Hollywood—Hawaii—1980
Prisoner of Paradise
The time had come to try and do something about John’s continuing drug use. I really did like John and it looked like he was on the fast track to self-destruction. It occurred to me that another vacation in Hawaii might do the trick. Of course, my idea of a vacation always included shooting some background location footage to be incorporated into a future film.
We were still up in San Francisco where we had just wrapped the Hot Legs/California Gigolo shoot and we were scheduled to head back for Los Angeles the very next day. We were all worn out but unable to sleep. Three of us had ended up in my hotel room where we had decided to kill a bottle of single-malt Scotch.
I began talking about my idea with Jeff Neal and Joel Sussman. They were both in favor of it, even though Jeff still harbored some reservations about how reliable John would end up being should we undertake this project. Sussman and I both thought that we would be able to handle him.
Then I called John, who was still awake and puttering around his room doing God knows what, and told him to come up to my room. As if he had been waiting for an invitation he showed up in a flash, and we broached the subject to him. John immediately became very enthusiastic about the project. He even forgot about cocaine for a few hours and took an active part in the discussion as we milled around the hotel room brainstorming and setting about to organize this newly conceived adventure.
I had come up with the idea to make a kind of porn-adventure epic, à la Robinson Crusoe, with an American sailor stranded on an apparently deserted South Pacific island sometime during World War II. He would have to learn to survive without even the most basic of necessities: shelter, food, and tools. The way I initially visualized it, the sex scenes would come in flashbacks during the long days and nights that he would be forced to spend in solitude. Here he was, on a beautiful tropical island, a paradise on Earth. But he was there all alone and, in essence, a prisoner of that paradise.
Everyone seemed to be hot about the idea, especially John. We decided to defer all of our salaries and split the production costs three ways so that we would each end up owning a third of the film. Of course, none of us had a whole lot of money, so we had to do the shoot as inexpensively as possible. Since he by far had the best head for business between all of us, we nominated Joel to have the responsibility of handling the money.
The greatest aspect about the whole thing was that John was the only actor we would need, and since he was now a partner, we didn’t have to worry about paying him his now exhorbitant daily rate.
Since it was just location background footage, we decided we didn’t have to record sound and therefore didn’t need a soundman. But we did need a cameraman and camera equipment. I didn’t want to do it all myself; I’d gotten somewhat spoiled by not having to be my own cameraman anymore.
I told Jeff, “We need to find a cameraman who has his own equipment and will either work real cheap or defer his salary until we sell the film.”
Jeff Neal suggested we use Lee Utterback.
The name sounded very familiar to me. “Didn’t he work as an assistant cameraman for us on Tropic of Desire?”
Jeff seemed to know what was coming. “Yeah, he did,” he replied. “Lee was the loader who made the mistake in the darkroom that exposed that roll of film with all those dialogue scenes on it.”
What Jeff said was true so I took some time to think about this long and hard before rushing into any kind of decision.
Then I told Jeff, “You know, the guy was totally honest about that mistake he’d made. He didn’t try to hide it or cover it up. As soon as he found out what he had done he came right out and told us about it, gave us the opportunity to reshoot those scenes while the lights were still up on the set. I really liked that about him.”
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed.
“Call him up and see if he wants to join the shoot. I know I can trust a guy like that.”
Lee Utterback now owned an equipment rental company in San Francisco, and was getting a reputation as an excellent cameraman. Jeff gave him a call and Lee said that he could definitely use a vacation himself and would bring a 35mm Arriflex motion picture camera along with him as well as his 16mm Arriflex camera, and I would end up putting this camera to good use as well.
We arrived in Honolulu in the midst of a huge tropical rainstorm. After picking up the rental van and car, we loaded our luggage, the camera equipment, and our rain-soaked bodies and drove for the two-hour drive through the relentless rain to a condo that had been booked for us on the west side of the islands. It was a nice, recently constructed condo building, but it was located way out in the sticks.
There was no way this was going to work for the shooting that I wanted to get done in Honolulu. John was also very unhappy being in the middle of nowhere, and he bitched constantly for the two days that we were there. Joel managed to negotiate for some better accommodations in town, so we moved to a nice hotel right in the middle of Waikiki.
We decided to spend a little vacation time in Honolulu to give ourselves a chance to decompress from the last shoot and recover from the slight jet lag of the plane ride over before moving on to the more rural island of Kauai for the main part of the shoot, which would be all of the background footage for the film that would eventually end up becoming Prisoner of Paradise.
There was also still some preproduction work that we had to do in Honolulu, so John helped pick up the film stock and assemble all the props needed for the location shoot on Kauai.
The costumes for the film had come with us from Los Angeles but the heavier and more bulky items we had decided to acquire here. We picked up a machete and other basic survival equipment. We scoured the local Army surplus stores for World War II vintage items. We even found the wooden olive-green-painted equipment supply box that would house what John’s character would find washed ashore on the deserted island.
Joel had brought along his girlfriend at that time, a young actress named Phae Burd who would appear in my film Blonde Fire as one of the hit girls—the one who Johnny Wadd has rough sex with before he puts a pillow over her face and knocks her out with his fist. Phae was a good sport and was always great to be with, so we welcomed her company. We had booked three rooms in the Waikiki hotel—one room for John and me, another for Jeff and Lee, and the third for Joel and Phae.
One afternoon, John, Jeff, and I were sitting in our hotel room making an inventory of our props when John suddenly blurted out, “It’s just not fair!”
“What’s not fair?” I asked.
“Fucking Sussman,” he answered.
“What about Sussman?”
“He’s in the room next door balling Phae and here we are sitting around like high school boys with our dicks in our hands. Why should he be the only one of us that’s getting laid?”
I didn’t quite know where he was going with this. “So what do you want to do about it?” I asked warily.
His face lit up as if he had come up with some kind of brilliant idea. “Why don’t we have our own party? Let’s call for three outcall massage girls? I’ll pay.”
We sure didn’t have anything better to do. “If it’s going to be on you,” I replied, “why not?”
“I’m game,” Jeff added with an enthusiastic smile.
John immediately perused the massage parlor listings in the Yellow Pages. Finding an outcall massage advertisement that appealed to him, he picked up the phone and dialed the place. John put in an urgent request for four girls—adding Lee in the next room—to be sent to our hotel room.
When they finally arrived we found them all to be quite attractive, young, fun-loving haole girls who had found a neat and easy way to supplement their income.
We kept three of them for our own private party after carefully making our respective selections and John sent the fourth to join Lee in the room down the hall. Thanks to John’s sudden and unexpected generosity, it turned out to be a wild and memorable afternoon for all of us.
Later, we made a trip to downtown Honolulu where John and I returned to Hotel Street and visited our old friend Mavis Oda at the Esquire and Risque Theaters and paid our respects to Chris Vicari at the Swing Club on Hotel Street.
Mavis and Chris were friendly, sociable, and brimming with aloha even though the new films that I was making for other producers were no longer playing their small mini-theaters but instead were now booked into Narcisco Yu’s family-owned Yuclan chain of regular movie theaters.
After visiting with these old friends, we all continued down Hotel Street to the Wo Fat Restaurant at the very edge of Chinatown. It was there where I introduced him to one of my all-time favorite culinary delicacies—a unique and utterly delicious dish you can only find in Hawaii, kumuu fish steamed Chinese-style with soy sauce, ginger, and green onion. At Wo Fat’s they always cooked this dish perfectly—you could savor the delicate taste of that rare fish along with the pungent freshness of the Chinese ingredients.
The kumuu fish is purported to have hallucinogenic qualities, so I just knew that John would like it. Well, it turned out that he did like it, almost obsessively so, and we had to return time after time to Wo Fat’s so we could eat that fish. Long after we got back to Los Angeles, he still talked about it fondly.
When we were leaving Wo Fat’s. John said to me, “You know, the fish with the longest name is a Hawaiian fish. It’s called like humahoku-hoku-something.”
“You mean humuhumunukunukoapua’a, right? The name in English means ‘triggerfish that has a pig-like nose.’ It’s a reef triggerfish. You can find them out there in the water around the coral reefs.”
“Are they good to eat?” John asked.
“I don’t know. I never ate one. But the Hawaiian fish with the longest name isn’t the humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Actually, the one that has the longest name is the lauwiliwilinukunuku’oi’oi.”
“What does that mean in English?”
“It means ‘long-nosed fish that’s shaped like a wili-wili leaf. Actually it’s a yellow butterfly fish that also lives out there on the coral reefs.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“God’s honest truth,” I said.
John didn’t know whether to be unconvinced or impressed. “How do you know about all this shit?”
“Hell, I’m a director—I’m supposed to know about all this shit.”
While we were in Honolulu’s Chinatown, I stopped at an herb shop and bought a bottle of Kwan Loong Oil, an aromatic patent medicine made in Singapore that does wonders in relieving muscular aches and pains as well as headaches. John immediately became hooked. Before we left the islands he went back to Chinatown and stocked up on about a dozen bottles of the stuff.
While I was showing John and the others around my old haunts in the Chinatown area, I came up with the germ of an idea for another Wadd film. Just seeing whole area once again was such an inspiration to me that I almost couldn’t believe it. It still looked almost the same way I had remembered it from my childhood back in the early 1950s.
Those old, rickety wooden two-story buildings and tenements that still remained from the turn of the century and rebuilt during the late teens and early 1920s were still there, but I knew that they wouldn’t be there for much longer. The days were numbered for Hotel Street, once a place soldiers and sailors had flocked to looking for fun and thrills. With urban renewal well on its way, the whole character of the place was about to change.
I wanted, more than anything, to be able to capture this little bit of history on film before the buildings were all torn down.
We began shooting location background footage in downtown Honolulu and the surrounding areas for the project I called Waikiki Wadd. We also managed to quickly choreograph and shoot a hair-raising chase scene through downtown Honolulu’s old open-air market. John chased me past the stalls displaying the colorful island fruit and vegetables, the cooked food stalls with hanging roasted ducks and pigs, dried meats and sausages, the fresh seafood stalls selling exotic island fish of every variety. Everyone in the individual market stalls was very cooperative and even somewhat thrilled that we were filming there.
We managed to shoot some terrific location footage in just about all of the downtown districts where there were colorful old, time-worn buildings, including Nuuanu and Kalihi. I felt somewhat comforted at having recorded for posterity many of the ancient bars, shops, and places of business that are sadly no longer there.
We also ended up getting some really great footage in other areas of Honolulu and Waikiki as well. We filmed at Diamond Head and Koko Head crater. We improvised a car chase to get some action location footage. We even filmed a bizarre scene at the old Japanese graveyard on Nuuanu Street. I was beginning to come up with even more ideas that I thought would make Waikiki Wadd a great film. But all this would never be realized. Unfortunately, because of John’s sudden and rapid subsequent downward spiral after we returned to Los Angeles, the Waikiki Wadd project was never completed.
That I had never been able to finish this film is one of the greatest disappointments that I ever encountered as a filmmaker. If it had been completed, I have absolutely no doubt at all that it would have been the most interesting of all of my Johnny Wadd films. It probably would have even ended up being my best film, because it could well have been the one film that I would have directed straight from the heart.
When the time came to head on over to Kauai for the primary shoot, we were running a little late, as usual, and were rushing to the airport to catch our inter-island flight. As we were walking quickly through the waiting room and nearing our boarding area, I noticed John looking down at a small flight bag that lay unattended in front of one of the waiting room seats ahead of us. He quickly looked around. There was no one in the immediate area. Without breaking stride, he reached down and picked up the bag and continued walking on.
I grabbed his shoulder to stop him in his tracks before asking him, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Hey, if people can’t look out for their own stuff they deserve to lose it,” he replied.
“You can’t be serious.”
He weighed the bag in his hand before looking over at me and with that naughty boyish smile of his, saying, “Nah, I was just kidding.”
He quickly put the bag down where he had originally found it. I shook my head while simultaneously expelling a sigh of relief, and we continued on over to the boarding gate. It was then that I suddenly realized that John was truly morally bankrupt.
John had remarkably curtailed his drug use during our brief stay in Honolulu, and by the time we had reached Kauai he had stopped almost completely. Almost, but not totally, since marijuana still had to be factored into the equation.
On Kauai there grows a particularly powerful product of this type of plant, reverently called Kauai Electric by those in the know. Kauai Electric is capable of giving one not only an almost electrically pleasurable jolt but an inexplicably mind-altering high as well. Naturally, such a thing had to be found and tried.
Still, it was as if the island itself became John’s high. It was the first time he had ever been to Kauai, and John immediately and unconditionally fell in love with it. One evening, while just he and I were sitting on the lovely beach at Kapa’a watching the sunset, he told me that he wished that he could remain here on Kauai forever. He said, “Bob—if there ever comes a time when you can never find me, and you want to know where I am—come here, because this is where I’ll be.”
I had never seen John so at peace with himself and the world. As the sun dipped down into the horizon and darkness began to fall, John sat on the sand, uncharacteristically silent until his cigarette burned itself out in his hand. He looked down at it as if he’d forgotten all about it and reached over and pushed it into the sand.
Finally, he broke his silence. “It’s like…” he began and faltered, then continued, “…I don’t want to go home. It’s like here I already am home.” We watched the waves wash into the shore for a while, then quietly walked along the pathway back to our hotel rooms, breathing in the gardenia scented air of the Kauai night.
Like many who came to its shores, John felt the sudden urge to reinvent himself as a South Seas beach bum—to leave his troubled past life behind him so he could live out the rest of it in peaceful, happy contentment.
To be perfectly honest, I knew almost exactly how he felt. Being in Hawaii, and now being back on Kauai, I felt like I was home once again myself. Sometimes the islands seem to me to be the most perfect place on Earth. Here, one can enjoy and bask in the colorful magnificence of nature and be lulled by the never-ending cycle of the surf into a quiet tranquility that makes everything seem at once to be alive and well.
The film director Anthony Mann once said: “Actors achieve far more truth on location.” In the case of John Holmes, I believe that this was somehow proved true. Away from the confines of the soundstage and away from the company of actresses that he always wanted to impress, he was a different person altogether. He was more himself: a flawed human being as we all are, but one without the need to prove to everyone around him that he was not.
Of course, he could still be as obnoxious as hell. But on Kauai his much more subdued personality was a little easier for me to take. This lasted until Lee Utterback’s girlfriend arrived to spend a couple of days with us and John once again reverted to the guy who just had to impress the new girl in town. She ended up not staying very long because John annoyed her so much.
We spent the first few days on the island scouting for locations. We found the beautiful beach on the North side of the island that I had remembered going to as a child. To avoid a hazardous trek, John tirelessly hacked a trail with his machete down the hillside and through the jungle on down to the beach. It proved to be a lot of work, but it was an ideal spot to film, and nearly all of the footage that we shot there was pretty spectacular.
We were shooting the scene where John, the shipwrecked sailor, swims to shore at the seemingly deserted island dragging his life raft with him. On that particular day the surf was heavy. Because of the strong current, John was having a great deal of difficulty making his way far enough out to sea for the shot to be effective. Then, he had to swim back onto the shore with the heavy rubber life raft in tow.
By the time we finally completed the shot, John was totally exhausted. He came up to me almost completely out of breath and said, “You better be able to use that take because I’m not doing another one while the surf’s that rough.”
“It really didn’t look all that great because we had some camera problems. Just give me one more take, OK, John?”
His voice went up three octaves as he almost shouted, “You kidding me?”
“You know I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that. I really do need another take.”
“Shit! A couple of times out there I really thought I was a goner, the way the current was pulling me out to sea!”
“I know it’s rough, but that’s what makes it look so damned good. Just go out a little way so I can pick up you landing on the beach in a little closer shot. You can do that for me, can’t you?”
John looked as if he were about to cry in frustration, but he just shook his head and walked toward the ocean, mumbling, “The things I do for you, Chinn.” He only addresses me as “Chinn” when he is unhappy.
I also made John scamper up a coconut tree to chop down some coconuts. He always prided himself on being able to do his own stunts, and he did. We made him do it a few times, so John ended up getting quite a workout.
We shot the scenes where John sits on the beach toward sunset, silently contemplating his situation and thinking about the past as the waves wash onto the shore. Conveying the story through his expressions, he thinks back to the final day he spent with his beautiful Chinese girlfriend in Hong Kong just before the Japanese bombs dropped, destroying the area and killing the girl that he loved.
“You were really great today, John,” I told him afterward. “I think you’re really getting into the character now. I’m happy with the footage that we shot today.”
John paused and started to say something to me, then abruptly stopped.
“What?” I asked him. “You were going to say something?”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you this,” he finally said. “You know, I’ve made a helluva lot of films. But the only films I’ve been really proud of are the ones I made with you.”
This was the first time he had ever paid me any kind of compliment. I knew he wasn’t just joking around, so I refrained from telling him that he really didn’t have to suck up to me.
Still, John was the same hyperactive pain in the ass he had always been. I channeled his seemingly boundless energy building and buying props as well as seeing to our lunches, keeping track of his props and wardrobe, keeping track of the shot continuity— anything that I could think of to keep him constantly busy and out of trouble.
When he wasn’t complaining about something or another, John attacked all these tasks with the utmost dedication. He did this not only because he had some of his own money invested in this project but primarily because his ego dictated that he show us all what he was capable of doing. He built us a reflector from scratch when the Hawaiian sun didn’t illuminate his face well. He loved to go out location scouting with the cameraman and me, and he would continue to diligently hack paths through the jungle with a machete while almost knee deep in mud so we could reach a particularly difficult filming spot.
John only complained once while I was shooting a scene with him, and that was when he was bathing naked while standing on a big rock in the middle of the pool directly below a waterfall. The shot begins with a long camera tilt down the length of the waterfall to reveal John. If we had been recording sound, you would have heard him shout, “Bob, finish shooting this fucking thing already! The water hurts like hell and I’m freezing my goddamn nuts off! And my cock’s shrivelling up from the cold!”
With all the bellyaching he was doing, I just had to do another take, knowing that by doing this it would piss him off even more. Lee boggled the camera during the tilt down on the second take, so we had to do it all over again.
“What the fuck was wrong with the first take, anyway?” John shouted through his chattering teeth.
“The tilt down was too fast,” I shouted back. We did the third take, which was even better than the first one had been. I was satisfied.
He refused to even talk to me for about half an hour as we sat in the car, driving to the next location. When I could finally see that most of his anger had burned away, I commented, “So it was a little cold under that waterfall, was it?”
He turned and glared at me for a long moment before saying, “Yeah, the water was icy cold, but it also felt as if I were being constantly pelted by a goddamn hail storm.”
“Sorry,” I said somewhat contritely. “I just wanted to get a really good shot, you know.”
“I know.” John finally smiled. He could never stay angry for very long. “Must have looked pretty spectacular, right?”
“Sure did,” I assured him.
While we were filming on Kauai, we stayed at the beautiful but reasonably priced beachside Kauai Beachboy Hotel in Kapa’a, situated right across from the large outdoor Coconut Grove Marketplace Shopping Center.
Aside from the tourist shops, there were a number of food stalls and regular restaurants, and we managed to frequent just about all of them during the course of our stay there. We’d always head on over to the Marketplace after a hard day of shooting to wind down with some local food and drink. Occasionally, people would recognize John and walk on over to us just to meet him. He would shyly bask in his celebrity and we would quietly back him up by acting as if we were his entourage. It made him feel good to appear to be so important.
Once, while John and I were chowing down on hamburgers, I noticed a young tourist couple standing nearby, eyeing him intently. They were both dressed in gaudy matching aloha attire and both were somewhat pudgy, but not unattractively so. They whispered to each other for a while before finally approaching, telling us they’d seen his films. Toward the end of our stay, some tourists from Germany walked up to us and asked if it was really him. John was somewhat taken aback so I answered for him. “Of course it is. Who else would be going around with such an ugly mug?”
I couldn’t help but notice that the women were shamelessly looking down at John’s crotch. John had noticed this as well and he gave me a look that silently said, I hope they don’t expect me to whip it out for them.
Apparently, some of my Johnny Wadd films had played in theaters in Germany where I was told they were very popular and successful. This was welcome news to me. I was further surprised to find that the German tourists also recognized me as the villain in those films.
For the Germans, meeting John, they said, was one of the big highlights of their trip. In fact, one of the women in the group even snuck away from her husband one evening to experience the biggest highlight for herself in a wild sexual tryst with John in the back of their rental van.
Another time, John and I were sitting at the bar in one of the bigger restaurants at the Coconut Grove Marketplace, drinking beer and eating a big plate of freshly made, delictable ahi poke, when a couple of big, beefy middle-aged haole guys recognized John and came up to us.
They looked like two old has-been football players spoiling for a fight, but thankfully they turned out to be really nice guys. They bought us a round of beers and one of them poked curiously at our poke. “What’s that?” he asked.
“Raw fish,” John answered. “Gives you a hard-on like you wouldn’t believe!”
“No shit?” the other one asked, interested. But the other guy gave a look that said he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Most everyday Americans had not yet been exposed to the culinary pleasures of raw seafood.
“No shit,” John confirmed.
For some reason, most normal guys are always curious about the business we’re in. They seem to think that our life must consist of hedonistic fun and games and wild, uninhibited sex by the swimming pool with all kinds of beautiful and sexy women. Well, maybe John’s life was sort of like that, but mine certainly wasn’t. But, of course, they refused to believe me. They figured that, since I was a director, I must always get laid.
One of the guys asked John, “So what’s it like having such an enormous cock?”
John seriously replied, “It has its disadvantages at times.”
The guy didn’t believe him. “Like what?”
John took a sip of his beer and replied, “If I’m not real careful when I sit on the toilet, it flops down into the water.”
Interestingly enough, the only picture of the crew for that Hawaii shoot that seems to have survived today was taken by John Holmes with his cheap little 110 Instamatic camera. He shot it from inside the van, and though the focus is hazy, it shows the back of Jeff Neal’s head, Lee Utterback, Phae Burd standing on the road barrier looking out over the Hanalei valley, and myself. Joel Sussman isn’t in it because he was out searching for magic mushrooms.
During most of the Hawaii location shoot, John had been remarkably restrained with his drug use. For the first time in his life he had found his paradise in reality. But after he returned to Los Angeles, he forgot his brief experience of paradise and went right back to a sleazy reality that only drugs could make bearable for him. In time, he became totally oblivious to the fact that true salvation might possibly lie only a few hours away over the ocean.