Tuning in to Channel Sex

Nightfall in the suburbs. Out in the yard, the kids toss the last ball of the day higher and higher, the better to see it against a fading sky. Down the street, a man lugs the dark-green-plastic bag of new-mown grass to the curb. His neighbor pulls the station wagon into the garage, stopping halfway in to move . a bicycle out of the way.

Inside, dinner is almost ready. Mom, wiping a bead of perspiration from her brow, leans away from the stove to call the kids in-for the last time. Dad says he'll get them. He gives Mom a pat as he walks behind her toward the back door. She rolls her eyes in mock exasperation--then smiles as she turns back to her chicken frying golden in the skillet.

After dinner, the ritual: table cleared, dishes to the dishwasher, little ones to the bathtub amid protests. Clean pajamas, small plaid robes, an hour of TV before bedtime. Mom takes advantage of the sudden peace and quiet to go upstairs and enjoy her own bath. The kids idly ask whether Mom and Dad are going out and are told they're not.

In a while, Mom comes back downstairs in her robe, hairbrush in hand, stroking shoulder-length hair. Dad puts down the paper as she joins him on the couch. As he gets up to fix her a cup of coffee, he announces that it's about time for a certain twosome to call it a night. After a few "Aw, Dads," they kiss Mom and trudge up the stairs, stopping several times along the way to play peekaboo through the railing. Dad brings back the coffee and says he thinks he'll take a shower. Grand idea, Mom thinks. He leans over and kisses her on the cheek. Don't go 'way, he says.

A half hour later, after he has finished showering, shaving and patting a bit of his best cologne here and there, he gives his body one more admiring view in the mirror, puts on his terrycloth robe and turns out the bathroom light.

Out in the hall, he tiptoes up to the bedroom door and listens. No sound other than the snoring of tired kids after a day of play.

Back on the couch, Mom has turned down the lights, and she smiles as Dad walks into the room. All quiet on the Western front, he says. He wonders if she would maybe like something a little stronger to drink. She thinks that would be nice.

When he hands her the drink, they click glasses. Another day, he says. She smiles. Another night, she says.

You know, Mom says, I think I've had about enough of Fantasy Island. She walks over to the video-cassette recorder and unlocks the cabinet where they keep the cassettes. Deep Throat? she asks. The Devil in Miss Jones? Debbie Does Dallas?

Across the room, Dad takes another sip of the drink. He smiles. What's your pleasure? he says.

•

It began in the early Seventies with closed-circuit "blue movies" in adult motels. Then a few controversial softcore shows, such as Midnight Blue and The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence, debuted on two of New York City's public-access cable channels. About the same time, sales of adult-film video cassettes started to take off, and then to skyrocket. Today, the boom has spread to cable and subscription television (STV). Across the country, up-and-coming video moguls recognize the adult market as the leading edge of their industry--and are scrambling to inaugurate special channels so they can show softened versions of popular X-rated films to an apparently insatiable late-night audience.

Before its demise, Panorama magazine, the TV Guide publisher's entry into the future video sweepstakes, credited video cassettes and cable and subscription television with sending the pornography market soaring. Home Video recently featured a cover story on Marilyn Chambers. Video Review regularly assesses the newest in adult films alongside general-release reviews. The Hollywood Reporter has plans to initiate its first regular column to review adult films and report on industry developments.

Even mainstream media coverage of porn has lately changed. There are still the requisite pieces about alleged Mafia involvement, or about "snuff" films and kiddie porn. But more and more, the media are leaving those subjects behind because they'd rather know about the people who act in and produce the sexually graphic films inundating our homes. Such interest can be simply explained: The media cover what sells to America, and adult material is something the public has proved it wants--and buys.

The first feature-length X video cassettes cost nearly $300. Since then, the price has plummeted to the $69--$99 range and is expected to drop further. There are currently 2,000,000 video-cassette recorders (VCRs) in American homes, and manufacturers estimate a growth of another 1,000,000 a year for the foreseeable future. And what do you think people are watching on all those VCRs? According to Daily Variety, the showbiz newspaper, "It is generally acknowledged that porno films are the biggest current sellers in the VCR market."

At the same time, there are nearly 4500 cable and STV systems in operation around the country. They feature close to 200 adult channels with names such as Private Screenings, Rendezvous, Escapade and Adults Only. Those channels aren't restricted to the traditional "sin capitals" of New York and Los Angeles. They're in such places as San Jose, California, Phoenix, Arizona, even Monroe, Louisiana. Just this year, four companies announced plans to start national adult pay-TV networks capable of reaching all 20,000,000 cable-connected homes in the U. S.

Because of FCC regulation of STV and the still-tricky, political nature of getting cable franchises (relatively unregulated), both systems currently carry only soft-core versions of adult films. The erections, insertions and pink shots one can see in a theater or on video cassette have been cut out--or, as is now more common, two versions of each movie are shot. Another indication of the future: New York-based producer Robert Sumner has made plans to start a Quality-X Cable Network via satellite, licensing his signal to cable and STV systems. "I'm only waiting for the availability of transponder time," he says. "By 1985, there'll be a dozen satellites."

The results of the porn-home-video boom are expected to be twofold. First, the adult industry should make more money, which it can recycle into its product, thereby making the films better--consequently, expanding the market.

Second, adult material shown in the privacy of one's own home is bound to change sexual attitudes. Jerry Falwell's minions may be in church on Sunday, but the daydreamers will likely be rerunning Saturday night's sexploitation flick during the sermon. Also, there'll be no more having to sneak into the local X-rated theater, where you might be seen by friends eating at the Denny's next door. And no more horny squirming in theater seats, wishing the management had been farsighted enough to provide couches and private rooms. Now, when desire strikes, all you have to do is put the tape machine on pause or flip the set off altogether--and then get into the altogether with your partner on the couch.

At this point, no one knows exactly what changes in attitude and behavior the regular viewing of suggestive and/or explicit sex on the home screen will bring about. But some observers predict that video sex will lessen hypocrisy and improve sexual communication--in general, will spark something akin to a second-stage sexual revolution.

"If you think the sexual revolution is over, you're wrong," says the Reverend Ted McIlvenna, head of the San Francisco-based Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. "It's just beginning!"

And author Isaac Asimov, writing in Home Video, foresees a time when "sexual activities would become a more normal part of the social environment; something one could talk about more freely."

One hopes so. But glowing predictions notwithstanding, an essential question has largely been overlooked in all the articles about the future of X home video: Can the adult-film industry rise to the occasion?

Adult films captured America's imagination and pocket money with Deep Throat back in 1972. But a subsequent flood of films lacking in basic plot and production values--not to mention quality sexual information--alienated the "porno chic" audience. Now opportunity knocks again. Nearly 2000 adult films were made in the past decade, but probably no more than the top 100 are suitable for cable. New films are needed--and, in fact, are being made--but inflated costs have slowed production. So what is made must meet new standards or lose a possible cable sale, not to mention an adult-theater play date in some of the more progressive chains. And after all, the audience for X home video will include a higher percentage of women than adult films have reached before. And while satisfying the women offscreen has rarely been a priority of adult-film makers in the past, the new bottom line is clear: Will film makers risk gearing their product to more than the guaranteed adult-theater hard-core audience? Can they produce films that meet the different aesthetic and social requirements of the potential home viewer? In other words, has the porn industry matured enough to successfully meet the new challenges that confront it?

•

My introduction to adult films en masse (beyond the few I'd seen since Deep Throat) came courtesy of Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw. In 13 years, Goldstein has made Screw the most successful "sex review" in America and himself, at 45, a multimillionaire. He is a fast talker and a quick thinker. Some consider him the epitome of vulgarity--a label Goldstein loves. Many more regard him as a farsighted, compassionate godfather to the pornography revolution--someone who, as Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife suggests, has had a profound influence on the course of sexual ideas in America.

Goldstein operates out of two floors in a 14th Street office building in New York City. Upstairs is Screw proper--in a manner of speaking. The decor is functional and spare, the mood semiprofessional. Downstairs is the headquarters of the parent company, Milky Way Productions, as well as the offices of Gadget, a "newsletter for grown-up kids," edited by Goldstein's second wife, Mary. Gadget reviews and tests everything from microcomputers to model rockets to stereo gear to peace pipes. There's no sex. Another newsletter, Cigar, and the production facilities of Midnight Blue, the long-running soft-core-sex cable show Goldstein sponsors, share the floor.

When I told him I wanted to take a crash course in adult films, Goldstein immediately volunteered the use of the Screw media room--actually, a storeroom equipped with eight video-cassette recorders, a Sony Trinitron, a phone and Goldstein's favorite easy chair. Then he gave me a stack of adult films to choose from and left for a week on a North Carolina fat farm. I ordered lunch sent in.

My first film was Harold Lime's The Ecstasy Girls, in 1980, winner of seven Erotica Awards--the porn-industry version of the Oscar. It starred Jamie Gillis, Serena, Georgina Spelvin, John Leslie, Desiree Cousteau, Lesllie Bovee and former Oui centerfold/cover girl Nancy Suiter, names that would soon become very familiar to me.

The plot is inventive by old porn standards. Gillis plays Jerry Stoner, an unemployed actor who has a magical way with the ladies. He meets J. C. Church, the greedy brother of terminally ill millionaire Edgar Church. Morally, Edgar is to the right of Anthony Comstock. He has willed his bank roll to J.C., a sister and his four daughters--but only if they are never caught in sexual misconduct. Of course, J.C. wants it all. He hires Gillis and two friends to perform and film the seductions of all five ladies.

The girls are pretty and passionate, the men understated, the plot and production values good, the acting credible. Minus the explicit sex, the movie could have played on cable TV (and no doubt will in a soft-core version). I laughed a lot. It was, as Lime's films tend to be, a good example of adult fare trying to look into the future instead of merely at the pocketbook. And it paid off. Ecstasy Girls grossed more than $1,000,000 in distributor rentals, and four or five times that at the box office.

But the oddest part was watching Gillis romp through the bedrooms of the rich and spoiled. We'd met and talked at the West Side apartment he then shared with author Gael Greene. Now, as I watched him perform sexually, I felt strange--as though I were invading his private life. It was actually a valuable lesson. I would have to get used to seeing close-ups of genitalia one day, then having lunch with the whole person the next--would have to remember that although the sex onscreen was real, these were just "films," fantasies, where everybody put on his clothes afterward and went home.

By six p.m., I had also seen Plato's: The Movie, Barbara Broadcast, Football Widow, Defiance, Cherry Truckers, Devil's Playground, Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls, Fantasy World, For Richer, for Poorer and Midnight Blue Uncensored, a hard-core video-cassette version of the Goldstein-sponsored cable-TV show.

Instant analysis: There was one example of gang rape in a mental institution (Defiance--an older film), some light S/M from Gillis and Serena (The Ecstasy Girls), but no kids, no killing, no water sports, no fist insertions. Even using narrow guidelines--other than the feminist assertions that any depiction of a nude woman is pornographic and that a woman's mere participation (albeit willing) in adult films is an act of at least societally induced violence--there was less physical aggression in the movies I watched than in a Three Stooges episode.

Overall, that afternoon's fare was typical of what I would continue to see in more than 75 films (and about 25 eight-millimeter loops) during the next four months. The films' greatest liabilities were repetition, less-than-proficient technical skill (in the older movies), unrealistic sexual situations and a creeping boredom that eventually diluted the erotic content. But there was lots of humor and human fallibility portrayed. Mostly, the films seemed harmless entertainment. Naturally, I was curious to see if what went on behind the camera bore any relation to what finally reached the screen.

•

All Ron Jeremey wanted was an erection. The actor stood broiling under the merciless klieg lights at one end of a chic Manhattan restaurant's upstairs bar. The fly of his heavy blue suit yawned open and his penis stared stubbornly at the Panaflex movie camera. Jeremey was surrounded by an eight-man crew and one curious reporter. It didn't help.

Director Henri Pachard had just cleared the room of extras from the previous night-club-disco scene. "OK, folks, I'm about to do some nasty hardcore action," he had said. "We're gonna do what this business is all about--a fuck-and-suck picture." (Its title: A Girl's Best Friend.) It was an exaggeration. Jeremey would get only a hand job. Pachard was laughing at his suggestive warning when the cameraman gave him some bad news: Someone had jarred the Panaflex out of alignment.

"That's an 'Oh, shit!' Definitely an 'Oh, shit!' " Pachard scolded. "It's gonna take at least ten 'Attaboys' to turn that one around." He sent for a replacement camera and glibly appraised the situation for the crew. "Hey, we just can't afford to take chances--even on this budget."

Meanwhile, Jeremey, a former Playgirl centerfold and Borscht Belt comic, had begun "tuning up" with a series of staccato jerks and long, slow, twisting strokes. When the new camera arrived, a nonchalant grip stretched a measuring tape between cock and camera lens. Jeremey tried hard to ignore him.

The scene's co-star, veteran adult-film actress Samantha Fox, winner of top female honors at both the 1980 and the 1981 Eroticas, sat on a barstool to Jeremey's right. She had long dark hair and exotic eyes and was decked out in full evening regalia with a simulated (continued on page 212)Tuning in to Channel Sex(continued from page 114) ermine wrap. Jeremey whispered in her ear. Immediately, Fox sank to her knees and slid Jeremey's half-mast in and out of her wet, professional mouth. His olive-colored member; her white face, red lips, concave cheeks and wide, upturned eyes--it was pure porn poetry in motion.

Jeremey's pencil-thin mustache started to overflow with sweat. Another drop traced a tiny river from beneath his ear lobe into his collar. Head bowed, shoulders curved and arms stiff, he was lost in some private fantasy world. Fox continued sucking. Pachard smoothed his shirt, removed his golf cap and ran a forearm across his brow. Producer Robert Sumner checked his watch. Ten minutes gone.

When Fox finally stood and wiped her mouth, Jeremey's cock pointed due West. He stroked himself while Fox redid her lipstick and eyed the reporter in the corner. She looked oddly intruded upon--as if millions of men hadn't already seen her suck hundreds of cocks on the love-stained screens of adult theaters everywhere. Yet the question in her eyes was clear: What are you doing here? Obviously, even on-set sex required some measure of privacy.

Well...I was watching furtively in the overhead mirrors. I was whispering hard into my tape recorder, like the color man on All-Star Bowling. After a three-week course on the current state of the adult-film industry in America, I was finally witnessing my first live cum shot. In the process, porn had become stripped of its facades, robbed of its lascivious adjectives. I knew that to most Americans, the shadowy world of adult films was laced with innuendo and a touch of moral decrepitude. It sounded at that reflective moment good enough to write down--and certainly more provocative than what seemed to be the truth: that Jeremey's cum shot, the supposed heartbeat of an industry, was no more than a job.

•

There's an old joke in sexploitation circles: While producers pay the women $75 a day, the men would pay $25 just to be in the films.

But now it's nearly ten years after Deep Throat, and actors from that era have survived to become household words. Many are intelligent, articulate, have solid middle-class backgrounds. They make, in some cases, from $800 to $1000 a day on the bigger projects. John C. Holmes is rumored to command $1500 a day. "That's what happens when you have a kangaroo for a cock," laughs Berkeley-based porn actor Richard Pacheco.

But why, besides the money, are these men in adult films? According to Pacheco, one obvious reason is "available sex." Most adult-film actors get the majority of their sex during working hours--for free.

"I was raised with a rather classic Jewish, repressed upbringing," says Harry Reems. "There were certain sexual curiosities and frustrations on my part. I also needed to supplement my income." Reems came from a legit acting background, as did many of his peers, and began his career four years before starring in Deep Throat, doing a stag film for $75.

Some consider Jamie Gillis, at 37, probably the most talented actor in the adult-film genre--and he has won numerous awards to prove it. "I never went into porn with the idea it was going to be part of a profession," he says. "It was a fun way to make a couple of extra dollars while I was waiting."

Waiting for what? Gillis, too, was a "typical starving actor" who got into sex films because he was "tired of driving a taxi." He still maintains many friendships in the legit acting world. "It never occurred to me that anyone would ever see these films," he says. "But since I've been around a long time and have seen enormous developments, in retrospect, I'm delighted. Fifteen years ago, we couldn't read Henry Miller. My career has been more exciting than, say, spending nine years on a soap opera and doing a few trashy Hollywood movies. My career has been unique."

Gillis is unique-onscreen and off. Privately, he is a connoisseur of fine food and wine; he is fond of jazz--we met one evening at a George Shearing concert. He also has a college degree and recently completed some scenes with Lindsay Wagner in Sylvester Stallone's movie Nighthawks, in which he portrays a bitchy, dominant clothing designer.

He built his adult-film reputation on being willing to act out--onscreen--America's kinkiest fantasies. As the macho leading man beneath an often comic, sometimes laconic exterior, Gillis would just as soon wield a riding crop as penis-slap a woman's face and tell her she loved it. He'd spit in his co-star's mouth or shackle her wrists. He'd stick a lit candle (unlit end) in his partner's vagina and masturbate on her stomach. And he'd do it all in a strangely attractive, supremely self-confident fashion. No malice or misgivings. Just porn panache. The pain was never real, but Gillis could make it look that way. It all added up to a perverse mystique: Porn actors wanted to be like him. And one actress calls him a "pig, but the best pig of all."

But even Gillis can tell that times are changing. Movie production has slowed. He works less. Some producers claim his prices are too high. Others--more realistically--suggest that his specialty is no longer the vogue. Three recent Gillis parts (in Blonde Ambition, Amanda by Night and High School Memories) make use only of his considerable acting talents. In the first, he plays a gay director of adult films. In the second, he's villainous only as far as the snarl on his lips. In the third, he portrays a comic, sex-crazed high school football coach.

The actor most in demand in today's adult films is John Leslie--especially after copping the 1981 Erotica Award for his leading role in Talk Dirty to Me. He's the strong, steamy type with green, heavy-lidded Italian eyes--the kind of guy women supposedly want to mother, then be taken by, or vice versa.

Leslie shares a Mill Valley, California, house with former porn actress Constance Money and her child. They are not romantically involved. He is renowned among his Bay Area porn peers (Annette Haven, Jesie St. James, Pacheco and others) as a superb chef who makes his pasta from scratch. He's also a promising artist. "I usually draw whatever's in front of me," he says over beers at a neighborhood tavern. At home, his walls are covered with his charcoal or oil renderings of household items--including a good many portraits of his beagle, Louie.

Leslie started acting in adult films in the mid-Seventies ("I needed money and a friend suggested this was an easy way to do it"), but he has since handled several directorial chores. His friend director Anthony Spinelli cast him as the lead in Talk Dirty to Me. Leslie also stars in the sequel, Nothing to Hide, as (continued on page 218) well as in a third Spinelli film, The Dancers, about male strippers.

But of all the actors working in adult films today, the one who seems most ready to handle the coming changes in the business is Pacheco, co-star of Talk Dirty to Me, Nothing to Hide and, of course, The Dancers. A college graduate and product of the Sixties counterculture revolution, he almost began his X acting career in 1971, after answering a casting call with his wife. They lived in a commune then and thought of adult films as an experimental extension of their radical lifestyle. Neither was used. But four years later, the producer, who had kept their number, called for Pacheco's wife. By that time, she was a working sex therapist and wasn't interested. So Pacheco showed up instead. "The $200 a day they offered was a lot better than the five dollars an hour I was getting for breaking up rocks with a sledge hammer," he says.

Since those days, Pacheco has become a more-and-more-outspoken advocate of change within the porn industry. "I'm committed to sex and sanity," he says. "There's nothing wrong with sex in films; the concept is right. We've just got to bring it out of the Dark Ages."

•

Although actors are important to adult films, they're not indispensable. The fact is simply this-the women draw the customers.

"I get women beating down my door to be in some of the films I make," says Bobby Hollander, once publisher of Cinema-X (now called Lipstick) and himself a producer of eight-millimeter loops and video shorts. "But we don't just take anyone like we might have about ten years ago. They've got to have talent--and know what they're getting into."

That's a statement with which jack-of-all-sex-trades William Margold would strenuously agree. Margold is, by his own admission, not particularly attractive. He's tall, wears glasses and a mustache, has sandy-blond hair and a postacne complexion: certainly not the typical sex star, though most definitely the typical adult-film journeyman actor. And after appearing in more than 100 movies and 300 magazine layouts, it's been some journey. Margold says he's in it "for the glory."

He is also a prolific writer of adult-film screenplays and is a film reviewer (adult and mainstream) for a Hollywood sex tabloid. And a publicist, under a collection of pseudonyms, for himself. And a nude-modeling agent. And God knows what else. Like Goldstein, he burns the candle at both ends. He spends most of his time behind a disaster-area desk at the one-man Sunset International Agency on Hollywood Boulevard, in a building that looks normal on the outside but appears to be direct from a remnant sale within.

Our short time together was punctuated by incoming phone calls. Margold insisted on answering them all--and in one, he found himself on the line assuring a whining actress that she did not have to continue with an anal scene:

[Into phone] No, I can't tell anyone to do anything that is uncomfortable or intolerable to them. Well...if you could do it halfway, that might satisfy them. OK, if you can't physically do it, don't. It's as simple as that. Hey, put one of the guys on the phone.

Hi. Sorry. I probably should have sent Rachel down. She is cavernous. You could fall into her. OK, so pay Susie $25 and send her home and give $75 to Rachel. What? Yeah, Rachel's a nice-looking person. Not too much on the tits, but you're going after something else, anyway. Gimme Susie.

OK. Come home. Right. I told you it's an exit sign only. Hey, you said you could physically handle it. You should have said something earlier.

As he hung up, Margold turned his attention back to me. "You know you're not supposed to stick things up your ass," he said, as though this particular problem were discussed by businessmen everywhere. "Sphincter valves are not supposed to inhale."

I also knew that porn wasn't supposed to be shot in L.A. Margold said it was a still photo session, not a movie. Then he regaled me with nonstop porn-star gossip peppered with brutal personal evaluations likely prepared by a secret team of writers. Examples: "I'd sooner stick my cock in a fan--and would get more action--than let that chick blow me." Or, on reviewing a movie he starred in: "I said it was so bad I enjoyed my barium X rays more." Or, "Actor John Leslie is so charming he could probably convince the Venus de Milo to give him a hand job." He was usually right on target.

Margold admits to being less than highly regarded among his peers. Perhaps it was his sarcastic revelation to Rona Barrett on Tomorrow: Coast to Coast that he would even consider fucking his own daughter, should she appear in a film with him. Or perhaps it's his iconoclastic view of the industry's new directions: "Porn has to stay dirty. Once people find out sex isn't unclean, we'll never survive." Yet Margold loves porn fiercely and has a very realistic view of life at the entry levels of the sexual subculture. His single caveat for anyone interested in getting into his corner of the showbiz world: No illusions.

"I go through maybe a hundred girls a month who come in here," he says. "Some--a very few--will make superstar. The rest last anywhere from six months to a year. They come in for glamor, glory and quick cash. They get disillusioned. A lot expect to transcend the genre and make it into the legit world. But it's largely a false hope. We're talking about a double standard here. Men, maybe. They're just in it for the sex. Women, labeled forever whores. Any other outlook is hopelessly deluded. Living on cloud ten. Some might nibble at the periphery. Some have crossed over and remained anonymous. But, in the end, they may use an Oscar, but they'll never win it."

Margold gives a similarly cynical disclaimer to all who enter his gates. "The first thing I say is: 'You know what you're about to do is going to haunt you for the rest of your life. You damn well better understand that ten years from now, when you have nice children and they come home with a magazine with you lying there with a candle shoved up your ass, you will not be able to tell them you were playing the part of a birthday cake. This will haunt you. This is the end of the world. But if you're willing to accept this end of the world and live in your own little garden and flower here, you can enjoy yourself.' "

Yet he insists most of his potential sex starlets don't listen. "They don't believe it's going to haunt them or that they can't transcend. I guess it's because some of the women, like Jennifer Welles and Nancy Suiter, eventually ran off and married rich men. Rich men think that by marrying a porn star they're going to marry themselves a furnace into which they'll continually be able to stick their logs. The problem is that many of the sex stars have about as much sexual appeal as a doughnut. That is why I think the women--more than the men--are into it for the glory, the grandeur and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."

How can Margold justify putting these women to work when they don't heed his warnings? "When they come in here, I make them admit to me they're in it for ego first and money second. If I can get that out of them, I'll give them a chance to find out for themselves."

Adult-film actresses are mostly well treated and well paid--$600--$800 a day, and up to $1200 (or more) per diem for stars like Seka, Samantha Fox, Marilyn Chambers and the ever-lovely Annette Haven. Newcomers are occasionally hazed like sorority pledges, but veteran actresses do their best to guide neophytes over the rough spots. As in any business, the strong survive.

"Seka is one of the few women in this business to have no delusions of grandeur," says Margold, with wide-eyed respect. "She believes that the world exists where the door is marked X. And she will make it in X and live here as happily as she can."

But while Seka is often whispered about as the next queen of porn, the acknowledged current queen is San Francisco--based Haven. The blue-eyed, raven-tressed star is (with kind apologies to all others) arguably the best-looking woman to bare her God-given charms in an adult movie. She is also the closest thing the porn world has to a feminist.

She refuses, for example, to take cum shots in the face. "Ever get cum in your eye?" she asks angrily. "Well, it stings." Laugh if you will, but change comes from within; if Haven's style catches on, the product can't help but be different--just in time for X home video.

Haven won't do anal scenes, either, and other actresses have started to follow her lead. Not only that but lately she's begun insisting that she, too, have orgasms on the set. "I like to finish what I start," she says. If her co-star can't comply, Haven has no qualms, according to one actress friend, about "finding some desirable stud on the crew and giving him a big surprise."

But of all the starlets and sex queens I met, none was as consistently fascinating or more representative of the new adult-film actress than the one I call The Straight-A Kid.

At first glance, 24-year-old Veronica Hart looks like a young, well-endowed Audrey Hepburn. She has the silver-dollar eyes, the warmly compelling smile, the understated sensuality. Sometimes she's a bit of Ingrid Bergman, and one gets the eerie impression that she could be any of a number of mysterious, intriguing women. I first saw her in a screening of A Scent of Heather. Hart plays the lead. It was one of 11 X-rated movies she'd made in the previous nine months. It was also nine a.m. and I was the guest of a wide-awake Al Goldstein. But neither Hart's grueling schedule nor the early hour could obscure her acting talent or sexual desirability. Hart is counting on both to make her one of adult filmdom's brightest stars.

She told me she graduated from high school at the age of 16, compiling a straight-A record. At 19, she got through college with a B.A. in theater arts and a teaching certification. After school, Hart says she took her smarts on the road--to Europe, Australia and eventually England, where, for more than two years, she danced, managed rock bands and modeled fashions for conventioneers. In 1979, she landed in New York with plans to begin an independent record label. But her investors reneged.

Her plans in shambles, she took a series of temporary secretarial jobs to get by. She'd thought once of trying to find legitimate modeling or acting jobs, but a duplicitous casting director she'd briefly lived with soured her ambitions.

"I knew a lot of times I'd have to give a lot of people head, or fuck a lot," she said one evening in New York as we huddled under an awning in a sudden heavy downpour. "Maybe I'd end up on top as a star, but more likely nowhere. You really have to want to be an actress bad. It's gotta be your whole life. It wasn't that important to me. I have other plans--in music. Besides, I didn't want to have to put out anymore."

She fell into adult films by accident. A man from whom she rented loft space discovered that she'd been a model and an actress. "He'd done porn movies and he told me I was an idiot to keep slugging my guts out as a secretary for $100 a week when I could make a fairly good living doing porn. I'd never really thought about it. Then I did. Money.

"But nobody made me do it. Nobody made me become a porn person. No one twisted my arms, no one filled me with drugs, no one beat me. Besides legit theater and rock, porn was the most fun thing I'd ever done. It was a way of accumulating wealth by doing some things that I liked: acting and sex. And, hey, if you're not terribly keen on the guy you're having sex with, that's where the acting comes in, right?"

For once, it seemed to Hart that she could do things at her own pace. The competition in adult films wasn't as fierce as in the legit world. "I'd always been pressed to the edge and over-achieved," she said. "Now my goal is just to do what makes me happy." Part of which includes being able to thumb her nose at what she considers a hypocritical society and, in so doing, no longer lead "a double life."

Unlike most other porn people on both the creative and the business sides, Hart told her parents what she does for a living. "I could just imagine one of their friends' going to a movie and saying, 'You know what I saw your daughter doing?' I care for my parents. They're proud of me. My dad's first reaction was, 'You're not serious!' But I think they understand now. They've read my stage reviews. They know I'm good, that I'm no dumb broad. I suppose if I'd never done anything else in life, I'd be ashamed of what I do now. But I feel no shame or guilt at all."

We had reached her building--and just in time. The rain again slapped the pavement like buckshot. Hart pushed open the hallway door and invited me up. Her loft is large and in the process of defining itself. After she put water on to boil, she gave me a quick tour. She pointed at walls and corners and described what the place would look like once she'd decorated. She knelt down to pet one of four cats prowling amid the clutter. Then, as we relaxed on a couch covered with large patterned blankets, she spoke about the world of adult films with what I'd come to recognize as characteristic candor.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about some of the feminist groups that say these films are hostile to women--that your being in them is hostility toward you that you might not even be aware of?

[A] Hart: Oh--somebody making me come or giving me pleasure and biting me all over my body is a hostile act? Beat me, you know? I wouldn't have anything to do with a film I thought was in bad taste, like where a girl's getting raped and the guys are getting off. I don't like to see women victimized or held against their will. A lot of men think a woman secretly wants to be raped. That's a bad thing.

[Q] Playboy: What about S/M in porn movies?

[A] Hart: I have no qualms about it, though it's definitely not my thing. What I don't like is violence in sex movies. I haven't seen Caligula just because I heard it's so violent and bloody. Almost as bad as television. It's excellent that so much money's been put into a porn film--it makes it more legit. But all that blood and violence? There's no violence in the stuff I've done. Maybe some S/M with dominatrixes and all that. It's like the old joke about the difference between an R- and an X-rated film: In the R, the guy kills the chick and cuts off her tits; in the X, she gives him head. What's that say about society right there?

[Q] Playboy: What kind of people are in the adult industry?

[A] Hart: There are your sleazy ones. But the better the films become, these people will just have to slide out the back door.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you expect to earn this year?

[A] Hart: I'd rather not say.

[Q] Playboy: Thirty thousand dollars?

[A] Hart: Easy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever have real orgasms while filming?

[A] Hart: Yeah--depending on who I'm working with. If you can make the scene hot and real, then why not? If it's nice and good for both of you, then that's great.

[Q] Playboy: What do you find you need most now in your life?

[A] Hart: Hugs and kisses and cuddles and someone to put his arms around me and say, "Hey, kid, it's OK. How was your day? How are you feeling?" I need that emotional support. Doing these movies is intense. Sometimes, after sitting around on the set all day, waiting for one scene, you come home wiped out. Fortunately, I have an understanding boyfriend who does just what I need. I love him a lot.

[Q] Playboy: What does he think of your career?

[A] Hart: It took him a little while to get used to, but now I think it excites him.

[Q] Playboy: How long do you think your adult-film career will last?

[A] Hart: I think I'll have worked a year before any of my movies are out--there's such a backlog of films that you sometimes have to wait eight months for a theater date. Then I'll work another year before anyone really knows me. Then a year or two of lots of fans; then a year of "Oh, no, not her again."

[Q] Playboy: What happens when the movie work slows down?

[A] Hart: If I get passé with the producers, I can always go out stripping for a while. Once I have a name, I'll make good money on the porn circuit and I won't be expected to turn tricks and all that other stuff regular strippers do. I also plan to produce my own movies. I mean, why not make a couple hundred grand instead of just $5000 for a few days' work? A producer needs to know how to organize. I can do that. I know enough people now and being a woman won't hold me back.

[Q] Playboy: Will established producers resent you? Ones you have worked for?

[A] Hart: I wouldn't be cutting them out, really. They also distribute films. I'd do business with them.

[Q] Playboy: Would your films reflect a woman's point of view?

[A] Hart: I'd like them to, but, hey, it's a business. There are certain things you can't get away from. It's a fuck film. Anyway, I'm going to have to wait and see on all that. There's too much on the market already.

•

The new audience composition isn't the only reason the industry is changing. Another factor is economics. According to David Friedman, chairman of the Adult Film Association of America (A.F.A.A.), a competently made adult movie would once return about 200 percent on the initial investment--within 18 months. Low budgets and extra-long playing life were the main reasons.

Deep Throat is an exception, but it makes the point. Nine years ago, it was shot in six days for $22,000. It has now run nearly 365 consecutive weeks in Los Angeles. Depending on your source, that film has grossed between $50,000,000 and $100,000,000. Today's average film can require nearly a $150,000 outlay, which, in the best of examples, includes three weeks' preproduction, a week's rehearsal, 10 to 14 days before the cameras and months of postproduction. Duplicate prints and the ad budget are extra.

Some producers predict that newer efforts will reach close to $250,000. Marilyn Chambers' latest box-office bonanza, Insatiable, is rumored to have cost upwards of a half million dollars. Just the advertising campaign for producer Harold Lime's 1980 hit, Co-Ed Fever, ran almost $70,000.

"There will never be another Deep Throat," says Robert Sumner. "It was a novelty item. A media event."

Another New York--based moviemaker is even more succinct: "The goose that laid the golden egg died long ago. We've got to work hard now."

Not that there is no money to be made. Some films, including The Opening of Misty Beethoven, The Devil in Miss Jones, Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door, Insatiable, Inside Seka, Talk Dirty to Me, The Ecstasy Girls and Sumner's Take Off, have grossed more than a few million dollars at the box office.

But it's tough. Beyond skyrocketing costs, there's the problem of limited play dates. As the porno-chic patina wore off, the number of theaters willing to run an exclusive bill of X-rated material dwindled from a high of 2000 to today's approximately 800. But film making didn't slow down, creating what one exhibitor calls a market glut.

Significantly, that oversupply has given exhibitors (and even distributors) a powerful edge in determining what kind of movies will be made these days. Until recently, producers and directors complained that the money men weren't willing to take any chance of losing the guaranteed hard-core crowd that has supported the industry all along. That stance restricted the liberties one could take with the old porn-film formula of seven-minute sex scenes, copious cum shots and dispensable plot and production values. Exhibitors wanted films that customers could walk in on at any time and not have to wait more than a few minutes for a sex scene.

But those attitudes are changing now, starting at the top. At least that's the forcefully expressed opinion of Jim Johnson, 31-year-old vice-president of California-based Pussycat Theaters, the country's largest adult chain. "I can't fool my customers with bad product," he says. "They don't want trash. So now I'm looking for movies that have better production values, coherent plots, actual acting, wet shots only when necessary and erotic situations geared to an audience of both men and women."

Any producer will agree that getting a Pussycat play date is a requirement for his film to succeed. Smaller exhibitors across the country regularly take their cue from Johnson's decisions. Slots in the Pussycat flagship theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles (fondly known as the Big Cat) are scheduled almost eight months in advance--and are rarely held over because of the constant backlog.

"I don't like saying it too loudly," says Johnson, "but I guess it's true that I have some power in creating general guidelines for future films. But, frankly, I don't have to do that much. In the last six months, I've seen more and more product that is substantially better than what's been available. The reason is simple survival."

Another factor is the law. Many adult-film makers feel that the Supreme Court's reliance on community standards as a determination of "obscenity" has added to, rather than cleared up, any confusion in the law. At a recent A.F.A.A. convention in Los Angeles, the country's adult-film community listened carefully while a panel of lawyers described progress in existing obscenity cases--and advised the film makers on their legal strengths and weaknesses. They suggested the producers "help themselves" by eliminating any vestiges of questionable sexual or violent practices from their product. Porn iconoclast Margold might not agree, insisting as he does that porn's "cleaned-up act" will only lead to a take-over by a better-equipped and -financed Hollywood.

But Margold's is a minority opinion. For most of the adult-film community, content that is socially and sexually responsible translates into self-respect and future success, if not mere survival.

But what do they mean by "socially and sexually responsible"? Director Spinelli, whose progressive adult hit Talk Dirty to Me was co-winner of the 1981 Erotica Award for best picture, says he would like to "reduce the sex scenes to mostly teasing and build-up--that's the turn-on--and cut the actual hard-core to no more than 60 to 90 seconds. Tops. I'm also getting rid of the cum shots--not completely, some make sense, but wherever possible. Mostly, they're ridiculous."

We were talking over an old-fashioned breakfast at his San Fernando Valley home. The morning's conversation had revolved around Spinelli's desire for change--in the context of his feelings not as a pornographer but as an artist in love with film first and with sex second. Frank Capra, he'd said, was his hero.

The cum shot is a particular bone of contention in porn ranks. It was originally included to show a predominantly male audience that the men onscreen were truly achieving sexual satisfaction.

"But now," complained Pacheco, also at Spinelli's breakfast, "it makes no sense. Sex in movies isn't real. You don't pull out and squirt sideways. Most women don't have orgasms when cum is squirted in their faces. Cum shots just reinforce illusions of masculinity."

"I used to put them in because everyone else did," said another breakfast guest, Sidney Niekerk. He is head of Cal Vista International, producer and distributor of films and video tapes. He's also the newly elected president of the Adult Film Association of America and producer of Nothing to Hide. Niekerk speaks intently and with a trace of Dutch accent. "A lot of exhibitors," he said, "used to take your films only after asking, 'How many wet shots?' Who gives a damn? I'd say. They'd say, 'It must have at least eight or ten.' So I'd tell them eight when it might be only five or six. I don't count. I'm not interested in that.

"I think the audience is mature enough now not to need it. And I want more of a ladies' crowd. What good is it to see a guy who jerks off and squirts it in a lady's eye and then puts his thumb in her eye to rub it out? It's ugly. Nobody would do that to his wife. I sure as hell wouldn't."

Ever the optimist, Pacheco thinks he may know a way for porn to be successful in the modern world. "It's a four-part plan: First, lessen repression on sex in media. Repression creates hostility, creates bad information. Second, get women interested in sexually explicit movies--enough so that they go to see them, enough so that they enjoy them. Let them write scripts and direct." (Today's crop of female directors--Gail Palmer, Svetlana, Suze Randall--make men's porn more glossy, but they're really trying.)

"Third, bring in more real artists to make the films. Artists, by definition, are free to create new things They don't take shit from anyone. Fourth, change the environment. There is nothing worse than seeing a porn movie in a theater. You sit next to strangers, you can't be sexual, you get horny and can't do anything about it. I get a hard-on in about five minutes and there's no relief. My sexual energy turns to nervousness. I eat more popcorn. I get a stomach-ache."

But Pacheco isn't rushing to a doctor. "There's a revolution coming. Ready or not--like it or not."

•

"The first video-disc system to press adult movies will be the one that eventually succeeds," said Harold Lime. We were standing in a boundless crowd at the heart of America's electronic tomorrow: last January's consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas. Displays from all the country's major electronics-manufacturing companies spilled over from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the adjacent Las Vegas Hilton and the Jockey Club. On hand were word processors, video games, car stereo systems, teaching aids, quartz watches, biorhythm computers, tiny hand printers, disco lighting systems, the finest in hi-fi gear, speakers, television sets and...porn.

The adult industry had its own section in the Convention Center's south wing. The oversized X in the VCX sign loomed overhead in the archway entrance. Stationing myself near the X, it was easy to overhear comments from the passers-by.

"This is where the action is," said one of two men in dark suits, wearing Atari tags.

"Yeah, but we've only got a half hour for lunch," said the other.

"Better than nothing," said the first.

Or imagine what a group of five jabbering Japanese men were really saying as they left the adult area, laughing and clutching glossy tape catalogs and posters autographed by the porn actresses working the adult booths.

Inside, the south-wing room was so packed that it was hard to scratch your head without bumping an elbow into one of the curious. Plus, the wing wasn't a walk-through area; there were no exits to other sections. Most of the mixture of men and women casually inspecting the displays worked in other parts of the Convention Center. It was obvious that the straights had come to play.

Marilyn Chambers drew the longest autograph lines at the booth of King of Video--it distributes her film Insatiable. The wait was often longer than an hour; sales of Insatiable video cassettes were topping 25,000 nationwide.

Lime was still wandering through the crowd with his partner in tow, stopping now and then at the booth of his distributor, Blue Video. Ted McIlvenna was also there. His "Creative Sex Series" (educational films of nonpros' regular sex patterns) is being offered by Wonderful World of Video. The company also distributes director Palmer's films, and she was at its booth signing autographs and chatting up the wholesalers, retailers and just plain fans.

The larger companies, such as Swedish Erotica, VCX, TVX and Niekerk's Cal Vista, were running preview tapes of their adult wares in little video theaters within each display unit. Even though all hard-core had been excised, the seats were never empty. Some companies even offered cassettes dubbed in Spanish, German and other foreign languages.

As I stood near the Swedish Erotica booth watching the crowd, that company's president, Noel Bloom, tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to an FBI agent. "It's a new guy this year," he said. "I guess we got to know the older ones too well." Actually, Bloom had little time to worry about standard Government surveillance. He was too busy taking orders for films and video cassettes from a nonstop procession of buyers.

Later, I made the rounds of hospitality suites, where adult-film actresses in expensive evening gowns circulated among businessmen in suits and ties. One hotel even sent strolling violinists. Another sent flowers, champagne and an opera-singing waiter.

It seemed that the tremendous response to adult films at the show--and there were as many attendees already conversant with the subject as those just curious--meant that sexually explicit material in the home had already had a noticeable, positive effect. Standing there, watching America meet porn, the myth meet the reality, I wondered if it would all come crashing down in a moral backlash choreographed by Jerry Falwell. There will undoubtedly be fights, but my concern quickly faded. It wasn't happening there.

Instead, it appeared that the optimists were correct; that sexually explicit material has, indeed, caught on; that today's pornography industry has learned from the mistakes of its turbulent past; that the adult industry has, in effect, used the American economic system and the country's own highly assimilative social processes to achieve a pornographer's version of the American dream. Which is just like everyone else's: home, family, security, success, health and happiness.

There are other, less obvious side effects of the adult-film revolution, ones that could easily get lost in the facts-and-figures shuffle. The actors and actresses who once made these films for extra cash in their spare time "because no one who really matters will ever see this, anyway" will soon have to get used to seeing their names in TV Guide and their lovemaking techniques on the television screens of America. Probably, they will at long last get to fully integrate their personal and public lives and feel good about it. Mom and Dad will finally have found out, but it will be OK.

"At least the old days are gone or going," said Niekerk as we watched the crowds lining up to meet the leaders of the new adult-film industry and to see their wares. "You know, the ones where when the movie was over, the naked girl in high heels walked out the door--and written on her ass was 'The End.' "

"Her white face, red lips, concave cheeks and wide, upturned eyes--it was pure porn poetry in motion."