On the set, the difference between role-play and on-camera work was emphasized: there were no set lines of dialogue, and improvisation from scene to scene was not only encouraged but also essential. If stopped by a soldier, an actor could submit to arrest, or flee, or fight.
“You were allowed to get into it with the marines,” Albaba said. “I was young and felt strong. I had martial arts and wrestling in my background. So when they said I could play, I really did play. I mean, I tossed some marines on their asses. You would hear superiors getting pissed off at the soldiers.”
It was role-play, Albaba said, but he added soberly, “I really am Arab, and they really are soldiers.” He heard epithets like towelhead, haji, and sand nigger thrown around. “I was reminded of high school, and those same seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who have that view—and here they are now, going to war. It was scary to me. I knew that once they got to Iraq, they weren’t going to treat the people with respect.”
The premise of the scenario in question was that a knife had been discovered in one of the village “units.” It could have been a bunker, or it could have been a house. The villagers/insurgents were either to submit to arrest and further searches or resist. Albaba found himself with a short file of marines coming at him. He could have easily raised his hands and surrendered. But he grabbed the first soldier by the pack straps and threw him to the ground. The man didn’t pop to his feet as Albaba expected he might and Albaba realized the military gear the soldier wore was too heavy. So Albaba used the same technique on two following men, but now the first was up, which caught his attention, just long enough for a fourth soldier to strike Albaba with a rifle butt in the back of the head. The actor went down, but would not admit that he was out.
“These were trained marines; if I took down a few of them, it definitely felt like some sort of victory,” he said. “But it was getting to the point where it was starting to hurt. They had full gear. I just stopped. It wasn’t worth it.”
Albaba stepped away from role-play but continued to cycle back to Stu Segall Productions for various gigs. He wanted to emphasize that as the “Shock and Awe” portion of the Iraq conflict evolved into the “Hearts and Minds” phase, the demeanor and professionalism of the troops improved, as did the sets. The bikes, for various reasons, seemed instrumental in creating that common ground. People on bikes, pedaling to market, are the same everywhere.
Albaba and I talked at length about his life and work before I got around to a question that had been needling me. “Why the company resistance to my interest in used bicycles?” I asked. “Is there some national security concern?”
“Well, kind of,” he said. “They bought those bikes under the table. There’s no paperwork. They didn’t even know where they came from. They could be hot, probably are. And then, the studio is selling those bikes to the United States government.”
In fact, they were selling them with an impressive margin. Tynan kept his best finds and sold the serviceable ones at the swap meet for twenty bucks apiece, which was still a fantastic deal for a reliable set of wheels. But then, through his connection with Kiser, he sold third-rate bikes in bulk to the studio. Segall Productions sold each of these as set dressing to various branches of the military. They were Tynan’s worst bikes. And Albaba was right: they had most likely been stolen at some point. But that was not their exact status when Tynan raked them out of fields and trenches. The only crime was abandonment and existing without papers. It struck me that, with shocking speed, the border bikes had been transformed from America’s stolen goods and joyrides into pennies-on-the-pound police auction fodder, then transnational contraband, then swamp trash, then something akin to the infamous $640 government-contracted toilet seats—all with little to no change in their actual appearance or operational mechanics. I realized the price of a bike has nothing to do with its ride, purpose, technology, or age. It has to do with to whom, where, and under what circumstances it is sold. It has to do with hearts and minds.
Stu Segall was well known for refusing interviews and shunning publicity. His stance may have been due to the proprietary nature of his business, or even legal troubles and controversies drummed up on the lot. But his past was almost certainly a factor. It had been described as “spicy” by the local press. Employees used the words “shadowy” and “dark.” Just about every production shooting south of Los Angeles ran a portion of its business out of the Segall lot, for logistical reasons. It possessed all of the necessary equipment, as well as links to local talent and the trades. Further, the San Diego market wasn’t big enough to go after, so there was little fear of competition from LA’s major players. In effect, Segall Productions was the only consistent movie gig in town—and from what I’d gathered, the boss ran it that way. The lack of competition was felt primarily by the workers. They got experience on his lot, but they also got suppressed wages and no job security. In exchange, their loyalty was demanded. For good reason, few with ties to the studio talked out of turn. Yet each knew some piece of Segall’s personal story.
Born just after Christmas in 1944, Segall hailed from the small seaside town Swampscott, Massachusetts. Before graduating from high school in the early ’60s, he split for Los Angeles, where he enrolled in community college and took odd jobs. The transition from small-town New England to the booming liberal metropolis must have been an exhilarating one. Segall drove a forklift, among other gigs. But his most pivotal engagement during this period was a three-year stint working as a private detective. The job was an education; it seemed to give the young transplant confidence, and further, it turned out to be a chip shot into the movie business. As Segall told Bryan Senn, the author of The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film, “I used to be a private investigator. And I ran into a guy through a mutual female friend who was a makeup artist in tittie movies, the T&A business. He was fascinated by me being an investigator, and I was fascinated by what he did.”
What the guy, Ray Sebastian, did was put makeup on naked people who were preparing to have or simulate sex. Sebastian soon invited Segall to act as his assistant makeup artist on a production featuring a number of well-endowed women, and now it was Segall’s turn to enhance their body parts. “You know, you have them lined up on tables, and you just went down this line and you put makeup on these girls.”
According to Senn, Segall continued taking gigs as a makeup artist but he also filled other film set positions like “grip” and “generally doing whatever needed doing on a low budget movie set.” A book titled History of X: 100 Years of Sex on Film claimed that Segall got his start “as a porn actor working for Ted Paramore,” aka Harold Lime, a writer and producer whom Segall worked with in other capacities. Whatever the route to his decision, Segall told Senn that he took a figurative look around and concluded, I think I can do this. And on borrowed funds, Segall made his own movie in 1969. With that title, Harvey, Segall took up the director’s chair just in time to meet what critics now consider the Golden Age of Porn.
In a hint at what was to come, the dawn of the 1970s saw a couple of productions that featured explicit sex and also received widespread release. But in 1972, when Deep Throat premiered at New York’s New World Theater, the film was met by cultural forces that vaulted it into a phenomenon. Tagged as “porno chic,” it was at once conflated with sexual liberation and the target of obscenity trials, the coverage of which only heightened its notoriety. Forty-eight weeks after release, Deep Throat still ranked in the top ten of box-office revenues. Then, in 1973, the United States Supreme Court narrowed its definition of obscenity from “utterly without socially redeeming value,” to the current standard delivered in Miller v. California: that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” With increased production values, plots, and even character development, the creators of pornographic films could now argue that their products included artistic merit. Suddenly, the nation’s thicket of local and national anti-obscenity laws and prohibitions was cut back, whi
ch greatly expanded the genre’s potential audience. This led to bigger budgets and more creative license. The movies were now shot on 35 mm film, were shown in sit-down theaters, and every major city included a boulevard that crammed a string of such theaters into a marquee-studded parade.
Under the nome d’arte Godfrey Daniels, Segall followed his first effort with the sequel Harvey Swings. And using the aliases P. C. O’Kake, Ms. Ricki Krelmn, and Arthur Byrd, among others, Segall made fourteen full-length sex films over the decade, sometimes two and three a year. They had names like Spirit of Seventy Sex (“a costume piece with wardrobe mostly from the Garden of Eden,” reads the description on IMDb) and Teeny Buns (“three girlfriends discover that they can make money the old-fashioned way”). Segall directed some of the biggest names in the business, and garnered awards. And in a nod to his ambitions outside pornography, he produced and directed 1977’s Drive-In Massacre, in which a serial killer slaughters patrons of a rural California drive-in with a sword.
That same summer, the US Department of Justice released a report on the intertwined relationship between organized crime and the pornography business. It fingered Stu Segall Associates, with offices in New York and Hollywood, as a business affiliate of Bonanno crime family capo Michael “Mickey” Zaffarano. Not only was Zaffarano president of Stu Segall Asscociates, together Zaffarano and Segall served as directors of a nationwide adult theater chain, Pussycat Theaters. Organized crime had moved into the pornography business very early on. The industry operated in a legal gray area and was conducted mainly in cash, which made it prime territory for money laundering and racketeering. According to the FBI, each of New York’s infamous five families sent emissaries to Los Angeles—some with instructions to corner the market. Intimidation was brought to bear, and at least one theater was firebombed.
Zaffarano was a big guy with a broad face who had once been a bodyguard for family boss Joseph Bonanno. His father was said to have worked for Al Capone in Brooklyn. In the book Donnie Brasco, Joseph D. Pistone, the FBI agent who famously infiltrated the mafia to the extent that he was on the verge of becoming a made man, bragged about having met Mickey Zaffarano through one of that captain’s subordinates. The meeting was a new height in Pistone’s long climb up the chain of command. When Pistone dropped his undercover identity, which resulted in over two hundred indictments of crime family members, those formerly associated with the undercover agent were assassinated.
But this would not be the fate of Stu Segall Associates president Michael Zaffarano. By 1977, mafia members had also expanded into the piracy of mainstream movies. The Justice Department claimed this trend had cost the mainstream industry $700 million in lost revenue. And the Motion Picture Association helped finance a nationwide FBI sting called Miporn, for Miami Pornography, where the investigation into a clandestine web of porn distribution, racketeering, and piracy began. Some of the mainstream movies pirated included Bambi, The Exorcist, Saturday Night Fever, and Jaws. In February of 1980, on Valentine’s Day, four hundred FBI agents fanned across the country to make arrests on the strength of the Miporn investigation. Agents searched the offices of Louis Peraino, financier of Deep Throat, and his brother Joseph C. Peraino—both of whom, according to The New York Times, were associated with New York’s Colombo crime family. At the Peraino offices agents discovered film reproducing equipment and a number of original film reels—including, get this, a copy of The Godfather.
Agents also raided an office located at 1600 Broadway, Manhattan, which a report by Attorney General Edwin Meese claimed to be the New York office of Stu Segall Associates. According to Zaffarano’s former underling, Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, the Bonanno family captain fled the FBI on foot. But the fifty-six-year-old didn’t get far, because he soon collapsed, the victim of a heart attack. Agents found his crumbled figure clutching a reel of porn that Zaffarano had apparently hoped to conceal from authorities. The New York Times reported that Zaffarano died an hour after agents attempted to serve him their warrant.
The loss of his business partner, and the upending of the industry, didn’t seem to slow down Segall. And despite the fact that agents observed wanted mafia associates as guests at Segall’s home in Los Angeles, he avoided entanglement in the Miporn operation. The year Zaffarano died, Segall released Insatiable, featuring Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes, the most successful film of Segall’s career and a modern porn classic. He followed this with a sequel, more movies, and by 1984, in a nod to his founding career as an investigator, Segall joined Stephen J. Cannell Productions to produce the hit TV series Hunter—a police drama centered on cagey, rule-breaking detective Rick Hunter.
Segall’s past almost certainly informed Hunter, and the fictional detective reciprocated by boosting Segall into the mainstream.
In 1991, Godfrey Daniels had graduated from a two-decade career in adult entertainment and escaped Los Angeles by establishing a studio for low-budget cable productions in quiet San Diego. The new venture found success with serial programs such as Silk Stalkings, Renegade, and Pensacola: Wings of Gold. But ten years later, in the wake of 9/11, the studio’s business began to weaken for a combination of reasons.
In a twist of fate, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Diego headquarters just happened to relocate to an office complex within shouting distance of the back lot. One day—the story goes—DEA agents heard automatic gunfire in the neighborhood and soon descended on the studio with guns drawn. Once there, they came face to face with “movie magic”—blank-firing weapons and actors shocked to see the real deal. In a peaceable turnabout, the DEA agents proposed that the studio mock up a training program for them. Trials in what was called the “shoot room” were successful. And with the growing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Segall saw his opportunity. He turned a portion of the lot into a Middle Eastern village replete with foam “insurgents,” minarets, and a dingy, moth-worn look of disorder. Segall’s people consulted their military contacts from dramas such as Pensacola to evaluate the potential for realistic training. The villages, whether intended to replicate Kurd, Persian, or Arab settlements, developed a common nickname, Baby Baghdad, and through government contracts these Baghdads were built at the most important bases in the United States. As set dressing, the studio shipped the swamp bikes around the nation. Soon, Native Americans role-playing as Afghan villagers at a Baby Baghdad in Nevada pedaled the bikes around a set weathered to look like Helmand Province. Christian Iraqi immigrants to the United States found work as Islamic extremists pretending to destabilize their former homelands. Simulation bullets flew. Pyrotechnics blasted. And the line between Hollywood make-believe and real war continually blurred.
Even in make-believe, problems arose. In 2004, eighteen-year-old marine private Jesse Klingler volunteered to play an interrogation victim on a set at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego. According to a Marine Corps investigation, Klingler was blindfolded, bound, and gagged during the exercise. A Lebanese role player employed by Strategic Operations conducted the mock interrogation. He questioned, punched, and kicked Klingler, who was lying prone. The role player also held an AK-47. It was loaded with blanks. Guidelines required guns to be kept some distance from their targets. But maybe things felt too real. At some point, in an apparent act of intimidation, the actor placed the rifle against Klingler’s body parts. Finally, he put the rifle against the soldier’s right thigh and fired. Hot gases shot from the riffle barrel and ripped a hole in Private Klingler’s leg. He rolled onto his side, attempting to evade further harm. The simulation turned nightmarish when the actor, apparently unaware that the gagged soldier was wounded, fired another round into the other leg. The actor then aimed at the soldier’s neck, at which point marine observers intervened. Klingler’s injuries ended his marine career.
According to an employee who managed a portion of the company’s budget, Segall Productions was up to its ears in debt. And, highlighting the downside of military largesse, attempts to hoover up grant money from the Departmen
t of Homeland Security just got weird. Senator Tom Coburn made an example of Stu Segall Productions in his report on the “misguided and wasteful spending” of DHS’s Urban Areas Security Initiative grants. The report cited Segall Productions’ staging of a “zombie apocalypse” tactical demonstration at a posh counterterrorism summit in 2012. The exercise cast forty actors as the gray-faced undead who were hell-bent on capturing an anonymous VIP while authorities fought them off. The demonstration was meant to simulate a “real-life terrorism event” for which DHS paid $1,000 per summit attendee. Brad Barker, president of the security firm the HALO Corporation and the organizer of the summit, told an Associated Press reporter, “This is a very real exercise, this is not some type of big costume party.”
There were plenty of reasons for Segall not to talk to a stranger poking around his swamp bikes, but given the variety of criticism pointed his way, I’m not sure he could pinpoint any particular one.
“It’s embarrassing, really,” said set designer Kim Zirpolo.
Along with designer Bill Anderson, Zirpolo was responsible for the look and feel of the training facilities of various nicknames—from Margoz in Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Little Kabul. By default, she also had her hands deep into procurement, buying everything from window curtains to copies of the Koran. During his stint at Stu Segall Productions, Tarek Ahmad Albaba had become close to Zirpolo. So it was not without reservations that Albaba put me in touch with her concerning the movements of what some at the studio suspected to be hot bicycles. When we first spoke on the phone, I explained my interest in her work and that Kiser had already granted me a tour of the set. As suspicious as she might have been about my motives, she expressed dismay at the thought that my first exposure to her design was the facility on Ruffin Road.
“I wanted to take Baby Baghdad, or Kabul—whatever you call it—to the next level. But Stu . . .”
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