INTRODUCTION

[David Jennings]

"Americans will say, practically in the same breath, 'No one can
tell me what to do,' and 'There ought to be a law against that.'"
---Gunnar Myrdal, Nobel Laureate

When police raided director Paul Thomas’s shooting location
in Oakland, California, they not only made arrests and seized
videotapes, but they also obtained autographs from their favorite
stars. This typifies America’s conflicting attitudes about
pornography.
The late author and editor Norman Cousins called
pornography dehumanizing and degrading. Johns Hopkins
therapist John Money calls it liberating and useful in treating sex
offenders.
Some wrote to Dear Abby that it ruined their marriages;
others told her it saved theirs.
In a Time magazine poll, 78% thought people should have
the right to buy pornography, and 72% wanted the government
to crack down harder on it. Many voted both ways, raising the
age-old question of what should be allowed and what shouldn’t
be. (Erotica--goes the saying--is what turns you on; obscenity is
what turns the other guy on.)
Reflecting the confusion over this issue, America’s porn
policies hang on the pendulum of politics. In the 1970s, a swing
to the left allowed a brief flurry of open commerce in child porn,
bestiality and brutal sadomasochism. In the mid-’80s, a swing
the other way knocked Playboy and Penthouse out of 7-Eleven
stores.
In the 1990s, the pendulum got stuck on the far right. A
massive push to eradicate erotica turned confusion into
absurdity: Colorado Springs vice cops set out to sting a Nevada
mail-order company. They ordered Animal Specials and Golden
Showers from an FBI agent running a sting on the other end. The
U.S. Government became America’s only commercial pusher of
child pornography: Postal agents spent two years sending kiddie
porn catalogs to Keith Jacobson, a Nebraska farmer, before he
finally sent in an order. Mary Jane Jenkins of Georgia was
busted on racketeering charges for buying adult bookstores from
convicted porn king Michael Thevis; she actually bought the
stores from the IRS, who had seized them from Thevis.
Anti-porn campaigns worsen the "problem" of pornography.
Police pressure drives erotica away from legitimate businesses
and into the clutches of criminals. As the industry goes
underground, AIDS cases among performers become harder to
trace. And anti-smut agitation has the boomerang effect of
stimulating porn sales.
How should this controversial business be dealt with?
Touting ways of dealing with porn are books by journalists,
attorneys, vice cops, sociologists, psychiatrists, movie critics and
radical feminists. Porn stars try to explain the nature of the
business in their autobiographies, but performers aren’t privy to
the inner workings of the apparatus that uses them.
To bring about enlightened regulation of this seven billion
dollar a year business requires understanding how it functions.
But those who run the machine remain silent. The only true
insiders, the career pornographers, don’t write books. Operating
in twilight legality, surrounded by enemies, the so-called "porno
kings" know that personal publicity means disaster.
With a code of silence rooted in the omerta of the old Mafia
days, porn moguls stonewall the "real world" (their sarcastic
term for outsiders). Any industry CEO with the temerity to
actually write about the business would be ostracized; a book
advance is small compensation for the loss of a lucrative career.
Unless that career is already over. Like mine.
Unlike my former associates, I didn’t get into pornography to
make it my life’s work; I got into it to write about it.

x x x x x x

I’d intended to spend six months in the business, not twelve
years. But something happened that changed my plans--and
those of pornographers the world over. The distribution of 16
and 35 millimeter films to theaters gave way to selling Beta and
VHS cassettes to video stores. This cued upheavals that turned
the world of sex movies inside out: MBAs replaced mobsters,
porn stars became corporations, and the annual output of sex
movies increased tenfold--while the industry plunged into
depression. A "kinder, gentler" pornography catered to a new
middle-class audience of women and couples. And the arrival of
porn tapes in shopping malls brought the biggest anti-smut
campaign in American history.
During this adult video revolution, I played the unexpected
roles of pioneer (the guy with the arrows in his back), producer,
manufacturer, distributor, videographer, actor (pants-on), and
mini-porn king. My company, Superior Video, Inc., was the first
to shoot X-rated features directly on videotape, an innovation
that transformed the industry.
Skinflicks is based on my journal of 347 audio cassettes; on
hundreds of hours of film and video footage; on collected books,
magazines, and news articles; on interviews with vice cops,
prosecutors, porn stars and producers; and on my dealings with
other porn moguls.
I had originally meant to write only of my journey through
the land of the sex movie, to reveal through my experiences a
world readers could not otherwise explore. I’d planned to write
only of things like working for what the FBI called "the biggest
Mafia porn outfit on the West Coast"; being the target of a hit
contract; dodging vice cops camped on my doorstep; shooting
sex during a wasp invasion, a flash flood, and an on-set AIDS
panic; sharing a mansion with porn queen Juliet Anderson and
her sex pro lifestyle of film work, strip shows and "fantasy
sessions" with select clients.And how I suffered a peculiar porn
burnout that brings back a fellow filmmaker’s warning:
"Ultimately, the hassles of the pornography business will destroy
you."
I wanted to answer the question that intrigues both fan and
foe of pornography: What are these performers really like? What
kind of person can make a public display of something that is so
private?
Something broadened my perspective: the "War on Porn"
that began in the mid-’80s and raged throughout the ’90s. To
write about this business while ignoring its uneasy role in our
society would be like writing about leopards without describing
the jungle. (That’s why--before relating my odyssey through this
arcane field--I’ve devoted Chapter One to debunking the myths
that keep commercial porn under siege.)
Thus, Skinflicks is both the narrative of my experiences and
the story of a revolution in erotica that almost made the X-rated
movie a legitimate form of American entertainment--but
triggered instead the biggest anti-porn onslaught the industry
ever suffered.
It is natural that these two stories coincide. As the
documentary film pioneer Alberto Cavalcante wrote, "To make a
film about the post office, make a film about a letter."

# # #

A note about names: I’ve used only the stage names or
professional noms de porn of performers and industry figures. In
cases where such pseudonyms were not available, I’ve given
fictitious names to real people--i.e. my former mob-connected
employers "Tony Romano" and "Marv."
I’ve only used real names for public figures, people
identified in media accounts, and where the use of real names is
vital to the information conveyed in the text.