Los Angeles—2001 to 2003
The Legend Returns
The coming of the year 2000 saw the dawning of a new era of my productivity. For better or worse, I had started directing porn features once again. I figured if I was going to be making these things, I might as well be making them for my own company instead of somebody else’s.
I partnered with some very good friends of mine, the Sun family. The Suns were Vietnamese-Chinese who owned several lucrative businesses in the area in and around Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and since they were always open to new ways of making money, we formed a production and video-releasing company called New Era Entertainment.
My partners in this new venture were Christine Sun, Timmy Sun Ton, Michael Quoc, Jenny Sun-Quoc, and Glendon Sun-Bang. Christine owned and operated two stores in Chinatown, Timmy owned a store and a karaoke hardware and software distribution business, Michael and Jenny were wholesale distributors for their own line of Asian music, and Glendon was a supplier for the garment manufacturing business.
We would end up producing twenty-eight features for New Era Pictures—all of which Michael Quoc served as executive producer on and which I directed—and releasing a total of thirty-four features on video, six of which were made by another director named Roy Karch.
After airing all five of the features I had made since my widely heralded comeback, the Playboy Channel had expressed a sincere interest in using any new features I made for cable television broadcast on their channel, so I would shoot them all in full softcore versions as well as hardcore. This meant shooting four separate versions in the alloted three days. We signed a contract with Mark Bruder of CED to handle the cable sales as well as marketing to hotels and other closed-circuit venues. New Era Entertainment was up and running.
For our first two-picture back-to-back shoot, I hastily wrote the scripts for two new Peter Magnum features titled The Jade Goddess and Naked Angels. Since I needed a line producer familiar with all of the new talent that I was, of course, still relatively unfamiliar with, I called up my good friend and fellow director Wesley Emerson. He was fairly busy directing his own projects, but for old times’ sake he volunteered to help me out.
Emerson read the scripts and we had a sit-down meeting along with his production manager, former adult film star Nicole London. The first thing he said was, “You know who would be great as the Asian chick—Asia Carrera! But she just signed an exclusive with Simon Wolf, so I guess she’s out of the picture.”
I had seen pictures of Asia Carrera and thought that she would be fine in the part I had written. “See if he’ll loan her to me for this project.”
Emerson shrugged, “Don’t hurt to ask, I guess.” Then he asked me, “You wanna use Billy Glide again as Magnum on these?”
“He’s not really my ideal image of Magnum,” I answered, “and he’s also not that great with delivering the dialogue.”
“So we need a Magnum,” Cass mused. Then he turned to his assistant and asked, “Who do you know that has a big dick, Nicole?”
“How about Lee Stone?” she answered.
“A possibility,” Emerson responded. Then a discussion about all the male performers with big dicks ensued. After that, he said, “We’ll get ’em all to come in for a casting session at Jim South’s and you can choose.”
I decided to go with Nicole’s initial choice, Lee Stone, in the role of the private detective. His line delivery was monotonous, but maybe I could work with him and improve it a little. They also informed me that Simon Wolf had agreed to let me use Asia Carrera for the two features.
We had a three-day shoot schedule for both features, one day on location and two days on the sound stage. The location was a large mansion that could provide a number of the practical interior sets. Bob Gallagher would build a terrific office set for Magnum on his small sound stage.
The terms of the loan agreement gave me Asia Carrera for two half-days, which were the location day and the first day on the sound stage. I found her to be not only attractive but extremely intelligent as well. She was of Japanese and German descent, and as a child she had performed as a pianist at Carnagie Hall. She had also attended Rutgers University. She was a true pleasure to work with. Lee Stone proved to be a slightly better Peter Magnum than Billy Glide had been. He was easy to work with as well and good at learning his lines, but his delivery of them still left a lot to be desired. Still, he did what he could to get the lines out.
On the first day of the shoot, one of the girls that had been hired proved to be a no-show. I shot around her as long as I could, but finally something had to be done.
Fortunately, our caterer, who happened to be a very attractive and sexy lady named Heather Lynn, agreed to do the part. After she finished serving lunch, we got her into makeup and put a script in her hands. She quickly learned the lines and ended up doing a very hot scene for me.
Aside from that one hiccup, the rest of the shoot had gone off without a hitch, and before the week was out I was supervising the postproduction of both features with the editor, Rocco Bones. He had edited the two previous features I had done for Wicked Pictures, and would become my regular editor.
Rocco was an amiable guy with a good sense of humor. He was married to a very attractive Japanese wife and had two cute little children. Aside from that, he was a skilled editor capable of working very quickly. He also realized that the dialogue-heavy features I was making were destined primarily for the couples market rather than the hard sex market and he adapted his editing technique accordingly.
Since The Jade Goddess and Naked Angels were successful both critically and commercially, I decided to follow them up with a pair of sequels for the next shoot. Even though I was still leery about Lee Stone’s ability to convincingly deliver lines, the same actors would return, so the continuity would remain.
Wesley Emerson wasn’t available to be the producer this time around, so I bagged his production manager, Nicole London.
“Want to be a producer?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she replied.
“Do you think you could handle a producer’s job while still being a production manager?”
“Piece of cake.”
“Would you do it for a production manager’s salary?”
“We’ll have to discuss that.”
We discussed it and she came on board. Nicole would serve as both production manager and producer of all the rest of the New Era features that I directed.
Nicole’s real name was Janine Martyn, and she was originally from South Amboy, New Jersey. She had been an actress in porn films for ten years before and, after having passed the age of thirty, she began segueing into roles behind the camera.
Since she had appeared in some two hundred adult videos, she was more than familiar with all the available talent and she had a good rapport with them, which, combined with the fact that there was a tough, no-nonsense business side to her, made her an invaluable production manager.
George Adams had done a great job with the the making of segments for the first two features and he would only get better as he became more experienced with each succeeding shoot. He could also be trusted to handle and direct the second unit whenever I needed him to do so. He would subsequently become an award-winning documentary filmmaker in his own right.
My nephew, Rex Zumwalt, was having some trouble finding a place in the crowded job market. His mother Valerie had taken me in when I was undergoing my divorce and needed a place to stay, so I definitely owed her. But even if this hadn’t been the case, I knew Rex to be a very intelligent guy who was capable of doing just about anything he set his mind to do, so I asked him if he was interested in becoming my assistant director.
“What will I have to do?” he asked.
“Run lines with the talent and make sure they know them before they come on the set. You’ll also be responsible for keeping tabs on them and making sure that they’re available when I need them. Also, I’ll be relying on you to help me get done whatever needs to be done.”
“I suppose I can do that,” he said.
“Well then, starting with the next shoot you’ll be my assistant director.”
That evening, I pounded out a couple of quick Peter Magnum scripts. When I handed them over to the executive producer Michael Quoc, he leafed through the first one, looked up at me, and said, “Hey, you’re getting a little ambitious, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?” I retaliated.
He opened up the script to the first scene I had written, which was set in Hong Kong. “We’re sure not going to go to Hong Kong on a ten-grand budget to shoot this,” he said.
“Hell, I can recreate Hong Kong by shooting in Chinatown,” I told him. “No one will know the difference.”
“And what about these Chinese triad guys? Who’s going to play them?”
“You look like a gangster, Michael.”
“No way.” He shook his head.
“In fact, if you do it, we won’t have to pay for additional actors. Especially if you can get a couple of your friends to play the other triad guys. And we’ll also corral one of Christine’s brothers.”
Not having to pay for additional actors convinced him. I grabbed a digital video camera and shot all those scenes by myself. We recreated the Hong Kong setting in Chinatown.
This shoot was slightly more complex than the previous one in that there was a lot of dialogue involved with the two scripts and a lot more scenes to be shot on actual locations. On the first and second days we were shooting the actual locations, and the third day would be spent shooting on the sound stage. The location for the second day was an old motel at the edge of town along with its adjacent old-style roadside diner.
The only problem that I encountered came while shooting the last scene of that particular day in the diner. Sky Taylor, the girl playing the waitress, had a relatively important part with a lot of lines. Not being an actress, she was a little nervous about the situation. So she had unwisely chosen to sneak out and smoke some grass in order to calm herself down and get rid of her nervousness.
When it came time to shoot her scene, she was pretty laid-back, but when we started rolling she kept blowing her lines. She was either so stoned or so remarkably stupid that she couldn’t even seem to concentrate enough to read her lines directly from the script while I cheated the camera angle away from her.
The crew, who had been sympathetic to her plight at first, began to grow increasingly irritated as the night wore on. Everyone was tired and tempers were beginning to flare. This girl was also straining my usually unflappable patience. It was an uncomfortable situation all around.
Nicole London was nervously pacing the floor, staring down at her watch all too frequently, and shooting me concerned looks. During a lull, she finally came up to me and asked, “Can we cut some of the lines, Bob? It’s just a fuck film, after all. Nobody will really care, you know.”
“I’ll care,” I replied. Even though I was growing beyond frustrated, I told her, “Don’t worry, Nicole, we’re going to get this.” She threw her arms up in the air and gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me.
To be quite honest, I wasn’t so sure myself, but I tried to remain optimistic. I looked over at the executive producer, Michael Quoc, who generally was the calmest person on the set. He was anxiously chewing on a toothpick and casting furtive glances at his own watch. Even he was beginning to show some real concern at this point.
We eventually did get all the lines out of her, but I wasn’t at all happy with them. Just chalk it up to an unpleasant experience, I told myself. But it was an experience that I didn’t need at this point in my life. And you know what? Nicole was probably right after all. People who see the show probably wouldn’t really even give a flying fuck as to whether she said all of the lines or not.
Perhaps I was just becoming too full of myself. What did I think I could do, working on a $10,000 budget trying to make a full-length feature with people that weren’t actors? Maybe I had convinced myself that I was a legend in my own mind.
As a result of this unexpected fiasco, we ended up going overtime, shooting well into the early morning hours. This forced us, because of the required minimum turnaround, to have a later call time for the sound stage the next day, which in turn forced me to shoot a full day’s scenes there in half a day, since my sets had to be struck for new sets put up for a shoot that had been booked there on the following day.
It wasn’t an ideal situation, but I’d certainly been in worse ones. I simply had to pay the price for my stubborness the night before. When these things happen, I’m certainly not happy because, as I know so well from previous experience, it always shows in the end result.
Rex had done a great job as assistant director on the shoot, as I had expected he would, and I was happy to have him on board. I had written a script titled Blonde Fury for one of the two next pictures that we were going to do, but I was getting a little weary of churning out the scripts, and since Rex was an aspiring writer who actually did possess some writing talent, I thought that I would let him take a crack at it if he wanted to. So I asked him if he wanted to write the other script for the next shoot.
“I’ve never written a screenplay before,” he replied. “I have no idea about how to go about doing it.”
“There’s nothing to it,” I told him. “All you need to have is an imagination and then be able to write down the things that you imagine. I know you can do it.”
“I’ll give it a try,” he said.
So I showed him the basic format and explained to him that the main thing in writing a script was to first come up with some believable dialogue that advanced the story—once he did that, everything else would fall into place. He listened intently and said, “Yeah, I can do that.”
Well, Rex took to script writing like a duck takes to water. He assumed the pen name of Rex Carlton, immediately went to work on an idea, and ended up with an interesting screenplay where Magnum gets caught in the middle of a war between two rival drug lords. It was a good script, but I felt that it needed just a little something extra.
Then it came to me. “What if one of the drug lords reads poetry?” I threw at him as I went to my bookshelf and pulled out Rainer Maria Rilke’s Diary of a Young Poet. Rex liked the idea, so he incorporated it into his screenplay.
In the feature alongside Blonde Fury, titled Blonde in Black Leather, I cast a guy who did look like a black drug kingpin named Julian St. Jox. When it came time to shoot his scene, I noticed that Julian had picked up the book I had brought to the set as a prop and was leafing through it. He looked up at me questioningly and said, “Rilke?”
“You read Rilke?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said.
And so, in Blonde in Black Leather, Magnum goes up against the poetry-reading drug lord who reads and quotes poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke.
New Era Entertainment had now produced six features. They had been aired in softcore versions on cable television, and the hardcore versions had been released on VHS videotape and DVD. These had brought in a fairly decent income so far.
But suddenly the sales of the videotapes began to fall off as the DVD format became more popular. Unfortunately, the DVD sales had not increased all that much.
Michael Quoc and I spent some time pondering this problem. “Maybe our DVDs are too expensive,” I opined.
“Well, they’re not cheap compared to a lot of other crap that’s on the market. But that’s just what most of that other stuff is. Crap. No story, just sex. Gonzo stuff. Think about it. That stuff’s a lot cheaper to make, and we can be more competitive.”
“I don’t want to just shoot wall-to-wall sex,” I responded.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I only brought it up as an option.”
“Well it’s not an option for me,” I said resolutely. Then a thought occurred to me. “What’s the pressing cost of a DVD?” I asked him.
“Not very much. About fifty cents or so.”
“Fifty cents more a unit isn’t going to break us,” I said, “and the buyer would be getting two DVDs for the price of one. Might justify the higher price.”
“Might,” Michael agreed.
“What if we released each title in special limited editions with two discs? There’d be the feature itself on the first disc and a full-length making-of feature along with the trailers on the second disc.”
He said, “It’s worth a try.”
From then on, all of my New Era features were released in dual disc special editions. These were special editions because New Era only pressed a thousand units of each title; after that, the title would go out of print because we never pressed a second run. This was primarily due to our limited distribution resources and the fact that a good deal of our income would be channelled back directly into production.
The next two productions were a Peter Magnum feature titled Young and Dangerous and a non-Peter Magnum feature called Jenny Rain—Porn Star. I soon found out that the new adult entertainment industry had its own unspoken self-censorship code regarding words.
“You want to be careful about using the word ‘young’ in a title,” our video distributor told me.
“Really?” I responded. “Well, I’m going to use it anyway.” It all seemed silly to me, especially when some of the product that was coming out from other producers featured some of the most extreme and repulsive hardcore acts that I had ever seen in a legitimately released adult video.
It seemed as if freedom of expression had been allowed to reach a new level. But what had happened to freedom of speech?
Anyway, I was too busy at the time to contemplate such things for very long. If I wanted to stay in business, I had to keep on towing the line.
My nephew Rex had written the screenplays for both of the new features. In Young and Dangerous, Magnum has to come to the aid of his cop friend George Lee, who has been suspended from the force for misconduct.
The companion feature, Jenny Rain—Porn Star, was set in the swinging seventies during the golden age of porn. Star E. Knight played a hip, beautiful young girl who struck a decisive blow for freedom of expression during a time when censorship and narrow minds ruled the world.
Some people who only see the finished product are under the mistaken impression that making adult movies is a glamorous occupation. There’s nothing glamorous about it. It’s a job that involves getting up very early in the morning, earlier than most people with ordinary jobs usually have to get up. It’s pretty disheartening to get into your car and see all the other cars in the apartment building still parked there, knowing that everyone else is probably still in their beds asleep.
Making movies also involves a lot of hard work that taxes both mind and body. And if you think those girls you see in the films look gorgeous, you should see them when they first show up for work before they’ve had a chance to go into makeup to put on their face and get their hair done. Still, it was hard for me to conceive of doing anything else.
We reinvested some of the money that had been coming in on two more Peter Magnum features, Dangerous Obsession and Platinum Blonde. Rex wrote the scripts for both of these. In Dangerous Obsession, Magnum must deal with the death of a family member, finally discovering the truth behind a tangled web of deception, treachery, and passion. Platinum Blonde concerned a wealthy starlet who is accused of murdering her aged husband; Magnum is drawn into the case when a friend of his becomes implicated.
At this point in time, New Era Entertainment had been in business for less than a year and had produced a total of ten features. The company was showing a profit, but by the time this was divided up among all of the partners, it didn’t add up to much. What it did seem to add up to, with everything taken into consideration, was a whole lot of work for very little money. It had been an interesting business venture, but I was beginning to entertain some serious thoughts about disbanding the entire operation.
Then Marc Bruder, the head of CED, which had brokered our cable sales, called me over for a meeting and indicated that he was interested in coming in as a coproducer on our future feature projects. The partners and I had a meeting and eventually decided to agree to his proposal.
After arranging another meeting with Bruder at his office, I arrived with Michael Quoc. Marc was sitting behind his desk and he immediately said, “I have an idea what we should make for our first production.”
“What’s your idea?” I asked him.
“Why don’t we revive your Johnny Wadd series?” he went on. “It was very successful for you in the past and I’m certain that it would be a big success for us now. We could update the character and the stories. You’ll have a hit on your hands.”
There was a long moment of silence as I thought about this idea. “I don’t want to do that,” I finally told him. “I think the Johnny Wadd character has now become so identified with John Holmes that the public isn’t going to buy someone else in that part.”
Bruder disagreed with my assessment, but I remained adamant about not making any features with a new Johnny Wadd.
Then he suddenly came up with another idea. “All right,” he said, “Johnny Wadd is dead because John Holmes is dead. But what if Johnny Wadd had a son?”
Now this was an idea that I could wrap my mind around. We all adjourned to a nearby restaurant to discuss this further over a power lunch, during which we were joined by Bruder’s sales associate Alex Hill.
We discussed the details of the partnership and finally agreed on a mutually acceptable arrangement. Marc would draw up the contract and we would get to work on the scripts for the new series.
During the course of the lunch, I couldn’t help but notice that one of the waitresses kept looking over at me. I also couldn’t help but think that she looked strangely familiar. As we were about to leave, she came over and said, “Bob Chinn, you don’t remember me, do you?”
I looked into her face and suddenly it all came back to me. “Of course, I do,” I said as I got up and hugged her. “Laurie Smith! It’s been, what, something like close to twenty years or so since we last saw each other?”
Laurie had been in a couple of my films many years back. The last time I had seen her was when she appeared as one of the actresses in the staged shoot for the film Exhausted. “You’re looking great, Laurie,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Chalk it up to a lot of hard work and clean living.”
For the new series with Johnny Wadd’s son, I wanted to go with a whole new concept, so I had Rex write the scripts for the initial two entries. The first feature, which introduced the character, was titled Re-Enter Johnny Wadd.
In this one, a young San Pedro private investigator named John Wolfe discovers that he is actually the son of the famous private detective Johnny Wadd, who had been murdered by a Mexican drug lord many years before, so he goes on the trail of vengeance to find his father’s killer.
The second feature in the new series, which was shot back-to-back with the first, was titled Satin and Sabotage. It was the first picture in the Sword of Charlemagne trilogy. I had decided to go with a gimmick similar to The Jade Pussycat, which had been successful for me many years before.
Or, as Alfred Hitchcock would have called it, the plot device known as a maguffin, which was a valuable object that everyone was after. In this case, the maguffin Johnny Wadd, Jr. is on a quest to find is the legendary sword that once belonged to Charlemagne, the eighth-century Holy Roman emperor and King of the Franks and Lombards.
Both of these features were released toward the end of 2001. As Marc Bruder had predicted, Re-Enter Johnny Wadd proved to be New Era Entertainment’s biggest seller to date. Reorders poured in, and within a few months the title completely sold out and that went out of print.
The beginning of 2002 saw the continuation of the new series with the production of the second and third parts of the Sword of Charlemagne trilogy. Joel Lawrence as Johnny Wadd, Jr. continued his pursuit of the elusive medieval treasure in Silk and Seduction. Passion and Betrayal concluded the trilogy.
Emerson, who is notorious for not allowing himself to appear in anything, only reluctantly agreed to be in the picture after I cornered him while he was delivering one of his handguns I needed to use as a prop.
Production on the new series continued that year with two more features. The first was a darker, more noirish entry penned by George Adams under his Omar Gedges pseudonym titled City of Desire.
This installment finds Wadd framed for a murder that he didn’t commit. From there, he must try to extricate himself from a nefarious scheme involving blackmail and murder.
In Jewel in the Lotus, the second feature in the back-to-back shoot, which was also scripted by Omar Geadges, Wadd is investigating the strange circumstances surrounding the violent death of a gorgeous model when he finds himself up against a ring smuggling contraband blood diamonds from Africa.
As the year progressed, the bottom seemed to be dropping out of the adult video business. There was no question that the market was oversaturated with new productions. But what really hurt was that the market had been flooded with virtually the entire feature and video libraries of huge companies like VCA and Vivid, and this older product was being offered up for sale to the consumer at five-dollar bargain basement prices. There was no way that we could compete with a price like this from a wholesale end and still stay in business.
It was no secret that Russ Hampshire’s VCA Pictures was going to be bought and taken over by Larry Flynt’s Hustler Video in 2003. It seemed as if now they were dumping their back library on the market for whatever they could get before the impending takeover.
Not to be outdone, Steve Hirsch’s Vivid Entertainment was also marketing their old library at similar competitive prices. And there were other video distributors who were rapidly bringing their prices down.
The consumer was now faced with the option of buying four of their titles for about the same price that one of ours would cost. Sales were falling at an alarming rate, not only for the VHS tapes, which we’d already downsized the production of, but for DVDs as well. It didn’t take a genius to realize that for us it was rapidly stacking up to be a lose-lose situation.
On top of everything, our video distributor, who had always been extremely prompt with her payments, was now stalling for time, claiming collection problems and sluggish sales. Apparently she, too, was feeling the pinch along with everybody else.
We had a corporate meeting to assess the matter. “At this point things are looking pretty bleak,” I said to everyone there.
“So what are we going to do?” was the unspoken question on everyone’s faces.
We reviewed all our options. We probably weren’t going to lose money if we continued production. But if things continued going as they were, we certainly wouldn’t be making very much of a profit.
Still, they were looking to me for a decision of some kind. “Well,” I began. “We could either discontinue production and take whatever money we’ve made to date and split it up. Or we could go back into production and see what happens.”
The Chinese are a race of gamblers, so I already knew what the answer would be.
“I think we let it ride,” Christine said decisively. Everyone else nodded their heads in agreement. With the entire Sun family behind me, along with Michael Quoc, how could I lose?
“I’m willing to give it one last try,” I told them. “When the going gets tough, it’s time for the tough to really get going.” A trite saying, I know, but it seemed appropriate at the time. I added, “And the way I see it, we’re all pretty damn tough.”
Then it was up to me to decide what exactly we were going to do. My partners were my friends, and they had faith in me. I couldn’t let them down. I agonized about how I could possibly make everything work in the situation that we now had. And then it came to me. I’ve never been afraid of hard work, but this time I was going to push myself to the limit.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I told Michael enthusiastically. “We’re going to add a day to the shooting schedule, and instead of turning out two features, we’re going to turn out three.”
“You can do that?” he asked somewhat skeptically.
I wanted to say, “Piece of cake,” but I didn’t because I knew that it wasn’t going to be. Instead I answered, “We can do it. And not only that, I’m going to shoot each one in both English and Spanish, so there’ll also be cable and video sales to the Spanish-language market as well as the regular cable and video sales.”
I could see the wheels turning as Michael was adding up something in his head. “That’s like making six separate features in one shoot,” he began. “No, it’s like making twelve, because each is in a hardcore and softcore version.” He shook his head. “I don’t see how you’re going to be able to do it.”
“Look at it this way,” I said to him. “The sex scenes only have to be shot once. Those are all covered both in hard and soft angles. The only other thing I have to do is separate takes on the English and Spanish dialogue.”
“If you think you can do it, then I’m game,” he finally said.
I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew before I dismissed that thought from my mind completely. “It can be done,” I said quite positively, although I was now beginning to seriously question the quality of the end product.
In keeping with the tradition of my studly private detective characters, I created a new one: a Mexican private investigator based in the border town of Tijuana named Nick Grande. I hastily wrote the scripts for the first three features, which were also translated into Spanish.
Casting proved slightly more complicated because we had to find performers who were fluent in both languages. For the lead part of Nick Grande, I stumbled upon a young Mexican-American actor and, after a script reading, hired him on the spot. He would go under the stage name of Rick Fuerte.
The first Nick Grande feature was titled Tijuana Detective in the English version and Investigador Privado in the Spanish version. In the feature, Nick Grande is hired to search for a mysterious lady’s missing sister and in the process meets Peter Magnum, who has been hired by someone else to look for the same girl.
Fortunately, Rick Fuerte had an ego that matched the size of his cock, and neither was wanting in any respect. That, combined with his macho wise-guy cholo attitude, made him just about perfect for the role. Like John Holmes had been, Rick was a quick study with the dialogue. He only had to go over the lines once before he had them down.
Occasionally, for the Spanish version, Rick would come across something that didn’t quite click for him, and when he did he was very vocal about it.
“A Mexican wouldn’t say this line,” he would say. “Maybe a Venezuelan would, but a Mexican would say it another way.” And he would proceed to tell us just exactly how a Mexican would say it. As it turned out, Mario Cazale, who had done the translation and was my assistant director for the Spanish versions, was from Venezuela.
If Lee Stone struggled with his lines in English, he really struggled with them in Spanish. When they ended up proving too difficult for him, we used the English version and subtitled it in Spanish.
The second feature, which was a direct continuation of the first, was called The Aztec Dagger in English and La Daga Azteca in Spanish. The search for Frieda Diaz continues as Grande tries to piece together a mystery that includes some gorgeous models and a beautiful but dangerous dealer in Aztec antiquities.
The story is concludes at the ruins of a lost city in the rebel-infested jungles of Guatamala in the third feature, The Serpent’s Secret in English and El Secreto de la Serpiente in Spanish.
Even though I had approached this project with a laid-back attitude, it had turned out to be one of the most gruelling shoots I had ever been on. Still, it wasn’t as bad as it probably could have been.
My nephew Rex worked especially hard as the assistant director for the English versions, and Mario Cazale helped to keep everything rolling along. Still, we had been filming at a breakneck pace and it would take me a good couple of months before I even wanted to embark on another project.
To finish off the shoot, Michael Quoc, his wife Jenny, and I headed down to Mexico where I photographed all of the location exteriors with a digital video camera. It was the first time that they had ever been to Mexico, and we all ended up having a blast.
I spent the next couple of months taking it easy, sometimes hanging out with my good friend Andy Dowdy at his Other Times Bookstore on Pico Boulevard during the day and getting plastered with him after a great meal at the bar in the Golden Bull Restaurant at night.
I had met Andy many years ago. Aside from owning the bookstore, he was the author of the 1973 book Movies Are Better than Ever: Wide Screen Memories of the Fifties, which was republished in 1975 as The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind, and he had also written a novel called Never Take a Short Price. We could discuss the various aspects of movies for hours. Andy was also an ardent jazz buff who enjoyed good bourbon and rye whiskey.
Sometimes I would see how many beers I could put away with my compadres at the old, familiar bar in the Talpa Mexican Restaurant. Sometimes I would just drive over to the beach at Santa Monica, look out at the ocean, and contemplate the manifold wakings of mankind.
In my spare time, I worked on the scripts for the next three Nick Grande pictures as well as a more serious project that I also wanted to film in Spanish called The Conquest of Mexico and the Fall of the Aztec Empire As Told by a Oaxacan Whore in a Juarez Cantina. I would shoot the three Nick Grande features, but the other project, the one I really wanted to do, would only end up gathering dust in my closet.
Thus, 2002 ended not with a bang but with a whimper. The year 2003 had arrived, and it was now time to make more movies.
The next Nick Grande shoot came very close to being a comedy of errors. To begin with, Nicole was having trouble reaching Rick Fuerte. “He’s not answering his phone,” she told me. “And he’s ignoring the messages that I leave.”
“Keep trying,” I said to her.
In the meantime, we had to put together the rest of the cast for the next three features. Unfortunately, we just happened to pick a time when there was a shortage of Spanish-speaking talent. There was nothing to be done, so we began interviewing girls who might possibly be able to deliver some Spanish dialogue on camera.
There were some girls whose looks fit some of the parts, but their attempts at the Spanish dialogue were laughable. My back was up against the wall because I was scheduled to shoot in a few days, so several of them ended up being hired in spite of their obvious linguistic limitations.
A real surprise came one day during the casting in the form of a pretty, blonde Czechoslovakian girl named Sonya Stark. She told me that she was fluent in Spanish and proved it with a perfect reading. I signed her up immediately by casting her in the part with the most difficult dialogue.
The time for the shoot was rapidly approaching, and Nicole still had not been able to reach our leading man. “This is not good,” I said. “We’re going to have to look for a new Nick Grande.”
This proved to be no easy task. While the adult film performers’ roster boasted a number of Mexican-American, Cuban, and Central and South American girls, there were very few males of that ethnic persuasion in the business. Also, most of the young Americans of Mexican descent that we interviewed were third- or fourth-generation and didn’t even speak Spanish.
“Oh yeah,” some would say. “I remember hearing my grandparents speak Spanish but my parents only talked in English.”
I was supposed to start shooting in two days and I still didn’t have a leading man. I was beginning to get nervous and so was Nicole. “How about Don Fernando?” she suggested.
I replied, “I don’t see him as Nick Grande. Besides, I need someone younger.”
Then someone younger walked into the interview room. The problem was, he had the unmistakable look of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He also had a good old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant name, Trent. But, like the Czechoslovakian girl before him, he gave an almost perfect reading in Spanish and he was obviously fluent in the language.
“I lived in Spain for a few years,” he told me.
Although I didn’t think he was as perfect for the part as Rick Fuerte had been, I had by now run out of options, so I tentatively cast him in the role of Nick Grande. We gave him the scripts for the three features that we’d be shooting but also let him know that at this point he was only acting as the stand-in. Nicole was still trying to locate Rick Fuerte.
The day before the shoot, Nicole located Rick Fuerte. “He said he’d been on vacation,” she told me.
“Did you tell him about the shoot tomorrow?”
She nodded. “He said he’ll be there. I also messengered the scripts to him.”
“Great!” I exclaimed. For the sake of continuity in the series, I hadn’t wanted to go with a new lead actor. Besides, Fuerte’s personality and attitude were more in keeping with the character that I had created. Now I felt a sense of relief. But that relief would be very short-lived.
When his call time for the first day of the shoot arrived, Rick Fuerte was a no-show. Nicole immediately got on the phone to him. “He’s not picking up,” she said.
“Keep trying,” I told her. “Maybe he’s just running late. We’ve still got a couple of hours while the crew lights the set. But just in case, call Trent and tell him to stand by.”
An hour passed and Rick still hadn’t shown up and Nicole was unable to reach him on the phone. “Trent is standing by,” she said as if to reassure me.
“I’ll start out with shooting the scenes with Lee Stone, but I can’t be shooting around Grande’s scenes all morning. Tell Trent to come to the set.”
The second hour came and went and still no Rick Fuerte. I began shooting Lee Stone’s scenes. Trent showed up on the set and my assistant director Rex began going over the lines with him.
Finally, I couldn’t shoot around the lead character any longer. Trent Tesoro (we had to give him a Spanish-sounding surname for his stage name) became the new Nick Grande. With everything that had been happening, we miraculously managed to finish the first day on schedule.
Toward the end of the second day, Nicole came up to me on the set with her cell phone in hand. “It’s Rick Fuerte,” she said, handing it to me.
“Where the hell have you been?” I almost shouted into the phone.
“Sorry, couldn’t get off work, man.”
“And you couldn’t call to tell us this?”
There was a silence, and then he said, “But I can be there tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother. We had to start shooting so we recast the role.”
“So I guess you don’t need me then,” he said with a slight tone of disappointment.
“You guess right.”
Rick Fuerte wasn’t my only problem. When it came time to shoot the Spanish language scenes with Kelly Warner, she began having difficulty with the dialogue. “You gave such a great reading,” I said to her.
“I know,” she said. “It’s easy for me to say the Spanish lines when I’m reading them from the script, but it’s another thing altogether to memorize them. Especially if I don’t know what some of the words mean.”
What she said made a lot of sense. It’s difficult for some people to memorize Spanish dialogue if Spanish is not your first language. I would also encounter this problem with some of the other members of the cast. But this would not prove to be so with one of the members of the crew.
The final day of the shoot was on location at a house somewhere in one of the canyons in the Hollywood area. One of the female performers had been a no-show and she was quickly replaced, but this ended up throwing us behind schedule.
Then the actor slated to play the non-sex role of the Mexican drug lord Archie de la Cruz also proved to be a no-show. This part involved quite a few lines of dialogue and we were totally at a loss about finding another actor.
It was late afternoon and the day was beginning to fade. In desperation, I turned to the crew and asked if anyone could speak Spanish and was willing to take over the role. There was a moment of silence, and then the sound mixer, Miles Long, raised his hand. “I think I can do it,” he said. “I can speak Spanish.”
Since Miles was the soundman, he already had a script. He quickly learned the lines and went in front of the camera. Not only did Miles save the day, but he also gave a better performance than the person who had originally had the role probably would have given. Miles Long has since gone on to become one of the most notable and prolific directors in the adult film business.
The fourth feature in the Nick Grande series was titled Border Girls in English and Chicas de la Frontiera in Spanish. The fifth feature was a direct continuation titled White Gold, or Oro Blanco, and concluded with the sixth feature, The Lost Girl, or La Chica Perdida.