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"With all due respect to the IMDB, they don't have a very deep porn database," writes webmaster Jeff Vanzetti. "We, on the other hand, do. The Internet Adult Film Database lists just under 50,000 porn titles, and have links to vendors on about 65% of them. There's a great many porn movies out there that have fallen out of print, but there is also a bit of a resurgence on some of the classic titles you mention. For example, if you searched for Story of Joanna on our site, you'd find a review of the movie and links to a half-dozen vendors who are selling it; some on DVD." A supporting comment —"You can find links, and ordering info, to pretty much any legal adult video by using the search form at https://www.iafd.com" —comes from Kevin, who has my favorite current e-mail address: defiant@depraveddollars.com.
Another resource I didn't know of: "You will find Story of Joanna and other movies you mentioned quite easily on Emule," Hikari Kage informs me. "Which goes to show ... the wide range of tastes (and the simple, and oh so rare, existence of taste) of those who frequent these new, exciting, and of course slightly illegal (as everything exciting) meeting places of the lewd and the damned." OK, Hikari.
Readers who want to find many of the films I mentioned —Mona and School Girl among them —should go to Mike Vraney's Something Weird Video, an exemplary trove for soft- and hard-core sexploitation.
4. Did they love it in Tacoma and at Texas A&M?
The original column was steeped in nostalgia, and so was some of the mail I received. Clint Weathers, a Minneapolis photographer and teacher, jotted a few kind words and added: "It certainly doesn't hurt that I had a celebrity crush on Annette Haven in my teens so you got nostalgia points, too." Haven was a prime lady of the higher 70s porn; her elegant manner and sweet overbite won many a heart. She was rumored to be considered for the lead role in Brian DePalma's Body Double, a thriller about the porn business, but settled for a cameo.
Reader Rick Taylor had a double layer of nostalgia: 50s going on 70s. He recalled seeing Deep Throat "along with my new wife it at the Community Theatre in Tacoma, Wash., probably about 1975, where it double billed with The Devil in Miss Jones for ages. I hadn't been in that theater since I was a kid watching the usual Hollywood fare. I can't tell you what a strange experience that was. They had the lights waaay up to guarantee that the audience behaved. I kept looking at the fixtures, and had these flashbacks to Abbott and Costello while looking at the screen and seeing Linda do his [Harry's] thing. I guess you can go home again, just that it's not quite the same. I do remember my wife and I going home afterwards and having a most pleasant evening, though."
In the 70s, a visit to Deep Throat and Damiano's follow-up, the much darker Miss Jones, was a mandatory social event for many young couples —and undergraduates. "I attended Texas A&M University, located in a small hick town called College Station," writes Freeman Fisher, now of West Hollywood. "The Campus theater, a tired single-screen 40s movie house, to my amusement was showing Throat when I enrolled in the fall of 1974. For 4 years it showed continuously, this epic tonsil-tickler, interrupted only once for 3 or 4 weeks with an exclusive run of Barry Lyndon for the entire area between Waco and Houston!... The double bill of Throat and Devil in Miss Jones...proved as much a rite of passage in this redneck college town as beer bongs, two-steppin', and kissing girls after every touchdown scored by the beloved football team."
5. What was it like to be there?
I got insights on 70s porn from two important figures in the genre. Jamie Gillis, called "porn's quintessential pervmeister" and recently ranked #12 in Adult Video News' list of the top 50 porn stars of all time, wrote me to correct my assertion that Damiano was the director of the 1978 Water Power. "Damiano had nothing to do with the 'high colonic' film, which I starred in," Gillis tells me. "His name is on it —that's all." (On the same subject, New York University savant Dave Cheung helpfully adds: "Damiano didn't make the notorious Waterpower. There's a guy named Warren Evans over at the discussion forum at DVDManiacs who claims that he's the director of this.")
I also heard from Howard Ziehm, co-director of the original porn fiction feature, Mona. Ziehm and his partners, producer Bill Osco and co-director Michael Benveniste, also did the early porn film Harlot, which I haven't seen, and assembled Hollywood Blue, an entertaining clip job that included the soft-core short that supposedly featured Marilyn Monroe (actually, Monroe lookalike Arline Hunter) and a homosexual hard-core reel with a young man bearing a strong resemblance to TV's Rifleman, Chuck Connors.
The team then made Flesh Gordon, which "began as a 25K porn film," Ziehm writes, "but wound up costing 500K. Because of the serendipitous hiring of a group of young animators, the film evolved into something much more." The team headed by SPFX maestro Jim Danforth included several young men who would build the vocabulary for Hollywood visual effects: nine-time Oscar winner Dennis Muren (the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park films, E.T. and The Terminator), Gregory Jein (Oscar-nominated for Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Joe Viskocil (Oscar winner for Independence Day and Dave Allen (Oscar-nominated for Young Sherlock Holmes), plus six-time Oscar-winning makeup man Rick Baker. "The porn scenes that we shot for the film were confiscated by the police. They confiscated the film's negative and I had to relinquish any hard-core in order to get the film back. By that time, I had decided not to make the film hard-core anyway, so I didn't care."
I was most interested in Mona —which was shot in L.A., not San Francisco as I had written. For a very-first-of-its-kind, the film is pretty impressive: a clever soundtrack, a black-and-white flashback to the heroine's youth, a decent sense of humor and some realistically shot, fairly hot whoopee. When I heard from Ziehm last week, I asked him to elaborate on his porn years, and he sent me the cogent commentary that follows.
Before Mona, porn films had been 10 or 20 mins. long, and all but a handful of those were silent. The biggest challenge, I imagined, was finding people who had some skill at delivering lines and would agree to be filmed having sex.
His reply: "Rarely had anyone learned their lines before the day of the shoot. They were sexual people, not thespians, although some kidded themselves into believing otherwise. It would be like trying to pretend that a defensive end could play cornerback. The idea of writing a complex script for people who were going to come to the set without even looking at the script was absurd. The script of a porno movie is a bridge between sex scenes —that's why the fast forward was the most important feature of video and DVD players. If I wanted to create great film stories I would have gone to a studio. After Flesh Gordon I had the chance.
"Mona was essentially the first porno with a plot that worked. It was written, if my memory serves me, by Bucky Searles. [Searles wrote the songs for the 1975 quasi-porno musical comedy Alice in wonderland.] The budget was 5K and shot in 3 days. Benveniste directed the non-sex scenes, and I directed the action scenes while doing camera, basically the way I did loops. When Bill told me he was taking it to Lou Sher [at Sherpix, a relatively legit distributor of soft-core exploitation movies], I thought he was nuts.... When he came back and told me he had sold Mona and Hollywood Blue for 100 grand I was awestruck.
"I used a pseudonym for most of my work because I was busted so many times I didn't want to give them a map where to get me next. I called myself Harry Hopper, Linus Gator and others when I did the 'pastry' series with Peter Locke: Sexteen, Honey Pie, Sweet Cakes, Hot Cookies, Star Virgin and Naughty Network. [Peter Locke had written and directed the very funny vaudeville-style porn, It Happened in Hollywood.] When video came in, it just wasn't worth the hassle, going back to making extended loops. In all, I had a court battle over my head for almost 11 years. By 1980 porn budgets were often 100K and rising. Then video came in and everything reverted back 10 years. Video producers had budgets as low as 8K and that included the director's profit. I dropped out. The legal and other problems just weren't worth it."