Hollywood—Mexico—San Francisco
—1975 to 1976
Johnny Wadd is Here at Freeway FIlms & the Star Sysytem
By 1975, my films were playing almost exclusively in the larger theaters that had begun to show adult fare as the old storefront mini theaters began to gradually fade away or become adult bookstores and arcades. Even those early Johnny Wadd films, now pirated and blown up from 16mm to 35mm, were playing some of the larger theaters, in what were advertised as so-called Johnny Wadd Film Festivals.
By this time budgets had gone up so the films that we made could now be a little more elaborate. It was around this time that I hooked up with a producer who would talk me into making the next series of Johnny Wadd movies, as well as some other films for his own company.
It all started one day toward the end of 1975, at Burt Steiger’s Pacific Film Lab while I was sitting in the waiting room. I was patiently waiting for a print of The Devil’s Garden to roll its way through the processing machine when a tall, well-dressed blonde-haired guy who could easily have been a plainclothes cop approached me and said “Bob Chinn?” I didn’t see anyone else in the waiting room so I figured he must be addressing me. I didn’t know who he was, but I saw no reason to deny it, so I replied, “That’s me.”
He then introduced himself as Dick Aldrich and told me that he produced films under the name Damon Christian; he was a distributor as well as a partner with Armand Atamian in a production and distribution company called Freeway Films. I had known Armand Atamian off and on for a few years because Art Burnham had initially introduced him to me, and not only did I frequently see him at AFAA get-togethers but he was also the owner of United Theatrical Amusement, the major motion picture accessory company of the adult film business.
Armand’s accessory company distributed the coming attraction film trailers, movie posters, and still sets to the theaters. I also knew and had made a film for his cousin Gil Atamian, who owned some theaters in New York. But I had never really done any business directly with Armand before.
Dick then told me that he had produced and was currently distributing a film called Beach Blanket Bango, which had been directed by a former classmate and old friend of mine from UCLA named Jim Bryan under the pseudonym Morris Deal. I hadn’t seen the film but I’d heard that it was very good. According to Dick, they were doing very well with it.
Aldrich invited me to go with him to the bar in the bowling alley across the street from the lab, and over drinks he told me that Freeway Films was going into the film production business in a big way. He asked me if I had any projects ready to go and if I would be interested in joining them. It was an interesting proposition, so I quickly gave it some serious thought.
The first thing I told him was that I really wasn’t very interested in doing the production aspect on any more pictures. Both producing and directing a picture was too much of a chore. At this point in my career, I preferred to concentrate solely on directing.
Dick smiled and said that would not be a problem—he’d handle all the production chores and I’d be free to concentrate on the directing. This was basically what I was looking for, and this potential deal was now all beginning to sound pretty good to me.
I realized that I did have a somewhat ambitious Johnny Wadd project which had been inspired after a brief trip to Baja California, Mexico. It was called White Gold, and I had written the entire screenplay over the course of one very long night alone in my apartment while consuming a quart bottle of Gusano Rojo Mescal from Mexico. But it had never been filmed because the production budget would have been far too high for what we were able to spend at the time.
Still, a bigger budget Wadd film had a lot of potential, given the seemingly enduring popularity that the character seemed to have. Of course, since I had sold those shoestring-budgeted films outright long ago, I had no claim to any of the huge profits that they were currently generating. A new Johnny Wadd film, however, could prove to be another story altogether.
White Gold was somewhat of an epic Johnny Wadd adventure set along the Pacific coastline from Baja California on up to the port of San Francisco, as Johnny followed the route of a big heroin smuggling operation. There was a solid plot and a lot of violence and action. It was a story of friendship and betrayal, of hate and love, violence and revenge.
In short, it had just about everything most porn films seemed to shy away from, and that was why it appealed to me. And, of course, there was also a lot of sex thrown into the fray for good measure. I had absolutely no doubt that it would make one hell of a film. And this time I wouldn’t be giving it away.
When I told Dick about this project he was definitely interested. So I thought over his offer carefully, and by the third drink told him that I might be interested in making the Johnny Wadd films for Freeway on a nonexclusive basis for a director’s fee and ownership percentage of the films.
In addition, I stipulated that I would retain all rights and title to the Johnny Wadd character as well as the stories and screenplays for any of the films that I made for Freeway Films. Aldrich agreed to these terms, and we arranged a meeting with Armand for the following day. That night, I dug out the script for White Gold as well as the preliminary budget that I had made for the production.
The next day, I drove down to Cordova Street. Freeway Films was a small, narrow office at the far end of a sprawling block-long building complex that housed Dan Sonney’s exploitation film business, aptly named Sonney Amusement Enterprises, as well as the self-styled Mighty Monarch of Adult Entertainment, Dave Friedman’s film company EVI, or Entertainment Ventures Incorporated.
At the other end of the complex were the offices and warehouse of Armand Atamian’s United Theatrical Amusement Company, a still photo lab called Ultra Volume Photo, which was run by a gentleman named Fermin Castillo del Muro Jr., and Escalera Production Art, where the artist Rudy Escalera created his unique style of posters and pressbooks for the exploitation film industry as well as the newspaper ads for the mainstream Mexican films released by their American sub-distributors.
There was also a line of apartments built into the west-facing side of the large cinderblock building. Most of them were used for storage, but Dan Sonny and Dave Friedman’s secretary occupied one of them and the recently divorced Richard Aldrich occupied another. We would eventually use both the interior and exterior of his apartment as locations for the forthcoming film project.
We met in Armand’s office in the UTA office section of the building. Armand was sitting behind the big desk in his private office puffing on a big, fat hand-rolled cigar. He greeted me with a nod and simply said, “Chinn.”
I nodded back at him and said, “Armand.” Without being asked, I took a seat next to Dick Aldrich, who was already sitting in front of Armand’s desk.
After I sat down and presented the budget to him, which included the cost of location shooting in Mexico and San Francisco and totaled $20,000, he said three words: “That’s too much.”
Dick had mentioned that Freeway Films generally wanted to keep their production budgets at around $15,000 per picture, so I quickly thought about it, then asked, “What if I can make two feature films out of that twenty thousand-dollar budget?”
Armand thought about this for a long moment and then took the cigar out of his mouth, letting some tobacco juice dribble onto the top of his desk, and said three more words: “Then it’s doable.”
We agreed that in addition to my director’s fee I would own a third of the films and would receive a third of the gross profits, against which I would receive a weekly draw to cover my living expenses. I also retained all rights and title to the Johnny Wadd character and the stories.
With all that settled, Dick shook my hand and said, “Welcome to Freeway Films.” And with that, I plopped my butt behind one of the Freeway Films desks and briefly contemplated my future.
The White Gold project became two separate films. Because White Gold is not a very erotic title, we decided to call the first film Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here, which, while also not a particularly erotic title, would let everyone know that Johnny Wadd was back and now at Freeway Films.
For the second film we came up with a slightly more erotic title in Liquid Lips. Both films were to be shot back-to-back—simultaneously—on location in Mexico and San Francisco, and here in Los Angeles for some non-sex scenes.
I gave John a call, told him I was going to make another Johnny Wadd film, and arranged for him meet me at the Dick Aldrich’s office. Dick decided to let me handle the negotiations with him.
So once again I was reunited with John Holmes, who had upped his fee to $1,000 a day, saying quite frankly that it was what everyone was paying him now. Apparently the star system had finally arrived for adult films.
I told him that we simply didn’t have the budget to pay him that much money, so I shrugged my shoulders and told him that I would probably have to just find myself another Johnny Wadd.
This didn’t seem to sit too well with him, but it induced him to make us a counteroffer of $750 a day, and when I told him that he was still way out of my league he went down to $500 “just for old times’ sake,” which was what I had thought about paying him from the very beginning.
I told John that would work if he would give me the days I would need for any additional location background shots and pickup shots for free. He hemmed and hawed before finally agreeing to broker a deal.
As John was getting ready to leave the office, Aldrich, who had been silently been watching all of this go down, finally spoke up, saying, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
The fact that the star system had finally taken hold was brought home with even more certainty when Armand called me into his office and said, “I think we need to have a big star for this film.”
“We have one,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“John—he’s the biggest.”
“No, Chinn. I mean we need a big girl star.”
Suddenly I could visualize the costs going up like crazy, but Armand was pretty determined about this, so I could only say, “Whatever.” If we were going to have to have a female star appear in the film, I decided that it should be for the first sex scene of the film, to really start it off with a bang. Then put it on the back burner.
We began production by shooting the location footage in Mexico with a three-man crew—Dick Aldrich, John, and me. Since Dick was going down to Mexico as the producer anyway, he agreed to play the non-sex part of the BNDD agent Sam Kelly. So both John and Dick appeared in the Mexican location footage as actors and also helped with the equipment. We drove down into Baja California and began by shooting some scenes in Rosarito Beach, where we happened to luck onto a small Mexican circus set up in a vacant lot.
“You know something,” I told Dick. “This would make a great background for the scene where Johnny Wadd meets with Sam Kelly.”
“Then let’s do it,” Dick agreed.
We didn’t ask permission. We just pulled out the camera and started shooting. It was at this point that I realized that I hadn’t bothered to discuss wardrobe with John.
In those days, it was the responsibility of the actor to supply his own wardrobe, since these productions operated on such a tiny budget. The only coat that John had brought with him was a white denim jacket with a huge, hideous embroidered blue circular design on the back.
“Why the fuck did you bring that thing?” I asked him.
“Well, we’re supposed to be in Mexico,” he answered, “and I thought this jacket looked sort of, you know, like Mexican. I bought it especially for this shoot.”
“Sure you did,” I said skeptically, knowing that we’d be stuck with using the thing for the remainder of the film.
After shooting the scene at the circus we picked up a few quick shots in the town of Rosarito Beach proper, of Sam Kelly’s character being trailed by an Oriental villain Frankie, which of course was played by me. These shots would appear in the titles. We were grab-shooting all of these scenes MOS—without recording sound—but there were only a few lines and it would be relatively easy to dub them in later. We would shoot the scene quickly in one take and get the hell out of there before anyone came around asking questions.
Then we moved on to the Rosarito Beach Hotel to pick up some background shots with John before driving farther down to do the main location photography in the quiet and beautiful seaport town of Ensenada.
The first day in Ensenada was spent primarily scouting locations and grabbing whatever shots we could. Luckily, I had brought along the camera, which was a good thing because we found a place on the hill above the town, from which I captured a terrific panoramic shot of the sleepy seaside town and the beautiful bay, the Bahia Todos Los Santos.
After we got back to our motel, I noticed there was a street vendor across the street selling fresh oyster cocktails from his pushcart.
“Hey Dick!” I yelled out. “You feel like eating some oysters?”
“Sure,” he replied.
We shot a quickly improvised scene of Sam Kelly getting an oyster cocktail from an Ensenada street vendor. I wanted to do a slow buildup title sequence for Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here that alternated between the first sex scene with the big-name female star and Sam Kelly’s precarious predicament down in Mexico. It would be a title scene like the way Sergio Leone was doing in his Westerns. I thought some shots of this Mexican kid shucking oysters for Sam would work well for that.
Although I did have a basic film script to work from, I found myself improvising as various opportunities during the location shoot presented themselves. If these scenes looked somewhat unpolished and amateurish, it was primarily because I was forced by circumstances to handhold the camera most of the time.
Toward the end of the day, we ended up at a deserted beach a few miles outside of Ensenada, which, I decided, would be a perfect location for the shot that would end the film. Since we were there and a beautiful sunset was looming on the horizon, I decided to make the shot. We parked the car, and I took out the camera and John carried the tripod down to the beach. I got the shot set up just in time to grab the sunset in the background.
“See that little outcropping of rocks over there,” I told John. “I want you to walk along the beach, then go over near that big flat rock, squat down as if you’re relaxing, and look thoughtfully out to sea.”
“What am I supposed to be thinking about?” he asked, in true actor fashion.
“You’re thinking about love and death and the manifold waking of mankind to suffering and endurance, you bonehead. What the hell do you think you would be thinking about at the end of the fucking film? We got to make the shot now or we’ll lose the sunset!”
John nodded, and when I called action, he entered frame and walked on over to the rocks. He sat down and looked out at the ocean. Then he suddenly leaned forward and put his arms around his knees, still looking thoughtfully out at the ocean. It made the scene play much better than I had originally envisioned.
The sun had gone down but there was still enough light reflecting off the water to grab a closer shot, so we could see the reaction on his face, which I really needed to do in order to make the scene work. As I was shooting it I told him, “I like that little action you did, you know. I think it really makes the scene work.” He was still in character for the shot, but behind the pained expression on his face the ghost of a smile briefly lit up in his eyes. I had the shot I wanted, and I turned off the camera and said, “Cut!”
One thing I have no problem admitting is that in spite of all of his obvious faults, John was a natural when it came to performing. He was a very quick study. He only had to look at the script pages once and he would deliver his lines exactly as they were written, even if the dialogue sometimes proved awkward to say. He would not correct it or modify it to make it easier for himself; I had to do that, and if I did, he would always remember and deliver the new lines easily on a single take.
In some ways John and I shared a similarly dry and somewhat sarcastic sense of humor, and we were constantly ribbing and kidding each other. We had our share of “in jokes’” that no one else was aware of. Sometimes people around us didn’t realize that whenever I made a sarcastic dig at him it was actually a kind of backhanded compliment. They usually expected him to get uptight and pissed off about it and were always rather surprised when he didn’t.
Of course, this was a grab-and-run shoot. We had no filming permits, so we had to be very discreet, especially when we were shooting in the town where people could see us. This meant handholding the camera most of the time instead of setting it on a tripod, so if necessary we could make a quick getaway before anyone with authority came around to ask questions. But we were used to it. In those days, nobody applied for a filming permit for a porn film.
Unfortunately, on the last day of the Ensenada location shoot, our luck ran out on us. We were shooting in front of the Ensenada Jail—which in retrospect was a pretty stupid thing to do—the scene where John and Dick get out of jail and walk down the street just before they are about to be attacked by the villain’s henchmen. We would shoot the actual attack and fight scene with the henchmen back in Los Angeles.
As I began the shot, I noticed that two Mexican-Indian women dressed in their traditional garb had walked into frame as they crossed the street to go over to the entrance of the jail, and it occurred to me that they were probably wives going over to visit their incarcerated husbands. The women both reached the entrance just as John and Dick were walking out, and I thought, “Wow, what a great shot!”
I had just finished that one take and was in the process of reloading the camera with a new magazine when two policemen walked out of the jail and came toward us. I turned away from them and quietly handed the magazine with the exposed film to John, who rapidly stuffed it into his coat and threw the coat into the car. I was hoping with all my fast-beating heart that the policemen hadn’t noticed.
We had all turned around and started to leave when the cops walked up and collared us. My heart sank and I could see the whole location shoot suddenly going straight down the tubes, since all the film we had shot there was in the trunk of the car. It was a very tense moment. One of the policemen said, “Vamanos,” which we all knew meant, “Come with us.” Both of the policemen had very grim looks on their faces as they took us into their nearby office and immediately demanded to know what we were doing.
We nervously told them that we were making a travel film, but the looks on their faces told us that our flimsy explanation did very little to placate them. One of them said it was against the law to shoot pictures of their jail. They all seemed to be very upset about the fact that we had done this.
I have to credit John for some extremely fast thinking, because at this point he opened the film magazine on the camera and pulled out the roll of unexposed film that I had just loaded before we were busted. He diligently handed the now, ruined film to the officers and told them that this was all of the film that we had shot of their jail.
This seemed to reassure them somewhat, but they were still giving us the evil eye and regarding us very seriously, talking with each other animatedly in Spanish. One of the officers picked up the receiver from the phone on the desk as if he was going to make a call but the other quickly said something and after a slight hesitation the man holding the phone receiver put it down again. They both looked over at us, and I began wondering with a certain sense of dread what the inside of the Ensenada jail might possibly be like.
The policeman that spoke the best English then explained that some TV station in San Diego had sent a film crew down a few weeks ago to do some kind of negative exposé on Mexican jails. When the televised segment aired, the Mexican officials were furious. At this time it was still a very sensitive subject with all of the police in Mexico. It all boiled down to a matter of us being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a movie camera.
All three of us breathed a collective sigh of relief when we were let off with nothing more than a stern warning not to shoot any more film in Mexico without express permission, in writing, from the Mexican Film Board and the local authorities.
Thus chastised, we quickly hurried out into the street. “That was a real close call,” John said as we headed toward our cars.
“Thanks for the quick thinking,” I told him.
“Yeah, John, you fucking showoff,” Dick joined in. “Don’t forget you owe me a roll of unexposed film.”
We then quickly got into our respective cars and hightailed it to the border before anyone might have second thoughts about confiscating our camera equipment and all the other numerous rolls of footage that we had already shot there. After we crossed the border back into the United States without incident, it was time for us all to breathe another huge sigh of relief.
For the next stage of the game, Dick and I went up to San Francisco to cast both films. Remembering that I had used the statuesque blonde beauty Enjil von Bergdorfe in The Love Slaves, I decided that I wanted to use her again for the cruel and sadistic villainess in Liquid Lips.
We found her dancing in North Beach at one of Warren St. Thomas’s many nightclubs doing a live sex show onstage with her husband. The nightclub shows had really progressed in the tolerant atmosphere of San Francisco. They both agreed to do the picture. All it took was one casting call to fill in most of the parts.
The San Francisco portion of the shoot went smoothly. A lot of the interiors were shot right in our suite at the Fisherman’s Wharf Holiday Inn, something that would backfire on us a few months down the road. Mike Weldon’s office also provided another location, and he was very gracious in allowing us to use it. After finishing the shoot in San Francisco, we still had a few major scenes to shoot in Los Angeles.
One of the first things we shot in Los Angeles was one of the more complicated scenes: the assassination of Sam Kelly in the Mexican restaurant. I had planned it out in detail in my mind, down to the editing. While it seems pretty crude when viewed today, at the time I was very happy that I was able to shoot this scene with so very little time and money.
The morning after John and Sam have been beaten up by Travis Elliot’s henchmen and gone on a mezcal binge at Maria Luisa’s Cantina, gathering information, they are both terribly hungover. The beginning of the scene finds them sitting in the restaurant ravenously eating a bowl of menudo in order to recover.
When Sam informs him that he’s eating beef tripe, the very thought that he has consumed cow’s stomach makes John’s stomach revolt and he immediately rushes outside to the nearest public toilet, which was another exterior shot that I had previously done in Mexico.
Meanwhile, Ringo enters the restaurant with two armed henchmen.
The scene that follows called for Sam to be blasted away with the henchmen’s shotguns. My old college friend, Conrad Rothman, had been hired as the “powder man” to do the bullet squibs.
This involved actually placing explosive powder charges on the actor to detonate the fake blood that came gushing out of the bullet wounds. Because these were supposed to be shotgun wounds, the powder charges were much larger than those used for the simple everyday bullet wound. Conrad was licensed and certified to do this work but, as in anything, there was always the possibility of a mishap that could result in serious injury.
But the most crucial aspect of Conrad’s job was to make sure that the detonation of the squibs was perfectly timed to when the two henchmen fired their shotguns. Dick, who was playing Sam Kelly, was a real trouper. He simply said, “Let’s get on with it.”
When it came time to shoot the scene, I called “Action!” and Ringo and his henchmen entered the scene. Ringo said his one line, “Señor Kelly,” and the henchmen raised their shotguns and blasted away. Conrad was perfect on his timing with the squibs, and Dick went way above and beyond the call of duty as the shotgun blasts swung him around, forcing him to dive headfirst over the dining table, which broke apart with his weight as he fell on it, then onto the floor where he lay in a dramatically bloody mess.
Miraculously, Dick emerged from the encounter unharmed and still in one piece. Since Dick’s no real stuntman, I had a feeling that the fall he took must have really hurt, but he never complained or said a thing about it.
Then, with Conrad still in tow, we filmed the shootout with Ringo’s boys in the Cantina at Lazaro’s Bar on Vermont and Cordova. We would be filming all of the Mexican bar interiors there, but the first order of the day would be to film the final showdown between Johnny Wadd and Ringo’s boys. The scene would begin with a montage of exteriors that I had shot in Ensenada of John purposefully walking down the Mexican streets looking for Ringo.
We had another important scene to shoot in the bar, which, chronologically in the film, came a few scenes before the one that we had just shot. This scene takes place after Sam Kelly has been killed. Johnny is now after revenge, so he goes to the bar looking for Ringo’s girlfriend so he can find Sam’s killer. When the bartender proves to be uncooperative, Johnny has to threaten him.
The owner of the place, Lazaro Valdez, would appear in this scene as the bartender.
At the last minute, I decided to give the bartender a brief bit of business to develop his character. “The camera’s going to open on you,” I told him, “so when I say ‘Action,’ look around, then pick your nose, hold your finger up and take a quick look at the booger you’ve extracted, then wipe it on your shirt.”
Lazaro nodded. I rolled the camera and he did the actions I had outlined to him almost, but not quite perfectly. I was standing behind the camera and John was standing beside me waiting for his cue. Just before I began the take I had whispered some instructions to him so Lazaro couldn’t hear me.
“John,” I had said, “Grab the bartender’s shirt and hold him just as you did in rehearsal, but then pick up that glass on the bar and break it and hold the broken glass up to his throat to really threaten him. You’ve got to do it right on the first take, ok?” John had nodded so I knew he understood exactly what I wanted him to do.
I cued John and he walked into the shot and did the scene exactly the way I told him to and I got the surprised reaction out of Lazaro that I wanted.
After we finished the shot, Lazaro said, “Shit, man—he scared the hell out of me with that broken glass!” Which was exactly what I was hoping would happen.
In the following scene, Johnny Wadd angrily interrogates Ringo’s American girlfriend Linda Bartels, played by Michelle Scher, and ends up slapping her in the face when she proves not only thoroughly belligerent but totally uncooperative as well. This scene is one that I have been frequently criticized for, especially since violence toward women is now taboo in the adult film industry. At that time, however, there were no such self-imposed industry restrictions.
There were still a couple of very long dialogue scenes that took place in the Mexican police station that had to be filmed, and Carlos Tobalina, the wealthy Los Angeles adult film producer and director, who happened to be a very good friend of mine, had enthusiastically agreed to play the non-sex role of Colonel Torres, the Mexican police commissioner. Carlos and his beautiful wife Maria Pia owned a couple theaters in Hollywood, one on Selma Avenue, and the big X Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, as well as the fabulous old Mayan Theater in downtown Los Angeles.
They also owned and operated their own film production company, which made most of the movies that played in their theaters. Maria had taken me out to dinner a couple of times to try persuading me to make films for them, but I was kept so busy that I never got around to doing it.
Carlos had been so thrilled about doing the role in Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here that he went over to Western Costume on the Paramount Studios lot and rented his own police commissioner’s uniform. He had it specially tailored for him and he showed up proudly dressed smartly, complete with the matching authentic hat and swagger stick, and he ended up doing a spectacular job. This appearance won him the Best Supporting Actor Award at the 1976 AFAA Awards Show.
From that time on, Carlos would always refer to me as his “favorite director.” Briefly, John was a little pissed that he had not won any awards for his thespian performances. Although I didn’t win that year either, I had been nominated for Best Screenplay for that same film.
Aside from Tobalina, the Spanish actress Felicia Sanda had been hired to do a softcore sex scene with John Holmes. She was not a hardcore performer so we felt safe shooting that particular scene in Los Angeles. We shot it in Dick’s tiny apartment. I had purposely lit it very low-key to help disguise the fact that it was a softcore scene, but once the filming got under way I began to regret my decision. Things began to heat up and much to everyone’s surprise, including Felecia’s, it ended up being a very real hot and heavy hardcore scene after all, and we were set up at the wrong angle to fully capture it.
After we finished that scene, I shot the scene where Johnny assembles and loads his gun in preparation for the big shootout with Ringo and his henchmen. John had let us use his own personal single action Ruger .44 Magnum for the film. At least, he said the gun belonged to him. With John, of course, who knew what to believe?
We also still had to do the pickup shots of the Ensenada fight scene, as well as the final shootout at the heroin-processing factory with stuntmen Jerry Wade and Greg Anderson. We were using Dan Sonney’s warehouse complex behind Freeway Films to double for the Ensenada alleyway exterior where they have their fight. When we first looked at the location, Dick had said, “This doesn’t look a whole lot like Mexico.”
“It will,” I told him.
I went over next door to see Rudy Escalera, and he got Azteca Films to send over a big pile of Mexican movie posters with which we proceeded to plaster the cinderblock walls of the surrounding buildings where we would be shooting.
“Now it looks like Mexico,” Dick finally agreed.
Jerry Wade was a good friend of mine: I’d known him from the early days, when he operated a small business of a somewhat questionable nature out of a storefront that had once been a used bookstore on Selma Boulevard. Jerry called it Buccaneer Films, probably because he fancied himself as somewhat of a pirate due to his one glass eye. His business had eventually gone bust, but he still got work as a stuntman or production coordinator or whatever other job, film-related or non-film-related, he could somehow manage to talk himself into.
Both of the stuntmen were enthusiastic and helpful even though we couldn’t afford to pay them very much. Greg was a gung ho stuntman who just plain enjoyed doing stunts, and the more dangerous the stunts the better he liked it. He managed to pull off a great stunt fall from the top of a building. I had been worried that he was going to get hurt, but after we made the shot he was just shaken up a bit.
What remained for that particular day’s shooting schedule was the scene where John guns down Jerry as he’s trying to escape. We were shooting this scene toward the end of the day and we were rapidly losing our daylight. We quickly did the shots that involved Jerry. All that was left was a shot where John comes crashing through the gate and fires his gun. John went around the corner to get in position and take a cigarette break while we set up.
The reflectors had been extended to their maximum to catch the last of the daylight. It was just a matter of seconds before all the daylight would be gone. John was out of sight around the corner. I told him to make it quick because this one take was really do or die.
He shouted, “Ready!”
I yelled “Action!” and right on cue John came crashing through the gate, firing his gun. Then I yelled “Cut!” and said “John, you stupid shit, you still got your cigarette between your fingers!”
He looked down at his hand and said, “Ooops!” But by now the sun had gone down and we didn’t have enough light to reshoot the scene, so we decided to just live with it. So if you’ve seen the film and wondered why John has a gun in one hand and a smoking cigarette in the other, now you know.
The next day, we had to shoot the final exterior pickup scene to complete the film as it had been scripted, which ended up being that somewhat cheesy fight scene between John and me for the sequel Liquid Lips.
Jerry Wade wasn’t around that day to assist in choreographing the fight scene, so John and I simply improvised in our usual amateurish way. It was the last non-sex scene that needed to be done for the film and we were both anxious to just get it over with. As a result, the fight scene ended up looking more like a joke than anything else, but hey, we weren’t making Gone with the Wind here.
All that remained to be shot was the scene that Armand wanted with a star to help sell the film. I had decided that it would be the first sex scene for Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here. Annette Haven was a well-known star, but she was very expensive—too expensive, we had thought at first, for our meager budget.
Fortunately, we did have some money left over because I had come in under budget for the entire production. Dick managed to negotiate a deal with Annette to work for a half day, so we made arrangements for her to fly down from San Francisco. Since hiring a cameraman for this additional day of shooting was out of the question, I would shoot the scene myself in front of the fireplace of Armand’s Hollywood Hills house. When she arrived on the location where we were filming, I realized that she was worth every penny we were paying her.
Unfortunately, because both of them had such massive egos, there had been a clash of personalities between Dick Aldrich and John almost from the very start. It had continued on throughout the shoot, but on this particular day John and Dick weren’t getting along at all. Dick had been drinking and somehow John had managed to push all of Dick’s buttons, but by this time I was pretty disgusted with it all and couldn’t be bothered because I’d simply had it with them.
Annette was getting impatient for things to get started and, truth be told, all I wanted to do was get the film finished. So I finally took Aldrich aside and told him that if they weren’t going to settle down, I was going home. This temporary truce allowed enough time for the scene to be shot. Not as well as I had wanted it to be, but at least it was finished. Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here was finally in the can.
After the shoot was completed Armand Atamian called me into his office. He showed me some newspaper clippings of ads for films that I hadn’t made that boldly stated, “starring Johnny Wadd” or “starring John ‘The Wadd’ Holmes.”
I was aware that some producers had started doing this. I was also aware that some producers were getting together some old non-Wadd John Holmes films as well and advertising them under the banner of a “Johnny Wadd Film Festival.”
Of course I wasn’t really thrilled about all this. “These guys are ripping off your character’s name,” Armand said. “You’re going to have to start protecting your own interests.”
“I know,” I said, “but what can I do?”
“Everyone knows you make the Johnny Wadd films. Everyone knows that the Johnny Wadd character belongs to you.” Armand paused to relight the cigar and took a few puffs. “Tell you what I’m going to do, Chinn. I’m going to put out the word that if anyone uses that name again without your permission, we’re going to sue their asses. But here’s what I want you to do. On these new films we just made, I want you to put your name on them.”
“You mean my real name?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I never use my real name on my films.”
“You did on The Devil’s Garden.”
“That’s a general release film for the exploitation market. All of the sex scenes in it are softcore.”
“What’s the difference? Everyone knows you make the hard films as well. Come out of the closet, Chinn.”
I wasn’t really thrilled about using my real name on the credits of a hardcore porn film. By not calling any undue attention to myself, I thought that I had done a pretty good job of staying out of jail. “You really think that will solve the problem?” I asked Armand.
His answer was, “Bobby, it’s for your own protection.”
So for the first time my real name was going to appear in the credits and on the posters and in the newspaper ads for a hardcore movie. I was fervently keeping my fingers crossed that this would not lead to an arrest. Fortunately, the overall climate concerning hardcore films was beginning to change, and, much to my relief, nothing ever transpired to justify my fears. Also, Armand’s “putting the word out” seemed to have had its effect. The other producers finally realized that the Johnny Wadd name belonged solely to me, and from that point on they stopped billing Holmes as Johnny Wadd and John “The Wadd” Holmes on their films. That was the good news.
The first bad news came after the stills we had taken for the shoot were developed. We had not hired an actual still man for the shoot. The cameraman, Frank Mills, was roped into filling that position by simply knocking off a still from time to time during a rehearsal or right after finishing a shot. Unfortunately he had a lot of other things to do as well—including the work of a gaffer, grip, loader, and his own assistant cameraman, so he didn’t have either the time or the inclination to concentrate on doing the stills. It was a terrible oversight on our part not to hire a still man for the shoot, and this glaring mistake would never be repeated.
But as a result, most of the stills that we had sort of sucked, and we didn’t have anything good enough to use for the posters—extremely important to selling the film to the public. There was no other option open to us; we had to set up a still shoot with one of the local models.
We quickly set up a shooting session with an attractive model at the agent Hal Guthu’s studio on Santa Monica Boulevard for the poster shots. I figured we could also get our money’s worth by shooting a quick softcore scene with John and the model to play under the title sequence of Liquid Lips, so I brought along my 16mm movie camera. Since we had hired the model for the half day, she agreed to do whatever was required for the shoot.
By this point, John wasn’t particularly thrilled about all of these extra days that he had to put in at no additional salary, but I reminded him of the deal he had made with us. He begrudgingly accepted, but he still let it be known that he wasn’t happy about the way it had turned out. When all was said and done, we probably exploited John pretty badly on these two films. But he would manage to eke out his revenge on the next ones.
After we finished the shoot, I sat down at a rented editing table in the tiny, crowded front reception room of Freeway Films and began editing. Dick Aldrich had already booked a play date with Pussycat Theaters, the large adult theater chain in California, so I was racing against time to get both of the pictures finished in time.
Rudy Escalera quickly did the poster artwork and ad mats for all the publicity materials. The press books and posters for both of the films had been rushed into production and were soon ready.
Since we had hardly taken any stills during the shoot itself, Fermin Castillo del Muro Jr. of Ultra Volume Photo had to blow up frames from the original 16mm film negative to fill out the still sets that were sent out along with the posters and press books to publicize the film. These stills weren’t of the best quality, but it was the best that we could do. At least no one complained about them.
Liquid Lips was ready first because the film that was supposed to precede it, Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here, still needed some sound effects that hadn’t yet been recorded and added to it, including the soundtrack for scenes shot in Mexico. Armand was in a hurry to recoup his investment, so he decided to release Liquid Lips first even though it meant releasing the sequel before the first part of the story.
When I brought this up to him, Armand simply chomped on his cigar and authoritatively said, “Who in the fuck, besides you, is even going to give a shit?” So Liquid Lips was rushed into the theaters first.
Surprisingly enough, since it was the first new Johnny Wadd film that had appeared in years, it proved to be a bigger hit than we had anticipated, and this was, of course, a good thing. Pussycat Theaters was thrilled with the grosses, and theaters across the country were scrambling to book it.
Not long after Liquid Lips was released, Armand called me into his office. “Hey, Chinn,” he said in his typical manner of greeting. “Want to take a trip?”
“Take a trip where?”
“To visit your pal Harry Mohney up in Michigan,” he continued, chomping on his cigar.
“He’s not exactly my pal, and why would I want to do that?” I asked him.
“I need you to hand deliver a print of your new film for me.”
At that time Armand had a fear of shipping prints of hardcore films interstate using a common carrier because the feds had been busting and prosecuting for the interstate commerce law violation. It was marginally less risky for a person to carry a print in his luggage, and if he were caught, there was no proof that the law had been violated if the person said the print was his own personal property. Still, transporting pornographic materials across state lines could still lead to trouble. Everything remained in such a grey area that it was difficult to decide.
“So you want to do it?” Armand persisted.
“I don’t know, Armand. I’m really not anxious to go to jail. And I’ve got to finish editing the second film.”
Armand dismissed my concerns with a quick wave of the hand. “You won’t go to jail. And the editing can wait for a couple of days. This thing is hot, now, and the theaters up there are waiting for the print.”
“So when do you want me to go?”
“Your flight leaves tomorrow morning.”
It ended up that I was delivering two prints instead of one. After arriving at the airport in Detroit, I delivered the first print to one of Art Weissberg’s theaters in Southfield. Then, road map in hand, I headed into the wilds of Michigan toward the small town of Durand, the headquarters for Harry Mohney’s adult entertainment empire.
The scenery along the road was beautiful. With the windows down I took in all the fresh country air, the woodsy smell of the forest. Everything seemed so rural, clean, and peaceful, in contrast to the grittiness and grime of the city I had just left. It was a long but pleasant drive. When I first came to it, Durand seemed to be more of a small village than a town, but as I got deeper into the town itself, it grew. I don’t know what I had expected, but this wasn’t it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be somewhat of an important railroad town.
Since I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, I stopped at the first eating place I came to and entered to the puzzled stares of the assorted rednecks inside the place. They looked at me as if it was the first time a Chinaman had ever passed through town. I ordered a ham sandwich and an iced tea, and when I asked for a slice of lemon for the tea, all I got was an amused laugh from the waitress.
It wasn’t hard to find the large, nondescript warehouse where I was supposed to deliver the print because Harry was actually the largest of all the town’s employers. I hadn’t known it before, but his company employed over two hundred of the local people.
Harry wasn’t there and I never saw him on this trip, but the young man who signed for the print promised to tell him that I said hi. As I drove away, I looked back and thought to myself, so this is the main headquarters of one of the largest porn operations in the country.
While I was away, Aldrich had taken it upon himself to record all of the sound effects that we needed for Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here. Dick was using an ordinary old cassette recorder and spent the day recreating the sounds I needed—everything from oysters being opened and scraped to traffic noises, footsteps, payphone sounds. If the shot needed it, he found some way to record it.
In fact, he proved to be extremely imaginative and creative with this difficult and exacting task. Just about everything that he recorded worked out beautifully. We had the sound effects transferred to magnetic film stock and I laid them into the film. After I finished editing them in, Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here was finally released.
Armand proved to be right, and both films ended up being very successful at Pussycat Theaters despite being released and played out of sequence.
The films also raked in the money at other adult theater box offices all across the country. Armand Atamian was happy, Richard Aldrich was happy, and I was happy. The audience, it seemed, was happy too. They apparently remembered the old Johnny Wadd films that I had made and now wanted to see more of them.
Perhaps as a direct result of the success of these films, a man named Dick Witte, who was the head booker for the Pussycat Theater chain, gave me what might be considered the ultimate compliment by letting it be known that he would play any film that I directed.
This sent my stock as a director soaring because it meant that, since the Pussycat chain had so many theaters, a producer’s initial investment could easily be recouped from the film rental guaranteed by that first-run booking. The president of the Pussycat Theater chain, Vince Miranda, even invited Richard and me out to lunch with him and his vice president Jimmy Johnson.
We now had a little more money to work with, so we decided to invest it into teaming John with more beautiful girls and at least one named star in the subsequent Johnny Wadd pictures that we would make. We had used Annette Haven and it had proved to be a big selling point to those who bought the tickets at the box office, so it made sense to continue on with that practice.
For years, we had kept the star system at bay by just making up names for the cast members, but apparently the audience was now recognizing their favorites and creating their own star system for adult films. It was a lesson that was not lost on me. So, like it or not, the star system had finally and irrevocably invaded the world of the adult film and, from what we could tell, it was now definitely here to stay.
Along with the star system came the demands for higher salaries, so the film budgets inevitably had to go up. This marked the beginning of a vicious cycle that would eventually see full fruition with the successful advent of the adult video market. The times they were “a-changin’” and all we could hope to do was be able to change along with them.
Now that I was working in the neighborhood just about every other day, Dave Friedman would frequently collar me, and sometimes Dick, too, and invite us out to lunch with him. Whether we were in a fancy downtown steakhouse or a small neighborhood Mexican restaurant, Dave loved to hold court.
He was a gregarious type of guy who enjoyed being the center of attention, and he would frequently reminisce about the time when he worked the carnival circuit and of his numerous exploits and adventures during the early days of the exploitation film business.
For me, it was a wonderful experience hearing these stories firsthand from someone who had actually been there and done that. Since this period covering the early history of sex films had always been of particular interest to me, I always enjoyed these impromptu lunches, and Dave would always pick up the check for them.
Dave enjoyed talking about working for the legendary showman Kroger Babb and about the films he had distributed—which included several that I had actually seen as a kid while living in Southeastern New Mexico—titles like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mom and Dad, and the wild and wooly African exploitation film documentary Karamoja.
He would usually punctuate his stories with numerous off-color jokes, which he would laugh at himself with unrestrained gusto. I’ve always been much more of a listener than a talker, so in this respect we got on very well. After lunch, he would present us each with one of his huge hand-rolled cigars, which were custom-made for him from Cuban tobacco leaf grown in the Dominican Republic.
In later years, we would get together and drink Grant’s Scotch at Boardner’s Bar in Hollywood, which was across the street from the video distributing company that Dave had some kind of partnership in, and he would continue to recount these stories again, as well as others, to me.
Dave was a different man altogether in the presence of his lovely wife Carol. She was a quiet and demure Southern belle, and whenever he was in her company Dave was always the total gentleman. When she was present, there were no cuss words spoken, and not so much as an off-color joke ever left his lips. Carol was always very nice and friendly toward me. She was a truly a wonderful lady.
I still have very fond memories of the small, elegant dinner parties I would attend at their Hollywood Hills house overlooking Sunset Boulevard.
The idea for my next film project came from a most unlikely source. I had moved in with an attractive strawberry blonde mother of two named Deanna, who, between films, gave me the stability of a normal family life. She was intelligent, emotionally secure, had a great sense of humor, and was not at all bothered by what I did for a living.
Her friends became my friends, and we enjoyed socializing and dining at each other’s respective houses. Deanna’s two small children, a boy named David and a girl named Jennifer, were both well-behaved and delightful. I got along pretty well with them and, remarkably enough, they seemed to accept and get along pretty well with me.
I had really not expected it, but for the first time in my life I was feeling somewhat domestic because I now had some kind of family going for me and was settled down and content on the home front. It was, I had to admit, a very comfortable feeling.
Deanna was not only a thrifty homemaker but she was a great cook as well. She could make a great pot roast, cook pork chops all kinds of ways, and even make a delicious and filling meal from ingredients as simple as some bacon grease, a few potatoes, and water. I’ll have to admit that during the five years that we lived together, she managed to add a couple of inches to my waistline that have remained with me ever since.
She could also repair and sew the missing buttons on my shirt, something neither of the previous women I had lived with had been either inclined or capable of doing.
She also insisted on ironing my clothing, so the wrinkled look I had sported for so many years had now become a thing of the past. At this time in my life she became my rock, my anchor, so to speak. I hadn’t realized it, but I had been adrift now for far too long.
Strangely enough, it was Deanna who suggested the idea for my next film project. We were lying in bed one night, flipping the channels on the television set, and a rerun of the sitcom soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman came on. We watched it for a while, and then she looked at me and asked, “Why don’t you do a porno satire of a soap opera?” I mulled it over for a minute or two and concluded that it was indeed a novel idea.
So the next day, I casually brought up the subject with Dick Aldrich during our morning meeting in his cluttered office, and much to my gratified surprise he too seemed to think that it was a great idea. In fact, after thinking about it for a few minutes, he suddenly became very enthusiastic about it and wanted to get started on the project right away.
He immediately got on the phone to a friend of his, John Chapman, who was actually a milkman but also a writer, and persuaded him to come to the office for a script conference.
The tall, red-headed, freckle-faced guy that showed up at Dick’s office looked like a tame version of the All-American Boy, but I soon learned that his mind harbored a weird and bizarre sense of humor. After we told him about the idea for a porno soap opera satire, he decided that he liked the idea and he immediately set about writing a script for it.
The result was the totally off-the-wall screenplay that Chapman titled Hard Soap, Hard Soap, the first-ever porno soap opera satire. I read the script and couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. It would be something totally different than anything I had ever done before.
At first, Dick wanted to title the film Milkmen Get Up Early, but I pointed out to him that there was only one scene with a milkman in the whole picture, so Hard Soap, Hard Soap it became. I was even happier when the title was subsequently shortened to Hard Soap.
When we were ready to begin preproduction on the project, Dick booked a suite at the Holiday Inn on Fisherman’s Wharf and we both flew up to San Francisco. There was a full-size sitting room where we would hold the cast interviews separated by a connecting door to the bedroom with two queen-size beds.
It was late afternoon when we arrived, too late to begin anything significant, so we kicked back and relaxed. As evening drew near we were getting hungry, so we decided to go out and get a pizza and some beer to bring back to the room.
As we hailed a cab for the nearest pizzeria, Dick came up with an incredibly appealing idea. He looked at me and said, “Why don’t we get a couple of hookers for the night? I can write it off as a preproduction expense.”
“Pizza, beer, and hookers,” I responded. “Sounds like a great idea to me.” Although I’m usually pretty faithful whenever I’m in a relationship, for some reason on this particular night I figured I was long overdue for some extracurricular sexual activity.
Dick asked the cabdriver if he knew of a couple of attractive, clean hookers who would be amicable to spending the night with us, and of course he did. He said that he would pick them up after he took us back, so we gave him our room number. We got the pizza and the beer and went back to our hotel.
The cabdriver had agreed to send the hookers on up to our room. Dick pulled out a big wad of cash—the preproduction budget—and gave the driver a generous tip.
We had finished the pizza and were starting on our third beer when the girls arrived. They both were just as we had ordered: attractive, young, and clean. They were dressed well enough to have not attracted any attention at the front desk. Dick negotiated a mutually favorable deal for an all-night session and, since they wanted the cash in advance, he pulled out his bulging wallet and paid them.
We watched the girls shed their clothes in the sitting room, and then we headed for our beds in the bedroom and turned out the lights. We all went at it until we were totally exhausted. I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep when I noticed that my girl was no longer beside me. I figured she must have gone to the bathroom or something, so I looked up and noticed that Dick’s girl wasn’t beside him, either.
“Hey, where are the girls?” I called out to him.
Dick must have dropped off to sleep because it took him a moment before he groggily sat up and said, “Huh?”
“The girls,” I continued. “I thought they were going to stay the night.”
Suddenly we heard the front door to the sitting room of the hotel suite slam shut and immediately Dick was wide awake. He said, “Oh, shit!” and bolted out of bed and rushed over to the nearby chair where he had laid out his pants to feel the pockets. “My wallet! They’ve got my fucking wallet!” he shouted as he dashed out of the room, clad only in his underwear, in hot pursuit of the two girls. I quickly got out of bed, pulled on my pants, grabbed a shirt, and followed him, hastily putting it on and buttoning it as I ran down the hotel corridor toward the lobby.
When I got to a lobby, a very strange sight greeted me. And what a sight it was: Dick in his underwear chasing two hippie hookers around the large fish tank in the center of the lobby. He caught one of them while the other ran out the front entrance. I held onto the first one while he charged out of the front door to catch the other girl who had his wallet.
Luckily, it was late at night and there were only a few people in the lobby, none of whom seemed particularly interested. After a couple of minutes, Dick walked back into the lobby, dragging the other girl clawing at him as he held her tightly with one hand, and with her opened purse strapped over his shoulder he was counting the money with his other hand.
When he determined that it was all there, he let go of her and said, “OK, girls, you can go.” I let go of the one I was holding and they both hightailed it out of the hotel and were gone in the blink of an eye.
“I thought we’d paid them for all night,” I said as we walked back to our room.
“We didn’t have to pay them,” he said, waving his wallet and two loose hundred-dollar bills. “I figured we were due for a refund on this one.”
The following morning we got right down to business. We had decided to film Hard Soap in 35mm using Panavision equipment and perhaps San Francisco’s Stage A Soundstage, too. It was a good-sized soundstage, the best in San Francisco, where a lot of big-budget commercials as well as feature films were always being filmed, and we hoped that we could somehow work the rental fee of the soundstage into our meager budget.
We had also come up with the brilliant and hopefully money-saving idea to build cheesy sets like a cheap television soap opera might have to give our soap opera spoof a feeling of authenticity. We were also going to attempt to populate the cast with the most bizarre and interesting people that we could possibly find.
While we were up in San Francisco casting in our suite at the Fisherman’s Wharf Holiday Inn, an energetic young man named Elliot Lewis showed up looking for a job on the crew.
We had the intention of bringing our crew up from Los Angeles as we had done before, but since only Dick and I were up there just now, and Elliot seemed eager to please and ready to go, we put him to work making phone calls to find out costs of the local sound stage and the rental equipment and to lock in the various buyouts and other things that we were going to need for the shoot.
Elliot was so quick and efficient doing this job that we couldn’t help but be impressed by the young man. We listened to him as he talked to the suppliers on the phone, bargaining and bringing down prices and making deals.
“You think you could make a deal to get us Stage A with our budget?” Dick asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “I know the guys there. I’ll work something out.”
He managed to get us a great deal on the sound stage, along with the Panavision camera equipment package.
He worked out a price with one of the local caterers that we could afford. We were suitably impressed. He also said that he knew of someone who would work cheaply and do a great job designing and building sets. We told Elliot to give him a call.
At the end of the day, Dick asked Elliot if he had ever worked as a production manager before. Elliot honestly replied that he had not.
“Well,” Dick said decisively, “get used to it, because you’re our production manager now.” Elliot would go on to be the production manager on nearly all of the movies that we shot up in San Francisco. I would also hire him to work on the projects that I did for companies other than Freeway.
He would end up becoming an indispensible part of my production team. Elliot was not only smart and industrious but talented and ambitious as well, so it was no surprise at all that he would later even become a producer himself, eventually going on to a very successful career in the mainstream film industry.
It suddenly made a great deal of sense to hire the majority of our crew here in San Francisco. We had been paying a small fortune to fly in the Los Angeles crew and put them up in hotel rooms—which in San Francisco were definitely not cheap—so by doing this we would end up saving the airfare, hotel room costs, and the per diem that we had to shell out to cover their meal expenses off the set. Hiring Elliot had turned out to be a win-win situation all around.
Since the cameraman Frank Johnson and the gaffer Ted Allen had already been hired in Los Angeles, we brought them up. Ted’s experience and remarkable talent with lighting justified the extra expense. As Dick Aldrich used to say, “Old Ted’s forgotten more about lighting than most of these guys that call themselves lighting directors will ever know.”
But the rest of the crew would be selected from the local talent pool. Elliot set us up with the best makeup artist in the city, David Clark, and got in contact with some other friends, like Curly Eason and a stocky, bearded biker-looking fellow named Sleaze to fill in the various crew positions from gaffer to grip. Elliot’s wife Sheree Eastmore was in charge of the costume department.
On Elliot’s recommendation, a very talented production designer named Bill Wolf had been hired to do the art direction and supervise the construction of the sets. Bill was not only a remarkable artist but he also had an extensive background designing sets for local theater and opera productions, so he ended up being perfect for the job.
Most of these San Francisco crewmembers that we had hired would become regular members of our production team.
One thing I learned was that San Francisco had a relatively large gay community, and instead of being ashamed of it, the city was actually very proud of it. Here was a place where tolerance and freedom of choice reigned supreme, and as a result the gay culture not only flourished but also repaid their unquestioned acceptance by making their own positive contributions to the culture of the place.
I’m ashamed to admit that up to this point in my life I had been profoundly ignorant about gay people and gay culture, probably because I’d just never had the opportunity to meet a lot of gays. Of course, I’ve never harbored any predjudice against people of that orientation. Live and let live has always been my motto.
Upon first meeting him I first thought that our makeup artist David Clark was gay, primarily from the way he spoke and acted and the remarkable affinity he had with all of the actresses. He was able to communicate with them as no one else could. David would gently calm their nervousness and listen patiently to their problems, but most of all he would make them feel beautiful and special, and as a result all of the actresses loved him. It was great for me as well because as a result those actresses would usually come on the set with a positive attitude and ready to work. But, as it turned out, David was married with children. On the other hand, our wiry and rugged set designer and construction supervisor Bill Wolf was not only gay but very proud of it. In fact, he was somewhat of an activist in that department. So I learned that looks could sometimes be pretty damn deceiving.
When Bill had asked me what kind of sets I wanted, I told him, “I want cheesy daytime soap opera-type sets, like for the television show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’m on it.”
The next day he came to me with his designs and they were exactly what I had asked for, so I said, “Build it.”
During the first couple of days of preproduction, after the exhausting casting sessions, I had spent the evenings in the hotel room trying to figure out what I was actually going to do with Chapman’s strange script. It finally occurred to me that here was my chance to do a little bit of experimental filmmaking. At this point in my career I had convinced myself that my justification for continuing to shoot pornographic movies was that it gave me the opportunity to experiment with various film styles and filmmaking techniques.
But what could I possibly experiment with in this case? I contemplated Chapman’s bizarre script, which in a way was surrealistic in its concept. And then the light bulb suddenly went off in my head and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Or, almost. I still wasn’t totally sure, but I was sure enough to bring up the subject. By this time, Dick was on his third glass of vodka and orange soda.
“Hey, Dick,” I began. “You mind if I make this thing a little surrealistic?”
He burped loudly before he answered, “You’re the director.”
“That I am,” I said, “but what I’m going to do may or may not work. I just wanted you to be aware of that.”
“Just make sure you shoot all the sex scenes.”
The entire shoot went off without a hitch from beginning to end, even the off-the-wall improvised scene we did with the crazy patients in the psychiatrist’s office.
Everyone seemed to be having a ball with the improvisation. Laurien Dominique and Candida Royalle were true delights to work with and even John Holmes, wearing a new three-piece suit, was more serious than usual, perhaps because he was playing a doctor in this one.
By the third day of the shoot, John Holmes had really gotten into his role as a psychiatrist and between setups he was trying to psychoanalyze Laurien Dominique, who was busily ignoring him. The rest of the cast seemed to be enjoying themselves and while I knew what I was doing, I was still also trying to make some sense out of exactly what it was that I was doing.
For some strange reason that I can’t quite fathom, Hard Soap became quite a big hit. Personally, I didn’t really think it was that good of a film. I didn’t think that I had any talent at all for staging or directing comedy. It was certainly a strange film, but I have to admit that I did have a lot of fun directing it. I’d never directed anything quite like it.
That is, until the next film project came along.