by Howie Gordon
Full circle. It had come full circle. Now, a nervous newbie was calling me up, to ask for my help, just as I had called upon Nancy Hoffman before The Candy Stripers and Candida Royalle before Pizza Girls. They both had been kind enough to try and help me. How could I refuse this young maiden?
I didn’t.
The movie was Little Anal Annie and the Willing Husbands. Charles de Santos, my old friend from Madame Lau days, would be directing. It was going to be another one of those new feature-length videos that would be entirely shot in two days.
Nina Hartley was cast in the title Anal Annie role as a hands-on sex therapist who goes around saving troubled marriages by letting the husbands fuck her in the ass and then teaching their wives how to do it for themselves. I was cast as one of the husbands. There wasn’t any script. Charles was going to let the actors improvise the dialogue.
As feature films go, you could pretty well anticipate that this movie would stink. Whether the sex would be any good or not, well, that was always a roll of the dice come game time.
The odd thought occurred to me that the rehearsal I was arranging with Nina would probably make a better movie than the movie, itself.
The more I thought about it, the more enamored I became with the idea of shooting the rehearsal. Backstage in porn always seemed far more interesting than so many of the foolish movies we were putting up there on the screen. Now, with the shrinking budgets of the video revolution, it seemed truer than ever.
If we shot this rehearsal, we would have the two fully developed characters of Nina Hartley and Richard Pacheco trying to get themselves ready to shoot an anal intercourse scene in a porn farce. We could make a strength out of our weakness by tackling it head on! A movie about the movie could be real. It could be charming. It could be as funny or as factual as we wanted to make it. And the sex could just be the sex, free to be whatever it really was.
This could be a way to make a cheap movie about porn instead of just another cheap porn movie. Now, wouldn’t that be interesting?
And even if our little rehearsal shoot didn’t work out, so what? If we only shot video, we could always just reuse the tape. The only expense would be our time. Yeah, I was all for it. Shoot the rehearsal. We could come out of this with a whole second movie and we could all agree to split the profits. That’s the way I pitched it to both Charles and Nina.
Nina was all for it, but Charles needed some convincing. He thought it would be a waste of time. Eventually, though, he agreed to shoot it, but I think it fell under the category of humoring the talent. Besides, it wasn’t like a “rehearsal” was going to hurt his movie any.
On the day before the rehearsal, I pulled a hamstring muscle while playing softball. It was a painful injury. I ended up using crutches and wearing an ace bandage to the rehearsal. No matter, we were after reality. We just had a little more reality to work with, that’s all.
Nina Hartley turned out to be bright, clear blue-eyed intelligent, and pretty.
Nina Hartley was different. For one thing, she was from Berkeley. Not many Berkeley women were getting involved with pornography back then. She was twenty-five years old and calling herself a pro-sex feminist in an era when angry, anti-porn lesbians had largely hijacked the feminist movement.
In the face of activist “anti” radicals like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, sex-positive young women like Nina Hartley and writers Susie Bright and Carol Queen, among others, were standing up to be counted. They were a breath of fresh air.
Nina was a nursing student and the daughter of leftwing politicos who had become Zen priests. Nina Hartley was trying to relive the Berkeley of the 1960s, in the 1980s. Good luck with that. She was even part of a three-way marriage with both a husband and a wife. I liked Nina. I was attracted to her. She was a mindful wild child, who in finding pornography, was exactly where she wanted to be.
The great X-rated performer Juliet Anderson, Aunt Peg herself, had introduced Nina to the business. At this point, Nina was serving as her apprentice.
Shoot the Rehearsal
We were breaking new ground. No one was sure exactly what we were doing, but we were doing it. I imagined the camera(s) as a backstage presence that would capture the intimacy of that situation in a real and candid way. We would just get used to the cameras being there and behave in our “normal” ways, I thought. It would reveal us as we were offstage, between takes, when we were not performing, when we were being ourselves. That was my fantasy, anyway, but our shooting the rehearsal didn’t turn out that way at all.
Charles was the director and from the get-go and he just took over directing the rehearsal. We went along with it while he tried to make things happen. He began by sitting Nina and me on a couch and as an off-camera voice, asked us a whole battery of questions about our characters and their development throughout the movie.
It treated Anal Annie and the Willing Husbands like it was some kind of off Broadway show that we were preparing to open instead of just being what it was, a half-baked porno script.
It wasn’t “backstage” at all. It was onstage. It was an interview, a performance. It was stiff and formal and not very intimate or candid at all. Nina and I got stuck on that couch “acting” like actors. It was like being interviewed for a television show. It was the stilted staged imagining of what a rehearsal would be like if we ever had rehearsals with “the grownups” watching. In the end, there had been a few interesting moments, but, basically, things were pretty dull on that couch. Fortunately, things got better when we moved to the bedroom.
In order to lend some credence to the concept of sex therapy, I had asked Carly how we might go about preparing a woman for anal intercourse. She suggested the same treatment that was used for vaginismus (painful intercourse). It was the insertion of a series of gradually enlarged dilators ranging from a pencil thickness to one of a full-sized erect penis. By allowing the body sufficient time to adjust to each size, eventually the male insertion could be achieved without undo pain.
And that’s what we did with Nina’s tushy, improvising a running commentary along the way. It was real and it was loving. It amounted to being an entertaining primer on how to do anal intercourse. And once my penis was actually inserted, well, school was out. We captured a real, live sexual experience that had some wit, charm, and some genuine heat to it. That was worth the price of admission right there.
My favorite moment in shooting the sex scene came when the phone rang. We were in a private home and there was no answering machine. When the phone rang, I was in the middle of performing oral sex on Nina. As Fate would have it, the phone was right next to the bed and I was the closest person to it. No one off stage was in any position to pick it up without cutting the cameras and it was just ringing.
So, I reached over, picked it up, and talked to the caller while I continued to lick, suck, and nibble the young Nina. This was fun. Multi-tasking, I repeated the caller’s phone number so that someone off-camera could jot down the information for the homeowner.
Then, when finished, I simply hung up the phone and returned to concentrating on my orals.
Our session ended on a high note. Pleased with our efforts, we all agreed to be of help with the editing and to share whatever profits there were to be.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Shooting the real Anal Annie movie followed in a couple of days. It was entirely anticlimactic. We worked at that same feverish pace I had experienced with Spinelli in making Spectators. Like in the days of loops, it was all get the actors on the set, get them fucking, and get them off. Next.
As expected, Anal Annie was completely asinine.
Charles had talked about doing a whole series with the Little Anal Annie character. The irony here was that Nina Hartley didn’t particularly like anal sex. She had worked it out with me so that she could handle it well enough, but desire and pleasure were another story. I suggested that she might want to reconsider building her reputation in the business as this Anal Annie character. She was imme
diately able to grasp the implications. She did not really want to become, how would Screw magazine have put it, “the Queen of the Hershey Highway.”
On the first day, we reprised our rehearsal scene with all the dilators, but it was nowhere near as charming when done in our movie characters, as it was when we played ourselves. At the end of the day, Nina wrote in my diary:
Gordon Archive.
The next day, I had another anal sex scene with a young actress who played my wife. I had completely forgotten this scene until I read about it in my diary. That surprised me. It wasn’t like me to forget a woman I had sex with, but I had very good reason to forget this one.
We were supposed to shoot our sex scene first thing in the morning. I showed up bright and early, on time, all scrubbed and douched and ready to go to work. She showed up late, over an hour late, and said that she was sick. She said she needed to get some sleep and offered to play the sex scene later. Director Charles sent her upstairs to a back bedroom and then changed his shooting schedule to work around her. He asked me to be the good soldier and to just hang out until she was ready to work.
I was pissed. I’m going to do this actress the favor here of not saying her name because I personally diagnosed her illness as suffering from an all-night cocaine binge. We used to call that being unprofessional.
I spent all day watching the Summer Olympics. Normally, that might not have been so bad, but I caught the one particular day when all they showed were hours and hours of synchronized swimming!
It was a cruel and unusual punishment!
In the evening, Miss Snow White arose from her coma. She was miraculously cured and ready to go to work. We did. Though we were able to successfully do our scene, I apparently still needed to pay her the ultimate disrespect by having forgotten for years that we had ever touched.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Ten Little Maidens
This is my “Homage to the Photographer” chapter. It is a dedicated thank you to Vincent Fronczek, Mark Focus, and Paul Johnson, three of the best still photographers it was my pleasure to work with during my career.
In this chapter, I’ll display a whole series of photographs I took backstage with my own camera.
I was on a wee bit of a roll there throughout the summer of 1984. I picked up a couple of days here and there in a few movies. They were all pretty schlocky, but they were helping us pay the bills. And things were nice and quiet at home. We were still working out the new rhythms with the kids and all, but for the moment, Carly seemed all right with me continuing to work in the business. I was keeping most of my extracurricular activities confined to the set and nothing else particularly scary was happening—yet.
My old mentor John Seeman got me an audition for a big, new film getting ready to shoot called Ten Little Maidens. I was to call up director Ken Collins and arrange for a meeting.
“Hello, I’d like to speak with Ken Collins,” I said.
“This is Ken Collins,” a woman replied.
“Oh,” I said, “I thought Ken Collins was a man.”
“I am a man!” replied an indignant Ken Collins. Ooops, I thought, kiss this job good-bye. But no, Ken recovered pretty quickly while I removed my feet from my mouth. He said that he was used to it. He just had a high voice. Later in the day, I met him and his wife. They were nice people and they hired me to be in their movie.
Ten Little Maidens was an Agatha Christies murder-mystery adapted as a farce for the X-rated screen. I was hired for one day to participate in a huge banquet scene. At the end of a sumptuous meal, I would have a sex scene that would have something to do with a chicken leg and Lisa De Leeuw’s vagina. Following that, I would be killed by poison. Sounded like a good day’s work to me!
By the time we got on the set in Los Angeles, John Seeman had been called in to co-direct this big banquet scene with Ken. Arthur King, the writer and producer from Excalibur Films, was also on the set. He was calling some shots too. Three directors on the set was a recipe for chaos, but for my one day’s work, I wasn’t all that concerned.
In this new era of low-budget video and cheaper films, King was definitely putting some bigger bucks into this feature. Ten Little Maidens was huge! When compared to most of the video movies being churned out at that point, it was a Hollywood extravaganza. I was glad to see it happening. King was new on the scene as a producer. I hoped he knew what he was doing. He was making a big film when they just weren’t making big films anymore.
You could have made two or three complete video features for just one day’s worth of what they were paying the guys alone. The sign I’m holding was a shout out to John Leslie, who was working on another movie or else he would have been there with us. It says, “Nuzzo (his real last name), wish you were here.”
They were a spectacular bunch. When the camera wasn’t on me, I took a lot of pictures that day with my own. If I was in the shot, I passed my camera to whoever was nearby and asked them to shoot some for me.
The first half of the day was spent getting everybody into costume and makeup. Just hanging around the set was a lot like being backstage at the X-rated awards. There was good gossip and grab-ass, and a lot of singing. We were having a terrific time.
The banquet scene took place early in the movie. Our story was that a very wealthy eccentric had invited us all to his lavish estate with promises of orgiastic splendor. Our host did not attend the banquet in the great hall of his mansion, but he received us with a prerecorded message.
Earlier in the day, I had won the Alfred Hitchcock soundalike contest and was chosen to do the voiceovers for the host.
Our plot then turned on the fact that our host grievously disapproved of our libertine sexuality and wanton ways and set about to murdering us one by one. At banquet’s end, I would be the first to die.
While everybody was getting ready, I asked Lisa De Leeuw if she’d heard anything about a chicken leg and her vagina. She told me that she had not heard anything about a chicken leg and her vagina and that she did not want to hear anything about a chicken leg and her vagina either.
When John Seeman found me wandering around in the gang, he quietly asked if I had a preference for any of the women.
I had gotten close to Janey during an episode of Playboy’s Electric Blue. We shot a scene where I pretended to get my penis stuck in my zipper. Janey had been on her knees in front of me for an hour pretending to help me to get it unstuck. We never touched. It had been an inelegant torture to be so close and yet so far away from all of the obvious.
She had the classic hourglass shape of big hips, large breasts, and a narrow waist. She was like the 1940s film star Jane Russell without the sneer. Janey Robbins was shy and sweet with a tattoo, which was still fairly rare on a woman in those days. She was a very interesting collection of contradictions. I very much wanted to spend a little time visiting in her cage.
They began filming us eating and improvising small talk about our very mysterious host. We were all wearing odd, torn pieces of costume with various organs exposed.
Along with Nina Hartley as his wife, both Jamie and Nina cooked and served us the meal.
In the kitchen before dinner, there is a scene of Jamie feverishly fucking a raw chicken as he kisses and tongues Ms. Hartley’s legendary bottom.
Later, after the meal has begun, Ginger Lynn requests “creamy Italian” dressing on the salad order she places with Jamie. Out of sight of the guests, we see Jamie in the kitchen masturbating and spraying his orgasm all over her salad. “Let’s see if the bitch likes ‘creamy Polish,’” he grumbles to himself.
Both Ginger Lynn and Harry Reems positively adore their salads, declaring the dressing to be “delicious!”
‘Ere long, as the meal progressed, we had the gradual transformation of the appetites.
All around the table, couples were fondling each other amidst the splendor of the great meal.
On the other side of the table, I lay down in my chair and placed my head in Janey’s lap.
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bsp; Janey had her voluptuous breasts dangling free and fed them one at a time to my waiting mouth. I closed my eyes and delighted in the tender mercy.
I soon felt a tongue and then a mouth upon my cock. I looked down and saw the cute, little Ginger Lynn smiling back at me with her mouth full. I had just met Ginger that day. How nice! She was just saying hello. I waved to her.
As the sex all around the table heated up, Jamie Gillis, the Mad Satyr himself, was about to hijack this whole scene and take it into another galaxy. It was about to become a classic for the Ages.
It began when Jamie brought in an entire roast suckling pig, complete with the apple in its mouth. He soon bent Amber Lynn over the banquet table and placed the entire roast suckling pig upon her back.
Then, he began alternately fucking Amber and the pig. Jamie. Jamie-Jamie-Jamie. There wasn’t another actor of this generation who could have lit such a fire. There was only one Jamie Gillis and he was just getting started.
As he warmed to the task, he tore off huge chunks of pig meat and greasy fat and began smearing it all over Amber’s body.
He was fucking the pig, Amber and stuffing food in her mouth.
We sat around the table in awe. The cameras were rolling. All three directors were silent. Jamie was making it up as he went along. He was on his own.
When he smeared the pig in Amber’s face and hair, there were audible moans and groans at the table. Surely a line had been crossed. Ginger Lynn looked white as a ghost. You had to wonder if they could even use a scene like this in their movie, but nobody was stopping Jamie. He was a runaway locomotive and Amber Lynn was looking like the train wreck.
It was hard to tell who Amber was in all of this. She could have easily stopped the scene at any time and just walked away, but she hung in there. I didn’t know what to think. She had been presented as Jamie’s current girlfriend. Who knows, maybe they did this kind of stuff at home.
