Hollywood—Hawaii—1970 to 1972
John Holmes, Johnny Wadd, and Me
The fictional character Johnny Wadd was created purely by chance one winter day toward the end of 1970.
A tall, skinny fellow named John Curtis Holmes walked into my office looking for a job. At that time I was only a few years out of film school and was working in the only field of the motion picture industry that had opened up to me.
By now these films were super-cheap productions, shot on 16mm film in a single day with a total production budget of $750 each. We had only recently begun to really push the envelope with what we could show in regards to hardcore sex, and we were doing so with the belief that what we were doing was and should be protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This was a moot point, however, because the local authorities were intent on shutting us down one way or another.
I was busy editing the trailer for our latest film that day when John walked in for an interview. We all went into the office and John informed us that he had worked as a gaffer and was looking for a job on our film crew. We didn’t need (and really couldn’t afford) to hire anyone else. Then John hemmed and hawed for a moment before he casually informed us that he was also an actor.
I took one look at this tall, skinny white guy sporting an unruly afro, which gave him a sort of goofy appearance, and really didn’t see a whole lot of potential there. So I went back to the front room to continue editing the trailer that had to be finished before the end of the day while Alain took the application and continued the interview.
A few minutes later, Alain came into the room where I was busy editing and said: “Bob, you’ve got to take a look at this guy’s cock.”
I told him, “Buddy, the last thing on Earth that I want to do is to go into the office and look at some skinny guy’s cock.”
But he was adamant, so I went in to have a look at it. John had pulled his pants back up, and when we entered the office, Alain said, “Show him.”
John lowered his pants to reveal what was undoubtedly the biggest cock I had ever seen in my life. I immediately saw the potential there. I had always wanted to make a movie with a sort of film noir theme, so I thought this might be a good time to try this idea out. A private dick with a big dick.
“Maybe we can fit you into the shoot this weekend,” I told him. “You free on Sunday?”
He smilingly retorted with, “Sure I’m available. But I’m never free.”
“Oh, so we have a comedian here, do we? We pay the talent fifty dollars a day.”
“Well, I get seventy-five.”
“No way,” I shook my head.
“That’s what everybody pays me. I won’t work for less,” John stated adamantly. “Look, I can do four sex scenes in a day.”
I looked at Alain. He shrugged. I thought for a moment, then said, “OK, Bro, seventy five it is—but the afro’s got to go.”
“No problem,” he said.
“Buy some brilliantine and slick down the hair. I’m going to have you play a private detective.”
That extra twenty-five dollars can mean a lot when your total production budget for the entire shoot is only $750. When John told us that he would do four sex scenes in a day, though, that gave us some pause to think. We figured we wouldn’t need to hire more than one other male actor. This even allowed us to come out twenty-five bucks ahead of the game. Our greed finally won out, which was why we agreed to his outrageous salary request.
After the interview, Alain and I went out for lunch. The ideas for many of our films were conceived there while consuming our greasy hamburgers, and I told Alain my idea for the private detective story. He thought it might work if I didn’t make it too complicated. We were both tired of making faux Danish films about swingers, anyway.
In those days we just wrote down the general framework of what might constitute a story for the film that we were going to shoot and improvised most of the action and the dialogue on the set. So I dashed of a quick script on the back of a legal-sized envelope. I finished the basic plot of the thing, but was still having trouble coming up with a name for the private detective.
We had been talking about the girls we were going to cast in the film, and then the conversation came around to how much we disliked shooting those pull-out and shoot-it-all-over climax scenes that theater owners insisted on.
And then we began discussing the guy we had just hired and Alain casually remarked “God, the wad that guy must be able to shoot with a cock like that,” and then I knew that we had it.
“Johnny Wadd,” I said. “With two Ds—we’ll call him Johnny Wadd.” It was a dumb name, but somehow it seemed to work.
We generally shot on weekends for a couple of reasons. For one, we could pick up the rental equipment on Friday afternoon and have it for two days, only paying for one if we returned it on Monday morning. This gave Alain a chance to make a feature for Canyon Films on Saturday and me a chance to make a feature for us on Sunday. If we shot this way we wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of shooting two films at the same time like we used to do. The other reason was that some of the actors we used worked regular jobs during the week but were free on the weekends.
John showed up on the set that Sunday wearing the one and only navy blue suit that he owned at the time, and a matching blue shirt. He was also wearing a hat because we had told him that he was going to play a private detective. He had slicked back his hair with brilliantine and even trimmed it a little, since I had told him that the afro simply had to go. He didn’t really look at all like my idea of a private detective, but that’s what he was going to be.
My concept of Johnny Wadd had him as a hard-boiled, hard-drinking private detective, so I told John that for the first scene he was going to go over to the bar and pour himself a stiff drink and take a healthy slug just before the telephone rang.
We quickly set up the shot and John took his position at the bar. He picked up the bottle of bourbon, unscrewed the cap, then he hesitated, took a sniff at what was inside, and grimaced.
“This is real whiskey!” he said.
“So?” I asked.
“I don’t drink alcohol.”
I let out a sigh. Already this guy was starting to be a pain in the ass. I rinsed out the bottle while Alain boiled three bags of Lipton tea. He snidely asked him, “You can drink tea, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” he responded, “tea I can drink. Just don’t make it too strong.”
I shook my head. This guy may have a big dick but he was already beginning to get on my nerves. This didn’t bode well for the shoot.
Two of the girls in this film were the cute and lively Sandy Dempsey and the sultry brunette Andrea Bellamy, and as I recall both of them were a real hoot during the shoot. Sandy was especially uninhibited and fun because she was always flirting with me.
“You know, you’re really great for my ego,” I told her.
“You don’t get it, Bob,” she said. “I really do like you a lot.”
Sandy could follow instructions perfectly, so she could improvise off of what little dialogue she was fed. John liked working with her and she enjoyed working with John. So far, this part of the film was off to a really good start.
Andy Bellamy was also great, even though she didn’t flirt with me quite as much as Sandy did. To be totally truthful, she wasn’t much of an actress nor did she even aspire to be. But she was good with the sex and I would end up using her in several pictures as well.
The filming went off as planned, except for a couple of slightly disconcerting wrinkles. The agent had sent over a last-minute replacement for the middle-aged actress scheduled to play the mother, who had turned out to be a no-show. No-shows were one of the primary hazards of this business. For various reasons, some of the people that performed in these films weren’t the most dependable types; one had to be not only tolerant but also flexible whenever such situations occurred.
Unfortunately, in this case, a lateral switch wasn’t in the cards—the replacement mother was more like a grandmother than a mother. My jaw dropped when I saw her walk through the door and I roundly cursed the agent who had sent her. But, unfortunately, I had no other choice than to go on with the shoot. John had been sitting off in a corner smoking a cigarette when the woman arrived and when I was free he hesitantly got up and walked over to me.
“Uh, Mr. Chinn,” John began. “Is she the one that’s playing the mother?”
“That’s her,” I replied sadly.
“And I’m supposed to do her?”
“That was the original plan,” I replied.
John seemed a little hesitant. “I don’t know if I’d be able to, you know, get it up for her.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Just thought I’d—better let you know.” He sounded almost apologetic.
I was really beginning to feel sorry for the poor guy. “Don’t worry, John. We’ll work something out. I hear where you’re coming from.”
For the first and only time in his career, John had met a woman who he really didn’t want to have sex with, so we made a quick alteration in the shooting plan.
But the main wrinkle was that John wasn’t really the stud that he thought he was, and had told us he was. By the time his third sex scene in eight hours rolled around, he was tired—and he appeared beat. He had to do a scene with a cute young girl named Patti Lee, and he was having trouble getting it up.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. We had given him what we had considered sufficient time to recover between sex scenes by going out and doing the exterior shots.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I had a hot date with a rich woman last night who paid me a thousand bucks for the night.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
We had a few anxious moments before Patti managed to work her magic and get it up to get through the scene. It’s a good thing he didn’t have to do the scene with the mother, I thought.
After we finished the final shot of the day, one of the girls in the cast pulled a joint out of her purse and lit up. She took a heavy toke and handed the joint to John. He raised his right hand and shook it in refusal. “I don’t do marijuana,” he said. “It’s bad for you.”
I had poured myself an after-shoot drink from the pitcher of bourbon and was quietly enjoying it. I looked up at John and asked, “Want a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” he said. He then explained that his stepfather had been a drunk who had constantly beaten him and abused his mother, which no doubt accounted for his aversion to alcohol.
“You don’t drink and you don’t do grass,” I said. “So what are your vices?”
“For one, I smoke cigarettes,” he replied as he lit one up. I noticed that he had just about gone through a whole pack during the course of a shoot.
“Cigarettes are bad for you, too,” I told him as I lit one up myself.
“Got to die of something, right?” he said, sagely.
“Right,” I echoed.
At the end of the shoot, as was our custom, I handed out the talent release forms for the cast to sign. The actors had to sign these before they were paid. John grabbed his, hastily scrawled a signature on it, handed it back to me, and held out his hand for his money, all in a single fluid movement. I affected a puzzled face as I held up the release and suspiciously examined it.
Alain came over and looked at the release. “What the hell is this chicken scratching?” he asked. “I can’t even read this.”
“It’s my signature,” John replied. “It’s taken me years to get it like that. It’s impossible to forge.”
“What a bunch of bullshit,” Alain commented with disgust.
“Who the hell would want to forge your signature?” I asked.
“You never can tell,” he said in all seriousness. “Just can’t be too careful nowadays.”
I handed the release back to him. “Well,” I continued, “print your name legibly beneath that unforgeable signature—just so I’ll know whose release this is.”
We titled the film Johnny Wadd and released it without any fanfare. After all, it was just another piece of product for a market that was gobbling them up from us at the rate of one or more per week. The film easily sold to all of our accounts just as all of the rest of them had, and we quickly reinvested the money we received from it into the next project and continued to turn out product.
A month or so passed before one of the theater owners called Linda up and asked, “Hey, when are you going to send us another one of those Johnny Wadd movies?” Linda dealt with all of our accounts, so she had her finger on the pulse of all the business that we were engaged in. This time, she read that pulse correctly.
I was sitting in the living room listening to an imported LP of Stanislav Richter playing Tchaicovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat when Linda came into the room and said, “I think we ought to make another film about that guy with the big dick.”
“You mean John Holmes?”
“No, I mean Johnny Wadd. That’s what the theater owners know him as.”
“You think?”
“I think. Murray Offen in New York just called to ask me when the next Johnny Wadd movie would be coming out.” New York, of course, was perhaps our most profitable account. So far, his Avon Theatres had bought everything that we had made, so we certainly didn’t want to disappoint him.
Another theater owner called with the same question, and then another, and I realized that we might actually have something going here. I brought up the idea of hiring John Holmes to make a second Johnny Wadd flick with Alain.
“You mean you want to work with that prick again!” he exclaimed. “Shit, Bob, he’s an asshole.”
“I know he is, and no, I don’t really want to work with him again. But…”
Alain was beginning to sound exasperated as he questioned, “But, what?”
“Murray Offen in New York wants another Johnny Wadd movie—and Honolulu, and just about all of the major markets have called and asked when the next one was coming out. So we might as well, I guess. I mean, the people that are buying our films definitely seem to want to see more of him.”
Alain rolled his eyes and shook his head and muttered something to the effect that I was creating some kind of Frankenstein monster with John Holmes. He wasn’t thrilled, and, I’ll have to admit, I wasn’t really stoked about it either. But in the end, greed was a great motivator. Seeing dollar signs in front of our eyes won out and convinced us both. Besides, I’d had fun making my little private detective movie and I was looking forward to making another one.
I decided that the next Johnny Wadd flick should have a theme that was a little more mysterious and exotic. Maybe we’d set it in Chinatown and try something a little different—keeping, of course, within the strict limits of our $750 budget. I was starting to get excited about the next project.
It was February 8, 1971. I can remember the date quite clearly because early the next morning both Linda and I were rudely awakened by the sound of the solid wooden headboard of our large wooden bed slamming against the wall like a jackhammer. And then I noticed the loud roaring rumble as if thunder was emanating from the ground as the earth rolled and shook. We realized that the bed was pitching and slowly but surely rolling across the floor and things were falling off the nearby dresser and shelves and crashing to the floor.
“What the hell is happening?” I asked groggily.
“I think it’s an earthquake!” Linda exclaimed, who was only half-awake herself but already somewhat panicked.
“Aren’t we supposed to get beneath the doorjamb or something?”
“I think so.”
We both rushed over to the doorjamb and anxiously stood beneath it as everything in the room shook and rattled while the earth continued to heave and roar, until finally it all suddenly stopped. We cautiously ventured around the apartment to assess the damage. It turned out to be nothing major. Aside from a few things toppling to the floor and some minor breakage, everything was pretty much as it had been before. The rest of Los Angeles, however, hadn’t fared quite as well.
The earthquake, which had originated in the Sylmar area out in the San Fernando Valley, had measured 6.6 on the Richter scale. Later in the day, when we drove around. we could see the damage that had been done to the city. There was rubble on Hollywood Boulevard and a lot of broken glass. A water main burst, flooding an area near Vine Street. Apparently the worst damage was in the Valley, where a hospital had collapsed and there had been a lot of fatalities. Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency. It was a strange time to have lived through.
In the aftermath, people were understandably shaken up. The earthquake had come suddenly and unexpectedly, and it was the first earthquake that I had ever experienced. There were those that said that the next one would be far worse. The doomsayers painted a picture of a devastated Los Angeles overrun with looters. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to take no chances and took the steps to buy a handgun for personal protection. But in the meantime, life had to go on and the next Johnny Wadd movie had to be made.
The second Johnny Wadd film was titled Flesh of the Lotus, and it featured a sexy blonde named Sheila Rossi. Legally, Rossi could actually be called a doctor because she was a PhD and a board-licensed psychiatrist. But the thing Dr. Rossi liked more than just about anything else was sex, which was why she was doing these films.
Like the first Wadd film, Flesh of the Lotus didn’t have all that much of a story to it, although I tried to work in the exotic angle to make it more appealing. The plot, or what little of it there was, had Johnny on the trail of the people that had brutally murdered a former girlfriend. For the most part it was just a threadbare story to link the various sex scenes.
The downside of the situation was after the earthquake, a couple of the girls we had wanted to use had cancelled, and with what replacements we had managed to come up with at the last minute we had a fairly unattractive cast.
To save the cost of hiring an extra actor, I decided to appear in it, in a non-sex role, as the villain. I would even end up having to have a fight scene with John. To save even more money, we shot much of the film in and around the actor Alex Eliot’s apartment.
Alex, whose actual surname was Elias, was a nice young man of Hungarian descent. Although he wasn’t handsome or even particularly attractive, he had an interesting look about him. From his outward appearance he looked like an ordinary office worker or accountant and he might have been, for all I know. But whenever I offered a film, he dropped whatever job he had in his real life to appear in it. He was always anxious, willing, and able. He would eagerly pitch in and help as a crewmember even though he didn’t really have to.
One day, out of curiosity, I asked him why he liked to do these films so much. “Are you kidding?” he replied. “Doing these films is the only time I ever get laid.”
By this time, I was also becoming familiar with John Holmes’ personality traits. For one thing, he had an enormous ego, which was proportionately in keeping, I suppose, with his enormous phallus. Another thing I noticed was his inherent tendency to stretch the truth to the point where it was totally bent out of shape, which was something that he would do almost constantly to suit his own needs. This could get to be somewhat annoying at times, but since I’m not very big on confrontations for unimportant things, I simply continued to bear it.
John also constantly tried to come off as an expert on virtually everything, even subjects about which he knew next to nothing. He would conveniently make up facts and figures to support whatever claim he was making at the time, and if he was challenged by anyone on anything he remained absolutely adamant about what he professed to know. Most of his lies were so transparent, but he continued telling them in spite of everything.
This was something that used to drive poor Alain up a wall. “You’re so full of fucking bullshit, John,” he used to say.
What I saw was a guy desperately trying to compensate for his real or imagined inadequacies. John’s ego wouldn’t allow him to be intimidated by those around him who were more intelligent that he was. His defense mechanism would automatically kick in. But sometimes I did have to agree with Alain: John just went a little too far.
When I told him that I had gone to film school at UCLA, he immediately informed me that he had graduated from UCLA also. I asked him what degree he got, a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science. Without hesitating for a single moment he immediately replied Bachelor of Science. I smiled at him and said, “I sort of thought that your degree would be BS.”
For the most part, John was not given over to any kind of particularly heavy thinking. His philosophical outlook was expressed mostly by various quotations from comedian Flip Wilson’s alter ego Geraldine. His patter as Geraldine was frequently hilarious, and Holmes would copy her accent and raise his voice a couple of octaves to mimic her to a T. He would do this so frequently that Alain took to nicknaming him Flip.
After a shoot, I generally liked winding down from the stress of the day with a couple of drinks. I had brought a half-pint of J&B Scotch with me and had just opened it and was taking a nip from it when John walked up to me.
“Could I have some of that?” he asked.
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
“I’ve taken it up since then. I still don’t smoke grass, though.”
I handed him the bottle and he took a large sip, savoring it in his mouth like a connoisseur would savor fine cognac.
“This is good,” he said after he swallowed it. “What is it?”
“Scotch,” I informed him.
“Scotch,” he said, smacking his lips. And he nodded and took another sip.
Flesh of the Lotus was just another routine one-day wonder and I thought, because it was not all that great, it would sound the death knell for the demand of any future pictures featuring Johnny Wadd.
But I was wrong. The picture ended up being an immediate success, no doubt because of the still relatively new novelty of John’s overlong schlong, and the theater owners clamored for more. As long as they wanted them, I decided, I’d continue to crank them out.
One day, I was out driving Art Burnham to a place he had to go somewhere in Hollywood when we passed the gun shop on La Brea Avenue where the gun I had recently purchased was waiting for me. The one-week waiting period for the handgun I had bought there was now over, so I told Art we were going stop at the shop for a minute so I could pick up the gun.
“What’re you buying a gun for?” he asked.
“In case we have another earthquake,” I replied.
“What’re you going to do,” he responded with a sly smile, “shoot at it?”
Art had a great sense of humor, but with his deadpan delivery I usually never knew when he was putting me on. Once I noticed that the fingernail on the little finger of his left hand was much longer than all his other fingernails, which were always clipped immaculately short. I knew that some cocaine users cultivated a single long fingernail but I couldn’t conceive Art as a drug user, which, of course, he was not.
When I finally asked him about the fingernail, he replied, “Of course I don’t do it in public, but if you have to know, it’s very difficult to pick one’s nose properly with a short fingernail.”
After Flesh of the Lotus was released, the third Johnny Wadd movie, Blonde in Black Lace, followed in rapid succession. The plot this time involved blackmail, infidelity, and murder. I had really begun to enjoy doing my little porno-noirs. They provided a well-needed break from the cookie-cutter stuff our adult film assembly line had been continually grinding out to make money.
It was during this particular shoot that John decided that he wanted one hundred dollars for the picture instead of the seventy-five we had been paying him. We had already made the initial exception to pay him twenty-five more than we paid any other male actor, and at this point we seriously considered terminating the Johnny Wadd series.
But the Wadd franchise was turning out to be more profitable on a per film basis than any of our standard features, so we felt as if we would eventually have to capitulate to some degree. So I decided to do another Wadd film and got hold of John.
He said, “Bob, I’ve got to talk with you,” so we arranged a meeting. I figured what John wanted to talk about was a raise in salary, so I went to the meeting prepared. But that wasn’t what John wanted to talk about at all.
When I got to the meeting John told me, “Bob, somebody with an inside line with the vice cops told me that there’s going to be some major busts—and from what I heard, your name is toward the top of the list. If I were you I’d cool it right now.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was.”
“Who told you this?”
“I can’t reveal her name but believe me, she knows what she’s talking about for sure.”
I told Alain what John had said to me and all he could say was, “Bob, you know how full of bullshit that guy always is. He’s so full of it that it’s coming out his mouth and ears as well as his ass. Why should we believe him?”
Then the police suddenly began cracking down on porno shoots and we quickly decided that if we were going to do that next Wadd movie then we were going to have to do it out of town. It was long past time for a vacation, so we all unanimously decided to go to Hawaii where I managed to more or less improvise the fourth Johnny Wadd movie, Tropic of Passion.
In order to circumvent any law that might possibly be on the books regarding bringing someone across the state lines for any kind of “immoral” purpose, we simply just mentioned to John that we were going to take a trip to Hawaii and hey, if he just happened to be there, maybe we would make a film.
“Cool,” he said. “What flight are you going to be on?”
So John bought his own plane ticket and, surprise, surprise, he just happened to be on the very same plane that we were on. So we even managed to grab a quick shot of John on the plane looking out through the window as it landed at the Honolulu International Airport, which we later incorporated into the film. And as far as we could determine, legally, we were completely in the clear.
We’d rented a nice and somewhat luxurious two-bedroom condo in Waikiki for a week, which would serve not only as our housing accommodations for the duration of our stay but also as our primary interior set. Our room was near the top of the high-rise building, and there was a large balcony that looked out over Waikiki. It was an ideal place to stay and made a great shooting location.
Since this was essentially a working vacation, production on the project progressed somewhat lazily without any particularly set schedule. Aside from the sex scene and the scene shot at the strip club, everything else with regard to the film was pretty much improvised on the spot, wherever we happened to be.
John was always the first one up, and each day he harnessed his manic early morning energy by preparing an elaborate breakfast for us. We’d made a trip to the local Star Super Market, where I had once worked as a box boy, and had stocked up on fresh island fruit and produce, as well as some easy-to-prepare staples such as eggs, bacon, Portuguese sausage and ham, and fresh raw island fish with which to make sashimi. We would be cooking some of our meals in the condo, but mostly we had our meals out.
Honolulu has great places not only for fine dining, but also for cheap local food and we took full advantage. When we weren’t shooting, we were usually sitting on the beach or relaxing and having a drink or two at the outdoor bar in the Banyan Court.
We were there one day, working on our tan while tossing down drinks from the hotel’s beachside bar when Alain met this cute, very shy Japanese tourist girl, and from the very beginning they were attracted to each other. Even though they could barely communicate with each other, they managed to arrange a dinner-date for that night.
Even though Alain was the one who had the date, John was beside himself with excitement. He rushed to the hotel gift shop and purchased some nice little souvenirs of Hawaii which he had wrapped as gifts. He insisted that Alain give his date one of them at dinner and the others would be waiting for her when he brought her back to the condo. Alain would never have thought of doing this, and those little presents made that Japanese girl so very happy.
At this stage of his life, John was a pretty nice guy. He even rushed back to our condo and cleaned and straightened it up to set the stage for a romantic after-dinner setting with flowers he managed to score from who knows where, candles, a bottle of wine, and the other little presents. Naturally, we all stayed out very late that night so that Alain and his date could have the place to themselves. The next morning, we woke up to see that John had prepared a special breakfast for Alain and a very bright-eyed Japanese girl.
In those days, John could sometimes be kind, thoughtful, and considerate, as well as a royal pain in the ass. He was full of energy, like a little kid. Fortunately he hadn’t discovered drugs yet: he still wasn’t even interested in smoking marijuana. He drank a little Scotch from time to time, but not too much. We also ended up drinking our share of Primo beer, which was only a natural thing to do since we were in the Islands, but John wasn’t really a big beer drinker either.
While we were shooting in Hawaii, I introduced John to the Hawaiian plate lunches from the lunch trucks that plied Ala Moana Park and the delicious Hawaiian-style Chinese food at Patti’s Chinese Kitchen in the Ala Moana Shopping Center. He took to both with the enthusiasm of a newly born gourmet, especially delighting in any kind of organ meat or unusual cuts of meat like oxtails, which he seemed to consider either a strange curiosity or a real treat.
One day we were perusing the wide array of the Chinese food offerings at Patti’s Kitchen when he asked me what a specific dish contained. When I told him, his eyes brightened up and he exclaimed with delight, “Hog maw!” and ordered a double helping. Maybe he was just a good old country boy at heart.
I’ll always remember the nice things that John did. In spite of his numerous shortcomings, like his ego or his obnoxious tendency to stretch the truth more than a little, there was a time when he was capable of doing some very caring and selfless things for other people. And I know that most people who knew him only later in his life would find this hard to believe.
Honolulu had always been one of our major film markets. Our films played at the Risque and Esquire Theaters, which were owned by Chris Vicari who also owned the notorious bar called the Swing Club right down the street. A shrewd businesswoman with platinum blonde hair and one glass eye named Mavis Oda managed and booked the theaters. We made arrangements with them to use their theater as a location where we filmed one of their dancers, Cassandra, doing her act.
A couple of the girls in Tropic of Passion had never worked with John before and were totally unfamiliar with him and his sole claim to fame. It was always interesting to see the big-eyed reactions of the girls when they first got a look at John’s oversized member.
They rarely said anything, but you could read it all in their reactions. Some of these reactions we were able to capture in some of the early films as well as a few of the later ones.
While we were in Hawaii, we drove around the island and managed to grab a lot of interesting location footage. Alain and I alternated doing the camera work. Whenever we saw something that looked like it might work, we’d jump out of the car and quickly think of something to film around it, and then go ahead and film it.
We shot a rather inept fight scene with John and me at the Nu’uanu Pali overlook, and later we shot the equally inept showdown fight scene at the Honolulu Zoo. Still another fight scene was shot, this time with Alain, down at the docks on a deserted freighter. But this one didn’t make the final cut of Tropic of Passion, appearing later in Manny Conde’s softcore Wadd film The Danish Connection instead.
We even quickly grabbed a spur-of-the-moment running shot when we saw one of the tourist charter helicopters getting ready to take off near the Marina. It would be a simple matter to integrate this shot into one of the chase scenes, so we rushed over there and quickly shot it. Anything to give the illusion of some kind of action happening within the flimsy plot with which we were working. At any rate, we were all having a great time, and it wasn’t long before we ended up shooting much more footage than we could feasibly use in the film.
Unfortunately, a little bit of John sometimes went a long way. A week with him in Hawaii had seemed like a lifetime, and by the time we finished a day of shooting the pickup scenes in Los Angeles, Linda, Alain, and I all unanimously felt as if Tropic of Passion would be a fitting farewell for the Wadd series. Aside from the fact that we had had our fill of John, John had suddenly awakened to the fact that he was rapidly becoming a big star and had adjusted his attitude accordingly, losing sight that I had been instrumental in making him that big star.
He was beginning to demand a much higher salary than what we had been paying him. Other producers were paying him $250 a day, he informed us, and now he didn’t want to work for less. On our tiny little budgets, there was no way that we were going to pay him that much. He was now not only acting like a prima donna, but he was also pricing himself out of our league.
“I suppose this’ll be the last Johnny Wadd film for you, then,” I decided to call his bluff. I also clearly implied that I was keeping my options open with regard to replacing him with someone more affordable in the event that I did decide to do any more Johnny Wadd movies.
“Well,” he hedged. “Give me a call when you want to do another one and we’ll work something out.”
“Sure,” I answered, but at the same time I steadfastly promised myself that I was finished making Johnny Wadd movies with an ungrateful John Holmes. Little did I realize that, in the near future, events would lead me to break that steadfast promise.