cypher13: Well, if it's confession time, I did too. It was 1974, I was a poor student and the rent was falling due. This was the day and age before videotape, so everything was shot on super 8 millimeter color (silent) film, with accompanying still shots being taken all the time. The films themselves lasted no more than several minutes and we were expected to make four or five a day, though the money shots were re-cycled by being filmed from different angles or up close so you couldn't tell it was the same actress was getting covered with semen.
We shot these films on West 22nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in a converted warehouse. Nice high ceilings, good natural light and all that. Female performers had to report an hour before shooting and remove their clothing (no unsightly elastic marks from the underwear) and I had to report two hours early because I had a strong back and could move the furniture around to set up the scenery and props! It was very cold and impersonal and the only reason things went as well as they did for me is because I was young and could perform. The director had a dirty black mustache with white particles in it (I thought they were cookie crumbs or something like that; it was cocaine and this was at the beginning of the 1970s cocaine craze), he smoked a cheap cigar down to the last disgusting, black, resinous inch as he sat in a director's chair telling us what he wanted us to do. Ah, the silent film loops of those days! At the same time, a photographer would move around taking still pictures, sometimes with a Polaroid because there was a market for these then, too. The still pictures went to magazines; the Polaroids went directly to consumers through mail order and the films went to the mob for distribution in adult bookstore booths from coast to coast.
All together, I had about thirty shootings. This footage was chopped up seven ways from Sunday into scads of different films about French maids, little girls lost, someone coming over to borrow a cup of sugar...it does not take much imagination to get the idea that there was not much imagination going into these. For an afternoon's work I was paid $100 at first and later $175 or $200. The money was always there, in cash at the end of the day. When I think of the other times when I have had to fight for my money, this was a welcome relief. In truth, these people had enough trouble and they made plenty of money, so why have problems with the actors, right? It was illegal then in New York State, but there were several pornographers in that building then (it's the one with the large white wall facing Sixth Avenue) and the police knew about us - so I was told - but looked the other way. And, yes, at that time, they were known to arrest actors, too, but nothing bad ever happened to me.
Am I proud of it? Not especially. Would I say anyone else should do it? Well, the industry has changed a lot with videotape and dvds and the more polished look pornography now has, so I can't say with any certainty how much of the superficial charm of "porno chic" it had then is still there. Probably none. Did it ever catch up with me? Well, I never saw one of my films (nor did I ever meet anyone who claimed they did) but someone at work did have a magazine with some stills of me, younger and thinner, but clearly me. We all had a good laugh, someone photocopied the shots and I autographed them. Every so often it would come up in conversation, but never in a nasty way. I was inwardly pleased they still used my material some fifteen years after its creation.
Later, I lived in a residential hotel near Times Square and I was not especially surprised to find how many of my fellow residents were at one time (or still) involved in pornography.