The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, Peter Pavia

Overview

A raucous and revealing oral history of the birth of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood peels back the candy coating to let the true story be told — by the stars, movie makers, and other industry players who lived it. And what a story it is: Through hundreds of original interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, police reports, court testimony, and more, Legs McNeil and coauthors Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia trace today's billion-dollar industry from its makeshift, mob-connected origins to the Internet age. Along the way we encounter porn stars such as Linda Lovelace, John Holmes, Traci Lords, and Savannah — along with countless mainstream stars, politicians, FBI agents, and more.

Epic, hilarious, and moving, The Other Hollywood contributes to the porn industry the one thing missing in all previous accounts: a vivid, tragicomic, irresistible humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060096601
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/21/2006
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	953,560
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.28(d)

About the Author

Legs McNeil is the coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a book widely hailed as a classic of its kind. A founder of the seminal magazine that gave punk its name, he is a former editor at Spin and Nerve, and wrote Marilyn Chambers's comeback film, Still Insatiable. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Jennifer Osborne is a journalist and researcher who lives in Los Angeles.

Peter Pavia is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The Other Hollywood
The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry Chapter One The Sword Swallower

And in the beginning, of course, you didn't dare show pubic hair. An L.A. vice squad cop told me, "If we see pubic hair, then it's pornographic — and that gives us an excuse to pick up the print."

It wasn't until probably 1968 that we began to show pubic hair. And the first nudist camp picture to show "pickles and beaver" was Raw Ones.

BUNNY YEAGER: As nudity became more acceptable, nobody wanted to buy my beautiful bikini shots anymore. The men's magazines wouldn't buy from me anymore. They said I was old-fashioned. They wanted explicit nudity, and I didn't want to shoot it.

DAVE FRIEDMAN: The heyday of the nudie-cutie was 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. Those were the years I was turning out Brand of Shame, The Head Mistress, Lustful Turk, Trader Horny, Thar She Blows, Starlet, and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro — some of the greatest films of the genre. Classics that still live today, ha, ha, ha.

BUNNY YEAGER: We stopped making our movies because all the distributors were calling and saying, "Make it more sexy!" Pornography was becoming legal.

We liked making our movies — and I didn't see anything wrong with nudity. But I guess there was a certain morality that we didn't want to cross. Pornography is a whole different bag. There's a reason for it, and there's probably a place for it, and I mean, everybody's got a right to do what they want to do. But I had no reason to get into that world. I didn't need it. I didn't want to be makingit: in stills or movies.

So I laid down my camera for about ten years, till the time came again when I could sell sexy glamour photos without being crude. By the time the 1980s were over, my work was well-accepted again.

DAVE FRIEDMAN: Even though they killed off burlesque — and killed off girlie shows at carnivals — the nudie-cutie films were the answer to the showman's prayer. Because he no longer had to worry about live talent, which was always a problem.

Now, of course, instead of the voyeurs staring at some tired old burlesque broad up there, live, onstage — they were suddenly looking at gorgeous, young, blond, tan California girls, in all their pristine glory, with their beautiful little breasts, and their pert little nipples, and their dimpled little behinds — in Technicolor — on screens forty feet wide and twenty-five feet high.

Where would you go?

The Turkey Raffle

Miami
1968—1969

CHUCK TRAYNOR: I wanted to own a topless bar because I wanted to be around topless girls, and that's a great way to do it.

I was making good money flying — first crop dusting as a pilot for Minute Maid Orange Juice and then for the Ocean Reef Club. But bars were expensive, so I ended up buying an old raunchy beer bar on North Miami Beach, at 123rd Street. I think I paid maybe $2,000 for it. It was a real wreck.

LINDA LOVELACE (PORN STAR): I was getting on the Taconic State Parkway in New York, coming out of second gear — it was raining. And this big Chrysler came over the hill; I could see he was going into a skid and coming across the highway. This all happened in two seconds, and then it was over. My forehead and face hit the windshield; part of one eye was hanging down, my jaw was broken, and my lower front teeth were sticking through my chin. The steering wheel broke my ribs and lacerated my spleen and liver. This was followed by a leaking of my intestine and peritonitis.

CHUCK TRAYNOR: We painted up the place, put in colored lights, I hired some girls, and called it the Las Vegas Inn. It was a topless beer bar. But because I was catering mostly to bikers and construction workers, it soon became a nude beer bar. I mean, my girls would be totally nude when they weren't supposed to be, but they'd do it with the door locked, and luckily they never did it with any ATF agents in the place.

LINDA LOVELACE: When they released me from the hospital, I went back down to Florida to live with my parents to recuperate, and my mother was really rough on me. "You have to be in by eleven o'clock. Call me, when you get there — so we'll know where you are and who you're with." And if I came in one minute after 11:00 p.m., she would smack me in the face. I had just turned twenty-two.

CHUCK TRAYNOR: I had a big, two-story house, with three or four girls living with me downstairs, and upstairs was a room we just used for screwing around.

Then a friend of mine, Warren, broke up with his old lady, and said, "Chuck, I need a place to stay for a few days."

I said, "Okay, come stay with me. Stay upstairs."

LINDA LOVELACE: My mother would even look up my date's driver's license to make sure he had no violations or anything. And most of the guys I'd go out with had to borrow their parents' car, and my mother would ask them if they had a bank account and how much they had in their savings. You know, like, whoa, too many rules and regulations.

CHUCK TRAYNOR: I don't think Linda was a prostitute before I met her, and she really wasn't one after I met her, either. But she was not an inexperienced little farm girl from northern New York — like she'd have you believe.

When I met her, she was dating another married guy — a biker who used to come in my bar all the time. He kind of told me about her. She was kind of a hot-to-trot, sleep-around kid.

LINDA LOVELACE: My best friend Patsy is actually the one that introduced me to Chuck Traynor. He told her he was looking for bathing suit models or something. Patsy didn't go out with him, but she had danced in his topless bar. That didn't bother her at all. But I never would've done it...

The Other Hollywood
The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. Copyright © by Legs McNeil. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

This compulsively readable book perfectly captures the pop culture zeitgeist. It doesn't hurt that the history of American pornography is inextricably intertwined with all the subjects that captivate us: sex, drugs, beauty, fame, money, the Mafia, law enforcement and violence. McNeil (Please Kill Me) focuses on the industry's dark underbelly: suicide (Savannah), fratricide (the Mitchell brothers), Mafia hits (John Gotti whacked Robert DiBernardo, the mob's point man in the porn business) and gangland slayings (John Holmes). But beyond the scintillating subject, it's McNeil's skillful technique that elevates this oral history, coauthored by journalists Osborne and Pavia, above the tedium of a courtroom transcript. Most chapters contain multiple story lines, which McNeil cleverly weaves together by the end. And the book's two most fascinating stories-about the making of Deep Throat and the Traci Lords child pornography case-involve unreliable narrators, which gives them a Rashomon-like quality. In the case of Deep Throat, the movie that catapulted hardcore pornography into the mainstream, its star, Linda Lovelace, claims she was forced to perform in the movie, though everyone else connected to the film contradicts her. As for Lords, her detractors make a compelling argument that far from being the victim she portrays herself to be in her book, she deceived the industry about her age so she could make a fortune and leverage her sob story into a mainstream Hollywood career. Whether recounting high-profile scandals or answering trivia about the origins of porn films and lap dancing, this is a relentlessly gripping read. B&w photos. Agent, Jim Fitzgerald. (On sale Feb. 15) Forecast: A 25-city radio campaign and author appearances in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York will spike sales. Recent media interest in publisher Regan should also help the book, which, interestingly, is about an industry where attractive, highly sexual women who make bad relationship choices dominate. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly