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I came out of Brooks Camera in San Francisco, loaded down with photographic supplies. My car was gone! Who’d want to steal a brown Rabbit with a faded right rear quarter panel? Evidently, no one. I found out from a liquor store clerk that the City tow truck had taken it to the impound yard, instead of issuing a parking ticket. Visitors weren’t known for rushing to pay them.

If you ever managed to get through the busy signals to the city garage, you’d be glad—by then—to pay the $135 ransom. But I was in a time frenzy: production was due to begin on All the King’s

Ladies in only two days.

Shelly and I had just seen the pyrotechnic Raiders of the Lost Ark; it gave me an inspiration. I called the information operator and said in a deadly calm voice, “I don’t want you to panic, but this could be a matter of life and death. I’m on the demolition team of a movie crew. That car is carrying explosive materials, which could become very unstable if you look at them the wrong way. If they go off, it would be the equivalent of 500 pounds of dynamite.”

“Oh, my God!” the operator exclaimed. She gave me the garage’s emergency number. I got through immediately, gave the same spiel and got the same “Oh, my God!” response.

I ran fifteen blocks through the bowels of “San Fiasco” and arrived at the garage, panting and sweaty, clutching my packages like a running back hugging a wet football. Two dark suits flanked me into the parking structure. Upon spying the Rabbit, I halted so quickly that one of the suits, trying to do the same, nearly sprawled headlong on the concrete. Cautiously, I approached the car. As I’d hoped, the suits stayed back. I jumped into the Rabbit and took off. In my mirror I glimpsed the suits—not yet aware they’d been had​—​dive behind a van.

The “Rabbit rip-off” episode was the first of the misfortunes that would make the production of “The First Big-Budget Erotic Extravaganza Shot Entirely on Videotape” seem jinxed. On the day before shooting started, the production company renting me cameras and recorders cancelled out; their client, Bank of America, had threatened to drop them if they got involved with porno. Only one other outfit in the Bay Area owned the Ikegami HL 79 cameras that Joe and I insisted on using. Compared to other broadcast portables of the time, the “Ikki 79” was like a Mercedes among Mavericks. Specializing in shooting rock concerts, this outfit had no compunctions about porn. They agreed to rent their gear for the standard one day rate for a full weekend. But when Joe and I arrived for the equipment early Saturday morning, the owners demanded two days rental​—​paid in advance.

The male leads pulled a similar rip-off. Looking like the obese southern sheriff I’d always imagined casting him as, Michael Morrisson splayed his cowboy-booted feet, hooked his thumbs in his belt and drawled, “Me and Jon only agreed to work a HALF day for $500, not a full one.”

Even porn’s top male, John Leslie, didn’t charge more than $750 for a full day, and these guys weren’t stars. Morrisson’s expanding gut was getting big enough to block penetration, threatening his porn career. He’d been feasting on the excellent cooking of the porn actor who shared his new Mill Valley home, skinny Jon Martin, who looked to me like a butch Rosanna Arquette. Some referred to

the duo as “porn’s Laurel and Hardy.”

Voices rose, anger flared. Morrisson turned to his sidekick and snapped his fingers, “C’mon Jon, we got a house to paint.”

Martin hesitated. He seemed perfectly willing to accept $500 for a day of sex with beautiful women, but he followed his partner. It was too late to find replacements. I gave in to their demands and frantically rewrote the script during breaks, so the two studs would be out in half a day.

The hassles continued: Perry Mann, co-producer of that voyeur’s delight, the annual Exotic-Erotic Ball, couldn’t get erect, even with the exotic-erotic Mai Lin. And his memory retained dialogue like a sieve holds rain. Juliet Anderson, making her debut as a director since I was too busy with production details, had to feed him his lines:

Juliet: Your soft, downy pussy gives me spasms of ecstasy. Mann: Your soft, downy pussy… what?

Juliet: Your soft, downy pussy… Mann: Your soft, downy pussy… Juliet: …gives me spasms of ecstasy. Mann: …gives me …ecstasy.

Juliet: OK, that’s good enough, Perry.

I blamed the equipment screw-ups on our snide little snot of an engineer, one of the few local technicians familiar with the new Ikkis. To him, working on a porno was like slumming. He neglected to clean the Sony BVU 110 VCRs, causing a head clog that wiped out the first twenty minutes recorded on one of the decks. A bad audio line rendered all the tapes from the other VCR soundless. After a fit of panic, I found I could transfer audio from deck to deck and stay in sync. As the second day went into overtime, the little engineer left to catch a flight to an out-of-town shoot. He assured me the gear was working fine; we should have no trouble. Right after he left, one of the Ikkis went out of phase. Joe the tape operator and I fiddled with the adjustments for hours to get an approximate color match with the other camera. But every time we changed angles during the climactic orgy, more “tweaking” was needed.

We finished under the sun of Monday morning. With all the delays, unanticipated expenses and hours of overtime, my ten thousand dollar budget had ballooned close to fourteen. I was almost broke.

With everything that had gone wrong on the All the King’s Ladies shoot, it was easy to overlook what went right. Those Ikkis captured the beauty of the flowers, fruit trees and forested hills on the Fairfax estate. We’d packed the cast with stars: Sharon Mitchell, Holly McCall, Mai Lin, and the winner of a Farrah Fawcett-Majors look-alike contest, Rhonda Jo Petty. At Juliet’s behest, Serena had come out of retirement for the movie. In addition to Mann, Martin and Morrisson, the male cast included Mike Horner, Don Fernando, newcomer Paul West and good-looking, muscular Ed Lincoln —​son of veteran porn director Fred Lincoln.

Even with hasty rewrites, the plot, about a stud mutiny at “Eden,” where rich ladies pay to experience their fantasies (establishment motto: “An Adam for every Eve”), still made sense. Adam

Film World’s 1987 X-rated Movie Handbook listed All the King’s Ladies among “The 500 Best

Adult Movies of All Time.”

There were nine sex scenes: two-somes, three-somes and group orgies shot in beds, gardens, couches, gazebos, hot tubs, recreation rooms and on rooftops. “I used to struggle to complete three sex scenes a day,” I told Joe Farmer, as we sorted out the production paperwork on the unfinished doors that passed for desk-tops. “And those were little more than loops, nothing like the feature story we just shot.”

Joe smiled and scratched the curly black beard he was growing. “Television production techniques will revolutionize the shooting of sex. Remember, you heard it here first.”

I’d been skeptical about all the added equipment: a roomful of diabolically sophisticated gizmos, all itching to foul up. But once sorted out, they made shooting sex easy.

I had to “unlearn” my filmmaker’s training and see a sex scene as Joe did: an event to be captured “live,” not a series of shots. Everything was different from shooting “film style,” which I’d done on earlier video productions. The director would sit at a console, watching monitors, and give instructions to the cameramen through a microphone feeding the headsets they wore. “Camera One, you’re ‘hot,’ hold on her face. Camera Two, get a medium penetration shot—tell him to move his knee to his right. OK… get ready Camera Two… you’re hot. Camera One, pull back for a long shot…” With the tape operator switching back and forth between the cameras, recording the intercut video onto a third VCR, a videomaker could “edit” the scene as it was taking place, capturing the spontaneity, saving hours of expensive post-production time.

Without the constant interruptions to change film magazines and batteries and to wait for the camera operator to line up each shot, performers could build momentum—and stay hard. That semi-mythical creature of big-budget 35 shoots, the “fluffer,” an off-camera lady whose job was to suck the men up for each shot, became obsolete in the video era. The erotic intensity that surprised me in All the

King’s Ladies became routine in later productions.

Not only could video be shot in a fraction of the production time of film, it could also be shot for a fraction of the money. At just $25 for a 60-minute 3/4-inch Sony Broadcast cassette, many hours could be shot for only a few hundred dollars. In film, the volume of footage alone on All the King’s

Ladies would have cost almost twice my $14,000 production total. Still, Joe Farmer and I were left

trying to figure out how to market All the King’s Ladies on a budget of nothing. x x x x x x

If you do something well, goes the show business saying, you won’t do it just once. With All the

King’s Ladies showcasing her directing skills, Juliet Anderson secured financing for Educating Nina. The feature also launched the Superior Video line that established Joe and me as the first

producers of quality adult features shot on video.

We met our need for immediate cash by striking a co-manufacturing deal with Select-a-Tape, a small but respected producer of quality 35s directed by company president Alan Roberts, a thin, energetic film artist whose skills would lead to the R-rated features Young Lady Chatterly and The

Gore-Gore Girls . We supplied Select-a-Tape with 3/4-inch masters of All the King’s Ladies , one-

sheets at cost, plus one thousand box covers at a license fee of $10 each. A second thousand would be sent COD for $9 each, a third thousand at $8, and so on until bottoming out at $5 for anything beyond 5,000 box covers.

Immediately, I had $10,000 of my $14,000 investment back. Between Select-a-Tape’s staff and Joe on the phone for Superior, sales were brisk. And another influx of cash came from an unexpected source.

Adult manufacturers who’d guessed that All the King’s Ladies cost between fifty and eighty thousand to produce were surprised when I told them we’d made the picture for only thirty-we didn’t want them to know it cost half that. Honi Webber, now managing a new company called Silver Fox Video, wanted us to shoot a video feature for her. “Nothing quite as ambitious as All the King’s

Joe and I got a chuckle out of that—and a $9,000 profit after shooting Sizzle with Samantha, starring the delightful Samantha Fox.

I put the profits into a Sony RM 430 editing system, with Sony 2860A VCRs that could double as location recorders. Joe and an outside partner bought two brand new Hitachi FP 21 broadcast cameras—new generation competitors for the Ikegami HL 79. By the spring of 1982, Superior was ready to shoot again.

“I sure hope we can maintain the level of quality we established in All the King’s Ladies ,” I said to Joe.

“If things go right,” he replied. “All the King’s Ladies should be the worst movie Superior Video ever makes.”

x x x x x x

The sales of our second release, Physical, were astounding: between Select-a-Tape (under the same contract terms as All the King’s Ladies ) and Superior, over 6,000 pieces were shipped within half a year. Appealing to the growing home video audience of women, Physical put female protagonists in positions of prestige and power—Juliet Anderson played a magazine mogul who exposes a phony contest called “The Erotic Olympics”. All of Superior’s future titles would be aimed at the “couples’ market.”

For the next two years, Joe and I felt we had the secrets of shooting expensive-looking adult movies cheaply on videotape all to ourselves. Except for our lavish rock and roll spectacle

Deviations, which went $15,000 over its $20,000 budget, none cost more than $19,000, including the

acclaimed Night Moves, Running Wild, and Chocolate Cream.

During these years of Superior Video’s peak prosperity, our crew became skilled and efficient. Legal pressures were so unheard of that Shelly lent her cooking skills to our productions without fear of jeopardizing the security clearance needed for her new job as “ergonomics specialist” with a large defense contractor. The rigors and rewards of running a thriving enterprise pushed my original goal of writing about the business into the “future projects” category. But this halcyon period didn’t last into the latter half of the 1980s. The decade was still young when the upheavals of the Video Age began.

By 1983, our competitors had begun shooting on tape. AVN later called 1984 “The Year of the Video Company.” In ’84, shot-on-video releases for the first time outnumbered those shot on film. Freed from the snail’s pace and expense of the celluloid medium, the number of adult features made rose from roughly 200 a year before ’83-’84 to almost ten times that for each year thereafter.

The new technology should have eased the work of performers and improved relations between casts and shooters. Instead, the opposite happened. On the fast-forward video productions of the mid- to-late 1980s, the underlying tensions between directors and actors exploded into war.

x x x x x x

An authority on pornography and its effects, psychologist Neil Malamuth of UCLA, said, “Our research shows that every time there is a satiation of themes, people to some degree lose their ability to be aroused by it. Therefore, newer themes are introduced, breaking new taboos.” Filmmaker Alex DeRenzy put it more simply: his biggest problem, he said, was “beating audience boredom.”

My sales manager said customers complained about the sex in Superior’s Dirty Pictures because it all took place in beds. “Have people screw on a rooftop,” she suggested. “We already did that in All

the King’s Ladies ,” I answered. We also used cars, hot tubs, beaches, barstools, pianos, nightclub

stages and marijuana fields. In Physical, Herschel Savage and Linda Shaw performed in a sea of Flo- Pak, bits of styrofoam packing material that made obscene crunches and raised a stench of polystyrene that made Savage worry about carcinogens. Sharon Mitchell said her strangest scene ever was in a vat of spaghetti with Eric Edwards (“It took me weeks to get the pasta out of my ears”).

Pornographers must always find novelties. DeRenzy’s gimmick in Babyface was young-looking Cuddles Malone. “With her shaven vagina, cute ponytails and underdeveloped chest,” went an AVN review, “The tyke looks like she’s not old enough to cross the street by herself.” Angel Cash literally milked the early part of her porn career by squirting her lactating breasts fifteen feet in a “shootout” with another new mother.

With a claimed $10,000 prop budget, producer/director Paul Norman created “gorgeous hermaphrodites with handsome, large and functional male equipment perched on top of female genitalia” for Bi and Beyond. Norman also mounted penises in new places in Paul Norman’s Cyrano and Edward Penishands.

For my outer space epic E.X., I attached blackout curtains to long black dildos which double- penetrated Lilly Marlene. My effects generator imposed multi-colored electronic “noise” over the black areas, so it looked like Lilly was being taken by aliens composed of pure energy.

Enamored with the unusual, pornographers don’t know when they’ve ventured into the absurd. In a

Hustler interview, actor/director/writer Ron Jeremy described a scene he wanted to shoot: “I’d like

to do a hang-gliding scene in an X-rated film. I see this great shot of me standing on a hill with my dick sticking straight out, hard as a rock. Then I take off and start gliding downward. There’s this gorgeous girl at the bottom of the hill pointing her little butt right at me. The master shot would look as if I’m going to dive right into her ass at top speed. But the final shot would cut to a camera zoom of my dick making a safe rear-entry landing right smack in the middle of her pussy. I’d like to see James Bond do something like that.”

Pornographers are stuck with the fact that 70% of a hardcore movie is comprised of repeats of the same half-dozen positions. In the struggle to create the unusual within this structure of conformity, the speed and cheapness of shooting video in themselves became novelties to be exploited—along with the performers.

x x x x x x

Serena’s retirement (before working in All the King’s Ladies ) came after a shoot that nearly led to her death. In Mai Lin Versus Serena , a filmed contest to see which actress could take on the most men, the compliant masochist was penetrated not only by forty or more studs but by the microbes they carried. “My doctor said the germs ganged up,” Serena told me. “My belly swelled up like I was pregnant.” Delirious from septic shock, she spent months hospitalized with severe pelvic inflammatory disease (PID)—epidemic in the wake of the libertine ’70s. The filmmaker didn’t even send a get-well card.

“Whatever anybody’s natural inclinations are, they play on them,” said an anonymous actress in a 1980 Adam Film World interview. “They’ll take an actress like C.J. Laing and beat the shit out of her because she’s into this S and M thing… If they can get two cocks in one cunt, they’ll do it. If they could stick a cock down someone’s ear and film it, they would.”

Pornographers push performers to their limits—and beyond. “If you can take four cocks at once,” said black superstud F. M. Bradley, “Jerry will want five.” Maggie Randall agreed to do just that for

Jerry Tanner, as long as none of them belonged to Ron Jeremy.

Cheered on by the crew, the slim blonde was enmeshed in bodies when Tanner sent in the fifth man: Ron Jeremy. As Maggie seethed through the scene, Tanner filmed her anger as passion and boasted later, “Only for me will Maggie Randall work with Ron Jeremy.”

After enough unpleasant surprises, actresses come to regard all directors as exploiters. Some play the game of balking at every request and negotiating every detail. And directors come to expect actresses to be lazy whores, out to get maximum dollar for minimum effort. Both parties arrive on a set ready for combat, perceiving politeness as weakness. “The nicer you treat the performers,” observed porn historian Holliday, “the more likely they are to shit on you.”

Sometimes, underlying sexual frustration complicates things further. Henri Pachard admitted “choosing actresses I’d like to fuck.” He hastened to add, “Not that I ever have sex with them