The Other Hollywood (10 page)

But my partner, Jim Buckley, photographed this summit meeting. I ran the photos of her sucking my cock and my description of it. It was a paradigm of personal journalism.

FRED BIERSDORF (PERAINO FILM DISTRIBUTOR)
:
You wouldn’t believe the calls Butchie Peraino was getting from people who wanted a print of the movie. You know, prominent people, like government officials. And whenever somebody’s secretary would call for them, Butchie would get on the phone and say, “Hey, if he wants a print, he can damn well call me himself.”

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
The first time I realized
Deep Throat
was a success was when one of the secretaries in the Perainos’ office said to me, “Jesus Christ, the fuckin’ phone’s ringing off the hook with people trying to get in touch with you.”

All I could say was, “Huh?”

She said, “Yeah,
Playboy
’s trying to get in touch with you;
Esquire
’s trying to get you. California’s been calling all day.”

Later I found out that these people were telling everybody that Linda’s unavailable, she’s got a husband that’s a fanatic, and you can’t talk to her. They wanted to keep her under wraps, you know?

LINDA LOVELACE
:
My father went to see the movie—because he wanted to see if it was really me. And he came back and said, “Yup, it’s her, but it’s some kind of trick.” Then he went and sat down on the couch with his peanuts and beer and watched
Wild Kingdom
.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
After the Lovelace story appeared, I began running anything I could find about Linda. She was my Marilyn Monroe. If I were a faggot, she would have been my Judy Garland.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
The key to it was that it was a comedy—that’s what made
Deep Throat
a success.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Linda thought they liked her
acting
! Jesus Christ, instead of being a masochist, she was a fucking idiot!

NEW YORK CITY/MIAMI
1972–1973

BILL KELLY
:
After
Deep Throat
was released, I had an informant in the Perainos’ office in Wilton Manors, Florida—in their lawyer’s office—and he calls me and says, “You are not gonna believe this, Kelly. We got so much damn money in the main office up here, we can’t move around. The money is getting in the way. We got it in garbage bags stacked up in here. We don’t even count it anymore.”

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
All my life, people asked me about the Perainos: “How’d you get along with those people?

I said, “It was very simple. We shook hands. I never signed any contracts. I kept my word. They kept their word.”

They said, “Well, why didn’t Linda make a fortune on
Deep Throat
?”

I said, “Very simple: because we were walking up and down Forty-second Street making eight-millimeter movies, and they brought us in, they paid her $500, and a couple hundred dollars a day and all that, and they had no idea
Deep Throat
was gonna be
Deep Throat.

If you’re gonna pay me ten dollars to dig a hole in the backyard, and I take the ten dollars and dig the hole and hit gold, then am I supposed to get the gold mine?

I mean, you told me to dig the hole, and you gave me the ten dollars. So good luck, you know? That’s the way I felt about the movie. But Linda was pissed.

BILL KELLY
:
I said to my informant, “What do you mean, you don’t count it? What do you do with it?”

He said, “We weigh it.”

CHUCK BERNSTENE (ACCOUNTANT) [FBI WIRETAP]
:
“The money was coming in like, you have no idea—we used to walk out with stacks, you know, from the theaters. Maybe some weeks it was a hundred and fifty thousand—but we’d have to take fifteen G’s off the top to pay the checkers—but I was getting like a G-note a week.”

BILL KELLY
:
The checker would go up to the owner of the theater and say, “Five grand now, or else.”

The owners of the theater would say, “What do you mean, or else?”

The checker would say, “You don’t pay me, you’ll find out what else.”

I remember about maybe four “or else’s.” A couple of them only had to do with the Perainos sending somebody out to take the film off the projector and giving it to a competitor across town—or burning down the theater.

FRED BIERSDORF
:
I was like a kid in Disneyland. Everything was strictly cash. I mean, if somebody wanted a mink coat they’d just walk into Bonwit Teller and plop down twenty thousand dollars. In a meeting one day, I asked Uncle Joe [Joseph Peraino, Sr.], “How much money has
Deep Throat
brought in?”

He didn’t say a word, and damn, ten minutes later they asked me to come out of the room, and they asked, “Hey, what do you want to know for?”

I said I was sorry I brought it up.

BILL KELLY
:
I said to my informant, “Well, why the hell don’t you take the money to the bank?”

He said, “Well, da boys,” meaning the Perainos, “saw you sitting out in the church parking lot across the street, and they’re not afraid of you ’cause they know the FBI can’t do anything to them—except put them in jail. But you had another guy with you, and they think the other guy is an IRS agent. And they’re afraid of the IRS because they’ll take the damn money away from ’em. And they don’t wanna lose that money, so they’re not gonna move it. They’re gonna keep it here under guard.”

NEW YORK TIMES
,
OCTOBER
12, 1975:
ORGANIZED CRIME REAPS HUGE PROFITS FROM DEALING IN PORNOGRAPHIC FILMS
:
“
Deep Throat
was made by an organization called Gerard Damiano Productions, owned originally by Louis Peraino, son of Anthony Peraino, and Gerard Damiano, who directed the film.

“When the film was released and began to make money, Louis (Butchie) Peraino bought out the interests of Gerard Damiano for $25,000.

“When a reporter remarked to Mr. Damiano that he seemed to have received unfavorable terms in the deal, Mr. Damiano replied, ‘I can’t talk about it.’ When the reporter persisted, Mr. Damiano said, ‘You want me to get both my legs broken?’”

BILL KELLY
:
Gerard Damiano went to one of the Perainos and asked for more money—and they told him, “Gerry, the only thing you’re gonna get in addition to what you already got is two broken kneecaps.” So Damiano backed off in a hurry.

FRED LINCOLN
:
You have to understand the way I feel about things, all right? When I was in Wes Craven’s
The Last House on the Left,
I made nine hundred bucks. I was the bad guy; the guy who gets his dick bit off in the end.

Okay, so the movie made $55 million. They didn’t owe me a penny of that money because we made a deal. They said to me, “It’s gonna take a week to do this. We can pay you nine hundred dollars, all right?”

Now, I could’ve said, “I want nine hundred bucks and forty percent of the gross.” Okay? But I didn’t say that. I said, “Okay, it’s a deal,” and I signed a contract.

So Gerry Damiano also felt bad because
Deep Throat
made $55 million, and he didn’t get $20 million. But the Perainos paid Gerry Damiano. I mean, that’s what Hollywood people do—they go and do an independent movie and pay everyone nine hundred bucks a week, and when the movie makes a hundred million, they don’t turn around and say, “Hey, let’s give you ten percent.”

FRED BIERSDORF
:
Later Uncle Joe took me to lunch and ordered me a whole lobster. I was so nervous there was no way I could eat. You know, Uncle Joe is about as big as that door over there. And he put his arm around me and said, “Fred, you asked that question this morning. Well, Butchie’s got eight kids, and Joe [Butchie’s brother, “Joe the Whale”] has kids, and their kids and their grandkids have nothing to worry about the rest of their lives. Does that tell you how much the movie brought in?”

PHIL SMITH (MIAMI FBI ORGANIZED CRIME SQUAD SUPERVISOR)
:
Bill Kelly was running around, licking his chops, saying, “We’re finally going to get legitimate! We’re finally gonna show once and for all that pornography is controlled by organized crime!”

Because nobody in the bureau was really excited about pornography. The O.C. connection—the organized crime connection—was what they were looking for…and Kelly finally found it.

BILL KELLY
:
I’ll tell you something that you’ve never heard before: One reason that
Deep Throat
had the success that it did and launched the whole porno chic movement, was that J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, the same year the movie came out.

Had he lived and been in full possession of his faculties, I think Hoover would’ve gone berserk with the success of
Deep Throat
. I mean he would’ve had us out kickin’ tail in every jurisdiction where it was presented. J. Edgar Hoover would not have permitted
Deep Throat
to have gotten the jump on law enforcement that it did.

And I believe, had Hoover lived, we would not be in the same terrible condition nationally that we are—as far as obscenity is concerned.

1973–1976

SAN FRANCISCO
1973

MARILYN CHAMBERS (PORN STAR)
:
When
The Owl and the Pussycat
was finished, Ray Stark asked me if I wanted to go out to California and go to some of the premieres. I said, “Yeah!”

So here I was—this little hippie chick who had always wanted to go to California—staying in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire. I had no clothes to wear, but it didn’t matter because I never made it to the premiere.

JIM MITCHELL (PORN PRODUCER/DIRECTOR)
:
I was studying political science at San Francisco State. I was thinking of going to law school, but I started taking a couple of classes in television and filmmaking. That’s when I got the idea—why not make a couple of eight-millimeter porn films and make some money on the side?

That’s how I got into sixteen-millimeter. My roommate bought a used movie camera, and we got together with a couple of guys who were into TV, and then it was just a question of how to get our sixteen-millimeter loops reduced to eight-millimeter, making copies, finding out about the market, and things like that.

Actually, there was no market—or, I should say, there was only an under-the-counter market. To get a better feel of what was going on in the business, I took a job at the Roxie Theater, which was running black-and-white beaver films.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Why didn’t I go to the premiere in Los Angeles? Well, I met Jim Brown, the ex-football player, at this club the Candy Store, and he asked me if he could take me to the premiere.

I said, “I guess so.”

Well, he’s totally against drugs and all that stuff. So, I’m waiting for him to come pick me up in my hotel room—and I’m smoking a joint.

When he came to get me, he said, “You’ve been smoking pot!”

I said “What? I am
not
!”

JIM MITCHELL
:
Around the time I was working at the Roxie my brother Art got out of the army, and he had some money saved up. All my money was tied up in the eight-millimeter things; I wouldn’t have been able to expand without some additional finance. So we formed a partnership and decided to make some beaver films.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
We were late to the premiere, so we couldn’t get in. We went to his house instead. I was, like, there for three days. It was scary because he’s a big tough guy. I liked him—of course I did. That was the exciting part of it. But after three days, I was glad to get out of there, you know, in one piece.

ARTIE MITCHELL (PORN PRODUCER/DIRECTOR)
:
We borrowed an eight-millimeter camera, went to the beach, and found this girl there running up and down the beach.

I asked, “How about taking your blouse off?”

And she did it. This was in the late 1960s—everybody wanted to do that. It was like the “Age of Aquarius” here. And it was an easy way to make twenty-five bucks—take your clothes off, and do a beaver movie.

C. J. LAING (PORN STAR)
:
I was from New York, so I was confused in San Francisco. When you’re twenty and you’re hungry and the rent’s due, you’re really just an idealistic youth; you’re not a whore.

Even though you are.

So I started working North Beach, started hustling, rolling drunks. They’d come into the Nude Encounter, a massage parlor where I was working. There was “nude wrestling” and “nude encounter,” you know, in different rooms. I don’t know if there could be actual physical contact, but they could look at you naked. Maybe there were hand jobs—you know, look at my titties, and get a hand job.

While they were doing that, I was lifting money out of their wallets. Oh yeah, I don’t know how much I could make because I was just so sloppy. I guess I didn’t have a sense of pride in my work.

JIM MITCHELL
:
Art and I would make a beaver film for, say, a hundred bucks. You’d pay a girl twenty-five dollars, buy forty worth of film, and still have thirty-five for processing and incidentals. When you had it done, and if it was any good at all, you could easily get two hundred bucks, so that was pretty nice.

We didn’t really know much about filmmaking, but there wasn’t a lot of product around.

C. J. LAING
:
But whatever I was making was never enough because I needed money to go to Texas to fuck Sam Cutler, the road manager of the Grateful Dead. He was the English guy responsible for hiring the Hell’s Angels at Altamont.

I was Sam’s little slut. I wanted the glamour; I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to belong to a rock group.

But I needed Quaaludes and Clark bars to give head.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We started off shooting single beavers. Then it went to two girls. Then it went to three girls.

C. J. LAING
:
One night I was in my communal sleeping room, at a house owned by the “Angels of Light” cult, and this gorgeous girl Tina came home with a hundred dollars.

I said, “Where’d you get it?”

She said, “The Mitchell brothers.”

So I did one film for the Mitchell brothers. Period. One little loop, part of this series of films called
Juke Joint
. I do recall giving head and everybody going,
“Oh!”

That’s how I got the money to go to Texas to fuck Sam Cutler.

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
Our movies have always been dirty hard-core. That was the idea: always to come up with a better fuck film.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
After Los Angeles, I went to the premiere in San Francisco. I was staying in this suite at the Fairmont Hotel—I mean God, Columbia Pictures didn’t spare any expense. And I fell madly in love with San Francisco, and I wanted to stay.

In New York I had met this guy from the band It’s a Beautiful Day, and they had this ranch up in Northern California wine country. So I went up there for a couple days and messed around with them, went to some of their concerts, and took acid. It was really fun.

Then I went back to New York, and I was really depressed because I couldn’t get any jobs. The new Ivory Snow box hadn’t come out yet. So I packed all my stuff and drove out to San Francisco in a U-Haul with some guys from Connecticut.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We made a couple of movies for another guy, and he didn’t even get us passes to the movie or something. So we said, “If we’re gonna do this, we might as well get a theater.”

We found this building and built it up: the O’Farrell Theater. Then we
really
started making movies.

JACK BOULWARE (WRITER)
:
When they were making those eight-millimeter loops, there was pornography being advertised in all the newspapers and in some cases being
written up
in them. The police were going nuts trying to figure out a way to regulate this.

Every week they would send police officers to the Mitchell brothers’ theater to watch the films in the dark and scribble notes on the plot lines—what little plot lines there were. It got to the point where they would just call the theater and say, “Can you come down? We have to arrest you again.”

JIM MITCHELL
:
We had more or less always known what was coming. We also had, you know, a layman’s interest in pornography as students, as everyone else had at the time. So we decided if we were getting arrested for simulated beaver, why not go ahead and run hard-core? That’s what people wanted to see. So soon we realized we needed to make a big, huge feature film to really sort of take it to another level.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
When I moved to San Francisco, I met this guy playing bagpipes in the street. I gave him some money, ha, ha, ha. And I kept giving him money. That turned out to be my first husband, ha, ha, ha. Boy, I know how to pick ’em, don’t I? Jesus.

We wound up living together in this big, huge Victorian house, which was like a commune. He played bagpipes for money on the street. I was doing a whole bunch of odd jobs: hostess in a health food restaurant, topless, bottomless dancer—you name it, I was doing it, just to get by.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We had a want ad in the
San Francisco Chronicle
that said, “Mitchell brothers casting for feature length film.” We didn’t get too many responses—just five or six hundred. And believe it or not, Marilyn Chambers is one that came through the door.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
One day I read an ad in the newspaper that said, “Now casting for a major motion picture.”

So I called up, and they said, “Oh, we finished casting.”

I said, “Oh, no, you have to wait! I’m coming down there right now! Please…”

They said, “All right, come down.”

So I went to Stage A, on Tennessee Street, in the warehouse district.

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
When I first read the story of
Behind the Green Door,
it was a short story that was being handed around underground, about twenty typed pages. People read it in fraternity houses and troop ships, those kinds of places. I read it in a college cafeteria seven or eight years before, not knowing then I’d even be making erotic movies.

But it stuck in my mind, and Jim and I thought of it, and we said this would make a good script. So we got it, and we adapted it.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I walked in, and there are all these people filling out these green forms. On the questionnaire it got to the point where they asked me if I wanted a “balling or non-balling role.”

I didn’t understand what they meant. I thought it was a misspelling for “bowling.” I wasn’t a very good bowler.

Then I’m thinking, “Wait a minute—they mean
fucking
? Oh, no. Absolutely not. I may be naughty, but I’m not
that
naughty.”

I got up and started to leave—the building was this big warehouse-stage kind of thing, with a long stairway going up to some offices on top, and that’s where Art and Jim Mitchell were standing. I had no idea who they were, but they were looking down at me.

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
I called to her, “Hey! You! By the door! Come on up here…. Where the hell are you going? What’s the matter? At least come up, and talk to us? You don’t have to take off your clothes to
talk
to us…”

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Art had on this sweater vest and button-down shirt, and nobody in California wore those clothes. But I’m from the East Coast, so I was used to that preppy shit. It was totally Antioch! I felt comfortable with them. They were very friendly, very cool, very San Francisco, and very hip.

JIM MITCHELL
:
I told her, “You just happen to be who we’re looking for. Marilyn, you’re the girl next door. You’re the face every guy dreams of shoving his cock into. But he never does because he can’t find you! You’re fresh air and apple pie.”

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
I said, “Listen, you’re classy, and this is going to be one classy film. We’re putting everything we have into it. Let us just explain the concept, tell you the story. The whole thing is a fantasy.”

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I had done a film called
Together
with Sean Cunningham—it was supposed to be a documentary—and I was topless in that, and it didn’t bother me.

But actual
sex
? The only kind of sex I’d seen in movies were “smokers”—what they used to call stag films—the kind with the guys wearing black socks and sunglasses.
Not
very sexy.

JIM MITCHELL
:
I said, “We’ve been pretty successful making hard-core films. This film here is our shot at breaking through to a mainstream audi
ence. So it’s not like we’re asking you to star in a fuck film. This is going to be a
real
movie about
real
sex.”

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I didn’t think I’d be able to fuck on camera; I’d thought I’d break out into a rash or go crazy. But I liked their approach. They didn’t say, “Well, honey, you gotta screw me first.” It was, “Here, smoke a joint,” you know?

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
That just isn’t part of the test. That’s more like what goes down in Hollywood. Making fuck movies is different somehow; there’s no casting couch—it’s almost too obvious a thing to do.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
There was no script. There was a story, about a woman who’s kidnapped and taken to this club. They showed me these pieces of yellowed paper that were worn from being passed around during the war. I guess one guy wrote his fantasy down, then passed it on to the next guy. That’s how
Behind the Green Door
came to be.

And I thought, “God, this might be cool. Maybe I can use it as a stepping stone to legitimate movies.”

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
Behind the Green Door
was the first film we’d put real money into and took more time with to get up to the point where it was even in a different class.

We’d taken one month to make one previous feature, but we were learning about cinematography at that point, not thinking we were immediately going to make a masterpiece. We had to learn the skills.

See, there was no precedent to go by, except the old black-and-white stag films. That’s probably why so many of the early porn films looked like that. People didn’t know what to do, you know? “Okay, we’re going to make an erotic movie—uh, what do we do?”