Hollywood—Oakland—San Francisco
—Hollywood—1979 to 1980
Jaacovi, Carribbean, and John’s Addiction
Jaacov Jaacovi was an enterprising and ambitious Israeli immigrant from Tel Aviv who had been the cameraman for me on Disco Lady as well as my postproduction supervisor on China Cat. He was getting ready to launch his own production and distribution company called Jaacov Jaacovi Productions with a film that would star John Holmes and Rhonda Jo Petty, and he wanted me to direct it. He handed me the screenplay and said, “Read it, Bob. I think you’ll like it.”
He and his ex-wife Svetlana Mishoff had written a screenplay titled Little Orphan Dusty, which was the somewhat overly melodramatic story of a sweet, innocent young runaway orphan girl who stumbles on to a vicious biker gang that captures and brutally rapes her. Left dazed and bleeding by the roadside, she is found by John, a compassionate artist who takes her to his home and studio and gently nurses her back to recovery.
Having brought her into his life, he proceeds to introduce Dusty to his swinging world of artists and models. They are in love and plan to marry, but before they can do so, one of the bikers spots her on the street and follows her home, then informs the biker gang leader of her whereabouts. More terror and violence follows before the happily-ever-after ending. God, I thought. Jaacov wants me to direct this?
The next time I saw Jaacov, he cornered me and asked, “Well, Bob, how did you like the script?”
Well, the story was somewhat corny, melodramatic, trite, and dated, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that. Instead I ended up blurting out, “I think it’s great, Jake.”
He said, “Good—so you’ll direct it, then.”
Jaacov was so enthusiastic about the whole idea that I decided that I really did want to help him get his project off the ground. I could also use the few extra bucks, so I said, “Sure, I’ll be glad to direct it for you.”
Jaacov made up a shooting schedule that looked almost impossible to accomplish, but he assured me that since there would be two directors it was definitely possible. It appeared that everything was ready to go.
But before we even began the shoot, Jaacov took me aside and told me that because his budget was so low and my fee was so high, the film was going to cost more than he had initially anticipated, and that he was very sorry but he could only afford to pay me half of the amount of my usual director’s fee.
It was a bombshell that he had managed to drop on me at the last minute, to be sure, so I decided to drop a bombshell of my own and I told him, “Fine, in that case I’ll direct half of the film. You’re a director, you direct the other half.” He thought about my proposal for a long moment—Jaacov’s no fool. He realized that he could use my name as codirector, which would insure a Pussycat Theater chain booking. That would recoup his entire production budget and lab costs easily.
And he also knew from working as a crewmember on the China Cat shoot how difficult John Holmes could be to handle. So Jaacov agreed to my terms and we set about dividing up all the scenes that had to be shot.
Somehow I ended up with the short end of the stick because my half of the script seemed to include all of the tougher scenes, like the wild and wooly gang, rape scene, the chase by the motorcycle gang down the country road, the sex scenes with the models, the big orgy scene at the house, and the majority of the scenes involving John that might possibly prove difficult to shoot.
But I was prepared for all that. Jaacov was, after all, the producer. He was determined to get maximum bang for his buck, so he wanted not one, not two, but three of those infamous fisting scenes in that film. Since I was the one who had that notorious reputation from the film Candy Stripers—well, guess who ended up having to direct those.
“Does Rhonda Jo know about these scenes?” I asked him.
“Of course,” Jaacov answered. “And she’s more than willing to do them.”
Just to be sure, once the shoot started, I confirmed with Rhonda Jo just what it was she was expected to do.
“Yeah, that’s cool,” she said in response.
It was a tiring shoot, but not a totally exhausting one. Jaacov always tried to cram two days or more worth of filming into one, which made for long shooting days and even longer shooting nights. I was used to shooting this way and it didn’t bother me all that much. I could always catch up on my sleep after the shoot was over. The thing that annoyed me the most was the bad dialogue and corny story. Jaacov wasn’t willing to make any changes, so I didn’t have all that much to work with. I had a lot of fun with Rhonda Jo, however.
At that time, she seemed to have no particular ambition to become an actress. But in spite of that, she was now well on her way to becoming a star. She was a natural. She played a part as if the character was an extension of her own unique persona. I always loved working with her because she was always so agreeable and nice to be with that it made it easy for me.
Probably the toughest scene to shoot was the rape scene because we had so little time to shoot it and the actual logistics were somewhat staggering. We were shooting all the exterior scenes—where Dusty runs from the orphanage, gets chased and raped, and is found dazed and bleeding by the artist—from my half of the script.
I said, “Jaacov, we’re shooting nearly half of the damn picture in one morning.”
“Not quite, Bob,” he answered. “And don’t forget I’ll be around to help if you need it.”
Jaacov was around, all right, but he wasn’t a whole lot of help. Mostly he helped out as an assistant director, wrangling the motorcycles so I could get all the exterior action shots that I needed.
One thing I noticed was that Jaacov and Svetlana seemed to confuse Rhonda Jo whenever they tried to explain something to her authoritatively. I decided to try and take things a little easier with her.
“Look, Rhonda Jo,” I told her. “You know that you don’t have to do anything that you really don’t want to do.”
“I know,” she responded.
“All right, then,” I continued. “This is the scene where the motorcycle gang terrorizes the shit out of you and then gang rapes you. Oh, and by the way, Jaacov wants to end it with a fisting scene.”
“OK,” she said.
“Think you can handle all of this before lunch?”
“Sure.” She smiled, and she was good to go. That’s how easy it was to work with Rhonda Jo.
The next day we shot the scene where John gets turned on by the two models that he’s painting and they end up having a hot threeway while Dusty, behind the door, watches. This is where Jaacov wanted me to film Dusty’s second fisting scene.
“In this scene, Rhonda Jo,” I told her, “at first you’re surprised by what you’re seeing, but as you continue watching those three having sex, you get really turned on and so you start to play with yourself. You’re getting all hot and bothered as you watch John doing them with his huge cock—so you begin inserting your fingers, really going at it until finally your whole hand is in there and then you work yourself up to a climax. Can you do that?”
She smiled and said, “Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
To answer my question she simply lifted up her dress, pulled down her panties to her knees and began slowly inserting her fingers until her whole hand suddenly disappeared inside of her. “Wow!” I exclaimed, totally taken aback by her ease. Rhonda Jo was one very talented lady.
When it came to the crew, however, it was almost like working on a film shoot in a foreign country. Sometimes they argued vehemently among themselves about who knows what, and at other times they were joking and laughing, probably saying all kinds of things about us that only they could possibly understand.
Svetlana Mishoff was always there on the set, keeping an eagle eye on everything that was going on, like she supposed a producer was supposed to do. Perhaps she had her life’s savings invested in this venture. I didn’t ask.
She also took charge of providing us all with lunch, which in her case meant putting a couple of packages of lunch meat and a single loaf of bread on the kitchen table. There was no mustard and no mayonnaise. I suppose she considered those things to be unnecessary luxuries. Such is life.
On some days, if she was feeling particularly generous, there might also be the makings of what might pass for a rudimentary salad on the table as well. But there was no salad dressing to accompany it, so I couldn’t really be sure.
For the advertising campaign pressbook and one-sheet poster, Jaacov proudly told me that he had come up with a wonderful and brilliant idea.
He was going to bill Rhonda Jo Petty as the Farrah Fawcett look-alike.
I looked him straight in the eye and told him, “Jaacov, the only thing about her that looks like Farrah Fawcett is her hair.”
But to him, she definitely looked like Farrah Fawcett. And so did the girl in the artwork for the one-sheet poster that Jaacov had printed for the film, as it turned out.
In fact she looked much too much like Farrah Fawcett. And to add insult to injury, she was in the exact same pose as Farrah’s famous poster—the one of her in the bathing suit. Naturally, Farrah Fawcett’s lawyers eventually did sue, but by that time Jaacov had already raked in what amounted to a small fortune from the picture.
After a short period of downtime, I went back to work to shoot two feature films back-to-back for Harry Mohney’s new company, Caribbean Films, NV. The first two films that I made for him were Fantasyworld and Tropic of Desire. Harry had always been impressed by the fact that I could easily turn out two relatively decent feature films for the amount that was usually budgeted for one, and this was probably one of the key factors that led them to hire me to make some more films for him.
Since I would be shooting in 35mm, I would have budgets that were a little larger than the budgets that I usually had to work with. Hopefully, this would allow me the opportunity to indulge in my desire to experiment in trying to achieve more erotic sex scenes.
Their front person for the company was Harry’s girlfriend at the time, an attractive and bright young lady named Gail Palmer, who had been credited as the director of a film they had made in Michigan called Hot Summer in the City, as well as two of their subsequent features The Erotic Adventures of Candy and Candy Goes to Hollywood. But the true credit for the direction of these films should probably go to Harry.
Gail was a pleasant girl with a bubbly, effervescent personality who didn’t hesitate to speak her mind about anything and who took her job very seriously. She also had a great sense of humor, which is always a big plus in my book. She tended to be very compassionate and, happily, I got along quite well with her.
She was the Caribbean Films front lady primarily because the powers that be at Caribbean Films firmly believed that a sexy, attractive female filmmaker and producer would not only appeal to the male audience but would be a plus factor in attracting females and couples as well. I found that I couldn’t fault their reasoning one bit.
The Los Angeles office for Caribbean Films was run by a personable Southern gentleman named Darryl Cash who was ably assisted by his charming wife, Autumn. They both were originally from Kentucky and had once worked in one of Harry’s theaters. He told me that Caribbean Films was aiming to attract a crossover audience rather than the typical raincoat crowd. It was an admirable goal, one that I could totally agree with, because making films like that was something that I had always aspired to do, but in the hectic years of simply churning out X-rated product, that aspiration had seemingly fallen by the wayside.
At one time I had helped them a bit by shooting some additional footage for one of their previous motion picture productions, the Carol Connors comedy film Candy Goes to Hollywood. Our deal stipulated that Gail Palmer would be credited as the producer and, if they chose, as the director on all of the films that I did for Caribbean. It was an arrangement that sounded fine, since credits on these films really didn’t mean all that much to me.
Tropic of Desire and Fantasyworld were to be shot back-to-back in 35mm. Instead of using a sound stage, we had rented a huge old warehouse in Oakland, California, for the shoot, and the art director in charge of designing and supervising the putting up of the elaborate sets was a talented young San Francisco artist named Jon Exworthy. Jon had previously worked with me as the art director on Pizza Girls. Kevin Rooney, who had also worked with me on most of the films I had shot in San Francisco, headed the set construction team.
Aside from building a pretty convincing 1940s vintage Hawaiian whorehouse and a sleazy San Francisco nightclub complete with fantasy rooms, they also had to build me the interior of a battleship that would be used for both films. On the miniscule budget they had to work with, this was no mean feat.
The primary action of Fantasyworld took place in a strange, off-the-beaten-path nightclub hidden in an obscure alleyway somewhere in the North Beach area of San Francisco. That nightclub is supposed to be a place where all your wildest erotic fantasies come true, as is stated by their ad in an underground newspaper, which is read by three horny sailors on their battleship as they prepare for shore leave. It all sounded good on paper as we were writing it. Now, if I could only film it so it wouldn’t end up looking totally ridiculous and hokey.
I wish I’d had a bigger budget, which would have given me more time to make the film as I thought it should have been made, although there are some things I still like about it.
Also, there was a scene that I filmed that was heavily censored. In the original version, the Garden of Eden scene was a little longer. There were some things that Elizabeth Eldridge did with the snake that were censored out of all the release prints after the picture hit the theaters, and the negative was also cut to a much tamer version, so this footage no longer exists, as far as I know.
The S&M scene was pretty well done, tasteful but not too tame. Sharon Cain was great. My assistant director and film editor Jeff Neal, who also wrote the script, was the person responsible for the success of this scene. He told me that he eventually wanted to go on and direct films himself.
So I decided to not only give him a little experience by letting him set up a couple of scenes himself, but also shared the directing credit on Fantasyworld with him, which would hopefully give him somewhat of a head start in the business. He had always worked hard for me, frequently going above and beyond what was required of him. Eventually, he went on to become an excellent director of several critically acclaimed adult films under the pseudonym Jeffrey Fairbanks.
The raunchiest and most outrageous of all the fantasy sequences, strangely enough, was the secret desire of the most prim and proper of the three Midwestern school teachers, Nancy, played by lovely Jesie St. James, to be a willing participant in a wild orgy.
And, being the genuine trooper that she is, Jesie pulled out all stops to make it a truly effective scene. I had not filmed an orgy since Candy Stripers, and this time I decided to attempt a highly stylized one, with masses of bodies filling the screen performing a wide variety of truly uninhibited sexual acts.
One scene that I truly enjoyed filming in Fantasyworld was the fantasy scene with Paul Thomas and Laurien Dominique.
But I realized if I simply shot it that way it would end up being rather dull. I tried to think of something to juice up the original script of the piano scene a little and perhaps add length because I was afraid we were going to come up short. And then it suddenly came to me.
I knew Paul Thomas could sing because he sang that song in the campfire scene in Lipps & McCain and then, of course, I also knew that he’d played one of the singing apostles in Norman Jewison’s film version of the hit Broadway musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
So I asked, “Hey, Paul, what if you sing her a song?”
“Sure, what do you want me to sing?”
“I don’t know—maybe something original. You write songs, don’t you? You have anything you think might be appropriate that I can use for the film?”
He thought for a moment before his fingers began with a melodic piano introduction and he started singing this song that he’d written called If Wishes Were Horses.
It had such a strange and haunting melody that just seemed to go just right with the mood of the scene and I said, “Perfect!” and when he agreed to let us use it for the film, we filmed it.
At that time, Laurien Dominique was not only an unhappy camper with her personal life but she also had a terrible drinking problem. People had warned me not to cast her because she couldn’t be depended on to show up. I had always liked Laurien a lot, starting from the time we had first worked together on Hard Soap.
So I decided to go out on a limb and asked her if she would consider going on the wagon for a couple of days as a favor to me, and if she would promise me that she would make her cast calls on time every day for the rest of the shoot. She promised that she definitely would and she didn’t let me down.
Laurien arrived sober and on time and she remained so. At times she appeared to be pale and looked as if she wasn’t feeling well, but she stuck it out like the trooper she was.
After her last scene was completed, we both celebrated by finishing off the half-pint she had brought in her purse every day that had remained sealed and unopened for the entire duration of her shoot.
The second movie of this back-to-back shoot was a subject that I had always wanted to tackle—a World War II–period erotic drama. Tropic of Desire is still one of my favorite films, even though it received decidedly mixed reviews.
However, the film critic Mark Kernes wrote: “Another of my favorite Chinn films is Tropic of Desire. This mini-masterpiece about a Hawaiian bordello during World War II combines excellent storytelling with some very hot loving. In fact, I’d say the steamiest scene is the very first, where one of the hookers (Kitty Shayne in an all-too-brief appearance) applies all of her talents to pleasuring her soldier customer. Her languid sexuality flows from the screen, enveloping the viewer in its soft folds, and it doesn’t let go.”
It seems as if Mark Kernes, at least, got the idea of what I was trying to do. My intention was to begin the film with a slow, leisurely pace to evoke the atmosphere of the tropical 1940s wartime Hawaii. Then, as the film progresses, the action gradually intensifies into the frantic final fight scene and the inevitable conclusion. At least that’s what I tried to do. I suppose, however, that I was either only partially successful or perhaps not successful at all.
Michael Copner, the editor of Cult Movies Magazine, also liked the film, and of it he wrote, “It has a deliberate pacing, reflecting a certain filmmaking skill seldom seen in adult movies.”
Apparently, even though the film seemed to move about as slowly as paint drying, there had been a certain skill involved in making it, which I must confess I indeed liked.
Jon Exworthy and his set construction crew had a lot of complicated sets to build, including the interior of a naval battleship. Fortunately, he was up to the job. He managed to get all of the sets finished on time—which involved working all night throughout the entire shoot because when we finished shooting one set he had to strike it and put up another in its place.
The hectic shooting schedule was offset by my opportunity to work with Georgina Spelvin once again. It was truly a luxury to be able to direct a woman who was not only a real actress capable of taking direction but an intelligent person as well who could contribute her own input to the role that she was playing—in this case, Frances, the owner and madam of the bordello.
In spite of the fact that she is surrounded by the girls that she controls and even mothers, I saw Frances as essentially a very lonely person. While not particularly sentimental, she cannot help sometimes reliving the past, when her youth afforded her all the intimacies and pleasures that her girls now enjoy.
Early on in the film there is a scene where Frances goes into her room alone and masturbates herself to sleep. After explaining my interpretation of her character, I told Georgina that I wanted a masturbation scene that not only expressed all this but was also both realistic and moving. She delivered exactly what I wanted in a single long take.
Jesie St. James was instrumental in helping some of the other, less-experienced members of the cast in learning their lines. It was difficult, if not downright impossible, to get the performances that I really wanted out of most of the non-actors. However, they all did their best, and for my part I also tried to do my best, but inevitably I found that had to compromise, and as a result many of the performances in my films have been soundly criticized for their amateurish acting.
Perhaps if my stories hadn’t been so ambitious, or if I had more talent or patience, this glaring fault wouldn’t have been so apparent. Of course I realize that great directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini have made masterpieces with non-actors, but he had the luxury not only of vastly higher budgets but also of post-dubbing his films with the voices of professional actors.
In spite of all this, I was happy with the way the scene between the new girl and Phil, the virgin sailor played by Blair Harris, ended up turning out. For the first several days I had managed to get through most of this two-picture shoot on time and on budget, but little did I know what would be happening on the following day.
On the final day of the shoot, a power outage affected several city blocks in Oakland where we were filming, resulting in over a half a day of down time. Compounded with this revolting development was the inescapable fact that the sets had to be struck that night because the stage had been booked by someone else for the following day. In any case, we did not have the budget to carry on shooting for another day. Thankfully, after about four hours of being down, the lights did finally come back on, and then it was do or die.
Toward the end of the day I had to really start cranking out the scenes to make up for the lost time, accepting the first take when I might have ordinarily ordered another. The quality of the films suffered somewhat, but eventually we managed to come in on time and on budget. This is due in no small part to the excellent crew that Elliot had assembled for me and the full, uncomplaining support of my cast.
Little Orphan Dusty had successfully completed a very successful initial Pussycat Theater run, and Jaacov Jaacovi had a big wad of cash that seemed to be burning an appropriately big hole in his pocket. This only meant that he was probably ready, at this point in time, to make another film.
This suspicion was more or less confirmed when he came to me with a thick screenplay that was obviously for a far more ambitious project than Little Orphan Dusty had been.
This one was called Taxi Girls, and he enthusiastically told me that he had a brand new starlet that was going to appear in it. Along with John Holmes, that is. In fact, the film was already scheduled to begin shooting on the following week. Obviously Jaacov was not one to waste any time, especially when there was the distinct possibility of someone else grabbing his new discovery before he even had the chance to use her, since he hadn’t actually signed her to any kind of contract. We all knew that he was too cheap to do something like that.
Then he asked me what I expected based on the fact that he had invited me for coffee, his treat: if I was interested in codirecting this new opus with him, too, like we did with the last one. “We make a winning team, Bob,” he said with a smile that showed a newly polished set of front teeth.
I wasn’t going to be starting up my new projects with Caribbean Films for at least a couple more weeks and I knew that I would probably be pretty bored in the meantime, so I answered, “Well, why the hell not, Jake. If the money’s right, that is.”
“How about the same deal?” he continued cannily. “I’ll pay you half your salary, you direct half of the film?”
“Can’t we do a little better than that this time? I know you made a whole shit pot full of money on Dusty.”
He shrugged his shoulders and raised his empty hands and put on his forlorn expression. “I only wish I could, Bob. I’ve got a lot of expenses now—my office, the overhead, the lawyers. I have some problems with the posters on Dusty. Stuff like that, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders again. “If I could pay you more you, know I would.”
“I know that you could, Jaacov.”
He shook his head and in his best, most sincere negotiating manner, simply said, “Bob…”
To which I said, “You really think I’m a soft touch, don’t you.”
It was obvious that he had in mind using my name again on his new film by only using half my fee, even though directing half of one of Jaacov’s films ended up being more work than anyone else’s films. But I’d become so used to being exploited that it didn’t really bother me much anymore. However, the prospect of working with John Holmes again so soon didn’t particularly intrigue me, especially since he was becoming somewhat of a real pain in the ass.
Little did I know at the time that John would soon get much worse than I had ever imagined. But I also knew that Jaacovi didn’t particularly relish working with him either, and he would probably need some help in that respect. And since I really liked Jaacov and since I suppose I really am something of a soft touch, I said, “OK, I’ll do it on the condition that you don’t use my name on this one.”
Since Jaacov was going to do the entire shoot in Los Angeles and even go so far as to shoot scenes of hookers blatantly soliciting on Hollywood Boulevard without a film permit, I definitely didn’t want my name associated with the film. I had never been busted in my entire career making these films and I certainly didn’t want that to happen now.
Doing what he planned to do was almost a certain invitation for a bust, and I was surprised because Jaacov was usually a pretty cautious guy.
Jaacov, realizing that I wasn’t going to change my mind, begrudgingly agreed to my terms. We shook hands on it.
With an expression that communicated that he had saved the best for last, Jaacov showed me pictures of his new star of Taxi Girls, a blonde All-American girl next door named Nancy Suiter.
“Yeah, she’s kinda cute,” I said to him.
Jaacov is a secretive guy who always likes to play his cards close to his chest. Getting him to reveal anything is akin to pulling teeth. “Guess what,” he said.
“What?” I said,
“Look closely at her.”
I looked closely at her picture. “Yeah, like I said. She’s cute.”
“Doesn’t she remind you of anyone?”
I looked so hard my eyes were getting strained. “Should she remind me of anyone?”
“Cheryl Ladd,” he finally told me. He said that he was going to bill her as the Cheryl Ladd look-alike. She was a very pretty blonde all right, and there was a nice, fresh look about her, but she was no Cheryl Ladd by a long shot.
So I said, “Jaacov, are you out of your fucking mind? She doesn’t look anything like Cheryl Ladd.”
“Sure she does,” he seriously assured me.
And sure enough, when the film was being released, I saw the poster and the face on the girl in the poster was far more like Cheryl Ladd than Nancy Suiter. This Jaacovi really has balls, I thought. But this time, however, he wasn’t so lucky. Cheryl Ladd’s attorney got an injunction right away and Jaacov had to quickly change the artwork on the poster to avoid the problems he’d had with Dusty. Of course, all this added expense ate into his working capital, and I had to wait until the picture began to show a profit before I could collect the rest of the money that he owed me.
There’s not a whole lot about this film that I remember because, to be quite honest, I’ve never even seen it. I was much too busy working on other projects. Thankfully, although Jaacov gave John Holmes star billing to capitalize on his name, he didn’t have all that many scenes in this film, so codirecting it turned out to be relatively painless.
While going through my script, I noticed that Jaacov had added some Sunset Boulevard scenes to my schedule. I really didn’t want to shoot them, so I said, “Uh, Jaacov—I thought you were going to shoot those scenes on Sunset Boulevard.”
“I was, Bob, but I’m getting behind and I’ve still got that whole police department interior stuff to shoot.”
“I’ll direct the police department interior stuff—you shoot the scenes with the hookers on Sunset Boulevard,” I told him.
“All right, but you’re going to end up doing a lot more work that I will. You’re getting the short end of the stick, you know.”
“So what else is new?”
The police interior scenes didn’t portray the local police in a very flattering fashion. But when it came to either that or risk being busted for real, the choice that was left to me seemed patently obvious.
I also vaguely remember a scene that I shot on the jail cell set with an actress named Pat Manning. Some years later, Pat reminded me about it the last time I saw her, when she was working as a production assistant on Age of Consent. In that scene she was fisted by Nancy Hoffman. She said that she had really enjoyed it.
Jaacov managed to get busted while shooting the street scene exteriors. I was certainly glad that I’d made that trade-off. When all is said and done, I have considered myself extremely fortunate because in all my working years I had never once been busted.
Jaacov quickly edited the film and rushed it into release. The poster and newspaper ads blatantly touted Nancy Suiter as the Cheryl Ladd look-alike, just as he had said they would. Taxi Girls was even more successful than Little Orphan Dusty had been, only this time Ladd’s agent sued. This didn’t faze Jaacov, who ended up using all of the publicity of the lawsuit to his advantage.
After Taxi Girls, I did a back-to-back shoot of two innocuous hardcore sex comedies for Caribbean Films, NV.
The primary feature was a film called Hot Legs, which had a story set in the topsy-turvy world of high-fashion photography.
Hot Legs is another one of my favorite films, even though I encountered a major problem during the shoot. After the first day, the cinematographer, Laszlo Crovney, unexpectedly jumped ship after learning that a four-week gig had come through for him. Sure, I understood that he could make much more money, but by not honoring his commitment to me he had left me in the lurch. Consequently, I never used him again.
My production manager managed to get the cameraman Joao Fernandes to fill in for a day until Ken Gibb was free to fly up and complete the shoot. No one seems to be able to tell that there were three different cinematographers for these two films, but I think each managed to contribute their own distinctive look.
What I found rewarding about the experience was the opportunity to get somewhat creative with the use of color, since we were working with more expressionistic sets and photographer’s backdrops and things like that. But I also tried to let this extend into the overall style of the film to create this unreal kind of advertising world.
Richard Pacheco was very serious about his part and wanted to get it right. He had gotten used to working with Anthony Spinelli, a great director who was a very strong presence on the set. I’m more of a low-key director, the kind who doesn’t strut around and shout on the set. I prefer to see my actors reacting rather than acting, and that’s exactly what I try and get them to do.
I don’t say, for example, “You’re going to come in, stand exactly here, deliver this line, pick up this, move there, do this, say this, do that.” Instead I just set up the situation and say, “Now walk into this dressing room as you would normally. Don’t forget you’re agitated and a little upset, but you still don’t want to piss off the star model,” and so forth. And then we feel out where such and such line should be delivered so I can hopefully end up with a more natural scene. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then I usually just end up saying, “Let’s shoot it—we’ve got to move on.”
I usually try to get things as perfect as I can, but if I can’t, my lack of insistence on it has always come back to haunt me when I see the finished film. Still, I’ve always managed to come in on time and on budget, which I suppose is something that kept me steadily working for all those years.
I’ve never had spectacularly large budgets like some directors in the business always seemed to be able to get, so I’ve never been able to spend the time I’ve wanted to on the dialogue scenes. It’s a big problem when producers and distributors know you can turn out a decent, playable product for a small budget.
That’s been my cross to bear throughout my entire career. Hell, that Chinn can make two pictures for what it costs to make one, they think. So instead of one great picture they get two good ones, and it’s not really a piece of cake to shoot two good full-length 35mm features for fifty grand. But I didn’t complain. Why should I? I was paid by the picture, so I ended up collecting two salaries instead of one.
The actresses in the two most touching scenes of the movie were undergoing tremendous personal problems at the time. Laurien Dominique was still battling her addiction to alcohol and pills, which had begun to take a toll on both her appearance and health, and would eventually lead to her death a only a short time later.
I had even begun to have second thoughts about hiring her, but she told me that she really needed the job badly, and I finally relented. I’m glad that I did. She gave a wonderful performance in Hot Legs. Sadly, it was the last time that we were able to work together.
Lisa Sue Corey was having a hard time trying to kick a bad heroin habit due to her living conditions in San Francisco. Somehow, I managed to get her to lose herself in her part—the wardrobe girl hopelessly in love with the agency’s star model, played by Jesie St. James.
I wanted it to be a very touching scene, so I went into great detail with her about how I wanted it played. She didn’t let me down. She gave what I consider to be a memorable performance and I was very proud of her.
When the film wrapped, Elliot, who had always been a generous and thoughtful person, bought Lisa Sue a plane ticket back to her hometown with some of the money that was left over in the contingency budget. He told her to go home and clean up her act. She was such a sweet girl. I sincerely hope that she managed to straighten out her life.
The second film of the back-to-back shoot, the one that John starred in, was a frothy little concoction called California Gigolo. To add something a little different to it, we had also hired the kinky stripper Veri Knotty, who had the remarkable ability to tie her large, somewhat overgrown labia into a knot, as one of the featured players. To complete the cast we also hired an actual housewife, who wanted to find out what it would be like to have sex with John Holmes, named Vanessa Tibbs.
It was Vanessa’s only film role and she was billed in the film’s publicity as “A real-life Debutante fulfilling her fantasy of starring in an XXX film.” To make matters even more uncomfortable, her husband was also on the set, watching. I knew that I myself would never permit such a thing to happen with my wife. I watched him watch John make love to his wife intently, and I think he even enjoyed it. After we finished filming the scene, our swinging real-life housewife told me that she really got off on the experience.
By this time, John’s cocaine use had escalated. Unfortunately the cocaine only intensified his already hyperactive personality. Half the time he would be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Then, he would suddenly come crashing down and become moody and uncooperative. Occasionally, he would suddenly disappear for long periods of time, and the crew would have to waste a lot of valuable time searching for him.
Once, the makeup man found him hiding in a closet, curled up in a fetal position, mumbling incomprehensibly to no one in particular. In this sorry state he was totally incapable of working, and I would have to frantically shoot around him. I could see that things were going to have to change if we were going to continue to work together.
After we returned to Los Angeles, I realized that I still had to pick up some shots for the title sequence of California Gigolo. I corralled Kenny Gibb and we shot some footage at the boardwalk near the Santa Monica pier of pretty California beach girls skateboarding and lying in the sun. But I soon realized that I would need a much longer sequence to bring the film up to an acceptable running time, so I called John and we set a day to shoot some location footage in Palm Springs.
We picked John up at Bill Amerson’s house as he had instructed. A pretty young actress named Kandi Barbour happened to be crashing there at the time and she volunteered to go up to be in the scenes that we were going to film with John.
Kandi would add another pretty face to the film, so I told her to get in the car. Julia St. Vincent, who was seeing John at the time, had also come along for the ride. John ignored Kandi, who was a very attractive girl; in fact, unless we were shooting he was just downright cold with her. I sensed that there was something going on.
We filmed some scenes in downtown Palm Springs and then, late in the afternoon, we drove to the edge of town and filmed John and Kandi together on the long tramway ride which went all the way to the top of the mountain.
When we got to the top of the mountain, Kandi indicated her willingness to do a sex scene there, but John proved to be not so willing. In fact, his exact words were, “You want a sex scene here, you fuck her.”
“Not my job,” I responded.
So there was not going to be a sex scene, but there had been no sex scene planned for this title sequence anyway. But in retrospect, with the sun setting in the background, it might have made for one hell of a sex scene.
That night, by the time we returned to Bill Amerson’s house Kandi was clinging to me like a stray dog. Bill said, “Why don’t you take her home with you?” But I refused because I was in a serious relationship with Deanna at the time. I never encountered Kandi again, but, like any girl you meet once and who makes an impression on you, I always wondered about her and what became of her.
It was therefore very disconcerting to learn of Kandi Barbour’s death some thirty-two years later. From what little information that I could gather, she left the adult film industry sometime back in 1984. On January 26, 2012, she was found dead on the streets of San Francisco, fifty-five years old and homeless. It was about as sad and as tragic an ending that there could be to anyone’s life.
But I will always remember the one day that I spent with her during that shoot in Palm Springs. And I will forever be haunted by the image of the pretty, clinging young girl who even back then somehow seemed so very lost and alone.