More Spankings Back at the Mansion

All the signs of a money scramble were present at DDEC, and some of them were amusing. 1985 was the heyday of the VHS tape, and adult films led the way. Liberated from the dirty movie theaters, all people had to do was endure the embarrassment of buying the tape in the first place, and for the first time in history, they could have dirty movies in their own homes. I’m avoiding the word “pornography,” because this story is about what were called “hard R” films at the time. These films were Playboy or Penthouse Magazine octane, not what was called “hardcore.”

At some point, somebody got the idea that DDEC (a.k.a. TSR West) should make some quick money making R-rated films. Given that TSR was in the business of making products for children, this seemed like a very bad idea to me. Nobody cared that I thought it was a bad idea.

One day I walked in during a meeting. I was introduced to Edy Williams and a couple other people. Edy was a strikingly beautiful woman who’d not only been in the TV shows I grew up with—Batman, Twilight Zone, Lost in Space—but she had also gone on to marry Russ Meyer, director of The Valley of the Dolls and other distinctly sixties and seventies films featuring large-breasted women, as well as healthy doses of camp and satire. Edy, however, was most famous to me for taking her clothes off at the Cannes Film Festival and jumping into fountains, or something like that. By this point in the eighties, she was appearing in movies like The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, Chained Heat, and Mankillers.

Now here she was standing right in front of me. She looked good, and she seemed like a fun cross between businesswoman and sexy actress, which is exactly what she was.

There were scripts on the table, and they were talking story.

Later on, when the meeting was over, I sat down to have lunch and a script was still there. I started thumbing through it. As I said, it wasn’t filth; it was just kind of eighties cheese with aspirations to be more. But it wasn’t the script I found most entertaining. It was the notes: “More spankings” and “Good scene for a spanking.” I don’t know whose copy of the script I was reading. Not Gary’s, because he’d been at the head of the table. But, yeah. Given that most of my career up to that point had been spent doing children’s shows, “more spankings” was a whole new kind of note to see on a script.