by Ron Jeremy
Mark and I agreed to take a look at the video, and it was surprisingly good. Heidi even brought a little humor to her scenes. During the tape’s first few minutes, she pretended to be annoyed with Ivan. She looked up and said, “Get that fucking camera out of my face.” When he wouldn’t stop, she looked back at his crotch and narrowed her eyes. “What’s that dripping out of your penis? It’s green. Do you have gonorrhea?” Ivan quickly turned off the camera. It was all in good fun.
We met privately with Heidi to negotiate a possible deal. We assured her that we wouldn’t distribute Ivan’s video without her consent, and Mark even tried to persuade her to star in a professionally made flick, which I would direct. Heidi thought about it, but she ended up turning us down. She was still arguing her case in court, and she worried that doing an adult film wouldn’t win her any sympathy with a jury. We were disappointed, but we realized that she was probably right.*
2. Pamela Anderson Lee
Okay, fine, Pamela never technically approached me about doing porn. But Mark and I were given first dibs on her sex tape with then-hubby Tommy Lee. I was friends with Milton Ingley, a porn actor from the mid-1980s and the director of such flicks as 1994’s Deep Space 69. One of his employees had supposedly done some electrician work at Tommy’s estate and somehow stumbled upon his private video collection. Mark and I were intrigued, but we decided to pass because there was no chance we’d get any kind of releases from Tommy and Pam. They might not have even been aware that the tape had been stolen. And it wouldn’t have been fair to Tom and Pam (whom I’d met on many occasions) who hadn’t consented to releasing the tape. It just seemed like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.
And we were right. The tape got into the hands of Seth Warshavsky, who sold the illegal video on his Web site before being sued by Tommy and Pam for close to $80 million dollars. They eventually signed some kind of a deal with Seth and the video went on to beat Uncut’s record as the bestselling adult movie of all time (with close to three hundred thousand copies sold). But even if I had the chance to do it over again, I still wouldn’t want any part of a video that’d been hijacked from an unsuspecting celebrity.
I will say this: the Pam and Tommy tape was one of the best amateur sex videos ever made. I’ve screened a few—including Pam’s sex tape with Poison front man Bret Michaels*—and none of them compare with Tommy and Pam. They had the most clearly shot positions (they passed the camera back and forth), a lot of exotic locations (including a boat trip to my old porn stomping grounds on Lake Mead), and a clearly visible pop shot.
I was talking about her tapes to actor Scott Baio, another one of Pam’s exes, and he said, “Well, I have news for you.”
“You’re kidding me?” I said.
“Yeah, we did a tape a long time ago. But I was smart. I have that thing stashed away where nobody can find it.”
Don’t be so sure, Scott. You never know when a nosy electrician is going to snoop around and uncover your dirty secrets.
3. Joey Buttafuoco
Joey and I met, curiously enough, because of a tabloid TV show called Current Affair. The producers brought us both to New York to identify a porn actress who looked eerily similar to Amy Fisher, Joey’s one-time girlfriend. As it turned out, the porn starlet in question wasn’t Amy Fisher at all but Kim Angeli, an Amy Fisher look-alike who had appeared with me in Maddams’s Family and Debbie Does Dallas 4.
Thanks to A Current Affair, Joey and I became friends. He invited me out to Long Island to meet his family and tour his auto-body shop. He soon became a regular addition to my social clique, which included Al Goldstein and Dennis Hof. The media called the four of us the “Slime Pack,”* which seemed like the most appropriate moniker.**
Buttafuoco and I often discussed casting him in an adult movie. He had loaned out his home as a location for several pornos, so he was no stranger to the industry. But his agent, Sherri Spillane, put the kibosh on it. It’s a shame, really. Joey’s porn debut could’ve been huge.***
4. Tonya Harding
The bad girl of Olympic figure skating, whose ex-husband once hired a thug to break the shins of competitor Nancy Kerrigan, made a brief splash in the porn world with her amateur sex tape in 1994. Mark and I were intrigued enough to consider signing her, and we even took a few meetings with her publicist, David Hans Schmidt. David explained that Tonya was only willing to be nude. She would discuss her skating techniques while doing a mild striptease on ice, but that was as far as she would go.
Needless to say, Mark and I passed. With her amateur hard-core tape already in circulation, we couldn’t imagine that an audience would pay to watch Tonya Harding flash her boobies. And for the salary she was demanding, it would’ve required at least a double anal.
5. La Toya Jackson
Every porn director has the one big fish that got away. Their proverbial white whale, if you will. For me, it was La Toya Jackson.
Around the same time as Bobbitt entered the picture, plans were already under way for La Toya’s porn debut. Mark agreed to pay La Toya around $500,000 up front—the largest payday ever for an adult star—and promised her even more on the back end. (Remember, La Toya’s husband, Jack Gordon, was Bobbitt’s manager.) Rather than toss off a quickie script, Mark hired a professional. I only skimmed the first draft, but I was impressed with its ambitious production values. It had an elaborate story line, taking place mostly on a train. We even discussed bringing in a second director to assist me. We took meetings with mainstream filmmakers like Salomé Breziner and Adam Rifkin, who considered directing the dialogue scenes while I directed the sex.
As we worked on the production end, La Toya continued her national tour of strip clubs, doing live appearances to promote her Playboy Celebrity Centerfold video. I soon heard about a disturbing rumor about her visit to Al’s Diamond Cabaret in Reading, Pennsylvania.
My friend, stripper Adara Michaels, was at the club with La Toya, and she told me what happened. When La Toya arrived for her show, she announced that she had no intention of getting naked. “It was bizarre,” Adara said. “She wouldn’t even consider going topless. She thought she could just dance around the stage fully clothed and get the same paycheck.” The capacity crowd was not amused. They had paid big bucks to see a nude Jackson. They demanded their money back, and when the club owners refused, they went on a rampage, throwing chairs and overturning tables. The police had to be called in to bring the riot under control.
I explained my concerns to Mark, and he agreed to talk with La Toya. Much to our surprise, she feigned ignorance.
“You mean I’m going to have real sex?” she asked. “I thought I’d have a stand-in or something.”
If we had to, we could have found a stunt double to do her sex scenes. I knew a few black actresses who could match La Toya’s pussy beautifully. But even so, the public isn’t stupid. Even with the best morphing techniques, they would know that something was up. If every genital shot was a close-up and we never panned up to reveal La Toya’s face, most audiences would realize that they weren’t getting the full show.
Mark agreed to compromise, but as he reminded La Toya’s husband and manager, it would mean renegotiating her contract. “La Toya needs to understand that she’ll get a lot less money,” he said.
There were a few hopeful phone calls, but in the end the deal fell apart. La Toya didn’t want to do any nudity whatsoever. If we had accepted her terms, it would have required superimposing La Toya’s head on another actress’s body. Even if we had had access to George Lucas’s editing facilities, we wouldn’t have been able to pull off those kinds of special effects. And even if we did, word would get out that we cheated.
Mark and I had a pretty good run in the celebrity porn racket. We lost a few big names, but we also signed more famous faces than any other adult company at the time. I thought about doing another big movie, but I couldn’t imagine who I or Aaron Gordon could get who would be worth the time and trouble.
And then I got a call from Howard
Stern.
Actually, that isn’t entirely true. I didn’t get a call directly from Howard, but rather from somebody claiming to be Crazy Cabbie’s partner. I was told that Crazy Cabbie, one of Howard’s sidekicks on his morning radio show, wanted to star in a porno, and he wanted to shoot it at Howard’s studio, among other places. Not only had Howard approved the idea, they said, but he was willing to promote the movie on his radio show.
I was happy and surprised that they’d come to me to direct and act in the film. I knew that Howard was a fan of adult films. He was constantly interviewing porn starlets like Jenna Jameson and Tabitha Stevens, who, in some ways, owed their careers to his support. But he couldn’t have cared less about most male stars. To him, we were just props, and our lack of titties made us less than appealing to his mostly male listeners. I was one of the few male stars who’d been invited on his show, for various skits and interviews many times, but he’d always vow never to have me back.*
Whatever their reasons for choosing me, I was thrilled. A porno film that came with Howard’s blessing would be huge. And what’s more, we would be shooting in his studio, where Howard and Robin Quivers and the whole radio gang recorded their show every morning. It would’ve been better if Howard himself was more actively involved in the shoot, but allowing us to use his studio was close enough.
I quickly rounded up a cast of actors, which took all of five minutes. Including myself, I hired Taylor Wayne, Tabitha Stevens, Christi Lake, and some new actress out of New Jersey who came highly recommended. I couldn’t offer any of them a big salary; I was given a budget that barely covered the bare minimum of expenses. None of us would be paid a normal salary until the movie was sold to a distributor. But given Howard’s reputation, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Any publicity from Howard Stern was reason enough to fly across the country and perform in a movie for less than full pay.
On a cold winter night in late 2000, we arrived at Howard’s studio at WXRK-FM in New York and were escorted upstairs by a nervous staffer. He seemed awfully jumpy about a porno shoot that was, to the best of my knowledge, completely sanctioned. But I dismissed it as porno jitters, a typical reaction among visitors to my sets.
We went straight into the recording studio and set up the cameras. We had only a few hours to shoot before Howard showed up for his morning broadcast, and we were given strict orders to be long gone by the time he arrived. So we didn’t waste a moment. After Crazy Cabbie did a brief scripted introduction—“Oh, what do we have here? Somebody’s in Howard’s studio! And…and…they’re naked!”—I had sex with Taylor Wayne right on Howard’s chair.
A few of the staffers were milling about, watching the action. Someone on the crew made a joke about using Howard’s microphone somewhere in the scene. I was well aware of Howard’s germaphobia, so I declined. But I did grab the O.J. Simpson mask off the wall and put it on while Taylor gave me head.
Though I wasn’t about to befoul any of Howard’s personal effects, I did make a few jokes about the possibility. As I was about to climax, I yelled out, “Oh God, here we go! I’m going to cum! Right…on…the chair!”
Taylor jumped out of the way and I started jerking myself, aiming my cock right at the chair’s cushions. “Uggghhh…,” I moaned. And then, just as I was about to explode, I stopped and smiled at the camera. “Just kidding!”*
When we finished, we moved to the green room for the next scene. This time, I had sex with Tabitha Stevens on the couch, and I wore a Gene Simmons mask. I put my tongue through the mouth hole and flicked it at Tabitha, doing my best impression of Gene’s onstage KISS persona. Weeks later, I met with Gene at a coffee shop in Los Angeles and told him about the scene. He gave me written permission to use his mask in the movie. I never did track down O.J. Simpson, but I doubt if he would’ve given me permission anyway.
I was in the studio only for those two scenes, though Crazy Cabbie’s partner returned on other nights to shoot more sex on Howard’s chair. We shot the rest of the movie at a porn set in Manhattan, decorated to resemble the hallway outside of Howard’s studio. We filmed an orgy scene where Crazy Cabbie and I teamed up with Taylor Wayne and Christi Lake. We had a large crew, and Cabbie had a little trouble performing with so many people watching. He wanted to be with Taylor away from prying eyes, so he and his partner Brett reshot their scene at a hotel room downtown, and he did a fine job. After he climaxed, he pointed at his erection, pounded a fist in the air, and screamed, “Hey, Howard, this is for the fans! Look at this! All right!!”
Cabbie and his partner also shot some additional scenes with the rock band Alien Ant Farm, who had a Billboard hit at the time with “Smooth Criminal.” I wasn’t present at the shoot, so I’m not positive who was involved. It may have been an actual band member, or it could’ve been their tour manager. Whoever it was, he was wearing a mask and having sex with a groupie while “Smooth Criminal” played in the background.*
I took the footage back to Los Angeles and gave it to my editor Jake. A few weeks later, we had our finished movie, which clocked in at over two hours and featured seven or eight sex scenes. We titled it The Crazy Cabbie Movie. The plot (such as it was) followed Cabbie during a “typical day,” as he and his friends had sex in a variety of locales, exchanging bodily fluids in the WXRK office.
As I waited to hear back from Brett and Cabbie, I happened to catch one of Howard’s morning broadcasts. He was scolding Elephant Boy, another of his comedy sidekicks, for purportedly having sex in the studio’s green room.
“You cannot mess around in my green room!” Howard admonished him. “Do you know what kind of scolding I’d get from Infinity Broadcasting for something like that? If you want to have sex, do it someplace else, but don’t bring it to my studio.”
Hmm, I thought. That doesn’t sound right. How could he lash out at an employee for messing around in his studio when he had just allowed a porno to be filmed in the very same location? That seemed awfully hypocritical. It didn’t make much sense at all. Unless…
Uh-oh…
I called Brett immediately and demanded answers. “Are you sure Howard’s in on this?”
“Relax, he knows all about it,” Brett said.
“And he’s okay with it, right? He knows what we did in his studio and he doesn’t have a problem?”
“Will you stop worrying? Howard said on the air that he’s okay with it. You think we’re going to go behind Howard’s back to shoot a porno without his consent? You think I want to get Cabbie in trouble?”
Like a putz, I believed him.
I sent Brett the edited film and all of the masters and waited for him to contact me with news of a release date. A month later, Brett called me in a panic.
“We’ve got to reedit the film!” he said.
Crazy Cabbie had been offered a full-time gig as a deejay, and he feared that he could lose the job if they found out about the movie. He didn’t mind being in a porno, but he couldn’t be shown participating in any of the sex scenes at Howard’s studio.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
“He just doesn’t want it to appear like he’s sneaking into a radio station and letting porno actors have sex on the company’s property.”
“What do you mean ‘sneaking’? Didn’t Howard give the green light for us to be there?”
“W-well,” Brett stammered. “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”
“You’re pretty sure?”
Because I’m a director who follows orders, Jake and I made a second edit, which created two films. We called them Scenes from a Shock Jock Studio and The Crazy Cabbie Movie. In the second film Cabbie appeared only in scenes that were clearly shot outside of the studio. In the other, the scenes were in the studio, but not with Cabbie.
Months later, I began getting phone calls from Melrose Larry Green on behalf of Stuttering John. They’d gotten wind of the movie and were not happy. I felt like I was being backed into a corner, and I wasn’t sure if I should confess to
everything or keep my mouth shut and hope that Cabbie wouldn’t get in trouble. When in doubt, don’t rat. That’s how I was raised.
“I cannot confirm or deny that such a film even exists,” I told them. “But I will say that if it does exist, there are no plans as yet to release it.”
“All we want to know is if you did anything sexual with his microphone.”
“Absolutely not. If this alleged porn film was indeed shot in Howard’s studio and I played some role in it, I can promise you that his microphone was not anywhere near a vagina. I would never do that.”
“We’re more worried about whether a penis was anywhere near it,” said Melrose Larry.
“No, of course not. My penis did not, at any time in this hypothetical porno, make any contact with his microphone. That’s just wrong.”
Cabbie was rattled enough to pull the plug completely. He stopped returning my calls, and Brett informed me that the movie was being shelved indefinitely. As Cabbie was making a lot of money for his upcoming Atlantic City boxing match against Stuttering John, he certainly didn’t need the proceeds from the film’s sale. I wanted to strangle them both. I had devoted months of work to this project, flying across the country and working for no pay, and it had come to nothing. Brett still owed money to my editor for the extra edits, and he should have at least thrown a few grand to my actors for their trouble. But he just wanted to sweep the movie under the rug and forget that any of it happened.
I called Brett and threatened to release the movie anyway. He had the only copy of the master tapes, as well as all the releases and receipts, but I had a few VHS dubs and I was prepared to use them. I couldn’t legally distribute it to video stores, but I could release it for free on the Internet, as a newsworthy documentary, just to spite Brett and Cabbie. Brett finally came up with the money for my editor. As a courtesy, I let the matter drop,* but I was still furious that my performers got a raw deal.