Hollywood—San Francisco—1978 to 1979
Further Adventures with Italian Businessmen
in Suits
Pizza Girls was another idea that I have to attribute to my girlfriend Deanna, and it came about one evening just after we’d had a pizza delivered to our door. As we were eating the pizza, she looked up at me and said, “Why don’t you make a film about a place that has pizza delivery girls on skateboards who deliver pizza—and other things?”
I thought it was a novel concept that had some serious potential. When I brought it up to Dick Aldrich at our next production meeting, he immediately had John Chapman come into the office and signed him up to write another one of his off-the-wall screenplays.
By now I had become more familiar with Chapman’s thoroughly demented and offbeat sense of humor, and I was looking forward to transferring those surrealistic ideas to film.
Again we hit another roadblock: Armand informed us that he wanted to recoup his costs from The Jade Pussycat before he ventured out to produce another film. Like the last time, this rejection didn’t faze Dick in the least. He combed through his list of sub-distributors and theater owners, then got on the phone and put forth his sales pitch until Chicago sub-distributor and theater owner Pat Ricardi agreed to put up the money.
Ricardi also sent one of his partners, a very large, very intimidating man who wore a diamond-studded solid gold Rolex and dressed in an impeccable, extremely expensive hand-tailored Italian suit. Instead of a tie he wore enough heavy gold chains around his thick bull-like neck to anchor a freighter. This gentleman was named Mario Nuzo.
Mario was there to look after Ricardi’s interests. He also looked like he could break every bone in your body without exerting too much effort. After seeing Mario, I began to worry about the unnerving possibility that I might be wearing concrete shoes if I didn’t make them a good picture.
He appeared to be much more dangerous than the representatives of the Peraino family that had been on the set when I had made the film Candy Stripers. Along with Nuzo came a very cute, young, pixie-faced brunette named Toni Damiani, who was his companion and, I assumed, his girlfriend.
While we were doing preproduction on the film in San Francisco, we all stayed at the Holiday Inn on Fisherman’s Wharf. Each night, Mario would take us out to a different Italian restaurant where he was always treated with the total respect and deference due to a man of his particular standing. The owners of the restaurants would always come out and greet him, and they would talk to each other in Italian. It was an interesting and enlightening experience.
Fortunately, from day one Mario and I got along fabulously. He had seen several of my films and told me, “I got a great respect for your talent, and you’re an OK guy. If anyone gives you any kind of trouble, you let me know. I’ll take care of it.” He patted me on the back and this reassured me somewhat.
Then something happened that sent my heart jumping all the way up to my throat. The day before the shoot, Mario took us to dinner. We had just finished the appetizers when I felt the toe of a shoe nudging my leg. Mario was talking to Dick, but his girlfriend Toni was smiling, and I suddenly felt the toe of her shoe run the full length of my leg and in toward my thigh.
To say that I was scared shitless would be an understatement. What kind of a game was this girl playing? I wondered. Was this some sort of test? I liked Mario a lot and I certainly didn’t want to piss him off by getting involved with his girl. In fact, I really didn’t want to get involved with his girl or any girl at all. I had a very happy home life. I still had most of my teeth and all of my fingers, and my toes and other body parts were relatively intact, and I really wanted to try and keep them all that way. Then the entrée arrived and I heaved a sigh of relief as I felt Toni’s foot withdraw.
I saw Mario looking directly at me. “What’s wrong, Chinn?” he asked. “You look like you’re a million miles away.”
“I was just thinking about the film,” I answered, and I could feel my face flushing with either guilt or embarrassment or both.
“Good,” he agreed. “That’s what you should be thinking about.”
After that night, nothing else happened. Toni was cordial but never made any mention at all of the little footsie incident, nor did it ever occur again. I never found out if she had been doing that to test me or just to make me feel uncomfortable.
The Pizza Girls shoot ended up being a lot of fun for me, but less so for Dick Aldrich. There was a lot of pressure on him, and Dick had begun to drink pretty heavily. He was having problems with Armand Atamian, who was incensed and jealous of the fact that Dick was now working with other producers and had begun to distribute those films under his own company while still using Freeway’s office to make the bookings.
Armand especially didn’t like the idea of his partner working with Pat Ricardi and Mario Nuzo, whom he called “those Chicago Mafia boys.” Armand, I discovered, was petrified by Mario Nuzo, even though Armand didn’t seem to be a guy who was easily scared by someone.
Dick later told me that the reason was because Mario had once set Armand’s coat on fire—while Armand was still wearing it. I suppose Mario had a strange sense of humor at times, but this was totally lost on Armand, who actually feared for his life whenever Mario was around.
“The guy’s a total psycho,” Armand had said to me before we left to meet with Mario for the Pizza Girls shoot.
“Funny,” I said. “To me he seems like a really nice guy.”
“Well, you and Richard just better watch your asses,” was the only further thing that Armand had to say on the subject.
Dick also had a very low tolerance threshold for John Holmes, and like the mischievous kid that he was, John often liked to play on that weakness. He took almost a perverse pleasure in needling Dick with antics that would almost send the poor guy over the edge.
As a direct result, Dick was drinking even more than he usually did. One time, John was proving to be more obnoxious to Dick than usual.
Dick shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t see how you can work with that guy.”
“Sometimes it gets to be a little difficult,” I admitted.
“A little difficult. Well, that’s an understatement if I ever heard one. You know, I just really can’t stand that dipshit Holmes,” Dick told me.
I could only return with, “Please try and make an effort, Richard. You know we have a film to finish.”
At times we were all walking a real fine line. When this happened, I would step aside while their two massive egos clashed and try to figure out how I would keep the shoot on schedule. Occasionally, if it went on too long, I’d have to step in, but usually Dick’s good sense as a producer kicked in long before that.
Chapman had written a small supporting part for me as John’s comic sidekick in the pizza parlor. I really didn’t want to play the part, since I’m far from being a comedian and I’m a terrible actor to boot, but both Dick and John insisted that I play the role. “The role was written for a Chinese guy,” Dick said.
“Well we can get some other Chinese guy,” I countered. “There’s lots of Chinese guys up here in San Francisco.”
“Yeah, like who?”
“How about Jimi Lee, you remember, the guy from The Jade Pussycat?” I answered. “He’s even more Chinese than me.”
So we had Elliot try to get hold of Jimi Lee, but sadly he was nowhere to be found.
“How hard did you try to find him?” I asked Elliot suspiciously.
“I tried everyone,” Elliot replied. “The guy just isn’t around.”
“Guess you’re going to have to do the part,” Aldrich said with a shrug.
“You don’t seem to understand. I don’t want to do the part.”
“Well what choice do we have?” Aldrich countered.
“Why don’t we change the part to a Caucasian guy?” I offered.
“Wouldn’t be the same,” John chimed in.
“We’re just going round and round here.”
“So just do the role.”
I kept protesting, but they would not be swayed. The role, they said, had been specifically written for me by Chapman, and therefore I had to play it. Now this was a lame reason if I ever heard one. But it seemed as if the only time that both of them could agree on anything was when it came to tormenting me. So, for the sake of having some peace once again, I reluctantly agreed, reminding myself that I was definitely going to get back at Chapman for this.
Elliot had scored an actual working pizza parlor for us as a location, and we consequently were forced to shoot only during certain hours so that their business wouldn’t be interrupted. It wasn’t an ideal situation but we would be able to make it work. It was far more economical to shoot this way than to build an actual working set on the sound stage. However, one day, one of the grip blankets used to deaden the sound had been placed too close to the pizza oven and suddenly caught on fire. John, who was closest to the fire, managed to maintain his cool as he grabbed another nearby grip blanket and began trying to snuff out the flames before I found a fire extinguisher and handed it over so he could calmly put out the fire. Once again, John had kept a cool head and defused what could well have easily become a very disastrous situation.
No one knew how to skateboard, of course. It had never occurred to us during the preproduction to locate anyone to instruct them, so we had a difficult situation on our hands. As a result, some hilarious situations ensued during the filming. In fact, their inexperience is somewhat evident in some scenes, but on our schedule and budget we had no time for retakes. Eventually, a couple of them ended up becoming pretty adept at it.
As with John Chapman’s screenplay for Hard Soap, the premise of Pizza Girls was pretty silly. But therein, as they say, lay its charm. Running wild with my initial idea of skateboarding pizza girls who deliver much more than pizza, Chapman hatched a hackneyed conspiracy by the pizza parlor’s devious fried chicken competitor to regain their previous fast food market dominance by putting the cute skateboarding pizza girls out of business. Stranger things happen as the film progresses toward its inevitable ending, especially when the dreaded Night Chicken enters the scene to seal the pizza girls’ doom.
What it all added up to, in the end, was a whole lot of nonsensical fun. At least, in spite of it all, I had a lot of fun. I had never imagined myself to be a director of erotic comedy, and I really can’t say how successful I ever was with this particular sex film genre, but here I was directing my third sex comedy project.
Sound mixer Rachel Lyon would later go on to produce the excellent feature movies Tell Me A Riddle and Thousand Pieces of Gold before continuing on to a remarkable career as a television producer and director.
In later years, when interviewers asked if I ever made films for the Mafia, I would always answer that I did happen to make a few films for some Italian businessmen in suits. Pizza Girls had been an interesting experience, but since Armand indicated that Freeway Films was ready to produce another Wadd film, it was now time for me to move on to the next project.
The Jade Pussycat had opened in theaters while we had been up north shooting Pizza Girls, and the initial run had ended up being enormously successful, not only with the Pussycat Theaters but with the rest of the country as well. Not only that, the Johnny Wadd films and even Hard Soap were all being snapped up by the foreign market. This is probably what prompted Armand to rush back into production. Eventually, The Jade Pussycat would prove to be the most successful of all the Wadd films, both financially and critically.
But even at this point in time, it was so successful that we unanimously decided to make a sequel to it called The China Cat. I quickly whipped up a somewhat goofy screenplay that incorporated a spoof of the then-popular television series Charlie’s Angels.
The screenplay that I had written had three pretty young female private detectives working for a mysterious benefactor going after the priceless jade artifact that John has in his possession. It wasn’t a very original idea, to be sure, but it was about all I was able to come up with on such short notice. And, as Armand would not hesitate to say, “Who gives a flying fuck anyway? It’s a fuck film, after all. Just don’t get all arty and shit like that. And make sure you put some good looking broads in it!” True words of wisdom, to be sure.
Armand’s attractive young niece Julia St. Vincent was now taking a much bigger part in the business, so she came up to San Francisco for the preproduction meetings and the casting. It appeared that she was now acting as Armand’s proxy not only for the preproduction but also during production; now it seemed as if Armand had begun to take a more active interest. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, I thought at the time. We didn’t need interference.
Kal Lahue also joined us to sit in on and take stills of the casting, and he would also stay on to shoot the production stills of the film itself.
Although China Cat was admittedly one of my less-inspired screenplays, the film would feature some of the most attractive newer girls, including Chris Cassidy, who had reinvented herself as Monti Stevens, and a classy-looking brunette newcomer Jennifer Richards, appearing in what would be her only adult feature film.
Monti Stevens, of course, was an avowed lesbian, but she didn’t mind doing sex scenes with men. “They’re only sex scenes, after all,” she would say. “Not real life.” But she would be especially enthusiastic if she had a sex scene with an attractive girl.
I once asked her, “Doesn’t your girlfriend get jealous when you have one of these scenes with another girl?”
She casually replied, “Nah, she realizes that it’s all just work.”
John had showed up for the shoot a couple of days early. He’d recently had his hair cut and styled, so he looked presentable. But he had also brought with him that same tired old dark blue suit that he had worn in the first Johnny Wadd film.
By now the poor thing was starting to get a little threadbare. I took one look at it and said, “That suit has got to go.”
Elliot took a closer look at it and agreed. He came up with enough money out of petty cash to send John out with his wife Sheree Eastmore, who was doing wardrobe on the shoot. In a few hours, Johnny Wadd had a stylish, brand-new suit complete with matching vest, so in keeping with this new look for the private eye we decided to provide him with an appropriately stylish apartment.
Since he probably had an inkling that this would end up being his last Wadd production for Freeway Films, Dick Aldrich got Armand to spring for the largest budget yet for a Wadd film. We went up to San Francisco for the shoot, and after we finished the casting we kicked off the shoot with a sumptuous dinner at the fabulous Vanessi’s Restaurant in North Beach. We ordered the Beluga caviar appetizer and an extremely pricey bottle of a decent vintage Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux wine. John said, “I’m not really big on red wine.”
“Trust me, John,” I assured him. “You’ll like this one.”
He took an exploratory sip and wrinkled his nose. Then he took another sip and nodded his head slightly, saying, “Not bad.” He ended up drinking almost half the bottle by himself.
We also showed John how to eat the caviar by putting it on buttered toast, then topping it with the chopped onion and hard-boiled egg. It was the first time that John had ever eaten caviar and he found that he liked it a lot, as well as the little ritual that went along with preparing and eating it.
Elliot saved the empty Château Lafite Rothschild bottle as a souvenir, and it eventually ended up as a featured performer in a scene from a film I would make a few months later called California Gigolo.
A day before the shoot, we flew our regular camera and lighting crew up from Los Angeles. Even though we had a larger budget, we were still shooting in 16mm for blowup to 35mm, which meant that a lot of Ted Allen’s imaginative and subtle lighting effects would inevitably be lost in the process. But in spite of this, there was still no reason why we shouldn’t try to make the lighting look as professional and as artistic as possible, and we all worked diligently toward that goal.
Bill Wolf had done his usual excellent job on the sets for China Cat. I had asked him to do his own recreation of the bar at Vanessi’s Restaurant for the scene in which Jennifer Richards meets John. The set that he came up with for the bar, in the small space he had to work with, was fantastic.
As I began to shoot the scene in John’s apartment, I found that the set somehow seemed to lack for something. The apartment itself was beautifully constructed and immaculately dressed, the way I had originally envisioned it, but I suddenly realized that the large sliding glass doors to the balcony simply opened out onto a dead black night cyclorama.
The old, experienced gaffer Ted Allen was standing around with me, wondering, perhaps, about where he was going to place the lights.
“Something’s just not right about this,” I said.
He said, “Uh huh.”
Then it came to me. I casually asked Ted if he could recreate a city at night out there, beyond the balcony.
He thought for a moment while scratching his beard and then said, “Well your set guy didn’t leave a whole lot of room back there.”
“But I know you, Ted. You can at least do something to make it look a little better, can’t you?”
After another long moment he said, “No problem.”
Ted immediately gathered his materials. He’d put an apple box and a sandbag and a light here and an apple box, sandbag, and light there. He cut out buildings and windows with black construction paper and an exacto knife, placing them around the area while the rest of the crew watched in amazement at the illusion that he was creating out of the most common materials. Then he carefully adjusted the lights to create the perfect balance between light and shadow. In twenty minutes or so, I had a fantastic San Francisco night cityscape glowing outside of the apartment set.
Ted Allen was an old-timer, a former big studio photographer who was not only a true Hollywood legend but also a real artist when it came to lighting for film. He had photographed a good many of the real Hollywood stars back in the 1930s, including Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Jean Harlow, and for a while he was Frank Sinatra’s personal photographer.
Ted really knew how to light the female face. He was also expert at creating all kinds of illusions with light and shadow. No matter what I wanted or asked for, he could always deliver. Back in the old days at MGM his nickname was “Rembrandt,” and Sinatra called him “Farley Focus.”
Also joining us from Los Angeles was an old friend of Dick’s named Jaacov Jaacovi, who had shown up at the office looking for a job after returning from a short stay in Israel, where he had supposedly gone to put in some time in the army but ended up putting in some time laying on the beach at Tel Aviv soaking up the rays instead.
Dick was a soft touch when it came to giving his old friends jobs, so Jaacov was hired on as the postproduction supervisor. Since he was on the set with nothing much to do, I drafted him as my assistant director. Along with Jaacov came Jeffrey Neal, another young man who had shown up at the Freeway Films office eagerly looking to work in any capacity for a film company.
Dick had hired Jeffrey as the continuity person because Dick would subsequently go on to edit the film after the shoot. I had made several commitments to direct films for other distributors, so I wouldn’t be personally editing or supervising the editing for this Johnny Wadd film, although I would come around to oversee it.
We did most of our postproduction sound transfers and sound mixing—which involved marrying the dialogue tracks, sound effects tracks, and music tracks after the final cut—at Irv Nafshun’s Quality Sound Studios housed in an ordinary-looking little office building on Melrose.
Coincidentally, John Forsythe, the voice of Charlie in the TV series Charlie’s Angels, was in another studio at Quality Sound recording the narration for a television documentary at the same time we were in the main studio mixing the sound for China Cat. It didn’t occur to me until later that it would have been cool if I could have persuaded him into doing the few lines required of Charlie’s voice in China Cat—anonymously, of course.
“You should have asked him,” Irv said. “He probably would have gone ahead and done it just for the hell of it.”
I have to confess that I don’t remember a whole lot about the next film that I made. Candy Stripers had been an enormous success, and one of the commitments that I had made was to direct another comedy for the boys at Pacific Coast Films. I guess they decided that the time had arrived to call in that option.
I had committed myself to several projects and was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I read the cute script titled Telefantasy that Steve Antoniou and Charles Belot had written, which they wanted me to direct. It was about a floundering television station that opted for more programs about sex to increase its ratings. I liked the script and thought it would make a fairly good film, so I had agreed to do it.
There were about three weeks until I was slated to do my next project, so I told them if we could slot it into three weeks, I could go ahead and do it.
Arnie Himmelstein said, “Yeah, let’s do it,” so we flew up to San Francisco, did the preproduction and casting, rented the sound stage, and shot the movie.
The budget wasn’t nearly as big as it had been for Candy Stripers, but it was big enough to comfortably get the job done. As with the previous Pacific Coast Films project, the Italian businessmen in suits were around during the shoot to see that the film got made properly and that I didn’t go astray.
The story of the film itself was summed up the best by Jim Holliday’s review in his book Only the Best, which is quoted here: “Clearly the best of all adult films with a media focus—newspaper, magazine, radio, or television plot setting. This unsung Bob Chinn film opens with a cartoon guy and a sex/violence choice… Ratings are low so Program Director Karen Peters (Mimi Morgan) chooses between sex and violence and opts for showing sex. John bristles at going on assignment and Chinn builds the sexual tension between John and Mimi like few big budget films ever take the time to establish. Sex with the scoops…”
Holliday makes the movie sound much better than I actually remember it. The wild, garishly colored massage parlor room set with stylized painted palm trees that Bill Wolf built for me looked like something right out of a Seijun Suzuki film. When I first saw it, I grabbed Bill and asked him, “What in holy hell is that?” He looked hurt so I quickly said, “No, I really love it, Bill. It’s…well, it’s definitely different.”
I do remember that I enjoyed working with Delania and Mimi and, of course, Desiree Cousteau who, as always, was a real kick-in-the-head. Lisa Sue Corey was a new girl I’d never worked with before, but she impressed me so much that I knew she’d be working in more of my movies. We also did an animated title sequence for this movie, something I had never done before.
Telefantasy was filmed in 35mm Panavision at San Francisco’s Stage A. Since shooting Candy Stripers, the remarkable cinematographer Bob Maxwell had passed away, so his son-in-law Ken Gibb ended up taking his place behind the camera for Telefantasy. Kenny turned out to be a remarkable cinematographer in his own right, and whenever he was available he became my top choice for director of photography on many of the films that followed.
Somewhere around this time I licensed the Johnny Wadd character to Joe Steinman’s Essex Distributing Company for a single film called Tapestry of Passion, which would be produced by a good friend of mine named Chris Warfield and directed by another good friend, Alan Colberg.
Chris had a long career as an actor in mainstream feature films and television before he started acting in, directing, and producing adult films. In fact, when I first met him, I told him that I remembered seeing him in the war movie Take the High Ground! when I was only ten years old. He said, “Geez, Bob. You’re making me feel ancient.”
Alan was the one who had originally approached me with the script for Tapestry of Passion. I’ve always liked my fellow director Alan Colberg, who was a very charming, kind, and generous fellow, and I always did have a soft spot for his charming and attractive late wife, Laurie.
When Alan told me that he had written a Johnny Wadd script and asked me to read it, I told him “Alan, I don’t feel like making a film with John just now.” When he said that Chris Warfield would produce it for Essex, I said, “Why don’t you direct the film yourself?”
“You sure you don’t mind?” he asked, and I realized that that was really what he had wanted to do in the first place.
I didn’t hesitate at all to reply, “Of course not. Be my guest. And enjoy John.” So I gave my permission, and Alan made the film for Essex.
The budget for the Essex Johnny Wadd film would be over twice the amount that I had ever spent on the most expensive Wadd film to date. Essex obviously had much deeper pockets than Freeway Films. But I actually preferred struggling with the smaller budgets to make a film. It was much more challenging that way.
I had grown a little weary of working with John, and to be quite honest I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to continue making Johnny Wadd films myself. I’d read Alan’s script, and while it was not quite the same as something that I would write for the Wadd character, I thought that it was a good script and I knew that Chris and Alan would make a good film out of it, especially with the big budget that Essex was willing to put up to make it.
Unfortunately, I never got around to seeing Tapestry of Passion so I really can’t comment on it myself, but in an article about the Johnny Wadd films that appeared in the March, 1978 issue of Velvet Magazine, Kalton Lahue said, “On the surface, Tapestry of Passion seemed to have the required elements, while Holmes attempts to stop a sex maniac loose in San Francisco, he comes into intimate contact with such talented lovelies as Annette Haven, Pat Lee, and Leslie Bouvee. Although the mixture concocted by Essex was a tantalizing one on paper, the film lacked one crucial element—Bob Chinn—and it died almost as soon as it opened.
“It’s not unusual for a director to bring off a hit film. But it requires a considerable amount of skill and talent, or at the very least, a good deal of luck to repeat that success with a sequel. This is especially true in sex films since most directors work with low budgets, poor writing and inexperienced casts. The few who try usually fall short the second time around. Anyone who looks at Chinn’s track record with Johnny Wadd will have to agree that he stands far above his contemporaries in that respect.”
The bad blood between Dick Aldrich and Armand had not only continued to fester but was now fast approaching the point of no return. They seemed to be hanging onto each other by a thread, simply because Armand needed someone to produce pictures and do the booking for Freeway Films, and Dick was perhaps still hesitant about setting out completely on his own. Being Armand’s partner had its distinct advantages along with the disadvantages, but it seemed to be taking a toll on Dick’s health.
One evening, while Dick and I were attending a meeting of the West Coast Film Producers’ Association at Don Davis’s house, Dick suddenly felt as if he were having a heart attack. I immediately rushed him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where, after a few hours of tests, during which I waited by his side, it was determined that he had suffered some kind of severe gastrointestinal disturbance, probably brought on by excessive drinking, poor eating habits, and the unrelenting pressure that he was constantly under.
Moderating his drinking, eating properly, and a good deal of rest were what the doctor prescribed, but to Dick this was out of the question. In an effort at relaxation, Dick and I drove down to San Diego and went deep-sea fishing on a charter boat. He caught some skipjack and announced that he was now rested. Still, it was a wake-up call that he wouldn’t easily forget.
Eventually, Aldrich bought his own sailboat and we went out sailing on it a few times, once even going out as far as Catalina Island. Other times we would sail around and dock at a seaside restaurant to spend some time at their bar. Not long after Richard got his boat, he went to Georgia on a business trip and returned with a new wife, an attractive blonde Southern belle from Atlanta named Sharon. They settled into marital bliss in a small house in Venice, but neither the marriage nor the sailboat lasted out the year.
For a while, just about every night after we finished our day at Freeway, Dick and I would walk down to the end of the block to Lazaro’s Bar to wind down after a hard day’s work. We both sat there and tossed down drink after drink while Dick would either regale me with stories of his many interesting experiences or, if the time and mood called for it, tell me his tale of woe.
I didn’t mind listening because Dick was a really nice guy, and besides, he always paid for the drinks. We would also discuss the projects we were currently working on and throw out ideas for forthcoming film projects. Some of the ideas were really good, and some of them could be really bad, depending, I suppose, on how much liquor we ended up consuming.
One night, Lazaro casually mentioned to us that he would rent his place cheap for a location if we wanted to film here again. I had filmed a couple of scenes in his bar for The Devil’s Garden and Richard and I had filmed several non-sex scenes in that very same bar a couple of years back for Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here.
Lazaro’s bar and nightclub certainly appeared to be as big as any soundstage we had filmed on. But because of the vice situation here in Los Angeles, we had been doing all of our shooting in San Francisco—which was a pretty expensive proposition—so his offer gave us some pause for thought. Shooting an entire film here in town would certainly save us a lot of money. Still, was it worth the risk?
“It’ll be safe to shoot here,” he assured us. “I can put people outside to keep watch for you, you know. Hey, have you seen the rest of the place?”
Actually, Lazaro’s Bar was only a very small part of his operation—the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. After emigrating here from Cuba, Lazaro had taken a long, hard look at all the distressed property available for lease and had settled on this huge old building. Before he took it over, the place had been a long-defunct bowling alley, and the huge back room had been converted into a full-bar nightclub and ballroom where he held weekend dances for the Mexican and Central American population, both legal and illegal, in the surrounding area. The dances were a welcome respite after a week of hard and grueling labor, a social gathering place so that they could be among their own, as well as a place to get drunk, dance, and blow off steam. In the front, just off the street, Lazaro put a restaurant and a bar.
We took him up on his invitation to look the place over. Aside from the bar, the restaurant, and the massive ballroom, a large area had been partitioned off into various rooms and storage spaces, none of which were being used. Most of them were large enough to build a set in. Lazaro was right. We could shoot a whole film in his building.
We mulled Lazaro’s proposition over with the next drink and concluded that since there hadn’t been any “busts” in the area in recent months, it would probably be all right to take a chance and risk a shoot here in Los Angeles.
But what would we shoot? I didn’t have any kind of script ready to go into production with, but that never really was a problem. We could always come up with some kind of idea for a feature-length film. Dick and I began racking our brains for ideas to produce—something that could be done quickly and inexpensively while using Lazaro’s place as the sole interior location.
Then Lazaro said, “Hey, you know what. I got one of them big balls in there, over there in the ballroom.”
“You got what?” Dick asked.
“One of them—what do you call it? You know, those big reflecting ball things like the big discos up on the Sunset Strip have.”
“Oh, yeah, a disco ball,” Dick acknowledged with little apparent interest.
After a few more drinks, a low-wattage light bulb seemed to go off in my head and I suddenly got turned on to the thought that hey, since Lazaro had that disco ball in his large ballroom back there, we could make a disco film.
I turned to Dick and said, “You know—maybe we could sort of chronicle the current fading fad of a passing era with one of our cheap fuck films.”
Dick looked over at me and said, “Yeah,” with recurring little interest.
“No, seriously,” I said.
Dick looked up at me again and said, “OK,” before ordering another round of drinks. After the drinks arrived, I proceeded to outline my sudden inspiration to him. Dick was finally beginning to warm to the idea, so we celebrated that fact by having another drink and came up with the idea for a real cheapie that would be set mostly in a nightclub called Disco Lady.
We also figured out that if we had a good art director, we could build whatever other sets we needed, like apartment interiors and such, right there on the premises of Lazaro’s place because there certainly was enough room to do so. It wouldn’t be a big thing to truck in what few flats we would need for the walls. We could turn Lazaro’s place into our own little sound stage. We decided to fly Bill Wolf down from San Francisco to take care of that aspect of the production.
With that settled, Dick turned to me and said, “Just one thing.”
“What?
“I don’t want Holmes in it.”
“You and me both,” I agreed. I’d also had about all of John Holmes I could take for a while. Making a film without him would be like going on a well-earned and well-deserved vacation.
Of course, being the homebody that I was, I really didn’t personally know much of anything about discos or the disco crowd or the disco culture. Luckily, our new employee Jeffrey Neal just happened to be a bright young kid who did. Since he had just finished editing China Cat, we decided to have him get to work on the script for our new project.
When we informed him that he was now a scriptwriter and I outlined the story we wanted him to write, his eyes brightened and he promised that he would tackle this new assignment with the appropriate enthusiasm.
Purely by chance, Jerry Wade, who worked occasionally as a production manager and stunt man for us, showed up at the office with a pretty little blonde in tow and said, “Chinn, get a load of these zyzycks!”—his word for tits—and the zyzycks this girl had were big, really big. She also had a very attractive face. In fact, she was a very pretty girl. She hardly needed any makeup at all to appear gorgeous.
And then Jerry said, “Chinn, why don’t you make her into a star?”
I looked at her and thought, You know, this girl really kind of turns me on, so why not? So I guess you might say I was the first director who actually saw the inherent star quality in a young lady named Rhonda Jo Petty.
In spite of the fact that she was going to be made into a star, Rhonda Jo wasn’t all that interested in acting. I suddenly realized that we were going to have to groom a relatively inexperienced girl as the star of Disco Lady, and as the director of this opus I had the task of coaching some kind of a performance out of her.
Even though it was her first appearance in a feature film, I found that she was a smart girl who could memorize lines very easily and take direction well. As it turned out, directing Rhonda Jo in her first feature film was not all that much of a task after all.
Two days after we had told Jeff Neal to write the script for Disco Lady, he arrived on his motorcycle to deliver the screenplay. After quickly reading it, I realized that he had done a really good job with a story that we could film very quickly and economically. This kid could write, and I toyed with the idea of having him write all my future screenplays for me.
Dick and I immediately broke the script down and worked out a budget for it. We figured that since we were building all the sets at Lazaro’s and there wouldn’t be any major location moves, it could easily be filmed in two days. We presented this idea along with the budget to Armand, and since the film project could be done so cheaply—and since we were doing the film within a block of his office, meaning he could keep a sharp eye on us—he readily agreed to do it.
In order to bring the film in on such a low budget, Dick played a major non-sex part in the film himself. Other non-sex parts were played by Jeff Neal as an underage teenager who sneaks into the club, Jeff’s girlfriend at the time—an aspiring actress named Robin Savage—as Dick’s wife, and Jerry Wade was the Door Cop/Bouncer.
One of the editing assistants at Freeway Films, Ross Johnson, played the part of the super-cool DJ Scorpio Sal. I also called in a favor and persuaded my friend, the film director Alan Colberg, to play a sleazy pimp, a role that he managed to fall into very nicely. His almost over-the-top performance seemed to compliment Rhonda Jo’s spaced-out young fun-seeking girl who was out looking for thrills.
We shot Disco Lady in the allotted two days. Unfortunately, the resulting film looked like it had been shot in two days. It was a low-budget cheapie in every sense of the word, from the hastily thrown together sets to the jerry-rigged exteriors. But all in all, the sets, both inside the bar and outside of it that Bill Wolf managed to knock together in record time, didn’t really look all that bad when seen on film. In fact, the front of the disco was actually shot at the back entrance to Dave Friedman’s EVI warehouse.
After the film was released, it ended up making money, primarily because we had made it so cheaply, and in this game that was actually what was important. The film also ushered in the beginnings of stardom for Rhonda Jo Petty.
By this time, Freeway Films had outgrown the small space it occupied on Cordova Street, so Armand decided to move it to a good-sized suite in the same high-rise office building where Pacific Coast Films also had its offices, and Jack Birch and his wife, actress Carol Connors, had their office there as well.
It was nice to be in a good-sized office and have my own separate space and editing room to work in, but somehow I missed the old place with its cramped quarters and musty smell.
There were probably reasons behind this move that I was unaware of, because in retrospect it seems like something that was so totally out of character for Armand, who usually liked to keep a very close watch on all of his businesses. On Cordova Street we had been right there under his thumb. I suppose the answer might lie in the fact that Freeway Films had become enormously successful very quickly, mainly due to the hard work and diligence of Richard Aldrich. But in spite of this, there were all kinds of friction and jealousy at play there. There was definitely something in the wind.
It was at the new Hollywood office that we finished the editing for Disco Lady. China Cat was already doing well with its play dates, and Armand had mentioned that he might be interested in going into production on another Wadd film, so I began developing a story for it.
Apparently the series still had some steam, so there was no reason at all for us not to keep it running. I had absolutely no compunction about running it into the ground as long as there was some money to be made from it. And this bothered me because, well, I was beginning to feel like I was turning into a hack.
One day, John Holmes showed up unannounced at the new Hollywood office. He took a look around and said, “Nice new digs.”
The new suite of offices was indeed an improvement over the cramped and aging space that Freeway Films had called their office on Cordova Street. Since we moved to Hollywood, John began showing up fairly regularly, and we would usually walk down the street for an extended lunch at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard.
Disco Lady was the last film that Richard Aldrich actually produced for Freeway Films, although he would begin work on the breakdown and preproduction of the next planned Johnny Wadd film, Blonde Fire. It was not long after we made the move to Hollywood that Dick and Armand had a final and irrevocable parting of the ways.
Dick rented an office in another part of the same office building and continued to distribute the films that he had made for his own company, Tenaha Timpson Releasing. Since we had always gotten along very well and we were still good friends, I told him that if he ever needed or wanted me to do something for him, then I would definitely be there for him. In a way, I think he was very relieved to be finally free of Armand’s stifling control and unwanted constant interference.
In the meantime, I had my interests in Freeway Films to look after. Unlike me, Dick didn’t own a percentage in the films I had made, or any of the other features that he had produced or acquired for Freeway, for that matter. I quickly realized that the only way I was going to get a somewhat-accurate accounting of what was due to me would be to stick with Freeway for the time being. But the months that followed ushered in a period of frantic production activity for me with other distributors.
One of those productions would bring me uncomfortably close to an unwanted brush with the law.