GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  One of the girls, [porn actor] Danielle, thought she was so cute that she believed she’d be famous. She was a little girl that I took in for a while after Armand died and she eventually ended up living with Gloria [Leonard] and Bobby Hollander. I talked to her extensively about what she was thinking and I’ve talked extensively to Rhonda [Jo Petty] as well. I know that girls came in believing that they were something special because guys would tell them how special they were and they were too naïve or confused to recognize the truth about that. When you take advantage of a person who is confused, then you are exploiting them. That’s like me telling a mentally challenged person, “Let’s go rob a bank.” How would they know? “You’re going to be famous on TV with a gun in your hand, let’s do it.” I mean, how did Patty Hearst end up with a gun? She was a hostage who ended up in an environment where weapons were being used and all of that was going on. It’s kind of the same thing.

  When I was working for Freeway, I’d get on an airplane to go somewhere and someone would ask me what I did. I’m a very talkative person, and I would end up telling them and I can’t tell you how many times I’d be embarrassed. Some people would really want to hear this stuff, but there were other people that just looked at me like “What the hell are you doing?” It was embarrassing to me because I was kind of raised with the message that you don’t get into movies. You don’t do anything like that. I had really no discretion about the people I spoke to and no censorship of my own which is typical with me, so I’d tell them my life story. There were people there who would go, “What? Why would you do such a thing?”

  I’m wondering, do these women never travel and run into people who know? How do they deal with that? Do they pretend it doesn’t exist when half the world disagrees with what they do? I couldn’t handle that. There’s a difference between how I think and how a lot of other people feel about it. Even back then, you knew this was something that was not a vehicle to real stardom. I mean, come on, everyone knew that. I guess some people just thought, “Oh well, I can just do this instead of real stardom.” Personally, I never wanted to give up the idea that I’d be rich and famous or whatever, in legitimate terms.

  Exhausted: John C. Holmes, The Real Story

  Armand Atamian was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 1979 and died six months later. Julia had grown very close to her uncle, and suddenly, while still grieving over his death she found herself in the position of conceptualizing a way to sustain the company’s success. St. Vincent found she was able to kill two birds by devising an idea for an inventive film project.

  Originally, the reason I made Exhausted is because my uncle had died and I was really floundering around trying to figure out what to do. I was going to the producer meetings and hanging out with some very ambitious people. One day it hit me, “You can’t call yourself a producer if you don’t ever produce anything.” I hired a management consultant to help us to figure out what to do with the company, and we all kind of brainstormed the idea and tried to determine what we had for assets in the company. It turned out that what we had the most of was Johnny Wadd [footage]. That turned into, “Well, we should make a film.” That really incubated for a long time. We didn’t immediately make a film. I started shooting these interviews with John mainly because I realized he was going to die one day soon. As far as the process goes, originally, it was shot on sixteen-millimeter film with this camera guy Kenny Gibb. I paid him to shoot interviews with me and with John in the back of this studio. That’s why the original footage looks so bad besides the fact that John looked terrible. It was the original footage shot.

  The original interview footage for Exhausted filmed in December 1980 shows Holmes looking rough and fidgety. As the star chain-smoked while positioned between two potted plants, St. Vincent posed several questions. Because of his relatively accelerated decent into the usage of freebase, Holmes was unable to remain focused and instead, laughed and danced around her queries. At one point, he turned to camera operator Kenny Gibb requesting a time-out. The twenty-minute raw footage did not appear in the 1981 release of the film, but it was introduced as one of the extra bonus features when the documentary was re-released on DVD in 2001, twenty years after its making. Julia expounded upon the reasons why she believed it was advantageous to produce the picture.

  The film was really a way to give John a thousand dollars and to give me something to do. In the back of my mind, I realized that a bunch of situations would be involved: John would realize he’s not a bad guy and he would get out of the dumps. In the case he died I would have that footage of him and I’d become rich, but there were lot of little things going on and that was how it was shot. Then it was put in the can until the next year, at least four or five months. We started editing in some of these other movies [Johnny Wadd clips] to it but we really didn’t have enough to do anything with it. I had hired a few people to help me and one of these guys said, “Let’s go and shoot some more footage”. We ended up going to Chicago and we did “man on the street” interviews there because we had already done them in Hollywood. We got more out in the open with regular people footage. We also interviewed Seka in Chicago. Then we came back and edited all of that together.

  Cowgirl on the Forefront

  In addition to the Holmes interview segments, Seka is the only other adult film star interviewed for Exhausted. At the time of production, Seka and Holmes had worked together in many feature films and Swedish Erotica loops, establishing a believable rapport as porn royalty. One of their most celebrated outings is the final Johnny Wadd film Blonde Fire (1978) produced by Freeway Films and adapted into Exhausted. When she was interviewed for this book, Seka spoke about St. Vincent’s adept capabilities as a filmmaker.

  I was put up at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago when I was invited to do the interview for Exhausted. Julia was very thorough and professional. She knew what she was talking about and she had obviously done her homework. I found that to be an interesting little tidbit at the time because often many people would interview you and they had no clue what they were doing. Especially in the eighties — she was doing something that men didn’t even have the balls to do. She was definitely one of the cowgirls on the forefront.

  As the first director and female to produce a feature motion picture about an erotic film legend, Julia made a distinction between her documentary and contemporary biographical films. She addressed how an effort such as Exhausted was atypical of movies being made during that time frame.

  It is different making a real film than it is to do what I did because essentially Exhausted is a compilation of films. I already had the material. I could do it at home now the way people do with YouTube. You get films and stick them together and then you need supplemental footage of people talking or something else happening in order to make it work. In 1981, there were no documentaries in the adult genre. I don’t think any documentaries were made in this fashion at all. You could say it’s more similar to Reality TV today or whatever. There was nothing else done like these “man on the street” interviews. It was partly due to the fact that I didn’t have any money that I had to do it that way. I did it on a sixteen-millimeter print and then it was sent it into the lab and they created the whole thing. It was kind of fun, actually.

  While in the midst of writing narrative, conducting interviews, directing, producing and editing the picture, St. Vincent added a personal touch when she wrote and recorded the film’s title song “Running out of Love.” The following is a sampling of the song’s lyrics illuminating Julia’s professional and private analysis of her film’s subject:

  “The words of many seem to whisper with the wind.

  The eyes of many gleam when he walks in,

  He is the man of love; he is the sigh,

  He is the mystery; he is the lie.

  Ten thousand held him close, but he was free.

  He is the mystery; he is the sigh.

  He is the man of love. He is the lie.”

  When you’re making a movie, y
ou get to do anything you want. You get to be the singer and the song-writer. There’s no one around to say you can’t do it. At one point, I tried to sell that song to radio stations but nobody bought it. I don’t think I really tried very hard though, I just sent a couple out to see what would happen. I should add that when we looked at the footage we decided that we needed another interview with John.

  We dressed him up and we put him in there, and we did the last shoot at Laurel Canyon. That’s when he was a freaking mess. I took him down to Ludwig’s [a high-end Men’s boutique in Los Angeles], and got him a nice suit and fixed him all up. Originally, I had really wanted him to look the way he does in the outside interview footage, but I couldn’t figure out how to get what I saw in my head on film. At first, there was sort of a disconnection between the idea of how to get someone to look good on film and actually executing it. I suddenly realized, “Oh, you’ve got to put him in nice clothes and surround him with a lavish set.” I was relatively young so I didn’t really recognize at the time that was the issue.

  The film was shot incrementally, but at that point, when the outside footage was shot, John was almost a total mess. It was a miracle that I got anything out of that; it really was kind of a fluke that it came out as well as it did because you’re dealing with a drug addict who is rambling. At the same time, I suppose for a film it’s a good thing when somebody’s rambling because now you’ve got footage. Shortly after we finished shooting, John was wanted [by the L.A.P.D. in connection to the July 1, 1981 multiple murders in Laurel Canyon] and then the film still sat around for quite a while until somebody said to me, “You better hurry up because I heard that someone else is doing it.” I thought to myself, “seriously?” That put a fire under my ass. I could have gone on indefinitely never putting that movie out. The reason that Exhausted sat in the can for a while is because I had to keep rekindling an interest in it. It turned out that no one was actually doing a documentary on John, but another producer had told me it was happening. When they said it I flipped out and went, “Oh, my god,” so I started working my ass off to try to get it out and that coincided with John being arrested. I broke that film in October. I can’t remember the exact date but John was arrested in December of 1981.

  St. Vincent ended her relationship with Holmes prior to his Wonderland escapades in the summer of 1981. While Holmes was on the run from the law Exhausted opened in New York City. The release of the film coinciding with Holmes’s disappearance triggered a wave of publicity that couldn’t have been strategically planned. By the time Exhausted reached The Pussycat Theatre in Los Angeles, it was both a critical and profitable success.

  October is when it was first released in New York City. We went to do a screening there and I’m confident that my partner called the cops. He started handing me money and said, “Call the papers right now.”

  I said, “What do I say to them?”

  He said, “Tell them you’re at a screening and they’re busting your film.” I started dialing the New York Post and everybody had this story the next fucking day. We were making phone calls and the cops were on their way while we were dialing. Then the cops would arrive and we’d get in an elevator — jump out, then jump in — because they were undercover. They followed us all the way back to our hotel room and then we got on the phone with The New York Times. I said, “Do you guys want an exclusive on this?”

  They said, “Yeah”. They asked, “Who has it?”

  I said, “Just, The Post,” so he said, “Yeah, we’ll take it.” I knew the people at The [New York] Times because they’d already interviewed me before when John had disappeared. From there, the guy in New York booked it at the [New York] theater. Thank god, because this was my last dollar. At this point, I had borrowed fifteen-thousand dollars from my mom. Back then, that was a huge amount of money. I had already put ten thousand dollars into the film and I had borrowed about forty thousand dollars on credit for the prints. I was nerve-wracked wondering if anybody would buy the film, and then New York said, “we’ll take it’. They ended up running it for six weeks and holding it over. The next quest was whether the Pussycat Theatres would take it. They ended up pulling down Deep Throat (1972) to take it. That’s when I realized, “Okay, you’re going to be alright.” Deep Throat had been running almost ten years and they were trying to figure out how to take it down because it was losing money. They couldn’t come up with a film to replace Deep Throat and then they put Exhausted there and put up the bright lights waving in the night. We had a big old party up there with the L.A. Times and the TV networks came and it was kind of fun. When The L.A. Times and others came they weren’t there to cover it, they came because I knew them. By now, we were friends. It was a private party. That night I was the Debutante of Porn, yeah.

  Exhausted: John C. Holmes: The Real Story contains a series of hardcore footages extracted primarily from the Johnny Wadd movies directed by Bob Chinn and produced by Freeway Films during the years 1975-1978. With a tagline that boasts: “14,000 Women knew him intimately!” what makes Exhausted a truly innovative venture is the rare interview segments with Holmes filmed between 1980 and 1981. Captured in an array of moods from provocative to pensive to playful, the dialogue portion is reinforced with candid and funny comments provided by random people on the street who supply opinions about the controversial and well-endowed porn legend. St. Vincent also shot Bob Chinn directing staged scenes from an unfinished Johnny Wadd script, Waikiki Wadd, depicting Holmes as the charming private dick chatting up Laurie Smith and Laura Toledo. Later, he makes simulated love to the two girls in a hammock. Ominously, the date on the clapboard for the exterior interview footage reads June 25, 1981, only four days prior to the robbery of L.A. nightclub owner Ed Nash resulting in four deaths at 8763 Wonderland Avenue. Thirty years later, very few documentaries have been produced about X-rated film legends. Exhausted is the first of its generation.

  The 2001 DVD re-release of Exhausted is accompanied by special features: Julia’s Diary, Cast Bios, and St. Vincent’s own engaging commentary presented in an upbeat and humorous tone. Julia is joined by her old friend and contemporary Bob Chinn, along with Gloria Leonard for a retrospective on Holmes and the golden age of adult filmmaking.

  The Legacy of Exhausted

  It was an unlikely scenario. When I made Exhausted, people said it was just a fluke and in a way, it was just a fluke. It really was a case of being in the right place at the right time to make a film. I had nothing else going on and there was nothing stopping me. I had to figure out how to survive the world I lived in. It was kind of incredible that it went as far as it did, and I was able to accomplish that with literally nothing. That film grossed over a million dollars in 1982.

  At the time, it had the biggest video contract ever done. It played outside of the pornographic film world. It went into Georgetown University and other regular theatres. It was a hardcore movie! When Boogie Nights came out [in 1997], that was the second fluke of the whole thing. Why would you think after sixteen years something as obscure as that film would come back into anyone’s consciousness? Most people would put it away as I did and think, “Okay, that was fun and maybe someday you’ll do something else with it.” That was just something in my closet. How do I view it in the bigger perspective? I don’t really think this was up to me at all. It was just a weird set of circumstances.

  Weird set of circumstances or not, Exhausted proved to have staying power. While still enrolled in high school, award-winning director Paul Thomas Anderson created a thirty-minute documentary shot on video, The Dirk Diggler Story (1988) about a promising 1970s porn star modeled after John Holmes. Almost ten years later in 1997, St. Vincent’s documentary became the impetus for Anderson’s feature film Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights’ two lead characters, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) are eerily reminiscent of Holmes and St. Vincent as their professional and personal relationships intersect when Waves creates a documentary about Diggler. In the film, Waves interviews Diggl
er and his director Jack Horner (played by Burt Reynolds) in a scene precisely duplicated in dialogue and set design from the Holmes/Chinn interior interview segment in Exhausted. Anderson also copied famous scenes excerpted from two select films of the Johnny Wadd series: The Jade Pussycat and China Cat, and even paid tribute to St. Vincent by naming the Melora Walters’ character Jessie “St. Vincent” an amalgamation of her surname and golden era porn actor Jesie St. James. Anderson endeavored for the authenticity angle when he hired adult film actors Veronica Hart and Nina Hartley to embody key players in the Hollywood account of the pornographic film industry during the 1970s at the peak of the golden age. The cover image for the Boogie Nights’ special DVD edition strongly resembles the original artwork for Exhausted.

  When I found out about Boogie Nights, I was sitting in the country on a ranch and I had no idea what was going on outside my door. Cass [Paley, director of the acclaimed documentary Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes, 1998] called me and I didn’t even really know who he was. I forget how he even found me. I guess my friend Lee knew him and he got me.

  If I played any role in any of this — and this is just the theme of my personal belief — but if you really set out to do a good deed and I earnestly was trying to do that even though it may have been a little misguided, but because of the good deed, years later Exhausted is remembered. Even though I’m certain there are fundamentalists who will say that’s a lie. You take lemons and you make lemonade. I earnestly believed that all I had were lemons and I had to fix it somehow. At the time I was trying to make another human being believe that he was better than he was, and plus, I had to survive. Honestly, and I’m not trying to say this is true — but I think I formed who John is to this day. He is perceived a nice guy because people have seen that film. He really wasn’t that nice. I created a monster. I was trying not to fail and I was trying to help someone see himself differently. I mean, that really was what motivated me behind everything else. I’m not particularly motivated by the idea of making a million dollars. I do say that — that I’d like to make millions, but that’s not what I was trying to do. That’s kind of where I think I probably differ from people who are in the porn business and that’s really why I’m not in the business anymore because it’s all about the money. To me, it was more about cause than it was about the money. It’s difficult to get through something if you are just doing it for money. If my uncle had been in some other business than I would have done the same thing somewhere else in a different genre, but unfortunately, I didn’t have any uncles that were regular producers!