Hollywood—San Francisco—1982 to 1983
A Legend Still in the Making
I have always felt more than a little uncomfortable when I read magazine articles or reviews that refer to me as a legend—or the legendary Bob Chinn—because, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never really considered myself worthy of legendary status.
I thought that, at best, my abilities were highly overrated. And yet the way people kept writing and saying it, I might even believe it myself, despite the fact that I certainly know better. And this was even happening back as early as 1982, when, after thirteen years in the business, I felt that my career had finally hit bottom in my downward spiral.
Well, once you’ve hit bottom the only place to go is back up again—or so I believed. I knew for sure that I didn’t want to stay at the bottom. I began to examine everything that had led to my current state. I began wondering if I had lost my ambition, or, at the very least, misplaced it.
How could this have happened to me? I thought about my after-five drinking on set, which had led people to misconstrue that I was an alcoholic. It was annoying, but it wasn’t what the problem was. The problem was me.
I realized that I no longer liked making these films because I was no longer having any fun making them. I no longer had the ambition to make a really good adult film. The elusive “breakthrough” adult movie that would suddenly catapult me into the realm of mainstream film production simply would never materialize. Hardcore sex movies were a genre of their own and they would never be accepted by or successfully mix with mainstream movies, no matter how hard any filmmaker tried.
So instead, I was now directing whatever project that happened to come my way simply to take home a salary, and as a result the last few films I had made had been made quickly and badly. The strange thing about it all was that nobody else in the adult film industry seemed to know that I had truly hit rock bottom; I was the only one who seemed to know it. The only way for me to survive was to find a way to put the fun back in it once again.
So what would I have to do to make that long return climb upward and restore my career? Not much, as it turned out. Just when I felt like I was totally out of the game, I got called back in. Strangely enough, it was Harry Mohney’s Caribbean Films, the people who I had least expected to ever hire me again, who had a project for me: to make a beautiful young lady named Hyapatia Lee into a star. Was I up for it? Sure, I was up for it. I’d turned total unknowns into stars before, so I most certainly could do it again.
I even got a call from Harry Mohney himself, who got right to the point and asked me, “You still drinking?”
“From time to time,” I answered.
“Like every day, I bet.” Nothing could fool Harry. “So you still need it, huh?”
“I drink because I enjoy it, not because I need it, Harry.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
So I was up in the office at Caribbean Films working out the details for the forthcoming shoot when one of the honchos, Jack Gallagher, walked in with a bright-eyed, curly-haired, slightly overweight young man in tow. As they walked over to me, Jack said, “Hey Bob—there’s someone here I want you to meet. This is Jack Nash.”
“It’s a real honor to meet you, Mr. Chinn,” Jack Nash enthused as he hesitantly extended his hand.
I shook it and said, “Call me Bob. Mr. Chinn makes me sound a little too distinguished.”
Jack Nash also went by Jim Holliday as a writer and film critic, so to save confusion I decided to call him Jim.
“Jim here’s working on a book,” Jack Gallagher said. “He’s been writing about some of your films.”
“I simply love Candy Stripers,” Jim cut in. “It’s my favorite film.”
I couldn’t figure out anything to say about that, but it was good to know that at least somebody seemed to appreciate my films. Gallagher broke the silence by saying, “Jim here thinks he can come up with some new dialogue to improve Gail’s telephone-operator script.”
“Cool,” I responded. “It could probably use a little improving.”
Gail Palmer had written a cute little original screenplay that still needed work, so Jim Holliday was called in to clean it up a little and change some dialogue. Hyapatia also put in her input for some changes that would make everything work better for her as well. Jim turned out to be such a big fan of my films, and since he was a nice guy to boot, being in a generous mood that day, I asked him if he wanted to come up to San Francisco with us for the shoot.
“Would I!” he exclaimed gratefully. He was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t help being glad that I had invited him. So I justified Holliday’s addition to the crew by telling Caribbean that we would be around to handle any rewrites that might be needed during the course of the shoot.
The telephone-operator film would be released as The Young Like It Hot. As was my usual practice, I would be shooting a second feature back-to-back with this film called Sweet Young Foxes from a screenplay that Deborah had written about three teenage girls undergoing tumultuous changes the summer after their graduation from high school.
Hyapatia and her husband Bud Lee arrived in Los Angeles, having driven in from Indianapolis. I met with them briefly before we all headed up to San Francisco, and they seemed like a nice young couple who really cared for each other. Hyapatia was as beautiful and personable as I had been told she would be, and now I was looking forward to the shoot. I could feel in my bones that I was going to redeem myself with these two films. No, sir, I wasn’t washed up yet. In fact, I was far from being the has-been that I had come to think I was.
After we arrived in San Francisco, Elliot Lewis set up a couple of casting sessions in the production suite of the hotel. Preproduction ran effectively and smoothly. Within three days, most of the cast for both films had been assembled.
Jack Remy—the director of photography—and I went over in detail the look I wanted for each film. We had both wanted to work together for a while now, and it was wonderful to be working with someone as dedicated and conscientious as he was. We were both avid moviegoers and had similar tastes and interests. I had been given the job of making Hyapatia Lee into a star, so I was very concerned about how she was going to be photographed in these films.
Since this was Hyapatia’s first hardcore sex film, she was naturally a little apprehensive about it, but she stoically hid any hint of nervousness she might have had very well. There was one person that had been cast that she said she didn’t want to do a sex scene with, so I accommodated her with that request. In fact, her husband and manager seemed even more nervous about the whole thing than she was. Before the shoot, he came up to me and said, “I thought I was all prepared for this, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What aren’t you so sure about?”
“You know.”
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“Well, I love Hyapatia and I don’t know how I’m going to feel when I see her, you know, doing what she’s going to be doing—you know what I mean?”
It was hard for him to come out with it and I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t have the time to be pussyfooting around. “You mean about pimping your wife? Because that’s what this all boils down to.”
He looked somewhat crestfallen as he replied, “I suppose.”
“Well, you better make a decision real quick. We’re already scheduled to start shooting the locations, but I can still make a major cast change if I absolutely have to.” Naturally I didn’t want to have to find a new lead at this stage of the game, and I knew that Caribbean Films wouldn’t have been thrilled about the situation that had suddenly and unexpectedly come up, because a lot of money had already been spent on preproduction costs, but I was going to leave it all up to Bud. I didn’t want him to to feel forced into doing anything that he didn’t want to do.
Bud made his decision and we continued on with the shoot as planned. To mollify him somewhat, we gave him sex roles in both films and suddenly all of his qualms seemed to fly out the window. In Sweet Young Foxes he would have a sex scene with his wife, and in The Young Like It Hot he played the added role of the sole male telephone operator in the exchange, a part that I got Jim Holliday to specifically write for him at the last minute. It had been a very good idea to bring Jim on the shoot after all.
This was the first time that Jim Holliday had ever been on a porn set, and to judge from the look in his eyes and the constant flow of expressions that I saw come across his face, he was in seventh heaven. There was no way that he could hide his joyous enthusiasm.
Jim was more than ready and willing to help with anything that needed to be done, which was a godsend. So we gladly put him to work doing whatever had to be done. And he did it all without a bit of complaint.
Jim would be the first to admit that he received a darn good education in filmmaking during the course of this particular shoot, something that would serve him well in later years when he finally became a director of adult films himself. Whenever he had the chance, he was carefully watching what I was doing on the set, sometimes even taking hastily scribbled notes.
A few times, those notes were his ideas for improving the dialogue that he heard during the rehearsals. Jim apparently took his job as a dialogue doctor seriously. He would bring me his notes after the rehearsals, and if I thought that it merited it I would go ahead and make the appropriate dialogue changes.
Hyapatia Lee was not only a beautiful young lady but she was talented and intelligent as well. She had some acting experience from high school plays, and she had also won a number of beauty contests not only in the Midwest but on the national scene as well, including the Miss Nude USA beauty pageant.
She had also been a stripper and nude dancer in nightclubs, so she definitely knew how to take off her clothes. She also had some amateur stage experience and was a whiz at memorizing dialogue, which, as it turned out, only helped to make my job all that much easier.
Once she overcame her initial nervousness, Hyapatia proved to be a consummate professional who came onto the set fully prepared with her lines and any changes. She also adapted well to shooting two films at once in which she played different characters, as did her talented costar Kay Parker.
I was gratified to discover that if I did my job right, it would be very easy to make this girl into a star.
However, aside from Hyapatia and Kay Parker, most of the other girls in the cast had very little experience with actual acting, memorizing and delivering lines, and following specific blocking directions. This meant that a few of them were actually incapable of walking and talking at the same time.
Some others picked things up very quickly, including Colleen Applegate—a young natural blonde billed as Callie Aimes, who later took up the stage name Shauna Grant.
In contrast, we hired the attractive older actress Pat Manning who could always make a hot scene even hotter. After I told her I wanted her character to combine sophistication with unbridled animalistic lust, everyone in the crew, including myself, was getting turned on by her scenes.
Technically, the shoot went well from the very beginning. We managed to remain on schedule and sometimes were able to even finish a day’s shooting a few hours early, which enabled everyone to get some decent rest before the next day of shooting. The extensive rehersals we had done during the preproduction phase had definitely helped.
Although the budget for these two films was fairly decent compared to the previous Caribbean Films, back-to-back shoots, it was still not all that large. Since I had only so much 35mm film stock to work with for the two full-length features, I had to limit the number of takes I could do on the dialogue scenes to stay within that budget.
There is a lot of inaccurate information floating around about me and my films to be found in books and on websites. A lot of this comes from people relying on second or thirdhand misinformation. I never cared enough about credits to bother to correct these inaccuracies, but apparently there are some people that do care.
I have been asked about the instances where Jim Holliday has been erroneously credited as a codirector of The Young Like it Hot. This doesn’t upset me, but to set the record straight once and for all, this is simply not true. Anyone who worked on that film would obviously know that. When I brought this matter up casually over lunch with Jim one day many years later, he appeared somewhat surprised at first, and then told me that someone had probably misinterpreted what he meant when he said to people that “he helped Bob Chinn make The Young Like It Hot.”
At least thirteen people who worked on that particular shoot did eventually become directors in the adult film industry. Aside from Jim Holliday, castmembers Eric Edwards, Paul Thomas, Bud Lee, Joey Silvera, Hyapatia Lee, Mike Horner, Herschel Savage, Ron Jeremy, and William Margold went on to become directors, as did the set designer Jim Malibu, the producer Elliot Lewis, and the extremely talented and hardworking cameraman Jack Remy.
The flip side of this shoot was the quiet little melodrama Sweet Young Foxes. In this film, which had been scripted by my wife under her pen name Deborah Sullavan, Hyapatia proved she could handle drama as well as comedy. Kay Parker’s role won her the AFAA Best Supporting Actress Award. Kay was one of the more talented actresses in adult films. Like Georgina Spelvin, she could give a believable and nuanced performance.
This shoot marked the first time that Kay had appeared in any of my films, and I found her to be a total delight to work with. Although I don’t believe she was a formally trained actress, she was one of those people who could bring a certain presence to any role that she played.
The Young Like It Hot and Sweet Young Foxes were two films that restored my faith in myself. I realized once again that I was capable of making a fairly good movie. Both of the features received decent reviews and ended up doing well not only in the theaters but later in video sales as well.
So I judged myself to be on track once again. I remember walking into some producer’s office out in the Valley around that time to hear him say, “Hey, I see that The Young Like It Hot just topped the sales on the video chart!” That was good news to a person who, only a couple of months ago, had just about lost all confidence in himself.
Hyapatia Lee had gone all out for the promotion of The Young Like It Hot, making personal appearances in theaters across the country. Apparently, she had captivated the adult film audience with her unique beauty and talent, and, as a result, both films were big hits and Hyapatia skyrocketed to almost immediate stardom. So it stood to reason that Caribbean Films was anxious for me to follow up on this initial success by making two more hit films with the lovely Hyapatia in the lead.
Hyapatia and her husband wrote the scripts for the two films that would come out of the next back-to-back film shoot. I was determined to do the best job I could. They weren’t bad scripts, but there was nothing particularly special about them. One was for a routine comedy built around a sexy young lady who operates a workout fitness center called Body Girls. The other script was a drama about a former ballet dancer who had become a dance instructor and owned a dance studio along with her crippled husband. That script was titled Burning Point, but for some reason only the gods and the higher beings at Caribbean Films are privy to, it was released as Let’s Get Physical.
Jack Remy had worked out so well on the last shoot that I decided to use him as the cinematographer for Hyapatia’s next two films as well. Jack had a constant drive to learn about things, and when we were preparing these films, he had been studying about the use and effect of color, and he applied what he had learned during his research in helping me choose the colors for the various sets. It was great to be working with someone who actually cared as much about the look of the films as I did.
Even though Caribbean Films appeared to be making money hand over fist with the previous two films, I still had to work with a limited budget with the forthcoming shoot. It didn’t bother me until it came to putting up the set for the dance studio that, with a few changes and a small makeover, would also double as the gym for Body Girls.
Josh Koral and his crew of set builders had just about finished the set when I walked in, took a quick look at it and said, “What the hell is this?”
The art director said, “It’s… It’s the dance studio.”
I asked him, “What about the floor?” We both looked at the hard concrete floor that the set crew had painted white. “I wanted a wooden floor. Dance studios have polished hardwood floors. Dancers can’t train on a floor like this! Didn’t I specify that I wanted a wooden floor for the dance studio set?”
“I know,” he replied defensively. “But we don’t have the budget to lay in parquet for this big of an area.”
I knew that Elliot was cutting it close on the budget as it was. Trying to hide my disappointment, I asked him, “How much would it cost?”
Apparently, he had already priced the cost of the parquet because he opened up his notebook and told me exactly how many squares he would need and what the stuff sold for at each of the local building supply houses.
“You can see,” he went on. “I just can’t afford it on the set budget that I have.”
“Well, this just isn’t going to work,” I told him decisively. “Go see Elliot and tell him he has to juggle the budget around so you can buy the parquet.”
The next morning when I walked onto the set I saw that I had my wooden floor. The set construction crew had stayed up all night to put it in. I don’t know how Elliot juggled the budget around to give me what I wanted, but somehow he had managed to do it.
The shoot on Let’s Get Physical went smoothly, but the film itself ended up being not quite what I had expected it to be. Although it was good enough, it was not quite as good as I wanted to make it. If this film disappointed me, Body Girls ended up disappointing me even more.
It was the fourth and final film I would make with Hyapatia. She and her husband had now learned enough about making films that they could go on to write and direct their own projects.
Dave Friedman’s dire prophecy was coming true more rapidly than one could have ever imagined: video had indeed become the next big thing. The prices of the initially prohibitively expensive home-video hardware had begun to drop, so more and more people now had a VCR in their home in either the Betamax or VHS format. Some even had both.
Film distributors were quick to jump on the bandwagon to release their libraries on these highly profitable new home-entertainment formats. Adult videotape sales were booming, and this was spelling doom for the adult movie theaters. Attendance at the adult theaters was dropping, and many of them began closing their doors. After all, why should one go to a public theater when one could enjoy the very same pornography in the intimate privacy of one’s own home?
Some producers had even begun shooting on video, which was a far easier and less expensive and troublesome format than film. The problem was, as I saw it, that the end result was far inferior to a picture shot with film.
But the video revolution had indeed begun, and in its wake came a deluge of backyard film producers flooding the market with pornographic video loops, and these were selling like hotcakes. The old-line film producers and distributors were now either adapting to the new trend or going out of the business entirely. A new breed of video distributors had also appeared on the scene, and they were hardcore businessmen with little or no experience with film but definite ideas on what their customers would buy, and feature-length adult films with stories weren’t high on their list.
The writing on the wall was there to be clearly read. My final big 35mm theatrical adult feature film, All the Way In, was made for a newly formed production company owned by Bob Easley and Gary Wolff called Osolobo Productions. It would be the only feature film that they would ever make.
Bob and Gary had made a small fortune with a mail order business that sold loops that featured the particularly well-endowed woman named Candy Samples as a columnist who offers sex advice to her avid readers. It was a cute idea and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t make a decent film, especially since Candy was already a big star among the big-bosom fetishists.
Fortunately, Bob and Gary already had a screenplay and were eager to begin production, so I flew up to San Francisco with Jack Remy, who had recommended me for the job in the first place, to scout locations and begin the preproduction. Since Bob and Gary seemed to have a lot of faith in me, they remained in the background. We cast the film in record time and began shooting in locations in and around the Bay Area.
Candy Samples had no real acting experience to speak of, but she was hardworking and willing, so it was no problem to get a performance out of her.
I had cast Ron Jeremy in the part of the magazine’s ace photographer, a role for which he won the AFAA Best Supporting Actor Award. It was the first time I had worked with Ron, and I had a really great time with him. Not much had been written for his part, so I had him improvise, which, with his brash ego and outgoing personality, was something he did very well.
Once during the shoot, he came up to me and said, “You know, I can suck my own cock.”
“Say what?” I said.
“It’s so long I can just bend over and suck myself,” he went on. “You wanna see?”
“I really think that I can live without seeing that, Ron,” I replied, not adding that it bothered me to even think about it.
Totally opposite to Ron was Candy’s then-boyfriend Pat Romano, a likable young man who had been cast in a small part in the film, primarily because he was the only person that Candy would have hardcore sex with. Pat was a somewhat shy and unassertive person who I quickly realized that I would have trouble with when it came time to shoot the sex scene.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was akin to pulling teeth. First of all, it’s difficult for just about any ordinary person to have sex in front of other people, let alone a whole film crew. Pat was extremely nervous and having trouble trying to get it up. We cleared the set of everyone but the most essential people: me, the cameraman, and the soundman. Pat still couldn’t get it up, no matter what Candy tried to do. Since they were a couple, a fluff girl was out of the question, and Candy refused to work with anyone else for a hardcore scene.
While Candy went to work on him, I tried to set him at ease. I told him to close his eyes and clear his mind, and imagine that he wasn’t here on a movie set but somewhere where he wanted to be, all alone with the woman that he loved. And now that woman was intent on pleasuring him just as he was intent on pleasuring her.
Candy took the cue and began giving him oral sex. Pat had closed his eyes and I hoped that he was imagining what I told him to. But no matter what Candy did and what I told him, it just wasn’t working. They were both dripping with sweat from the hot studio lights, so I brought in a portable fan to cool them off a little and killed most of the lights. Even this didn’t work. Pat indicated that the hot lights didn’t bother him, so we turned them back on so we’d be ready to shoot. Just in case.
After an hour passed, I was on the verge of pulling out my hair. It was the final scene of the whole shoot, and while the rest of the crew lounged in air-conditioned comfort in the other room waiting for me to call a wrap, the cameraman, soundman, and I were sweating, waiting for something that it seemed like wasn’t going to happen. Candy resolutely continued her oral ministrations. She wasn’t about to give up.
Suddenly, Pat uttered the three words we all had been waiting to hear, “It’s getting hard.”
I got up from my director’s chair and walked over for a peek. What I saw was a semi-hard-on, but it was servicable. I signalled for Jack Remy to come over with the handheld camera. We got about thirty seconds of footage before Pat went limp again. I had finally reached the end of my rope.
“OK, Pat,” I told him. “I’m going to try and cheat this thing as best as I can, but I need you to get it hard enough so we can at least do an insertion shot. So please, try to concentrate and give me what I need.”
Pat nodded his head to indicate that he understood, then closed his eyes and gave it an all-out effort. At least he was trying.
Finally, after two agonizing hours, we got the scene in the can. It wasn’t the scene that I wanted, and it was definitely the most difficult sex scene that I had ever shot. I never wanted to repeat that experience.
The rest of the crew filed in and I called a wrap for the picture. Then I turned to Jack Remy, who was wiping the sweat from his brow, and I said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’ve had enough and I’m going to retire.”
My decision had been a long time coming but it had finally arrived—and none too soon. The adult film business, as I had known it, was quickly sinking headfirst into the cesspool of oblivion.
Audience attendance had dropped to an all-time low and adult theaters were closing right and left. First-run bookings had now become a thing of the past. The few holdouts that still remained were playing triple bills of recent films in a last-ditch attempt to attract a rapidly dwindling audience. The business was now in the throes of its final gasp for breath.
The final bastion for adult films ended up being the drive-in theaters, where the members of the audience were at least afforded some privacy within the confines of their own cars. But even the drive-ins were not only playing triple bills but also sometimes showing as many as five films. I noticed that in the newspaper advertisement for one of these drive-ins, three of the features being shown on the program were mine.