Legs McNeil - The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

The overwhelming majority of the material in The Other Hollywood is the result of hundreds of interviews conducted by the authors. In some cases, interviews and text were excerpted from other sources, including anthologies, magazines, newspapers, journals, federal wire taps, police reports, FBI 302s, coroners reports, psychiatric records, court records and testimony, published and unpublished interviews, and other books. A list of these sources appears on page 591. We wish to acknowledge the contributions of these sources, which have enriched the content of our book.

Of the seven years it took us to complete The Other Hollywood, we spent roughly half the time trying to sell the book to a publisher. Surprisinglyor notpornography was considered an uncommercial venture by the literary publishing industry, who seemed to believe that even people who watched porn would not want to read about it. It wasnt until we produced the three-hour television series Adults Only: The Secret History of the Other Hollywood for Court TVand it became that channels highest rated original program to datethat the New York publishing world took notice. In the end, it was the maverick publisher Judith Regan who took a chance on us; we can only hope this book will live up to her expectations.

Just before this book was sold to ReganBooks, my girlfriend, Shannon McNamara, died, after injecting herself with black tar heroin that had been infected with flesh-eating bacteria. When the infection spread throughout her body, Shannon was forced to undergo surgery to amputate her leg and did not survive the operation. I didnt know she had been using dope, nor dealing it, and the resulting emotional fallout was crippling for me. For some time I couldnt face the bookor myself, for that matter. It was Gillian McCain, my coauthor on Please Kill Me, who reminded me that if I didnt continue my work on The Other Hollywood, no one else would tell the story of the porn industrys rise from a marginal criminal enterprise of starving hippie actors and mob-sponsored back-alley loops to the multibillion-dollar juggernaut it is today.

Through me, Gillian had become friends with former porn stars Jane Hamilton (whose stage name was Veronica Hart), Sharon Mitchell, and Tim Connelly, and she realized that their story demanded to be toldwithout the cheap put-downs and hip moralizing that every magazine reporter who went slumming in the porn ghetto had already exhausted. As Fordham professor Walter Kendrick wrote in The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, Pornography turns writers and readers alike into amateur psychologists, who never ask what an object is, only what is meant by it. Pornography names an argument, not a thing.

What I remembered, from my conversations with Gillian, was the goal that had started me down this path in the first place: to try to capture the birth and first few decades of the porn film business in all its hilarity and horror, to tell the story of Americas obsessive love/hate relationship with sex through the voices of those who embodied it. It was Gillians inspiration that sent me back to work, and Im grateful to her for it, as for so much else.

All these many words and hundreds of pages later, Im certain weve left out as much as we were able to put in. If we havent managed to include your favorite porn star or stories from the making of your favorite porn film, Im sorry. I regret that this isnt the history of gay porn: We tried, but in the end discovered that thats another book unto itself. And to all our born-again Christian friends, Im sorry that were not judgmental in our narrativebut to our minds porns been demonized long enough. What we wanted to do, instead, was to let the people involved speak for themselves: the actors and actresses, cops and mobsters, producers and directors, photographers and writers, hustlers and suitcase pimps, and everyone else in between. Whether my cowriters, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia, and I have succeeded is for you to decide.

Legs McNeil
October 2004

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JOHN WATERS (FILMMAKER): There was a theater in Baltimore, where I grew up, called the Rex Theater, that showed all the nudist camp movieswhich was what we had before porno.

Since I was twelve years old Id read Variety, which was the only paper that covered the pornography business at the time. Variety reviewed every filmand I saw them all. Not just the exploitation movies, but the nudie movies, which had to be the most ludicrously unsexual films ever made, like a girl on a pogo stick or a nude volleyball game. You just saw their backsasses and tits, but never dicks.

DAVE FRIEDMAN (EXPLOITATION FILM PRODUCER): The exploitation business was an extension of the circus carnivalgirlie shows, freak shows, gambling games, rides, ballyhoo, hullabaloo, all done at a local level. But think about this: If youre in the carnival business, you can be in only one place at one time. And if you get rained out, youre dead.

But what if, all of a sudden, you can put this stuff inside? And be in more than one place at one time? Thats when these guys started figuring out: Hey, well put this crap on film!

JOHN WATERS: Kroger Babb was one of the first great exploitation filmmakers. He went around to bingo halls and firehouses with his movie Mom and Dad that played for ten years all over the whole world.

Why? Because Mom and Dad showed the birth of a baby. It was the only way to show parental nudity at the time. I guess men liked looking at the vaginas, and ignored the babywhich is really scarybirth as an erotic act. And they would have men see it in the day and women see it at night. They also had fake nurses selling sex education literature.

So Kroger Babb is one of my heroes. I mean, I have the poster for Mom and Dad in the hallway of my house.

DAVE FRIEDMAN: The exploitation filmmakers quickly realized they could make a picture about any controversial subjectas long as it was done in bad taste.

They had to do only one thing: They had to square it up, like you do in the carny. The square-up is the pitch at the beginning of the picture where they say, The producers of this picture show you these scenes not in any terrible attempt to exploit this subject, but to make the public aware that these things exist in our beloved land, and that through education it will be brought to the attention of the proper authorities, so that child marriage can be stamped out, so that dope can be stamped out, so that miscegenation can be stamped out, so that juvenile delinquency can be stamped out

JOHN WATERS: The exploitation film business was an industry based on slowly and sneakily showing what the studios wouldnt showlike the nudist camp movies.

DAVE FRIEDMAN: These movies were about as erotic as walking through the cold storage room of Swift and Company in Chicago. You got these poor, tired old dames with their breasts hanging below their navels, and these old guys walking around

Nudist camps were the salt mines of sex, so to speak.

ROGER EBERT (FILM CRITIC): The nudist camp movies were one of the most pathetic and least significant of the 1950s subgenres, of interest largely because of the actors difficulties in manipulating bath towels while standing in shrubbery. Their inevitable strong point was a volleyball game made somewhat awkward by the need for the male actors to keep their backs to the camera.