I admitted this in a previous incarnation of this website, so I guess there's no harm in admitting it again....
I appeared in many pornographic films in the mid seventies. Don't ask me how many, I can't say how many or which ones as the footage was invariably cut seven ways from Sunday, reassembled, and distributed to porno shops up and down the east coast where you would drop a quarter in a slot, the rhythmic clicking would start and you would get a minute or so of projected "entertainment."
I answered an ad in a long-defunct New York "underground" newspaper, lookingfor "performers." I called and the man answering the phone asked some pointed anatomical type questions. Well, I had seen Deep Throat, and I compared more than favorably with anyone in that, and so I told him. He told me to drop by that afternoon. I did, he inspected the merchandise and I was hired on the spot.
It wasn't nearly as glamorous as the fantasy indicates, but it wasn't as arduous or torturous as pornography's detractors want everyone to believe, either. The film was shot in a converted warehouse on West 22nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan, the scenery was a printed backdrop on the kind of movie screens you had in grade school (that is, when there was scenery) and, as often as not I had to move the prop furniture as well as perform on it. The "director" sat in a canvas director's chair (ironically enough), telling us what he wanted us to do. His unkempt moustache usually contained a white powder (at that time, I was so naive I did not know what it was!
and the snuffed-out cigar he clamped in his mouth was invariably smoked down to the last malodorous, resinous inch. Even so, we would eat together (mainly because if you went out, you would put on your clothes and allowing the elastic marks from underwear to fade take precious minutes from a tight shooting schedule - and this is why women in seventies porn wore all those loose, easily-removed pull overs, that is, when they came on screen dressed) and we joked around. For the most part, I liked these people in their eccentricities. Now, I imagine, it is all industrial, assembly line production, in which everyone looks like everyone else.
These were the days of super 8 millimeter wind-up Bolex cameras, no sync sound and there were three of them, so he could get three times the footage and the money shot from three angles, thereby tripling his investment. It was, however, the days before videotape and, therefore pornography still had some soul - at least insofar as it could have soul. The man who did this also took numerous still shots for promotional material and, as I would later discover, magazines too. He wanted as much footage as he could get and as many money shots as possible. The rest was creative license and, in truth, I rather doubt much of my face appeared in the films themselves. For the record, I really don't know because I never saw one.
It was $150 to $200 a day in the mid seventies, which was damned good money then, especially for what I regarded as pleasurable activity. I have worked in print ads, commercials and performed numerous other forms of media whoredom...and most of the time I had to fight for my money. In those days, in pornography, the money was always there, in cash, in an envelope at the end of the day. He would always ask if I was available for work again. I generally was.
It was invariably the same "starlets," a dozen "older" women, all of whom taught this boy a thing or six about life and the mechanics of sex. How inexperienced was I? Well, put it this way, the first time I kissed a woman on screen, my biggest fear at that moment was that I would miss her lips...please don't ask me to explain beyond that. Chalk it up to the exuberant infelicities of youth. At least I was young enough to almost immediately do the shot again when I messed up the very first one I did - by not withdrawing.
In picking up my money, he made me sign two things: a receipt and a form which effectively assigned all my rights to everything, in perpetuity, to some dummy corporation in Brooklyn that was, no doubt, run by the mob.
Some years later, let's say close to fifteen, someone comes up to me in the office where I am working and says "This is you!" I look at it. It is me. I try denying it, but he can tell from my legs, of all things. I do not think he had ever seen other parts of me, at least not in the flesh, and it was definitely a younger me. The magazine seemed to be of recent vintage...so, these things were still popping up as late as 1990. Ultimately, I had to accept it with good humor. Before lunchtime, it seemed like everyone had a Xerox copy of at least one of the pictures and was asking for an autograph on it, which I cheerfully gave them. Being admired for something silly in the past is far, far better than being criticized for something serious in the present. I would like to think there is some logic in that sentence.
What does this mean? Well, I have no regrets. Sure, I'll never be able to run for Congress, but that variety of pornography is far too intense even for me. It was, on the whole, profitable, kinda fun in an edgy way and, like I said, I learnt a great deal about life and all aspects of human nature, especially sexuality.
