The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (25 page)

Santa Is Coming All Over Town

A RHETORICAL QUESTION

What Did You Say Your Name Was?

What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in an Anal Movie?

What’s the Lesbian Doing in My Pirate Movie?

You Want to Fuck Me Where?

Lesson #3:
PARODYING THE MAINSTREAM

I
know you’ve all played this game before. Take the title of a mainstream movie and tweak it until it becomes a porno.
Forrest Gump
becomes
Forrest Hump
.
Romancing the Stone
becomes
Romancing the Bone.
If you’re new to the ol’ “porno parody switcheroo,” here’s a small sampling of some of my most popular porn parodies and the mainstream movies and TV shows that inspired them.

But cooking up a title is only half the battle. Now you’ve got to make a movie that lives up to your parody without getting you and your financers slapped with a costly lawsuit. Here’s where it gets tricky.

It’s a little-known fact that most adult filmmakers are sued not for the content of their movies but for the box covers. Take a porno like
Indiana Joan and the Temple of Poon
. The cover was a blatant rip-off of the wildly successful Steven Spielberg movie
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, right down to the flame letters. Amblin Entertainment or Universal (whatever) didn’t appreciate having its creative property used to sell a porno flick, and they promptly had their lawyers file a cease-and-desist order. The same thing happened to the producers of
Splatman
, who were sued by DC Comics not because of the porno’s plot, but because the poster art was designed to look like a
Batman
comic. A porno comedy romp called
Whorios
was sued by Nabisco because the filmmakers modeled their box cover after a box of Oreos. Nabisco didn’t object to actual boxes of Oreos being used as props in the movie itself. They just didn’t take kindly to their corporate logo being mimicked for a porno’s cover art.
*

When I directed a porn parody called
E3: Extra Testicle
, I never got so much as a phone call from Spielberg Productions. Our alien looked absolutely nothing like Spielberg’s cute extraterrestrial. And our box cover and poster looked completely different. It was just a bunch of gorgeous girls and a spaceship. The title’s lettering was different, and there was nothing to indicate that it might in any way be related to Spielberg’s sci-fi classic, other than that both films had the letter
E
in the title. You can get away with almost any parody as long as you practice just a little subtlety on the VHS or DVD box cover.

Oh, and then you have to write a porno that’s actually funny but not
so
funny that it distracts from the sex. It took me almost thirty years to get the formula right, and I’m still learning every day.

And while I’m not an entertainment or copyright lawyer, I have reported these events as they happened.

Hamming it up onstage—impersonating Rome’s Trevi fountain. (Courtesy “Dirty Bob” Krotts)

chapter 10

I FOUGHT THE LAW (AND THE LAW LOST!)

I was having nightmares
about vice cops on Jet Skis.

After my first two arrests in 1988, I was not taking any more chances. Mark Carriere and I decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk to shoot in California, at least not while my pandering cases were still pending. So we moved all future porn productions to Nevada. Though prostitution was legal in some of the state, shooting adult movies was not. But still, given the alternative, it seemed like the safest bet.

We found the perfect location in Lake Mead, a beautiful shoreline community just thirty miles north of Las Vegas. It was secluded, it was small, and it was the last place on Earth that anybody expected to find a porn actor. I rented a houseboat and took the cast and crew to the most deserted corner of Lake Mead. We’d dock at an isolated beachfront and camp out for as long as it took to finish the movies.

During the summer, it could be breathtakingly beautiful. We’d swim, have sex on the beach, take a break for a cookout, start a campfire, have sex under the stars, and then wake up the next day and do it all over again. We had every right to feel comfortable again. The nearest civilization was miles away. Even hikers didn’t travel out to such remote corners of the lake. We were safe.

But I was still paranoid. Once you’ve been busted twice and spent time behind bars, it’s difficult ever to feel truly at ease again. For months afterward, I jumped every time I heard a knock at the door, even if I wasn’t shooting a porno at the time. I couldn’t forget that feeling, that glimmer of fear just before I heard them yell “Police!”

At Lake Mead, I was having a few bad dreams. I dreamed that I was having sex on the beach, and in the distance I could see Como and Navarro Jet Skiing toward me. They’d both be in bathing suits, waving at me and flashing their badges.

“Jeremy!” they’d yell out. “How’s it going? Didn’t think we’d find you, did you?”
*

It never failed to wake me up with a start. I knew it was just a silly dream, but it seemed so real. And worst of all, so
plausible
.

I soon found out just how plausible.

At the same time we were shooting at Lake Mead, there was a police convention taking place at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. I was good friends with a lounge act called Taylor and Taylor, who were booked to perform at the convention, and they told me later about a conversation they’d overheard between two off-duty cops.

“You’ll never guess where that porn guy Ron Jeremy is shooting,” one cop said.

“Where?” his partner asked.

“Lake Mead,” he responded. “Jeremy probably thinks he’s getting away with it, too.”

That was enough for me. We canceled all of our upcoming shoots in Lake Mead. Mark found another location, at a rented home on the outskirts of Vegas, but I was still nervous. If the police tracked us to Lake Mead, surely they could find us if we moved just a few miles away. I convinced Mark that it would make more sense to find someplace so inaccessible and out of the way that the vice cops wouldn’t even consider following us.

Someplace like Hawaii.

Mark didn’t go for that idea. Instead, another porn company, Cinderella, hired me to shoot a few films in Hawaii.
*
The cops were well aware of our plans, though we never had a clue. And it wasn’t just Como and Navarro who were on our tail this time. The FBI was now involved, because I had made a fatal miscalculation.

Shooting porn in California may have broken the state pandering law (we’re saying it didn’t) but by traveling to Hawaii we may have inadvertently violated the Mann Act, which forbids transporting actors across U.S. state borders for the purposes of prostitution (if porn is considered prostitution). The Mann Act was serious stuff. It’s basically white slavery. And worst of all, it has long legs. It has tentacles. They can bust everybody involved in a production: the cast, the crew, even the makeup person. Nobody is safe from the Mann Act. When I learned about it later, I had my lawyer look into it. “Theoretically,” he said, “even shooting in Las Vegas could have been a Mann Act violation, and you’ve already done that. It’s a stretch, but you could get busted.”

Oh,
great
. All we’re doing is making adult movies. We’re not criminals.

Neither the FBI nor Como and Navarro busted us in Hawaii. They were just watching us from afar and collecting evidence. They had us in their sights from the moment we walked off the plane in Hawaii. One of them was brazen enough to make contact with me without blowing his cover. I was signing autographs for fans at the airport, and I was approached by a beefy guy in a Hawaiian shirt. He asked for an autograph and even posed for a picture with me. Years later, I learned that he was an undercover FBI agent posing as a baggage handler. To this very day, that picture still sits in his office at FBI headquarters. I’m not kidding.

Even without the knowledge that vice cops and FBI agents were around every corner, we went to great lengths to be as inconspicuous as possible. Or at least I thought we did. Before taking a bus out to the beach for the day’s shoot, we needed supplies. I knew that I was the most recognizable person in our crew, so there was no way I could walk into a public place without setting off alarm bells. So I asked Ray Victory, one of my actors, to go in my wake. I gave him a grocery list and a wad of money, and I sent him off to the nearest store.

No sooner had he left than Charlie Diamond, my assistant director, asked me just what the hell I was thinking.

“You
are
trying not to be noticed, isn’t that right?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “That’s why I sent Ray.”

“Ray,” he repeated. “The big, supermuscular black guy with the bulge in his pants.”

Aw hell!

It was too late to stop him. And by the time Ray returned to the bus, a small crowd had already gathered in the store’s parking lot. They were all staring at Ray, who was casually walking toward our bus in clear sight, dressed in nothing but a tiny Speedo, his huge cock almost bursting from its seams.

The cast and crew were laughing their asses off. “I can’t even imagine what they thought,” Charlie said. “It’s not every day that a nearly naked black man walks into a grocery store and buys twenty-five douches and sixteen enemas. Oh, and lest we forget, enough jars of Vaseline and K-Y jelly to lube a small army. If they didn’t know that a porn production’s in town, they sure as hell know now.”

Ray walked inside and dropped the bags on the bus floor. “Damn,” he said. “That was weird.”

“Ray,” I groaned, covering my face with both hands. “Why the hell didn’t you go in there with pants?”

He glanced down at his shorts. Both of his testicles had broken free from the Speedo’s fragile fabric and were dangling in the air like two medicine balls.

“Whoops,” he said, not bothering to conceal himself.

M
ark still wanted me to shoot a few more films for him, so he convinced me to return to Nevada. At least in Vegas, black men with gigantic testicles weren’t uncommon enough to stall traffic.