I’ll admit: I’m not the biggest fan of watching porn. I know it’s hard to believe, but for the most part, you only really need it for five minutes and once you finish, do you really need to watch the rest of it? No.
But I am completely fascinated by the porn industry. If it’s anything to with the behind-the-scenes workings of the fuck-film, I am enthralled. The directors, the actors and actresses, the hangers-on – to me it’s such a brilliantly sordid world of hedonistic delusion, it makes me want to somehow be a part of it. I kinda want to write and direct a porn film, just once, just to put my thumbprint in such an outré community. But until then, I guess the insider biographies I plow through will have to do.
Which brings me to my latest conquest, THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF THE PORN FILM INDUSTRY. Following the format of such other tell-alls like LIVE FROM NEW YORK, this book is completely comprised of quotes and anecdotes from a virtual who’s who of adult film, starting in the ’50s with the nudie-cutie pioneers and ending in the pre-DVD late-’90s, the high point of the video boom.
Everything from Linda Lovelace copulating with dogs to the suicides of actors who can’t get it up, THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD is a warts-and-all (mainly warts) history lesson, that, while fully entertaining, gets a little too bogged down in police procedural and wholly boring mob tales in the late 1970s, practically throwing the book off for a good hundred pages. If it were only one chapter, it would be interesting, but you don’t want to know about fat Italian guys who were indicted for making illegal copies – you want stories about Sharon Mitchell scoring heroin or Traci Lords passing around a fake ID. And when those stories are told, this book is a must-read.
As an interesting sidenote, in the introduction, co-author Legs McNeil dedicates this book to his late girlfriend, who passed away after injecting black tar heroin laced with flesh-eating bacteria. Now that’s a book I wanna read!
Related posts:
- Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film
- KNOW-IT-ALL Jacobs set to conquer Hollywood
- Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong
- Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia: The A-to-Z Guide for Finding Your Favorite Actresses Naked
- The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction
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