Hollywood—San Francisco—1980 to 1982
The Downhill Spiral
Not long after I had completed postproduction on Prisoner of Paradise, I got an unexpected phone call from my old friend Larry Price who told me that he wanted me to direct a film that he was going to produce. I met him at his big, rambling ranch house in Granada Hills and he handed me a screenplay over two hundred pages long titled “Sadie.”
It was a contemporary adaptation somewhat loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham’s famous short story “Sadie Thompson” about a prostitute who had been run out of Honolulu to end up on a South Sea island, where she is confronted by an overzealous missionary who tries to save her soul, then becomes infatuated with her.
Written by Don Greer, who was the brother of the 1940s and 1950s film noir leading lady Jane Greer, the screenplay was a ponderous one, more than a bit diffuse, that could certainly have done with quite a bit of editing. In this version, updated to the period, Sadie Thompson has been run out of Vietnam.
Larry was obviously very enthusiastic about the script when asked me, “So what do you think of it, Bob?”
“You really want me to tell you?”
Larry nodded. I looked over at his actor friend Mike Lane, who was sitting on the sofa in the living room, smiling. Mike was a former wrestler and a prolific television and movie actor who had played the son of Hercules in the Italian strongman epic Ulysses against the Son of Hercules. Apparently, Larry had recruited him to look over the script, too.
“Well, Larry, I like the setting, of course, and I do like the characters and the basic premise of the story, you know, the two-faced hypocrisy of those who profess to be ‘holier than thou,’ but there’s an awful lot of dialogue in it for a sex film,” I said.
“That’s what I told him,” Mike agreed. “There’s way too much dialogue.”
“But don’t you guys see—that’s what makes it so great! It’s a classic story and it can be made in a hardcore version, a softcore version, and even as a general release picture.”
I was still unconvinced, so I told him, “Larry, in order to make this film on the budget you want to make it for, I’d have to shoot over forty scenes a day. You’ve got a two hundred and thirty-page script here, for Christ’s sake.”
“You did it on Lipps & McCain.”
“But Lipps & McCain didn’t have all these horrendously long dialogue scenes that Sadie has. Who are the adult film actors that can handle that kind of dialogue? Besides, I only shot over forty scenes on that one day.”
“If anyone can do it, Bob, I know that you can.”
No matter what I told him, he continued to believe that he had a real winner. He said that he could possibly raise $75,000 for the project. I said that there was no way that this script could be filmed properly on the budget that he was talking about, and even if it was, I seriously doubted its commercial potential.
However, Larry was adamant and he pleaded with me to direct the film. “You do great with the period exotic South Seas stuff like this,” he said. “Nobody else in the business could even make something like this on the budget I have to make it with!” But I was far from assured. I told him I’d have to think about it.
In the weeks that followed, Larry continued to beg me to direct the film. “Please Bob,” he said, “direct the film as a favor to me!” I did owe Larry a favor because he had helped me out by not only working as assistant director but also playing a Mafia hitman in Lipps & McCain. Although I did have a project lined up with Joe Steinman at Essex Pictures, it wasn’t set to go for at least another two months. In the meantime, I had to work on developing a story screenplay for that project with a writer that had been hired.
So I finally gave in and told him that I’d do the best I could with what we had, although I couldn’t guarantee anything. Larry promised that he would take care of reworking the screenplay himself. Still, I was afraid that without enough money to do it right, the film would bomb.
After I agreed to direct Sadie for Larry, we flew up to San Francisco for preproduction. I talked Deborah into coming with me so she could see what was involved with the films that I made, the ones that she didn’t like. She sat in on the preproduction and casting. Cris Cassidy, also known as Montana and Monti Stevens, who had done Candy Stripers and China Cat for me, got the lead role. Since he was somewhat of a shady character himself, Larry played the shady character Harry. I managed to persuade Deborah to rake on the non-sex role of Senator Daniels’ wife.
Stage A had already been secured and the 35mm Panavision camera had been booked. The set crew constructed the huge, elaborate tropical hotel, perhaps the largest single set that had ever been built on that sound stage. When it was ready, it was so impressive that all kinds of production people were stopping by to see it.
When she came out of makeup on the first day of the shoot, Chris Cassidy looked absolutely gorgeous. The talented David Clark had done a marvelous job in transforming an attractive San Francisco hippie girl into the role of W. Somerset Maugham’s iconic South Seas tart. Here was my Sadie, I thought, and whatever reservations I had before I now realized that she would be perfect in the role.
The day went remarkably well in spite of the fact that I was rushing to get as many scenes as I could possibly film in one day into the can. Six days would provide very little time for us to get it all done. Larry and I had for most of the day and evening before going over the script with the cast so they would be familiar with the respective parts they were playing, and that rehearsal time had ended up paying off.
The second day of the shoot began well. I was breezing through all of the scenes that I had to shoot. Beautiful Diana Holt, who was playing the senator’s young and innocent daughter, was truly a delight to work with.
I was even setting up and making some fancy, complicated camera moves using the dolly that Elliot had managed to secure for me even though our limited production budget didn’t warrant it. Some of these shots involved moving furniture as the camera dollied in and quickly replacing it as the camera dollied back. The crew was responding enthusiastically to these creative moves, and at this point I was definitely having a lot of fun as a director.
Unfortunately, since most of the castmembers weren’t actors, they were not all that great in delivering the lines. I thought that if only I had more time, I could try and work with them, but I knew this didn’t always solve the problem. So I had to accept what I got. Not an ideal situation. I was looking forward to working with the stage actor Joseph Darling later in the day. Surely he would give me a great performance, right? Wrong.
Toward the end of the second day, Joseph Darling, who was an old man and primarily a stage actor who had only played small roles in local productions, was having a good deal of difficulty memorizing all his lines. He had some very long speeches and it was hard for him. What lines he did know came out in a blustery stage manner that was totally wrong for what I wanted to achieve.
On the third day, we were in for a gigantic shock. Elliot said that Stage A was going to shut down the shoot. Larry Price had run out of money and the stage had not been paid as had been agreed—the money that had been promised by his backers had not come through.
In spite of the fact that I had been shooting fast and furiously, I only had about a third of the film in the can. There was still a lot to be done on this elaborate set that we were going to lose forever. Elliot managed to get us a brief reprieve. He got Stage A to agree not to shut us down until the next morning. We would be filming all through the night.
Elliot and I rearranged the shooting schedule so we could shoot as much as possible in the limited time that we had. I quickly began trimming down some of the dialogue scenes, especially those that Joseph Darling was in. Fortunately, the entire cast was ready to do whatever had to be done. The important love scene between Sadie and Jock, which was supposed to have been one of the highlights of the film, was far too rushed and hurried and didn’t turn out at all as I had wanted it to. The sex scene between Bear and Honore did not come out as the tender love scene between the two young lovers I had hoped for. Quality was going down the drain, but we had no other choice. The cast and crew continued to soldier on without complaining.
By the time we had wrapped, I had managed to complete about three-fourths of the film, which was everything that had to be shot on the hotel set. There were still several key scenes, including a major sex scene that still remained to be shot. Larry assured everyone that the remaining money was on its way and the film would be completed.
We arrived back at the Jack Tar Hotel to find that we had been locked out of our rooms. Apparently, Larry’s check had bounced, and the hotel was not very happy. The entire Los Angeles contingent sat in the lobby and waited while Larry frantically called Los Angeles.
It was then, while listening in on the phone conversation, that Joel Sussman and I discovered that Larry had started the shoot with only $35,000 and a promise from his backers that the balance of the budget was on its way. Obviously, this balance had not materialized when it supposed to have.
“It’s just like Larry to pull a fucking stunt like this,” Joel said. Joel rarely cursed, so I knew he was pissed about all this. I was not very happy about it myself.
For some reason, the balance of the budget never materialized, and Larry Price now found himself between the proverbial rock and hard place. In all my experience, no one ever began a shoot without having the entire budget ready to go.
The entire Los Angeles crew was becoming very angry. We were all extremely tired and we wanted nothing more than to take a shower and go to bed, but we no longer had access to our rooms. The management wanted the hotel bill paid in full before they would release our belongings. Finally, Larry managed to get someone to wire enough money to pay the hotel bill so we could get our stuff and fly back to Los Angeles.
All in all, it was an experience that I wished I had never experienced, but then again, such is life. You’ve got to take the bad along with the good, but it doesn’t mean that you have to like it.
In the period between the aborted first shoot and the finishing of the film, I directed two films—Baby Cakes for Essex Pictures and The Seductress for Damon Christian Productions.
It would be another six months or so before Larry would find another backer—Wes De Pue of Mitam Productions—to put up the money to pay the back salaries owed to the cast and finance the two days of shooting required to finish the film. Understandably, some of the original Los Angeles crew refused to work for Larry for the rest of the shoot.
Fortunately, Elliot Lewis managed to get all of the original San Francisco crew to show up so they could finish the film and get paid for their previous work. We were very lucky that Cris Cassidy had not altered her appearance and could make herself available to finish the film. An actor name Richard Slade replaced Herschel Savage as Rajah, the island monarch. Herbert Siguenza still had his script and was still willing to play Colonel Moktar.
The scenes that still remained took place in Colonel Moktar’s office and Rajah’s palace—including the wild orgy scene. It was a lot of scenes to shoot in the little time I had, but if I couldn’t do it, Larry would be left with an incomplete film.
The first cut of Sadie ran well over three hours long. Larry hadn’t kept his word about editing the script. The script that I was handed to shoot was still a little over two hundred pages long and was still full of overlong dialogue passages.
I must confess that I had a hard time hiding my embarrassment as I sat through that first cut, but Larry was pleased with what had been shot. He said that he had enough for an X-rated film release as well as a tamer R-rated version, which he could sell on the general release market. It was, he said, just what he wanted.
A lot of the overlong dialogue scenes were cut or trimmed down for the X-rated version, which made for choppy continuity. The cut that I approved ran 118 minutes, but the film was trimmed further to 92 minutes.
Predictably, reviews were generally less than enthusiastic. Adam Film World, one of the kindest, said: “Director Bob Chinn is a master at putting sensual images on the screen… Cris Cassidy is such a sensual and evocative lady that the movie, even with a few rough edges, still has erotic appeal.”
The film critic Mark Kernes wrote, “This classically inspired adult film—and it should be noted that Chinn is the only one in the business who’s doing these—stars voluptuous blonde Cris Cassidy in the title role. Sadly, this film no longer appears to be in an X-rated version, although Applause Productions Inc. recently released the film with a less explicit R rating.”
In March 2014, Joe Rubin’s Vinegar Syndrome company released a seventy-four-minute hardcore version of Sadie that was scanned and restored in 2k from an existing 35mm internegative. The longer versions of the film now seem to be lost.
In January, 1981, I married Deborah. She was a leftist, a feminist, a vegetarian, a writer, and an aspiring actress. She didn’t want to have anything to do with my films because she still firmly believed that they exploited women; I leaned more toward the other side of the fence, with the firm belief that it was the women who were exploiting us. After all, they had the higher salaries and were the people who the predominately male audience really paid to see. If you ask me, the women in this business had us over the barrel.
Before we were married, I had invited her to come onto the set of one of the shoots. After seeing what actually went on and learning how the girls really felt about appearing in these films, she modified her opinions somewhat, but not completely.
But she had modified her opinions enough to work on a few of my films as a script girl, once as an actress in Sadie, and then on the crew as script supervisor for Baby Cakes, The Seductress, and a terrible abomination of a film that I directed called Las Vegas Lady. I don’t think that she really liked working with me on those films. I think she just did it so she could keep an eye on me as well as keep me from straying.
On the second film that Deborah worked continuity, she had just finished writing up her script notes when she rushed out of the room in tears. I had just completed filming a particularly difficult scene with the volatile redheaded Lisa DeLeeuw and was happy that it had come off so well. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I rushed out after her.
I caught up with her outside and asked her what was wrong. She said, “How can you talk so nicely to that porn slut when you never talk that nicely to me?” I realized that she was absolutely right. I hadn’t ever noticed before, but when I was directing a film, I became sensitive to the needs of the people that I was directing.
I told her that I had to do this to get the performance out of them that I wanted, and she seemed to accept this, although she still wasn’t very happy about it. I had to admit that I was pretty insensitive when it came to dealing with my wife. It was a lesson I should have taken to heart at the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t.
When I was filming in San Francisco, she would frequently fly up on the weekend to be with me for a night and we would lock ourselves in my hotel room to enjoy a marathon sex session. In those days, the sex we shared was always great, perhaps the best that I had ever experienced. Once she asked me, “Do you think of those actresses that you’re working with when we’re having sex?”
I replied, “No, I don’t. Why would you possibly ask such a question?”
“It’s just that you see all those naked women all day long, doing—well, you know what.”
“Seeing all that, well it’s just not really a turn on for me. It’s more like work, you know. Actually, it’s reached a point that seeing a woman fully clothed is more provocative.”
“I don’t know whether to believe you or not.”
“Believe me.”
After the shoot wrapped, she would usually come up again so we could spend some time together exploring our favorite city. We would get a room at the Chinatown Holiday Inn, have a few drinks at the Buddha Bar on Grant Avenue, go for long walks and dine at many of the wonderful restaurants in Chinatown, North Beach, and Fisherman’s Wharf.
We were just like eager tourists exploring our favorite city. One day, while we were at the Buddha Bar, I noticed that they had a dark brown ceramic jug of the incredibly potent Southern Chinese liquor known as ng ga py.
A long time ago, my grandmother had pointed one out to me in a Chinese market and told me that it was what my grandfather used to drink when he was alive, casually adding the implication that it was also probably why he was now dead.
John Steinbeck had also made mention of ng ga py in his book East of Eden. It was supposed to contain medicinal herbs as well as a trace of wormwood, the ingredient that led to the almost universal banning of absinthe. Since I’d never tried it before, I decided that now was the time.
I signaled for the bartender and said, “I’ll have an ng ga py.”
All eyes in the bar suddenly turned on me and the bartender looked me in the eye and said, “Are you sure?”
“Of course I am.”
She shrugged her shoulders, picked up the brown ceramic jug, broke the seal at the top, pulled out the fat cork beneath it, poured a couple of inches of it into a glass, and brought it over to me. I couldn’t help but notice that all eyes were still on me and there was an unusual silence in the bar.
Deborah gingerly picked up the glass and took a quick sniff. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed and put it back down in front of me. “Are you really going to drink that stuff?”
I resolutely picked the glass up, held my breath, and quickly bolted it down. To say that ng ga py is incredibly potent is an understatement. The first thing I noticed was the searing burning sensation travelling from my throat all the way down to the very depths of my gut, and when I could breathe once again I became aware of the incredibly terrible taste in my mouth.
Drinking that stuff was akin to drinking kerosene. But suddenly I was assailed by a pleasant floating sensation. Aside from the vile, lingering taste, after the initial startling and sudden wallop it was as if my brain had suddenly disconnected and was free-floating in space. My senses seemed heightened and I was definitely feeling no pain.
“I’ll have another,” I said to the wary bartender who, unasked, had brought me a tall glass of ice water. An amazed murmur was heard throughout the bar as she poured me another. “You’ve got to try this stuff,” I said to Deborah.
“I don’t think so,” she said, contentedly nursing her Amaretto.
A big Chinese guy, who had been sitting at the end of the bar watching me, said, “So you like to drink ng ga py, huh?”
I nodded and boldly tossed down the second drink, which had pretty much the same effect as the first.
“Give him another one on me,” he said to the bartender.
She poured another healthy shot of the stuff and put down a fresh cocktail napkin. “The General’s buying you this one,” she said as she put the drink in front of me.
I raised my glass to him, and as I prepared to drink my third ng ga py, The General came up beside me. “You can drink three of those and feel really good,” he informed me in all seriousness, “but if you drink a fourth I guarantee you the next day you’ll feel like you’re dying the death of a dog.” Since he no doubt spoke from experience, I decided to heed his advice and limit myself to three.
The General, a regular at the Buddha Bar, seemed to immediately take a shine to Deborah and me, and he ended up taking us out to dinner, which proved to be a virtual feast at one of the nearby local restaurants. He was pretty well-known because we entered the back way, through the kitchen, where he greeted and talked with all the cooks. We not only got first-class service but also the best of the freshest fish and vegetables of the day.
We had all the food and booze that we wanted and he refused to let us pay for a thing. The General also took it upon himself to instruct Deborah on the proper use of chopsticks and before long she was eating with them as if she had been using the things all her life.
“See,” The General proudly said, “she can eat with the chopsticks even better than you!” I had to reluctantly agree. Since Deborah was such a good learner, before we left the restaurant, The General scored a fistful of those plastic chopsticks and offered them to her as a souvenir of the occasion.
The General had not lied. The next day I had only a mild hangover and my head was a little fuzzy, but for the rest of the day my occasional burps continued to bring up the terrible taste of the ng ga py.
When I was not filming, we made frequent trips out of town to Ensenada, where we would always stay at the Casa del Sol on Avenida Lopez Mateos y Blancarte, get rip-roaring drunk at Hussong’s Cantina, and dine either on street vendor fare of fresh fish tacos or at the famous El Rey Sol Restaurant where the sautéed abalone was superb. We would also make trips to Las Vegas or Hawaii for some rest and recuperation. I really needed it, because at this point in my life I was starting to burn out.
During the course of my relationship with Deborah, I had made some of my best films and some of my worst. They say that once you’ve made it to the top the only other place to go is down. I don’t know if I ever made it to the top, but at times it felt like I was getting somewhat close to it. Not that I had achieved anything even remotely close to what I really wanted. But I can certainly attest to the truth of the saying. So I suppose my own decline was somewhat inevitable.
A rumor began circulating that I was an alcoholic and always drunk on the set. I don’t think that I was an alcoholic, and I can truthfully say that I was never, ever drunk on the set. And I never had a drink on the set until after five o’clock in the afternoon, when my production manager would bring me a Scotch on the rocks to renew my energy level.
But the rumor persisted and I began to realize that fewer and fewer job offers were coming my way. With what I had accomplished so far, I felt like a genuine failure in my chosen profession. It began with Sadie and would only intensified with the next three films that I would make.
Joe Steinman of Essex Distributing had been after me to make a film for him for years, but I had always been tied up making projects for other producers. I had just completed the postproduction work on Prisoner of Paradise when I ran into him at a meeting of the West Coast Producers Association.
“So are you ever going to make a film for me or not, Bob?” he asked once again.
For the first time since he first asked me I found my plate to be empty, so I replied, “Well Joe, you finally caught me at just the right time.”
Steinman wanted to make a light-hearted film with the theme of pretty, young California girls. I quickly came up with the idea of three girls riding their bicycles down the Pacific Coast, getting into all sorts of situations. Joe liked the idea and said that he would be good to go in about two months.
Around that time, Larry Price continued calling me about directing Sadie for him. I kept trying to put him off, but since I had some time before starting the Steinman project, I finally decided to give in and do the film for him. Of course, it was a decision I would come to regret. Dick Aldrich’s wife, Louise Cashman, who was the production manager for the Essex film, hired a friend of hers to write the screenplay for California Girls, based on my idea, while I went off and worked on Larry Price’s film project.
After Larry’s “film from hell,” I returned to Los Angeles dispirited and totally exhausted, just in time to begin preproduction work on Baby Cakes, as the Steinman project was now called. I would much rather have taken a long vacation.
I was far from thrilled with the screenplay, but both Louise and the people at Essex thought it was all right, and I was in no state of mind to raise any kind of objection.
Deborah read the script and said, “This screenplay’s not very good.”
But I was already committed to filming it. “It’s not terrible and the Steinmans like it, so it’s going to have to do.” Later, I would regret not taking a more active stand.
Rhonda Jo Petty had by now become something of a star, so she was cast in the lead role. We flew up to San Francisco and rounded out the rest of the casting. In addition to the rest of the crew, Deborah, who by now was very pregnant with our first child, would be the script supervisor.
The San Francisco soundstage and location scenes went off without a hitch even though I was still pretty worn out from the Sadie debacle. Apparently, six weeks had still not given me enough time to recover. I felt bad because I was not operating at 100 percent, and we still had to do the location shoot of the girls’ adventures and misadventures as they rode their bicycles down the Pacific Coast, which was the bulk of the film.
Location shoots are always tough, even when the conditions are perfect. Unfortunately, in this case, they turned out to be not-so perfect. The sunny California weather we had expected did not materialize—in fact, it was unseasonably cold for September.
The girls, in their skimpy bike riding costumes, suffered the most. You can see poor Rhonda Jo’s teeth chattering as she speaks her dialogue in the film. After every take we had to rush over and cover the girls with warm coats. It was tough for the surfer dudes as well, since they were in T-shirts and swim trunks. But they were all troopers and I was proud of them. Aside from freezing our butts off, everyone had a pretty good time.
On location, the film crew usually appeared a little grungy. Lack of ready access to laundry facilities meant that we would usually wear the same clothes for days on end, but Deborah had always been very particular about the way she appeared. She had brought with her so many changes of clothes that I had made fun of her about it.
One day she stepped out of the Winnebago ready to do script notes and the assistant cameraman Tom Jewett said, “Jeez, Bob—your wife always looks like she just stepped out of the pages of Harper’s Bazaar.”
As we travelled down the northern length of the Pacific Coast Highway shooting the film, I became increasingly unhappy with our location footage. The warm, sunny feel full of strong, vibrant California colors were replaced with a muted dull grey palate of cold, foggy weather. It was nobody’s fault, really. We had simply undertaken to shoot this film at the wrong time of year. Things don’t seem to always work out as you might expect.
On top of everything, my lack of sleep as a result of all the stress I was experiencing wreaked havoc on my health. One day, we had to knock off early because I just wasn’t feeling well.
When we finally reached Zuma Beach for the final scenes of the film, we began experiencing some major equipment problems. These could be readily resolved, but what was not so easily resolved was the loud noise from the portable electric generator powering the lights, as well as the increased Southern California air traffic, all of which were steadily interfering with the sound recording and throwing us way behind schedule.
Still, we continued to plod on, goaded by the knowledge that the end was within sight. When the film was finally wrapped, we all gave a celebratory shout and I was ready for a long period of convalescence.
Baby Cakes was not a terrible film, but I didn’t consider it to be a very good one either. I had wanted to make a great film for Joe Steinman because he had waited for me for so long. But sadly, in this case, I had a very strong feeling that I hadn’t succeeded.
On the other hand, even though I couldn’t figure out why, Steinman seemed pleased with the film. In fact, he was apparently so pleased that even wanted me to direct something else for him: an extended prologue sequence for a mainstream horror film called The Prey that he had already finished editing.
Apparently, Joe Steinman was somewhat unhappy with the picture because the people he had screened it for had told him it was un-releasable as it was on the mainstream film market. He wanted a ten-minute prologue sequence shot with an explanatory story and perhaps some softcore sex, so that, in his own words, “the damn thing would make some sense and be more sellable.”
He screened the film for me and asked me for my opinion. I told him that I couldn’t see how an added prologue sequence was going to make the film any better. But for some reason Steinman was convinced.
So I came up with the idea of making the prologue a flashback to an incident that happened a good many years before. In my prologue, townspeople were not thrilled about a gypsy camp in the area. One of the young gypsy men sneaks out of the camp and has an affair with the wife of one of the townsmen, and when the husband finds out about it, he stirs up his fellow townsmen and they head out and set fire to the gypsy camp.
A small boy manages to escape from the raging inferno, stumbling into the woods where he hides. But he is so badly burned that he becomes hideously deformed. Now, after all these years, he has grown to manhood, and he wreaks his awful vengeance on anyone who dares to enter his domain.
Nothing new there, but it was about the best I could come up with on such short notice. Steinman wanted to make everything as authentic as possible. To do research, Deborah and I visited some gypsy families in the area to learn a quite a bit about their culture.
These people were not only very friendly but they went out of their way to be helpful, inviting us into their homes to see how they lived and sharing their stories and food with us. So we decided to hire the real gypsies to play most of the gypsies in the camp. The part of the gypsy who has an affair with the townswoman was played by an adult film actor I had worked with up in San Francisco, John Leslie.
We filmed the prologue out at Paramount Ranch, where Warren Beatty was directing some scenes for his film Reds at the same time. We made very believable a caravan set out of authentic old gypsy wagons. The gypsy families showed up in full force, already dressed in appropriately authentic period gypsy garb, and brought food with which we ended up having a great feast afterwards. The production manager managed to get a vintage car club to provide authentic 1940s-period cars for the townspeople. The clubmembers also came wearing vintage clothes appropriate to the period, which lent some authenticity to the scenes that we filmed.
By the time midnight rolled around and I was finally able to call a wrap, Deborah and I were both thoroughly tired. We told each other that we would both need a little vacation before undertaking the next project.
But there was no chance for a vacation, because the next project came around less than a week or so later.
Not long after we completed the prologue shoot for Steinman, Deborah and I were having dinner at Dick Aldrich’s house in Venice when he turned to me and casually asked, “What’s the cheapest you think we can make a film for?”
“If we shoot it on sixteen millimeter, maybe ten thousand or so—depends on who’s in the cast and how much they’re going to cost.”
“Ten grand, huh,” he said thoughtfully.
“It won’t be much of a film, though,” I warned him. “You can’t expect any kind of blockbuster for ten grand.”
Dick mulled this over. He had the screenplay for a project that he had never filmed, and with a few modifications here and there, this became the script that we used for The Seductress. Now all we needed was to assemble a cast.
“Who are you going to get to be in it?” I asked Richard.
“All the girls in the film are going to have big tits,” he replied. I suppose that was some kind of an answer.
Deborah, who is flat as a board, was definitely not impressed. In fact, although she didn’t say anything, I could tell that she felt distinctly uncomfortable being surrounded by all those oversized, naked bosoms.
The original script was a little lackluster, but we would do what we could with it. As one theater owner who thought that my films had way too much dialogue in them once said, “Who the hell goes to see these damn things for the story, anyway?”
Nevertheless, we did try to improve on the story a little. We worked a recent Las Vegas hotel fire that had been in the news into the plot.
This was the first of my films in which Lisa de Leeuw appeared. Since Dick had done the casting I hadn’t met her until she showed up on set. As we started to rehearse her lines, I noticed that she was trembling.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you OK?”
She hesitated for a moment before she replied, “I’m a little scared. You’re such a legend in this business, your mere presence is intimidating.”
“Bullshit!” I exclaimed. “Hell, I’m actually nervous about working with you because you seem like you could really be a bitch.”
She let out with a huge laugh, and from that point on her uneasiness disappeared and she was fine. I took some time directing her scene even though I didn’t have a whole lot of it to spare because of the budget. When we finished it, she came over to me, gave me a peck on the cheek, and said, “You know, you’re a real pussycat.” I smiled, not knowing whether that was a compliment or something else.
Aldrich had wanted to make a cheap film featuring girls with big tits, and I wanted to make a dark porno-noir, and it seems that we both ended up succeeding.
The Seductress was made at a dark period in my career, when it seemed as if everything that I had worked toward was starting to fall apart. I was even beginning to question my ability as a director. It is probably one of my darkest films—with unsympathetic and selfish characters, illicit sex, blackmail, betrayal, and death.
We all did the absolute best that we could do with the money and the time that we had, but I was far from satisfied with the end result, which only seemed to confirm my feeling that whatever career I had was going down the toilet. I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my “touch.” I also wondered if I had ever even had any kind of “touch” to begin with.
To save money on an editor, I had agreed to edit The Seductress myself. One day, when I had almost finished, Deborah came over to the office and we both went across the street to the Hollywood First United Methodist Church and got married. It was a simple, very casual private ceremony. We didn’t tell our friends or relatives. We just went over and did it.
At the time that we made The Seductress, Dick was married to Louise Cashman, and she also worked at his office doing his accounts as well as the secretarial work and answering the phone. Louise always had an interesting and often humorous way of innocently putting words together that we on the crew often referred to as “Louise-isms.”
One day, Deborah called the office and Louise answered the phone. When Deborah asked if I was there, Louise replied, “Yes, he’s sitting there in the editing room just cutting his little heart out.”
If she only knew how close I came to actually doing that while I was assembling the footage. I kept wondering what had possessed me for even wanting to attempt to make such a cheap and sorry piece of shit. But if I was feeling down on myself now, little did I know that the next film I was going to make would mark a whole new low point in my now questionable career as an adult filmmaker.
Things were not good, but they would get far worse in my personal life. My mother had been battling cancer off and on for years, and when her doctor finally told her that she only had a few months to live, she decided that she didn’t want to die in a hospital.
My sister Valerie invited her to move from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to her house in Torrance, California, so that she could spend her final days with the loving atmosphere provided by Valerie and her family. And I would be nearby. My father’s mother, Grandmother Chinn, who had shared the Albuquerque house with my mother, also moved to the Los Angeles area, settling in an apartment in Monterrey Park in the same complex where her younger sister Ruth also lived.
My mother was always very correct in whatever she did. She was correct in dress, speech, and manner, and she was always correct and proper when she was entertaining guests or serving food or simply being a guest in someone else’s home, and she wanted me, my sisters, and my brother to behave just as properly.
Despite my rebelliousness and unconventional manner of living and working, whenever I was around her I always tried to behave in a manner of which she would have approved. From the time when we were children, she had instilled in us a sense of proper etiquette.
As far as I know, she never discussed my occupation with anyone. Whatever she felt about it she kept inside of her. She never once treated me as if she thought less of me because of my personal opinions or my questionable occupation. To her, I was still her son, and she loved me and would continue loving me in spite of anything that I said or did.
When my mother was dying at Valerie’s, I would frequently visit her there as if by being there now I could somehow make up for all the years that I had ignored her. There was a feeling of guilt, certainly, about how I had gone on with my life and rarely wrote or called or visited her.
Whenever my guilty conscience crept up on me, I tried to justify my negligence by citing the distance between New Mexico and Los Angeles. But this was a pretty lame excuse, because all I had to do was pick up a pen and write a letter or pick up a telephone and call. The real reason for my hesitation to phone her was what I perhaps feared the most—that possibly the subject of what I was doing might come up in our conversation, because she knew what I did and I knew that she knew. Still, whenever we did communicate, she always greeted me cheerfully as if we had spoken only the day before, even though it had been years. It was a difficult time for all of us.
My mother longed to revisit her old home on Kauai once more before she died, so some of the immediate family and their families got together and took a brief vacation to the Islands. Deborah and I had been married for several months, and we decided to take our delayed honeymoon on Kauai so that we could be there to join them.
Deborah was pregnant with Kerima at the time, and we all had a terrific vacation. We spent happy, lazy days on the beautiful beaches at Hanalei and Lumahai or driving around the beautiful island. Deborah had never been there before and she loved the relaxed atmosphere. As for me, it was wonderful being here once again, so very close to the paradise I had known as a child. It was then that I had decided that someday I wanted to return to Hawaii to live there once again, this time with my own family.
One evening, my mother asked me to take a stroll along the beach with her so we could watch the beautiful Hawaiian sunset over Hanalei Bay. We walked in silence for what seemed like a very long time, and then she finally turned to me and said, “I don’t ever want you to think that I’m not proud of you, Robert, because I am.”
I was speechless and tears began welling up in my eyes. We sat down on the clean, white sand and she spoke wistfully about the brief time she had shared with the handsome young man who was the father that I had never known.
She told me things that she remembered about him that she had never spoken to me of before. How he had wanted to come to Hanalei to see where she was born and grew up, but that was never to be. Most of all we recalled the happy times we’d shared when she had returned with me to Hanalei after my father had died. Then she told me how wonderful it was to be here in Hanalei once again, if even for only a very short time, because, as she said, “We always seem to be drawn back somehow to the place from which we originally came.”
She told me stories about her happy childhood days and recounted memories of her father Chock Chin, of her mother Chock Chun Shee, and the numerous other members of her family. I listened with rapt attention. Now that she is gone, I am so glad that she took the time to share these very intimate and heartfelt personal reminiscences with me. We sat and silently watched the sun drop below the horizon as the long summer day faded slowly into night.
My daughter Kerima’s birth on July 10, 1981, at Santa Monica General Hospital, had been one of the high points of my life. Deborah had the baby by natural childbirth, and we had dutifully attended a series of classes to prepare us for the big event.
It was the first time that I would be present at the actual birth of one of my children, participating, as I was supposed to be participating, as my wife’s coach. We had gone to Lamaze classes to prepare for this, but, like everything else, nothing can ever fully prepare you for the real thing.
It was a long and difficult ordeal that was much more difficult for Deborah than it was for me. It seemed to take forever for the baby to come. I tried to apply everything I had learned at the Lamaze classes, but I seriously doubted my effectiveness. While I agonized mentally, she agonized physically.
It was her first child and I don’t think that she was totally prepared for all the pain that childbirth entailed. It was the only time in all the time I had known her that she shouted out curse words that I didn’t even think she knew. But she came through with flying colors after eight hours of suffering.
Kerima emerged as a healthy baby girl and both Deborah and I were aglow with a happiness and contentment neither of us had ever experienced before.
We had barely arrived home when Louise Aldrich called and said that she and Richard were throwing a baby shower for us later in the week at their home in Venice. This was totally unexpected and it was just like Louise to plan out something before even consulting us, but it was such a nice thought that we agreed to come.
Somehow, I thought that it was just going to be a small, informal party, but when we arrived I was surprised to find just about all of our immediate friends and many of the crewmembers that I had worked with as well as a number of our acquaintances in the industry in attendance. It seemed as if everyone we knew wanted to be there to greet the new mother and her new baby. We were thoroughly taken aback by the lovely and unexpected reception that we were greeted with.
We also received another unexpected reception when we took the trip down to Torrance to introduce Kerima to Valerie, her family, and my mother.
My mother had gradually taken a turn for the worse after returning from Hawaii. She had lost a lot of weight and was also losing her interest in food. I couldn’t believe how thin she had become.
She was extremely happy, she said, to have been able to see her new granddaughter before she died. “I feel blessed,” she had said. And she had felt doubly blessed when my daughter Amy arrived one day at my sister’s house with her recently born son Travis, so that she could also get to see her only great-grandson.
One of the last things that she said to me was, “Make sure that Gertrude is always taken care of. This is the one duty that you should not neglect.”
Gertrude, of course, was Grandmother Chinn. She and my mother had always been very close because they had both lost the one man that the both of them had truly loved, who was my father. After my parents’ divorce, Gertrude had gone to live with my mother in her small house in Albuquerque. Apart from the five years of my childhood in Hawaii, the two women had both lived together for well over forty years.
Before she died, my mother told me that she had never gotten over her love for my real father. He was her first love and, she said, it was her deepest. Even though she had remarried, he had never left her mind. She also told me that my stepfather had known and understood this. After divorcing Dr. Toney, my mother had no interest in marrying again. Her children were all now adults and she could enjoy her independence.
A few months after my daughter Kerima was born, my mother passed away.
Later that year we flew to Hawaii for my mother’s memorial service, which was short and simple. Members of the immediate family boated out to a special spot in Kaneohe Bay, where her ashes were scattered in the water to join those of other members of her family who had chosen to be cremated and consigned there for eternity.
Afterwards, our entire family took the inter-island flight to Kauai where my stepfather Dr. Toney and his new wife LaRue had rented accommodations in Hanalei for us to stay. There would be another brief and relatively subdued memorial service for my mother at the old church in Hanalei, for only the immediate family.
When a loved one dies, we are inevitably reminded of our own mortality. I realized that I had already lived perhaps half of my life. This now made me wonder about how I was going to live the other half. I had certainly not accomplished much of anything in the first half of my life. I had started out with lofty goals that had still not been accomplished. I certainly was not proud of anything I had done. That made me realize that there were still many things that I needed to do.
It was wonderful to be reunited once again with my family. We had all been busy building our careers, raising our families, and living our lives all across the country and, in the case of Gene and Stephanie, abroad in the Netherlands, and we rarely had the time or the opportunity to gather together.
Although the tragic circumstances had brought us together, we all optimistically looked forward to the joyous reunion that seemed to only reaffirm our family’s close ties and our hopes for the future. The days that we spent there were filled with fun and fellowship. Now I was totally convinced that I wanted to move my family back to Hawaii. I wanted my children to grow up in a happy and safe environment, and to me, this was truly paradise.
It took a couple of months for my mother’s death to fully sink in, but when it finally did, I suddenly found that I was devastated. I lost interest in looking for work and moped around the house for what seemed to be way too long. Perhaps it was a deep guilt gnawing away at me for all the things that had been left unsaid, all the things that had been left undone.
It was only after she had died that I realized that I had never thanked her or shown her any appreciation for all the love that she had given me and all of the things that she had done for me. I was appalled at my selfishness.
Deborah seemed to realize what I was going through and she was very understanding. She didn’t pressure me to get off my ass and get back to work, but eventually it dawned on me that if we kept on with the way we were living, it was going to be a disaster. All of the money was going out and there was nothing coming back in. I had to get it together.
I redoubled my efforts at finding film work, but still to no avail. Even though I was going through the motions, my heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps, I thought, I was already going through some sort of midlife crisis.
I was on the verge of giving up hope about ever working as a director again when I got a call from a man who called himself “Spanky” McFarland. He had worked in the film industry for years, and the stuntman Jerry Wade had recommended me to him.
He didn’t want to discuss any of the details over the phone, but he said that he knew me by reputation and a friend of his had spoken very highly of me, so he wanted me to direct a feature film for him. Then he asked me if I would meet him at his production office in North Hollywood.
For a while I had visions of finally getting a job doing a legitimate general release film, so I quickly answered, “Sure.”
This vision quickly dissipated when I saw his production office, which was little more than an anonymous, grungy storefront in one of the seedier parts of Lankershim Boulevard. Inside, the secondhand furnishings were even grungier. It certainly didn’t look like any kind of producer’s office that I had ever seen or imagined. In fact, with all the clutter of old sound equipment and various mechanical stuff of just about every shape, size, and description spread out all over the place, it looked more like a dusty old junk shop.
Like “Spanky” from the Little Rascals comedies, this “Spanky” was also kind of chubby. He had worked in the film business for years and years, but as a soundman rather than a producer. At least he would know about what it took to make a film, but I was still somewhat leery about getting involved with him. I made a mental note to really “thank” Jerry Wade for making this wonderful introduction.
He immediately got right down to business and told me that he knew a young lady who wanted to become a pornstar and how he thought that, given the reputation that I had in the business, I could turn her into one. He had some money, but not a lot, and he wanted to produce a film that would showcase her talent, which, he led me to believe, was considerable.
I wasn’t totally sold on this idea, but since I wasn’t doing anything at the time, I thought, what the hell, I’d just made one cheap piece-of-shit picture and making another one wasn’t going to kill me. Besides, I could use the money. So I agreed to take on the directing job for the small but not insignificant salary that he offered, which, I’m somewhat ashamed to say, made up the majority of the budget for the film.
The young lady in question was Drea, and, because of “Spanky” McFarland, I would end up directing her first film. As I recall, Drea was one of those raven-haired All-American girl-next-door types who impressed me as being more of an astute businesswoman than your run-of-the-mill pornstar.
She was also very smart and surprisingly easy to work with. I noticed that she was carefully studying all behind-the-scenes aspects, as if the film were a crash course in motion-picture production.
Looks-wise, she was rather ordinary. She wasn’t beautiful—she wasn’t even particularly pretty, and whenever she took off her glasses she tended to squint as if she was somewhat nearsighted. She had an awkward, almost tomboyish way of standing and walking. But there was no denying that there was some kind of aura of repressed sensuality about her that made her attractive.
But initially I couldn’t visualize Drea as a star because, to be perfectly honest, she was so far from the standard concept of a sex goddess—but then again, I’ve been wrong more than once and stranger things have happened. And stranger things did happen. Drea did end up becoming a sex star—and also, subsequently, a producer and a director.
Las Vegas Lady didn’t have much going for it because “Spanky” didn’t have much money to spend on it. With really cheap productions, spending a few hundred dollars to hire a name star for a half-day at half her normal rate to do something like a girl-girl scene could give the film some box-office appeal.
But there wasn’t even any money for that. And the script, such as it was, was pretty basic and trite. We managed to avoid any possible confrontation with the LA vice squad by shooting some of the film at a private location in an industrial complex just outside the Los Angeles County line and went on to complete the rest of it with a one-day shoot up in San Francisco.
It didn’t take much to persuade Gary Eberhart, the aspiring musician who had written the title song for Sadie, to write and perform the title song for Las Vegas Lady, which we recorded right there on the set on the final day of the shoot. The cameraman and grip were friends of McFarland’s and he recorded the sound himself, so crew costs had been kept down to a bare minimum.
I don’t remember much about the shoot, and I can’t even recall ever seeing the film after it was released. All I can say was that it was a job that I somewhat reluctantly accepted even though the pay wasn’t very good, and once I started it, all I had in mind was to get it done. Throughout the whole affair, I couldn’t get over the unnerving feeling that this was, perhaps, the sleaziest and most unappetizing film that I had ever made.
Consequently, it ranks as one of my all-time worst films. Drea, however, did go on to make many more movies, hopefully much better than the one I made with her.
With Las Vegas Lady, my film career seemed to have hit an all-new low. I wasn’t directing the film as I should have been directing it; I was just going through the motions like some kind of robot. Had I totally lost interest in what I was supposed to be doing for a living?
For the first time, I sat down and seriously began taking stock of my life. I started wondering if this was an indication that I wasn’t happy about what I was doing. My wife tried to bring me out of my depression by encouraging me to find work directing mainstream pictures.
She even wrote the screenplay for a horror film for me. It was a good script and I wanted to make it, so, thus encouraged, I went to see whatever contacts I had in the general release market to get the project off the ground.
After a few months of pitching the project and meeting with absolutely no success, I became more than discouraged. Although I had already directed seventy-some-odd adult feature films and I knew that I was capable of directing any kind of motion picture, I began to feel there might be a stigma attached to me because of the adult films I had previously made.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do anymore. I was sick of making porn movies. I was getting tired of the whole rat race, and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t just tired; I was totally exhausted.