The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (45 page)

Still nothing. I might as well have been speaking in Yiddish. I gently took her arm and led her back toward the set. “Just one more hour, and we’ll be finished,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through everything.”

I should have seen this coming. I just assumed that Divine would know the difference between an adult movie and her regular line of work, prostitution. For her, a job ended when the guy popped. She just collected her money and stumbled out of the car. But porn was a bit more complicated. Sure, it was still essentially about having sex. But I’d hoped that the crew, the cameras, the lights, and, well, the fact that she was having sex indoors would clue her in that this wasn’t the same ol’ “wham-bam, thank-you-sir.”

Her most infamous trick, Hugh Grant, was also an actor. But I suppose that just blowing an actor doesn’t automatically instill a person with a working knowledge of film production. It’s a shame, really, because if she’d had any idea of what that blow job would lead to, she would’ve asked Hugh for a few acting tips rather than her usual cash compensation.

Mark happened to be on the prowl for our Bobbitt follow-up when the scandal broke, and Aaron Gordon and a fellow named David Hanz Schmidt approached Divine about starring in her own adult movie. The three of us quickly threw together a script, which we called
Sunset & Divine: A Doc-HUGH-Drama
. As with
Uncut
, I based much of the story on actual events. I included the infamous blow job in the front seat of Hugh Grant’s car, of course. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough to substantiate a full movie, even a plot-deficient adult movie. So I added some filler to flesh it out to a full two hours. A lesbian threeway in a prison here, a sexual rendezvous with a randy lawyer there, and
voilà
! We had a porno.

I found a British actor named Mark Davis to play Hugh Grant. Aside from the obvious similarities in their accents, Mark also bore a slight physical resemblance to Hugh. Well, except for the uncircumcised penis. As far as that went, we were just guessing.

I took over the role of Divine’s lawyer. The actor I originally hired failed to show up for the shoot, and, with no time to recast, it was down to either me or the on-set caterer.

As for Divine, once she stopped fumbling for a door handle the moment she finished a scene, she was actually quite good. She had an innate sense of how to perform on film. She knew to tilt her legs to the side so that the camera had a better shot of the insertion. She knew to pull back her hair during a blow job, how far to arch her ass while doing doggy, and even how to aim a guy’s cock for the most photogenic pop shot. All in all, she was a pro, and I’d happily hire her again if given the chance.

Mark rushed
Sunset & Divine
into video stores, and it did a modest business. It didn’t do Bobbitt numbers, but with roughly forty thousand copies sold, it still performed well above the industry norm.

W
ith
Uncut
and
Sunset & Divine
, Mark and I were two for two. We’d made porn superstars (however temporary) out of an ex-Marine who’d lost his penis and a street hooker. In our self-made genre of quasi-reality, semicelebrity, scandal porn, we were (at the time) the uncontested leaders. It seemed like nothing could stop us from churning out an endless string of hit adult titles.

Assuming, of course, that we could find another willing participant.

I’ve been very fortunate when it’s come to casting star talent in adult films. When celebrities have wanted to try their hand at porn, more often than not they’ve come to me. I’ve directed everyone from football players (a former Miami Dolphin) to horror scream queens (Linnea Quigley) to cult-film actresses (
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
star Edy Williams). Some did soft core, some did hard core.

But for every legitimate star who has wanted to appear in my films, there’ve been a few who came close but ultimately changed their mind. Here’s a short list of my most heartbreaking near-misses and almost-rans in celebrity porn.

1. Heidi Fleiss

I
n 1997, the Hollywood Madam was busted for operating one of the biggest prostitution rings in Los Angeles. Soon after the arrest, her ex-boyfriend and business partner, Ivan Nagy, showed us a sex tape that featured him and Heidi in action.

Mark and I agreed to take a look at the video, and it was surprisingly good. Heidi even brought a little humor to her scenes. During the tape’s first few minutes, she pretended to be annoyed with Ivan. She looked up and said, “Get that fucking camera out of my face.” When he wouldn’t stop, she looked back at his crotch and narrowed her eyes. “What’s that dripping out of your penis? It’s green. Do you have gonorrhea?” Ivan quickly turned off the camera. It was all in good fun.

We met privately with Heidi to negotiate a possible deal. We assured her that we wouldn’t distribute Ivan’s video without her consent, and Mark even tried to persuade her to star in a professionally made flick, which I would direct. Heidi thought about it, but she ended up turning us down. She was still arguing her case in court, and she worried that doing an adult film wouldn’t win her any sympathy with a jury. We were disappointed, but we realized that she was probably right.
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2. Pamela Anderson Lee

O
kay, fine, Pamela never technically approached me about doing porn. But Mark and I were given first dibs on her sex tape with then-hubby Tommy Lee. I was friends with Milton Ingley, a porn actor from the mid-1980s and the director of such flicks as 1994’s
Deep Space 69
. One of his employees had supposedly done some electrician work at Tommy’s estate and somehow stumbled upon his private video collection. Mark and I were intrigued, but we decided to pass because there was no chance we’d get any kind of releases from Tommy and Pam. They might not have even been aware that the tape had been stolen. And it wouldn’t have been fair to Tom and Pam (whom I’d met on many occasions) who hadn’t consented to releasing the tape. It just seemed like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.

And we were right. The tape got into the hands of Seth Warshavsky, who sold the illegal video on his Web site before being sued by Tommy and Pam for close to $80 million dollars. They eventually signed some kind of a deal with Seth and the video went on to beat
Uncut
’s record as the bestselling adult movie of all time (with close to three hundred thousand copies sold). But even if I had the chance to do it over again, I still wouldn’t want any part of a video that’d been hijacked from an unsuspecting celebrity.

I will say this: the Pam and Tommy tape was one of the best amateur sex videos ever made. I’ve screened a few—including Pam’s sex tape with Poison front man Bret Michaels
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—and none of them compare with Tommy and Pam. They had the most clearly shot positions (they passed the camera back and forth), a lot of exotic locations (including a boat trip to my old porn stomping grounds on Lake Mead), and a clearly visible pop shot.

I was talking about her tapes to actor Scott Baio, another one of Pam’s exes, and he said, “Well, I have news for you.”

“You’re kidding me?” I said.

“Yeah, we did a tape a long time ago. But I was smart. I have that thing stashed away where nobody can find it.”

Don’t be so sure, Scott. You never know when a nosy electrician is going to snoop around and uncover your dirty secrets.

3. Joey Buttafuoco

J
oey and I met, curiously enough, because of a tabloid TV show called
Current Affair.
The producers brought us both to New York to identify a porn actress who looked eerily similar to Amy Fisher, Joey’s one-time girlfriend. As it turned out, the porn starlet in question wasn’t Amy Fisher at all but Kim Angeli, an Amy Fisher look-alike who had appeared with me in
Maddams’s Family
and
Debbie Does Dallas 4
.

Thanks to
A Current Affair,
Joey and I became friends. He invited me out to Long Island to meet his family and tour his auto-body shop. He soon became a regular addition to my social clique, which included Al Goldstein and Dennis Hof. The media called the four of us the “Slime Pack,”
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which seemed like the most appropriate moniker.
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Buttafuoco and I often discussed casting him in an adult movie. He had loaned out his home as a location for several pornos, so he was no stranger to the industry. But his agent, Sherri Spillane, put the kibosh on it. It’s a shame, really. Joey’s porn debut could’ve been huge.
***

4. Tonya Harding

T
he bad girl of Olympic figure skating, whose ex-husband once hired a thug to break the shins of competitor Nancy Kerrigan, made a brief splash in the porn world with her amateur sex tape in 1994. Mark and I were intrigued enough to consider signing her, and we even took a few meetings with her publicist, David Hans Schmidt. David explained that Tonya was only willing to be nude. She would discuss her skating techniques while doing a mild striptease on ice, but that was as far as she would go.

Needless to say, Mark and I passed. With her amateur hard-core tape already in circulation, we couldn’t imagine that an audience would pay to watch Tonya Harding flash her boobies. And for the salary she was demanding, it would’ve required at least a double anal.

5. La Toya Jackson

E
very porn director has the one big fish that got away. Their proverbial white whale, if you will. For me, it was La Toya Jackson.

Around the same time as Bobbitt entered the picture, plans were already under way for La Toya’s porn debut. Mark agreed to pay La Toya around $500,000 up front—the largest payday ever for an adult star—and promised her even more on the back end. (Remember, La Toya’s husband, Jack Gordon, was Bobbitt’s manager.) Rather than toss off a quickie script, Mark hired a professional. I only skimmed the first draft, but I was impressed with its ambitious production values. It had an elaborate story line, taking place mostly on a train. We even discussed bringing in a second director to assist me. We took meetings with mainstream filmmakers like Salomé Breziner and Adam Rifkin, who considered directing the dialogue scenes while I directed the sex.

As we worked on the production end, La Toya continued her national tour of strip clubs, doing live appearances to promote her
Playboy Celebrity Centerfold
video. I soon heard about a disturbing rumor about her visit to Al’s Diamond Cabaret in Reading, Pennsylvania.

My friend, stripper Adara Michaels, was at the club with La Toya, and she told me what happened. When La Toya arrived for her show, she announced that she had no intention of getting naked. “It was bizarre,” Adara said. “She wouldn’t even consider going topless. She thought she could just dance around the stage fully clothed and get the same paycheck.” The capacity crowd was not amused. They had paid big bucks to see a nude Jackson. They demanded their money back, and when the club owners refused, they went on a rampage, throwing chairs and overturning tables. The police had to be called in to bring the riot under control.

I explained my concerns to Mark, and he agreed to talk with La Toya. Much to our surprise, she feigned ignorance.

“You mean I’m going to have
real
sex?” she asked. “I thought I’d have a stand-in or something.”

If we had to, we could have found a stunt double to do her sex scenes. I knew a few black actresses who could match La Toya’s pussy beautifully. But even so, the public isn’t stupid. Even with the best morphing techniques, they would know that something was up. If every genital shot was a close-up and we never panned up to reveal La Toya’s face, most audiences would realize that they weren’t getting the full show.

Mark agreed to compromise, but as he reminded La Toya’s husband and manager, it would mean renegotiating her contract. “La Toya needs to understand that she’ll get a
lot
less money,” he said.

There were a few hopeful phone calls, but in the end the deal fell apart. La Toya didn’t want to do any nudity whatsoever. If we had accepted her terms, it would have required superimposing La Toya’s head on another actress’s body. Even if we had had access to George Lucas’s editing facilities, we wouldn’t have been able to pull off those kinds of special effects. And even if we did, word would get out that we cheated.

M
ark and I had a pretty good run in the celebrity porn racket. We lost a few big names, but we also signed more famous faces than any other adult company at the time. I thought about doing another big movie, but I couldn’t imagine who I or Aaron Gordon could get who would be worth the time and trouble.

And then I got a call from Howard Stern.

Actually, that isn’t entirely true. I didn’t get a call
directly
from Howard, but rather from somebody claiming to be Crazy Cabbie’s partner. I was told that Crazy Cabbie, one of Howard’s sidekicks on his morning radio show, wanted to star in a porno, and he wanted to shoot it at Howard’s studio, among other places. Not only had Howard approved the idea, they said, but he was willing to promote the movie on his radio show.

I was happy and surprised that they’d come to me to direct and act in the film. I knew that Howard was a fan of adult films. He was constantly interviewing porn starlets like Jenna Jameson and Tabitha Stevens, who, in some ways, owed their careers to his support. But he couldn’t have cared less about most male stars. To him, we were just props, and our lack of titties made us less than appealing to his mostly male listeners. I was one of the few male stars who’d been invited on his show, for various skits and interviews many times, but he’d always vow never to have me back.
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