The Other Hollywood (21 page)

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK CITY/MEMPHIS
1976–1977

BILL KELLY
:
The Perainos made so much money on
Deep Throat
that they went out to Hollywood and developed their own legitimate motion picture film studio—Bryanston Films. They bought up something like nine scripts and hired a lot of technical people, cameramen, directors, and technicians. They spent all this money out there, but they never really made a movie. However, they did go into the national distribution of a number of very violent—but not obscene—motion pictures.

AL RUDDY (PRODUCER OF
THE GODFATHER
)
:
Bryanston Films was a company a lot of people were aware of in Hollywood. Bryanston were, in effect, picking up films—and I throw myself in this same category, unfortunately—that a lot of the majors didn’t want to distribute. They were too sensational, or the studios thought they didn’t have big potential.

I think it was fairly common knowledge that Bryanston was a company that was controlled by the boys—the mob, organized crime.

BILL KELLY
:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was distributed nationally by the Peraino family. I don’t know how much money they made off of that, but I’m sure it was a lot. But eventually they went belly up, so to speak.

AL RUDDY
: Bryanston never had the chance to really function because you can’t have a distribution company if you can’t get films to distribute. If you come around to a producer or a director and say, “I’d like to distribute your film,” he’ll say, “Well, what other films have you distributed?”

And if you say,
Deep Throat,
they’ll say, “Well, I’m not sure that’s quite what we had in mind.”

LARRY PARRISH (U.S. ATTORNEY)
:
In 1976, a United States Marshal had gone to a theater in Memphis to pick up a film called
School Girls,
which we later prosecuted. And when he was there, he saw previews to a film nobody had ever heard of called
Deep Throat,
and when he came back he told us about it. He didn’t even know the name of it. But we knew it was a film that deserved to be prosecuted—and we proceeded from there.

BILL KELLY
:
What Bryanston did was they bought a lotta people—directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, and so forth—and overpaid them, like a thousand percent more than what they were worth. For example, if you could buy a script for ten grand, they’d pay a hundred grand. They were throwing money around.
The Hollywood Reporter
thought they were great. I was reading it, you know, and it said, “The Perainos are here. Isn’t that wonderful?”

AL RUDDY
:
My only recollection of the meeting with Joe “The Whale” Peraino was that he was very affable, you know? You never walked in and said, “Oh my God, am I gonna get outta this office alive?”

The Perainos were very excited about what they thought they could do with my movie
Coonskin
. It was an absolutely straightforward meeting with a man who wanted to be a distributor. Look, I’ve dealt with plenty of people in my life who came from varied backgrounds—including people who’ve been in organized crime—and I found Joe the Whale a guy you could do business with, no question about it.

LARRY PARRISH
:
Deep Throat
was a dirty sixteen-millimeter film, and the FBI agents up in Chicago found it—and determined that it was going to be shipped back to Memphis and distributed out of there.

So FBI agent Joe Hester came to me and asked if I was interested in prosecuting it. I told him I would be more than happy to—but that he needed to talk to my boss, Mr. Turley.

BILL KELLY
:
Bryanston Films didn’t make any films that I’m aware of, but they bought the distribution rights to a group of violent movies—
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,
and
Return of the Dragon
by Bruce Lee.

So they made a lot of money distributing those films.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
has been seen by innumerably more people than
Deep Throat
. About twenty million people saw
Deep Throat,
roughly, if there’s a hundred million-dollar take. Probably fifty million people saw
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
. I mean, I was teaching police recruits, and I’d ask, “How many of you saw
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
?”

About 75 percent of them raised their hands. I said, “Congratulations.
You sent two and a half dollars of your money to the Columbo family in Fort Lauderdale….”

AL RUDDY
:
I’ll tell you one thing you cannot do: You can’t come in as a Bryanston into Hollywood and say, “Give me the film, or I’ll kill you,” you know?

The Perainos came into town with a big bankroll. And you can’t walk around with that visibility and ever try to muscle anybody. I mean, that’s out of the question.

Quite often, you go to the other extreme. You know, you wanna show that you’re more honest than most of the other thieves around Hollywood. I think that’s what the Perainos did.

BILL KELLY
:
Even though the Perainos made tons of money distributing
Texas Chain Saw,
the traditional Hollywood people really stung them bad because the Perainos had absolutely no experience in motion picture film production. They started spending money like water to make some films, and even then they never got one in the can. The producers just ran wild with the budget and frankly wiped them out—and then came Larry Parrish in Memphis.

LARRY PARRISH
:
After Joe Hester talked to him, Mr. Turley came walking back into my office and said, “Okay, you’re going to be my lawyer on this. Do what you need to do. I don’t want any popcorn sellers, ticket takers, or things of that nature. If you can’t get the people who manufactured it—who are profiteering off of it—don’t do it. But use your best skill, and call me if you need me.”

With that, Joe Hester and I became a team. Joe was with the FBI, and I was with the United States Attorney’s office, so we began to prosecute Interstate Transportation of Obscene Material cases—ITOM for short.

BILL KELLY
:
Larry Parrish happened to be a Knoxville guy—he went to the University of Tennessee Law School. He was a stand-up guy and a very dedicated Christian. He was really after these pornographers, and as an assistant United States attorney he had the authority. Larry is one of the real heroes in the Justice Department in the last twenty-five or thirty years.

Larry also had a young FBI agent out there in Memphis named James Donlan, who was in the bureau maybe six months. A first-office agent. And he was assigned as the primary agent in the
Deep Throat
case—which I thought was a mistake because he didn’t have any experience, you know? But he did a magnificent job. He was the coordinator of the whole operation for the entire United States.

LARRY PARRISH
:
Interstate Transportation of Obscene Material is a crime that is prosecutable anywhere that the material lands or passes through. And in our earlier cases, we had established a use of a conspiracy theory.

But
Deep Throat
was distributed in a different way from
School Girls
—because it was distributed “out of the trunk of a car.” They had runners who would physically carry the cans from city to city—and sit in the booth with the ticket seller and take the cash. They would stay for a while in a city while the film was playing, then they would leave town with the film and with the cash that had been collected in its sale.

So it was a process of locating the people who were distributing it—and it turned out to be the Perainos, who were in New York. They were using Fort Lauderdale as the place from which they distributed it—and they would send their runners all over the United States. Well, we flipped some of those people who gave us information.

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE,
MARCH 6, 1977: PORNOGRAPHY ON TRIAL
:
“The government had an informer named Phil Mainer working with the producers of
Deep Throat
in Florida. Mainer disappeared. His car was found with two fingers in it. Later, the rest of him was found in a shallow grave in Ohio.”

LARRY PARRISH
:
We just went where the investigation led us. Now, with Harry Reems—whose real name is Herbert Streicher—that was a matter of prosecuting the actors and actresses.

We just felt that the actors and actresses should be prosecuted. And Harry was the actor in
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones
—two cases where we decided to prosecute.

HARRY REEMS
:
I was brought before the grand jury. It was embarrassing—not because of what I am or what I do, but because I was considered a criminal.

“Now, who’s that with you in that scene?” I’d be asked.

“That’s Juicy Lucy.”

“What’s Juicy Lucy’s real name?”

“I only know her as Juicy Lucy.”

“Who hires you?”

“Usually it’s the director.”

“Who pays you?”

“Usually the producer.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Can you give us some of their names?”

“I don’t know their names. Everything’s on a first-name basis. Everybody’s John or Dick or Pete.”

“Do they make checks out to you signed just ‘John’ or ‘Dick’ or ‘Pete’?”

“We usually get paid in cash.”

“That might be of interest to the Internal Revenue Service….”

FRED LINCOLN
:
Harry Reems was just a nice, decent guy. He had no malice. I mean, he worked two days a week; he made maybe two hundred dollars. Gerry Damiano probably tried to get him for seventy-five a day because that’s the way Gerry was.

So they went after Harry Reems, thinking this kid wouldn’t be able to defend himself.

And even Harry didn’t know Hollywood was gonna get behind him. And all those guys—Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty—headed up his legal defense fund.

TONY BILL (PRODUCER OF
THE STING
)
:
I didn’t pay much attention to
Deep Throat
. I don’t know any of my friends that particularly had anything to say about it, but one day I got a call from a lawyer in Los Angeles who was the head of the ACLU, and he said there was a trial about to go on “that is going to be a landmark trial.” He explained to me the conditions of the trial, and then he said, “We would very much appreciate it if you would appear at the trial as an expert witness.”

I asked, “What am I supposed to be an expert in?”

He said, “Well, you’ve been an actor, and you’re a producer and a director, so you can speak with authority on the roles of all those parts in the production of a movie, and because of the quality of the work that you’ve done, you’re a great spokesman for our side.”

So I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
Larry Parrish said, “I could get Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson, too, for that movie
Carnal Knowledge
because if we get the actors, then they can’t produce more films.”

I watched this guy and I said, “Holy shit! This man is
scary
!”

He was gonna arrest Jack Nicholson! And Art Garfunkel! Because the state of Georgia had found
Carnal Knowledge
obscene! Larry Parrish wanted to put them in jail for twenty years, the fucking creep. The guy was a maniac.

BILL KELLY
:
There were a number of Hollywood luminaries that came to Memphis to lobby against the government prosecuting an actor. They were very upset. They said, “You can’t prosecute an actor for making an allegedly obscene movie!”

My response to that was, “Just watch us.”

HARRY REEMS
:
They didn’t get anything out of me. The moment I got sprung from the grand jury, I tore ass to Gerard Damiano and told him the fuzz was hot on the trail of the eight-millimeter filmmakers. He called the Perainos, and overnight they cleaned out their offices of thousands of loops.

“Thanks, kid,” said Butchie Peraino. “You’re a great kid.”

I had perjured myself, but it wasn’t to save the skins of a couple of mobsters like the Perainos. It was in defiance of the stupidity and rigidity of the whole principle of censorship—that elected or appointed “judges” that can decide what is fit for adults to see or read in a free society.

TONY BILL
:
I had won an Academy Award for producing
The Sting
. My company had produced
Taxi Driver
. I produced a movie called
Hearts of the West
. I had acted in a bunch of movies. I was getting ready to direct my first film. So I was part of the Hollywood establishment in many ways.

And Larry Parrish, who was the federal prosecutor, was trying to get the makers of
Deep Throat
by trying the actor as an accomplice to the crime—because if he could get his hands on the actor he could find the rest of them, I guess. So the punitive crime was transportation of pornographic material across state lines.

So rather than go after the people that made the movie, he decided to go after the performers—in this case the male lead, Harry Reems—as an accomplice to the crime, as if he had driven the getaway car at a bank robbery.

C. J. LAING
:
I went to a Harry Reems legal defense fund-raiser at Elaine’s. I donated money, and Harry was shocked that I did that. We had this conversation about our comings and goings and attractions—you know, what was going on. And I guess I had matured a little bit, become a little bit more of a woman.