The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  I was pissed off at Marc after that—he knew I lived there. So we didn’t see each other for about six months after that—and all that time he was dying.

  TIM CONNELLY: At that point I started feeling like I had to get out of this business. I’m in a relationship, and I’m having indiscriminate sex with strangers—on camera, you know? Whoever I fuck that day, I don’t even know. I mean, I’d always try to find out who I have to work with in the hope that I might be able to say: “Well, if these are the choices, can I have this one?”

  But you never ultimately have control over who you work with, you know?

  ANNIE SPRINKLE: Marc wasn’t particularly out about having AIDS. I saw him before he died, and it was just a really sad ending. He was frothing at the mouth; he must have weighed eighty pounds. Nobody was caring for him, and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. And of course as soon as he died everything was stolen.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Marc died of AIDS. It was slow and painful, and it involved a lot of freebase—a lot of drugs.

  ANNIE SPRINKLE: Marc’s mother had jumped out a window, so I think Marc always thought he would commit suicide, too. And in a way he did. I would say that smoking crack was a way of committing suicide.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: What happened to the sexual revolution? It caught AIDS and died.

  Pimping and Pandering

  LOS ANGELES

  1985

  BOBBY ELKINS: Hal Freeman was a bar-supply salesman. When I owned the Lemon Twist Lounge, he was my man. All my juices and all my bar stuff came from Hal.

  Well, one day Hal comes in and says, “Look, my cousin Sam Lebowski and I are going to make these booths for peep shows. And we’re gonna make loops for the booths.” Hal was making rubber goods—dildos and stuff. So Hal says, “Come on over.”

  So I sold the bar to twin brothers. But one of the twins was AWOL from the army, and they put down like $40,000 for the bar, and the ABC Agency comes to me and says, “The bar can’t go through. He’s AWOL from the army, and you’re going to have to stay here.” So I said to Hal, “I’ll be over, as soon as I get this thing with the bar cleared up.”

  PAUL FISHBEIN (FOUNDER OF ADULT VIDEO NEWS): Hal Freeman was a big guy, heavyset, sort of balding, had a big army tattoo on his forearm. Hal was a big presence, with a bellowing voice; he commanded attention when he walked into a room. He was one of those guys with a lot of bravado but actually had a big heart, you know?

  BOBBY ELKINS: Hal and Sam were building rubber cocks; they hooked up to bicycle pumps as penis enlargers, ha, ha, ha. And then they were building peep-show booths, slapping them together out of plywood, a coat of paint. They were shit.

  After I sold the bar, I kind of got my feet wet with Hal and Sam and then one day Hal says to me, “Why don’t you be a salesman, and sell this stuff?” Which I did. And I helped them in other ways. Hal had sold a guy in Denver twenty of the peep-show booths, and the guy stiffed him. He owed him something like ten thousand dollars. Hal says, “Will you go up there and get my money for me?” That sounded exciting, so I go to Denver.

  PAUL FISHBEIN: I was working out of my apartment in Philadelphia, putting out the AVN Newsletter. Hal called me from the set in San Francisco. At the time nobody was shooting in L.A. because of the ongoing pimping and pandering cases there.

  Hal told me, “I got these beautiful girls here. I want you to come out and cover the movie.” So I flew out from Philadelphia, in an ice storm, to cover this movie, Layover.

  BOBBY ELKINS: I walk into the shop in Denver, and this guy has got two topless broads shining shoes in the corner.

  I says, “I’m here for Sam and Hal Freeman. You owe them money. Why don’t you pay them?”

  He goes, “Whaa? Whaa?” So I call Hal and say, “Hal, this guy don’t want to pay you.”

  Hal says, “Let me talk to him.”

  Hal talks to him, and I still can’t get nothing out of him. So I tell Hal, “The only way I’m going to get the money back is to give him an okiedokie.” I says, “Hal, let me fuck him.”

  So I start telling the guy about eight-millimeter stuff, and he wants the stuff—he needs a hundred, two hundred pieces—so I tell him they’re eighteen bucks a piece, and I need eighteen hundred.

  PAUL FISHBEIN: It was the first time I was ever on an adult film set. I was fascinated. People were having sex in front of me, and they were filming it.

  I met Paul Thomas, and he talked to me a lot. I interviewed everybody. I was really naive at the time, and Hal was like really pushing for the publicity. It turned out to be the first “On the Set” piece AVN ever ran. And I was an extra in the movie.

  BOBBY ELKINS: This guy ain’t paying Hal, and he’s buying eighteen hundred bucks’ worth of stuff from me, so me and this sharp dago kid get a trunk—one of those steel lockers. Then we fill it with peat moss and lock it up.

  Then we meet at the airport, we’re gonna make the switch at the airport. He turns over the eighteen hundred. I give him the locker. He goes, “Wait a minute. Let me open the thing. Let me make sure it’s in there.”

  I start to run, and he follows me. But I give the eighteen hundred to the sharp dago kid.

  Well, the guy from Denver calls the police, and they arrest me at the airport in Denver. The guy tells the cops, “We opened it, and it was just peat moss!”

  I said, “So what do you want me to do? I got no money—I got nothing on me.”

  FRED LINCOLN: I was living in Ventura at the time, on the beach. Sharon Mitchell says, “Please—let me move in with you. I don’t wanna start this heroin shit again. I wanna be straight. I wanna be okay.”

  BOBBY ELKINS: The cops lock me up. I walk into jail, and everybody has heard about the con man who put the peat moss in the trunk for eighteen hundred bucks. The head cop calls me in—Italian cop, good-looking—and says, “We know you fucked them, and we know he had the money—we saw the bank account. And you gave it to somebody.”

  I said, “I gave it to nobody.”

  I spend the weekend in jail, and I became a celebrity to all the schvartzes and Mexican kids because of that peat moss. When they let me out Monday morning, they said, “Take the first plane out, and never come to Denver again.”

  FRED LINCOLN: So we moved to a new place in Ventura, me and Mitch. She had a boyfriend, but Mitch and I’ve had flings off and on for twenty years; we’ve been buddies. Then Buck Adams and Amber Lynn come to the house, and Buck didn’t have no place to live, so I let him stay there. Then Amber stayed. And they all started gettin’ high, and I’m starting to do a lot of drinking.

  I’m thinkin’, this ain’t workin’ for me. Then Mitch got a new boyfriend—Buddy Love—and I didn’t know it, but they’re gettin’ high together.

  BOBBY ELKINS: Hal loved me for getting that money, even though it was only a quarter of what the guy owed him. That guy in Denver was greedy. The funny thing about life is, you cannot beat an honest man. An honest person is not greedy, and there’s no way you can hurt an honest man.

  Then Hal went into the video thing—Hollywood Video, right? I kind of liked Hal’s videos. So I became a buyer, and I sold a lot of them to my clients.

  FRED LINCOLN: Jesus, Amber Lynn was making so much money it was insane. She was the highest-paid girl on the dance circuit. She was making thirty-two thousand a week.

  I told her, “You’re making more than the entire Supreme Court! Whatsamatter with you? You can invest in real estate—buy bonds, stocks, whatever! You have a chance to reach an age where you don’t have to worry about money!”

  She said, “No, let’s smoke it instead. That makes more sense.”

  What the fuck? What is wrong with you people?

  LOS ANGELES TIMES, MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?: “Cracking down on the city’s $550-million-a-year adult film industry, the Los Angeles Police Department has taken the controversial step of arresting producers of hard-core sex films under the state’s tough pandering law, which carries a three-year prison term.” />
  PAUL FISHBEIN: The first time Hal Freeman was arrested was in 1983, the same year AVN started publishing. I didn’t have anyone on the West Coast, so the stories came in by phone. I’m not even sure we covered his arrest. But Hal always said, “I’ll fight this to the Supreme Court if I have to.” There was never a doubt.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES, MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?: “The Los Angeles Police Department has sought pandering charges against six people connected with the adult film industry since 1983. To date, one prosecution has reached trial stage.

  “The case involves Harold Freeman, an Encino filmmaker who is on trial in Van Nuys Superior Court in connection with the film ‘Caught From Behind II.’”

  BOBBY ELKINS: Hal Freeman never became big because he was always fighting the beef. What happens when you’re fighting a beef? You think you can’t expand because then you got a beef over a beef, then you’re redoing a beef, you always got problems. So you stop making new stuff; you’re not producing like you used to. That’s what happens when you get in trouble. It all falls apart.

  JERRY BUTLER (FORMER PORN STAR): Hal Freeman wanted to see me, so I drove to his office with Amber Lynn, Buck Adams, and Jessica Wylde. When we walked in for our appointment, Hal’s daughter, Sherry, and his wife, Cynthia, looked at us as if we were animals in an exhibition. Then they took turns grilling us about our appointment with Hal. Here we were, in a business where we fucked our asses off so that people like them could make a lot of money, and they were whispering about us and giggling.

  I’d had enough. “What the fuck is so funny? If you don’t get off your ass and tell Hal I’m out here, I’ll go berserk. And you won’t like what you see.”

  They stopped laughing.

  BOBBY ELKINS: Hal was married to a blond—a shiksa, right? He had a gentile daughter, too—looked like Hitler.

  JERRY BUTLER: Hal called me inside immediately. He seemed pretty friendly, so I told him about the snot-nosed cunts he employed in his front office. He told me they were his wife and daughter, but I didn’t apologize. “Hal, I can’t say I’m sorry,” I told him. “They treated us like animals.”

  He apologized—but in the next breath he asked me to do an anal scene for three hundred and fifty bucks, which is far below standard. I agreed, but on the day of the shoot, I never showed up. It was my way of getting back at him.

  FRED LINCOLN: One day I was driving Amber Lynn back from the airport. She’s coming back from Canada. We’re talking about things—and Amber and I were fucking. So we’re driving, and she said, “You know, I’d really like something to eat.”

  I had my little convertible, so I said, “You know, Amber, we can’t leave the luggage because it’s got no top.” I said, “Let’s drop by home.”

  So we dropped the luggage off, and I heard this thud from the closet. I looked inside, and Buck’s in the fuckin’ closet, dead. No pulse, no nothin’. God, I was so fuckin’ mad. I start yelling, and Amber’s freaking, she’s screaming, “MY BROTHER!” I’m poundin’ him on the chest. “You dumb son of a bitch. You wanna kill yourself, walk in front of a truck. What the fuck are you doin’ in my closet?” I guess all that pounding brought him back to life; I mean all of a sudden he’s breathin’ again.

  I mean, Buck did this over Janet Littledove, another porn star. Chrissakes—talk about a fuckin’ moron.

  JERRY BUTLER: Buck and Amber were adopted by their stepparents. Their biological mother died of cancer. They led a pretty shabby life in Orange County. They were rednecks—poor, white trash. Grew up stealing and driving fast cars. So I really clicked with Buck.

  BUCK ADAMS: My sister, Amber Lynn, had been in the business maybe six months when a still photographer introduced her to an agent named Reb Sawitz. Now this was back in the days when male strippers were just crazy guys who ran around in their underwear, and I was making a little money doing that because I couldn’t box anymore—I’d hurt my hand.

  So Amber called me up and goes, “I’m doing movies, and they need a guy. You know, you can make three hundred and fifty bucks cash—like, now. You can work with one of my girlfriends, and she’s really cute.”

  Which was an exceedingly huge lie—about the girl, not the money.

  FRED LINCOLN: Buck Adams hung himself in my closet, but the bar broke, ha, ha, ha. So Buck comes back to life, but Amber’s called 911. The cops show up, and Buck has all these outstanding warrants for child support. The cops are in the house and they pull out their guns. I don’t even know if they had a warrant.

  I said, “What the hell is goin’ on here? All we need is an ambulance. This guy hurt himself.”

  The cops said, “No, he don’t need no ambulance.”

  I finally calmed the cops down, calmed Amber down. I thought, “What am I doing with these fuckin’ crazy people? Jesus.”

  You know what’s wrong with Buck and Amber? You can never fuckin’ believe anything they say, ha, ha, ha. If they say, “Nice day,” then get your raincoat because it’s probably storming.

  JERRY BUTLER: I felt very brotherly toward Amber Lynn. Before doing The Four-X Feeling with her in New York, we were staying at the Edison Hotel. I was doing so much cocaine. Maybe the coke made me more intense, but Amber and I got into a pretty heavy conversation. I had never made love to her offscreen. That night she let me stay in her room.

  We talked and talked, and she told me things about her childhood that I’d never known. Her mom had died at an early age, and her dad ran away.

  I was very open with her, and I asked her to do something I felt very shy about. I let her take a hairbrush and stick it up my behind.

  FRED LINCOLN: Fuck it that Buck and Amber had some trailer-park roots. Who cares about their childhood? Everybody blames their childhood for what they do when they’re adults. How fuckin’ stupid is that?

  I knew Buck, knew he was high. But I like Buck; he was a good guy. Then things started to slip a little bit with Mitch, and she really panicked. And I said, “You know what, Mitch? I really can’t be around drugs. That’s why I left Tiffany Clark.”

  So after that little scene with the cops, I thought, “I should be living somewhere else.” I actually left them the house.

  VERONICA HART: You would never, ever film in Los Angeles because back then, there was a law called “pandering.” They basically considered a paid performance of sex to be prostitution. According to them we were all whores—the guys, the girls, whatever. Basically they did not consider us actors and actresses; we were considered prostitutes because we were getting paid for sexual services. It didn’t matter that the person we were having sex with was also getting paid—that we were both paid professionals.

  FRED LINCOLN: Jamie Gillis calls me and says, “I’m going to San Francisco. Wanna rent my house in Hollywood?”

  I said, “Lemme see it, Jamie. I’m lookin’ to move.” Because I couldn’t stand the drive from Ventura anymore, fuckin’ horrible.

  Jamie’s house was really nice; rent was like seven hundred fifty a month. I said, “Wow, this is cool. I’ll take it.” It was already furnished, so I just moved right in.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES, MAY 20, 1985: HARD-CORE SEX FILMS: DOES CASTING CONSTITUTE PANDERING?: “‘If I had been shooting in Los Angeles, you best believe I wouldn’t be now,’ said Les Baker, president of Gemini Film Corporation in Las Vegas, who films in the San Francisco area. ‘Unequivocally, it has put a chill on the Los Angeles industry. No sensible person would stick his head into that meat grinder.’”

  VERONICA HART: The only place really in California that was safe to shoot was in San Francisco, where nobody gave a shit. You had to be fucking in public or running around without your clothes on for them to get upset. The HoJo’s in Marin County was our big hideout there.

  SHARON MITCHELL: There were a couple of cops in Hollywood who were really keeping tabs on where the shoots were and chasing after us. Because there was no such thing as a permit, we couldn’t shoot. They used to scan footage and recognize the p
alm trees as Los Angeles and track down the location.

  FRED LINCOLN: I met this production manager, Patty, at Reb Sawitz’s office. Reb told me she was good. Up to that point, I’d never used a production manager; I’d always done everything myself, but I liked it. Patty got me back with this producer in New York. Best movie I ever made was with him.

  SHARON MITCHELL: The cops tracked Backside to the Future down to Zane Entertainment—the Zacari brothers. They thought the easiest way to prosecute was the pandering law; they wanted to prove that having sex with people in front of a camera wasn’t any semblance of a performance. If you’re getting paid for sex, it must be prostitution, so the producers must be panderers, and this must be stopped. Okay, which is a little roundabout. But they were very serious, very storm-trooper-like.

  FRED LINCOLN: Then, all of a sudden, the word is out that I couldn’t work for this guy anymore. I was done for. I said, “I gotta sit down and talk to him because something’s wrong.”

  He says, “Wow, you went a hundred thousand dollars over budget.”

  I said, “Wait. What over budget? I never touched the budget. We had a seven-day shoot, and I shot in seven days. I never go over budget.”

  The guy took some money and told our backers it was my fault. So he and I had a fallin’ out. But I met Patty when she was workin’ for him.

  SHARON MITCHELL: I’m at my home in Ventura one day, and I had this big, six-foot-long picture of me. So I put a line of cocaine from the shoes to all the way to the top. I’m going in the bathroom, and I’m getting high. I’m shooting a thing of dope, and I’m having a good time. I’m snorting a little, and I’m naked, taking Polaroids. I took Polaroids of everything back then. I’m entertaining some friends, playing poker, and having a good time. That’s what life’s about, right?