PORNO DEL SOL
It’s location, location, location, as ‘Grubby Vic’ makes his flicks along the coast
PORNO DEL SOL
One of the Costa del Sol’s most notorious porn-film-makers is a 59-year-old Brit with bleached hair called, rather predictably, ‘Grubby Vic’. He’s a remarkably straightforward character, considering the dubious nature of his business: he sees it simply as a matter of supply and demand. ‘I knock out the porn and the punters buy it by the bucketful. Is that so bad?’
It is typical of Grubby to play down his role as the ultimate purveyor of porn on the southern coast of Spain. He started in the film business more than 40 years ago when he worked as a camera assistant on some of those classic old Carry On comedies, starring stalwarts Barbara Windsor, Syd James and just about every other light-entertainment icon of the 1960s. As Grubby explains, ‘The pay was rubbish, but we had a right laugh – although I knew the producers were doing very well, leaving the rest of us struggling.’
It wasn’t long before Grubby and a couple of his pals from the camera crew decided to branch off into their own ‘specialised’ side of the film business. ‘I knew there must be a market for porn films, but back in them days there was no video so it was an expensive business putting together a movie. I contacted an old boy I knew who owned a few strip clubs in the West End of London. He got together a few grand, persuaded his favourite girls to appear for free and off we went.’
Grubby admits that those early efforts ‘weren’t up to much, but they made the rounds in all the dirty bookshops because there wasn’t anywhere else you could sell porn back in them days.’ Then he had the brainwave of advertising his ‘saucy movies’, as he called them, in the personal pages of Exchange and Mart. ‘Suddenly I had more customers than hot dinners. What was surprising was that so many people had their own home movie projectors to play the films. I made all the investor’s money back for him and even managed to keep a few bob for myself.’
But for the following ten years, Grubby struggled to make a full-time living out of the burgeoning porn-movie business. ‘I was also blacklisted by the so-called legit British film industry; at around the same time the UK film business collapsed. So not only was I not allowed near a film set, but most of my mates were on the dole. It was a difficult time.’
Then Grubby got himself a job running one of those very same Soho bookshops. He also fronted a couple of hostess clubs for one of the most evil West End porn barons of the 1970s. ‘It was a funny old time back then. We had loads of coppers in our pocket and the filthy mags were flying off the shelves at a rate of knots, but the porn-film business had stalled. It was just too tricky to make a decent movie that people would buy.’
Then along came the 1970s porn classic Deep Throat; suddenly Grubby and his merry men were back in demand. ‘But it was the invention of the video that made all the difference. Deep Throat and a load of other Californian porn films were initially shown in backstreet flicks; once they got released on video people started flocking to buy them.’
Grubby Vic was not one to let such obvious opportunities slip through his hands. ‘I taught myself how to handle one of the earliest video cameras. It was a huge great thing and weighed a ton, but once we’d shot the pictures that was it. We didn’t have to do all that long-winded processing that you had to go through with reels of old-fashioned film.’
Needing good weather to shoot an outdoor porn film about life in a nudist holiday camp that had the endearing title of Love in a Warm Climate, Grubby headed out to southern Spain and borrowed a criminal associate’s villa near Marbella to shoot his movie. ‘It was late October and I wanted the film ready for the Christmas market, so I was delighted to find it sunny and eighty degrees when I got out there.’ He has never looked back. ‘I knew it was the place for me the moment the plane touched down at Malaga Airport. Lots of pretty birds everywhere, plenty of geezers prepared to get at it in front of a camera. I never had to recruit any more actors from England. This was where it was at.’
From the late-1970s onwards, Grubby reckons he shot an average of ten porn movies a year. ‘They don’t have a long shelf-life. Back in them early days, it was all pretty straight stuff. I used to recruit women and men from local clubs and by putting advertisements in the classified sections of the Costa’s English-speaking newspapers. We never did much other than straight sex and a bit of oral. Back then we didn’t even like to show actual dicks. It was pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.’
But Grubby’s arrival on the Costa del Sol coincided with the influx of British criminals taking advantage of the lax extradition treaty between the UK and Spain. ‘A lot of heavy fellows turned up on my doorstep wanting a piece of my porn-film business. They couldn’t accept that I was running a straight business and the last thing I needed was a bunch of bored old bank robbers with nothing else to do but cause me a load of aggro. That’s what often happens out here when villains want somewhere to launder their cash. Most of them didn’t have the skills to knock out their own movies so they tried to muscle in on my set-up, but I somehow managed to see them off without any real problems.’
From the late-1970s through to the mid-1980s, Grubby says he continued knocking out porn videos, but then came demands for more varied types of movies.
‘The punters no longer wanted to just watch a pretty couple in their mid-twenties getting it together by the side of a luxury swimming pool in the sunshine. I was being asked for more specialist material, like S and M, orgies, bisexual stuff, even some gay material.’
Ever the adaptable professional, Grubby started franchising off some of his work to other supposed filmmakers on the Costa del Crime. ‘It was a recipe for disaster. I started working alongside some right cowboys who didn’t know one end of a camera from a Hoover. We wasted a lot of cash on rubbish product and meanwhile others were flooding the market with anything-goes material, which was pretty explicit. I used to take a week knocking out a decent porn film, all shot at one house with lots of set-ups featuring at least five different women and three men. But these arseholes were trying to do it all in a two-day shoot. As the quality started to deteriorate, so did the demand. The punters knew they were being conned and turned their backs on us.’
Then Grubby discovered that one of his cowboy partners had raped an actress in front of the rest of his camera crew and threatened to kill anyone who reported him to the police. ‘That was completely out of order. This animal even pulled a gun on me in a row over what he’d done. That was when I realised I had to pull out of the business until things cooled down. I didn’t want to be associated with a bunch of sick bastards like that.’
Grubby also discovered that, by producing ‘softer’ edits of his films, he could exploit TV outlets in hotel rooms and at regular video stores. ‘So I stopped making them and simply got out all the old ones and re-edited them to make them acceptable for these so-called “normal” outlets. It was a licence to print money. My films were soon being shown in hotel chains across the world, and even Blockbuster was stocking them.’
With four marriages under his belt and ‘an assortment of kids here and back in London’, Grubby’s nice little earner only came to an end with the internet in the mid-1990s. ‘It was inevitable something would come along, so I wasn’t that surprised. I had a long, hard think about the business and realised I needed to, shall we say, readjust my thinking.’
Ever the opportunist, Grubby then began setting up internet porn sites and sex phone-in services catering for all types of perversions. He ran his new operation from a tiny office above a jeweller’s shop in the centre of Marbella’s old town. ‘I had three women and three men sitting there answering emails and taking calls twenty-four hours a day. It was brilliant for a couple of years.’
But Grubby still had a dream to make ‘really classy porn movies’ that could be broadcast over the internet. He also wanted to take full advantage of the massive influx of British residents on the Costa del Sol. ‘I started approaching people with holiday homes and offering to pay them to use their houses as locations for my brand-new, slick porn movies. Then I offered to film their homes separately so that when the owners wanted to sell them they could put the footage out on the internet through local estate agents. With more and more people buying and selling properties regularly out here it worked like a dream.’ Grubby says his latest business venture isn’t nearly as exciting as the early days of porn, ‘but I’ve got a steady income and I think I’ve been wise about moving with the times.’
Today his life revolves around occasional visits to his rented office and relaxing around the 40-feet pool of the million-pound villa he shares with his 28-year-old fourth wife Sharon. ‘Look, I came here with nothing, and when I die I can’t take it with me so I reckon I might as well enjoy every penny while I’m fit enough to have a good time. People get all embarrassed when I say that I make porn, but what the hell’s so bad about it? You can’t tell me that in every suburban street back in Britain half the men and women haven’t sat down and watched a porn video. It’s what makes the world go around.