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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  A virgin no longer in her incipient career as a scriptwriter for erotic films, in 1986 Penny was commissioned to assemble the storyline and dialogue for what became the final Johnny Wadd movie, The Return of Johnny Wadd (1986), in which John Holmes reprised his role as the lusty private dick. Fashioned eight years after Blonde Fire, The Return of Johnny Wadd was released by Penguin Productions and directed by Patty Rhodes-Lincoln. Antine had not penned a story about a hard-boiled detective before, but figured she had nothing to lose. Shot on video, The Return of Johnny Wadd is mildly reminiscent of the earlier Johnny Wadd movies that made Holmes a household name, but Penny’s dialogue is slick and snappy, and Holmes, Kimberly Carson, Sheri St. Clair, Mai Lin, Melissa Melendez, Bunny Bleu, Buck Adams, Billy Dee, Dick Howard and Nick Random all rose to the occasion.

  By that time, I was cranking out maybe three scripts a month and it was just another script. Actually, the first movie I saw of John’s was Insatiable (1980) with Marilyn Chambers and I was impressed with a couple things. One was the scene where he kind of very manly picks Marilyn up and moves her down. That scene really got me. I thought, “Wow”! He’s so masculine. He’s so male in that scene. That movie really impressed me. I thought that was very good. The other thing that impressed me was the size of his dick.

  I watched a number of the Johnny Wadd movies in order to get a hit on his character. I watched that genre of film in regular movies because that’s not my forte. I just sat there and I wrote it. I figured it out. They told me how many sex scenes it would contain — they always do. What combinations they wanted. Sometimes they’d tell me the actors they’re going to use in different roles and I can write for those people because I know of them. It never seemed to me to be a big deal. It only became a big deal after John died when it was the last Johnny Wadd movie ever made. As far as I was concerned, at that time, there’d be ten more.

  When I started, video had just moved into the home. People were buying VCRs and renting or buying videos and adult film companies were springing up like Vivid, and Wicked, and others. VCX and VCA were among the old warhorses. Some had been around since the 1970s when porn hit the big screen. There was a great influx of people from mainstream. Granted, Ron Sullivan had started years before, but he came from legitimate theatre. I think the last thing Bruce Seven had worked on as a Hollywood artist was Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). He was the one who figured out how to get the bullets out of the gun, smash into the person’s head, and blow his brains out. He was a special effects artist who had always loved porn. Because he had developed lung disease, he found he could not keep up the pace of working for the mainstream studios so he came over to the porn world. Paul Thomas came from the legitimate stage. A lot of people did, and so did I, so there was a great energy alive at that time. It was electric. It was palpable because we all wanted to make good porn, good movies with sex.

  Featured in previous chapters, Paul Thomas or “PT” as he is more commonly known today became a leading man in adult movies after jump-starting his career in sex films in 1974. A trained actor, Paul Thomas is remembered for portraying the Apostle Peter in the 1973 film Jesus Christ Superstar. Thomas was also a member of the original cast for the production of Hair. For the past few years, PT has been actively involved in the industry as a freelance director after having worked with Vivid as a mainstay for two decades. Thomas mentored under Ron Sullivan, and according to Antine, is now one of the wealthiest people in the adult entertainment business.

  Penny recalled how impressed she was by PT’s “astounding range of talent” when she first met him in the mid-eighties on the set of I Dream of Ginger (1985) where he played the male lead. When she asked him why he wasn’t working in Hollywood, Thomas replied, “I’ve already done that. Out there I’m just another handsome, talented, brilliant performer…” Then, with a grin, “In here, I’m a star.”

  In the very beginning, we had some good actors but there were also a lot of kids in the business who couldn’t act. It was just like a little repertoire company. It was very small. There were not novices with a camera who thought they could direct. We had real directors who had actually studied the art. When you look at the quality of some of the people who we had in those days — there was Jamie Gillis who was a fabulous actor. Rick Savage was a wonderful actor. You had Sharon Kane, and you had Sharon Mitchell. I was able to write wonderful stuff for Sharon Mitchell, for Sharon Kane, for Rick Savage, and for Jerry Butler. It was a great bunch of people. They were actors. They all came out of theater.

  John Holmes was smart. He was an intelligent man. He was not stupid. Harry Reems was an intelligent person. He may have gone crazy and gotten religion, but he had intelligence — and Ron Sullivan, and Freddy Lincoln, and Alex deRenzy. You had a wealth of fine talent so it was exciting and it was fun. I always liked Buck Adams a lot. My interactions with Buck were always on the set. Buck had a lot more talent than he thought he had. I did a great photograph of Buck.

  Coupled with creating something new was the fact that we were outlaws which made it an absolutely wonderful and exciting time. Companies were willing to pay so we got paid pretty well. Because it was a small group of people, we worked all the time and the money just started to flow. It was just remarkable and we started making wonderful films, terrific movies. I’m proud of all of that. People say, “Well, it’s just porn!” It’s MY porn. People today still say to me, “Do those movies have a plot?” It was fun being an outlaw. We had to leave the area to shoot our movies because the cops were after us. There were these two cops, Como and Navaro, and they were the ones who were busting everybody. We would go up to Big Bear to shoot and up to Riverside. We’d go to San Francisco. There were many days when I would arrive at the airport and meet the rest of the cast and crew there. We’d also drive up near the San Francisco area where we were shooting. We’d shoot two or three movies at a time and then come back. It was interesting because a lot of the time we shot in the home of one of one of the City Councilmen. His name was Jack, I think. He had this incredible home that had a big area like a studio. I think there was an indoor underground pool in this house. It was an incredible property. We shot there a lot because the laws up there were much looser regarding shooting porn.

  Excluding minor exceptions, for several years the community of San Francisco was welcoming and virtually immune to the regulatory laws that made the production of pornographic movies illegal in the state of California during the 1960s, `70s and `80s until the Freeman ruling in 1988 finally lifted the ban.

  In the beginning, I remember going on shoots with Scotty Fox where they would put us all in a big van and literally blindfold everybody so that no one would be able to tell anybody where they’d been. It was such fun. Who gets to do something like that?

  So Much Beauty

  I was in porn for many years and saw so much beauty. I could not put it into words. It was actually in 1992 that I decided I needed to get some of what I saw on film. That was when I went to school to study photography. It was precipitated a few years before by a scene we were shooting a scene for Ginger and Spice (1986) in a big fancy bathroom in a large home. Ginger Lynn was in the bathroom, naked. She has got this pale, beautiful skin with blue, blue eyes and blonde hair. Her hair was tied up on the top of her head in a little ribbon. She asked for a glass of wine so somebody brought her a glass of wine. I was in there because I was running dialogue with her. She was in a bubble bath with her script in hand, and in comes Barbara Dare who was in the same scene with her. She has this beautiful olive skin and dark hair, in absolute contrast to Ginger. Her hair was also tied up in a little colored ribbon on top of her head. Here, you had these two beautiful girls both naked with gorgeous bodies, and Barbara said, “Ginger, can I get in with you and run lines with you?”

  Ginger said, “Sure”. Somebody brought Barbara a glass of wine and she sat at the other end of the tub. These two young, fabulous women are in a bubble bath with a script in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, their hair tied up
on top of their heads. I looked at that and I said to myself, “I would never be able to find the words to really convey how beautiful this is. I need to go study photography.” That’s what sent me to school.

  I loved Ginger. Ginger was like a kid sister to me. I wrote all of her Vivid movies and I was on all of the sets. I helped her with her dialogue and when she got a column for Club Magazine called “Pillow Talk,” I wrote that column for her. I was “Ginger Lynn” on paper. She’d bring me her fan mail and we’d go through the letters and pick out the ones that were the best for her to answer. I was also writing her monthly fan letter. I think I was the only one in the industry who was invited to her baby shower.

  Due to Penny’s unique situation as a woman who functioned behind the scenes in the sex industry for more than two decades, I was curious to learn if she observed evidence of exploitation of the women or men hired by the studios to facilitate the material written by scriptwriters such as Antine.

  The girls are not exploited. I can’t say one hundred percent because there are some people who will exploit everybody, male and female, even the crew. I’ve seen a clip of a so-called producer/director with his camera in hand, literally shooting a little deaf girl who was crying. He kept forcing her do to more and more. It was a masturbation scene and it was completely hideous. It was shown to me by Savannah Jane who is also a deaf porn actress and she was out to get this guy. I saw that clip maybe a year or so ago when I was interviewing Savannah Jane for my documentary. Those things definitely exist. There are creeps in this business, but I haven’t worked with them. My experience has been different. I have worked with the Paul Thomases, and the Michael Zens, the Bruce Sevens, the Ron Sullivans — directors who have respect for the people they work with.

  In twenty-five years in this business, I personally have never seen a girl or boy forced to do anything. They all sign on of their own volition. They are paid well. Some of these kids are not very well educated and would be working at McDonalds. Some of them shouldn’t be in the business. I’ve seen girls who feel so guilt-ridden about it. I always would say to them, “You don’t belong here. Go do something else. It’s too hard for you.” This business is good for some people. It’s not good for others. Those kids don’t usually last very long because they spend their whole time crying and they wind up not being there — guys too. I think, for the most part, the only people who are exploited are the people who put themselves into a position to be exploited. Certain types of women and men have a specific mindset about sex. They understand it’s a job. These people function well.

  People were interesting when I started. They were [also] really screwed up. They were drugged-out or they were this or they were that, or they came in because they had such horrible issues with their parents. Today everybody is pretty much level. They come in with their datebooks and their agents and their lists of the people they will and they won’t work with. They come, they do their job and they leave. A lot of girls come in just to work to make a name in porn so they can go dancing on the road and be a feature, and make a whole lot of money. That whole thing has changed.

  People like Porsche Lynn [who started as a performer in 1986] find their way somehow into the industry, and it becomes the place where they work out their life “stuff”. It is so with many people. Sometimes they stay a long time and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they stay forever and just move into another area of the industry, but unlike any other work place in the world they find their way here into the porn industry because for some reason it’s the best place for them to work out their life issues.

  Porsche not only had that incident as a child [where she witnessed her father shoot and kill her mother before turning the gun on himself], but she was abused by all sorts of people after that. How does a child survive this kind of treatment? Porsche has this incredible spirituality which she found in her search while working and living in the porn world. I believe she’s a prime example of someone who came in here to work out her life “stuff”. I think Sharon Mitchell is another. She had a bad drug problem for a number of years. Look where Mitch went with her life. It’s remarkable. That’s often a part of it. We tend to fall down before we come up.

  In 1986 Penny wrote the script for the overlooked video production Innocent Taboo (directed by Scotty Fox) starring Eric Edwards and Porsche Lynn as part of an ensemble of actors showcased in several scenes. The storyline exposed a different twist on the term “familial ties” as two sibling brothers marry sisters and the newlyweds rediscover the meaning of family unity after sampling a new love potion. The film’s amusingly ironic tagline, “Being bad has never felt so good!” could also serve as a mantra for members of the Adult culture.

  Porsche Lynn gained far more than bargained for on the plus side when she decided to become an erotic film performer. Unfortunately, external factors can cause one to lose footing. Lynn’s former colleague and handsome cast mate, Eric Edwards, a graduate of New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts with over five hundred films under his belt, has spent much of his post-porn years as a single parent battling alcoholism and more recently, cancer. Penny had an opportunity to see Edwards recently while attending John Leslie’s memorial and said he looked happier and healthier than he had in ages.

  People aren’t as much fun anymore because they’re too sane today. They’re not emotional messes, most of them. Part of the attraction of working in the industry is the fact that it is an outlaw industry. It’s a taboo industry. Sex in this country is so fascinating because it’s still taboo except everybody wants it. Today, all the kids are dressing like the BDSM community or porn stars.

  Penny’s observation about today’s breed of porn performer appears to be precise, that they adopt a clinical approach to their work and are seemingly able to emotionally detach in order to be effective on camera. Penny drew from her own observations as a woman in a man’s land when asked about the pitfalls of the business with respect to females who are not necessarily grounded or strong.

  I believe most of the women who are running companies and directing porn are feminists. I’m not sure about all of the girls who work in front of the camera. I don’t believe all of them have come in with a feminist attitude. They come in sometimes more out of desperation.

  There was a little girl years ago when I was working with Scotty — I say “little” girl because I was at least twenty years older than she was but she was certainly of age. She was married and had a baby and her husband did not know that she did this work. She was doing it because her husband was having trouble keeping a job and she needed to feed her child. Her husband thought she was modeling. This girl was on a shoot that was busted. The cops dragged her in and she cried and begged them not to tell her husband. They said that if she would name names, they wouldn’t tell her husband. She named the names and the cops went right to her husband and told him. He took the baby and disappeared and she was left absolutely bereft and alone because of these friggin’ cops. Here was a girl who was doing porn to feed her kid and tried to make a better life for her family. That was just a devastating story for me. I think her porn name was “Pam” but I’m not sure. This would have been around 1985.

  There was a group years ago that some of us women were in called “The Pink Ladies”. One of the functions — and Nina Hartley would do this — she would make the girls understand that they didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to do. She would teach them that they had power. She would also teach them that hygiene was necessary. Unfortunately, that group didn’t last. Everybody just kind of grew up and went on, but it was certainly worthwhile.

  It is presumed that (perhaps in another universe for the purposes of discretion) most males would jump at the opportunity to indulge in lascivious experiences with some of the sexiest women in adult movies if given half a chance. Jokes have abounded for years about male porn stars “having it easy” and how they are the envy of the have-nots. In reality, performing on cue is not as easy as one might think. The niche group of men that ha
d long lasting careers during the “old school” porn era is considered by their peers to be athletes in their field. They definitely had their “mojo” working without the benefit of enhancements.

  In the past, before Viagra, the guys would be so terrified. They would come in and they wouldn’t be able to get a hard-on. They couldn’t perform and they’d be so humiliated, you’d never see them again. It’s not for everybody. It becomes a mechanical thing with the men. It’s mental. Again, there were those who could do it. [Canadian born] Peter North [aka Alden Brown] could do it every time, and he’d shoot fifteen feet high into the air. You’d have thirty people standing around applauding him.

  I remember being up on a shoot in Big Bear. I think it was with Peter North and Tommy Byron. They were on the couch discussing how they were able to get it up every time. It is a process. There were those who were brilliant at it, they were like athletes. They were able to focus their energy, and they knew how to do this and they were magnificent. There were others, who were hit or miss. Then, of course, Viagra fixed it for just about everybody.

  The Artist doesn’t see things as they are, but as she is.