Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  “…and ACTION!” When I dove across the pool, I was flying. I was so pumped up with nervousness and adrenalin that I went a lot farther than I had planned.

  The result was that I banged my head directly into the wall on the other side of the pool. Didn’t even see it coming. Pow! Wham! Oi. It hurt.

  Poor Irv! When my bloodied face first popped into his extreme close-up, he flew back from his camera like there’d been an electrical shock. That was actually funny. The whole scene, in fact, had some definite Three Stooges qualities going for it. Shame that none of that made it into the movie.

  Eventually, I stopped bleeding. With some ice and a frying pan, we got the swelling down to the point where we could continue shooting the scene. Oddly enough, I had no trouble with the sex that day.

  “Who did you fuck?’ asked the imaginary interviewer.

  I haven’t got the slightest idea. With what we now know about concussions, that’s not surprising at all.

  Chapter Five

  Sam

  Everybody said I had to meet Sam. Everybody said I had to meet Sam. Sam Weston was Anthony Spinelli. Anthony Spinelli was Sam. He was the best director. He hired the best actors and he made the best movies. So, I met him.

  I was still shooting Tangerine at the time. I had a day where I was only scheduled to work the morning, so I met Sam in the afternoon.

  We spent the whole time talking about acting and “the business,” but Sam didn’t fall in love with me until I ordered dinner.

  I had been auditioning for him. It was at the Travel Lodge on Eddy Street in San Francisco.

  He had me read a few pages of script from Easy, his upcoming film. After the first time through, he gave me a few notes on my character and then had me read the scene again. It was a dialogue between a man and a woman. He read the woman’s part.

  This was already going into more depth than I had ever experienced before at an X-rated audition. Usually, they just took a naked Polaroid of me, asked a few questions about my past sex scenes, and then had me do maybe one cold read out of the script — if there was one.

  After the second reading with Sam, he launched into a detailed account of how this scene fit into the larger movie. He got into the inner conflicts of both characters and how they would be resolved. We read it a third time. We read it a fourth time. Sam Weston was in his element. He was having fun. He was directing. He was having his way with me.

  The clock lazed through the afternoon. Was my performance improving? I don’t know, but it was my first Sam Weston acting class. He put me through my paces. Porn had nothing to do with it. Power, on the other hand, seemed to have a lot to do with it. Sam Weston made it very clear to me from the very beginning that he was the painter and I was the paint.

  “Okay, okay,” he said scratching his chin and thinking it all over.

  Apparently, the audition had concluded. He talked about his shooting dates. It just so happened I was available. When we discussed salaries, I agreed to work for the customary entry level fee of $200 per day as I had done in other feature films. He gave me a script and told me that I should learn the role of “Boy.”

  Afterwards, Sam offered to buy me dinner at the coffee shop. When I ordered, “Five eggs, sunnyside up, two orders of link sausages, two orders of whole wheat toast, two orders of well-done hash browns, and one large orange juice,” Sam put a meaty paw around my shoulders, flashed me a million dollar smile, and became my friend for life.

  Chapter Six

  I auditioned for a Dracula movie. The director liked my reading. He’d had me read for the part of the vampire and I had given him my Bela Lugosi best.

  “You know,” he said with his thick European accent, “you read that very well, but I think that part belongs to Jamie. I’d like to try you in something else. Let me see.”

  Jaime. He was talking about Jamie Gillis. I could barely contain my excitement. This film was gonna star Jamie Gillis and Annette Haven, two of the biggest names in the business. It was going to be a big step up for me.

  “Would you like to read for the part of Frankenstein?” the director asked. You bet I would, pal, feature films were the place to be. This time I did a Boris Karloff imitation.

  “Very nice,” he said to me, “Very nice!” He was pleased. I was giddy. I knew I was going to get the part.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think I’d like to cast you as the monster.”

  “Great!”

  He went through the details. “We’re going to shoot in New York, San Francisco and New Orleans,” he said. “The pay will be $200 a day and you should get five or six days of work. We’ll pick up all the traveling expenses and you’ll also get a per diem when we’re on the road.

  “That’s all fine,” I said with delight.

  “And one more thing,” he added. I was all ears. “About your death scene. When you die at the end of the film, we will have the heroine sit on your face and pee. It will short-circuit your electrodes and you will be electrocuted!” He said it with a childlike glee.

  “What?” Oh, I’d heard him all right. I just didn’t want to believe what I’d heard. He told me again, only speaking more slowly and deliberately.

  “When you die at the end, the heroine pees on your face and you get electrocuted!” He paused. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  He wasn’t kidding.

  Yeah, I had a problem with that. Just between us girls, making sex films was one thing, but getting pissed on was something else. I didn’t know what that was, but it wasn’t me.

  Oh, we went around on it for a while. I tried to convince him to use a stand-in for that part of the death scene, but he wasn’t buying it. It got to the point where he said, “Look, take it or leave it.”

  I heard Bob Dylan singing on the record player:

  “No, no, no, it ain’t me, Babe.

  It ain’t me you’re looking for, Babe.”

  Chapter Seven

  I earned my SAG card by whistling “Hooray for Hollywood” and carrying a camera tripod up and down several flights of stairs in a Bank of America commercial.

  Chapter Eight

  Hot Legs

  Notice that they advertised “Playgirl Man-of-the-Year — Dewey Alexander.” Playgirl didn’t want me to mention that I’d had anything to do with porn. The Hot Legs producers had promised me up and down that they wouldn’t mention Playgirl at all. When they figured they could make an extra nickel out of the publicity, they betrayed their pledge to me. Sadly, it was often par for the course in the X-rated industry.

  “Oh! We didn’t know you wanted to keep that secret,” they would say when you called to protest. It was like trying to uncrack an egg after the movie came out. Oddly enough, there was no “Dewey Alexander” in Playgirl to be found. As I told you I would, I used my real name in the magazine.

  It wasn’t the first time, neither would it be the last, that an X-rated production company would violate an agreement they made with me. One had to wonder, though, and take pause in seeking redress when these kinds of things happened. After all, one had to consider who exactly would you be suing?

  Hot Legs was the pinnacle of the “Dewey Alexander” phase of my career. It was a lead role where I played a lot of scenes beyond the customary one-and-done sex scene which I’d been pretty much doing up until then.

  I got to work with Jesie St James, Sharon Kane, Bob Chinn, and Paul Thomas, future Hall of Famers all, and career-long friends.

  And I had a surprisingly successful sex scene with Laurien Dominique that absolutely nobody was expecting. Director Bob Chinn had presided over some of my earlier failures and was expecting no more than a soft-core simulated scene from me. But when Laurien and I got it going, we got it going. Dewey Alexander the Great!

  Chapter Nine

  Sam Weston had a whiff of the big time early. He produced and acted in a successful “art” film called One Potato, Two Potato. It was a controversial interracial love story done just as the 1960s were getting started. It starred Barbar
a Barrie, Bernie Hamilton, and Richard Mulligan. What, you never heard of them?

  Sam’s older brother was Jack Weston. You had to have heard of him! For years, he was a wildly successful character actor on stage, in films, and on TV. Sadly, Jack’s success never seemed to do too much to help his younger brother Sam get his own footing in the game. I was always curious about that, but it was never really any of my business.

  Sam produced a western called Gun Fever in those early years too. It starred Mark Stevens, a second tier Hollywood actor, not the later New York porn star of the same name. I don’t remember Sam talking about any more straight credits. Like so many before and after him, Sam became a career minor leaguer knocking around Hollywood in search of that one big break. He had a wife and three kids. He had to feed ‘em. Had to put a roof over their heads. He had to pay the bills. There were some funky jobs like selling encyclopedias and then one day, porn came along. It became his calling.

  By the time we met at the Travel Lodge in San Francisco, he had just won some kind of X-rated Oscar for directing the film Sex World.

  Chapter Ten

  Life Among the Extras (from my 1979 diary)

  It’s my first straight picture, Purple Haze. They’re telling us that it’s the sequel to American Graffiti. It’s starring Ronnie Howard and Cindy Williams. I already met both of them!

  It’s lunchtime. The stars are in their air-conditioned campers and I am writing this in the back of my Volkswagen bus. From the ambition-crazed mob of hundreds of extras, I was chosen early this morning to be one of the four stand-ins! We were cut from the herd and escorted up to the mountain top.

  We lucky four have been anointed “the second team!” Our job is to spell the lead actors while cameras are focused, sound levels are checked, and lights are adjusted in readiness for the next shot. When all preparations have been completed, the “first team” actors are summoned from their trailers and we are shown back down the mountain after having been that close to glory.

  We get $50 extra for our efforts. I was selected because I bore a height, weight, and coloring resemblance to the film’s costar, Will Seltzer. There is a rumor here that he is Richard Dreyfuss’s younger brother.

  There are many, many rumors in this crowd of extras. There is also an endless patter of self-promotion and name-dropping. Everyone here has an 8 x 10 glossy at the ready. Blinding desire is mirrored everywhere you look.

  Forget pornography, this is naked ambition.

  I got an unexpected acting lesson this day from the great Bob Ernst. During the big mob riot scene, a thousand extras are all running this way and that, laughing, playing, and having a good time. They’ve taken so long shooting this scene and generally treated the horde of extras so badly all day that it appears nobody amongst us really gives a shit anymore that we are still making a movie. Nobody, that is, except Bob Ernst. Running along beside him, I saw that he may have been the only person there who was still concerned with staying in character. I was amazed.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Sensuous Detective

  Serena had the title role and we played an odd sex scene together. I had to overpower her, tie her up, and spank her as foreplay. I was completely out of my league. Serena was a major player. She was living with Jamie Gillis, for God’s sakes! When it came to doing any kind of an SM scene with an experienced woman, I was a clueless cub scout. It was like Jerry Lewis driving a Ferrari.

  When the director called, “Action,” we shot something, but my heart wasn’t in it. Tying up a woman, spanking her? I didn’t think this was going to go over very well with the feminist crowd in Berkeley! I played a very quick paddy cake on her tushy and got to the sex as soon as possible. I was embarrassed, titillated, and completely humiliated. But. I got hard. I got in. I got off. Job well done.

  When I was wrapped for the day, paid off, and on my way out the door, Serena asked me for a ride back to her hotel. “Well, sure,” I said, anxious to please, and off we went.

  Once there, she invited me to come hang out in her room. Well, okay, I thought. She’s a big star. Could get me some more work if we became friends. Maybe she wants to mess around some more, y’know, in private. Teach me a little bit about what’s what.

  What she didn’t tell me was that she had just used me to walk off the set after having had a big blowout argument with the director. I was her getaway driver.

  Within fifteen minutes, the producer, the director, and the entire cast and crew were all standing below us in the hotel parking lot and beseeching their star to return to the production. It was a full-scale diva snitfit and I was Serena’s accomplice in The Runaway Honey!

  For a while, both sides used me as a go-between since Serena would not meet with them. Serena was trying to reach Jamie Gillis for advice. He was out of town. When they finally did hook up by phone, I quietly excused myself and went home.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Good directors can bring certain things out of you, with their intensity or gentleness or sensitivity or understanding. They can make an actor feel he can do no wrong.”

  Robert DeNiro, Parade Magazine, 11/8/09

  In rehearsing for Easy, Sam was every bit as good as advertised. He cared more about the acting than any other director I ever met in the business. Period.

  When Sam couldn’t find work plying his trade as a director in straight Hollywood, he proceeded to make a name for himself by doing it in porn. The result was, that along with Gerry Damiano and a few others, Anthony Spinelli led the pack in creating the erotic films that now make up the catalog of porn’s so-called “Golden Age.”

  To begin with, we had rehearsals! I’d tell friends I was off to rehearse my next adult film and they’d give me this knowing “Heh-heh-heh” elbow in the ribs like I was off to the orgy.

  Hardly. We’d be sitting around the table in the Howard Johnson’s Banquet Room in Mill Valley. We’d be running lines. Learning the script. Improvising. Drinking too much coffee. Developing characters. Imagining backstories. Rewriting scenes. Blocking. Smoking too many cigarettes. And then we were running lines again. Did I say we were running lines? Yes, over and over, we’d be running lines. “Let’s take it from the top,” he would say, and we would. At our own expense, I might add, there was rarely any pay for this rehearsal time. With Sam, you just gave it.

  All this preparation would save us hours once we started shooting, and that would be a good thing too, because it was not uncommon for an Anthony Spinelli day to last a very loooonnnnnnnggg time once we finally got on a set. Alone among porn directors, Anthony Spinelli would shoot between ten and twenty takes of a particular shot until he felt he’d gotten what he needed out of it. He could get very meticulous out there and be very demanding of both actors and crew. Producers could often be seen standing off to the side and pulling out their hair as Spinelli emptied their wallets in overtime costs.

  I loved this part of working for Sam. The training was invaluable. The process was fun.

  The problems I had with Sam were all about sex.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Long before I ever played in one as an actor, I was a fan of X-rated movies. These, of course, were the days before you could watch sex videos at home and you had to go out to the adult theaters and drive-ins to get in on some of these new, voyeuristic thrills. I was almost always amazed at how bad the movies were. I’m not even talking about the acting or the filmmaking skills at work here, I’m talking about the sex, the quality of the sex.

  It used to astonish me! Here you had naked men and naked women apparently eager and willing to have hot wet sex right in front of a camera and yet they still managed to find ways to fuck it all up!

  It was the rage that used to get to me, the meanness and the rage.

  Okay, okay, one and one are eleven. I’m not stupid here. I can understand how unlikely it would be for a culture as fucked up about sex as ours has been to generate any kind of healthy sexual media, but it was just too much. So many of the sex scenes were hostile and bru
tal. They were odes to male domination run amok. It would be embarrassing and insulting to watch these movies with a woman who had an IQ higher than a plum.

  The sexual revolution of the egalitarian sixties had moved the culture to allow sexual activity to appear up there on our movie screens and what did we get? We got extreme close-ups of Josef Stalin and Attila the Hun squirting their come in women’s faces. This was the sexual revolution? Fuck! It killed my buzz. It wasn’t what I had signed on for.

  When I first read the sex scene that Sam wanted me to do in Easy, it was more of that same brutal crap and it depressed the hell out of me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You sure you want to take this on?” Marty the agent asked.

  “How can I not?” I answered. “It was one of the central issues of my career.”

  “I don’t know,” Marty said. “It’s a bog. It’s a swamp. It’s like getting into a land war in Asia, attacking Russia in winter. You’re swimming in some very murky water there. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? And who the fuck are you to say? It’s the battle of the sexes, y’know? So much bullshit has been slung in there that it’s really hard to say what’s good and bad, right and wrong.”

  “It’s not about good or bad, right or wrong,” I told him. “It’s all just about balance.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Welcome to the Circus

  Porn has long been a bastion of male fantasy.