The Call of the Weird Page 5

  “People say it’s becoming more extreme,” I said.

  He agreed, and cited the influence of reality TV shows where members of the public ate live grubs and pig rectums and dangled from helicopters. “The majority of people who buy our product, our DVDs and tapes, and take them home and watch them—I call them raincoaters—I believe they’re lonely people. They don’t like women, so they want to see them degraded. I love women and I will quit the industry before I shoot them the way they’re being shot today.”

  Though I’d only been in the Valley a few days, I already felt light years away from the UFO believers. I remembered my conversation at the Congress about “star kids.” In this world, star kids meant eighteen-year-olds from Manchester willing to risk tissue damage for a few thousand dollars and a moment in the spotlight.

  And yet, looking beyond the strange rummage sale of sex and occasional injury, there was at least an openness and honesty about the business. No euphemisms or flim-flam here. No claims to be changing the world. Porn was porn. Herrera had mentioned reality TV, meaning it disparagingly, but porn also shared some of the democratic ethos of that genre. And it spoke of a touching kind of humility in the industry that, despite its huge profits and the global reach of its images, a thinly credentialed reporter like myself could still wander with impunity at a casting call for the leading talent agent.

  I’d driven west from Las Vegas and, after the desert, the landscape of the San Fernando Valley was like crashing back to Earth—an anonymous sprawl of chain stores and strip malls and low-rise housing, where dusty banners advertised special offers on rent. Though there are, allegedly, separate cities with names—Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Chatsworth—you get no sense of them as distinct places, no recognizable high streets and downtowns, no squares or parks.

  I thought back to my first visit. It was only the second episode of my series, and, because I was sensitive to the creep factor, I’d sought out a male performer who was as unsleazy as possible. In the production office, we referred to him as our “hungry young male”—someone just starting out, dewy-eyed and unjaded, with a good attitude and a nice personality. Jim South had put us onto JJ.

  He was twenty-three at that time. He’d done four years in the Air Force—they’d taught him Chinese and computing—but he’d dropped out to work in porn. He’d been in the business five weeks and done thirteen movies, including Anal Witness 4 and Bottom Dweller. He’d proven himself in one of his first scenes, pulling off a tricky “double penetration,” or “DP,” which is, as it sounds, two men inside one woman, one by the back door and one by the front. (Surprisingly, I’d heard that some women preferred this to straight anal, the front entry being the “spoonful of sugar” that helped the medicine go down.) JJ was aiming to make “a nice career” out of porn, as he put it.

  His apartment, in a two-storey building round a swimming pool, was unusually tidy for a young bachelor, with racks of Heavy Metal CDs, John Carpenter movies, and Godzilla toys, all neatly organized. His fridge was stocked with low-fat yogurt and cans of tuna and not much else. He took me down to the gym, where we worked out together. “Can you get wood? That’s the most important thing right there,” he said. “Can you keep a hard-on the entire time? And believe it or not, it’s not easy like it seems it should be. I don’t care how beautiful she is, how turned on you are. Sometimes it’s not happening.”

  The next day I followed him to the set of a movie called Twisted. Shot on film, on a soundstage, Twisted was the kind of movie that became a rarity soon afterward, when “gonzo,” the unscripted quasi-documentary style of porn-making, took over. It had lines for the actors to learn, dramatic situations, proper sets. The scenario was based on the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. JJ’s scene was adapted from “The Masque of the Red Death”: The world had been overtaken by plague. Left with nothing better to do, four workers in a laboratory, played by JJ and the male veteran Peter North, and the female performers Johnni Black and Kaitlyn Ashley, dropped their white lab coats and had romping sex.

  In hindsight, I think JJ probably didn’t want me on set with him. And whether because of my presence, or because my questions about “wood problems” at the gym had jinxed him, or for some other reason, he struggled to stay hard for the scene. I loitered in the background, chatting to Johnni Black’s boyfriend who, bizarrely, was on hand to watch his partner in action. As the shoot overran, I could see the crew becoming impatient. “Woodless wonders,” the soundman grumbled. “Whatever drives people to do this for a living, perhaps some people shouldn’t.”

  JJ was a little downcast after it was over. “Well, I didn’t do as good as I’d like,” he said. “It’s just so many people. And I was nervous, kinda, working for Shanahan’cause he’s a big director. You get nervous, it’s hard to work. But yeah. Near the end, it was fine.” As I walked him to his car in the dark parking lot, I asked his thoughts on a recent HIV scare—an industry stalwart, John Stagliano, better known as Buttman, had tested HIV positive.

  “I’ve got a death wish,” JJ said. “So I don’t really care.”

  After that the plan had been to visit JJ on the set of a film called Forced Entry, a rape-themed film that was being shot by Rob Black, a young director who was carving out a niche as a maker of “horror porn.” In the end, JJ didn’t appear in the movie because his paperwork from the clinic vouching that he was free of HIV or venereal disease, which performers in porn have to keep updated on a monthly basis, hadn’t been processed in time. Still, I went along to the shoot. Though not exactly shocking, the artless, willed offensiveness of the action seemed out of key with the lighthearted documentary we were trying to make. My director filmed me leaving the set.

  The next day I had a final conversation with JJ about his choices. We bought lemonades at the mall. On the way back to his apartment, in the van, I said, “Porno seems like a dark brooding place to us in the outside world.”

  “For me it’s not,” he said. “It’s the opposite . . . I finally found somewhere where I like being, where the people like me being there and where I am appreciated. I am happy and it makes me happy so why should I leave this?”

  In subsequent years, I watched as porn drifted mainstream. The Clinton era was good to the industry. The number of federal obscenity investigations plummeted. New technologies—smaller cameras, the Internet, Viagra—led to increased production. It cost nothing to shoot a porn film. Meanwhile, respectable newspapers and magazines began taking note of how big the industry was. Estimates varied but the annual profits were always put in the billions of dollars. Stories about porn appeared in such august journals as the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. The performers turned up in pop videos, advertising campaigns, supermarket tabloids, and became semi-celebrities.

  It is possible that the increasing strangeness of the sex acts was a response to its new respectability, a way of keeping its outlaw edge. It is also, I suspect, the natural tendency of capitalism to innovate constantly, to find new niches in the market, to stimulate the jaded palates of its consumers.

  “Back in 1998, I made a joke. ‘Short of driving a train up someone’s ass, I don’t see where they can go with it,’” an industry veteran, Sharon Mitchell, told me. “But the kink factor has just gone through the roof! It’s almost like, we have a show here in the States called Fear Factor where they have secretaries and members of the public jumping off fucking buildings, you know? Think of that ‘Can you top this?’ in the porn world and that’s an idea of the changes I’ve seen. It’s just—shocking. Ejaculating in women’s eyes—that’s a series. Where people ejaculate in each other’s eyes!”

  “Because that stings, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah, it stings. It’s a very good way to get HIV or gonorrhea of the eyes, too.”

  Indeed, the higher health risk associated with the new weird sex acts was being blamed for an HIV outbreak that had taken place just a couple of weeks before I arrived back in Los Angeles. Five performers had tested positive, prompting an ind
ustry shutdown, a “moratorium,” which had been observed by all the big companies.

  But there were signs of an end to the ascendancy of porn. In addition to his “war on terror,” George Bush was gearing up for a fight on obscenity. There had already been two skirmishes in this confrontation. The first, widely publicized, was an aggressive clampdown on Viacom, the parent company of CBS, after Janet Jackson had her breast bared by Justin Timberlake during a halftime Super Bowl dance routine. “Until then, we were flying. We were cooking,” the head of publicity for Vivid, one of the high-end porn companies, told me. Within a week of the furor, a cable network had canceled plans to air a documentary about the Vivid girls.

  The second, less well-known theater in the war against indecency was a case the Attorney General was pursuing against a young porn director. If carried through to trial, it would be the first major federal obscenity case in more than ten years. The target of the case: none other than Rob Black, the “horror porn” maker who’d appeared in my documentary.

  Rob Black works out of offices in Chatsworth, in the far north of the San Fernando Valley, on a quiet semi-industrial street of singlestorey brick buildings and warehouses.

  Late one afternoon, soon after I arrived back in Pornworld, I found him sitting at a desk in a darkened back room of his production offices, writing an email to his general manager. Since I’d last seen him, in addition to being investigated by the government, he’d started his own company, Extreme Associates, been crowned Best New Director at the 1998 Adult Video News Awards (the porn equivalent of the Oscars), then lost all his money in an ill-advised attempt to launch a wrestling league, Extreme Pro Wrestling. In the wake of the obscenity case, he folded XPW and returned to porn. But where before he’d been one of the innovators, now he found himself outflanked by directors even more willing to stage outrageous stunts.

  On the plus side, he did remember me, vaguely. “Tell me again. What do you do?” he said. “What the fuck do you do?”

  “Make documentaries about offbeat subjects,” I said. “Try to get involved. Now I’m doing a book.”

  “Kind of like that Plimpton guy that died, huh?”

  “George Plimpton, exactly.”

  It was odd hearing him mention Plimpton. Stocky and hirsute, thirty-one years old, Rob affects a goombah mafioso persona. (His real name is, in fact, Rob Zicari.) He was wearing a Sean John velour tracksuit and had a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth— from time to time he spat brown juice into a large coffee tin that stood on his desk. All in all, he seemed an unlikely audience for the gentlemanly doyen of “participatory journalism.”

  He offered to take me on a tour of his premises. We walked back into a large, high-ceilinged stockroom, where shelves were stacked with thousands of videos in garish boxes, with titles like Squirmin’ Germans, Planet of the Gapes, Anal Blitzkrieg. He said he’d made over 450 movies since my last visit. When I mentioned that I was curious about JJ, he looked vague and said, “Yeah, that little prick! I don’t think he’s around anymore.” He talked about changes in the industry. “You’ve got your puking, choking, slapping. Everyone does everything now. What I started eight years ago, everybody does now.”

  “Do you ever worry that what you do is degrading to women?”

  “You know what? Nobody’s kidnapped off the street. And in our business, the girls get most of the money. And the thing is, why are our movies judged differently than Hollywood movies? A girl is degraded in a Hollywood movie, what happens? That’s acting. And they get a fucking Academy Award. A girl is degraded in porn and for some reason that’s more extreme than a real movie.” “Isn’t it because it involves things like spitting and pissing? It’s kind of a self-evident thing that that’s degrading.”

  “Being degraded is a sense of one’s own mind,” Rob said. “You’re only degraded if you let something happen. If you per ceive that what’s going on is degrading to you, then that’s that. But if you don’t perceive that you’re being degraded, then it’s not degrading.”

  I asked how he’d feel if he had kids (which he hasn’t, but was hoping to) and his daughter wanted to be in a porno.

  “Nah, I wouldn’t want her to . . . Just because you do something, doesn’t necessarily mean you would like your loved ones to do it. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong necessarily, but, you know, we can support things that we wouldn’t want.”

  Rob picked a garish box off a shelf. “Here’s a movie I did a couple of weeks ago, Creampie Milkshakes,” he said.

  I looked at the cover and said: “Jesus.”

  “You like that, huh? Fucking filthy.”

  The names of five tapes had appeared on the search warrant the government used during its raid in 2003. Rob was now selling these at a bulk discount, as the “federal five.”

  Rob had a specific take on the case against him. To him, his films were no different than any other films. His performers were actors, acting out fictional scenarios. He was a kind of relativist— he saw no intrinsic moral or emotional value to the acts themselves. The performers consented to have weird sex, so what was the problem? He didn’t seem to see that, irrespective of the legal case, it might be questionable to pay people, some of them, presumably, penurious and confused, to take part in degrading sex. Rob also mentioned the indignities suffered by the contestants on reality TV shows. How was it different just because sex was involved? he asked.

  For my own part, I had mixed feelings about the case. I could see the argument that it was an infringement of civil liberties to prosecute someone for making a movie. If the acts themselves weren’t illegal and all the participants were consenting adults, then what was the problem? It was also true that, notwithstanding the recent HIV outbreak, the rate of infection in the industry was quite low. But—I also had a sense that the porn industry, with its ever more grotesque provocations, was spinning out of control, and I wondered whether a successful case against someone like Rob might help to rein it in again.

  We walked outside.

  “Do you think you’ll go down?” I asked.

  “Nah, because Bush isn’t going to get re-elected, and if he doesn’t get re-elected then all the charges go away. Remember, it wasn’t a local bust, it was a federal bust.”

  “How long a stretch are you facing?” I asked.

  “Fifty years.” He paused. Blew a raspberry. “Fifty years. Five years per count.” Another pause. Then Rob said softly, as a strange kind of joke, “It’s your fault.”

  “In a way, it is, because I can vote in the U.S. and I didn’t vote in that election. But I don’t live in Florida.”

  “See? You were that one swing!”

  “I was the dangling chad.”

  “Dangling Chad,” I realized, would be quite a good porn name.

  Since arriving in the Valley I’d been looking for clues on JJ, but he seemed somewhat forgotten. One of the few facts I was able to glean was that toward the end he’d been working mainly for a director named Jim Lane.

  Jim Lane, like Rob Black, specialized in the new brand of disturbing, freaky films. I found him in the phone book and arranged to meet him in the far north of the Valley on the set of The Violation of Missy. A spiky-haired forty-two-year-old, an ex-stockbroker, Jim remembered JJ in characteristic porn terms. “He was a guy, he got his dick hard,” he said. “He was a good kid.”

  He told me JJ had left because his then-wife, Astrid the Australian, was getting into the business, and he couldn’t handle her being with other guys. JJ was working in computers now; and his new wife wasn’t Russian but Ukrainian. A “mail-order bride,” Jim said.

  A few days later, I returned to Jim South’s office. With no JJ as a way of understanding the business as it was now, I’d decided to meet up with another young performer—a 2004 version of the “hungry young male.”

  Up a flight of narrow stairs, in a dingy two-storey building with blinds over the windows, the World Modeling headquarters feel raffish in a faintly old-school way, like a private detective’s
office in a movie from the forties. Sitting at three desks were Jim, Jim Jr., and a young Asian woman called Envy Mi. Even though, by Jim’s standards, it wasn’t busy, the phone still rang frequently. Lounging back in his chair, in western-wear shirt and Wranglers, with pompadour hair, Jim would say, in his Texan drawl, “Hello, my darling. Bobby at Wildlife wants five girls. Single girl masturbation and a handjob.” Or, “It’s a boy-boy-girl anal.” Or, “It’s a BJ, I don’t know if it’s two different girls giving different blowjobs or two different girls giving the same blowjob.”

  For the best part of an hour I sat parked on his sofa, trying not to stare at the many glossy posters of porn stars with large breasts, waiting for a lull in the calls.

  “So what was the thing you did?” Jim asked me, finally.

  “A documentary for the BBC,” I said. “I followed JJ Michaels around. You took my Polaroid.”

  “And we gave you your photo back at the end. Yeah, you were the crazy guy!”

  “Do you still keep up with JJ at all?”

  Jim looked vague, as though he didn’t remember JJ too clearly.

  “He’s no longer with us, I believe,” he said. “I think he even left the state, got remarried.”

  “To a Russian woman,” I said.

  I had a vision of Jim as a schoolteacher with generations of young talent passing through his profane cloisters, all remembering him and his shaping influence, him remembering them less clearly, a Mr. Chips for the porn set.

  “I get people through here now who say, ‘You used to be my mother’s agent,’” Jim said. “I’ve been in this more than twenty years.”

  “Has the industry changed a lot?”

  “Oh yeah. More directors. More producers. Everyone’s an agent or a manager now.”