The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  Lesson #2:

  THE FUNNY PORN TITLE

  Did you know that the original title for Deep Throat was The Doctor Makes a House Call? Sometimes a porn film is only as memorable as its title, and with thousands of films competing for your attention every month, it helps to have a title that not only catches your eye but also makes you laugh.

  But what makes a porn title really funny? It’s an art form, and not just any hack writer can come up with a truly inspired title. You need the perfect combination of sexual suggestion and comic premise, erotic allusion and double entendre, making the casual porn consumer think, Wow, that’s hot and Wow, that’s fucking funny, often simultaneously.

  There’s no magic formula for creating a porn title that’s guaranteed to get a laugh and a hard-on from your viewer. But, as with anything, practice makes perfect. For your further studies, I’ve collected some of the most hilarious porn titles from my illustrious career, arranged by category.

  PUNS

  Anals of History

  Dick-tation

  Incocknito

  Innocent Bi-Standers

  Udderly Fantastic

  POLITICAL

  Nude World Order

  All American Girls in Heat

  Oral Majority

  Girls of the Third Reich

  PROFESSIONS

  Once Upon a Secretary

  Samurai Dick

  Mistress Hiney, the Beverly Hills Butt Broker

  Cheerleader Nurses

  BOOBIES

  Bodacious Ta Ta’s

  Big Boob Bonanza

  Attack of the Monster Mammaries

  Dixie Dynamite and the All-Star Tit Queens

  FULL-FIGURED WOMEN

  2000 Lbs of Love

  This Little Piggy Went to Porno

  Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Fat Chicks

  Bad Mama Jama and the Fat Ladies of the Evening

  Fatliners

  HOLIDAY-THEMED

  All I Want for Christmas Is a Gang Bang

  Jingle Balls

  Gang Bang Under the Mistletoe

  Santa Is Coming All Over Town

  A RHETORICAL QUESTION

  What Did You Say Your Name Was?

  What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in an Anal Movie?

  What’s the Lesbian Doing in My Pirate Movie?

  You Want to Fuck Me Where?

  Lesson #3:

  PARODYING THE MAINSTREAM

  I know you’ve all played this game before. Take the title of a mainstream movie and tweak it until it becomes a porno. Forrest Gump becomes Forrest Hump. Romancing the Stone becomes Romancing the Bone. If you’re new to the ol’ “porno parody switcheroo,” here’s a small sampling of some of my most popular porn parodies and the mainstream movies and TV shows that inspired them.

  Mainstream Movie

  Porn Parody

  Against All Odds

  Against All Bods

  All in the Family

  Ball in the Family

  Bridges of Madison County

  Bridges of Anal County

  Driving Miss Daisy

  Drivin’ Miss Daisy Crazy

  Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

  Filthy Sleazy Scoundrels

  The Flintstones

  The Flintbones

  For Your Eyes Only

  For Your Thighs Only

  Frankenstein

  Frankenpenis

  General Hospital

  Generally Horny Hospital

  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

  Guess Who Came at Dinner?

  Home Alone

  Bone Alone

  I Know What You Did Last Summer

  I Know Who You Did Last Summer

  I Dream of Jeannie

  I Ream a Genie

  Jailhouse Rock

  Jailhouse Cock

  Mutiny on the Bounty

  Mutiny on the Booty

  Robin Hood

  Throbbin’ Hood

  Same Time, Next Year

  Same Time Every Year

  Terms of Endearment

  Terms of Endowment

  What’s Love Got to Do with It

  What’s Butt Got to Do with It

  The Wizard of Oz

  The Wizard of Ahh’s

  Young Frankenstein

  Hung Wankerstein

  But cooking up a title is only half the battle. Now you’ve got to make a movie that lives up to your parody without getting you and your financers slapped with a costly lawsuit. Here’s where it gets tricky.

  It’s a little-known fact that most adult filmmakers are sued not for the content of their movies but for the box covers. Take a porno like Indiana Joan and the Temple of Poon. The cover was a blatant rip-off of the wildly successful Steven Spielberg movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, right down to the flame letters. Amblin Entertainment or Universal (whatever) didn’t appreciate having its creative property used to sell a porno flick, and they promptly had their lawyers file a cease-and-desist order. The same thing happened to the producers of Splatman, who were sued by DC Comics not because of the porno’s plot, but because the poster art was designed to look like a Batman comic. A porno comedy romp called Whorios was sued by Nabisco because the filmmakers modeled their box cover after a box of Oreos. Nabisco didn’t object to actual boxes of Oreos being used as props in the movie itself. They just didn’t take kindly to their corporate logo being mimicked for a porno’s cover art.*

  When I directed a porn parody called E3: Extra Testicle, I never got so much as a phone call from Spielberg Productions. Our alien looked absolutely nothing like Spielberg’s cute extraterrestrial. And our box cover and poster looked completely different. It was just a bunch of gorgeous girls and a spaceship. The title’s lettering was different, and there was nothing to indicate that it might in any way be related to Spielberg’s sci-fi classic, other than that both films had the letter E in the title. You can get away with almost any parody as long as you practice just a little subtlety on the VHS or DVD box cover.

  Oh, and then you have to write a porno that’s actually funny but not so funny that it distracts from the sex. It took me almost thirty years to get the formula right, and I’m still learning every day.

  And while I’m not an entertainment or copyright lawyer, I have reported these events as they happened.

  Hamming it up onstage—impersonating Rome’s Trevi fountain. (Courtesy “Dirty Bob” Krotts)

  chapter 10

  I FOUGHT THE LAW (AND THE LAW LOST!)

  I was having nightmares about vice cops on Jet Skis.

  After my first two arrests in 1988, I was not taking any more chances. Mark Carriere and I decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk to shoot in California, at least not while my pandering cases were still pending. So we moved all future porn productions to Nevada. Though prostitution was legal in some of the state, shooting adult movies was not. But still, given the alternative, it seemed like the safest bet.

  We found the perfect location in Lake Mead, a beautiful shoreline community just thirty miles north of Las Vegas. It was secluded, it was small, and it was the last place on Earth that anybody expected to find a porn actor. I rented a houseboat and took the cast and crew to the most deserted corner of Lake Mead. We’d dock at an isolated beachfront and camp out for as long as it took to finish the movies.

  During the summer, it could be breathtakingly beautiful. We’d swim, have sex on the beach, take a break for a cookout, start a campfire, have sex under the stars, and then wake up the next day and do it all over again. We had every right to feel comfortable again. The nearest civilization was miles away. Even hikers didn’t travel out to such remote corners of the lake. We were safe.

  But I was still paranoid. Once you’ve been busted twice and spent time behind bars, it’s difficult ever to feel truly at ease again. For months afterward, I jumped every time I heard a knock at the door, even if I wasn’t shooting a porno at the time. I couldn’t forget that feeling, that glimmer of fear just
before I heard them yell “Police!”

  At Lake Mead, I was having a few bad dreams. I dreamed that I was having sex on the beach, and in the distance I could see Como and Navarro Jet Skiing toward me. They’d both be in bathing suits, waving at me and flashing their badges.

  “Jeremy!” they’d yell out. “How’s it going? Didn’t think we’d find you, did you?”*

  It never failed to wake me up with a start. I knew it was just a silly dream, but it seemed so real. And worst of all, so plausible.

  I soon found out just how plausible.

  At the same time we were shooting at Lake Mead, there was a police convention taking place at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. I was good friends with a lounge act called Taylor and Taylor, who were booked to perform at the convention, and they told me later about a conversation they’d overheard between two off-duty cops.

  “You’ll never guess where that porn guy Ron Jeremy is shooting,” one cop said.

  “Where?” his partner asked.

  “Lake Mead,” he responded. “Jeremy probably thinks he’s getting away with it, too.”

  That was enough for me. We canceled all of our upcoming shoots in Lake Mead. Mark found another location, at a rented home on the outskirts of Vegas, but I was still nervous. If the police tracked us to Lake Mead, surely they could find us if we moved just a few miles away. I convinced Mark that it would make more sense to find someplace so inaccessible and out of the way that the vice cops wouldn’t even consider following us.

  Someplace like Hawaii.

  Mark didn’t go for that idea. Instead, another porn company, Cinderella, hired me to shoot a few films in Hawaii.* The cops were well aware of our plans, though we never had a clue. And it wasn’t just Como and Navarro who were on our tail this time. The FBI was now involved, because I had made a fatal miscalculation.

  Shooting porn in California may have broken the state pandering law (we’re saying it didn’t) but by traveling to Hawaii we may have inadvertently violated the Mann Act, which forbids transporting actors across U.S. state borders for the purposes of prostitution (if porn is considered prostitution). The Mann Act was serious stuff. It’s basically white slavery. And worst of all, it has long legs. It has tentacles. They can bust everybody involved in a production: the cast, the crew, even the makeup person. Nobody is safe from the Mann Act. When I learned about it later, I had my lawyer look into it. “Theoretically,” he said, “even shooting in Las Vegas could have been a Mann Act violation, and you’ve already done that. It’s a stretch, but you could get busted.”

  Oh, great. All we’re doing is making adult movies. We’re not criminals.

  Neither the FBI nor Como and Navarro busted us in Hawaii. They were just watching us from afar and collecting evidence. They had us in their sights from the moment we walked off the plane in Hawaii. One of them was brazen enough to make contact with me without blowing his cover. I was signing autographs for fans at the airport, and I was approached by a beefy guy in a Hawaiian shirt. He asked for an autograph and even posed for a picture with me. Years later, I learned that he was an undercover FBI agent posing as a baggage handler. To this very day, that picture still sits in his office at FBI headquarters. I’m not kidding.

  Even without the knowledge that vice cops and FBI agents were around every corner, we went to great lengths to be as inconspicuous as possible. Or at least I thought we did. Before taking a bus out to the beach for the day’s shoot, we needed supplies. I knew that I was the most recognizable person in our crew, so there was no way I could walk into a public place without setting off alarm bells. So I asked Ray Victory, one of my actors, to go in my wake. I gave him a grocery list and a wad of money, and I sent him off to the nearest store.

  No sooner had he left than Charlie Diamond, my assistant director, asked me just what the hell I was thinking.

  “You are trying not to be noticed, isn’t that right?”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “That’s why I sent Ray.”

  “Ray,” he repeated. “The big, supermuscular black guy with the bulge in his pants.”

  Aw hell!

  It was too late to stop him. And by the time Ray returned to the bus, a small crowd had already gathered in the store’s parking lot. They were all staring at Ray, who was casually walking toward our bus in clear sight, dressed in nothing but a tiny Speedo, his huge cock almost bursting from its seams.

  The cast and crew were laughing their asses off. “I can’t even imagine what they thought,” Charlie said. “It’s not every day that a nearly naked black man walks into a grocery store and buys twenty-five douches and sixteen enemas. Oh, and lest we forget, enough jars of Vaseline and K-Y jelly to lube a small army. If they didn’t know that a porn production’s in town, they sure as hell know now.”

  Ray walked inside and dropped the bags on the bus floor. “Damn,” he said. “That was weird.”

  “Ray,” I groaned, covering my face with both hands. “Why the hell didn’t you go in there with pants?”

  He glanced down at his shorts. Both of his testicles had broken free from the Speedo’s fragile fabric and were dangling in the air like two medicine balls.

  “Whoops,” he said, not bothering to conceal himself.

  Mark still wanted me to shoot a few more films for him, so he convinced me to return to Nevada. At least in Vegas, black men with gigantic testicles weren’t uncommon enough to stall traffic.

  Mark still had a lease with a house outside of town, so we used it for a few shoots while we looked for someplace more convenient and a little less obvious. It was more or less the same arrangement as Lake Mead. We’d buy groceries and retreat to the house for a weekend, being as self-sufficient as possible so we didn’t attract too much attention, not coming out until we had at least a few films in the can.

  But during one of our visits, we pulled into the driveway and noticed that there were some unfamiliar cars parked nearby. I immediately suspected the worst, assuming that Como or Navarro must be waiting for us, ready to bust us the moment we walked inside.

  I snuck around the side and peeked through an open window. There were women cleaning the kitchen, and the strong odor of ammonium was unmistakable. Well, I thought, this can’t be right. Mark wouldn’t have been stupid enough to hire a maid on the very weekend we were scheduled to shoot a film.

  We drove to the nearest phone booth, and I called Mark in Indiana, explaining that the house appeared to be occupied by a rogue cleaning service.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  “You’re damn right it doesn’t,” I barked at him. “Please tell me you paid the rent on this place.”

  I waited while he checked his records. “Aw hell,” he said. “You’re right. We didn’t renew the lease.”

  “Goddamnit, Mark!”

  “My secretary forgot to remind me. Wow, buddy, I’m sorry about that.”

  Mark was a multimillionaire, and one of the richest men in adult films. But he was too busy when it came to keeping track of his own bookkeeping.

  “So what do you expect me to do?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a crew with me, Mark. I have actors and cameras and everything. How the hell am I supposed to shoot a goddamn film if I don’t have a goddamn set?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Look to your left. What do you see?”

  “Nothing.” We were in the middle of the Nevada desert, somewhere between Lake Mead and Las Vegas. There was nothing around us for as far as the eye could see.

  “Okay,” he continued. “Now look to your right. What do you see?”

  “More goddamn desert.”

  “Look behind you,” he said. “What do you see?”

  “Desert, you fucking idiot. What are you getting at?”

  “That’s it!” he declared. “Shoot a desert movie!”

  If he was standing in front of me, I would have strangled him with my last ounce of strength.

  “Where are the actors
gonna pee?”

  “Ronnie, just work it out. You’ve never let me down before. I’ve gotta go now, good-bye.”

  The phone went dead. There was nothing to be done. I was stranded with a van full of anxious actors and miles of white sand between us and the nearest town. But at least I had a lot of charged batteries and power packs. And I am, if nothing else, a professional. I wasn’t about to give up without a fight. We had no script for this scenario, and just a few hours of daylight left. But as Benjamin Disraeli once said, desperation can be as powerful an inspiration as genius. So with just a camera and some ballsy improvisation, we made our film. We made a film about people stranded in a desert, because that was what we knew. A group of girls run out of gas, some guys come walking by, and they all have sex. It was brilliant in its simplicity.