FRAMES O’ REFERENCE >> My Life in Porn

Discussing books on movies … almost as good as watching them, and without the sticky floors!

Whenever I tell people that I once spent three months working the graveyard weekend shift at a 24-hour adult video store, they usually assume I’m setting them up for a joke, but I’m not … or at least not one in which I do not serve as the living, breathing punch line.

For the sake of veritas and other pretentious Latin words, I then admit that the store I worked at wasn’t the sordid, peep-show/jack-off mill of so many bad TV cop shows, but rather a very well-lit and clean environment whose open layout specifically was designed to prevent shoplifting and any attempts at covert masturbation. It is because of this that I can say with some relief that during my brief tenure at the store, I never once had to face the indignity of cleaning up another man’s personal juices — a statement I know cannot be made by many folks who worked at more traditional video stores dabbling only in the business of blue movies.

Though I did serve many a customer who could be described politely as “eccentric” (ask me sometime about the guy who browsed for eight and a half hours before discovering he only had enough cash for half of his intended purchases), I always tried my best to treat them with the same dignity and respect I myself would hope to receive during a transaction that could legitimately be concluded with a friendly “Have a happy self-induced ejaculation!”

I am proud to say that a customer could do only two things to provoke a rude or sarcastic response out of me: The first was to try and convince me to ignore their flagrantly huge late fees and let them rent another eight movies out of the goodness of my heart. The other was to demand a refund because the tape they rented didn’t satisfy their entertainment requirements.

Usually these assholes were upset because they rented the video whose cover featured an attractive young woman suggestively petting a horse, only to discover that neither she nor the horse actually appeared in the video, much less did anything they would be ashamed to tell their parents. We eventually solved this problem by placing a sticker reading “Does Not Contain Any Animal Fucking” on the cover, which caused a dramatic drop in its popularity.

But every now and then, we would get a similar complaint from someone who had rented a video that didn’t offer false promises of human/equine intimacy and each time, my response to their grievance was always the same: “Dude,” I would say disbelievingly, “it’s a porn movie. They all suck!”

And it’s true. By its very nature, all pornography is awful, because if it isn’t, then it’s no longer pornography, but a work of legitimate art. And though art is in the mind of the beholder, only a true nimrod would argue that AMERICAN BUKKAKE 11 – the cover of which, if my memory of this frequently rented title serves me correct, shows one of its performers attempting to ingest the contents of a beer bong loaded with an unpleasant amount of male issue – qualifies.

The central problem with pornography – the quality that forever will doom it to suckitude – is that it is inevitably tedious. This notion was best summed by the famed Italian neo-realist film director Vittorio De Sica (THE BICYCLE THIEF), who, when he was asked to give his own personal definition of pornography, said it was a film about a car trip that ran the exact same amount of time as the actual car trip would in real life. For those of you confused by analogies, simply replace “car trip” with “people fucking,” and I’m sure it’ll make more sense to you.

Interestingly, though, this insight leads to pornography’s greatest irony: Though its end product is by its nature unavoidably dull, the industry that produces it is inherently fascinating. Pornography very well may be the only genre of filmmaking where you are guaranteed that the behind-the-scenes footage included on the DVD always will be far more interesting than the movie itself. This is because – despite all of the reports of how “mainstream” the industry has become – pornographers still are very much outlaws in today’s society, and outlaws have always been the most interesting people in this world.

Two people who understand this idea very well are Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne, the authors of 2005’s THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF THE PORN FILM INDUSTRY. In their 600+ page brick of a book, they describe in great detail the efforts of all of the outlaws (of both the sexual and literal kind) who built the industry and the lawmen who tried to stop them every step of the way. It’s the kind of book I usually find incredibly absorbing.

Why then, didn’t I like it?

First, I am not a fan of the “oral history” genre, especially as presented here. With the exception of a brief introduction, the bulk of the text consists of intercut transcripts taken from interviews conducted by the authors and – in some cases – other sources. As a writer, I can see the appeal of this approach, since it absolves you of doing any actual, y’know, writing, and instead requires you only to give your interview tapes to a typist and then edit the resulting transcripts into a cohesive whole.

The problem is that the finished manuscript is then entirely devoid of anything approaching commentary or insight regarding its subject matter – especially since, for the most part, pornographers aren’t prone to introspection – which may be appropriate if all you truly intend to do is document the subject’s straight and unvarnished history, but ultimately can result in a dry quality that dulls the impact of the work.

It also doesn’t help that McNeil and Osborne seem most interested in the part of the story that is likely to be the least interesting to the majority of their readers: namely, the efforts of the FBI and local courts to prosecute pornographers across the country. So much time is spent describing these stings and legal battles that it becomes possible to forget that this is supposed to be a book about filmmaking (and it definitely hurts the book that much of this same tale was told far more skillfully in Eric Schlosser’s excellent REEFER MADNESS: SEX, DRUGS, AND CHEAP LABOR IN THE AMERICAN BLACK MARKET). And chances are that anyone who picks up the book with the hope of finding out more about the men and women who actually made the films, rather than just distributed them, likely will come away disappointed.

All of the major (and most controversial) icons are mentioned and whole chapters are devoted to Linda Lovelace (whose own book ORDEAL contains all of the same information, albeit in a far more discomfortingly lurid fashion), John Holmes (who is given ample page time far more because of his role in the infamous WONDERLAND slayings than for his any of his performances onscreen), Traci Lords (whose story of working in porn as a minor is so well-known, it has even made its way in front of OPRAH’s audience) and Savannah (a blonde starlet whose life and suicide was the stuff AFTER SCHOOL SPECIALS were made of), but beyond that, the best the book can offer up is only the most random of biographical tidbits here and there.

For example, no mention is made of The Andrea True Connection, even though the band fronted by an adult-film actress had a Billboard Top 10 hit in 1976 with a song (“More, More, More”) whose lyrics were explicitly about her X-rated cinematic exploits (“Get the action rolling / Get the camera going”) says just as much about the sexually schizophrenic nature of the period than another rehashed look at the rise and fall of the stars of DEEP THROAT.

While I admit that these complaints on my part say less about the book then they do about the psychology of an individual who has done so much reading about a genre he admits he finds virtually unwatchable, the fact is that McNeil and Osborne’s book commits the one sin no work of its kind ever should: It is, at times, as boring as the films it documents.

They say that pornography largely was responsible for the home-video revolution of the early ’80s, and while I have no doubt this is true, I also would speculate that it was also the motivating factor in the invention of the fast-forward button. Just as even the most well-made works of pornography are improved greatly with judicious use of such a function, so, too, is THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD improved by skipping whole pages of text and even a chapter or two here and there.

It may work as a good beginner’s guide for folks who are interested in the subject and have never approached it before, but, despite its length and diverse group of subjects, it doesn’t offer anything new to readers more familiar with the sordid history of cinema’s dark side. –Allan Mott

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