Los Angeles—1972 to 1973
Blue Movies, Danish Connections, Psychotic Evangelists, and Blue Money
When we returned to Los Angeles from our sojourn in Hawaii, we found that the heat on the business had still not abated. We had managed a good run making hardcore feature films for the past couple of years, but we certainly didn’t want to get busted at this point, so we made what we considered to be the wise decision of keeping a low profile for awhile.
We went back to making our theatrical softcore sex films and a few cheap low-budget mainstream exploitation features. Softcore sex films were still playing in regular theaters in the areas where hardcore was not yet permitted to be shown. In the meantime, I edited Tropic of Passion at Manny Conde’s filmmakers’ service center.
I had a hell of a lot of outtake footage because we had shot so much in Hawaii, including footage for subplots that I would now never be able to use, so I was thinking about taking it all to the dumpster and throwing it away when Manny came by and took notice of all the footage that I still had left.
He casually asked, “What are you going to do with all those boxes film you have left, Bob?”
Seeing the twinkle of anticipation in his eye, I could almost hear the wheels turning around in his head. “Well, sell it to you, I suppose, Manny,” I answered.
Manny Conde was a Cuban expat who had left the country around the time that Fidel Castro came to power. He had immigrated to Florida where he began working in the Florida film industry with the likes of Ivan Tors and Barry Mahon for a while before moving to Los Angeles, where he set up a filmmaker’s service center in Hollywood and a distribution company that distributed low-budget softcore feature films that he produced himself.
In Cuba, Manny had also been a filmmaker whose most famous film had been titled Around Cuba in Eighty Minutes. His filmmaker’s center had a sound-mixing studio and some editing facilities, and it seemed to be the only place in town that could resolve and transfer sound tape recorded with the Uher Crystal Sync system. In fact, Manny frequently worked as our soundman and mixer, and supplied us with rental equipment when we made a film. I would frequently run into other adult filmmakers like Don Brown, Spence Crilly, and Pete Perry at Manny’s place of business.
Manny slowly and carefully considered my offer but I knew that he was hoping that I would move first. He was a crafty businessman and never rushed into anything half-cocked. He said he’d buy the footage if I let him use the Wadd character in a softcore film he would make out of it. I saw no reason not to, so I agreed.
Then he made another condition: that I would have to appear in some of the additional footage he would shoot, to tie in with my appearance in what had already been shot on Oahu. This didn’t really thrill me, because I really hate appearing in front of the camera unless I absolutely have to, which all too frequently happened in the cheapo productions that I produced. But this time he sort of had me over a barrel.
I wanted to sell the footage to recoup the money I’d spent in Hawaii, so I reluctantly agreed to his terms. What I neglected to tell him was that Alain Patrick was also in a lot of the footage, playing another villain that John happens to run into in Hawaii. Manny would end up having to make a separate deal with him to appear in his film as well.
“Shit, Manny,” I told him, “you not only want the footage, you want an arm and a leg. I’ll make the deal only if you promise me that I won’t have to direct the goddamn thing, because I know that’s what you’re going to ask for next.”
After selling him all of the outtake footage from the Hawaii shoot for an amount of money that pretty much covered the entire cost of our trip there, I gave him written permission to work it into a softcore Johnny Wadd film that he subsequently released The Danish Connection.
Manny’s talented resident film director Walt Davis wrote a rather strange but colorful and thoroughly imaginative script around my outtake footage, and he directed the film as well. And I kept my promise to appear as Hercules Fong, one of the villains in that film.
By the time we got around to shooting my scenes, my hair was well below my shoulders, so there was no way that I matched the look of the footage that had been shot in Hawaii. I had hoped that this obvious fact would dissuade Manny from using me in the film, but unfortunately it didn’t.
Manny simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Nobody’s going to notice.” Fortunately, I ended up being killed off in that film, so I wouldn’t have to participate in any possible sequels that might possibly come about.
Working on The Danish Connection turned out to be a lot more fun than I had expected, probably because I didn’t have any responsibility at all with regard to either producing or directing it. For the first time, I was able to take advantage of my situation as a so-called “big producer” and play around with the attractive girls in the cast. I was also very surprised to find that a lot of the girls didn’t mind playing around with me.
This could happen because the relationship that Linda and I shared was simply limited to business, food, and sex. Although we did actually live together, there was absolutely no romance or love in the equation. There was also never any possessiveness or jealousy, so everything worked out well for both of us. We were quite comfortable with the idea that whenever we got tired of living with each other we would simply move on.
The Danish Connection is often mistakenly credited as being the first Johnny Wadd film by those who apparently don’t know any better. This, of course, is definitely not the case. There were four hardcore Johnny Wadd features made before The Danish Connection. The Danish Connection was something cobbled together. In fact, The Danish Connection is really not a true Johnny Wadd film in any sense of the word. Johnny Wadd appears in the movie as a character in name only, and even though he has top billing, he’s not even the main one at that.
During the shoot, even John Holmes noticed that Walt Davis had chosen to satirize the Wadd character in his screenplay, making him a sort of James Bond-type spy character rather than the hard-boiled private eye that I had originally created.
One day during the shoot, he came up to me and asked, “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Doesn’t what bother me?”
“What Walt’s done with Johnny Wadd.”
“Not really,” I answered. “Did you see that James Bond satire Casino Royale? Well, look at it this way. This is Johnny Wadd’s Casino Royale.”
“Oh, yeah. So when are we going to do another Wadd movie?” John asked “You know, a real Wadd movie.”
“I’ll let you know,” I told him noncommittally. Actually, I had no plans at all about making another Johnny Wadd movie, either with John or anyone else for that matter. But he didn’t know that.
I felt as if I had gone as far as I wanted to with the Johnny Wadd series. It no longer interested me, so the next Johnny Wadd film would not be made until several years later.
In the meantime, I began a hectic production schedule of a number of softcore features, many of which were shot simultaneously to take full advantage of the sets and actors. We would shoot scenes of one film, and then have the actors do a quick costume change, and, with the lights still in place, knock off scenes for another film. At times, as was attested to by the weekly production charts published in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, I had as many as three shows in production at once, so I had to hire a couple of other directors to help me out and keep the momentum going.
But no matter how hard I tried to avoid him, John Holmes kept turning up in my life. Whenever he wasn’t working, John would come around and ask what I was doing. I told him just softcore stuff, and John said if it was just softcore he would work as an actor for only one hundred dollars a day. I said how about fifty dollars, and he said, “For you, Bob, sure. But don’t tell any of the other producers, OK?”
I promised not to tell the other producers, and John Holmes appeared in The Liberated Woman with Sandi Carey, which I made for Continental Film Corporation, and I also got him to appear in another softcore film production of mine that I had my friend Walt Davis direct, a cheap sexploitation feature called The Passion Seekers, at the same reduced rate. According to John, this was the last time he ever appeared in a film for fifty dollars.
The Liberated Woman supposedly documented the initiation of a frigid housewife into the perverse world of wild, swinging pleasures and insatiable desires. The poster for the film was an example of Linda’s exploitation artwork at its best. Beside a striking photograph of an almost nude Sandi Carey, the bold type proudly proclaimed: “Inside her beautiful body burned a lifetime of unawakened passions.”
Sandi Carey was a petite blonde that was such a delight to work with that I frequently cast her in my films. She always showed up to work on time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for anything that might come her way. She was capable of memorizing lines on the spot, which was especially important for the part she was playing in The Liberated Woman because I was mostly making up the dialogue as we went along.
The Passion Seekers claimed that it went one step further by chronicling a wild party that descends into a totally perverted sexual orgy. Well, that it did—in a way. Walt Davis’ offbeat idea of perverse was the shocking revelation that one of the cute girls at the party was actually a transvestite.
We shot the entire film at Walt’s house on Larchmont Boulevard. Like me, Walt loved making movies. It didn’t matter whether they were good, bad, or indifferent. We just really got off on running film through the camera to record an imaginary world totally of our own creation. Sometimes this resulted in some pretty weird shit.
And then there was the slasher-sexploitation flick Evil Come, Evil Go. The idea to make Evil Come, Evil Go simply came out of the blue one day when Walt and I were sitting in the open-air hamburger stand next to Manny’s place having lunch. The inside of the hamburger I was eating was almost raw, and as I looked down at the bloody red meat wondering just how fresh it was and if it was all right to eat, I got a sudden inspiration and asked, “Did you ever see that film Charles Laughton made, The Night of the Hunter?
“You mean the one with Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters? It’s one of my favorite films.”
“Mine, too,” I continued. “What if we make a film about this evil, psychotic preacher-woman that picks guys up in bars, screws them, then kills them horribly just as they’re climaxing? You think that’s sick enough for the sick-flick slasher film market?”
Walt’s eyes lit up and I could read the enthusiasm on his face as he said, “I do, and I like that idea. It sounds like a lot of fun. Let’s do it! I’ll be glad to write the script for you.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ve got a whole lot of other things going right now—like a couple more features I have to turn out for Nancy Lindsey—but if you write the script and direct the thing, I’ll produce it.”
“You want me to direct it?” he asked in amazement.
Walt’s films were campy and at times could be pretty outrageous, probably because he was gay. Some of them were rough around the edges, but whose weren’t on these kinds of budgets? At any rate, I tended to like them because they showed a strange and twisted imagination behind them.
“Yeah, Walt,” I answered him emphatically. “I happen to think that you’ve got a hell of a lot of talent.”
And so that’s how this particular project got started—because Walt Davis and I thought that it might be fun to make an erotic slasher movie. Never mind that the two genres didn’t particularly meld together very well. This was the era of trial and experimentation, a time when we could not only use our super-low budgets to turn out product for a built-in market that we were already familiar with, but also have the opportunity to wet our feet in different exploitation film genres as well.
John Holmes happened to come around one day when Walt and I were doing the preproduction planning on Evil Come, Evil Go. When I happened to mention that we had to find a special-effects makeup artist for all the blood and gore effects, John immediately told us with a straight face and in all seriousness that we were indeed lucky because he just happened to be an expert in that particular field.
Of course we were pretty skeptical because, after all, 99 percent of the time John was simply full of shit. So we hemmed and hawed and said we’d think about it. But John really did want to work on the film in that capacity, and he told us that if we put him on the shoot and didn’t like his work then we didn’t have to pay him. Knowing exactly how much we had to spend for this particular project, this new revelation gave us pause for some serious thought. Even if we did have to pay him, John always worked pretty cheaply if he was behind the camera.
So we decided to take a chance. John showed up on the set with gallons of stage blood that he got from who knows where. He’d also made a trip to the supermarket where he had scored some expired cow’s liver, brains, tripe, and other assorted animal organs. Of course, he also brought a handful of questionable receipts that he wanted to be reimbursed for. This was one way John had for supplementing his low salary.
“How long have you had this stuff in the trunk of your car?” I asked John as I turned away from the packages, gasping for breath. “I think this stuff has already started to putrefy.”
“Oh, just since last night,” he casually replied. “Some of that stuff’s not so easy to find, you know.”
“You sure you didn’t just pull this stuff out of some supermarket dumpster?”
He became flustered. “You have all the receipts there,” he stammered.
“Yeah, I do but most of ’em are barely even readable, except for the totals that you’ve circled. What did you do, wash them with your clothes?”
The organ meat that he unwrapped had obviously already begun to rot, so it smelled absolutely terrible, but in spite of that odiferous fact it actually ended up looking pretty effective in the scene where the hick pig farmer, who was gamely played by Walt Davis himself in order to keep the budget down, is savagely slashed before being disemboweled by the psychotic Sister Sara Jane.
Walt bravely and uncomplainingly let John apply the gooey, smelly mess onto the front of his naked body to simulate his exposed intestines. John worked with surprising delicacy, but within a matter of minutes the rotting offal began attracting the flies. I don’t know where they came from, but their buzzing around Walt’s “corpse” certainly added an unexpected sense of reality to the scene. Walt had a tough time remaining still because he said the flies tickled.
After we finished shooting the scene, John innocently asked, “I know the budget’s real tight, so do you want me to save this stuff for another slasher killing scene?”
Everyone in the room, cast and crew alike, let out a resounding, “No!”
All in all, John ended up doing a surprisingly good job with the blood and gore effects, and when he wasn’t doing that he enthusiastically pitched in wherever and whenever he was needed—as a production assistant, assistant director, and even as an extra in one of the bar scenes. He was having a good time on this shoot because he didn’t have to put up with the stress of playing a leading role. By almost the same token, I was having a good time because I didn’t have to put up with the stress of both having to produce and direct the film.
If we needed someone to make a run for something, John was usually out the door before we could tell him, “and don’t bring back another gas receipt; you’ve already brought back two today.”
The leading lady in the film was an actress in her late thirties named Shannon Lane, who went under the stage name of Cleo O’Hara. She was no longer a spring chicken, so she was grateful to have the part.
She rarely was cast in a leading role, but I felt that she was perfect for this one. I had previously used her in The Passion Seekers, which had also been directed by Walt, and even though she was no great shakes as an actress, she had a strong personality that had impressed me enough to want to work with her again.
Shannon talked with this sweet Southern accent and she sometimes had the tendency to say the most off-the-wall things. One day, during the course of the shoot, she came up to me and said, “You know, Bob, I’m saving my money to have an operation to get my pussy tightened.”
“Come again?”
“My pussy,” she continued as if she were just having a casual teatime conversation with one of her close friends. “I never did take care of it properly and what with all the use it’s gotten over the years it’s become pretty loose. I want to get it tightened up for my boyfriend Jamie.”
Jamie was about a decade and a half younger than she was, so I began to see her point, but I was still puzzled.
“I thought a vagina had a lot of elasticity and durability,” I said. “I didn’t think you could wear the thing out.”
She leaned over and whispered in my ear so no one else could hear, “But I used mine a lot, Bob, a whole lot.”
“Oh,” was the only thing that came to mind for me to say.
Shannon claimed to also have a bit of musical talent, so when I told her that aside from being a psychotic serial slasher she was also a street preacher who sang hymns before preaching about sin and damnation to the passersby, she asked, “Can I play my accordion?”
“You have an accordion?” I asked in awe.
“Yeah, you want me to bring it for those scenes?”
I answered, “Yeah, why not.” So that’s how her accordion ended up appearing in the picture.
Since I was working on a pretty miniscule budget, Manny Conde had agreed to supply the production equipment and work as cameraman on the shoot if I agreed to let him shoot a few scenes with my actors and sets for his upcoming epic production The Danish Connection while I was making my film. Manny was using my dime and I was using Manny’s dime and it all sort of equaled out in the end, so I agreed.
One day, while we were in the midst of editing the film, Walt turned to me and asked, “You think seeing these graphic bloody scenes might inspire the psychos out there to go out and hack somebody up in real life?”
“You mean, like do the sex films we make inspire someone to go out and rape a girl so he can get his rocks off?”
“Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“I think that if someone’s going to do stuff like that, they’re going to do it regardless of what movies they may or may not have watched,” I assured him. But Walt, at that moment, had been truly concerned and I have to admit, this gave me cause for thought as well.
Evil Come, Evil Go turned out to be the weird and bizarre super cheapo picture we had intended it to be, and in spite of its cheesy production values and a total absence of any kind of coherent storyline, it ended up playing for a good many years in the drive-ins and the grind houses around the country that specialized in that particular brand of cheap sexploitation fare.
A talented young man named Mark Haggard came to me with a screenplay he had written that I thought showed some potential. Not only was it well-written but it tackled a controversial subject. The story was about a young writer who meets and falls in love with a girl in his apartment building, only to discover that she happens to be in a live-in lesbian relationship. He decides that, since he’s in love with her, he’s determined to have her. What I liked about it was the unexpected ending, which saved the story from being just another trite melodrama.
I told Haggard that I liked it and I thought that it would make a great film. It had to be handled right because it wasn’t what might be considered a conventional adult film, but I did see some potential in it as a softcore feature if it was properly marketed.
Then Mark told me that he wanted to direct it. He had never directed a feature film before, but he had made a short film on the famous movie director John Ford and was confident that he could handle directing a feature film as well. I had some reservations at first, but Mark was intelligent, opinionated, and obviously talented.
In an effort to persuade me, Mark introduced me to a friend of his named Roland Miller, who was willing to put up the money to make the film if I would put up the money for the postproduction and lab expenses and use my contacts to get the film sold to a distributor and released. I decided that the screenplay would make a pretty good film, and since he seemed so intelligent and dedicated, Mark should definitely be allowed to showcase his talent by directing it.
The shoot went as expected for a first-time director. Mark was very hesitant at first, which was a disaster because time means money when you’re making a film. But he eventually found his legs and things began moving along at a slightly better pace. Mark quickly learned what to do with camera angles and shots in order to get exactly what he wanted. For the most part, the cast was eager and cooperative and respected what he was trying to achieve.
Production seemed to have shut down while Mark was trying to figure out how to shoot the next scene, which was an important one to the development of the story. Roland, the producer, kept looking at his watch. It was getting later and later, and soon we would be going into overtime. The actors were getting restless.
Roland walked up to me and said, “Bob—please do something.”
I went over to Haggard. “Mark,” I began, measuring my words carefully. “We’re going to be here for-fucking-ever unless you get it together and make some kind of decision about what you want to do.”
“I know what I want to do,” he said. “I just can’t quite figure out how I’m going to do it.”
“Then I tell you what—why don’t we just leave this scene for now and do another one that’s set here in the living room, now that it’s lit and ready to go.”
A light seemed to go off in his head and he said, “Yeah, uh, I think we could do that.”
The fly in the ointment eventually came after the film had wrapped. Roland and Mark had gone against my advice and used students from USC as key members of the crew, primarily because of budget considerations, I supposed. This turned out to be fine as far as the cameraman, Doug Knapp, was concerned, but the soundman turned out to be a total disaster. Somehow, he had managed to lose all of the production soundtrack, which comprised all of the dialogue that had been recorded. I had never heard of anything like this ever happening before, and of course it now happened on a production that I was committed to finishing.
“It’s true,” Mark said, “the soundtrack’s gone. Uh, the soundman lost the soundtrack.”
“How in God’s name could he do that?” I asked, not quite believing what I had just heard.
“It, uh, just happened.”
“How in the hell did that happen?” I asked.
Mark shrugged his shoulders, “Uh, he says they were stolen from his car.”
“Stolen from his car?”
“Yeah, uh,” Mark repeated, “stolen from his car.”
“Who in the fuck would want some boxes of quarter-inch sound recording tape enough to break in and steal them from someone’s car?”
“Uh, I think he’d left the car unlocked.”
I threw my arms up in exasperation. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard of,” I said as I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. “Un-fucking believable!” If you hire amateurs to do a professional job—well, this is what you get.
Great! We now had a picture with no sound. The entire dialogue track would have to be rerecorded. Fortunately the cast was composed of only three people. Mark assembled the cast for a dubbing session at Scott Sound and we rerecorded the entire dialogue track there at the sound studio, with Bruce Scott supervising the technical end.
Since the dialogue still wasn’t perfectly in synch, we hired professional film editor Ray Nadeau to eyeball-synch the rerecorded track to the picture. This was a long and tedious process that often required the manipulation of single frames, but it had to be done. The plus side of the equation, as it turned out, was that the rerecorded dialogue was probably better than the original synch soundtrack, since the actors could now concentrate exclusively on the delivery of their lines without any distractions.
Then the rerecorded dialogue track had to be eyeball-synched to the picture, which was no mean feat. It was a painstaking process that could only be accomplished by matching the picture with the rerecorded dialogue frame by frame.
Mark turned out to be an extremely slow editor, and this would drive Roland up the wall. He had already invested a good deal of his money and he wanted to see the film finished as quickly as possible so he could recoup not only his investment but the anticipated profit as well. To hurry him along, we would try and bribe Mark by taking him out to dinner at his favorite Hollywood restaurants—Tick Tock, Nicodell’s, and Musso & Frank’s—hoping that our generosity would inspire him to work faster. All it did was allow him to put on more weight. Mark was pretty set in his ways and continued to work at his own slow and deliberate pace in spite of all the bribery and cajoling. All of the fancy dinners and pleading were to no avail.
The Love Garden turned out to be a very good film, and I was gratified that my confidence in Mark had not been misplaced. He turned out to be an exacting director, a perfectionist who knew what he wanted. For all the problems and delays, I was more than happy with the final product. After I sold the film to Continental Film Corporation at a healthy profit, Roland was more than anxious to get under way with the next production.
I decided to coproduce Mark’s second film with Roland, The All-American Girl, with a young, somewhat innocent and not-so-innocent, sexually curious teenager anxious to experience the erotic pleasures of life.
The production went much more smoothly than the shoot for Mark’s first film had gone. He was much more confident with his direction and the resulting footage showed this. Like before, however, Mark proved to be extremely slow with the editing process.
This really didn’t matter all that much to me because I had managed to work out a deal with Burt Steiger at Pacific Film Industries and now had sixty days before the lab bill became due, and I could always move money around from other productions to pay it. But poor Roland had put up his own cash for the initial investment and the long wait was excruciating for him.
On the plus side, Mark had persuaded a young composer named Don Dunn, who had written songs for a lot of stars in the music business as well as the popular Joe Cocker hit Hitchcock Highway, to compose the original music score and record the music track for the film. Dunn also wrote and performed the catchy, bouncy, and energetic title song for The All-American Girl.
The film itself had an attractive cast in addition to Haggard’s talented direction and Dunn’s great, bouncy musical score. Roland and I decided to do the postproduction sound mix at Manny Conde’s facilities, primarily to keep the costs down.
After finishing the sound mix, Manny became unusually friendly and, in a magnanimous gesture that was truly not typical of him, invited Roland and me out to lunch. Of course, Manny’s idea of a power lunch took place in a plastic seated booth beneath the golden arches at the nearby McDonald’s but hey, a free lunch was, after all, a free lunch. While we were munching our fries and tearing into our Big Mac’s, Manny smiled that big sunshiny smile of his and said, quite decisively, “Guys, I want to buy The All-American Girl.”
This statement stopped us in mid-chew. So this was the reason for the free lunch. “But Manny,” I said, “I’ve already promised this one to Nancy Lindsey. She bought The Love Garden and she also wants this one.”
Manny took a deep breath and screwed his face into the most pleading expression he could manage to muster and said, “I really have to have this picture, Bob. Isn’t there anything at all that you might be able to do? Maybe make another film for her or something?”
Ordinarily I sold all of my softcore films outright to Nancy Lindsey at Continental Film Corporation for a little over twice what it cost to make them, which assured us a very healthy profit, of course. Aside from the film and promotional trailer, which I was responsible for, my package also included the artwork for the one-sheet or poster, the press book, and the newspaper ad campaign done by Linda Adrain with her total fee added to the sale price accordingly.
The All-American Girl was a good film and Nancy Lindsey definitely wanted it, but Manny needed it more. He had always wanted to get into big-time distribution by booking one of his films with the Pussycat Chain, but so far, with all that cheap tasteless crap that he distributed, that big multi-theater booking had eluded him. Now he saw this picture as his ticket to not only make that booking but also set himself up as a supplier of future product to the Pussycat Theaters.
Manny was a good friend, and I wanted to do all I could to help him even though I was obligated to give Nancy the right of first refusal. To complicate matters even more, Manny wasn’t prepared to offer us any more money than Nancy had offered for the picture. In fact, he said, he was stretching it to come up with even that much. I didn’t know whether he was just being a crafty businessman or telling the truth, but this posed a dilemma.
I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, but since Manny had literally begged me for the film, and also since he had willingly sprung for our food, all out of the goodness of his own heart, I knew that I had to figure out a way to talk Nancy out of wanting the picture. And I had to do so without lying to her because, after all, I did have my principles, and I was smart enough to realize that lies always came back to bite you on the ass.
It definitely wasn’t going to be easy, because she knew that The All-American Girl was a good picture. But eventually, I managed to convince her that she really didn’t want it. Everyone seemed to be happy for the moment. When the picture started playing the Pussycat circuit and raking in big money at the box office, Nancy became decidedly unhappy, so I promised her that she would have the next picture, which I also promised would be a controversial one.
The next picture was one I helped my producing partner Roland Miller direct. It was his first film as a director and he had even written the script for it. Brother and Sister told of a happy, well-adjusted middle-class family—the only thing was that the two teenage siblings were romantically attracted to each other.
Nancy Lindsey liked the story idea from the very beginning. It broke new ground in an industry that was already beginning to creatively stagnate, and with the forbidden incest theme in the air as well as in the newspaper advertisements, she could see the dollar signs heading her way. She even allowed us to use her Hollywood Hills house as the primary location for the film.
In spite of the somewhat taboo subject matter, the whole affair was handled with a modicum of taste and restraint, and there were no censorship problems at all after the film’s release. Of course, the fact that we had made them stepbrother and stepsister softened the impact considerably. After all, if this was the case there was no actual incest, was there? This would be the first film made by our newly formed Pantheon Pictures Corporation and its theme and subject matter would pave the way for Kirdy Stevens’ famous Taboo series of hardcore films that would follow some eight years or so later.
Since we had decided to temporarily steer away from hardcore in order to stay out of jail, the films we were making at this particular period in time were all softcore, and yet they all didn’t hesitate to tackle some very controversial subjects such as sexual freedom and promiscuity, lesbianism, pathological obsessions, teen sex, and incest.
It was our belief that by doing something like that, we might gain an edge in an already overcrowded market. In spite of the fact that all of these movies were originally shot on the cheap in 16mm and later blown up to 35mm for theatrical release, they all ended up doing remarkably well.
Toward the end of 1972, I produced a general release mainstream exploitation film with Alain Patrick based somewhat loosely on a few of our adventures and misadventures in the porn film business.
“You know what,” Alain said in a moment of inspiration one day when we were discussing this project. “These movies that we make are called blue movies.” This was true, so I nodded my head in agreement. He went on, “Well, then all the money we make from them should be called blue money.”
“So?”
“So, well, the title of the film will be Blue Money!”
I thought that the idea was indeed, perhaps, a good one. Alain wanted to both play the lead role in the film and direct it. He had the feeling that this film might provide his big break in an acting career that seemed to be going nowhere fast, hopefully giving him more mainstream film gigs or at least better roles than bartender or bellboy.
Truth be told, Alain was more of a realist than a dreamer, so he realized that the chances of his hopes being fully realized were probably slim to none. But this wasn’t going to stop him. There was always the possibility of that outside chance, so what the hell, he thought, life was short, so why not go for it? It would mean taking a big gamble with most of the hard-earned money that he had carefully saved, but, well, stranger things had happened.
Alain found an out-of-work writer named Nick Boretz to do the screenplay for the picture that we would call Blue Money, and we sat down and hashed out our ideas for the story with him. After a few days of this he went off and after a week or so came back with a script. I personally thought that the script wasn’t all that good. It was trite and lacked the element of gritty realism that I had been expecting. But since Alain liked it and he was calling the shots this time around, we made revisions, and after the final rewrite the script was finally approved and we were all set to go.
Blue Money was our first attempt at mainstream Hollywood feature motion picture production and it was filmed in 35mm on a budget of around $35,000, which was not very much, even in those days, for such an ambitious project. Since Alain was putting up all of the money for production, we would be using my credit to see that the lab bill, which would be considerable, was taken care of. I was still a little reluctant about the whole thing because Alain was, at best, a pretty pedestrian director. But I thought that his enthusiasm for the film would make up for any shortcomings in that particular department.
The soundstage that we used as the location for the porn studio was the old Jack Schwarz Studio on Wilton Place in East Hollywood, an unsung historical Hollywood landmark if there ever was one. This is the very same studio where many of the old Eagle-Lion and PRC grade B-pictures had been filmed. Even the old office was instantly recognizable as the set of countless cheap poverty-row film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. In our movie, we used this same office as the set for the vice squad detective’s office.
Strangely enough, while we were filming there, we had a visit from the Los Angeles vice cops. Apparently they had followed the well-known porn actresses and actors to the soundstage and were hoping to come up with a big porn shoot bust. When they found out that we were shooting a softcore film, they begrudgingly left us alone.
The finished movie was picked up for distribution by one of the contemporary poverty-row distribution outfits, Red Jacobs’ Crown-International Releasing Company, after Red’s son-in-law Mark Tenser saw it and liked it, and it was put into general release.
Although the movie itself was fictitious, the story was based on fact. And the fact was, there was still a very good chance that I could be “busted” for the porn movies that I had made in the past. The vice squad was becoming more aggressive, and when news arrived that they were going to raid the film labs to confiscate films as evidence, we immediately pulled out all of our negatives.
With no place to store them, this left a huge pile of film cans containing virtually every hardcore feature we had made to date littering our living room floor. Linda was not pleased.
“If the cops ever decide to raid our apartment,” she theorized, “they could confiscate all this as evidence and still bust us.”
The paranoia of the time caused me to say, “You’re right,” and inspired me to make one of the worst business decisions of my life. “We’ve already sold prints of all these films to every market that we know of. How about we just unload this stuff for whatever we can get and carry on without the fear of having all this evidence hanging over our heads?”
Harry Mohney happened to be in town, so I rang him up. He owned so many theaters that I figured he could put my library of films to good use. “Hey, Harry,” I asked, “you want to buy all my negatives?”
“If the price is right, why not?”
“The price is right,” I assured him.
So I unloaded everything, lock, stock, and barrel. Decisions like this are the reason why, in the long run, some people stay poor while other people get rich. But at the time, I was dealing with the short run.
By the time 1973 came around, we were getting fat from all the “blue money” rolling in and we were planning and looking forward to an even more prosperous year. But sometimes even the best laid plans of mice and men can suddenly turn to shit.