GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  I am fully on board with spending our tax money not in the way in Iraq bullshit, but putting up mental health facilities. I have no problem with cleaning up our own backyard. If you really want to help people, go to Africa and help the AIDS babies, don’t spend it on a fucking war just so that Cheney could get the oil out. That’s my opinion. The whole Bush Administration has turned me off of government. I had no problem with it when Clinton was President. I voted for Obama, but the man got handed a pile of junk. People complain that the man hasn’t done anything, but that man has eight years of a spending spree to undo. He’s fighting an uphill battle. I think he steps up one and the Republicans push him back two. They need to work together which is what’s wrong with the country now. They’re all fighting. For the first time they need to think about the country. I’m at the point where I don’t even watch the news. All I can do is take care of my family and that’s it. I’d rather be watching CSI: Miami. It’s escapism.

  COURTESY OF CHRISTY CANYON

  PHOTO COURTESY OF SUZE RANDALL, WWW.SUZE.NET

  PHOTOGRAPHY BY KENJII

  Marilyn Chambers and Christy Canyon.

  Adult Video News (AVN) award.

  24.

  Raven Touchstone

  Innocent Taboo

  PHOTO COURTESY OF PENNY ANTINE

  “Part of the attraction of working in the industry is the fact that it is an outlaw industry. It’s a taboo industry. Sex in this country is so fascinating because it’s still taboo except everybody wants it.”

  — Raven Touchstone

  Penny Antine began her career as a scriptwriter in the adult industry in 1984 under the pen name Raven Touchstone when the genre was in the midst of a transformation to video.

  As a youngster who endured a turbulent mid-west childhood, Penny found salvation through her love for reading, writing, and theatre; at six years old, she joined the Cleveland Play House in Ohio and became enthralled by the world of fantasy, costumes, and thespian training.

  In the mid-1960s, Antine transplanted to Southern California to pursue an acting career, and performed with “A” list Hollywood stars such as Doris Day and Richard Harris. She won a small role in Caprice in 1965. Penny also accepted a non-credited part in the 1968 film The Valley of the Dolls, and appeared in guest stints on popular TV shows of the decade such as The Beverly Hillbillies while continuing to cultivate her writing as a sideline. She hoped to become a novelist one day.

  After a hiatus as a wife, stepmother, and businessperson, Antine renewed her commitment to writing while assuming a position as a personal assistant for the haughty actress Eva Gabor. In an unexpected turn of events, the developing scriptwriter was hired to compose her first story for adult director Scotty Fox under the VCX umbrella. The result was Intimate Couples (1984) with Herschel Savage and Jacqueline Lorians. Thus began Antine’s love affair with the adult entertainment profession which allowed her to exercise her creative outlets in inventive and exciting new ways.

  Penny recounted what a rush it was to shoot pornographic movies in California during the mid-eighties while production and performing in sex films was still illegal. Excitedly, Antine described how she and members of cast and crew would be blindfolded and driven in vans to film locations always staying one-step ahead of the L.A.P.D. More than twenty-five years later, Penny marvels at her own endurance in an unconventional career that has paved the way for her to hone her craft as a writer, costumer, and erotic photographer extraordinaire.

  At present, when she’s not writing scripts Antine and collaborator Rob Clampett (son of Robert Clampett, the animator for “Tweety Bird”) are working on a series of film exposés about various facets of the sex industry, an endeavor shaping up to be a massive but rewarding project. In her spare time which is not as abundant as what she would like, Penny is writing her memoirs.

  Antine once remarked her childhood resembled that of Francie Nolan, the lead character in her favorite book, the classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). Francie Nolan had wanted to grow up to be “somebody.” While garnering admiration and accolades in a profession unchartered by most, Penny Antine has indisputably proven she is somebody.

  I interviewed Penny Antine in the summer of 2010.

  The Curtain Puller

  I was born in Cleveland, Ohio and I grew up in theater. My mother and my grandmother took me to a play in an amphitheater at Cain Park when I was four years old. I think the show was St. Joan — Joan of Arc. What a play for a four year old to experience. I was so entranced by it. I have no memory of it, but I’ve heard this story many times: my mother, my grandmother, and my family have told me that I was completely riveted to what was going on, on the stage. When the actors came out to take their bows and there was all this applause, I stood up; I looked around and started crying. I said to my mother, “I want to do that.”

  In Cleveland at that time, there was the Children’s Theatre. I think it might still exist. It was at The Cleveland Play House [established in 1915] which was America’s first repertoire theatre and it was extraordinary. The Children’s Theater was called “The Curtain Pullers,” but you were not allowed to start in the Children’s Theater until you were six. I think I got dancing lessons until I was old enough to enroll in theatre. At six or so, I started at The Cleveland Play House and it became part of my soul. I adored it. Actually, it was my salvation.

  I grew up in a very volatile home with a mother who was a rage-aholic and a father who was an alcoholic. I probably would have drowned in this life had I not found my calling which was the Arts. By the time I was eleven, I was assisting the teachers at The Play House. I became the leading juvenile actress there in the adult productions as well as the children’s productions. The whole of my summers were spent at Cain Park Children’s Theater. My winters were at The Cleveland Play House Children’s Theater. When I got into my teens I was working at Musicarnival part time, which was a Musical Theater in the round. I apprenticed in costuming. I loved sitting in the costume room and just wallowing in the smell of old costumes. I would sometimes take them and wear them at school. I did costumes for plays at high school, because I had apprenticed at the Play House and Cain Park and at Chagrin Falls Valley Theatre so I learned how to do that. Years and years later, in porn, I wound up doing a lot of costuming. I have a costume room in my home. I must have over ten thousand dollars worth of costumes. As a kid I learned costuming, I learned props. I learned all of it because I did it all.

  I had, in one sense, a significant childhood because I had such a great passion. There was not one minute of my childhood when I was ever bored. There was always something to do. My little friends and I from the Play House made up our stories. We had reel-to-reel tape recorders in those days and we would tape our stories taking on the various characters. We were always busy. We’d be in the basement making paper mache animals or writing plays, or making costumes. We were always doing something creative. I won a scholarship singing in Cain Park Main Stage Theater when I was fifteen years old. I was a musical comedy type singer. During that summer and the summer after that, I actually worked in the main stage adult theater rather than in the kid’s theater. By the time I was seventeen years old I was teaching drama in the summers at another little theater. In my last year of high school, I actually didn’t stay for the prom or anything like that. I left and went to New York. I wanted to be a Broadway star.

  I moved to New York to pursue my career as an actress. I turned eighteen when I was there and I hated New York. I didn’t like the feeling of the city. It was too much cement for me. I was overwhelmed by the coldness, and the rush and the subways — I just didn’t fall in love with it. After about four months in the city, I went back to Cleveland and contacted my father who was in California. I had not seen him since I was eight years old. Now, ten years later I was eighteen. I contacted him and asked him if he would send me money for a plane ticket to California. I figured I could pursue my acting career in California. He did and I came out and I moved in with my dad and my s
tepmother. She was wonderful. He was a jerk. I never did like him. He had abandoned me when I was eight years old and I had longed for my daddy for the next decade. What a disappointment to find him at last and not even like him! He was a bonafide jerk. I loved my stepmother and felt sorry for her because she was married to him. I stayed with them until I got an apartment and a job. I joined some acting classes and started working in movies and TV out here.

  To backtrack a little bit to being a very little girl: I loved to read and I loved to write. I wrote poetry and I wrote stories. I still have stories I wrote when I was eight, nine and ten. That was kind of a second passion of mine. Acting was first, writing was second, and singing was in there somewhere. I had a career as an actress and I did that consistently for quite a few years. I was in Caprice (1967) with Doris Day and Richard Harris. It was just a small role, but it was actually my first major movie. I also did a pilot called Judd for the Defense. I played the girlfriend of the lead girl, and I did the original movie Along Came a Spider. There was one made years later with another cast, but the cast I was with was Lee Marvin and Lee Grant. I did a lot of things like that during those years. I was in Planet of the Apes (1968), and I was in Valley of the Dolls (1967). I played a small part in that one, but it was fun. I was in a lot of plays in little theatre around town. Some were musicals. I also took the usual acting classes. I was on The Beverly Hillbillies as one of Nancy Culp’s Biddle Bird Watchers.

  On the side, I worked as an artist and sold my pieces at outdoor art shows on Melrose Avenue. Actually, I remember being on an art lot selling my things the day the astronauts landed on the moon. We were all gathered around a television set someone had bought and somehow plugged in somewhere. It was an exciting time to be alive and be young.

  I continued working as an actor and an artist, and along the way, I got married to man who had five kids. I fell in love with the family and became like a second mom to his children. He was a singer. He’s long gone now. We got into Shaklee Corporation and made a ton of money at it. We did very well. Shaklee is a direct sales company. It was the first time I did something that wasn’t connected with the arts. He was very good at the sales program and I was very good at doing the product pitch. We became coordinators quickly, made a good deal of money; bought our first home and so on.

  Penny and her husband had actually met at a club where they were both singers. Her husband performed with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey bands. Eventually, he retired from his career as a singer when interest in Big Band jazz fizzled after Elvis Presley and the rock ‘n roll phenomena began.

  Years before the trend for healthy living via the supplementation of vitamins and minerals was in vogue, Shaklee Corporation was founded in 1915 by nutritional vitamin guru and San Francisco chiropractor, Dr. Forrest C. Shaklee. In 1956, Dr. Shaklee employed a multi-tiered marketing strategy to sell his product “Shaklee’s Vitalized Minerals,” another revolutionary measure that conveyed an environmentally consciousness raising message to prospective consumers. Shaklee Corporation has grown over the past few decades to sell organic biodegradable cleaning solutions worldwide.

  I had agreed to give two years to this endeavor before I went back to my own life, and by the time the two years had passed, we were quite successful and secure so I began the next real phase of my life: writing. I thought I’d be a novelist. I was a major reader of literature. I wanted to create something great so I began to write my first novel. It was horrible! I realized how much I didn’t know about writing, so I went back to school to study creative writing.

  After a while, the marriage didn’t work out. We got divorced and I went off on my own. In 1984 I was working for [Hollywood actress] Eva Gabor as her personal assistant and I was still selling my artwork. I had rented a darling little house and advertised for a roommate. I took on a nurse named Mary Westerfield. As fate would have it, she had lived next door to a porn director named Scotty Fox. She told me when she moved in that Scotty was looking for writers. Well, at that time, I was also trying my hand at writing screenplays, and I said, “Well, I could talk to him”. By then I had written many things, and I’d ghost written some books and published stories. I met with Scotty and he gave me the basic five sex scenes: boy-girl, girl-girl, girl-girl-boy, and boy-boy-girl. It sounded like a dance — dah, dah, dah, dah, dah! He told me he wanted twenty page scripts and how many characters and so on. I wrote a few treatments for him and he took them and sold them so I started writing these porn scripts.

  “Do those movies have a plot?”

  I hated working for Eva Gabor. She was the Bitch of Buchenwald, a most hideous human being. When I started writing scripts for Scotty, I began working on the sets as well so I quit working for Eva. I figured I’d be in porn for about ten minutes. I would make enough money to find what I wanted to do next. Of course, what happened is that I fell in love with the business and started making so much money that I couldn’t leave.

  That first script was called Intimate Couples (1984) for VCX. Scotty Fox directed it and John Holmes was the line producer. He and Scotty came over to my house while my roommate was leaping around her bedroom screeching, “John Holmes, John Holmes! The biggest cock in the world is in my house sitting on my couch!” It was hilarious. John was very diligent about going over every line making sure he understood everything I wrote. He made sure he knew how they were going to shoot it. That was the very first script I had ever written in the business. The second was Just another Pretty Face (1985) starring Traci Lords.

  Again, this was back in 1984, which is when I got into it. In 1985, I went onto the sets and started working the actors on their dialogue. Then Ginger Lynn was put under contract to Vivid, and Scotty started directing for Vivid. I wrote the first Ginger movie for Scotty which was called Ginger (1985). Then I wrote the second and the third one. After the third Ginger movie, they fired Scotty and kept me. They brought in a director named Bruce Seven. Bruce directed the next seven Ginger movies and I wrote them all and worked alongside Bruce assisting him and working with talent on their dialogue — costuming, anything that needed to be done. Then Bruce went on to other things and they brought in Henri Pachard. He just died a little over a year ago.

  The late Bruce Seven was a special effects wizard in straight Hollywood prior to entering adult films in 1970 where he shot bondage loops as a sideline. Seven graduated to camera operator in 1980 when he was hired to shoot primarily bondage features for Bizarre Video. He teamed up with pornographic performer John Stagliano in 1983 to create a joint production company Lipstik Video. Lipstik Video, a lesbian centric collaborative venture, produced Seven’s first full-length feature Aerobisex Girls (1983). In addition to working on Lipstik’s fetish line, Seven freelanced as a director for the start-up company Vivid Entertainment. Bruce Seven passed away in 2000 at age fifty-three from complications arising from the combination of a stroke and emphysema.

  Discussed throughout this book, the colorful and imaginative director Ron Sullivan (Henri Pachard) initiated his career in the adult genre in the late 1960s while directing several films for 42nd Street grindhouse moviegoers. His first film, Lust Weekend, about a couple abducted by a sex cult was released in 1967. In 1969, Sullivan was the associate producer of the politically incorrect satire Putney Swope, written and directed by filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. (who also had a minor, but key role in Boogie Nights). After assuming his nom de porn, Henri Pachard, in the 1980s Sullivan directed and produced an abundance of hardcore sex films until his death from cancer in September 2008 at age sixty-nine.

  Bruce and Ron both became like brothers to me. We were all close to the same age and wanted to make the very best movies possible. For the next six, seven, eight years, I wrote every show that either of them directed. I was on the set assisting them. I was working on the sets with them and I was just having an absolute ball. I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the whole thing.

  One of the benefits Penny didn’t bank on when she agreed to create sex stories for adult companies was
the sheer caliber of talent she would be writing for.

  Going back a little, when I had first agreed to write a few scripts for Scotty Fox, he gave me several adult films to watch, as I had never seen one before. My impression of the porn industry was pieced together from things I’d heard or read about: men and hookers in hotel rooms naked except the males kept their socks on. The porn craze of the seventies — Deep Throat (1972), Behind the Green Door (1972), Devil in Miss Jones (1973) — were all movies I read about but had never seen. Scotty gave me Story of Joanna (1975), Devil in Miss Jones, and one or two others. Story of Joanna and Devil in Miss Jones blew my mind because of the quality and the stars. Jamie Gillis was a terrific actor, perversely sexual in a way I had never before seen portrayed on the screen. I loved his talent and his style. Georgina Spelvin of DMJ [Devil in Miss Jones] was such a fine actress, so deep and rich I could hardly believe I was watching porn. She was long gone from the business by this time. I hoped that one day I would meet her if only to tell her how much I admired her work.

  After seeing Jamie in Story of Joanna, I hoped I would be writing porn films long enough to write something glorious for him to perform. As it turned out, he was cast in one of my movies for Bruce Seven in a role in which he wore a goofy Peter Pan outfit with wings. Fortunately, it was just the first of many roles I was fortunate enough to happily write for him over the years. He was in a class all by himself. There will never be another like him.

  Blame it on Ginger (1986) and Silver Tongue and Hot Rod (1990) are two early feature films written by Antine and directed by Henri Pachard. Both productions showcased Jamie Gillis in fine form. Blame it on Ginger, a sex-laden adaptation of the hilarious Hollywood hit Blame it on Rio (1984) paired Ginger Lynn and Barbara Dare as two vacationing friends attracted to one another’s fathers (Jamie Gillis and Joey Silvera) with Tom Byron and Peter North co-starring as the girls’ love interests. The video combines zany situational comedy with passionate sex scenes and is a model of the taut, well-constructed stories Antine had started to write.