The Other Hollywood (67 page)

ROB BLACK
:
I came back to Rochester, and my parents fucking yelled at me. It was one of those ultimatums—
Mow the lawn for the next ninety years! Get the fuck out if you think you’re a tough guy! You’re disowned!

So I called Tricia up and said, “My parents threw me out, and I got no place to go. I’m gonna come out there with you.”

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I was working in porn fairly consistently when I moved to L.A.—a couple times a week. I’d flown out to L.A. about five times at that point to make videos, and eventually I realized that if I was going to continue to do it, I needed to be out here for good.

So when Rob decided he wanted to move out here, I let him move into my house.

ROB BLACK
:
I got all my shit, and I moved in with Tricia and lived with her while she was still married. She was going to go through a divorce, but she was still married.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Not even a month after he moved to L.A., I was in a story in
Adult Video News.
I said, “Oh, this is great! I’m starting to make it.”

Rob said, “Let’s see who’s bigger from now on—you or me.” He said it real serious. And this guy is madly in love with me? I was like, “What? Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be me.”

Rob was mad at me. That was his personality, and I was in denial.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
If that crazed-psycho fan, woman-hater, fucking guy hadn’t tried to kill me, I wouldn’t be here. He was like a Disciple of
Doom—there was death all around me, but he kept me alive, you know? I mean, I’m not even mad at him because he gave me my life back, ha, ha, ha. It was over. No more standing out in the middle of the street, looking at the sky, screaming, “COME ON MOTHERFUCKER! BRING IT ON!” You know, no more, “WELL GOD, STRIKE ME DEAD!”

So I checked into a detox. I was so bad they had to take me to the emergency room immediately.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Rob was very possessive, which didn’t really bother me at first because I’d never been in a possessive relationship before, so I didn’t see what it could lead to. Then I started learning what that meant—that he didn’t really want me doing anything that he wasn’t a part of. I wasn’t allowed to say anything bad about him. I couldn’t question his perfection; if I did it was a betrayal.

Then the video
Bad Wives,
directed by Paul Thomas, ended up winning best film of 1996. I went up to Paul at a party Rob and I made an appearance at, and I said, “P. T., congratulations. I’m so happy for you.”

Rob got mad at me and said, “What, I’m a piece of shit here?”

I asked him, “Rob, were
you
nominated for best film?”

He said, “No.”

I said, “It’s not like I’m congratulating someone who beat you in some category today.”

He was like, “I don’t care. That’s just horrible, that you’d go and congratulate someone else.”

That was the last straw—when I realized Rob was hopeless. I stepped back and looked at the whole picture and said, “Okay, there’s a lot of things wrong with this. And none of it is me.”

That’s when I knew I had to break up with him.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
My life was just bisexual-weird-insanity. And heroin and more heroin. And jail sentences and more movies and traveling. And young girls. And then old men. I mean—I had this boyfriend that was, like, in his seventies. Fucking crazy, cranky, old fuck, right?

I’d see my little chickies, and then the older boyfriend would come over. One day, right before I get sober, I looked in the cabinet and there was Geritol and Lucky Charms, ha, ha, ha!

And a spoon of dope, you know?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I was trying to break up with him, so I started using psychology against Rob. I’d ask, “What do we have in common?”

He’d ask, “What do you mean?”

I’m like, “We don’t really have anything in common, other than, you
know, listening to music. I mean, that’s something for people to be friends about. What do we have in common to date about?”

Rob would never really have an answer. He’d just say, “I love you.”

TIM CONNELLY
:
Rob loved Tricia Deveraux. He really felt this sort of incredible, deep, love-of-my-life, soul mate kind of connection with her.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I went to school as soon as I got out of rehab. And I immediately excelled in school—superfast, right? Overachieving A’s, super-ahead of the class, magna cum this and that. Took the graduate course first and then went backward. I got a scholarship all the way through to the master’s.

I thought I would get as far away from the business as I could—and goddamn it, something drove me back, you know? And that’s probably my redemption.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Rob always told me that the one thing he could never forgive a girlfriend for was cheating on him. That’s why he made me stop working with guys—because he thought that working with another guy would be cheating on him. I did a lot of girl/girl scenes for about six months.

Eventually, though, I slept with Rob’s best friend. And I set it up so I knew he’d find out.

Rob’s best friend was a guy from New York named Andy, who really didn’t have anything to do with the porn business. So I started turning Andy against Rob. I said to him, “If Rob was such a good friend of yours, why does he treat you like shit all the time?” And he started to question Rob; finally he was like, “Well, you know what? I fucked your girlfriend.”

That was what I was going for. I know it’s manipulative, but I was at the point where I didn’t know what else to do.

ROB BLACK
:
Tricia and I got into a fight at a party. She was being, like, a twat, so I sent her home. That’s when she cheated on me with my best friend—this big, fat kid I brought out from New York. Then I broke up with her.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I was afraid to leave Rob, but I figured, at the worst, he’d beat me a tiny bit—not like he’d kill me or anything. When he found out that Andy and I had slept together, Rob slapped me, really hard, once.

That was it. I was like, “Okay, that wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it was gonna be.” Ha, ha, ha.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
When all is said and done, heroin habit or no heroin habit, what have I been famous for? Fucking in front of a camera all my
life? What the fuck? I don’t want to go bed with that! I don’t want to get in the fucking ground with that as my only accomplishment. I just think it’s psychologically damaging. It follows you around like the plague for the rest of your life.

So when this HIV situation came up, since I was the one in school doing a term paper on HIV research, the board of directors at PAW—Protecting Adult Welfare—thought that I should handle it. Well, I quickly amassed information on testing—what kinds of tests were available—and I got information as fast as I could.

I’m just here to save lives. And get a little redemption out of it. And then maybe, I can go to heaven, you know?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
So I broke up with Rob; he got me fired from a job, but at least I got away from him. By the end of 1997 I was just doing some box covers to advance my dancing career, and doing less scenes. Everything was fine—that is, until I turned up HIV positive.

LOS ANGELES/SEATTLE/LAS VEGAS/AMSTERDAM
1996–1997

EVAN WRIGHT (WRITER)
:
There’s really only one celebrity porn tape, and that’s the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee video. There have been other celebrity scandal sex tapes, but the Pamela Anderson Lee video is the first one that was distributed over the Internet—that was actually
streamed
over the Internet.

TOMMY LEE
:
Pamela and I were chowing down on some dinner and flipping through television stations when we heard our names being mentioned on some news show. On the screen, there was a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes. And we knew just what they were.

RON JEREMY
:
Pam and Tommy Lee’s first tape was stolen. I know that for a fact, and I know who stole it.

RAY PISTOL
:
An electrician walked out with the tape. I never asked his name; sometimes it’s better not to know. But I do know the facts. He was in porn—kind of a hanger-on—and he did some work for Pam and Tommy, and they didn’t pay him. So he just snooped around, found this tape, and said, “Well, I’ll just get paid with this.”

TOMMY LEE
:
Months earlier, we had taken a five-day houseboat trip on Lake Mead as a vacation. As usual, I brought along my video camera. We weren’t trying to make a porno, just to document our vacation. We watched it once when we returned home then put it in our safe. The safe was a five-hundred-pound monstrosity hidden underneath a carpet in my studio control room in the garage, where we recorded part of
Generation Swine
.

RAY PISTOL
:
The electrician went to Milton Ingley and offered him the tape. Ingley was a porn director who owned a studio out there in the Valley.

TOMMY LEE
:
Pamela and I spent that Christmas in London while some work was being done on the house. Afterward, I finished recording in the basement and then dismantled the studio.

When the carpet was torn out, I saw nothing but empty space where the safe had once been. There were no broken locks or windows, so it had to have been an inside job. The only people with the keys were my assistant and the construction crew, which come to think of it, included an electrician who used to be a porn star and knew the porn business pretty well.

RON JEREMY
:
Milton Ingley had offered the Pam and Tommy Lee tape to everyone in the business. He asked me and Leisure Time first—because Marc Carriere had the John Wayne Bobbitt movie. Marc has so much money, plus Milton knew he had high-speed duplicating machinery. So he figured Marc should be the one to buy the Tommy Lee tape. But Marc Carriere said, “No, it’s unethical. It was stolen, no release, no receipts. It’s not fair.”

TOMMY LEE
:
The way I figured it, they must have removed the safe with a crane, taken it back to one of their houses, and had it picked or blown open. They were probably after the guns and jewelry in there, but they also ended up with everything personal that was important to us—from family heirlooms to photographs.

RAY PISTOL
:
Milton Ingley didn’t have any money, so he went to Butchie Peraino—and Butchie actually loaned him thirty thousand dollars to buy the Pam and Tommy Lee tape and to set up distribution. Butchie took Beta machines and camera equipment for collateral, in case he didn’t get paid back. Then the tape was duplicated at LP Duplications.

Butchie
didn’t
get fully paid back, so he wound up with the collateral equipment—plus some of his money. But not nearly as much as he was supposed to.

TOMMY LEE
:
I was so freaked out that I fired the assistant and sicced my lawyers on the construction company.

RON JEREMY
:
So Milton went to Europe and basically started it there. Then some guy pirated his tape, and then everyone pirated it. And then Seth Warshavsky from Internet Entertainment Group—who is a pretty conniving guy, but who’s pretty smart—went legal with it.

TOMMY LEE
:
The next thing I knew, there was a porn peddler from a company called the IEG phoning me. He said that he had bought the tape and was going to broadcast it over the Internet.

RAY PISTOL
:
Milton came to me to work out how best to distribute it—which involved a dozen different sites, in a dozen different countries, so that even if they got a restraining order somewhere, you could just keep going on and on.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
The Internet is a natural for porn because of the anonymity. You don’t have to go into the store and embarrass yourself by asking for your favorite big boob movie. You can just dial one up in the privacy of your own home.

RAY PISTOL
:
I wanted to spread the Pam and Tommy Lee tape on innumerable sites, but using ten different money points. Fuck—the Pentagon papers was my model! You shut this one down, it doesn’t make a fuck, it’s getting published over here!

I believe Seth Warshavsky was one of the money points—but there were others.

SETH WARSHAVSKY (PRESIDENT AND CEO OF INTERNET ENTERTAINMENT GROUP)
:
We sold it at Tower Video and Wherehouse Video; we sold it pretty much in every major video store in the country. It was on pay-per-view; it was in hotel rooms. I think that’s really one of the things that kind of helped legitimize porn.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN (IEG EMPLOYEE)
:
I worked at IEG for close to two years, and over the course of that time IEG exploded in the media because of the Pamela Anderson tape.

RAY PISTOL
:
Instead of going with the multiple points, they used only about four, and they seemingly got ripped off at every point. But they did get some money out of it, I know that. I masterminded that deal, and then Milton Ingley screwed it all up.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
Twenty years ago it would have been hard for a Pamela Anderson Lee video to make it to the public because no one would have distributed it. But because of the Internet, it can be distributed worldwide, instantaneously, by anyone. There have always been celebrity scandals and celebrity sex, but now technology enables the public to find out about it much faster.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN
:
Seth was a marketing genius. His intention really wasn’t to air the Pamela Anderson video on the Internet; he was only
saying he was going to, for the publicity. He had a good PR firm; it was like a machine for him.

RON JEREMY
:
So the Pam and Tommy Lee tape was released out of Amsterdam into America. And because Pamela Lee mentioned it on the Howard Stern show, Seth Warshavsky tried to make a public domain issue out of it—and tried to take her to court to release the tape.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN
:
Seth figured that once he put out a press release, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s attorneys would get an injunction so that Seth wouldn’t be able to air the tape. Seth would save face: He wouldn’t have to air the tape because legally he couldn’t. Seth would just get all the publicity—and that would lead to a lot of traffic to ClubLove, Seth’s website.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
There was a rumor put out by IEG that Pamela Anderson deliberately leaked the tape to revive a sagging career. That was completely false. I knew Pamela Anderson Lee and her husband, Tommy, from a prior story I did. They’re actually very nice people. Believe it or not, Pamela Anderson Lee was very hurt by that sex tape. Even though it probably helped her career, there was no way Pamela or Tommy enjoyed that tape being put out.

TOMMY LEE
:
We had Pamela’s lawyers send them a cease and desist order—but for some reason it didn’t arrive on time. Our lawyers and managers advised us that the best way to minimize the damages was to sign a contract saying that—since the company had us by the balls—we would reluctantly allow a one-time Webcast so long as they didn’t sell, copy, trade, or rebroadcast it.

We thought we had won. Hardly anyone would see the video on the Internet, and we could recover the tape and start over.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN
:
The day it all went down, it had been back and forth between Seth’s lawyers and Pam’s lawyers, and they were supposed to fax something over and they never did. So at some point Seth just said, “Fuck it. Air it.”

That really exploded Internet Entertainment Group and turned Seth into the adult media mogul that he became. ClubLove was getting thousands of sign-ups a day. People were joining the site just to see this thing. Thousands of sign-ups a day is
huge
.

RON JEREMY
:
That’s the thing with the Internet—it’s a good thing to have in this world, but unfortunately it takes away a lot of privacy, right?

Some people claim that Pam said, “Might as well make money on it.”

RAY PISTOL
:
Milton Ingley dropped two hundred of the Pam and Tommy tapes on me and said, “Here, do something with these.” It wasn’t my payment for anything; he just did it. He said, “Nobody’s got these in the country, so do with them what you want to.” I think I’ve got one left around here somewhere; the rest of them we sold for good money.

TOMMY LEE
:
Pamela and I were getting in fights all the time. Trying to have children, continue the careers that consumed us, make a new relationship work, and deal with the nonstop barrage of bullshit in the press was more of a challenge than we ever could have expected.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
Nobody believes me even though I probably know, better than anybody else, the background of that tape. I know that they did not want that tape put out.

We have this love-hate relationship with celebrities, but actually I knew Pam and Tommy, and they were hurt. It was a very hurtful thing.

TOMMY LEE
:
Then the judge in the case shut Pamela and me down on every privacy issue and allowed the sale of the tape because he ruled that the content was newsworthy. It pissed me off—because I don’t ever want my kids to go to a friend’s house and find a video in the VCR of their parents fucking.

SETH WARSHAVSKY
:
I didn’t feel sorry for Pamela Anderson. She’s a sophisticated woman. She’s an actress. She’s somewhat intelligent; she could be extremely intelligent. I just don’t know her. But she was definitely surrounded by extremely competent counsel.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
That was the defense at IEG—the way they were able to put out the Pam and Tommy Lee video was because their lawyers argued that Pamela and Tommy had relentlessly publicized themselves anyway, talking about the sex tape and sex acts in explicit detail before IEG put out the tape. Celebrities are exhibitionists, too.

RON JEREMY
:
The Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee tape sold over a hundred and fifty thousand tapes.

TOMMY LEE
:
I finally broke down and watched the thing. I couldn’t see the big deal; it’s really just our vacation tape. There’s only a little bit of fucking on there. That hasn’t stopped Ron Jeremy, though, from trying to get me to make a fuck flick for him. I guess if my career as a musician ever fails, I can always be a porn star.

SETH WARSHAVSKY
:
I think the sex video was a phenomenal push for Pamela’s career. I mean, if you do a search on Pamela Anderson, you’ll see
a couple hundred articles prior to the release of that video, and then thousands of articles after its release.

I think IEG really made Pamela the most talked about celebrity in the world.

JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN
:
Seth got press for other things, but the Pam and Tommy tape was really the launching pad because it got covered on
48 Hours
and Howard Stern. This was huge news—but all that did was bring other people out of the woodwork who had interesting and controversial material, too, you know?

TOMMY LEE
:
I tried to keep my cool after the drama. But it kept getting harder while the news kept getting worse. Then the Internet Entertainment Group started selling a tape of Brett Michaels from Poison with Pamela.

RON JEREMY
:
Now, where does this Brett Michaels and Pam Anderson tape come from all of a sudden? At one point, as far I as know, only three copies existed in this world. Actually, maybe four. Brett had one, Pam had one, Brett’s friend had one, and I got one from a source that no one even knows about.

The tape is Brett Michaels and Pam having sex. I saw it early on, when very few people had ever seen it. But the Brett tape was made first; it goes back to 1991.

LARRY FLYNT
:
There were two videos involving Pamela Lee. One they said was stolen from their home. The other one was not stolen from their home, so that one could legally be sold anywhere.

So when it gets to the question of privacy—people should have privacy in their home. But if you’re a public figure, you give up any right to privacy because you’re there because of your profession or an act you committed. So if you don’t want to give up your privacy, don’t get into public life.

These guys who get on TV and harp about the paparazzi or somebody stealing videos? It goes with the territory. They can’t have it both ways.