Hollywood—Jamaica—San Francisco
—1973 to 1975
The Rise and Fall of Pantheon Pictures Corporation
Sometime early in 1973, Roland Miller and I, along with Linda Adrain, formed the ill-fated Pantheon Pictures Corporation, which produced only three films before quietly folding and closing its doors about a year or so later.
Brother and Sister had been the first Pantheon Pictures feature. Our second film was a cheaply made general release exploitation film titled Panama Red, which was an experimental feature film that I wrote and directed.
That project came about when the Agfa-Gevaert Film Company sent me a four hundred-foot roll of their new Agfachrome color reversal film to try out. At that time, they were trying to break into the professional film market that had been dominated by Eastman Kodak and Fuji.
We shot a quick test of the film and I liked the color, so I had Linda call them up and tell them if they would provide me with twenty rolls of the film I would shoot a general release feature film with the film stock that might help promote it.
To my surprise, they sent the twenty rolls, so I put together a quickly written screenplay about a musician who was a part-time dealer who had to move a lot of marijuana in a very short time.
Because we had so very little money to work with, we had to come up with a cast that wasn’t particularly interested in being paid. Naturally, this wasn’t anything new in Hollywood, but when push comes to shove it’s really not all that easy. But somehow we managed to scrounge some kind of cast together.
For the lead, I cast the musician who had written the title song for Evil Come, Evil Go, Jim Wingert. He’d been knocking around the music scene in Los Angeles for quite a few years, trying without much success to make it to the top, or even at least to the middle, but everything seemed stacked against him. He saw this project as a possible showcase for his talent; since it presented a potential career break, he enthusiastically agreed to do it.
Jim hastily penned several songs for the film and modified a few that he had previously written, and we quickly lined up some studio time and at the cheapest recording studio we could possibly find: the Cherokee Ranch Recording Studio in Chatsworth.
Roland and I then assembled the rest of the cast from willing and occasionally not-so-willing friends and members of family. One of our friends, Jack Morgan, was an attorney at the time, and he subsequently became a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. Like Roland and me, Jack was also an ardent film collector, and we would sometimes watch movies in the screening room he had specially built in his large Palos Verdes house.
John Holmes had a supporting part in it and worked as a production assistant for which I gave him a credit as assistant director in lieu of any kind of salary. At this point in his career, he was still interested in getting crew jobs on films, so crew credits were important to him.
Panama Red was shot all over Los Angeles and its vicinity. The locations ranged from luxurious mansions in Long Beach to Barbara Mills’ funky old house just off the Venice Beach boardwalk and Alain Patrick’s small apartment in Marina Del Rey. We also filmed at the Los Angeles International Airport, the Follow Your Heart Juice Bar in Johnny Weissmuller’s American Natural Foods Store in Canoga Park, where the owner Paul Lewin played a small part.
The resulting film ended up being somewhat interesting but little else. In fact, it looked like some kind of ambitious and elaborate home movie. I was crestfallen, and I considered it to be my first truly failed experiment. Somehow we did, however, manage to sell it and recoup our investment. It was sold to and distributed by a company called American Film, Ltd.
The third Pantheon Pictures Production was a documentary drama featurette filmed in Mexico by Pierre Moro-Giafferi titled Patamban. It was just as eminently forgettable as Panama Red, so it has hopefully forever joined the legion of lost films where it really and truly belongs.
Pantheon also had an movie project that remained unfinished. We had been given a feature film by a small-time moneylender and producer, one of the many who operated on the fringes of Hollywood, named Claude Spence.
The unfinished film had the working title of Charlotte, and Claude wanted to know if we would finish it and release it through our company. Claude had apparently run out of money before several of the key scenes could be completed by the director Gunther Collins. Collins was the ex-husband of the beautiful blonde exploitation film actress Roberta Collins, who scorched the screen with her magnificent presence in such epics as The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, Unholy Rollers, Death Race 2000, and Death Wish II.
The unfinished film starred Sally Struthers who had obtained a major part in the TV sitcom All in the Family, and since this show had become a big hit, Struthers had now become a household name. It was only natural that she would want nothing more than to forget that she had starred in this cheap exploitation film, so there wasn’t a chance in hell that she would even think of returning to finish it.
The intriguing thing about the film, which was about a prostitute redeeming a vice cop who has sunk to the lowest depths of degradation, was that Struthers did a total nude scene in it. Struthers’ nude appearance left absolutely nothing to the imagination. She had a great little bod and seeing her in the buff was pretty darn arousing.
The downside, however, was twofold; Sally Struthers, with her newfound fame, was no longer able to complete the film, but everything that had been shot so far was pretty terrible anyway.
“What a piece of crap this thing is,” Roland finally said after we had looked at all of the footage.
I asked, “You think we can save it—maybe find some chick to double Sally and shoot her from the back so no one can tell the difference?”
“What about when she has to talk?”
That was a good question. “Well, we could cheat it. We’ll find someone who sort of looks and sounds like her and shoot her from behind and run her dialogue over reaction shots of the guy she’s talking to.”
I could tell that we both were thinking it would end up looking cheesy. Then we both shook our heads and said, in unison, “Nah.” It would have been close to impossible to salvage that film.
Roland informed me, “Claude told me that Sally Struthers’ agent was trying to buy the negative from him.”
“Well he should sell it to them,” I said.
“They’re not offering enough for Claude to recoup his investment, so he won’t sell. Anyway, let’s hang onto it for a month or so and think about it some more. At least we could put it in as a work in progress for the company’s advertising flyer we’ll pass out at the convention in Jamaica.”
So we held on to the Charlotte footage for a month or so and it appeared in the Pantheon Pictures advertising flyer.
Eventually, we mutually concluded that it would be impossible to complete the film without Struthers, so we decided to do the prudent thing and pass on it.
Pantheon Pictures slowly went downhill as the result of our inexperience and poor management. Roland and I managed to enjoy ourselves during this time by drinking a lot of bourbon while pondering projects that somehow never managed to get off the ground.
Eventually, we decided that there was no reason to keep the Pantheon Pictures Corporation going anymore. We moved out of the office, and all the furniture and equipment we had bought went into storage in Linda’s once spacious but now overfilled garage. Another chapter in our business experience had closed, but there was no way to move but on.
Roland and I attended the AFAA Conference in Jamaica in February 1973. It was the first time I had ever been to the Caribbean, and I thoroughly enjoyed the trip. Of course, I had not neglected to bring along my 16mm camera with me with the intention of shooting some exotic location footage to work into a future feature film. Since we were there and we had the camera and some film, we proceeded to collar the actress Sandi Carey, who had come to the conference with the producer Bill Amerson, to see if she would be willing to let us shoot some location footage with her.
“That way you’ll have a starring role in a film I’ll have to finish after we return to Los Angeles,” I told her.
Sandi was more than willing and she said, “Sure—if it’s OK with Bill.”
The plan was that we would incorporate this footage into some kind of softcore sexploitation thriller that we would finish in Los Angeles at a later date, so there would be a feature job for her when we got back. Sandi had already appeared in a lot of my films, and she was more than willing to be in another one, so I found Bill sitting at a table by the outdoor bar next to the pool, drinking some kind of large tropical drink with a flower in it, and asked him if he minded us using her.
“Take her,” he said, emphasizing his words with a dismissive wave of the hand. Then he went back to immersing himself in his large drink.
Poor Sandi. I’ll have to admit that there wasn’t a nicer, more energetic, or more cooperative actress in the business. I had her running—running through teeming Jamaican street markets, running through dense jungles, running along beaches, running everywhere from Montego Bay on up to the Blue Mountains.
In fact, we ran poor Sandi ragged and only stopped running her when her feet started bleeding. Even then she never complained, not even once, and was willing to keep doing even more. Now there’s a real trooper for you.
So why was Sandi doing all that running? Because the only idea I had so far was that she was being chased. I hadn’t worked out any kind of script yet, but that would come later. My sole objective at this point was to take advantage of the pictorially beautiful and exotic locations that we found ourselves in.
The conference itself was more of a social event that brought together a lot of the players in the adult film industry. Of course there was always the chance to discuss some business. Roland and I spent a good deal of our time drinking rum while we hobnobbed with the big distributors like Dave Friedman, Bob Cresse—accompanied by his ever-present bodyguard Jerry Wade—and big theater chain owners like Lou Sher, Sumner Myerson, Art Weissberg, and Gil Atamian.
After we got back to Los Angeles, I worked some kind of a shooting script around the Jamaica location footage. The story had Sandi searching Jamaica for her missing husband. Along the way, she gets involved with some sinister island aristocrats who claim to help her but make her a prisoner instead. Added to the mix is a mysterious and dangerous Chinaman who drugs her and uses her for his own twisted pleasure and a bizarre voodoo cult hidden away somewhere deep in the Blue Mountains.
So the story was a little cheesy, but how could you lose with a convoluted piece of crap like this? Besides, it was going to cost just a little more than nothing to make. You might say that this one was some kind of homage to a couple of my favorite Eurotrash directors at that time, Jess Franco and Joe D’Amato.
I ended up appearing as the dangerous Chinaman called Chang, who got to do a simulated sex scene with Sandi Carey. This would be the one and only softcore sex scene that I did in my entire career, and I probably never would have done it had it been any girl other than Sandi.
When the time came to shoot that scene, I was having second thoughts and wanted to back out—because I’d never done anything like it before—but Sandi took my hand, rubbed her breasts with it, looked up at me with those imploringly innocent eyes, and said, “Don’t worry, Bob. I’ll be very gentle with you.” And she was. I’ll never forget how gentle Sandi was with me.
The resulting film was a quickly slapped together super cheapo general release sexploitation thriller called The Devil’s Garden, a movie that continued to play in the drive-in and grind house circuit for a good many years.
Nowadays, whenever I went to Pacific Film Lab to drop something off or pick something up, Burt Steiger, the owner, would call me into his office and we would shoot the shit while drinking Teacher’s Scotch from Styrofoam coffee cups. After I’d finished editing The Devil’s Garden, I asked Burt how much he was going to charge me for a 35mm blowup negative.
He smiled and answered, “If you do it yourself, I’ll just charge you for the stock and the developing.”
I said, “Sure, I’ll be glad to give it a try, but you’ll have to show me how to do it.”
“No problem,” he told me. “If you know how to load a camera and thread a projector, it’s really easy.”
It turned out to be a relatively easy job for me once I got used to doing everything upside down. The contraption was set up so that the bottom film loop of the 16mm projector passed through a metal trough, which had to constantly be refilled with film cleaning liquid, so that the film was wet when it passed through the projector film gate. This was the Burt Steiger version of liquid gate film printing. After a while, I became quite adept at making 16mm to 35mm liquid gate blow-up negatives.
One thing about this business was that we were always on the lookout for new angles and new ideas to make new films. One day, after Burt and I had downed a few Styrofoam cups full of Teachers, something came to mind and I told Burt that my partner Roland Miller just happened to end up with a great mass of unedited footage that had originally been shot in North Borneo and New Guinea for a documentary film about the search for some lost tribe, and we were trying to figure out what to do with it.
The footage had a lot of shots of dusky, bare-breasted New Guinea babes and nearly naked native New Guinea men in it, as well as some weird anthropologically interesting dances that might be interpreted as some kind of coming-of-age sexual rituals. There were also shots of exotic jungle scenery and strange animals, as well as dusty, grubby villages and muddy river villages with shacks built on stilts. All in all, however, the stuff was pretty tame and more in the vein of a low-rent National Geographic documentary.
Burt and I tossed a few ideas around about making it into a hardcore exploitation Karamoja-type picture. Karamoja had been a documentary feature movie filmed in Africa many years ago featuring bare-breasted native women as well as some nearly naked native men who sheathed their penises in some kind of long, dried gourd. The film had been an exploitation film sensation, which had consequently made a lot of money for the old pioneer exploitation picture showman Kroger Babb.
“You’re the only one in the business doing all this exotic shit,” Burt commented.
“I suppose I am,” I said as I finished my drink. Burt poured me another generous serving before pouring one for himself.
We began throwing out ideas, some good, some bad—but this was the way these brainstorming sessions usually worked. From time to time, his bookkeeper and secretary Hilda would come in to bring him a phone message slip while regarding us disapprovingly.
Burt took a sip of Scotch and thought for a moment. “You could get some black actors and shoot some loops to cut into it,” Burt offered sagely.
By that time, we had downed more than enough of the Styrofoam cups of Teacher’s Scotch and Burt was becoming even more inspired. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “A thought just came to me; you know any black midgets that do porn?”
“No, I don’t, but I heard there’s a white midget couple, and from what I’ve been told they’re willing to do hardcore.”
Burt was on a roll now. “Hell, slap some makeup on ’em and shoot a loop! I can see it now,” he continued as he raised his head and his eyes tried to focus on the ceiling. “Hey, how’s this for a newspaper ad headline: ‘see pygmies fucking!’”
At that point, I felt that we had both had enough, so I staggered out of Burt’s little office and headed back to mine. Needless to say, our genre-bending sexploitation documentary never did get made after all, and all of that exotic New Guinea film footage languished in Roland’s extensive film vault.
The runaway box office success of Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat in the summer of 1972 had effectively caused the total collapse of the softcore feature market and opened up the big theaters to hardcore film fare. There was no arguing with the skyrocketing box office receipts. Hardcore was what people now wanted to see, and hardcore had finally become acceptable in the theaters across the country.
In California, the Pussycat Theater chain was now playing hardcore features, and a booking with them was essential if you wanted to recoup your initial investment and show a profit. Shooting a hardcore film was still an extremely risky venture. It was difficult to find a secure location and then get the cast and crew there without being followed by undercover vice cops anxious to make an arrest.
One day, I was walking out the door of Pacific Film Lab with an armload of prints of my latest film when I heard an unfamiliar voice addressing me from behind by calling out, “Hey, Chinn!”
Turning around, I saw a guy I remembered having once met someplace or another named Ruby Gottesman, who was some kind of businessman who always seemed to be hanging around on the fringes of the adult film scene.
“Hey, Ruby,” I responded in kind.
He walked up to me, then quickly looked around to see if anyone was listening, and when he had satisfied himself that no one was and that we were alone and could talk in confidence, he quietly asked, “Could you make me a hardcore feature movie for five grand?”
Since the situation in Los Angeles was a little iffy, I realized that I would have to circumvent the Los Angeles vice cops by going up to San Francisco to shoot the film. This was something that I had never done before, but I knew that I could do it. I could cast the film up there with the wide range of local San Francisco talent that was always available, but I also realized that I’d have to bring up a small crew with me and we’d all have to stay at a hotel.
Since this would add some bucks to the budget, I did some quick addition and figured that if I could shoot the film in one day it could be done. If there ever was a time to get back into hardcore production, I decided, it was now. I really wanted to explore the situation up in San Francisco, and something like this would give me a chance to do just that.
Ruby reiterated his question. “So, Chinn—you think you could do it?”
“Sure,” I replied, “I could do it, but it would be a real cheapo, a down and dirty one-day shoot without much of a story. A one-day wonder, you know.”
“That’s all I want,” Ruby said.
“How come you want me to make the film for you?”
“I heard you’re the best shooter in town, and you can make a film for almost nothing.”
“Who told you that?”
He nodded his head toward the lab. “Burt Steiger.”
If Burt Steiger was behind the recommendation, I figured Ruby was OK. “When do you want me to do it?” I asked.
“How about now,” Ruby said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a big wad that contained a hundred fifty-dollar bills.
I let out a low whistle and quickly stuffed the bankroll into my own pocket as I told him, “You’ve got a deal.”
I told Burt that I was going to do the film for Ruby but I wanted to shoot it up in San Francisco, and since I’d never been to San Francisco before, I really didn’t know anybody there.
Burt said, “No problem, I do,” and he proceeded to set me up with some of his many contacts in San Francisco.
It was common knowledge that in San Francisco the authorities were far more liberal in their attitude towards the production of hardcore sex films. Apparently they had far better things to do than prosecute people based on the long-outdated California “Blue Light” laws. Since the budget was miniscule, I took up a crew of only two other people aside from me.
I directed the film under the pseudonym of Sparky Shayne, and it was originally titled The Married Woman. I guess someone didn’t think that title was catchy enough because I learned that it was subsequently rereleased with the more descriptive title of My Wife the Hooker when it was later distributed by Arrow Video. It was the first film that I had ever made in San Francisco, and it turned out to be quite an experience.
The day we arrived, we had a quick casting call and interviewed a couple of dozen hopefuls that had been recommended by the local San Francisco filmmakers Lowell Pickett and Alex de Renzy. Our extremely small hotel room was quickly filled to the brim with an abundance of local porn performers eagerly seeking work. In fact, the talent was lined up along the hallway outside of the room as well. It proved relatively easy to choose an appropriate cast from the crowd that had gathered.
On the following day, we loaded ourselves and our equipment into a taxi and drove to the location. Both of my pants pockets were bulging with cash because I had to convert most of Ruby’s already large bankroll into tens and twenties to pay the cast more conveniently. After we arrived at the location, we proceeded to shoot the entire film in the third-story apartment we had rented for the day. All of the equipment and lights had to be schlepped up three flights of stairs. It was a good thing that the cinematographer Frank Mills was in great shape and strong as an ox. By the time he got all of the lighting and camera equipment up the stairs and set up, he had gotten his second wind and was ready to go.
I had no script, but I had the story in my mind and a location to shoot in, so I improvised all of the action and dialogue on the set. The story was a simple thing about a housewife with an out-of-work husband who decides to get a job herself. She cruises the classifieds looking for something to suit her abilities, and the job she manages to land is as a hooker in a bordello.
I was about halfway into the shoot when I realized that the film needed something more in it, something to set it above the ordinary. I wracked my mind for an idea, but was having a hard time coming up with one.
During a shooting break, while Frank was setting up the camera and lights for another scene, it finally came to me. I decided to do something I had never done before with one of these features: a golden shower scene. I told Frank about my idea and asked him what he thought. “Well,” he replied, “it’s going to be a little messy.”
“We’ve got a lot of towels,” I countered. “I think we can pull it off.”
I brought the idea up with Stephanie and asked her if she was willing.
“Sure,” she said.
The guy who volunteered to do it with her was Stephanie’s real-life boyfriend who had been hanging around the set waiting for her to finish so he could take her home. We gave him a six-pack of beer to consume so he’d be truly ready for the scene when it came time to shoot it. That scene would be the last thing we would shoot.
After we finished shooting all of the film that had been scripted, Frank was busily setting up the lights to shoot that spectacular final scene when our brave volunteer, the boyfriend who had been diligently drinking beer all afternoon and had already finished the six-pack, waddled up to me and announced in somewhat of a panic, “I got to pee!”
“Hold it,” I said. “We still got to set up the lights.”
“I really don’t think I can,” he continued.
“Sure you can,” I assured him. “It’s just a matter of mind over matter. Get into a Zen thing or something. You know how to do that, don’t you?”
“No.”
Sweat had formed on his forehead and he was straining to hold all that beer in. I could feel danger in the air. Things just weren’t looking good. “Shit! How long ’till we’re ready?” I asked Frank.
“Ten minutes,” he said, adjusting the lights.
“Oh nooo,” came a long painful moan from the bloated boyfriend. “It’s coming!”
These were definitely not the words that I wanted to hear. “Hold it in for ten more seconds,” I yelled. I grabbed Stephanie who was sitting nearby eating a donut. “Quick, Stephanie! Get those towels spread on the floor and kneel on them! Frank, get behind the camera now!” Stephanie rushed to do as I asked and her boyfriend took his position standing over her.
“I can’t hold on much longer,” the boyfriend warned.
Frank immediately rushed to the camera, framed the scene, quickly focused the lens, and turned on the camera just in time. It seemed as if the guy peed forever. Poor Stephanie was literally drowning. It was all over her, face, her hair, her body—all over the place.
When Stephanie’s boyfriend finally squeezed out the last drop, I yelled, “Cut!” Then I turned to Frank and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think the lighting sucks,” he replied.
In spite of the sucky lighting, it was a spectacular scene, but it definitely was not something that I would care to ever do again. After the shoot wrapped, I paid everyone from the huge wads of cash that had been making the pockets on both sides of my pants bulge. One of the actresses, Laura Bourbon, snuggled up next to me intimately and said, “Jeez, Bob, you’re loaded!”
“Not for long,” I replied as the huge wad of bills gradually dwindled down with each payout. When we were finished and Frank had cleared out all the equipment, I treated the cast and crew to a grand feast of home-style Chinese food.
After I finished this project, I was contacted by Bob Cresse, the head of Olympic International Pictures, who had finally decided that he wanted to jump on the increasingly profitable hardcore motion picture bandwagon with an English language remake of a Japanese softcore sex flick that he owned the US rights to. The film was called The Love Robots. Although I must confess that I questioned the sanity of this project, because I had great respect for the man, I decided to listen to what he had to say.
Bob was one of the old guard exploitation film producers who had paved the way for the sexploitation film business with such classics as House on Bare Mountain and the campy and notorious Love Camp 7, in which Cresse himself gave a totally memorable performance as a gleefully sadistic Nazi officer who thoroughly delighted in torturing his female prisoners.
Cresse had me come up to his lavishly furnished office on Sunset Boulevard where he had his formally uniformed black butler serve us iced tea with sprigs of mint. I sat there drinking the overly sweet concoction while Bob outlined in great detail the plan for the project that he wanted to do.
When he finished, he asked me, “So what do you think?”
“I can do it,” I told him.
“I know you can,” he said, “and you will.”
Then he provided me with a 35mm print of the black-and-white softcore Japanese film that I was supposed to copy almost frame for frame into an all-new hardcore version. Cresse wanted the dialogue copied word for word and the picture more or less scene for scene.
I took the film to the lab and screened it in their screening room while making a dialogue script from the dubbed English dialogue. Then I transposed this all into a screenplay that copied the film scene for scene, just as Bob Cresse wanted.
It was shot in 35mm on Fujicolor negative stock and was directed under the pseudonym Robert Husong. When it was released to the theaters, it ended up being titled The Love Slaves.
Bob Cresse had come up for the beginning of the shoot and he stayed in a large luxurious suite at the Chinatown Holiday Inn. He invited me over for a room service banquet of Holiday Inn Chinese food in his room, which I gingerly picked at and pretended to enjoy, while he related stories of many of his numerous experiences during the early days of the exploitation film business.
“So are you ready to make the film, Bob?” he asked as he singlehandedly polished off a double-order plate of Cantonese-style egg rolls.
“I’m ready,” I replied as I watched him lick the egg-roll grease off each of his fingers.
“Good,” he said, and he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a .38 Special Smith & Wesson revolver and began waving it around. I backed away warily. Then he showed me the cylinder, revealing that it was unloaded.
There is an oft-told story that Cresse once visited his rivals Dave Friedman and Dan Sonney at their place of business, and when Dave took him to the warehouse in the back, where all their old props were stored, Bob pulled out his handgun—probably the same .38-caliber revolver that he was brandishing now—and put three carefully aimed shots into the ancient, dusty stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling. The old croc was a relic of one of the old Sonney Amusement Enterprises African exploitation pictures.
I had seen the bullet holes in the side of crocodile, so I assumed the story to be true. At any rate, it was a well-known fact that Cresse liked playing with and shooting off guns.
Much to my relief, Bob flipped out the bullet cylinder to show me that it was unloaded, and then he handed the gun to me. “You said you needed a gun for the film,” he said. “You can use one of mine. It’ll save you from having to rent one.”
“Thanks, Bob,” I said appreciatively.
“Just be careful and don’t shoot anyone with it.”
“Oh, I’ll be sure not to.”
One of Cresse’s business associates, a sinister-looking guy with short, dark curly hair named Fadik “Freddy” Gasparian, had come up with him. Freddie looked like a tough mobster from the Armenian mafia but he turned out, in reality, to be a real pussycat.
After Bob left to go back to Los Angeles, Freddy remained up in San Francisco to administer the money for the production as well as keep an eagle eye on the progress of it. Freddy was actually a real nice guy who was ready and willing to help with pretty much anything, whenever we needed him to do so. He even managed to come up with an interior location for us by contacting one of his relatives who lived up there.
We were filming with 35mm short-ends, which meant more frequent reloading of the camera, but the shoot still came off without a hitch. I wanted the film to have a cold, grim, and grimy appearance—sort of a San Francisco film noir look—and I think we managed to pull off just that. By the time we finished shooting, I was relatively happy with what we had accomplished.
While I was in San Francisco, I finally got to meet Alex de Renzy, and also met Lowell Pickett and his partner Arlene Elster who operated the Sutter Cinema. Before I left town, the theater owners Art and Jim Mitchell also expressed a desire to meet with me, so I was driven to their office at one of the Mitchell Brothers Theatres, the O’Farrell, where they laid out some big lines of cocaine on a large mirror and invited me to partake of the white powder before showing me their operation. I was suitably impressed.
Toward the end of the year, when business had started to really pick up and I was busy working on a couple of projects simultaneously, I got a call from Armand Atamian, who told me to come over to his office on Cordova Street. Armand owned the theater accessory business United Theatrical Amusements.
I was shown into his office. He was sitting behind his desk and his cousin Gil Atamian was sitting next to him. They were shelling and eating these fresh jumbo gulf shrimp that lay in a pile on some butcher paper on Armand’s desk. Gil Atamian was a New York theater owner who I had met and talked with in Jamaica at the AFAA Convention.
“Have some shrimp,” Armand said between bites. “Gil just flew in from New Orleans.” I accepted the invitation and wished that I had a beer to go along with them.
The conversation had stopped when I entered the room, but Gil decided to resume it. “So, Chinn,” Gil said. “When are you going to make a movie for me?”
I had been hearing this question a lot lately, which, I suppose, was a good thing. “I’ve sort of got a lot on my plate right now, Gil,” I began. “Joe Steinman wants me to make a film for him, Tobalinas want me to make a film for them.”
But Gil ignored what I had said. “I heard you made a film for Ruby for five grand,” he went on. “You want to make one of those for me?”
I really didn’t want to continue making those $5,000 films for these people. By the time I’d shelled out the money for all the expenses and paid the salaries of the cast and crew, I didn’t even have as much as a grand left for myself, which was very small compensation indeed for all the risks I had to take making the film—not to mention all of the hard work I had to do just getting it made and edited. I had made considerably more money making The Love Slaves for Bob Cresse, and I had some other irons in the fire.
I suppose Gil sensed my reluctance because he said, “Oh come on, do a guy a favor. I could use a film from a good director.”
Gil was a nice guy and I didn’t want to turn him down; besides, he called me a good director. So I guess I was officially considered a film director now. Strangely enough, after all this time, I had never thought of myself as a real movie director. We had been running around, making these films on the sly, churning them out at such a rate that I really gave no thought to the fact that I was actually directing as well as producing them.
“OK, Gil,” I told him. “I’ll make a film for you.” Then I sat back and quietly enjoyed the pleasure of the realization that I was now officially a movie director.
Unfortunately, I really didn’t have any ideas or scripts at the moment so I got together with a film editor friend named Jack Tucker, who conveniently happened to have a script on hand—almost everyone in Hollywood seems to conveniently have a script on hand—and produced a quick down-and-dirty one-day wonder for him titled For Love of Money, which was directed under the pseudonym Ben Koren. To keep the costs down, the picture was shot quickly and quietly in South Pasadena. And so Gil had his film.
Thankfully, since I had been shooting the rest of my films up in San Francisco, I had managed to get through a whole year without having to put up with John Holmes. But this was soon to change.
And that’s another story.