The Other Hollywood (48 page)

FRED LINCOLN
:
Jamie Gillis calls me and says, “I’m going to San Francisco. Wanna rent my house in Hollywood?”

I said, “Lemme see it, Jamie. I’m lookin’ to move.” Because I couldn’t stand the drive from Ventura anymore, fuckin’ horrible.

Jamie’s house was really nice; rent was like seven hundred fifty a month. I said, “Wow, this is cool. I’ll take it.” It was already furnished, so I just moved right in.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?
:
“‘If I had been shooting in Los Angeles, you best believe I wouldn’t be now,’ said Les Baker, president of Gemini Film Corporation in Las Vegas, who films in the San Francisco area. ‘Unequivocally, it has put a chill on the Los Angeles industry. No sensible person would stick his head into that meat grinder.’”

VERONICA HART
:
The only place really in California that was safe to shoot was in San Francisco, where nobody gave a shit. You had to be fucking in public or running around without your clothes on for them to get upset. The HoJo’s in Marin County was our big hideout there.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
There were a couple of cops in Hollywood who were really keeping tabs on where the shoots were and chasing after us. Because there was no such thing as a permit, we couldn’t shoot. They used to scan footage and recognize the palm trees as Los Angeles and track down the location.

FRED LINCOLN
:
I met this production manager, Patty, at Reb Sawitz’s office. Reb told me she was good. Up to that point, I’d never used a production manager; I’d always done everything myself, but I liked it. Patty got me back with this producer in New York. Best movie I ever made was with him.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
The cops tracked
Backside to the Future
down to Zane Entertainment—the Zacari brothers. They thought the easiest way to prosecute was the pandering law; they wanted to prove that having sex with people in front of a camera wasn’t any semblance of a performance. If you’re getting paid for sex, it must be prostitution, so the producers must be panderers, and this must be stopped. Okay, which is a little roundabout. But they were very serious, very storm-trooper-like.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Then, all of a sudden, the word is out that I couldn’t work for this guy anymore. I was done for. I said, “I gotta sit down and talk to him because something’s wrong.”

He says, “Wow, you went a hundred thousand dollars over budget.”

I said, “Wait. What over budget? I never
touched
the budget. We had a seven-day shoot, and I shot in seven days. I
never
go over budget.”

The guy took some money and told our backers it was my fault. So he and I had a fallin’ out. But I met Patty when she was workin’ for him.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I’m at my home in Ventura one day, and I had this big, six-foot-long picture of me. So I put a line of cocaine from the shoes to all the way to the top. I’m going in the bathroom, and I’m getting high. I’m shooting a thing of dope, and I’m having a good time. I’m snorting a little, and I’m naked, taking Polaroids. I took Polaroids of everything back then. I’m entertaining some friends, playing poker, and having a good time. That’s what life’s about, right?

Then I get a knock on the door. I was very friendly with the Ventura Police Department at that time; the local cops liked me because I was a porn star. I gave ’em porn movies, and I was fun to talk to.

But this cop says, “You know, you’re going away for a while. You better bring a toothbrush.” I’m still loaded, so I’m thinking, “What the fuck do I need a toothbrush for?”

FRED LINCOLN
:
I had to have a sit-down with DiBe—Robert DiBernardo. He believed me. Of course he did—I’m from the old school. I don’t fuck with nobody. I make a deal; I do it. I mean, that’s the way I was brought up.

Anyway, Patty and I ended up getting married.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They brought me to Ventura County and told me there’s a warrant out for my arrest because I didn’t appear in a court case. I acted like I’d conveniently forgotten, but really I’d just put it in a pile. I was loaded; I had more important things to do.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Just pandering—that’s all these cops did. They went everywhere; they went to San Francisco, and they got Paul Thomas in Oakland. But they didn’t bust P.T. They busted Patty, my wife, because she had the money. She was paying everybody, so they assumed she was the producer. And P.T. didn’t say nothin’, ha, ha, ha. Thanks, P.T.

I was in Florida. Patty called me up—she was in a complete panic, man—and Joey Perpara bailed her out. If it was Frisco Vice that busted them, or Oakland Vice, I would say okay. But it was these same two guys from L.A.—Conte and the other guy.

LOS ANGELES TIMES,
MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?
:
“‘We tell them that they are part of an investigation involving pandering and prostitution,’ Lieutenant Conte said. ‘We
make them fully aware they are a suspect in a prostitution case and tell them we’re trying to identify the main serious offenders—the producers and still photographers.’”

FRED LINCOLN
:
It was bad, man. These guys would follow you—that’s how I know there was a rat involved. Patty and I used to shoot at this ranch in Valermo, up by San Francisco. I mean, you rode twenty miles on the guy’s property before you even got to the house. So it’s not like somebody saw us and reported us, you know? And these cops came right to the door!

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They arrested everyone on that shoot,
Backside to the Future,
and scared them. I mean, these are young kids. They’re saying, “We’re going to take away your birthday presents if you don’t say that you got paid
money! FOR SEX!!
” So these kids are saying, “Oh! He
did
pay me!!!” so they can go. Me, I knew this was harassment. I knew that this had something to do with obscenity. I was going to stand my ground and make a statement; that’s just where I come from. So I knew I was going to be doing time for a while.

FRED LINCOLN
:
These cops were busting everybody everywhere. Scaring the shit out of people. Telling the girls they’re going to jail for twenty years to get them to testify. These cops, Conte and the other one, were following people everywhere. People were ratting us out. I don’t know who, but I’ve heard rumors—John Holmes, Jim South….

LOS ANGELES TIMES,
MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?
:
“‘These young ladies who appear in these pictures normally come through modeling agencies,’ said Dave Friedman, head of Entertainment Ventures, which he described as the ‘oldest exploitation film company in the United States.’

“‘Contrary to the beliefs of our enemies, such as Citizens for Decency and Morality in Media, we do not coerce or kidnap these ladies for appearances in our movies. We use tried and true performers.’”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They brought the investigator up to interview me there. The cop that headed the investigations wasn’t a bad guy; he was reasonable because he had so much background on you that you kind of had to respect him. But this was another guy, who they’d hired to do sort of a bad-movie version of an interrogation with, with the lightbulb swinging overhead, you know: “And where were you on the night of…”

FRED LINCOLN
:
I mean, how the fuck could two LAPD vice cops be busting people outside of Los Angeles? What are they doing in Oakland? It’s not even their jurisdiction.

I don’t know how they got away with that shit because we used to go
to San Francisco because San Francisco did not bother us. San Francisco would give us a permit.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
20, 1985:
“Beverly Hills attorney Richard Chier is defending Marc and Tina Marie Carriere, an Indiana couple accused of pandering for hiring actresses to appear in an adult film they produced.

“Chier said one 21-year-old woman was followed by vice officers to her Huntington Beach home after performing in a film in Coldwater Canyon.

“‘She’s married and has a child,’ Chier said, noting that the husband knew nothing of his wife’s participation in such a film. ‘She was not a hooker. She was a happily married woman who did this as a vocation. They (police) then went into her house when she wasn’t home, knowing she wasn’t home. Can you imagine if you were home and police said they were the vice squad and wanted to talk to your wife? She came home, and they said they were going to expose her unless she cooperated and signed a statement. They put words in her mouth.’”

FRED LINCOLN
:
There was one girl—I forget her name, but she was a really pretty girl, blond—that everybody said was a rat. That was when I first came out here. About 1984 or 1985. She told me that these cops told her they were going to put her away for twenty years, and she didn’t know what to do.

Come on, you take a nineteen-year-old girl, stick her in a holding pen with hookers, and then tell her she’s going to be there until she’s forty—that’s pretty powerful shit.

These girls aren’t street girls. A lot of people think they are, but they’re not. You know, a lot of them are just kind of like oversexed girls who like to be seen.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
20, 1985:
“‘They told me if I didn’t cooperate they would arrest me for prostitution,’ said Susan Hart, a Canoga Park adult-film actress whose family does not know she appears in hard-core films. They said, ‘You don’t want a record, do you?’”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
This cop was asking me, “What are you going to do when it all runs out?” He’s popping his Ps, spitting in my face. “How do you like not being a manicured porn star? Huh?!
And you’ve just been here for a day and a half!
Who’s paying you? Who directed that movie? And how much money did you get?”

I wasn’t feeling very good, but I was still a smart-ass. I said, “You know, I make so many movies, I forget. But a bottle of champagne and a dozen roses would be extraordinarily helpful in helping me remember!”

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
20, 1985:
“‘I was really scared,’ Hart said. ‘I didn’t want to go to jail. We went to a Burger King, and they asked me questions about others in the business, when they were going to shoot and where they lived.’”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I just made the cop fucking crazy. Suze Randall sent big bouquets of flowers, like, “Don’t give in, Mitch!!” to the Ventura County Women’s Pig Farm, where they had me stashed for three days. Then they moved me to an L.A. County facility.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
20, 1985:
“Susan Hart, the name she goes by in the films, said in an interview that she was asked by Lieutenant Conte to sign a blank victim’s report against one producer, which detectives later filled in.

“Lieutenant Conte denied Hart’s allegation and said that she was shown the report after it was filled out and that she concurred in its statements.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
I sat down and asked this lawyer, “How could it be pandering?”

He said, “Because they’re actually fucking.”

I said, “Well, I used to be a stuntman. I blew up buildings. Was I guilty of arson?”

“Whoa,” he said. “That’s different. That’s a movie.”

I said, “What the fuck do ya think we’re doin’? We’re making movies, too, you idiot!” I used to get so frustrated.

The lawyer said, “Well, you don’t understand the law.”

I said, “You know what? I’ll tell ya what I
do
understand. You guys have gotten yachts with the money you’ve made from us. You don’t want any of us to win because if we did, you’d have to go get a fuckin’ job!”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I think I ended up in the holding tank of Sybil Brand Women’s Prison for a couple days. I was there for a while, and I guess it became clear that I wasn’t going to say anything. And they needed everyone on the cast to say they’d been paid in order to prove their case. And Randy West and myself were the only two—probably the oldest—that didn’t sell out. We just said, “No, no. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
23, 1985:
“In a controversial test case, a Van Nuys jury found Harold Freeman, an Encino producer of hard-core sex films, guilty of pandering Wednesday, making him the first filmmaker convicted in California under a law that mandates a three-year prison sentence for hiring people to perform sex acts.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I was kicking dope. I think they even offered me some
balloons filled with heroin at one point. I said no because I was already three or four days into it. I figured I’d stick it out.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, MAY
23, 1985:
“Prosecutors contended that women hired to perform in a 90-minute movie, ‘Caught From Behind, Part II,’ are prostitutes because they were paid to perform sex acts. Filmmaker Harold Freeman said throughout the six-day trial that the women were actresses.

“‘We concluded that the acting was secondary and that the sex was primary,’ jury foreman Joan Keller said after the verdict. ‘The girls were hired for sex.’”