for drugs. Some said he’d taught tennis at a nudist camp, but others remembered him having his own successful male stripping group before The Chippendales were famous. People couldn’t even agree on his race – was he black or mixed race?

And some said he’d left adult films to attend Bible College. He’d become a preacher, a Southern fire and brimstone evangelist, who shunned his porn past and wouldn’t welcome anyone asking about it. And so no one had heard of him since then.

I looked for him everywhere and eventually managed to reach him last year. The thing is I didn’t get a reply back from him until just a few weeks ago. It turned out that he was wary about talking about his career in adult films. He explained that when he stopped making films, he made sure that he really disappeared. Even his partner, actress Nikki Knights, didn’t know where he’d gone.

In the end Billy Dee agreed to talk. And it turns out he’s a salesman living in Scotland.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

April Hall interviews Billy Dee in this special extended edition of The Rialto Report.

This episode’s running time is 134 minutes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Billy Dee – Yesterday and Today

The post Billy Dee: Porn Again Christian
Podcast 56 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Many interviews that have appeared on The Rialto Report have featured people’s fond memories of Shauna Grant. From Richard Pacheco to Roberta Findlay, Billy Dee and many others, people who knew Shauna have spoken about their friendship with her – remembering her wholesome, “girl next door” looks, her fragility, but most of all her sweet and trusting nature.

In 1982, Shauna (born Colleen Applegate) ran away from her small home town in Minnesota with her high school boyfriend. After responding to an ad for Jim South‘s World Modeling, she proceeded to appear in over 30 pornographic films. She was young and insecure and soon developed a drug problem. Tragically, despite the efforts of several people close to her, Shauna killed herself in March 1984.

In this Rialto Report, we present a series of rare and previously unpublished photos of Shauna Grant from various private collections.

As a counterpoint to these pictures, we also re-visit the ‘Frontline‘ documentary on Shauna Grant’s life called ‘Death Of A Porn Queen‘ by re-printing a transcript of the documentary together with screenshots from the program itself.

It was first aired in 1987 three years after her passing, and was one of the first sensationalist exposés of the adult film industry to appear on network television.

Reviews of it were good – the Los Angeles Times described its “sensational storytelling” and praised the “enormously compelling” story told “simply, movingly, effectively and unsensationally.”

Viewed almost 30 years later however, a viewer might feel rather differently. Today it comes across as one of the sensationalist and voyeuristic ‘porn-is-the-problem’ documentaries that fit the Reagan-era neo-puritanism agenda well.

Perhaps an early warning sign was when the network executives changed the name of the original program, ‘Death of an American Girl’, to ‘Death of a Porn Queen’. The filmmakers had nailed their colors to the mast.

An over-the-top voiceover talks of the manipulative nature of the industry. Leading questions solemnly lead the witnesses. Subjects, who are often filmed in grave lighting, are chosen and edited to fit the anti-porn agenda.

In short, the adult film industry of the mid 1980s does not come across well.

Despite these drawbacks, the film is still valuable – in part because it speaks to many of the major players in the story shortly after the events, when the after-effects were still fresh in people’s minds.

This cast of characters includes Bobby Hollander (perhaps the person who emerges least well from this endeavor), Jim South, Jerry Butler, Danielle, Laurie Smith, Jeannette Littledove, as well as several family members and friends of Shauna.

We re-present the transcript of the documentary here to allow you to draw your own conclusions.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shauna Grant: Rare and Unpublished Photos

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Shauna Grant: Death of a Porn Queen (1987)

Voice-over:

Tonight on Frontline. She went to Hollywood…

Background male voice:                

Just start to bring your jeans down a little bit.

Background male voice:                

You look like a million, Colleen.

Voice-over:     

…and ended up in a nightmare.

Background male voice:                

You look fabulous.

Background female voice:           

Colleen Applegate does not like doing sex on film.

Background male voice:                

Terrific!

Background female voice:           

She hated it.

Voice-over:       

A small town girl…

Background male voice:                

Like she just came right off the farm.

Background male voice:               

She looked like peaches and cream.

Voice-over:     

…who killed herself. Tonight on Frontline…

Background male voice:                

Great, take the picture!

Voice-over:          

…Death of a Porn Queen.

*

Voice-over:         

This is where the story ends, Palm Springs, California early in the evening, March 21, 1984. A young woman lay thrashing on her bed with a bullet wound through her temple. A rifle lay beside her.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

I went over to her and she was laying… There was like two mattresses pushed together on the bed and there was a crease and there’s blood going all the way down the crease but you couldn’t see any blood on her and… (breaks down crying)

Unidentified doctor:      

Her condition was helpless, she was comatose and she was going to die.

Police Officer (in police depot):

Could I have the gun on the Applegate shooting please?

(Brings over a large gun.)

Okay, this is the weapon that was found at her side.

Interviewer:      

How do you think she shot herself?

Police Officer (holds gun to temple):

She would have been laying down on the bed, with a gun on the bed or propped on her arm, possibly with her thumb or other finger to the gun and the bullet would have passed through her head and into the wall where we found it.

Voice-over:        

She was known as Shauna Grant, a star of X-rated films. Her real name was Colleen Applegate from Farmington, Minnesota. She left home when she was 18. When she died, she was 20.

(Interviewer walks through a gate into an apartment complex.)

Voice-over:      

Colleen lived here for a while, an apartment house near Hollywood. In the spring of 1983, a few months before her death, she suddenly moved out.

Interviewer (speaking to a neighbor in the apartment complex):

I wonder if she left anything here?

Ex-neighbor of Colleen:                 

Yeah. I have some things that I was to send to her mother but I never did. You’re welcome to them.

(Neighbor shows a pile of papers, records, and photographs.)

Ex-neighbor of Colleen:

Pictures and terrible books, just a lot of pictures. She was very pretty.

(Interviewer pulls out a heads shot of Colleen.)

Interviewer:      

That’s a beautiful picture.

Ex-neighbor of Colleen:         

Yeah.

Interviewer:      

Is that what she looked like?

Ex-neighbor of Colleen:              

Yeah. Her hair was long, a little longer than shoulder length, blonde like strawberry blonde, very pretty. And these are just, I guess, her high school things.

Interviewer:      

Diploma?

Ex-neighbor of Colleen:                

Yeah, diploma, letters, school letters. I guess they’re for cheerleading.

(Interviewer is shown by himself leafing through a stack of Colleen’s documents.)

Voice-over:         

High school diploma, old snapshots and Valentines, her confirmation certificate from the Catholic Church. And a copy of Hustler magazine with her picture on the cover. These are like the belongings of two people as though Shauna Grant had kept Colleen Applegate’s things, dragged them with her from place to place and finally left them behind.

When did one person become the other? How does an ordinary small town girl like Colleen become a Hollywood porn queen? Then what happened to her? She shot herself, but why? How did she get so far from home?

*

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She was an everyday girl just like everybody else. She was in cheerleading, I was in cheerleading.

Voice-over:

Teresa was one of Colleen’s closest friends from the 6th grade on.

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She always appeared happier than she was. I remember that she was so unpredictable and you never really knew what she was thinking. You never knew what she was going to do next unless she shared it with you.

Phil (Colleen’s father):

Colleen was… She was more private, or more inside of herself I think, than our other kids have been.

Voice-over:

Colleen Applegate’s parents Phil and Karen still live in southern Minnesota. Recently, they divorced.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

I was very strict with Colleen. To me, right is right and wrong is wrong. It still is… but as long as it doesn’t go too wrong, they’re going to do what they want to do anyway.

Phil (Colleen’s father):

I maybe tried to run the house, or I tried to run a house like you do a business and really, that isn’t a good way to run a house sometimes. Maybe I come off that way, but I learned over the years too.

I think when she was going to high school, when she was in… I expected certain things. I realize I was a tough father, I wasn’t an easy father – and I don’t know whether that was a mistake or not because I was just as tough on the other kids too.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

She was the oldest of five but there was nothing strange or abnormal about her childhood. It was a very obvious childhood. She would love to read, she used to write poems. She wasn’t much of a housecleaner but she loved to cook. Our relationship with Colleen was fine until her junior and senior year and then we had a lot of arguments.

Voice-over:

At about that time, she began to date a boy names Mike Marcell who was 2 years older.

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She started liking boys and showing it and she knew that she could get almost anyone she wanted to. I think that’s when she started liking boys.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend) (looking through a high school year book):

Is this her graduation year, Colleen?

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Yeah, because it’s ’81.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Yeah. Okay, this is the year we graduated and she wrote on the back page, “Brenda, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

Voice-over:

Two of Colleen’s oldest friends live now in southern California, Brenda Rosenow and Colleen Hare. They grew up with her, both went to California at about the same time she did and stayed in touch with her to the end.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend) (reading from high school yearbook):

“No matter how far we are apart, we’ll always be close at heart and we’ll always keep in touch even if one of us ends up in dumb fuck Egypt, but anyway, I think I’ve used up enough space. Be good Brenda, keep smiling and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Love, Leena.”

God, it’s been a long time since I read that.

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

I think she was a little bit different. She had different ideas, I think, than everybody else. She had these dreams of what she wanted to do and she wanted to be a model. Back then, we didn’t really have set dreams or goals – and she did.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

It was small town, only a population of, what was it, 4,800 people at the time?

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Yeah and now, it’s even less. It’s a small town.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Everybody knew what you were doing before you did it, and there was never really anything to do.

Voice-over:

Colleen stayed in Farmington a while after high school working first as a cashier then as an employee of the telephone company.

There, one night in December, she swallowed a bottle of pills. She was rushed her to the hospital.

Phil (Colleen’s father):

We took her to the emergency and they pumped her stomach. It was basically… that it wasn’t so much that she wanted to kill herself as it was that she wanted some attention. And she thought that was a way of getting it.

Interviewer:

Did you and Colleen ever talk about it?

Phil (Colleen’s father):

No. To be honest, no – I don’t think we did. I don’t think we really sat down and talked about it. We went to the counselor with her as a family.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

They had one group session with the whole family. All of us were in there and they tried to get us to talk and of course, we’re all sitting there looking at each other and nobody is saying much.

I was very angry because I still don’t feel she took that because… of physical… although maybe it was… maybe that was the beginning sign and I didn’t know it… of a problem. I thought she did it for attention.

After she took the pills, living in a small town can really be the pits sometimes. A lot of people were talking about it and a lot of people were on her case. She wanted to get out of here.

Voice-over:

Colleen and her boyfriend Mike Marcell headed west.

Interviewer:

Why do you think she went to California?

Phil (Colleen’s father):

To be somebody.

Voice-over:

Los Angeles that first spring was no more fertile ground for Colleen’s vague ambitions than Farmington, Minnesota had been.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

All I know was that I had talked to her a couple of times and neither one of them was having good luck finding a job. Mike was getting real upset and he wanted her to find a job because he couldn’t get a job. He found… From what she told me, he’s the one that found that ad for modeling.

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

It was just in the newspaper.

*

Jim South (owner of World Modeling) (speaking on the phone):

It’s a two girls, one guy simulation. Yeah, there’s no colored guys, hello? Okay, he needs you at 10am Friday.

Voice-over:

This is the man Colleen went to see in the spring of 1982. His name is Jim South.

Jim South (owner of World Modeling) (speaking on the phone):

Have you got a pencil, and can you write this early in the morning?

Voice-over:

He runs an agency called World Modeling.

Jim South (owner of World Modeling) (speaking on the phone):

What we do is that we’re licensed to get you work with professional photographers. The majority of work that we get is nude photographic modeling. The pay does run from $100 a day up to $1,500 a day depending on who’s shooting you.

Jim South (owner of World Modeling) (interviewing a prospective female performer called Kim):

Now, the 2 different type of shootings we have, we have single girl, you modeling alone like you see in Penthouse. We also have simulation, you lucky devil.

Voice-over:

A documentary crew led by Wendy Apple shot these scenes of South as he interviewed a new model named Kim.

Jim South (owner of World Modeling) (interviewing a prospective female performer called Kim):

You are touching, you do like you’re doing something but you’re not.

Wendy Apple:

Jim South is indeed an agent.

Voice-over:

Apple was making a film entitled ‘Fallen Angels’.

Wendy Apple:

He is absolutely the medium, the way in which girls who know nothing about Hollywood or movies or pornography come into the porno industry. They have to pass through him, they don’t have to, but that’s the way his business is set up.

Jim South (preparing to take a Polaroid of Kim, a nude model):

Give me a shot of you standing close to the stool with your right foot on the bottom ledge…

Wendy Apple:

He said that he could get new girls work very fast. There’s always a job for a new girl.

Jim South:

…I’ll be right over there, taking the Polaroid, okay?

Kim (nude model auditioning):

Okay.

Jim South (behind the camera):

Thank you. Hi, now twist a little bit more around…

Voice-over:

South showed his Polaroids of Colleen Applegate to Penthouse photographer Steve Hicks.

Steve Hicks (Penthouse photographer):

I don’t equate what I do with X-rated films whatsoever. What I do is I photograph women in an attempt to create beauty out of their bodies.

Colleen was a beautiful girl and I think very unaware of it. She was the type of girl who once she walked in, she’d look in many ways like she just came right off the farm, but in makeup, she was a very beautiful girl and she really took to modeling quickly.

It’s unfortunate that Mother Nature put 18 year old girls on this planet with beautiful bodies. Because the mind of a typical 18 year old girl is not prepared to make the right decisions in this town with these opportunities.

Voice-over:

Hicks advised Colleen to get out of nude modeling quickly because it leads downhill. After all the magazines have used her, the only thing left is X-rated movies.

She ignored the advice and soon was posing for raunchier magazines.

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She invited us out so we went to her house for the weekend and…

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

That’s the first time we saw the pictures and all that.

Interviewer:

What sort of pictures were they?

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Shocking pictures. We didn’t expect… we didn’t know. When she said modeling and then she finally told us it was nude, well… you think of maybe Playboy… and then the pictures we saw though were like from…

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

More hardcore type pictures.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Yeah, Erotica and what’s that other magazine? Velvet, stuff like that. And then she just had the Polaroids, the instant pictures of her and some guys… (laughs). She pulled them out, started showing them us and we just looked at each other. Our mouths were like down to our knees.

She didn’t explain. She’d been covering up. She didn’t come right out and say, “Well, I was doing this with this guy and I did this with this girl.” You could tell she felt bad because she wouldn’t tell us the whole story. And then it even went as far as her trying to convince us to do it with her.

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

So it wouldn’t be as bad.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Yeah.

Interviewer:

What would she say to do that?

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She had an appointment set up with her manager for us…

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

…for me and her…

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

…to go in, and the whole bit, and we’re just like, “Well, I don’t think so.”

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She said it’s easy and…

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She’s… “Well, just go talk to him. It’s good money, you can just do it like on the weekends, come out here and you don’t have to take your clothes off if you don’t want to and…”

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

…seeing the pictures, you knew you would have to take your clothes off.

Interviewer:

How important do you think it was to Colleen that you approved of what she was doing?

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

I think it was very important to her.

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Very important to her.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

Because I think she knew that nobody that was in her life before did approve.

Steve Hicks (Penthouse photographer):

You take a typical girl that’s used to working at McDonald’s or in a shoe store making a minimum wage and suddenly, she’s given the opportunity to get made up and be in front of people that tell her she’s beautiful and make as much money in a day than she was making in 3 weeks. They change and that’s sad.

*

Voice-over:

Mike Marcell, Colleen’s boyfriend soon left her and returned to Minnesota where he spread the news that Colleen was involved in pornography. Marcell won’t discuss it now. He says he just doesn’t care about her. The Applegates heard the stories about her daughter and flew at once to Los Angeles.

Phil (Colleen’s father):

We knew that she was working through this World Model Agency so we went up to the offices up there and saw Jim South and saw what was going on. We asked if Colleen worked for him and he said yes, and then he said, “Well, she’s right in here,” and he threw this book at us. He opened it up and there was nude photographs of Colleen among other girls and I guess you could come in and pick who you wanted to model for you. That’s how they… And we said, “How can you let an 18 year old girls involved in this?” “Well, she’s 18 and she’s of age and consent,” and blah, blah, blah.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

They wanted her to come home and they were ordering her… giving her no choice which I think was a mistake – because she didn’t listen to them in high school, why would she listen now?

Interviewer:

Did that cause a rift between you?

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

Yes. I didn’t hear from her for, it seemed like an eternity, but it was probably two months… didn’t hear a word and I didn’t know where to call her. We left there and then. All the way home, I kept saying, “Why did we do that? We could have found out where she was living, found some…” I didn’t know how to find her.

Jim South (speaking on the phone with Colleen sat across from him in his office):

Okay. I’m at 4523 Van Nuys, Boulevard. Now it is a small office building, it’s suite 203…

Voice-over:

By this time, Colleen had posed for almost every men’s magazine.

Jim South (speaking on the phone with Colleen sat across from him in his office):

Could you come in tomorrow? Well, what’s convenient for you?

(Camera close up on Colleen’s face as she waits for Jim South to finish speaking on the phone.)

Voice-over:

Producer Wendy Apple happened to filming in Jim South’s office when Colleen dropped in.

Jim South:

“1:30, that’s when I get back from lunch. Okay, have a good time and I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.”

(Addresses Colleen) Okay, well you and I are going to undress (they laugh) and we’re… You don’t have enough money. Just be nice.

Colleen Applegate:

Who doesn’t have enough money? You don’t have enough money.

(Phone rings.)

Jim South (answers phone):

World Modeling. Okay, what’s the name of the paper, please, you saw the ad in?

(Camera close up on Colleen’s face as she waits for Jim South to finish speaking on the phone.)

Voice-over:

Colleen was in South’s office again when an adult film director named Bobby Hollander came in looking for actresses for his next film.

Bobby Hollander:

I wanted to use new girls who were just making the turn over. I didn’t want to use a first timer and Colleen had done a piece prior to the Paper Dolls, just one. We sat and talked and she was wearing jeans, no shoes and a sweatshirt, and sitting on a tabletop. I just got good vibes from her and she received good vibes from me.

I said, “This is going to be easy. It’s all a matter of dollars and cents now.”

She said, “Well, I don’t know about that.”

I said, “Well, what you don’t know about? Don’t be ashamed to ask me because I like you. I don’t want to take you to bed. Let’s be friends.”

In this business, she felt, “Wow! There’s somebody that doesn’t want to grab me.” I’ve been in this a while. Those days, they’ve passed me already. You don’t have to sleep with anyone to get in the film. You have to sleep with them on the film.

*

Bobby Hollander (interviewing Colleen Applegate poolside on an adult film set):

Shauna, how old are you?

Colleen Applegate:

I’ll be 20 in a week.

Bobby Hollander:

You’ll be 20 in a week.

Colleen Applegate:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bobby Hollander:

I thought you’re going to be 19.

Colleen Applegate:

No. I am 19. I’ll be 20.

Bobby Hollander:

Oh, and how long have you been a Paper Doll?

Colleen Applegate:

A Paper Doll?

Bobby Hollander:

A model, a cover girl, a centerfold.

Colleen Applegate:

About two months.

Bobby Hollander:

Two months.

Colleen Applegate:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Bobby Hollander:

Did anybody twist your arm to get into the business?

Colleen Applegate:

No, not at all. It was all my idea.

Bobby Hollander:

Really?

Colleen Applegate:

Uh-huh (affirmative).

Voice-over:

This is a scene from that first scene Colleen did with Bobby Hollander. He renamed her Shauna Grant. She was not 19 but 18 at the time.

Bobby Hollander:

Are you still a virgin?

Colleen Applegate:

No, are you kidding?

Bobby Hollander:

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

Colleen Applegate:

Almost 17.

Bobby Hollander:

Almost 17. You almost lost it or you did lose it when you were almost…

Colleen Applegate (laughs):

I did lose it when I was almost 17.

*

Bobby Hollander:

I said to her, “You have the capability of being a star, an overnight sensation. Because one day, and it’s going to happen fast, once they put a little makeup on you, put some high heels on your feet and stockings and garter belt like they do in the picture layouts, the public’s going to fall in love with you.”

Laurie Smith:

Bobby could talk a nun into doing a porn movie.

Voice-over:

Laurie Smith is a veteran adult film actress and makeup artist. She became Colleen’s closest friend. After Colleen died, Laurie gave up acting and moved away from Los Angeles.

Laurie Smith:

I always looked like such an elegant lady on film and I’m still like a little kid. I’m a little tomboy in my real life and I never changed from the time I came from Huntington Beach. I’m still a little beach bum girl.

(Footage of Paul Thomas and Laurie Smith in a scene from an adult movie.)

Paul Thomas:

“I love it when you touch me there.”

Laurie Smith:

“When I touch you where Chuck?”

Laurie Smith:

On movies, I was… Give me a whip, and put some make up on me and I could say “Lick my boots” to anybody.

Laurie Smith:

“Is there anything else you’d like me to do…?”

Voice-over:

Laurie transformed Colleen.

Laurie Smith:

When I first met her, she was frumpy, school girlish, wore funny clothes. I thought they were funny clothes, I called them funny clothes. And plain and she didn’t know about makeup, never really wore makeup and just never…

(Outtakes from an adult film set – with Bobby Hollander, Jamie Gillis and Colleen – as a girl applies make-up to Shauna.)

Laurie Smith:

Then after I was finished with her, her shoulders were back and her back was arched and her chin was up and she’d flip her hair around and she became sexy. She became Shauna Grant.

Bobby Hollander:

She looked like peaches and cream nude. Naked peaches and cream. And there was that Minnesota upbringing.

(Footage of Herschel Savage and Colleen from an adult film scene.)

Colleen Applegate:

“This is the furthest I’ve been from home on my own.”

Herschel Savage:

“That’s crazy.”

Colleen Applegate:

“I haven’t been anywhere.”

Laurie Smith:

She had her little act down like a little girl from Minnesota and till the very end, she used to say, “I wonder how many years I’m going to get away with this Minnesota act?”

Colleen Hare (Colleen’s childhood friend):

We would tell her, “Well, if you want to get out, you can come stay with us, we’ll find you a job,” letting her know that that wasn’t the only thing that there was for her. We couldn’t tell her what to do. She was happy doing what she was doing. We were her friends. All we could do was back her up.

Interviewer:

When you invited her to come live with you and get a good job, what did she say?

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She always told me, “Well, what could I do?” And she goes, “I can’t do anything. I can’t type, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” She always… not really putting forth the effort. Making up excuses, “Well, I can’t right now. I have this coming up, it pays real good.” She said nothing that she could do would compare to the money she was making… and I think that was a big issue.

(Footage of Bobby Hollander from an adult film addressing the camera.)

Bobby Hollander:

Before I blast off my mouth and go any further, let me introduce you to one of the stars in the business, Miss Shauna Grant.

Colleen walks into shot.

Bobby Hollander:

Hi, love.

Colleen Applegate:

How are you doing? Thanks for the intro.

(Addresses camera) Bobby told me that… told you that you can write to me and I would love it if you wrote to me. I will send you a picture and I will autograph it.

Bobby Hollander:

I thought she was adorable, I thought she was cute and I took a liking to her. I wanted to see it happen where she got what she deserved where she wasn’t abused.

(Footage of Colleen Applegate having sex in an adult film scene.)

Interviewer:

Any mind tricks she used to get through those sex scenes?

Laurie Smith:

No, we’d just get high. We always got high before we did it.

(Footage of Colleen Applegate having sex in an adult film scene.)

Voice-over:

Colleen had begun to use cocaine. She returned to Minnesota for a visit in the fall. Her friend Teresa met her at the Twin Cities’ airport.

Teresa (childhood friend):

She got off the plane and she wasn’t really clean, the clean that I knew. She seemed very uppity, a little jumpy, like she was anxious – and first thing she wanted to do is go into the bathroom and get a snort of coke.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

Her eyes looked wild, she wore a lot of makeup and her hair… She always was very fussy about her hair but it was just brushed. It wasn’t really fixed, she just… she just looked hard. She just didn’t look herself at all.

Phil: (Colleen’s father):

The subject of drugs, I guess I brought the subject up. I said, “I hope you’re not involved in… and stay away from all this cocaine and things like that.” I said, “You really don’t need that.”

And she said, “Oh, you don’t have to worry Dad.” She says, “I go to parties but that’s it, I don’t… I don’t do that.”

And because I’m a parent I guess, and because it’s my child, I guess I wanted to believe her.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):

I just didn’t like what she was doing. She was flaunting her portfolio or whatever. The pictures she showed me in the portfolio weren’t nude pictures but they were very flattering pictures but she hardly had anything on and she wanted to give me one. She wanted me to pick one out and give it to me. I told her I didn’t want any of those pictures.

Voice-over:

Magazines with Colleen’s nude pictures had reached the stores in Farmington. In high school, Colleen’s younger sister found one of those pictures taped to her locker. Colleen had become not a celebrity but an embarrassment.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend):

She went back to go to a friend’s wedding that was one of the girls that hang around with us, and she was worried… and the things they were saying. The girl’s mother wouldn’t even let her in. She wouldn’t let her in the church. They didn’t want her around.

*

(Footage of Sharon Mitchell and Sharon Kane kissing at a convention.)

Voice-over:

Despite appearances, this is serious business: The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Twice a year, these exhibitions give the porn industry a chance to show off its new films and its stars to the nation’s videotape dealers.

(Footage of Jeanne Fine autographing a photo for a fan.)

Jeanne Fine:

Triple X kisses.

Male fan:

Triple X.

Jeanne Fine:

For your office wall?

Male fan:

Sure.

Jeanne Fine:

What are the clients going to say?

Voice-over:

Americans rented 100 million X-rated videocassettes last year. Most of the companies that produce them are represented here. They have a pool of 400 actors and actresses who are willing to have sex on camera.

(Footage of adult film awards ceremony.)

Female announcer:

And the winner is ‘Blame it on Ginger’.

Voice-over:

The X-rated performers have their own version of the Academy Awards. Janette Littledove is another newcomer to adult movies. She is 19 from Oklahoma.

Janette Littledove:

It just messes with your mind. It’s addictive, you can’t quit once you get a hold of the money and you know it’s there and it’s easy to get to. You don’t want to quit.

Voice-over:

In 1983, Colleen Applegate attended one of these shows as the porn industry’s new star. She had been unwelcome at her friend’s wedding in her hometown but here, people lined up to have their picture taken with her.

Bobby Hollander:

She had a line of a minimum of 40 people at a time. She saw the recognition.

Interviewer:

And she liked it?

Bobby:

Yeah, she became Shauna Grant.

Male:

At that show?

Bobby:

Yeah. She became Shauna Grant. But Shauna Grant always was Colleen Applegate. I don’t know which scared her more.

Danielle (adult film actress):

She was a little girl, needed to be supported, needed to be told that everything was okay and that there were people there with her.

(Footage of Danielle signing autographs at an adult film convention.)

Voice-over:

Danielle Martin and Colleen began their X-rated acting careers at about the same time.

Danielle:

We met on a film, Summer Camp Girls. She was really nice and we just started hanging out, best friends, very close.

I will always make it on my own and I know that – even if everyone dumps me, but she couldn’t. She was holding on, she was frightened to make her own decisions, or what to do, or anything like that.

*

(Outtake footage from ‘Centerfold Celebrities’ with Bobby Hollander, Jamie Gillis, and Colleen.)

Bobby Hollander:             

Is your sound okay in there now?

Colleen Applegate:  

Can I have a slate?

Bobby Hollander:   

Okay, fine. Slating Centerfold Celebrities. Shauna and Jamie. Take 1.

Colleen Applegate:     

“Why would you want me to lay down?”

Jamie Gillis:       

“Well, just so you could be comfortable. I don’t want you to strain.”

Voice-over:         

Bobby Hollander directed Colleen in a series of hardcore tapes that required only a day or two each to shoot.

Jamie Gillis:       

“Oh, you are. You’re going to go on the side?”

Colleen:         

“Uh-huh.”

Laurie Smith:    

Bobby is an okay person to work for. He’s not a pushy, mean… doesn’t make you feel… I mean, you may look cheap in the movie but while you’re doing it, he makes you feel like a little queen. During the time, you feel like you’re doing ‘Gone with the Wind’. It’s like one of the things. He didn’t talk her into it, she wanted to do it.

(Footage of Colleen Applegate having sex in an adult film.)

Bobby Hollander:          

Shauna was a talent. She was a star. There are stars in the business. Shauna Grant made herself a star in a short period of time. The quickest I’ve ever seen.

(Footage of Colleen Applegate from ‘Suzie Superstar’.)

Voice-over:     

Colleen’s movies and modeling paid her almost $100,000 in one year. She spent most of the money on cocaine.

Laurie Smith:    

She needed it like you feel like you need it. It’s a security blanket and we just liked to do it. We did it a lot though. Through that one year… in a year and a half actually, I really hung around with her a lot because we would always go in on it together, and we always would buy a lot.

Bobby Hollander:             

I may have done cocaine with both of them, but on selling either one… I wasn’t selling cocaine. I was a user.

Interviewer:      

Did you give Colleen cocaine?

Bobby Hollander:             

I think I gave Colleen as much as cocaine as she gave me.

Laurie Smith:    

It was the perfect thing to have. You could go smoke a joint, unwind from the first scene and then right before you go on, you take a toot.

Voice-over:         

These are outtakes from a movie Laurie and Colleen did with Bobby Hollander.

(Outtakes from an adult film directed by Bobby Hollander, with Laurie Smith and Colleen Applegate.)

Bobby Hollander (losing his temper off camera):        

She’s going to dust off the fucking screen.

Laurie Smith:    

Okay…!

Bobby Hollander:             

All right. Now, get right up here!

Laurie Smith:    

I just see… Every time I go… I mean…

Laurie Smith:    

Once I saw Bobby started freebasing, that was the last time I worked for Bobby and it’s the last time I would ever work for him and I was really pissed off.

(Outtakes from an adult film directed by Bobby Hollander, with Laurie Smith and Colleen Applegate.)

Bobby Hollander (losing his temper):    

No. You don’t know… you’re not listening to shit!

Laurie Smith:    

We are listening to everything, you walked away…!

Colleen Applegate:        

I know exactly… I’m listening.

Bobby Hollander:             

I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen to me!

Laurie Smith:    

Okay, Bobby.

Bobby Hollander:             

Laurie, deep inhale.

Laurie Smith:    

I know but let’s get the…

Bobby Hollander:             

Do you see…? You’re saying this… You can read it right from the script!

Laurie Smith:    

He just was crazy. He couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do. He had this script that he’d written probably when he was on his 3rd day awake but it was so sadistically disgusting. I just said, “Colleen, forget it. Just forget Bobby, go off on your own. You got your name now, you’re big enough where you can do it on your own.”

(Outtakes from an adult film directed by Bobby Hollander, with Laurie Smith and Colleen Applegate.)

Colleen Applegate:         

You didn’t tell me I was shooting.

Bobby Hollander:             

I told you yes, we are shooting.

Colleen Applegate:         

No, you didn’t.

Bobby Hollander:             

We are shooting, we are rolling.

*

(Footage of Bobby Hollander doing manual work at side of a busy road.)

Voice-over:         

Bobby Hollander is on probation for cocaine possession. Each weekend, he must clean up highways for the California Transportation Department.

Bobby Hollander:        

I’ve been here 16 or 17 days working with this crew, some of the finest guys in the highway and freeway business.

(Footage of Jamie Gillis and Colleen Applegate in a sex scene.)

Voice-over:       

Colleen was making as much as $1,700 a day when sex scenes were shot.

Laurie Smith:    

She hated it. She just lay there and just let it happen. Colleen Applegate did not like doing sex on film, period.

Jerry Butler:       

She just was so overwhelming because I knew the girl did not want to happen. It was so shame. It’s a shame for a lot of guys…

Voice-over:         

Jerry Butler, one of Colleen’s costars believed she did not belong in adult films – but others kept encouraging her.

Jerry Butler:   

Everybody said it was okay. “Hey, put this skirt on. You look like a million, Colleen. Oh, you look great.” I mean Shauna, “You look fabulous, oh great! Take the picture. Oh, terrific! Oh, this is great! Oh, great sex scene! Oh, terrific!”

These are the people that are still alive, these people that made money, still making money off this poor little girl getting to think that that’s all she needed in life.

Bobby Hollander:           

She enjoyed the recognition, she enjoyed the money. There’s no question about that.

Interviewer:      

Okay, but she was an aimless girl. She was vulnerable. Don’t you think that that life is harmful to a person like that?

Bobby Hollander:             

That’s a loaded question.

Interviewer:      

Yeah, it is.

Bobby Hollander:          

It’s a loaded question. I think anyone who is in Colleen’s age group, they’re all in the same situation.

Interviewer:      

Okay.

Bobby Hollander:          

She chose to do it. She could have stopped and made less money just being a photographer’s model, but I personally think she enjoyed doing it. Colleen was an exhibitionist.

Interviewer:      

Okay, maybe she was…

Bobby Hollander:             

Colleen was two different people on camera and off camera, two different people. Jekyll and Hyde. Completely.

Interviewer:      

It was her choice – but wouldn’t it have been better for her to stop?

Bobby Hollander:             

Well, talking about it today… Yes, it would have been better.

(Outtakes from an adult film featuring Jamie Gillis and Colleen Applegate.)

Colleen Applegate:         

You need to tell somebody to bring my bathrobe in here.

Voice-over:         

In that one year, Colleen performed in 30 X-rated movies. She had an abortion. She contracted herpes. She performed sex on camera with 37 men.

*

Jake Ehrlich:      

The thing I notice mostly about is how quiet it is here now. There used to be noise, there used to be life here.

Voice-over:         

Jake Ehrlich is a former cocaine dealer. He returned to his home in Palm Springs, California this winter after almost three years in prison.

Jake Ehrlich:      

It was just an empty feeling as if I left last week and coming back to absolutely zero.

That used to be how our bedroom was set up. We’d just keep a stereo over there and there’s a patch there that bothers me. That’s the patch the police pulled out. They made a patch or someone tried to patch it up. It bothers me to sleep next to it.

Voice-over:       

What do you mean?

Jake Ehrlich:     

The bullet went through her head. I don’t know how she was lying or how she was even shot, I never knew, but the bullet went through her head and into the wall.

Some of her clothing is still here, not much but a piece here and a piece there.

Voice-over:        

Jake met Colleen in the spring of 1983 after he saw pictures of her in Penthouse magazine.

Jake Ehrlich:      

I opened it up and I saw the section she was in and I said, “This girl is gorgeous, this girl is for me. Bobby Hollander is her agent and he’ll come around.”

Voice-over:         

He learned that Colleen’s manager was Bobby Hollander, one of his cocaine customers.

Jake Ehrlich:      

He brought her over and this little girl with this washed hair, curling up and a little gumby t-shirt and a pair of jeans and I said, “This couldn’t be the girl. This girl is 14, 15, 16 years old.” But it was her. Not what I expected, not the fantasy. It wasn’t the fantasy from the magazine. She came in and she never left.

Interviewer:      

She just stayed.

Jake Ehrlich:  

She stayed, she found home.

Interviewer:  

And she quit doing pornography?

Jake Ehrlich:      

She just stopped it. She was very happy in the very beginning, very exuberant, happy person. She’d call up everyone. “I’m in love, I love Jake.” People would tell me, “Jake, this girl really loves you,” and she started building up. She would call home for recipes to her parents… “I’m not in the business no more and give me the recipe for that. I’m cooking for Jake.”

Voice-over:    

Sometimes late at night with the stereo on, Colleen tape-recorded her thoughts.

Colleen Applegate (voice-recording):    

You amaze me Jake. Here I am, 20 years old and in love with a man twice my age. You let me be Colleen and you don’t expect me to be anybody else. You respect me and you care about me and you at least like me.

Jake Ehrlich:      

She was basically happy living here. She was safe from the outside world.

Voice-over:         

Colleen stopped making adult films but the people she’d met in that business often came to visit her at Jake’s.

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend):      

There was always drugs around, it was like a non-stop party.

Voice-over:        

Her friend Teresa came from Minnesota to see her once.

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

They always had people coming over. I remember a bad experience at one of these parties that I was offered something that I thought was a joint and it was something called Jerry Lewis’ kiss. It made you feel retarded and that was the point that I decided I shouldn’t be there. It scared the heck out of me. I believe Colleen was dependent on Jake for her habit, her drug habit, and because she had a beautiful house. She was very dependent on people.

Jake Ehrlich:      

We just started drifting a little bit apart. I couldn’t supply her with the amount of attention she needed. She would follow me from one room to another. It’s something I couldn’t take. I just couldn’t take it so I’d just constantly push her off.

Voice-over:       

Jake didn’t know it but Colleen had become involved with a college student during a trip back to Minnesota. He doesn’t want to be identified.

Unidentified male (shown in silhouette):         

She just seemed like someone who had made mistakes and she didn’t want to be doing it anymore according to her. She was friendly and intelligent and pretty and fun to be with. We had a great time.

Teresa (Colleen’s childhood friend):      

Now, she told me that she was going to marry him and I don’t know if they’d actually talked about that. In her heart, that was her dream, to marry him, come back, go to school, be a regular college student. Use her mind because she had a good mind and marry him.

Voice-over:       

Yet Colleen stayed with Jake and her cocaine addiction worsened.

Jake Ehrlich:      

It’s hard for a cocaine dealer to control someone that’s close to you especially if you’re selling it. How can you say, “You shouldn’t do it, it’s not good for you.” Meanwhile, I’m doing it myself and I’m selling it.”

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

She got real thin, she was real pale, she wasn’t eating. She just looked sick and I would always ask her… I would say, “Why do you keep doing it? Why don’t you just stop for a while?”

And she’s like, “Oh, I’m okay. I don’t do it that much,” and I say, “Well, look at you. You’re 90 pounds.”

Voice-over:         

Jake urged her to get psychiatric help. She refused, and one night he told her she’d have to move out.

Jake Ehrlich:      

She said, “If that’s the end, I’ll show you.” She runs in my bedroom and I hear her pick up my rifle and go click, click and I run in there real fast. I didn’t take her serious. I figured she just wants attention, she wants something. I ran in there quick enough that she had a rifle cocked and…

Interviewer:      

She hadn’t pulled the trigger?

Jake Ehrlich:      

No.

Interviewer:      

She cocked the rifle.

Jake Ehrlich:      

She cocked it.

Interviewer:      

It was loaded.

Jake Ehrlich:      

It was loaded. I kept a rifle. It was a 22 rifle, same rifle she took her life with. But I didn’t take her serious, I figured she just wants attention, she’s mad and I couldn’t handle the situation either and I… We sat down on the bed, we talked and I said, “All right, you don’t have to move. You stay here and when you’re ready, you’ll move.” I was scared.

Voice-over:         

A few days later in February 1984, police arrested Jake for drug dealing. He was taken to jail and faced several years in prison.

*

(Footage from adult awards ceremony.)

Announcer:      

The Adult Film Association of America proudly presents the 8th Annual Erotic Film Awards. Adult movies have come of age.

Voice-over:       

Colleen had not made a hardcore film in the ten months she lived in Palm Springs, but three of her earlier performances were nominated for awards.

Harry Reems (announcing winner from the stage):     

“Shauna Grant for Flesh and Laces Parts 1 and 2.”

(Footage from adult film with Colleen Applegate.)

Colleen Applegate:        

“My rate is $100 an hour.”

Male:          

“Are you worth that?”

Colleen Applegate:         

“Of course I’m worth that. You asked for a top model, you’re going to get it.”

(Footage from adult awards ceremony.)

Seka (announcing from stage): 

“Mr. John Leslie and Miss Shauna Grant.”

Voice-over:      

She didn’t win but it must have been an exciting evening for Colleen. Francis Ford Coppola was seated at the same table.

John Leslie:    

“…for the best art and set decoration are:”

Colleen Applegate:       

“Eddie Heath for The Devil in Miss Jones Part 2.”

Voice-over:         

Colleen found she was very much in demand.

That night, she agreed to make another adult film and was to begin shooting it in eight days. It was seven days before her death.

A few days after the award show, Colleen’s Minnesota boyfriend arrived in Los Angeles to see her. She never showed up at the airport.

Laurie Smith:  

Oh, there’s a mix up in the fact that Colleen just totally disregarded the fact that he is flying in and forgot. She forgot he was coming in. She’d made plans for two months to have him come out from Minnesota and he finally got the time to come out. She knew about it for two weeks. She knew but when it came down to that day, we had gone to the awards and we got wasted and then we were hanging out at my house, we slept for two days.

We didn’t know how we were going to get there because we didn’t have a car. We had to figure out a way to get there and that’s what she was doing all that day… was figuring out a way to get there and that’s when Jake called and all the shit came down.

Voice-over:         

Jake phoned Colleen from jail, and told her their relationship was over. She would have to move out.

Jake Ehrlich:    

Her boyfriend was coming in town. She didn’t pay none of the bills, destroyed the $2,000 on mostly drugs and limousines and partying. All these things are building in my head and I’m saying, “Hey man! Stop her now.”

Voice-over:       

Colleen called her friend Brenda and asked her to come over and keep her company while she packed.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

She was real depressed and she wasn’t talking much. She was just sitting around. You could tell she wasn’t happy at all.

Voice-over:   

She had run out of money and cocaine. In 2 days, she’d be performing sex on camera again. Now, she had to pack and get out.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

The stereo was on and she went back into her bedroom.

Colleen Applegate (voice recording):    

I remember the first time I really, really was lonely and depressed and down. I wasn’t doing a lot. I was stuck and had no one to depend on but me. That was the first time I really felt bad and that was my mood compared to what’s coming and what’s happened since then.

Brenda Rosenow (Colleen’s childhood friend): 

I heard a pop, like a loud pop. I look and she was laying… There was 2 mattresses pushed together on the bed and there was a crease. There was blood going all the way down the crease but you couldn’t see any blood on her. I tilted her head up and I was just trying to see… I was just trying to look at her and I was like, “Colleen? Colleen?” because she was still breathing.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):        

A girl named Laurie called here at midnight our time and was crying on the phone and asked if we knew about Colleen and we didn’t. Then she said that she was in L.A. but Brenda had called her and told her that Colleen had shot herself. She just was wondering if I knew and I didn’t hear from anybody.

Voice-over:         

At the hospital, machines kept Colleen alive for 24 hours. Her mother and friends were there.

Danielle (adult film actress):     

I had had this ring that was a little heart, some diamonds on it. I wore it on my wedding finger and I asked Colleen’s mom if I could give it to her, and she’s like, “Are you sure?” I gave it to her. I was afraid to touch her. I was like reaching out and I asked, “Can I? Can I touch here? You know, she just looks so frail and everything.” Just was so different to see someone with a bullet through their head. I can imagine and so I took it off my wedding finger and it wouldn’t even fit on hers.

Her body was being kept alive by machines and circulation… and when it goes your body swells up. I just knew that she wasn’t there, it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Colleen.

Karen (Colleen’s mother):         

Her eyes were donated. I got 2 different letters about her eyes. Her kidneys were supposed to be but I never heard from them so I don’t know if it worked or didn’t work. I never heard back if… But that’s what I signed for them to take.

Voice-over:         

Colleen Applegate went to California in March 1982. She died there in March 1984. She went in search of something not knowing what and with only her beauty to offer in return and she got lost.

She left home incomplete, unequipped for the adventure she’d have, lacking an inner compass. Like Dorothy from Kansas, Colleen found herself in a dangerous forest but there was no scarecrow along to help her find her way out.

Colleen Applegate (voice recording):   

Maybe adults learn too much, maybe we should all go back to being kids. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be a kid and keep the honesty, be totally ignorant to hate and loneliness and disgust?

*

The post Shauna Grant:
Rare Photos… and ‘Death Of Porn Queen’ (1987) appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Friends, family and fans gathered to celebrate the life of Candida Royalle on November 22, 2015 at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. Included among them was Efrain Gonzalez who has been photographing erotic sub-cultures such as the BDSM community at New York’s Hellfire Club for over 30 years. Efrain shared his photos of Candida’s memorial with us, along with some of his favorite photos of Candida.

As Candida told us in her 2014 interview with The Rialto Report, “There’s no time to waste. Whatever it is you want to do, do it now. It isn’t going to be easy – but that doesn’t ever stop me. There’s only one Candida Royalle, that’s for sure. It’s really been a colorful life indeed.”

________________________________________________________________________________________

Photos from Candida Royalle’s Tribute Event

Annie Sprinkle, Michael Dattore, Susun Weed

Gloria Leonard’s daughter, Robin Leonardi, Vanessa del Rio, writer and ex-Show World worker Guy Gonzalez

Director and producer Michele Capozzi, Vanessa del Rio

Robin Leonardi, daughter of Gloria Leonard

Veronica Vera

Rick Savage (right)

Michele Capozzi, Guy Gonzalez

Michele Capozzi, Annie Sprinkle

Betty Dodson

Gerard Damiano Jr., Robin Leonardi

Barbara Nitke, Annie Sprinkle

Efrain Gonzalez‘ favorite pictures of Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle, Veronica Vera, Annie Sprinkle

Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle

Siobhan Hunter, Annette Heinz, Gloria Leonard, Candida Royalle

Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Veronica Vera, Gloria Leonard, Jane Hamilton

Veronica Vera, Stuart Cottingham, Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle

Your photographer Efrain Gonzalez

The post Celebrating Candida Royalle:
A Life of Passion & Purpose appeared first on The Rialto Report.

We recently heard that one of our all-time favorites, golden age actress Miss Sharon Mitchell, has recently been going through an very tough time.

The Rialto Report interviewed Mitch early in 2014 – and heard how she had struggled since the closure of her AIM organization a few years ago.

In recent years she’s lived in a rural area in the country outside of Los Angeles where she has struggled to find work. After several years of looking, Mitch finally found work with a nearby AIDS advisory service this summer, but shortly after she started work there she crashed her motorbike. She was badly hurt in the accident – and the bike was almost a complete write-off.

What made this even worse was that she needed the bike to commute to her job, and Sharon has not been able to afford the cost of the repairs so the bike remains with the repair shop.

Without the bike, Mitch will not be able to stay in work – and she badly needs the income to survive.

This holiday season we’ve joined up with the Golden Age Appreciation Fund to raise money for Mitch. Please visit the site and give whatever you can. It’s so important to Mitch that she can get back to work.

We also have a number of attractive incentives for donors – including magazines and DVDs – so please visit the Golden Age Appreciation Fund to find out more.

Thanks very much for all your help.

This podcast episode running time is 107 minutes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The post Sharon Mitchell – Her Interview Revisited:
A Christmas Fundraiser appeared first on The Rialto Report.

One of our most popular features in 2015 was our podcast interview with Candy Samples. Since then we’ve received many requests for another feature about the legendary actor, dancer and model.

In this feature we present a photographic portrait of her long life and career.

Candy kept limited scrapbooks over the course of her career but much has been lost. In recent years a number of her friends and fans have made a determined effort to collect everything they can find that relates to her. All of this material has recently been sent to her.

This collection consists of many large boxes of picture spreads, magazine features, fan photos, private portrait sessions and Polaroids. Some of these items were never intended for publication, and their quality reflects this.

The Rialto Report has combined a selection of these items with Candy’s own collection to present an overview of her life.

We end this feature with photos taken just a few days ago when we interviewed Candy. Our interview with Candy Samples can be heard here.

We are indebted to GH and KB for their kind assistance in putting this feature together.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Candy Samples – The Early Years

Candy Samples (February 1965)

Early modeling show (1966)

Candy (second from left) in early modeling assignment (1967)

Early Modeling

Candy and Uschi

When The Rialto Report interviewed Candy Samples, her fondest memories were reserved for her friendship with Uschi Digard.

Fetish Photos (1979)

Dancing across the country

Life with Pat Romano

In the early 1980s, Candy’s career was managed by ‘Pat Romano‘. The relationship didn’t end well, and Pat later died in jail where he was serving time for drug dealing.

Private Sessions

Candy would sometimes pose for private photographic sessions for fans, who she encountered when dancing in clubs around the country.

Personal Appearances

A rare photo of Candy with Russ Meyer at a convention.

Vacations and Traveling

London (1981)

Austria (1981)

Venice (1986)

Cancun (1988)

Retirement

Candy Samples’ scrapbooks

The Rialto Report interview

Candy Samples recording The Rialto Report interview with April Hall

Candy Samples with The Rialto Report’s April Hall

The post Candy Samples – An Actress’ Scrapbook:
Yesterday and Today appeared first on The Rialto Report.

This year we lost our friend, Candida Royalle.

Recently fellow actor Alan ‘Spike’ Adrian (born John Mozzer) kindly sent us a selection of Christmas cards that Candida and her then-husband Per sent to friends in the early 1980s. Candida drew each one individually – and we thought that sharing them with you would be a perfect way to close out the year.

Thank you for all your friendship and support over the last twelve months. We’re on vacation for a few weeks. See you in 2016!

Many thanks to John Mozzer for sending us Candida’s cards to use in this article.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christmas card (1982)

Inside of Christmas card (1982)

Christmas card (1983)

Christmas card (1984)

Happy Christmas, Candida

The post Happy Christmas!
Candida Royalle’s holiday cards appeared first on The Rialto Report.

A month ago we launched our 2015 year-end fundraiser in conjunction with The Golden Age Appreciation Fund to provide assistance for former actress and healthcare advocate Sharon Mitchell.

Thanks to your generous support we raised $3,300 to help Sharon get back on her feet.

This brings the total money you contributed in 2015 to help golden age performers to over $10,000.

When we called Sharon to tell her about the success of the fundraiser, she was overwhelmed with gratitude and sent the message below.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Message from Sharon Mitchell

Happy New Year and thank you all so much for all of your contributions, both individually and collectively.  For those of you who know me, you know how difficult it is to ask for help.

This act of kindness truly warmed my heart and soul. I should have my motorcycle back this week, and be mobile once again.

My gratitude is without bounds, you have truly made this the Happiest New Year!

Much Love,

Dr. Mitch

Contributors

We’d like to add our huge thanks to the following donors who contributed so generously.

1 Adam Johnson
2 Annie Sprinkle
3 Anonymous
4 Anonymous
5 Anthony Nesbitt
6 Anthony Nicoletti
7 Anthony Veilleux
8 April Hall
9 Ashley West
10 Benny Ellis Jr.
11 Brian Christgau
12 Burt Lum
13 Cathy Brown
14 Christopher J. O’Neill
15 Christopher Romano
16 Christopher Squassi
17 Constance Penley
18 Damian Pring
19 Dan Wheeler
20 Dann Lennard
21 David Beynon
22 David Munn
23 David Peller
24 David Tuszynski
25 Don Benn
26 English Teacher X
27 Erik D. Harshman
28 Ermanno Biot
29 Frank E. Fernandez
30 Gaye E. McNown
31 Georg Domkamp
32 Hudson Marquez
33 Jay Moyes
34 Jeanne Silver
35 Jens Boeckel
36 Jose Verschaffel
37 Joshua Kesler
38 Lori Stacy
39 Lou Rusconi
40 Mark & Miranda Murray
41 Mark Fuentes
42 Mark Savage
43 Michael Cavataio
44 Michael Stabile
45 Michael Stewart
46 Mitchell Hampton
47 Monty Davis Jr.
48 Paul M. Scrabo
49 Peter Pasquale
50 Rafael Godwin
51 Randal Haecker
52 Richard Pacheco
53 Richard Stegman Jr.
54 Richard Wenk
55 Robert Aven
56 Robert Dyer
57 Robert St. Mary
58 Robert Stoesen
59 Robin Bougie
60 Ryan Koetstra
61 S. J. A. Koorevaar
62 Sean Higgins
63 Shane Brown
64 Steve Elmer
65 Steve Messenger
66 T. Reilly
67 Terry Fenwick
68 Thomas Gross
69 Thomas Russo
70 Timothy Crawford
71 Timothy Stroup
72 William Adcock
73 William Burns
74 William Codington
75 William J. Laux
76 William Litzler
77 William Molloy

The post Sharon Mitchell Fundraiser:
A Big Thank You appeared first on The Rialto Report.

The landmark adult film Deep Throat (1972) was notable for a host of reasons; it was one of the first pornographic films to feature a plot, character development and relatively high production values, it launched the ‘porno chic’ trend, and it was banned in some jurisdictions and the subject of high profile obscenity trials.

It was also a rarity in that it was a New York film that was shot in Florida. This meant the filmmakers had to rely on local contacts to set up the locations in advance. Their faith in the Florida advisers proved to be ill-founded – and the initial locations all fell through as soon as shooting was about to start.

Needing to some up with alternative venues quickly, the crew was deployed to find places around the Miami area to use for scenes in the film.

Fortunately they came up with a memorable series of locations that play an important part in making the film unique.

This week, continuing our mission to find the original locations of golden age adult films, April Hall visits South Florida in search of Deep Throat – and arrives just before one of the most iconic spots disappears forever.

With thanks to Len Camp, Joao Fernandes, and Sepy Dobronyi for their memories, and special thanks to Hank Wellman for his sterling detective work.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Getting to Miami to shoot Deep Throat:

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano (unpublished biography, excerpted in High Society magazine):

Some guys I knew came back from Florida after making a film there. It was freezing in New York, and they kept talking about palm trees and wide stretches of beach and sunlight. They said Florida was a perfect place to film, and that if I wanted to go there they’d put me in touch with people who could help me. I hadn’t taken a vacation in four years. I was freezing my balls off in New York. I decided to film ‘Deep Throat’ in Florida.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!‘ (1975) by Harry Reems:

On January 11th, 1972, I left for Florida. And Deep Throat. It was the first porno film to be shot on location at any long-range distance by on-going producers.

From Rialto Report interview with Len Camp (Deep Throat location scout) (2006):

I booked rooms for everyone at the Voyager Congress Inn because I knew the owner. I told the manager to expect many people – but the producers were cheap sons of bitches and they made everyone share rooms to lower the cost.

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

I flew down to Florida to look things over. The palm trees freaked me out. They were fucking everywhere. I sat by the pool at the Voyager Motel and felt relaxed for the first time in years. My friends had assured me that everything would be perfect in Florida.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

I drove the blue and white Cadillac you see in the movie – I drove it from New York to Miami. I’ll always think of it as the pimpmobile.

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

My production crew drove down in a van. Chuck (Traynor) and Linda (Lovelace) flew down. I flew in Dolly Sharp, but she’d only come if she could bring her old man. I wrote the Wilbur Wang part for him.

Day 1:

From ‘Ordeal’ (1980) by Linda Lovelace:

When the cast and crew arrived from New York several days later, we all made our headquarters at the Voyager Inn on Biscayne Boulevard.

Voyager-Congress Inn, Miami (c. 1960)

From ‘Getting Into Deep Throat’ (1973) by Richard Smith:

Gerard Damiano remembers, “I went to see all the locations that a friend of mine had set up. I had said I need a swimming pool, I need a house, I need an apartment. He had a co-op apartment – beautiful, beautiful place. I fell in love with it; we were going to shoot 90% of our film there.

At nine o’clock in the morning we showed up at the pool, unloaded the equipment, and a little Jewish man came running out and said “What are you doing here?”

I said, “We’re shooting a film” and he said, “Who says?”

I said, “Well my friend spoke to the person who owns this place who said we could use it,” and he said, “I own this place.”

All our locations were at this place. Everything. Out of the window.

I called the motel we were staying at and asked if we could shoot at his swimming pool. At that particular time we were the only ones there, and he couldn’t do enough for us.

Voyager-Congress Inn, Miami (c. 1960)

Day 2:

Voyager Inn, Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL

Shooting the pool scene, and externals of Linda Lovelace arriving at an office for an appointment

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

Gerard Damiano remembers, “We began with the pool sequence – with Linda Lovelace and Dolly Sharp, where Linda confesses that she’s never felt firecrackers exploding when she made love. It was terrific.”

Dolly Sharp in the swimming pool at the Voyager Inn, Miami

Linda Lovelace and Dolly Sharp by the swimming pool at the Voyager Inn, Miami

Linda Lovelace and Dolly Sharp by the swimming pool at the Voyager Inn, Miami

The site of the former Voyager Inn in 2015: now the Johnson & Wales University, S.E.E. & Golf Management Center

The swimming pool featured in ‘Deep Throat’ – still in use in 2015

The swimming pool featured in ‘Deep Throat’ – still in use in 2015

From ‘Ordeal’ (1980) by Linda Lovelace:

We laughed a lot that first day of shooting while we were doing the poolside shots, the walking-down-the-street shots and the knocking-on-the-door shots.

Linda Lovelace drives past the Golden Buddha Chinese Restaurant…

… and the site of the former Golden Buddha restaurant in 2015: now a branch of BankUnited

Linda Lovelace makes an office call near the Golden Buddha restaurant…

… and The Rialto Report’s April Hall re-visits the steps of Linda Lovelace (2015)

Days 3 – 5:

Private home, Seven Isles, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Shooting the kitchen scene, the orgy scene, the Wilbur scene, and externals over a bridge

From Rialto Report interview with Len Camp (Deep Throat location scout) (2006):

When Gerry’s original location fell through, he needed to find a nice quiet house to film in. I had a friend in Fort Lauderdale who had a good place so I called him up and arranged a deal. Everyone was living at the Voyager Inn, but they traveled up to Fort Lauderdale for three days to film some scenes.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

The opening scenes were shot at Handsome Harry’s place. Handsome Harry lived in Fort Lauderdale. He was a bachelor, maybe 28 or 29 years old, a nice gent who lived solo in his ranch-style house with a swimming pool. Most of his waking thoughts turned lightly to love in any season… and swings and orgies. Our crew – and our project – could not have been more welcome.

Handsome Harry never could figure out why after a long hard day in front of the cameras we weren’t all chomping at the bit to swing into a wild orgy.

From ‘Inside Linda Lovelace’ (1973) by Linda Lovelace:

We shot at a nice home in Fort Lauderdale. The Lauderdale place belonged to a young guy whose only interest was getting into chicks, right? He tried every device to make us. He brought cute chicks, handsome guys, and before we finished that two-day shooting schedule, he was practically begging us to stay on after our day’s work. We didn’t and left him practically in tears.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “what a bunch of dead dicks you all turned out to be!”

Linda Lovelace drives Gerry Damiano’s car over the bridge…

… and the ‘Deep Throat’ bridge in Fort Lauderdale in 2015.

Linda Lovelace drives Gerry Damiano’s car over the bridge…

… and the ‘Deep Throat’ bridge in Fort Lauderdale in 2015.

Linda Lovelace turns into the driveway of ‘Handsome Harry’s’ house…

… which is now a lawn, though the same dip in the sidewalk remains (2015).

Linda Lovelace parks in the driveway…

… which has been remodeled since ‘Deep Throat’ but it is still recognizable.

The men arrive for the orgy…

… the house has been given a second level since ‘Deep Throat’.

The former owner of ‘Handsome Harry’s’ Fort Lauderdale house re-named the new driveway…

… paying tribute to the film’s star.

Dolly Sharp and Linda Lovelace walk over the bridge…

… and The Rialto Report’s April Hall follows in their steps (2015).

Dolly Sharp and Linda Lovelace walk over the bridge past the electricity pole…

… and The Rialto Report’s April Hall walks past the same electricity pole.

The kitchen scene – shot at the Fort Lauderdale house.

Day 6:

Rest day, scouting for remaining locations

Days 7 – 9:

3980 Wood Ave, Coconut Grove, Miami, FL

Shooting two scenes set in the Doctor’s office – one with Linda Lovelace and one with Carol Connors, as well as the wine cellar scene, and several exterior shots in the garden

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

One day we happened to meet a real-life Prince, Sepy Dobronyi, who was excited about the film we were making, so he suggested that we could use his house for some interior shots we needed. “I’ve got this great place,” he told us, “and some good dope, so we’ll party and we’ll smoke and we’ll all have a great time.”

From Baron Joseph Dobronyi’s biography:

Baron Joseph “Sepy” De Bicske Dobronyi (April 20, 1922 – May 29, 2010) was a Hungarian-born sculptor and royal crown jeweler, aristocrat, art collector, world traveler, movie maker, pilot, wine collector, sportsman, playboy, and bon vivant.

His name was familiar in international society and movie circles as well as the art crowd.

Baron Sepy was world renowned for his bronze and gold sculptures of famous celebrities such as the controversial 42″inch tall Golden Statue of movie star Anita Ekberg, who posed for him and gained recognition worldwide.

Sepy pictorial by pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager (1960)

Sepy in a magazine article about him (1961)

Sepy at work in his studio (late 1960s)

Sepy and his statue of Anita Ekberg (late 1960s)

Known as the Hugh Hefner of Miami, Sepy counted talents such as Frank Sinatra, Bjorn Borg and George Hamilton as his friends, regularly hosting them at his home. Throwing legendary parties out of his Coconut Grove home, Sepy became known as much for his range of friends as for his seduction skills.

The home was designed by Otto F. Seeler, who was a professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame, and because Sepy’s star sign was Taurus, the roof is in the shape of a bull’s head complete with two copper horns extended over the roof.

Sadly the property was put up for sale in 2012 and sold in 2013. The new owners have started to demolish it. The pictures that follow, that were taken in 2015, may be the last of this legendary house.

Sepy’s house, as seen in the real estate listing when it was being sold (2012)…

… and in 2015 when we found it to be derelict and waiting to be demolished.

The entrance to Sepy’s house in 2012…

… and soon to be razed to the ground (2015).

Sepy’s main lounge (2012)…

… with the furnace dominating the room (2012)…

… and in 2015…

… a shell of its former self.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

We went to Coconut Grove for the final days of shooting to the beautiful estate of a baron who was strapped for cash and rented out the place for moviemaking. For ‘Deep Throat’ we turned his guest house into a Doctor’s office.

I kept getting hornier and hornier. I was glad I was going to play the doctor.

Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems in the Doctor’s office…

… with the white panel wall behind them

… and as seen in the real estate listing when the house was being sold (2012)

The Doctor’s office scene was shot in a now-abandoned guest house on the grounds of Sepy’s property (seen here in 2015)…

…where the same white panel wall still exists.

Another view of the inside of the Doctor’s office (2015).

External of the guest house – the location for the doctor’s office (2015).

From ‘The Dream Studio of Sepy Dobronyi’, The Miami Herald, (1963):

Dobronyi traveled to 89 countries. When he arrived in Miami, he brought trophies of his travels. These included an impressive array of native primitive sculpture, dozens of artifacts from the Near and Far East. Ancient arms and armor displayed on the walls of his home/studio, along with animal skins.

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

His house was incredible. It was filled with larger-than-life statues of all these naked women. They were everywhere – in the foyer, by the pool, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. It wasn’t hard to know where his head was at.

From Rialto Report interview with Len Camp (Deep Throat location scout) (2006):

Sepy made sure he put as much of his own artwork in the shots of the movie – so wherever you look you see some African shit or some of his old paintings.

Harry Reems diagnoses Linda’s affliction, whilst Sepy’s self portrait looks on…

… a self portrait that remains in Sepy’s estate.

Sepy was particularly proud of two metal wall hangings…

… which appear in two scenes of ‘Deep Throat’.

eBay listing (2011):

For Sale: $1,999

A fine hand hammered metal (brass or copper?) wall hanging sculpture “Krampus-like mythical faces” from the private collection of the estate of the famous “aristocrat, sculptor, photographer, royal jewelry designer, art collector, world traveler, sportsman and bon vivant” Baron Joseph “Sepy” de Bicske Dobronyi.

The original wall hanging featured on in ‘Deep Throat’ – sold on eBay in 2011

From ‘Inside Linda Lovelace’ (1973) by Linda Lovelace:

We shot in a mansion in Miami. We were hosted by a fantastic human named Sepy Dobronyi, and his place is a shrine to sex. The man is a winner. I’m not sure what his business interests include, but he does live well. I don’t know his age either, but it doesn’t matter. He is handsome, well-groomed, well-muscled, and – I discovered to my delight – very well hung.

He was following me around, sneaking peaks under my skirts, anything to get a better view. I had every intention of rewarding him for his attention and hospitality, but I waited until the right time to surprise him.

It was an off day for shooting, and I was one of the luncheon guests. After the feast, he took me on a personal tour of his mansion. We reached the sleeping wing, and he very subtly directed me to his unique bedroom. Want to know what he sleeps in? Well, it’s an authentic Viking ship converted into a bed. Now this is class, right?

eBay listing (2011):

For Sale: $7,500

Up for auction is this circa 1960 previously owned front half of an exact replica of a Sea Serpent Viking ship bed made in Oslo, Norway, from the 800-1000 A.D., designed by Famous Sculptor Baron Joseph “Sepy” de Bicske Dobronyi. This is a fully functional bed with storage compartments under the mattress. The full size mattress is custom made but previously used and might need to be replaced or cleaned. The bed is made of solid wood planks with the prow having the form of a sea serpent’s head with horns and glowing eyes and the fangs are from a Hippopotamus.

Sepy’s Viking Ship bed (early 1960s)…

… and as seen in the real estate listing when his house was being sold (2012)

From ‘Inside Linda Lovelace’ (1973) by Linda Lovelace:

We shot from dawn to midnight at Sepy’s mansion, and Sepy didn’t care for this. No matter what Damiano had in mind, Sepy had a mind of his own. When he had had enough of the movie-making nonsense, he didn’t scold or even hint. All he did when he wanted to call it a day was cut the master electrical switch, plunging everything and everybody into total darkness. I rather admired that.

Linda Lovelace in the grounds of Sepy’s house…

… making a house call dressed as a nurse…

… in 2015, the gardens are untended and overgrown.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

There was a nutsy scene where Linda visits a guy who lives in the Baron’s wine cellar. The guy has a real obsession with Coca Cola.

From Rialto Report interview with Joao Fernandes (‘Deep Throat’ cinematographer) (2015):

I was surprised that Sepy let us into the cellar with all the expensive bottles of wine. I asked him why he trusted us. He just said that he had added a few bottles of poison amongst the expensive wine so he would know immediately if anyone stole his wine.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

Gerry had someone make a glass dildo for ‘Deep Throat’. The guy who made it guaranteed it wouldn’t break. The script called for the guy to put the glass dildo into Linda and suck his favorite beverage out of it.

From Esquire (1973) article by Nora Ephron:

All I could think about was what would happen if the glass broke.

From ‘Here’s Harry Reems!’ (1975) by Harry Reems:

When the scene was over, everybody was happy and laughing. Laughing made Linda contract the muscles of her vagina. The dildo came flying out of her. It landed on the floor and shattered into a million splinters of glass. So much for the guarantee of glass dildoes. Ralph Nader, are you listening?

Linda Lovelace descends into the wine cellar…

… where she strips for Bob Phillips.

The wine cellar as seen in the real estate listing in 2012; it has since been demolished.

From ‘Getting Into Deep Throat’ (1973) by Richard Smith:

“Now that’s a pervert!” Damiano grins, recalling the owner of the mansion. “Sepy was there, watching, carrying on, trying to make out with everybody in sight. He’d had a lot of stuff shot there, and he figured that if he just played his cards right, at the end there would be a big party and everyone would carry on. But unfortunately on my set we don’t do that, so he was pretty disappointed.”

Sepy in the pool at his house (late 1960s)…

… and the same pool in 2015.

The entrance to Sepy’s former studio in 2015.

Day 10 – 12:

Collins Ave and Pine Tree Drive, Miami Beach, FL

Shooting Linda Lovelace driving Gerard Damiano’s Cadillac for the opening credit sequence

From ‘Getting Into Deep Throat’ (1973) by Richard Smith:

After completing all the interiors for Deep Throat, Damiano had to wait a few days to get his outdoor shots thanks to a very un-Florida like stretch of rain.

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

It started to rain. It never rains in Florida, but it’s raining now. I had a scene where I have Linda driving into Florida. The wipers are going in the car. It turned out to be a great opening sequence, even when the sun came out and I had to keep the wipers going to maintain continuity in the film.

From Rialto Report interview with Len Camp (Deep Throat location scout) (2006):

They didn’t know where to go to shoot the driving scenes so I sent them out to Collins Ave, and they spent the whole day shooting Linda driving up and down. They were crazy to spend so much time doing that. What did they think this was…? ‘Gone With The Wind’?

The route taken by Linda Lovelace in the Deep Throat title sequence – the car traveled south down Collins Ave and north up Pine Tree Drive.

The square arches at the bottom of one of the apartment buildings on Collins Ave…

… are still there in 2015.

The building with the round edge seen in the title card…

… is still there in 2015.

Many buildings on Collins Ave have been built in the last 40 years…

… but a surprising number can still be recognized.

Along the waterway, on the other side of Collins Ave…

… a few buildings can still be recognized – such as these archways.

Driving up Pine Tree Drive…

… several of the houses are still recognizable.

This gated house…

…has not changed significantly in 45 years.

The driveway to this house…

… remains similar.

Linda Lovelace is introduced to the world…

… and introducing April Hall as herself.

*

From ‘Inside Linda Lovelace’ (1973) by Linda Lovelace:

As far as the filming schedule went, all was on time, and the movie came in on the anticipated date of January 31, 1972.

From ‘Getting Deeper’ (1977) by Gerard Damiano:

We filmed for a week, and it was beautiful. It had been funny, it was exciting, and it was bright.

*

The post Adult Film Locations 5:
Deep Throat (1972) appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Herschel Savage is raising money for his one man show, ‘Star Studded’!

He describes it is as dealing with “The true secrets of my career in the adult film industry. The ups and downs, the ins and outs. When my whole world came crashing down”

You can visit his Kickstarter page here. Please give generously!

And you can re-listen to our interview with Herschel here.

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The post Herschel Savage:
Star Studded appeared first on The Rialto Report.

What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera is a rarity. It is a well-made, ambitious early adult film that pre-dated much better known successes such as Deep Throat and Behind The Green Door, and claimed to deal with suburban relationships in a feminist-pleasing manner.

In the words of a reviewer at the time, the film “has the dual distinction of being the first pornographic soap opera, and the first erotic movie which attempts to alter the ‘women-as-object’ image of porno films.”

Or in the words of the film’s director at the time, it is “the first erotic film which… gives women (whether angered, encouraged, excited, motivated or bored by this film) a permanent platform from which to begin making erotic, cinematic statements about themselves.”

Wow.

But the story behind the film is even more interesting:

– It turns out to have been made by an ex-deputy sheriff and Army Intelligence agent.

– It featured the first couple of San Francisco adult films, Emily Smith and Lee Parsons.

– It was subject to a military investigation.

– It became a mini media sensation.

– And it was busted when it was shown in theaters. Twice.

So what’s the real story behind What About Jane?

The Rialto Report tracked down the film’s director, Tom Hanley, and actor Lee Parsons to tell the story.

With special thanks to Tom Hanley, without whom this Rialto Report would not be possible, and to Lee Parsons.

‘What About Jane’ is available on DVD or download from the fine folks at Something Weird Video.

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What About Jane: A Timeline

Pre 1971:

Tom Hanley (Director of ‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’) – interviewed in 2015:

I was raised in Mill Valley, CA. I graduated from Tam High (Tamalpais High School) in ’59 and bummed around Europe for a year.

I was a Berkeley graduate. I always thought I was going to flunk out. Then in ’65, they invited me to join Phi Beta Kappa. I did pretty well at Berkeley and graduated in Social Anthropology. It was the toughest and the best public university in the world at the time.

I was fresh off my two years of active duty. I managed to stay out of Vietnam. After that, it was easy for me to get a job as a Deputy Sheriff in Marin County, as I had the right kind of background.

I was also a captain in the Army Reserve – assigned to military intelligence.

Lee Parsons (male lead in ‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’) – interviewed in 2015:

I come from Alameda, CA.

Right out of high school, I went into the navy for four years and four months, and didn’t get out until 1967 when I was 21. It was unbelievable, because when you’re a young kid, you go through life just wishing you’d get some pussy once. You know what I mean? When you’re in high school and stuff like that, you’re frozen solid around women. You’re absolutely fearful of them.

Then when I came back, and took a look around and saw California blondes, it’s was like night and fucking day. Compared to every other woman in the world, I don’t care where you are, nothing can compete with Huntington Beach, San Diego… goddamn blondes from California. Nothing. They’re the hottest things on earth other than the fucking sun.

June 1971:

In early 1971, in his capacity as assistant sheriff, Tom Hanley was part of the security team responsible for detaining political activist Angela Davis, who had been arrested in connection to a shoot-out in a courtroom in Marin County. In the aftermath of this high-profile operation, Hanley abruptly resigned his post.

Tom Hanley:

I left the sheriff’s department after a dispute over the privacy of my notebook.

After the Angela Davis pre-trial hearing, they had to pump up the security. I was fine with that, but I was always collecting names and stuff in my notebook… other than just work. It was my business. I had a dispute over it with my superiors.

They gave me every chance to get out of it, because they knew I was good at my job. But I stuck to my principles and I refused to give my notebooks. So I quit.

From the Independent Journal (June 12th 1971):

Hanley said he was not sure what type of work he would look for now.

“I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” he joked. He said he was considering state rehabilitation counseling or some type of in-depth media work.

*

July 1971:

After leaving his position as assistant sheriff, Hanley chose an unusual career path. He decided to make a film. A pornographic film no less. This was before the era of Deep Throat, Behind The Green Door, and ‘porno chic’. Despite having no experience in film-making, he formed a production company, Cinmarin, with two friends, and set about the task idealistically and energetically.

Tom Hanley:

The San Francisco Bay Area, Berkeley and then Haight Ashbury – they were the center of the universe at that time.

You could find every idea, every social movement, and every radical in every theory represented one way or another. For us west coast boys… to our west was just ocean. There was really nowhere else to explore. We kind of did it chemically. Some of us survived and some of us didn’t, you know?

Lee Parsons:

Oh, fuck. The summer of love changed everything. After that it was unbelievable. I was in the music business by then, so I had this van chock full of albums. When you’re in the music business, you’re in a record store and all that, you’re like right next to Christ in people’s eyes, you know?

At the end of each evening, working at that record store, I could look around, and there’d be girls lined up. I could go, “Okay, I’ll take you two, but no more.” It was like that, I’m serious! It was amazing. Nobody’s had a better life than I have.

Things changed later, and nobody had it worse than me, but at that point, nobody had it better than me.

Tom Hanley:

The 1970s was when people thought there might be some positive social functions to erotographic cinema, and they wanted to take it away from the grindhouse stuff where old men were masturbating with their hats on their laps, you know what I mean? The Mitchell Brothers and ‘Behind the Green Door’ and ‘What About Jane’ all happened around the same time.

I was a chauvinistic, young educated punk. I honestly thought that I could make a film that would be some kind of statement about men, that you need to be sensitive to women’s requirements in sex too.

I enlisted the help of a couple of friends. Dick Hoyt was our photographer, helping us frame shots and get things right from the photography point of view. I wrote the thing. Peter Tar-sian was the cinematographer. I did the major stuff. We all took credit for the direction of the thing.

I got some the cameras from Lowell Picket who was kind of one of the local sleazeballs. I gave him some kind of system producer credit for that. I paid him a couple of thousand.

Peter Tar-sian and Mark Hofherr (sound)

Tom Hanley:

How did I find the actors? I think I just advertised in the Berkeley Barb, and then I rehearsed them until they were ready.

Dig this, man, those actors worked for $40 a day cash. I’m not shitting you. Two $20 bills each one of them!

Martha Strawberry was one of the two actresses. She wasn’t real smart, but a pleasant woman. She was interesting. My best understanding was that she was kind of a high class hooker for the insurance convention industry. She had large breasts… I’m a small tit guy in terms of my own preference, so I liked the redhead girl, but Martha appealed to the other side, so to speak.

Director Tom Hanley with actress Martha Strawberry

Tom Hanley:

I hired pretty standard guys. Emily (Smith) and Lee were actually a real life couple.

I did have a problem with Lee because he was just all butched up and not in touch with his feminine side. You got to be in touch with all sides of yourself – whichever way you live your life.

Lee Parsons:

I was at work one day, and this kid, Carl Hunter, who worked for me came in. He was late. I said, “Why are you late, Carl? I’m about to fire you.” He says, “Wait ’til you hear this story.” He says, “Some guy got out a camera, had two white girls with him, and says, ‘You let these two white girls suck your dick, and I will pay you $150 to take a movie of it.'” I said, “Well, where’s my two black girls and my $100?”

Then I met this girl, Emily Smith, hitchhiking in Golden Gate Park. I picked her up, brought her home. When I met her, I told her, I said, “Look, the Lee you see is the Lee you get. I’m a very social guy, I screw a lot of babes. I’m still going to be a very social guy that screws a lot of babes. If you can handle that, wonderful. Move in and dig it. If you can’t, I wouldn’t advise it.” She said, “Oh, I’m good with that. I’m the same way.”

I told her about Carl and his film. She said, “Oh God, I’ve made a lot of those. Me and my girlfriend hitchhiked from back east and got all the way out here by making loops.” I said, “What’s a loop?” She says, “Oh, it’s one of those little things when you put money in a machine. You see a little bit of a film. That’s a loop.” She says, “You should do it. You’d be good at it.”

So I tried it. The first time, I couldn’t get it up. I tried to have a couple of drinks to see what would happen. It was a total failure. It was weird. Second time I was smarter, I smoked a joint, no booze. It all worked out, and it went fine. I made a couple hundred bucks.

The first couple of San Francisco adult film, Lee Parsons and Emily Smith

Lee Parsons:

Then, after a while, fuck, I was making two, three hundred bucks before 4:00pm in the afternoon!

Oh my god, it was unbelievable. We would just go out, and we’d get hired. The money rolled in. I’d get up in the morning, I’d go out, get a nice workout, run in a park. Come home, have a great breakfast. Go make a porn movie, make as much as most people in a week – getting laid! Come back home, get a steak for dinner at Original Joe’s, you know? Life was good.

And we lived at the sexiest address in San Francisco: 1669 Bush!

Tom Hanley:

In the original script, I had an acting part in the film as well. There was a nude beach boy scene that I played. It was me, running along the beach. I didn’t like the way it looked, so that wound up on the cutting room floor.

But I never would have played a sexual part myself. Getting in front of a camera and say, “Okay, get a hard on now,” would be beyond me. Even then.

Lee Parsons:

I remember making the movie very well. Emily was such a good actress that she could actually evoke tears in a movie, and get real tears to come out and do a scene that well. After she would do a scene, there’d be rounds of applause because she acted so well.

Did she have any acting training? Nope. She’s just a girl, all girls are good at it. All girls can act. They can make their chin quiver, and their eyes well up, and then wink to another girl on the other side of the room like, “I’ve almost got him.” You know? Women are just incredible like that.

Emily Smith, on the set of ‘What About Jane’

Tom Hanley:

The whole thing was an 11 day shoot, of which seven days were in my house in San Rafael.

We had three different shooting locations. One was in the East Bay, another was the S&M scene in Berkeley, and then back to Marin.

I put that whole thing together for, believe it or not, $20,000.

*

August – October 1971:

Tom Hanley:

I was happy to get the red head, Emily Smith, in our film. She was in Playboy at the time we were making the film – so it was good publicity for us.

Emily Smith in Playboy (October 1971)

From Playboy (October 1971):

At 23, Emily Smith is a member in good standing of San Francisco’s casually liberated legion of erotic models. She and her steady boyfriend of the past two years work together in blue movies, and are pooling their savings to buy a farm in Northern California.

Tom Hanley:

It took us two months to edit it as we were new to the whole process.

Tom Hanley and Peter Tars-sian editing ‘What About Jane’

Peter Tar-sian editing ‘What About Jane’

Richard Hoyt working in post-production

*

November 1971:

Adult films are notorious for hiding the names of the participants behind an array of colorful pseudonyms. Not so ‘What About Jane’. But not only did Tom Hanley have no intention of hiding his real name, he didn’t hide his background in law enforcement either. What’s more he decided to use his former career to gain as much media attention for the film as he could. He mounted an aggressive media campaign, and news of his film was soon splashed across the newspapers.

What could possibly go wrong?

Tom Hanley:

Rather than change my name and hide my identity, I wanted to make a virtue of my background and use it in the publicity for the film.

I used the sheriff thing and the military intelligence thing to jack the publicity of showing that a middle class, educated guy might have something positive to say about erotographic cinema through this porno film. That was the concept.

Predictably all the publicity around ‘What About Jane’ set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power – especially at the U.S. Army Intelligence office at the Presidio in San Francisco. With good reason: Hanley was still a captain in the Army Reserve. Within days of completing the film, he was called in and questioned by the military.

Independent Journal (November 1971):

(‘What About Jane’) began as an experimental venture by a young Phi Beta Kappa graduate who considers himself “an erotic movie buff.” But it soon became part of an extensive security investigation.

At the center of the investigation was 29 year old Tom Hanley, the film’s writer, director and producer. Hanley resides in San Rafael with his daughter.

Hanley’s interview with Jerry I. Wright, a special intelligence agent, included the following questions:

– Have you ever made or are currently making films whose themes are anti-establishment, subversive, or in any way inimical to the United States government?

– Is there any truth to speculation that you may be planning to expose policies or practices of the Marin county sherriff’s office or other governmental offices?

At the conclusion of their investigation, the military concluded that neither Hanley nor his movie were of a subversive nature. A relieved Hanley was quoted at the time as saying, “I’m simply interested in making good pornography. As a reformed male chauvinist, I wanted to make a film about an important aspect of women’s liberation; the sexploitation of women – treating them as an object. And I’ve done it.”

True to form, Hanley capitalized on the investigation by declaring that ‘What About Jane’ was now the first ever erotic film with full security clearance.

*

December 1971:

The marketing approach worked. As the film moved towards its premiere, the newspapers latched onto the story, eager to cover the upcoming film.

*

January 1972:

‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’ was first shown in an exclusive press screening on 4th January 1972 – at 10:00am!

From ‘What About Jane’ press release:

“If graphic, explicit visual renderings of sexuality disturb or embarrass you….. come anyway!

If, however you feel this exposure will turn you into a sexual psychopath or a witness for the prosecution, give this invitation to your best friend and continue as you are in peace.”

‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’ premiered to the general public the following day on 5th January 1972 at Arlene Elster’s Sutter Cinema.

Tom Hanley:

Arlene Elster was the only female who owned an erotographic house in San Francisco. It seemed appropriate to me to hold the premiere at Arlene’s theater… since I was so dumb to think I was producing something that was positive for women. You know? Pornography for women…

I wasn’t really a businessman. I was an applied anthropologist, that was was my overall mission. I wanted to change attitudes, not make a billion bucks. If I had made a billion bucks, it would’ve been nice, but that wasn’t the thing that turned me on.

Independent Journal (November 1971):

The film’s creator said the film “strikes a blow for women’s liberation” because it attempts to solve the problems of an attractive, disciplined girl whose marriage to the handsome, athletic, hard-working youth of her dreams turns sour because of his romantic clumsiness and insecurity. Through the friendship of another couple, Jane and her husband learn to be equals in sexual freedom, Hanley said.

“I’m putting my clean-cut, red-blooded middle class image on the line to be able to screen ‘What About Jane,'” Hanley said. “Erotic films need to be legitimized. We can’t have blue-noses controlling our free access to such art forms. The people who enjoy erotic films have to stand up for their constitutional rights to do so.”

He said his wife disagreed with his ideas of sexual freedom “but we’re very up front about it.”

Emily Smith as Jane

John Christian as Johnny

Lee Parsons and Martha Strawberry

Emily Smith

Martha Strawberry

The cast of ‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’

Tom Hanley:

There was an excellent poster for it. I had a wonderful line sketch, just beautifully done, of Emily down on her knees, you know, from the S&M scene.

Tom Hanley:

The publicity for the film was pretty successful, and it was reviewed all over the place. It got good reviews too.

*

February 1972:

Tom Hanley:

I just kept pushing the film, and I had a cheeky style. I invited the entire California State Legislature, I invited them all to come along.

I wrote them a paper outlining the three positive functions that could be derived from our type of film if it is reasonably well done. I said if they brought it along they could get in free.

– Firstly, a sex film can be educational in the sense that people are always looking for new techniques, methods, styles… that kind of thing.

– Secondly, it can also provide vicarious release for all the super kinky, illegal shit you want to do that you can’t do. You identify with the do-er or do-ee. You have some kind of mental, spiritual, psychological, sexual release… whatever it is. Then you don’t have the energy building up that you’re out to do something that’s illegal or bad.

– The third thing is that some porn is goddamn entertaining. Most of it quite boring though, I’ll tell you that.

On 18th February 1972, ‘What About Jane’ started an engagement at the Colonial Theater in Sacramento.

That’s when the trouble began.

Tom Hanley:

The way it went was that some of those people gave the paper I’d written to the attorney general, who was a two-star air force reserve guy, who gave it to John Price, the district attorney of Sacramento, who gave it to a young vice lieutenant.

Then one busy Saturday night in Sacramento, with all the normal stuff going on, ten young policemen came down and bust this clean cut porno boy!

Tom Hanley:

What happened was that I was there at the Colonial greeting people at the theater. I had taken my two stars up there, Emily Smith and Lee Parsons. It was 19th February ’72. My wife had made me a pair of crush red velvet pants. I was doing the whole auteur porno boy thing.

The owner of the Colonial was a black city councilman in Sacramento who was kind of a gangster type guy.

That night they busted us!

I did my bail. Then I bailed the other guys out. It was a misdemeanor obscenity. Then on the basis that there was some oral sex in the film, they made that a conspiracy!

Lee Parsons:

Emily and I made a personal appearance one night to promote the film. I forget the name of the spot. The police came in and raided, seized the film, and seized us. Luckily Tom knew exactly what he was doing, and he had us out of it faster than we got in.

It was a relief to get out because I was also dealing pot at the time. I always had it. Did it forever, did it real nice. That and the sex films, it just paid every fucking bill. I always had a grand in my pocket. Everything was just fantastic.

I highly recommend making porn films and dealing pot when you’re a young person. You can’t live a better life.

Tom Hanley:

They never filed charges. The D.A. backed down a few weeks later.

I had this guy called Milton McGee defend me. He was a black attorney from Chicago. He was a ‘fixer’. In those days, those guys, what they did is they represented the underclass. They got their money from making deals for the guys who owned all the money and property and everything. You know how it works.

*

March 1972:

A few weeks later ‘What About Jane’ was busted again – and the film was seized, leaving Hanley with no copies of the film to exhibit.

Tom Hanley:

We eventually got the print back but it was a constant fight.

Tom Hanley:

I didn’t have the marketing or the gangster stuff you needed to be successful like the Mitchell brothers. But ‘What About Jane’ played in Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and continued to get good publicity.

Then I basically got tired of it. I wanted to go back and finish my master’s degree at State. I sold the film cheap and paid off my investors. It made around $300,000, so they made a little dough.

Lee Parsons:

After making the film, me and Emily went to Hawaii and did a live sex show there. ’49 Ways to Save a Marriage’. That’s what it was called. We enacted these 49 positions for a live audience. Great! I was making money, seeing Hawaii. That’s a pretty good life.

Why did I stop? I got a call from my mother. She said, “I heard from some people here in Alameda that you are making porn movies. Is that true?” I said, “Well, I’m not going to lie to you mom. Yes, it is.”

She said, “Well, you’re not going to make any more, are you?” I said, “Not if you don’t want me to.” She said, “I don’t want you to,” and so I never made another one.

I mean, one doesn’t fuck with their mother, you know? Once your mother says something, it doesn’t matter how old you are. You’ve just got to say okay. What mom says, goes.

Tom Hanley:

After selling the film, I went back and finished the master’s degree. Then a guy who was a head of this criminal part of Cal/OSHA, both the legal section and the criminal unit, he looked at my background. Military intelligence guy, infantry officer, Marin County Deputy Sheriff, presents well, reasonably good diction. And he thinks I’ll hire this guy. Never asked me any other questions. I just took a civil service exam called Special Investigators, and went to work in that field.

I never mentioned the film I’d made.

*

2015:

Lee Parsons:

I eventually split up with Emily, but we stayed in touch. In fact I talked to her two days ago. We’re still very close.

Tom Hanley:

Looking at pornography today, it’s so niche oriented. It’s so addictive to so many people. I don’t even watch it anymore.

If I look back on it and anyone asks me, “Did you ever regret doing this?” – I was always fucking proud I did it. I’ve always been proud I did it even though it was a weak film. But what can you do with $20,000? To this day, I’m proud of it.

If anybody asks me about it, I tell them, but I don’t go around and tell people I did it.

I was off and on in touch with Lee and Emily for a number of years afterward, but I’ve lost touch with all of them now.

To my associates, I’m an odd 73 year old guy. The way I dress, I’m offbeat. I’ve got a lot of strange habits. But I’m also a triple dipper retiree, living in a place that’s half as cheap as California. So I’m well off.

I’ve just had a very interesting life. I had 27 year army reserve career overall, and a 28 year law enforcement career, man. Pretty good!

And I made ‘What About Jane’!

Tom Hanley in 2015; hardly changed in 44 years

*

The post ‘What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera’ (1972)
The Ex-Sheriff Who Made A Porn Film appeared first on The Rialto Report.

João Fernandes was adult film’s first true cinematographer.

He started in New York in the 1960s shooting black and white soft-core sexploitation films.

Then he was the man looking down the camera when Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, The Story of Joanna and other groundbreaking Gerard Damiano films were made.

He worked with Doris Wishman, Armand Weston, Jonas Middleton and many others. He was responsible for the visual flair of films like Through The Looking Glass and Take Off.

But his talent and success was a double-edged sword. How could he hope to turn his underground fame in a semi-legal industry into a mainstream career?

After years of struggling, he did find success in Hollywood, working as Director of Photography on Chuck Norris films, shooting movies starring people as diverse as Tony Randall, Tom Berenger and Christopher Lambert, and even directing episodes of the hit TV show Walker, Texas Ranger.

But all the time, he wondered: What would happen if Hollywood found out about his adult film past?

For years he denied his involvement in adult film – even when it eventually seemed to be an open secret. So when Ron Howard’s production company came knocking in 2005, looking for an interview for their documentary, Inside Deep Throat, he continued to resist, still determined to keep his decades old secret.

As a result the man himself has been a mystery. No one knew much about him. How did a Brazilian become porn film’s first visual artist, what does he remember about the notorious and fabled films he worked on, and does he have any regrets?

On this episode of The Rialto Report, the artist also known as Harry Flecks breaks a 50 year silence.

In a special extended interview, we speak to the man himself. Joao Fernandes.

This episode’s running time is 118 minutes.

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João Fernandes

The post João Fernandes: The Artist Formerly Known as Harry Flecks
Podcast 57 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

We recently featured cinemtographer João Fernandes‘ (aka Harry Flecks) first interview in 50 years. Due to the great response we had to it, we’re pleased to showcase a selection of rare and unseen photographs from his scrapbooks – covering a career that spanned 1960s New York sexploitation films, 1970s hard core movies, and finally Hollywood success in the 1980s and 1990s.

The above photograph shows João on the set of The Story of Joanna (1975).

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João Fernandes (and Harry Flecks) at work

João, with friend Ron Wertheim (late 1960s)

João, with Ron Wertheim (left) (late 1960s)

João, with Don Walters (late 1960s)

João, with Ron Wertheim

João (early 1970s)

Gerard Damiano, Ron Wertheim, and João (1974)

João, on the set of The Story of Joanna (1975)

João, with Armand Weston (left)

João, with Richard Pacheco (courtesy Gordon Archives)

João takes his place in the ill-feted biplane, for The Comeback Trail shoot (1982) – listen to to the podcast for the full story…

The remains of the biplane after the accident on The Comeback Trail shoot (1982)

Victor Petrashevic cradles João’s head after the biplane accident

João, at work in the Philippines

João at the center of the action

João, with the director who gave him his mainstream break, Joe Zito

The legendary action star. Posing with Chuck Norris in 1988.

João, in the Philippines with producer (and brother of Chuck) Aaron Norris (1988)

João, with Dolph Lundgren on the set of Red Scorpion (1988)

João, with Suzanne Somers on the set of Seduced By Evil (1994)

João, on the set of The Road to Galveston (1996) with Tess Harper and Piper Laurie

The talented, charismatic and unforgettable legend of the silver screen (posing here with Charlton Heston in 1998).

João, on the set of Gideon (1998) – Shirley Jones, Charlton Heston, and Barbara Bain

João Fernandes

The post João Fernandes / Harry Flecks:
Scrapbook of a Cinematographer appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Navred Reef has long been a mystery in the world of adult film.

He’s credited with directing five pornographic pictures in the late 1970s, was believed to have been Dutch, and was rumored to have been murdered in the early 1980s. But apart from these fragments, little concrete detail about the man has surfaced over the years.

In 2014, Robin Bougie, author of the excellent Graphic Thrills, contacted us to say that a Dutch friend had a theory: What if ‘Navred Reef’ was actually the Dutch name ‘Van der Feer’ spelled backwards?

Starting out with little more than this clue, The Rialto Report’s April Hall set out on a year-long investigation – tracking down family members, business associates, friends, organized crime figures, adult film colleagues, detectives, postal inspectors, prosecutors, and many more – to find the real Navred Reef.

What she found was a surprising story of crime, 8mm sex loops, the New York mafia, fraud, pornographic feature films, psychopaths, the Westies, the Dutch mob, Gerry Damiano, murder, Linda Lovelace, and much more.

The story of Navred Reef can now be told.

Special thanks to the Anderson and Thompson families, Bill Luxe, John Dulaney, Daniel Morgan, Roger Caine, and countless former detectives, cops, filmmakers, and others, many of whom have asked to remain nameless.

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The Life and Death of Navred Reef

1.     Beginnings:

It’s true. ‘Navred Reef’ started life as Van der Feer. Tom Jan Van der Feer to be exact. (His name was spelled both ‘Van der Feer’ and ‘Vanderfeer’ on official documents, so the correct version is an open question).

Tom was born on November 19th, 1932 in Rotterdam in the Netherlands to Tobias, an apartment building superintendent, and Mary, a housewife. He had a brother Adriaan, who was seven years his senior.

Little is known about Tom’s childhood as he remained secretive about his past, but one aspect of it affected him for many years afterwards. He was seven at the time of the Rotterdam Blitz, the aerial bombardment of the city by the Luftwaffe on May 14th, 1940 during the German invasion of the Netherlands in World War II. The bombing destroyed the entire historic city center, killing nearly 900 people and leaving 85,000 others homeless. The effects of the bombing and the ensuing Nazi occupation of the city affected Tom physically (the poor air quality gave him lifelong emphysema) and inflicted deep emotional scars on him. The Gestapo had an office in the same building as the family, and Tom grew up with the daily threat of violence hanging over him.

In the summer of 1952 when Tom was 19, the entire Van der Feer family boarded a ship in Amsterdam bound for Western Australia. They arrived in the port of Freemantle on September 11th, 1952, and from there the family stayed on the ship until it docked in Sydney. They disembarked and traveled on to Brisbane where they settled.

Shipping documents, showing the names of Tom’s family emigrating to Australia in 1952

In Brisbane, Tom’s brother, Adriaan, married a local girl, Lonnie, who worked as a masseuse. She was well-respected and had an impressive list of clients, including the wife of the then Premier of Queensland, Vince Gair. Lonnie would fill all the family in on the gossip shared during the massages.

Tom found work as a photographer in Brisbane, developing a fascination with photographing showgirls and ballet dancers. He’d go and meet these young women at the local train station whenever they arrived in town for shows and offer his services to them.

In 1955, Tom met his future wife, Margaret Ann Lace Carruthers. She was in a movie theater with a girlfriend who had dated Tom. He spotted them and waved before going over to chat with them. The next day Tom turned up at Margaret’s house and their relationship progressed quickly. They were married on June 6th, 1955.

Margaret remembers Tom as being quick and smart – but that he also had the “instincts of a pimp”. He was keen to make as much money as possible – and often this meant sending Margaret out to find any additional work that she could.

Tom was headstrong – in particular in relation to his new parents-in-law. When Margaret’s parents came to stay, Tom clashed badly with his mother-in-law. It was so bad that on one occasion Tom insisted that they leave immediately – when no alternative accommodation could be found, a tent was bought and Margaret’s parents were dispatched to a nearby camping ground.

By this stage in life Tom had his own shop front photo studio, taking portraits and developing the pictures in a darkroom on site. Margaret was his receptionist and helped him hand-color some of the photographs. Tom was a hustler too – taking pictures of people on the beach and streets and then trying to sell them back to those appearing in them.

The lingering impression of Margaret’s family was that Tom didn’t settle well into married life. Margaret suspected he was womanizing, and on one occasion she found him in bed with another woman. Tom loved the night life, spending many of his evenings gaining free access to nightclubs in exchange for taking pictures of the customers. Eventually management in one club noticed there was no film in his camera and kicked him out.

Brisbane, Australia (1950s)

Despite the modest success of his studio, Tom never had difficulty affording anything – something even Margaret found puzzling. She discovered the reason when she found stacks of topless photos of women stored in the studio; he’d been taking them behind her back and trading them for goods, services, even restaurant meals. Margaret was shocked and told Tom to stop. Shortly afterwards the police arrested him for taking more nude pictures; he was released soon after but he begged them not to tell his wife.

In November 1957, Tom and Margaret had their first son, Robert, and within months Margaret was pregnant with their second boy, William. Before William was born however, events took an unexpected turn. Tom’s parents and brother had already left Australia to return to Holland, and in 1958, Tom abruptly disappeared leaving Margaret pregnant.

Margaret was destitute. Desperate, she went to the local social security office to see if she could find out any information about where Tom had gone, and to see if she was eligible to get any financial assistance or pension. The government official said he wasn’t allowed to give out any information, but when he was called out of the room, Margaret seized the opportunity to look through Tom’s file. She learned that he’d left Australia and traveled to Canada by boat.

By the time second son William was born in October 1958, Tom was long gone. He never returned or seemingly made any effort to contact his family again. Margaret divorced him the following year on the grounds of abandonment.

No pictures of him exist from his time in Australia. Margaret’s mother cut Tom out of every photo they had.

*

2.     Coming to America

After arriving in Canada, Tom made his way to the United States, traveling down to New Jersey where his parents and brother Adriaan had moved and settled. Tom’s father had gotten a job as the superintendent of a garden apartment complex there. Tom opened a small photo business in Newark, New Jersey, this time using his middle name as the company name, Jan Photo Products Inc.

Those who remember Tom from this time recall a fidgety, restless character, who was invariably cooking up schemes to make more money. Despite his interest in photography, friends remember him as being less concerned with the creative side and more focused on both the commercial and technical aspects of the craft.

In late 1961 Tom met Judy Thompson, an aspiring Broadway singer who’d moved east from Carmel, California to follow her dream of becoming a stage performer. She was eight years his junior, and was living in a 4th floor apartment in East Orange, New Jersey from where she would commute each morning to her day job in Manhattan as a filing clerk.

Tom and Judy met at a singles group at Marble Collegiate Church, her social base, on Fifth Avenue and 29th Street, just five blocks south of the Empire State Building. Tom loved showgirls and expressed an immediate interest in Judy’s aspirations of being a performer. He offered to help her by taking some professional head-shots.

Judy remembers her own insecurity at that time, and after dating Tom for a year she started pushing him to get married. Tom agreed, and the ceremony took place in May 1963 at the church where they’d met, with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the bestselling ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, serving as minister for the wedding.

Tom and his father rented a loft at 82 Broadway in Newark, New Jersey for the couple to live in. They built partitions so that the loft could also serve as Tom’s photo studio. It was a strange space for the newlyweds, and one that Judy admits was “pretty bleak.”

The former location of Tom’s photo studio at 82 Broadway in Newark, NJ (pictured in 2016)

Tom also built a sound studio there to record Judy singing, figuring it was an opportunity to make some money off of her talents. Judy called a local Newark newspaper and arranged for an article about the business. As part of the feature, the newspaper sent a photographer to take a picture of the couple in the recording studio. It is the only known photo of Tom in existence.

Tom (right), with his second wife Judy

Even before they moved in together, Tom had been prone to volatile mood swings, alternating between declarations of love and volleys of verbal criticism. On occasion the abuse was physical too; he once broke Judy’s finger in a fight. Judy describes him as being a damaged person who suffered from some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of his childhood wartime experiences. On the rare occasions he opened up to her, Tom spoke about his memories of the bombing. He recalled being picked on by his classmates because he looked Jewish. Teachers bullied him too, and he remembered spending many of his school classes standing alone in the corner. He did tell Judy he had been married before, but omitted to mention that it was in Australia, or that he had two young sons.

After Tom and Judy married, the relationship didn’t get any better. He refused to continue going to church, and devastated Judy by telling her he wouldn’t have children. Tom installed a twin bed in a cubby hole in their loft apartment, but would only let Judy into the bed to have sex before forcing her to sleep on the sofa each night. A possessive and jealous streak emerged too, as Tom attempted to intimidate any men he suspected of showing Judy too much attention.

Tom’s photo studio was struggling to make much money, and being short of cash made Tom nervous. He suggested Judy find additional work, such as selling pre-packaged foods to restaurants. As for Tom, he’d try anything to get paid work, honest or otherwise, displaying a chameleon-like ability to assume another identity if it suited him. Judy remembered Tom once professing to be Jewish to get a job photographing a local temple.

He enjoyed working on the processing side of photography, and in November 1963, Tom filed a patent for a new way of washing photographic film rolls clean of chemicals.

Extract from patent application: Roll film washer – US 3169539 A

“This invention relates generally to film washers and more particularly to new and useful improvements in a roll film washer for 120, 127 and 35mm roll film, wound on Nikor type reels.

Heretofore, washers of this type with which applicant is aware drained from the top leaving considerable hypo on the film negative. The present invention is based on the principle that hypo and chemicals are heavier than water and the draining is made from the bottom.

A principal object of the present invention is to provide a film washer that is effective in removing the hypo solution or used chemical or residue clinging to the film after developing and fixing, in quick time.”

Extract from Tom’s patent (1965)

*

3.     Nude Photos and 8mm Loops

In 1965, Tom revealed to Judy that he’d been taking nude pictures of local women and selling them to adult bookstores in New York. Judy got the impression that he’d been doing this for several years, probably since well before they met. Tom said that now he needed to take nude photos of her; apparently a telephone company executive had promised to award Tom an advertising contract in exchange for nude pictures. Judy agreed, and Tom’s business saw an upturn in its fortunes with the additional work from the telephone company.

Shortly after this however, a competitor informed local vice cops that Tom was peddling obscene pictures. The cops came and ransacked the Newark loft, but somehow Tom had been tipped off in advance and he and a friend had already taken the offending material out on the Hoboken ferry and dumped it into the sea the night before.

The last straw for Judy’s marriage to Tom was when she took a role in a touring version of ‘Hello Dolly’ in 1966. She returned home to find condoms in the bedroom and realized that Tom was seeing other women. Once she was back out on the road, she decided she did not want to return to him. While in Las Vegas performing she learned she could get a divorce in Nevada, and so filed papers claiming emotional and physical abuse. Tom was upset and angry but agreed to dissolve the marriage – as long as he could keep all their common possessions.

After the divorce Judy kept in touch with Tom infrequently; she remarried and when pregnant with her second child in 1973, Tom sent her $600 and a gift for the baby. It was the last time she ever heard from him.

As the 1960s drew to a close, Tom became interested in making films. Specifically 8mm sex films. Through his contacts with adult bookstores, he met Sal Sodano. Sodano was an aspiring filmmaker in Manhattan and one of the pioneers in the cottage industry that churned out explicit sex loops for an insatiable audience of adult bookstores on 42nd Street. Despite the high demand and good money to be made, the group of loop-makers at the time was relatively small – Sodano, Sam Menning, Bob Wolfe, Ted Snyder, and a married Dutch couple, Peter and Iris were the main players. Tom wanted into that group.

If the underground nature and danger of the films intrigued Tom, the opportunity to make money excited him even more. He moved out of Newark and rented an apartment on West 48th Street in Manhattan – just down the block from the heart of New York’s sex trade. He started shooting loops straight away in his apartment, using his own camera and girls he met from ads he placed.

When The Rialto Report interviewed Sal Sodano he remembered Tom well: “He was a strange guy. A loner, and could be a little secretive. He was nervous too, as if he feared someone was coming after him. He was interested in shooting loops like the rest of us. But he didn’t just want to shoot, he wanted to get know the people who we’d sell them too. He knew that was where the real money was – and he wanted the money.”

Sal remembered that Tom was one of the first to shoot an 8mm loop with Linda Lovelace when she arrived in New York in late 1971, just before she became a household name following the success of Deep Throat (1972).

Extract from ‘Ordeal – An Autobiography’ by Linda Lovelace with Mike McGrady (1981):

Those first eight-millimeter films were shot in a loft near 48th Street and Broadway by a man named Tom. The bathroom sink was filthy. The rooms were filled with odd pieces of furniture covered by sheets. The floors had never been mopped and your feet turned black just walking on them. The people who made filthy movies always seemed to live in filth.

Tom introduced us to our co-star for the day, a nice-looking young man named Rob. I would up making a half-dozen of the eight-millimeter movies with Rob, including some with his wife, Cathy.

The director, Tom, told Brandy and me to take off our clothes and lie on the bed. He told us to lie there naked and be laughing and talking together and then to start kissing each other.

Linda Lovelace 8mm loop (1971)

When The Rialto Report showed Eric Edwards (Rob in the extract from Linda’s book) the photo of Tom from the 1960s, his reaction was immediate: “Yes! I absolutely recognized Tom. I can’t remember which loops he shot with Linda and me, but I recognize him from that time.”

Tom shot more and more loops, most of them in his space on West 48th Street, and sold to various buyers such as 42nd St bookstore owners like Marty Hodas, and experienced distributors like Luis ‘The Spik’ Marti. (Luis Marti was already a notorious dealer in pornography, and by the end of the 1960s had a string of arrests for distribution of obscene material – including bestiality loops. In a 1965 court case, he was asked by an incredulous prosecutor how he managed to get a dog to perform in a sexual situation. Luis replied, “I have no idea: I work in the sales department, not in production.”)

Much of the distribution of loops was handled by the Italian mob, so some of the shooters had protection from mafia figures. Tom soon found himself an ally, aligning himself to the notorious Roy DeMeo.

*

4.     Roy DeMeo and the Mob

Roy Albert DeMeo was a member of the powerful Gambino crime family in New York. In the 1960s, he made a minor name for himself by heading a ruthless gang active on two fronts, loan-sharking and car theft. It was this collective of criminals that would become known both in the underworld and in law enforcement circles as the DeMeo crew.

The DeMeo crew even developed their own gruesome style of execution, dubbed the “Gemini Method” after the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn, the primary hangout of the gang – as well as the site where most of their victims were killed. The Gemini Method, revealed by multiple crew members who became government witnesses, did not come to light until a decade later in the early 1980s.

Typically the victim would be lured through the side door of the lounge and into an apartment in the back portion of the building. At this point, a crew member, almost always DeMeo, would approach with a silenced pistol in one hand and a towel in the other, shooting the victim in the head then wrapping the towel around the victim’s head like a turban to staunch the blood flow. The body would then be dismembered, put into bags, and sent to the nearby Fountain Avenue Dump, where so many tons of garbage were dropped each day that it was near impossible for the bodies to be discovered.

DeMeo started distributing pornography and relied upon filmmakers like Tom to keep him supplied with fresh product, so Tom kept a steady flow of loops into DeMeo and DeMeo’s associate, Richard ‘Big Richie’ Kuklinksi.

Tom did well out of the relationship and took on a second space in the Times Square area at 160 West 46th St that he used as his main film studio, both shooting and editing there. Often he’d shoot by himself, though sometimes he would have a helper – such as Bill Luxe, who also had a printing business that handled a number of pornographic magazine titles. Luxe shared office space with DeMeo’s associate Big Richie and remembers Tom as “a strange, nervous guy, schizo even… especially when he hadn’t taken his meds. Even though he’d been in the U.S for a while, he still spoke with a Dutch accent.”

As the demand for loops increased, Tom needed more help and gave work to Lloyd ‘Smitty’ Smith, a tall, hard-working guy from the West Indies who worked closely with Bill Luxe. Smitty lived around the corner from Tom on 48th Street above a bar called The Golden Oaks. Smitty often shot and edited films in his own apartment.

Tom was known to be careful with his money, not to mention greedy at times, and this could cause problems for him. Smitty put together a one-day-wonder film for Tom, and was angry when Tom didn’t pay him. Smitty began making a lot of noise about the debt. Tom complained to Roy DeMeo and in such a small but highly profitable business, DeMeo didn’t want quarrels that would elicit unwanted attention. Any problems had to be snuffed out swiftly and efficiently.

Roy DeMeo

Bill Luxe, Smitty’s friend, remembers clearly what happened next: “Roy DeMeo came knocking at my door and said he knew Smitty was with me. He said Van der Feer worked for him and that I should tell Smitty not to go near Tom. I passed Roy’s message on to Smitty – and told him that coming from DeMeo it meant a threat. Smitty didn’t listen. He was a hot head and he went to Van der Feer’s place in Times Square, wrecked his studio and took a camera for the money Tom owed him. Next thing I heard was that Roy DeMeo had called Smitty out to the Gemini Lounge for a sit-down with Van der Feer. I talked to Smitty before he went out to the Gemini. He said he’d call and let me know what happened at the sit-down. That night my wife and I were up until after midnight waiting for Smitty to call, but he never got in touch. I was at the lab the next day and Roy was there. I asked how the sit-down went and was told, “Sit-down? What sit-down?” I knew not to ask too many questions, so I let it slide. That was the last anybody ever heard from Smitty. There was no doubt in my mind that Smitty got the Gemini treatment.”

There was no police investigation into Smitty’s disappearance.

Tom continued to make loops under the protection of DeMeo.

*

5.     Film Making

Over the next few years, the market for 8mm loops subsided, so Tom started to look for alternative sources of income.

He became friendly with a couple of Greek Americans from Queens, Tom Gioulos and his partner Teddy Kariofilis, who co-owned the Capri Theater at 738 8th Avenue in Manhattan. Gioulos and Kariofilis had acquired the place from the doyenne of Times Square theaters, Chelly Wilson, in the late 1960s and by the early 1970s they were looking to pay for their own product to show there. They offered to finance ‘one day wonder’ adult films with Tom directing them and taking a flat fee.

The Capri Theater, 1970s

The resulting films were low quality pornography, with Tom using a variety of anonymous pseudonyms to hide behind. But they did well at the Capri and the Greeks kept coming back for more.

Remarkably Tom was also successful in getting mainstream film work at the time – including a contract with Texaco to work on commercials and industrial films for them. This deal would continue for several years and provide Tom with steady additional money. It also enabled him to hire a personal assistant, Connie, and an apprentice to work in his studio (see photo, from 1973).

Meanwhile Gioulos and Kariofilis expressed an interest in producing a mainstream film, and they approached Tom to put it together. He started by placing an ad for a screenwriter in the Village Voice.

John Dulaney, an aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter, answered the ad and remembers meeting Tom for the first time: “It was around 1973-74 and we hit it off great from the first meeting. Tom worked really long hours. He was a real nice guy, though a bit high-strung. He had a heavy Dutch accent but spoke good English. Basically he was a techie and just loved new gadgets.

“The ad in the paper was for a writer to work on a screenplay. The film was to be called ‘Costa Del Sol’ and the flimsy idea was written by a Greek guy and was exactly thus: “An artist in Spain falls in love with a girl.” The Greek guy and I had just one conversation at his apartment in Queens – in which he spent most of the time telling me Greeks aren’t “queer” and that it’s not true that they screw each other in the “ass”! From that I wrote the entire screenplay, and yet when it was printed and bound, it gave the Greek guy credit for the story and me for just “additional dialogue”. I believe I was paid $2,000.

“The screenplay was never produced, but I was also trying to produce and direct a sci-fi film of my own, so after I finished the screenplay, I asked Tom if I could use his studio to build space ships for my feature. He was kind enough to let me.”

Tom’s studio (circa 1973) (courtesy of John Dulaney)

Another person who worked with Tom was production manager, Daniel Morgan. Morgan worked with Tom on a Texaco commercial in the mid to late 1970s. Tom was the director and cameraman, and Morgan describes him as being polite and pleasant though also aloof and detached. He remembers Tom as being less interested in the creative side of enterprise but more concerned with trying to please the client who was on set that day.

Morgan remembers one detail in particular about the commercial. The storyline of the short film had a Texaco gas station attendant give a small boy a balloon. Then the balloon pops. The way Tom made the balloon pop was to hire a man with a BB rifle to stand at the other end of the gas station and shoot out the balloon… which was bobbing around the boy’s head, not to mention the gas pump. The boy finally got wise to the danger and became hysterical. End of the shoot.

In the mid 1970s, Tom worked on a number of other commercials for businesses, and also started a small scale film school, offering classes to aspiring cinematographers and crew members. Connie arranged the classes and Tom taught them himself out of his studio at 160 West 46th Street. He also took on additional shooting space at 74 West 47th Street, where he started shooting more of his loops.

Tom’s studio at 74 West 47th Street (pictured in 2016)

*

6.     The Rise and Fall of ‘Navred Reef’

Despite his increasingly mainstream jobs, Tom continued to dip into the growing pornographic film industry on a regular basis. In 1976, he formed a short-lived company, ASOM Distributing, which handled the distribution of Gerard Damiano’s Let My Puppets Come (1976) – a bizarre porn film that included Muppet-style marionettes, and the following year he distributed Damiano’s next film Odyssey: The Ultimate Trip (1977).

Tom continued to shoot loops and one day wonders out of his studio and was well known to the New York cadre of performers, such as Tina Russell, Gloria Leonard, Dave Ruby – and Jamie Gillis, who starred in one of his more notorious loops featuring Crystal Sync and a transsexual named Sandi Suarez.

Tom’s studio at 74 West 47th Street

Another actor who worked for Tom was Roger Caine – although at first it was not in an acting capacity. A former junior high school teacher in Philadelphia, PA, he began cutting loops for Tom when Caine was temporarily unable to act in films as a result of breaking his leg in a skydiving accident. He’d go into Tom’s studio at night to edit the short films, and remembers Tom hard at work cutting commercials for his corporate accounts.

Roger Caine, in a scene from Playgirls of Munich (1977)

Caine formed a particularly close friendship with Tom, describing him as a brilliant and intelligent man with refined tastes, a lover of opera and a connoisseur of fine Scotch whiskey. He loved women too though Caine remembers Tom having no consistent relationships. And though Tom’s increased income had markedly improved his lifestyle, it had also increased his desire to enjoy more of the high life. Caine remembers Tom telling him that he needed at least $1,000 each week to continue to live the way he wanted.

One easy income source was pornographic films, and in 1976, Tom adopted the name ‘Navred Reef’ by reversing the letters in his surname, and over the next two years made a series of five hardcore feature films. The idea came from his friendship with actor / director Zebedy Colt.

Zebedy Colt, in a scene from Playgirls of Munich (1977)

Zebedy Colt was born Edward Earle Marsh in California in 1929. After a career as a child actor in Hollywood, he became an innovator of ‘queer cabaret’ when, as ‘Zebedy Colt’, he recorded an album of gay torch songs, ‘I’ll Sing for You‘, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1960s. He started making pornographic films in the mid 1970s when short of money and revived the ‘Zebedy Colt’ name to conceal his true identity as he was still active in theater productions at the time.

Tom had met Zebedy when Colt was working on the film Unwilling Lovers (1975). They hit it off from the outset. They were close in age, and shared similar interests and a bawdy sense of humor. They would sit around for hours thinking up more outrageous plots and scenarios for porn films.

Deciding that they would have fun working together, they came up with the idea of shooting a series of XXX-rated comedy ‘road’ pictures in the tradition of the 1940s films starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. What’s more they decided to go to film them in Europe: Tom would use his contacts there to produce and direct the movies, and Zebedy would take a lead acting role.

To keep costs down, the crew for the foreign shoot would need to be minimal, so Zebedy introduced Tom to a young and energetic jack-of-all-trades filmmaker, Bill Bukowski. When it came to film, Bill was a fast learner. At the age of 16 he’d become one of the youngest members of the film union, I.A. Editors Union. He’d then attended NYU film school, and after graduating he went to work for Leonard Kirtman’s porn production company, International Film Industries (I.F.I.I.), where he did a bit of everything – such as cameraman, editor, and gaffer – on countless films, using a variety of pseudonyms such as ‘Billy Hawk’. Still in his early 20s, porn films were his way of funding his first love – 3-D film techniques.

As a warm-up film for their European trip, Tom developed a storyline about the incestuous adventures of a teenage girl. In truth it was just a succession of routine sex scenes, livened up by Zebedy’s role as the lecherous father. The resulting film, Sharon (1977), distributed by Tom’s ASOM company and falsely billed as “Filmed on location in Atlanta, Georgia!” did well so Tom wrote two outlines for their European road movies.

In early 1977, Tom and Zebedy set off on a two week filmmaking trip to Amsterdam and Munich. Bill Bukowski went with them, as did the second lead actor, Tom’s close friend Roger Caine. Zebedy and Caine played the parts of two bumbling friends – Zebedy the loser, Caine the charming, successful ladies man – who encounter women in bierkellers, on the streets, and at parties.

The two week shoot proved to be a riot – with real life events often proving to be more entertaining than the plots of the actual films. A more detailed account of the trip will be told in a future Rialto Report.

Tom had been traveling to Europe on and off in the 1970s, sometimes carrying out instructions on behalf of Roy DeMeo. As a result he’d made contacts with organized crime bosses in places like Amsterdam. In particular Tom had become friends with Maurits ‘Zwarte Jopie’ (Black Joe) de Vries, an infamous Dutch criminal considered the godfather of the local underworld, particularly involved in prostitution and gambling. De Vries operated out of the Amsterdam Red Light District and his headquarters were at Amsterdam’s largest live sex club, Casa Rosso, which he owned. It was de Vries who set up filming locations and a selection of porn actors and actresses in advance of Tom’s arrival. Many of the performers were well-known and established on the European sex film scene, but there were still many roles still to fill so the filmmakers had to hold improvised casting sessions with local prostitutes and strippers.

Much of their footage was taken on the streets of the two European cities, incorporating landmarks such as the Munich Olympics complex and the Amsterdam Red Light District (De Vries’ Casa Rosso is clearly visible in some scenes) and they also filmed in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a German ski resort in Bavaria, 90 kilometers south of Munich.

The European footage was released in two films: Dutch Treat (1977) and Playgirls of Munich (aka Munich Madness) (1977). Once again Tom’s ASOM company distributed them and box office receipts show the films did well all over the country, cashing in on American’s prurient interest in European permissiveness. The films boosted Tom and Zebedy’s bank balances, and they were keen to continue their working relationship.

They threw together Hollywood Goes Hard (aka French Kittens) (1978), a quick and cheap film consisting of a flimsy framing device featuring Zebedy (as movie mogul Renaldo Rutolicci) and Caine, and a selection of interspersed loops, many of which Tom had shot over the preceding years, one of which was Jamie Gillis’ transsexual loop.

During this period, Tom had a regular Village Voice ad for actors, inviting applicants to contact his faithful assistant, Connie, at his film studio. Roger Caine would interview people and recommend them to Tom.

Financially Tom was doing well enough to buy a beachfront property on the north shore of Long Island at 74 Highland Down in Shoreham. He had regular parties at the beach house, and visitors remember being impressed with the size of the home which included an outdoor swimming pool, Jacuzzi and large garden. Tom also bought a house boat which Caine helped him paint.

It was at this home that Tom shot most of his final ‘Navred Reef’ film, Angie Police Women (aka Angie Undercover Cop) (1979), in the summers of 1977 and 1978. The film featured a stellar cast including Vanessa Del Rio, Rikki O’Neal, Samantha Fox, and (who else?) appearing for the last time together, Tom’s close friends Zebedy Colt and Roger Caine.

The film was another cheap effort, shot and edited by Bill Bukowski, but with Tom’s marketing and networking skills it made another healthy profit.

*

7.     Credit Card Fraud

Despite his various film ventures – the commercial film work, the film school, the pornographic features – that enabled him to live comfortably, Tom was restless in pursuing other money-making activities. Bill Luxe, Tom’s friend from the loop days whose printing business now provided posters, magazines, and illustrated boxes for the sex industry, remembers Tom getting involved in a number of scams as the decade drew to a close. Principal among these schemes was credit card fraud, and once again mobster Roy DeMeo was Tom’s mentor and facilitator.

Tom started off in a primitive way, using stolen credit card receipt slips to claim money back from the underwriting financial companies. Then Tom and Roy moved on to counterfeiting actual credit cards. DeMeo would pass stolen credit cards to Tom who ironed off the numbers and replaced them with new details. Ever the technical nut, Tom prided himself in developing a method to do this that was virtually invisible to the human eye. The altered credit cards were then given back to Roy who had teams of people use them to buy goods that could be re-sold on the black market before the real owner got the bill. Tom worked out of his studio on West 46th Street and received a flat payment each time for his efforts.

Credit card fraud was still in its infancy, and the risk to perpetrators was reasonably low. Stores were issued with lists of ‘hot’ credit cards but they were neither exhaustive nor supplied on a timely basis, and store employees often weren’t diligent in checking them. Detectives active at the time remember that criminals would typically run up charges of around $10,000 on a card before dumping it.

It was a cottage industry that wasn’t destined to last. To stay ahead of the law, fraudsters needed to come up with new and improved ways of developing counterfeit credit cards. Roger Caine was fully aware of what Tom was doing, and remembers the lengths Tom would go to in order to perfect his work. He recalled Tom going to Canada, posing as different people to get access to credit card manufacturers so he could learn more about the process.

Tom worked hard in his studio looking for innovative methods to print the credit cards in more accurate ways. He contacted his old friend Bill Luxe and asked for help in silk screen printing, but Luxe was inexperienced in that field and turned him down. Eventually Tom made a breakthrough and developed a new ‘foil transfer’ technique – a way to effectively transfer the art work to the credit cards. When some of the cards fell into the hands of the police and credit companies, they were amazed at the quality.

Before long DeMeo introduced Tom to someone who was interested in using his new found methods.

George King was 48 years old, a couple of years older than Tom. A life-long criminal, he was well known to New York police as an associate of the Westies, the notorious Irish American gang who operated out of Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s West Side. DeMeo had developed an alliance with the Westies and knew George King personally.

King had a reputation as a thug, violent and extremely dangerous, and was suspected of being involved in a string of crimes in the city since the early 1970s. He lived at 51 West 68th Street with his wife, Nora – a partner in her husband’s criminal activities. Their side-kick and enforcer was Frank Elsis. King and Elsis were crazy – certifiably so; they were reported to have been psychiatric patients at Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood, NY. Roger Caine met George King through Tom, and King openly talked about being a hit man listing the various guns he used.

King smelled an opportunity and was intent on developing a more advanced counterfeit credit card operation – more sophisticated than anything that Tom had been doing, and on a much larger, more profitable scale too. Tom was a good fit for King’s plan but King also needed another person; a skillful artist capable of copying credit card designs perfectly.

Step forward, Donald Sanders.

If George King and Donald Sanders were identically hard-wired for deceit and a life of crime, in other respects they couldn’t have been more different. Whereas King was an intimidating, brash and brutish physical force, Sanders was a slight and anonymous, long-haired artistic wizard. Appearances could be deceiving however. The police considered Sanders just as dangerous as King.

When it came to counterfeiting, Sanders had been a child prodigy. He’d got his start as a teen by forging $100 bills on his high school mimeograph machine in California. Accounts from the time state that the quality of the bills was good enough for them to be passable… so he used them to make purchases. Eventually his youthful naivety led to his arrest, but he got off easily due to his status as a minor. Shortly afterwards his mother moved them to Peoria, Illinois.

In Peoria, Sanders and his mother got involved in a scheme to purchase airplane seats with counterfeit cards and re-sell them. They were both arrested, and found their case being aggressively pursued by a determined local district attorney who refused to let it drop.

Cops who remember Sanders from the time describe him as a fascinating sociopath with no moral compass, and a cold-blooded violent streak. Their accounts suggest that it was Sanders’ mother that connected Donald with George King in New York, and Sanders flew there while on bail to join the inner circle of King’s counterfeiting gang.

It was an unlikely but complementary group: George King was the belligerent, bullying boss with the organized crime connections, Donald Sanders was the talented young artist capable of generating picture-perfect artwork, and Tom handled the equipment capable of transferring designs to cards in a seamlessly accurate manner.

Tom also handled the logistics of the operation. His studio on West 46th Street was the hub of the activity. He developed and maintained computer records of all the cards that came into and left the gang’s possession. And when they ran out of storage space he took over part of a warehouse at 47 Hall Street in Brooklyn. Tom also opened up a P.O. Box address in the Bronx where deliveries of counterfeiting equipment could be made in a more anonymous way.

The gang was ready for action.

The gang’s primary storage location for the counterfeit credit cards in Brooklyn

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8.     Moving into the Big Time

At first the operation was successful. The gang generated thousands of counterfeit cards and developed high value markets in which to use them. Gone were the days of buying lower cost items like TVs and sofas to fence on the black market. Now they targeted car rental companies, leasing out high end vehicles which they drove straight to the ports and shipped out of the country for resale overseas. At one point detectives estimated that the business of the eastern seaboard car rental companies was losing over 20% of profits as a result of the credit card fraud.

Seeing the cash flood in only increased the gang’s desire to exploit the opportunity for as long as it lasted. They increased the number of cards in circulation, and found new markets in which to use them. The group started to open businesses with the main purpose of running up charges on credit cards before shutting down and moving on. Law enforcement was caught on the back foot, and struggled to find resources to address the fraud seriously.

The large profits didn’t escape the attention of other criminal groups – in particular the Italian mob. Roy DeMeo was angry. Wasn’t he the one who’d started Tom in the credit card business? In fact wasn’t he the one who’d given Tom his start in New York? On a good day DeMeo felt neglected; on a bad day he felt betrayed. He called a meeting with Tom and demanded a cut of the money. But Tom’s hands were tied. He was part of a bigger group now. George King called the shots, and King had little interest in cutting the Italians into the business. It put Tom in an awkward and dangerous position.

Eventually the New York cops responded to the growing size of the problem and formed a task force. One detective remembers his amazement when he came across the gang’s work: “When I first saw their counterfeit cards, it was amazing. I was blown away. The cards were truly perfect in design.”

In June 1980, Tom was arrested for credit card fraud. It was a wake-up call for the gang, but the case against him was mysteriously dropped shortly afterwards. Detectives involved in the arrest remember concluding that Tom was not one of the masterminds, but instead a background facilitator with good technical skills. They described him as a flashy party character, and considered using him as an informant.

The arrest incident raised the suspicions of George King; why was the case against Tom dropped? Had he been turned by the cops? These doubts affected Tom’s relationship with King, and broke the trust that had existed since they came together.

Tom now felt under pressure from all sides; the Italian mob wanted a part of him, the cops were onto him, and George King suspected Tom was double-crossing him. Tom called Bill Luxe and admitted his fear: “The Italians are coming for me”. Ever the technical innovator, Tom even installed surveillance listening devices in his West 46th Street office to spy on George and the others.

*

9.     Downfall

If George King was worried about Tom’s trustworthiness, it was nothing compared to the storm about to break over Donald Sanders. King knew that Sanders was young and could be impetuous, but in the summer of 1982, King learned that Sanders, frustrated that he was still being pursued by the district attorney back in Peoria, had decided that he needed to teach the lawman a lesson once and for all. Feeling invincible from the success of the credit card scam, Sanders had hatched a plan to kill the D.A.

King was furious and forbade Sanders from returning to Peoria saying it would upset their lucrative business. But against King’s wishes, Sanders left New York on September 4th, 1982 with an associate, Christopher Sample, to find the D.A. To add salt to King’s wounds, Sanders recklessly tried to buy their air tickets with a counterfeit credit card.

In a search of Sanders’ luggage at Chicago airport, officials found guns in his bags and arrested him. A more detailed search also revealed a collection of counterfeit credit cards.

Chicago Tribune (September 17th 1982):

The men arrested here, Donald Sanders, 28, of Los Angeles, and Christopher Sample, 20, of San Bernardino, CA, were seized at O’Hare International Airport Sept 4, when they claimed a suitcase containing two guns that had arrived on a flight on August 31.

Airline personnel seeking the owner of the suitcase had notified police after they opened the suitcase and found a .22-caliber pistol and a .45- caliber pistol. Police arrested both men after Sample presented a claim check to get the suitcase and then was joined by Sanders, who picked it up and began carrying it.

A search of Sample turned up a counterfeit credit card, and Sanders was carrying six counterfeit cards according to Detective Dallas Tyler of the Grand Central District here.

Even more damning was the discovery of contact details for George King and Tom back in New York.

Court papers:

A search (of Donald Sanders) produced documents reflecting the purchase of the equipment and collection of information necessary to produce counterfeit credit cards, including orders for equipment out of 160 West 46th Street, New York City, and Sanders’ telephone book in which George King’s name and home address appeared.

Noting the New York connection, the Chicago cops contacted their East Coast counterparts. NYPD realized this could be a breakthrough in their bid to bust the credit card gang, and their response was swift: Sanders should not be released on bail. Their instructions were partly because they wanted to speak to him, but also because, as one detective remembers, “We knew that if Sanders was set free, George King would get to him quickly and if that happened there was a high risk of him being killed by their criminal associates.”

When questioned, Sanders confessed his part in the credit card scheme, and identified the other participants and the gang’s locations.

On September 7th, 1982, search and arrest warrants were issued for the gang’s two main locations; Tom’s studio at 160 West 46th Street in Manhattan and the storage space at 47 Hall Street in Brooklyn. But when the postal inspectors and detectives turned up, they didn’t find as much as Donald Sanders had promised:

–        At 160 West 46th Street, postal inspectors complained that the space had been “cleaned out” before they got there, though they still found some art work used to make counterfeit American Express cards.

–        At 47 Hall Street, a warehouse employee told the inspectors that less than an hour prior to their arrival, two men had removed equipment that was used to produce counterfeit credit cards from the premises. Inspectors just found large pieces of vinyl plastic on which the MasterCard logo was imprinted.

The truth was that George King and his sidekick Frank Elsis had hurriedly emptied most of the incriminating equipment that could be tied to the gang. The following day on September 8, 1982, King rented a 10 foot by 15 foot space in Secaucus, New Jersey at a storage facility called the ‘Space Station’ and moved everything there.

The ‘Space Station’, Secaucus, New Jersey (pictured in 2016)

George King was angry. His worst fears about Sanders’ trip back to Peoria had been realized, and now the operation was collapsing. How did the cops in Chicago know to arrest Sanders? Had Tom tipped them off?

The net was closing around Tom. He confided in Roger Caine that the listening devices he had installed in his 160 West 46th St studio revealed that George King and his associates had discussed killing him. Not knowing who to trust, Tom hid from King, he hid from Roy DeMeo, and he hid from the cops. He didn’t dare go near the West 46th Street studio that had been his for a decade, hiding out instead in an apartment on 75th Street for a few days. But he knew he had to keep moving, and found friends in short supply. Tom reached out to old contacts, such as people from the adult film business like Zebedy Colt. But Colt was typical of the people to whom Tom turned; he just didn’t want to get involved. Tom was alone.

Unbeknownst to Tom, the cops were trying to reach him to offer protection in return for information about George King’s gang.

But it was too late. On September 30th, 1982, Tom’s body was found in a car parked in downtown Manhattan. He’d been shot eleven times.

WWM, November 3, 1982, by Tony De Stefano:

New York: Law enforcement sources have linked Thomas Van der Feer, a Dutch-born film director murdered a month ago, to a suggested counterfeit credit card operation here.

Van der Feer is believed to have been involved in a number of credit card schemes as far back as 1980.

Additionally, investigators said, organized crime figures have been trafficking in the bogus cards.

Police found Van der Feer’s body, with 11 bullet wounds, in Lower Manhattan on Sept 30th. The body was in the back of a light blue Buick Regal stolen from Long Island earlier that day.

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10.  Aftermath of a Murder

Tom Van der Feer died an anonymous death. There were few to mourn him. But who killed him?

The person or people responsible were never found. No one was ever charged with his murder. In fact the investigation never got off the ground. It was viewed as a gangland hit, and the cops were much more interested in cracking the credit card operation so Tom’s murder was soon forgotten.

Everyone had a theory though.

Bill Luxe thought it was the DeMeo gang. Since the early 1970s when Tom had first met Roy DeMeo, the gang had become a ruthless and prolific killing machine, suspected by the FBI of murdering as many as 100 people since 1973. Detectives still shudder when they remember the extent of the cold-blooded murders committed by the group. Luxe reasoned that Tom’s murder was intended to warn others of the consequences of not doing business with DeMeo.

Detectives and postal inspectors who worked on the credit card case are still convinced the killer was George King. They describe Tom as a ‘buffer’ – a loose end that has information that can put his associates in jail and so needs to be eliminated.

But if it was King who murdered Tom, it didn’t have the desired effect. A week after Tom’s body was found, on October 5, 1982, postal inspectors discovered the Space Station storage facility that George King had taken. They rightly suspected that it was the new home of the counterfeit cards and equipment that they could tie back to King. They staked out the location. They didn’t have to wait long.

On the morning of October 6, 1982 George King, his wife Nora, and their associate Frank Elsis turned up at the facility and were arrested and charged with conspiracy to use and manufacture counterfeit credit cards. An extensive arsenal of weaponry was also found at the storage space.

The press reported that King was a suspect in Tom’s murder. King’s bail was set at $500,000 – a huge sum for the time.

‘3 Suspects Accused in Jersey Of Bogus Credit-Card Scheme’, New York Times, October 6, 1982:

Secaucus, NJ: George King, 51 years old, and his wife, Nora Mary, 36, both of 51 West 68th Street in New York City, and Frank Elsis, 34, of 4 North Umberland Road, Jericho, L.I.

Mr. King was charged with conspiracy to manufacture or use counterfeit credit cards, while his wife and Mr. Elsis were to be charged with aiding and abetting, Mr. Bonney said

King also is a suspect in the shooting death of a man identified only as Thomas Van der Feer whose bullet-riddled body was found Friday in a car parked on Wall Street.

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Epilogue

The Rialto Report tried to locate George King, but was dissuaded by everyone who had come across him. “He’s a bad, bad man, very dangerous, and not worth getting involved with,” we were told by one detective. We eventually learned that George passed away in June 2007 at the age of 75.

At Donald Sanders’ trial, prosecutors said that his skills as a credit card forger were “artistic, but the stuff he was producing wasn’t art. Because of his ability, his group was the first ever to successfully duplicate the intricately designed American Express card.” The judge gave Sanders a seven-year sentence. However rumors circulated that rather than serve time, Sanders entered the witness protection program. The last time one of the detectives remembers seeing him was, bizarrely, when he attended a police party held to celebrate the conviction of George King. Sanders’ current whereabouts are unknown.

Roy DeMeo met a similar end to Tom Van der Feer only a few months later. On January 20, 1983, DeMeo was found murdered in the trunk of his abandoned car. He’d been shot multiple times in the head and had a bullet wound in his hand, assumed by law enforcement as being from throwing his hand up to his face in a self-defense reflex when the shots were fired at him.

Both of Tom’s former wives are still alive and have been extremely gracious and helpful in talking about their time with Tom. Neither knew anything about the rest of his story. Neither expressed great surprise at how his life or death had turned out. “We reap what we sow” was his second wife’s comment.

Tom’s parents moved to Spain shortly after his murder. His father Tobias died in Seville in February 1985, and his mother Mary died in Madrid thirteen years later in March 1998. Tom’s brother Adriaan stayed in New Jersey and died there in October 2013.

Film friends Zebedy Colt and Bill Bukowski have both passed on too; Zebedy Colt retired to Las Vegas where he died in May 2004. It is claimed that he told people that Tom’s murder had made him afraid of the pornographic film business, and was ultimately responsible for his decision to retire. Bukowski suffered a fall in his North Hollywood home in March 2006 and died shortly afterwards.

Roger Caine moved out of New York long ago, and still misses Tom. If only Tom had gone in other directions he says, he could have enjoyed huge success in other fields.

As for Bill Luxe, he eventually sold his printing business after 24 years and opened up a popular pizza take-away in the East Village of Manhattan. He retired two years ago.

Tom Van der Feer’s final resting place is unknown.

*

The post Who was Navred Reef?
(And What Happened to Him?) appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Barbara Dare was a superstar of the adult industry in the 1980s video era. She was one of the first contract girls – initially with Essex Video, then with Vivid.

Then she disappeared from the industry over 20 years ago and has rarely been heard from since. This week Barbara shares rare, previously unpublished photos she selected from her personal collection especially for The Rialto Report.

In next week’s Rialto Report podcast, we’ll feature the first in-depth interview with Barbara in almost 30 years.

All photos belong to Barbara Dare.

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Barbara Dare: Scrapbook

Baby Barbara Dare

Barbara Dare, 2 years old

Barbara Dare, Cinderella, 2nd grade

Barbara Dare, age 15

Barbara Dare, high school prom

Barbara Dare, high school graduation

Barbara Dare, vacation

Barbara Dare, vacation

Barbara Dare, Essex Video party

On the set of Where the Boys Aren’t 2 with Deidre Holland, Barbara Dare, Jamie Summers

Barbara Dare, Jim Morrison‘s grave, Père-Lachaise, Paris

Erica Boyer, Barbara Dare

Barbara Dare, on a film set in Florida

Barbara Dare, Europe

Barbara Dare, radio station interview

Barbara Dare with girlfriend Leanore

Barbara Dare on the road

Barbara Dare in the changing room

Eric Bogosian, Barbara Dare, Esquire magazine shoot

Nina Hartley, Barbara Dare

Barbara Dare, featured dancer

The post Barbara Dare:
Scrapbook of an Actress appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Last week we presented a selection of pictures personally chosen by Barbara Dare from her collection – and have been amazed by the response.

We received email from so many of you, all eager to know more about the elusive star of the 1980s who vanished from the scene almost 25 years ago.

Barbara was a superstar of the adult industry in the 1980s video era. She started out in New York – where she was a regular at the sex club Plato’s Retreat – before moving to California. There she quickly became one of the leading ladies of porn throughout the late 1980s, starring in over 100 features. She was one of the first contract girls – initially with Essex Video, then with Vivid. She made films with Ginger Lynn, Erica Boyer, Paul Thomas and all the other big stars from the era. She traveled regularly to Europe to make movies there with people like Rocco Siffredi. She retired from film in the early 1990s, opting to travel across the U.S. and Canada where she was a big draw on the dance circuit. There was talk about her moving into the mainstream – with a one-woman show that Sandra Bernhard’s manager was interested in promoting.

And then what happened?

This week Barbara talks candidly to The Rialto Report in her first in-depth interview in decades – it’s a moving, entertaining, and surprising story.

All photos belong to Barbara Dare.

This episode’s running time is 100 minutes.

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Barbara Dare films

April Hall and Barbara Dare, 2016

The post Barbara Dare: A Curious Woman
Podcast 58 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Vivienne Maricevic started taking photographs in the 1970s, and chronicled many aspects of New York that were hidden to the outside world, from gay male burlesque shows to live sex shows in Times Square theaters. In short, she persuaded people to do something that no one else had done; she gained access and documented what she saw with her camera.

Then when porn stars starting headlining at places like Show World, the Pussy Cat, the Seven Eleven, and the Avon in New York, Vivienne was there to capture their acts. And what’s more she interviewed them all as well.

We sat down with Vivienne recently to hear about her life, and are pleased to showcase some of her work here.

All photographs on this page belong to Vivienne Maricevic.

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Vivienne Maricevic: Discovering Photography

I first picked up a camera when my twin brother returned from Vietnam with one. Before that I didn’t know anything about photography.

He had a 35mm Miranda camera, which was heavy when I held it. He didn’t want to use it anymore so he gave it to me. This was in the early 1970s. As soon as I held that camera, I knew that I wanted to start photographing with it.   At first, I didn’t even know how to put a roll of film in it.   My brother had to put the roll of film in it for me and take it out when I finished shooting a roll of black-and-white film.  So that was my first camera.

I grew up north of New York City and was always attracted to the diversity of the city. At a very young age, around five, I remember my mother bringing me to Times Square on Sundays. We’d walk around and she’d point out all the different characters that were on the street of Broadway near the Ed Sullivan Theater. There used to be a lot of characters around. I remember the wrestler Haystack Calhoun appearing when we were there once.  All these crazy characters were on the street.  My mother was fascinated by them and I was, too.

My first pictures were taken in Bryant Park near Times Square. Back in the 1970s, Bryant Park was pretty dicey. There were a lot of homeless people there. I still have my first pictures that I ever took from inside the park. I would approach a person and ask if I could photograph them and they always replied yes. I recall that, for someone who was entirely self-taught, I took a few interesting portraits.

I’ve always been attracted to the underbelly, the outcasts, of society. I like to befriend them and hear their story and make them feel that they have somebody that’s listening to them, so that’s what I did. I saw a bunch of homeless people in Bryant Park and I did some pictures of them, portraits of them sitting around.

When I looked at the pictures for the first time, I liked the ‘instantness’ of capturing something. Before I started taking photographs, I used to paint with watercolors and it would take me a while to finish each picture. So I liked that it was quicker than doing a painting.

I immediately became attracted to photography. I knew about composition and lighting from my paintings, so I applied that to my photography and just kept shooting pictures. I was hard on myself and I knew when what I photographed was not a ‘good’ photograph. I just kept photographing until I felt my photos became ‘mature’. I’d rather be photographing than doing anything else, and I was very disciplined about doing what I loved.

I wanted to find more guys who were living on the street. I heard about the Bowery, so I went there and started a series called ‘On the Bowery’.  I would spend my weekends on the Bowery shooting these guys. I have a picture of me with a guy drinking from a bottle at that time. I remember he insisted that I drink first before he drank out of it.

This was the mid seventies. It was a very shady and dangerous time. The news was full of stories about a guy who was running around the city with a knife killing people, and I remember hearing sirens all the time. I’d be there in the dark, all hours of the day and night. I was in my early twenties. I was so naïve, but I never felt scared.

I was always attracted to people, places and things that were different. That was the beginning of my photography.

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Male Nudes

We’re a very puritanical country, we’re not as open minded as Europeans. We suppress a lot of things, such as the male nude image. I started photographing the male nude in 1975. Back then and still today, there are men who never had the experience of being photographed in the nude by a female. Women have been photographed and painted throughout history by men. There are still very few male nude photographs being published for women to see compared to the amount of female nudes for men to see.

I knew a lot of male photographers who were photographing female nudes.  So I started photographing some of my male friends in the nude. The photos were good, but they were restricted to this one age group, and I wanted to photograph a variety of different shapes, sizes and ages of regular guys.  I wanted to show the beauty in all of us, not just the perfect body.

To get a cross-section of men, I put an ad in The Village Voice: “Female photographer seeks men for nude photography.  Call (212) etc.” The reaction was phenomenal. I put my home number in there… of course my phone was ringing at all hours. I had to unplug it at night.

I didn’t need to meet the man first. I spoke to them over the phone first, and made sure that the shoot was just about being photographed and not of a sexual nature. If anything sexual was brought up, I would not set up a photo shoot. Times were different in those days and I never had a problem with anyone.  All were interesting experiences. I always arrived with just a camera in a small canvas bag.  Not seeing much equipment, the guy would say, “You’re the photographer?!”.

I would say, “Trust me.”

My film of choice has always been black-and-white, and I still shoot with a 50mm lens and available light.  I’ve never been technical. I guess that comes from being self-taught and doing everything my own way. What you see in the photo is what I saw looking through my lens. I thrive with lots of obstacles and challenges, so it always worked out well for me to get photographs that I’m pleased with.

Ziyad (1979)

Joe (1980)

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Male Burlesque shows

After leaving a male nude photo shoot in the West 50s on Broadway, I was walking through Times Square back to my apartment. Times Square was one of my favorite places during those days, it was always interesting to walk through it as you never knew who you’d see or what you’d see.  I came across a barker outside of a venue for gay men featuring male burlesque. It was called the Big Top. He had a flyer that said “Come on in! Male burlesque dancers! Come and see them for yourself!” I took his flyer and walked upstairs. Of course I met resistance immediately. There was a guy there who said, “What are you here for?”

I said, “I’m here to see the male dancers.”

It was a Saturday afternoon and when I looked into the space, it was all red… They had these red lights illuminating the stage. I knew I wanted to take pictures of the dancers and I wanted to shoot in color. That was the first time I ever shot color film.

First, I had to get permission because no one had ever taken pictures in there before, and there were signs that said “No Cameras Allowed.” I said, “Is there a manager here?” I spoke to the guy in charge and told him I was a photographer and asked if I could have permission to photograph in the club. I figured he’d be concerned about me interfering with his patrons, so I kept telling him that I would never photograph the audience. I didn’t have a wide angle lens and I assured him I wouldn’t be intruding on any of the paid customers. I would only photograph the guys that want me to photograph them. I also said that I always get model releases. I happened to have some photographs with me of male nudes so I showed them to him.

He finally agreed and said, “Okay, but not now. Come back next week.” I was excited and when I returned I went straight to the dressing room to talk to the male performers to tell them what I wanted to do. The majority of the dancers loved the fact that I would be photographing them.  It also brought more attention to them, while they were on stage, with me photographing them.

That’s how I began doing my series of male burlesque photographs. I noticed that there were other similar clubs in the area and so I visited those as well. The next place I went to was the infamous Ramrod in the West 40s.  In the late 1970s it was one of the most popular gay male burlesque clubs in New York City. It was the wildest place. The Ramrod had a lot of explicit sex going on… back stage, in the aisles and in the seats. That was the first club to be closed down and padlocked with chains by former Mayor Giuliani during the AIDS crisis.

From the Ramrod and the Big Top, I photographed the male burlesque scene at other places like The Unicorn and Crazy Horse.

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Live Sex shows

I was always looking around for other male clubs in the Times Square area. One day, I was at 42nd St. and Eighth Avenue, staring at Show World’s marquee, which said “Live Sex Shows.”

They had pictures of women and couples on the outside of the place. I’d never seen a couple having sex on stage with people paying to watch. At the Ramrod, the sex was going on between customers – but it wasn’t the main event. I was curious to see if this was just a ploy to bring people in. If this was really happening then I wanted to see it. And of course, photograph it.

So I went into Show World. It was a little bit more difficult for me to convince the manager to let me take photographs. The person at the entrance said there was no way I could do that since their policy explicitly said “No Cameras Allowed.” The guy said, “You can get in as a customer if you want to pay – but you’re not going to be photographing.”

I said, “Well, who do I need to speak to?”  They gave me the name of a person who had an office around the corner on 43rd St. So I went there and spoke to man who was in charge of everything at Show World. I brought my photos to show him my work. I told him there was no way that I would ever photograph any of the performers who didn’t want to be photographed, nor any of the patrons. So he gave me a letter, with his name on it that allowed me to photograph at Show World. I still have that letter.

So from then on, I was always at Show World and started a new series of photographs. This time I focused on the live sex shows on the main stage and the performers who were called “love teams”, and also the women in the peep booths.

There were three levels in Show World. The first level was a peep show, and then there were theaters on the upper floors. You had to pay for each different floor. It was open twenty four hours.

Those who worked the live shows and peep booths seemed to be there night and day. A lot of people slept in the dressing room. They had showers for them too.  Sometimes the performers were meeting the person they were going to have sex with on stage for the first time in the dressing room. I knew a couple that lived in a van over on 10th or 11th Ave and they came into the dressing room to eat their fast food, have a shower, do the sex and then go back to the van, where they would sleep. I became good friends with this guy named Jack who ran the projection and did the music for everybody. He was a character, a fun guy.

Some of the performers were transient whereas others also did live sex shows on the ‘circuit’ of local theatres, such as the Pussy Cat, Seven Eleven, the Avon, and the Bryant Theater. These theaters were all managed by the same person, a woman called Stella Stevens. I still have the card that she gave me. I laminated it. She was helpful and gave me permission to take photographs at all her places.

I also went to the Melody Burlesk. Bob Anthony and Dominique managed the place. Bob loved everyone, so I was allowed to photograph there, too. They gave me a little card that I could use when I went there. I’d just go up to the booth, show my pass, and that’s how I got in.

I went to these places whenever I could, photographing for years. I didn’t just turn up, shoot film for a while, and leave. I hung out, sometimes not even photographing, just socializing. I developed relationships with the people in the photographs. I liked being there and having a good time with everyone. I was taking photographs and I was having lots of fun times, too.

Sometimes I’d meet my boyfriend, Michael, who is now my husband, and we’d go and see a ‘love team’ on stage or to a theater to watch a porn movie and see who was sitting in the seats. Jamie Gillis would often be there, as would other porn stars that lived in the area.

Kandi Barbour

Kandi Barbour

Kandi Barbour

Kandi Barbour

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Female Porn Stars

While I was at Show World they started having a featured porn star appear once a week. These women were brought there as headliners. I was immediately intrigued by these porn stars, so I started a new series of photographs dedicated to porn stars.

For this series, I used a different approach. The way that I had been shooting the live sex shows was documentary style. I didn’t pose anybody. I didn’t tell them to do anything. I just took pictures of what was going on. They kept doing their thing, and I kept photographing.

For my new series I didn’t want to photograph them on stage, nor did I want to photograph them in an explicit way like they were photographed for the porn magazines. I wanted to photograph them in black and white. I wanted more of a fine art approach. It was also important for me to photograph them in their home environments, or in the hotel room where they were staying. Show World would usually book them at the Carter Hotel so I often went to shoot them there.

I would introduce myself to the featured porn star and would show them some of my photos. I’d tell them that I wasn’t interested in shooting them explicitly, but in more arty way.  They liked that.

I also wanted to go one step further. I wanted to have a better understanding of them. I wanted to know where they were coming from, and what they were really like as people. After they were photographed, I interviewed them with my tape recorder.  I interviewed many of the early 1980s porn stars… Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart, Danielle, Sparky Vasc, Tish Ambrose, Vanessa Del Rio, Samantha Fox and others. Many of them became close friends. I was close to Kandi Barbour. She was a vulnerable girl, but so sweet.

Vanessa Del Rio

Sparky Vasc

Samantha Fox

Mai Lin

Lady Ashley / Ashley Liberty

Candida Royalle

Baby Doe

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Male Porn Stars

The porn industry was still big in New York City in the 1980s, and I got to know many of the male performers, too – people like Marc Stevens, Jerry Butler, Ron Jeremy and others.  I photographed and interviewed them, too.

Later, the porn movie industry shifted to Los Angeles when everybody got video cameras.  They started to do these quick one day wonders on videotape, they needed good weather all the time so they could shoot outdoors, so the industry shifted out west.

But before that there was lots of energy, life, variety and character in Times Square, now it’s all gone.  I was often in Times Square by myself, even late at night with a camera in my small canvas bag.  I used to see lots of pimps and prostitutes on the streets at that time. They thought I was an undercover cop since they use to see me going in and out of the sex clubs, but they never bothered me.

Jerry Butler

Alan Adrian

Marc Stevens

Dave Ruby

Bobby Astyr

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Transsexuals

One day I was in the dressing room at Show World waiting for whoever was coming in next, and this woman came into the dressing room.  I thought she was a new performer. I had my camera, so she asked me, “Are you a photographer?”

I said, “Yes.” I told her I knew Jack and all the performers who work here. “I take pictures of those who want to be photographed.”

She said, “Really?! Maybe you can photograph me. I’m going to be working downstairs with a group of ladies, who I will be managing.  We’re working in the peep show booths with some of the transsexuals I’m bringing in here.”

I said, “Transsexuals?”  I’d never seen a transsexual. To be honest, I didn’t believe her. She looked just like me.

So she said “I’ll show you.” And she pulled down her pants and she had a penis.

I wanted to start photographing them. And just as I had done before, I wanted to shoot them in their home environments. So I started meeting them at Show World in the downstairs area.  I became friends with them, developed a rapport with them, and they gave me their phone numbers, I called and set a day and time, when I would go to where they lived to photograph them. I gave them photos in exchange for a model release.  Some of them needed photos for their ads that they put in the back of Al Goldstein’s newspaper, Screw. I also called many of them from the ads that were in Screw, asking them if I could photograph them and give them new photos to have.

They told me about other clubs in the city where transsexuals went to socialize and to meet men to be with. One of them was Sally’s on West 43rd St. Many of them did shows there and they wanted me to come and photograph them. They dressed up and lip synced to songs on stage. I became good friends with a number of them.  They were fun to be around and loved to party.  Liz Eden, the trans woman who the film ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975) was based on, became a close friend. I remember one gorgeous trans girl called International Chrysis.  She was beautiful.

I was also interested in the way that transvestites would get themselves together to go out to the clubs. So I took three pictures of each of them; one in their casual clothes, one while they were getting ready, and finally one when they were in their glamorous outfits.

One of Vivienne’s Transsexual triptychs

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Showing the Photographs

In 1995, Edition Stemmle published a monograph of these triptychs, along with nudes of male-to-female transsexuals, entitled Male to Female: La Cage Aux Folles.

My second monograph was published by Schiffer Books in 2013, featuring my male nude photographs from 1975-2015, entitled She Shoots Men.  My website is www.sheshootsmen.com

My work has been exhibited and published worldwide; New York magazine reviewed an exhibition of my early male nudes, ‘Naked Men’. It was a good review, too.  Male burlesque photographs were exhibited at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery, ‘Porn Stars’ exhibited in Seattle, photographs from Male-to-Female were exhibited in Munich, Germany and have been included in many selected Group Shows. I have been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship, along with inclusion in collections here and abroad.

My lifetime mission and passion is to continue to photograph erotica, sexuality and gender positively and have begun a new photographic series that will enlighten people about nudity.  But I do want to say that NYC and Times Square has given me a lifetime passion that I will always be thankful for, especially being able to photograph during the decade of the 80s in the Times Square that I once knew and will always cherish.  Times Square will always have a special place in my heart.

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Vivienne is currently seeking a reputable publisher for her third monograph, ‘Times Square 1980s – Sex, Porn and Burlesk’. Interested parties should contact Vivienne at her website.

Vivienne Maricevic

The post Vivienne Maricevic:
Times Square 1980s – Sex, Porn & Burlesk appeared first on The Rialto Report.

The Critics Adult Film Association (CAFA) was a New York-based group of East Coast adult sex film critics that bestowed awards upon those working in pornographic film during the 1980s. The awards were first presented in 1981, honoring the movies of the previous year. The first winner of the best picture award was Talk Dirty to Me (1980), starring John Leslie, who also won Best Actor.

Erica Eaton, an adult film personality since the 1970s, was the CAFA chairperson for several years, and the group of writers and critics behind the association included Colette Connor, Jack Shugg, Steffani Martin, and Will H. Jarvis.

CAFA was keen to develop a more respectable, mainstream image for the industry, leading Cheri magazine to declare, “the Critics Adult Film Awards was a gentle reminder that porn films can be measured against standards other than the Peter Meter.”

Indeed the 1984 awards ceremony was held at Sardi’s in Manhattan, an historic restaurant located in the Theater District. Sardi’s opened in 1927 and is known for the hundreds of caricatures of show-business celebrities that adorn its walls.

After the seventh annual awards in 1987, CAFA faded away as did the New York-based adult film industry, overtaken by California, the new center of porn production.

The Rialto Report was recently given a collection of previously unpublished photographs from the 1984 event that we’re pleased to share.

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The Critics Adult Film Awards (1984)

The 1984 Critics Adult Film Awards went to:

Best Film:
Irresistible

Best Actor:
John Leslie – Talk Dirty to Me 2

Best Actress:
Veronica Hart – Roommates

Best Supporting Actor:
Jamie Gillis – Roommates

Best Supporting Actress:
Tied between Lisa De Leeuw – The Blonde Next Door and Sharon Mitchell – Blue Jeans

Best Director:
Chuck Vincent – Roommates

Best Erotic Scene:
Tied between Roommates (Kelly Nichols and Ron Hudd) and Talk Dirty to Me 2 (John Leslie and Nicole Black)

Bobby Astyr and Al Goldstein

Tish Ambrose

Erica Eaton (partially obscured), Ron Sullivan

Dian Hanson, Vanessa Del Rio

Dian Hanson

Lisa Cintrice

Sue Nero

Dian Hanson, Sue Nero

Danielle

Tanya Lawson, Fred Lincoln, Tiffany Clark

Tanya Lawson, Fred Lincoln, Tiffany Clark

Gloria Leonard, Tiffany Clark, Samantha Fox, Al Goldstein

Al Goldstein, Gloria Leonard

Samantha Fox, Jose Duval

Annie Sprinkle

Gerard Damiano, Tanya Lawson, Ron Jeremy

Sharon Kane, Dian Hanson

Vanessa Del Rio, David Davidson

Anthony Spinelli, Gerard Damiano

Anthony Spinelli, Gerard Damiano

Ron Sullivan (aka Henri Pachard)

Sharon Mitchell

Anthony Spinelli, unknown, Jim Holliday, Danielle

Erica Eaton, Jack Wrangler, Richard Milner, Candida Royalle

Vanessa Del Rio

Vanessa Del Rio

Fred Lincoln, Al Goldstein, Erica Eaton

Fred Lincoln

Al Goldstein

The post A Night at Sardi’s:
The 1984 Critics Adult Film Awards appeared first on The Rialto Report.