by Gerrie Lim
One of the girls in that project was the Vivid contract girl Raylene, a dusky Mexican/Italian/Austrian/Polish beauty, whose very first video was Shane’s World 4: Wet & Wild, all about horny hijinks on a houseboat, shot in November 1996, right after she’d turned eighteen. In it, Raylene is called Stacey (her real name) and she loses her porn cherry to Mark Davis, getting all giggly after giving him a long, lusty blowjob. “I feel like such a virgin!” she’d giggled, in jest. In the very next scene, she engaged in an enthusiastic lesbo-liaison with Anna Malle, an already outrageous siren who was then in her sexual prime; Anna later died in a car accident in Las Vegas in January 2006 and while I had a connection to her (because she had once been the publisher of Fox, a New York hardcore magazine I had written for), I’d never actually met her in person. But I certainly had long admired her skills, as seen in Asia Carrera’s best film, A is For Asia, and too many gonzo flicks to name offhand. Gonzo was invented for women like Anna, who worked without a net and knew how to fog up the camera lens.
Many famous contract girls started out doing gonzo as a way of learning the ropes. A new contract girl like Krystal Steal, signed to Jenna Jameson’s company Club Jenna in early 2005, will typically disclose in an AVN interview that “when I first started, I did about fifty gonzos, and I think, in my opinion, that’s the best way to go for a new girl. Because that way you get your name out there and you get established, versus being a brand-new girl and getting a contract right away, people aren’t going to know who you really are for a while.”
Raylene, when I met her in person, a year after my Shane project, equally waxed nostalgic about her own entry via gonzo. Formerly a child actress at age five and later the manager at an L.A. Fitness health club before she became a stripper, she was refreshingly candid about her career. If not for Shane’s World and her own youthful enthusiasm for swallowing Mark Davis’s cum (as he shot his load right onto her waiting tongue, which she accepted with a huge smile), she might never have eventually become a Vivid girl and an A-list star.
“I met Shane when I was very young, way before I was eighteen, I wasn’t even planning on doing movies,” she recalled. “But I hung out with Shane and Mark Davis and his ex-girlfriend Yvonne, and decided I wanted to do movies. So I started with my first movie, Shane’s World 4. If I hadn’t signed with Vivid, I might’ve done more with them. I like doing gonzo, because it’s really short and really spur-of-the-moment.” She then told me a story of how she recently had sex with a total stranger, a deejay at a club, simply because she had always fantasized about having sex in a men’s bathroom. “And so we went and did it, and I haven’t spoken to him since,” she giggled.
Art imitating life. Happens all the time in gonzo.
However, I’d asked Shane in our interview about being molested as a child, and all she would say was: “You know, that is something that I’ve gotten past. I like to live in the present, and I try to stay as positive about life as I can.” (This quote was, of course, not used in the final draft of that Penthouse Variations interview.) Now married to Bobby Hewitt, the drummer of the heavy metal band Orgy, with whom she has two children, Shane still runs across her sets topless but no longer performs any actual sex acts, though in spirit she remained relentless. She told AVN reporter Acme Andersson that she recently had her fifth boob job (“I think I have the record for boob surgeries … Small C’s, then DD, then back to small C’s, and then fixing and then fixing. I like to trade them in and get new models, just like I do my cars”) and also talked about her new series, Shane TV: “It’s reality porn. You know how I used to go out and blow people unsuspectingly on the street? I miss that the most. So I have Holly Hollywood, she’s wearing an earpiece connected to the phone, and I kinda tell her what to do, what to say, who to grab. So I live vicariously through her.
“Like in Volume 1, we’re driving on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway), saw a surfer, snagged his towel and then we did a U-turn and brought his towel back. Propositioned him. Got him in the back of the car and slurp, gave him a blowjob. I was so in shock. So was he.”
Shock value lies at the heart of gonzo. In September 2003, I was in Los Angeles and spoke with Calli Cox, the star of one of my personal favorites, Shane’s World 29: Frat Row Scavenger Hunt 3. “I feel that gonzo will continue to be the biggest, most watched category,” she said. “Sexually speaking, I do think that gonzo is more my kind of thing. I appreciate the beauty of features and the time it takes to make one, but I think gonzo is the best. It’s ‘realer’ sex to me than what you see in a feature.” How on earth, I asked, did she learn to give such excellent handjobs and blowjobs? In true-blue gonzo style, she was seen masturbating and fellating young guys she had never met before, particularly college frat dudes who couldn’t believe what was happening.
“Funny you should ask,” she replied, grinning. “When I started in the business, I felt that I was terrible at oral. I wasn’t really comfortable doing it because I didn’t feel I did a good job at it. So when I first started, I asked some of the guys in the business who they liked getting HJs and BJs from. What was it that they liked from those girls? Then I watched those particular girls in action, whether on set or on film. I practiced a lot and became pretty good at it!”
Interestingly, at the time that we spoke, she had taken on a new position—as publicist and official spokesperson for Shane’s World. A furor had just broken out—Rolling Stone magazine did an exposé of gonzo porn featuring Shane’s World filming live footage on college campuses. I was in Los Angeles at the time but was due back in Singapore the following week, and only found out about it after I’d landed at Changi and bought a copy of that issue (Rolling Stone, September 18, 2003). I immediately emailed Calli, and she was amazed that people in Singapore could now read about her in Rolling Stone. (Proof positive, in my mind, that you can’t prevent people from knowing about porn even in a country where porn is banned).
The piece discussed how Shane’s World had helped bring gonzo into the mainstream, thanks to their latest video Shane’s World 32: College Invasion, which caused the right-wing television host Bill O’Reilly to admonish this “dorm porn” in his Fox News Channel show, The O’Reilly Factor. (O’Reilly alleged that the school in question knew of the shoot but did nothing to stop it.)
The Rolling Stone story also carried a sidebar about the woes of one Brian Buck, a student from Arizona State University, who had appeared in Shane’s World 29: Frat Row Scavenger Hunt. “When footage surfaced of Buck cavorting with two Shane’s World pros, the twenty-two year old was expelled from his fraternity, barred from ASU housing and employment, placed on permanent probation and forced to write a twenty-page essay, (entitled “Reflections on Integrity”), complete 100 hours of community service, and resign his post as student-body vice-president. Worse yet, his parents have refused to pay his tuition, and he was offered a measly US$500 from Shane’s World for his troubles.”
That amount was what the company offered him as compensation for his unforeseen pain, but he rejected it and insisted that Shane Enterprises pay for his three years of law school. “He got greedy,” said Calli, in the Rolling Stone story, which also mentioned the company told Buck to “go pound sand.”
Buck was then quoted as being in some distress: “I wish I could have my anonymity back … For years I will have problems, because of a two-minute mistake.” But Calli, of course, saw it as a publicity windfall. “The feedback from the article has been pretty positive,” she told me. “We received a lot of calls and emails from people who felt that the article was unfair and misrepresented us. We have also gotten a lot of praise from the industry in general for having a four-page article in Rolling Stone. I think that overall this mainstream coverage is positive.” She defended the gonzo genre from the naysayers, insisting that it’s not merely a cheap way to generate massive turnover, even as the industry sales and rental figures showed huge surges in the popularity of gonzos, wall-to-wall and compilation tapes as opposed to the more plot-heavy features.
“Reality porn tends to take a little longer to shoot because a lot of the time it is spontaneous, you have to get the right reaction from someone,” she told me. “It takes more time because there is more to shoot than just sex. Some performers aren’t into this. They simply want to get in and get out. It definitely takes the right cast to shoot a good reality film.” Earlier that year, Jennie Grant had told me about the elation they’d all felt at the AVN Awards ceremony. “It’s funny because I knew winning would feel good, but I didn’t know that it would feel THAT good! You should have seen us at the awards show, our table was out of control!!! Plus Calli gave an awesome speech.”
Jennie added that she remembered talking to Tricia Devereaux (ex-porn star and wife of famed gonzo director John Stagliano) at the show and congratulating her on the new feature film, The Fashionistas, which Tricia co-produced and which had won a staggering ten awards that night. “She said the best thing—she said that ‘people always say, oh, they’re just porno awards. But this is our life. If we disregard the award, then we’re really disregarding our lives.’ I thought that was really cool, since we, Shane’s World, put a lot of effort into our company and I know that they do too.”
The first eighteen volumes of Shane’s World were released on DVD in early 2001, and by 2005 the company was investigating transferring all its movies onto the new-fangled contraptions of hand-held mobile technology. Life was good. Neither Jennie nor her husband Brian had ever worked in the adult entertainment industry before they acquired Shane Enterprises, having done mostly documentary films. They simply viewed porn as merely an extension of the same. Gonzo, to some extent, is a quasi-documentary format since it utilizes camera verite techniques, unlike features or even “wall-to-wall” porn, where you can catch the cameras panning and zooming, with cutaways for overhead crane shots, and the like.
The closest that gonzo approximated any of that was when the cameraman zoomed in for a close-up of genitalia and then captured the insertion shot and then the obligatory pop shot. “I have a theory that most male porn fans are possibly bisexual or at least bi-curious,” Jennie once told me. “Otherwise, why do we always show the guy coming on the girl’s face? Why is the pop shot so important?”
Those were valid points. But I also like the fact that gonzo was porn with a sense of humor, particularly when it satirized social conventions. Billy Glide, in the Shane’s World off-shoot flick Pornological 1, can be seen cooking pasta and talking about how he has to make his girl dinner first in order to warm her up: “You can’t just bring them in here, pop on a porno and fuck, you got to go through all the bullshit, bring them dinner, give them some wine, hopefully get them a little tipsy, put in a romantic movie. You might hate it but they’ll love it, they’ll cry, they’ll hold you, and then you’re gonna get some. A little bullshit before you get some.”
Of course, Billy did get some, with the lovely Claudia Chase, though the scene felt a bit staged. “So, are you horny now?” he asked her, right after she’d just started eating her dinner and complimented him on his pasta—which we all know doesn’t ever happen in real life. Claudia made a face, which only underscored the irony. Gonzo humor can be a little too cute for its own good. (Billy and Claudia, of course, cut to sex fairly quickly after dinner—in fact, the dinner pretty much ended right there!—and Claudia talked and giggled too much during the sex, hinting that she’d definitely done Billy before.)
And so we suspend our disbelief, heave a collective sigh, and reflect on our own personal après-dinner sex moments. That’s the social value of porn, aside from how it gives spanking material to those guys for whom their own past sexual memories can never be evocative enough.
However, one afternoon, I was on yet another set with Kelly Holland, an episode of Naked Hollywood, her Sex & the City porn-spoof series (winner of the “Best Continuing Video Series” at the 2003 AVN Awards), and a bunch of us began a discussion during a shooting break about the limits of permissible porn. Kelly had directed for Vivid for seven years, under the pseudonym Toni English, and she was talking about the gonzo director Max Hardcore, who specialized in testing the limits of acceptability.
I had told her Jill Kelly had recently disclosed to me some edits she had to make to some of her recent films—“Chloe likes to be choked while she’s coming, but for cable we had to cut that,” Jill said. (Why? In case some folks decided to literally die trying in the privacy of their hotel rooms?) Kelly said one of her favorite things in porn was to have the guy pull out just as he’s about to ejaculate and then grab his own cock and spray all over the girl, from every angle and in every direction. “Now, I like that,” she said, “but it may not be something everybody will want to see.”
“But Max Hardcore will have a girl put an air tube in her mouth, like a straw,” she told us, “and insert the other end into her own ass. Max will piss in it and make the sure his urine goes up the tube so she will be drinking it. Now, where do you draw the line with that?
“And why does it happen? It happens because there’s always going to be a girl who thinks that US$800 is a lot of money.”
The industry term is “scab labor” and such girls are prevalent in the wacky world of gonzo. Exploitation sadly exists, like in any industry, the only difference being that we all make choices based on our economic needs and some just make the wrong ones. Not morally wrong, but economically wrong. Not many of Max Hardcore’s girls end up on the adult-biz A-list; most of them end up as hookers in the Nevada desert, if they’re lucky to get any work at all, like the gangbang girls who were the bottom-feeders of the porn totem pole, parallel to soap stars in television who never ascended to the big screen and were viewed with a mixture of condescension and pity. It ain’t pretty but it’s the truth.
In any case, it can seem strange today to look back at Shane’s World circa 1996 and realize how her little travelogues, with porn stars reading maps and boarding planes, actually predated current mainstream reality fodder like The Amazing Race. One of my all-time favorite scenes in porn featured the blond, bodacious Johnni Black sucking off three guys in the open air, on the houseboat in Shane’s World 4, shot ten years ago, and it seemed so innocent compared to today’s harder-edged gonzo fare.
Because everyone’s hellbent now on pushing the envelope, on seeing how far we can go. The production company Elegant Angel, in February 2004, filmed Gangbang Anals (the sequel to Gangbang Angels): one girl, five guys, all anal. Anarchy Films released “100% Anal, ATM, 120 minutes” flicks (“ATM” is “ass to mouth,” any explanation needed?) and there are “all-swallowing gonzos” like Erin Sky’s No Cum Spitting, shot for Anarchy’s Python Pictures, where the girls can be seen swallowing every last lovin’ drop.
And then, there’s the hardest of the hard edge, like porn’s super-nasty gonzo girl Ariana Jollee, who specializes in taking all comers even down to the double-anal (though she won’t do the equally scary “double-vag,” because, unlike some girls, her vagina is unable to accomodate more than one penis at a time). In May 2005, Jollee, a twenty-one-year-old native of Long Island, New York, journeyed to Prague to star in 50-Man Creampie, for Devil’s Films, in which she had sex with sixty-four Czech men in an exhausting six-hour shoot. “The wronger, the better” was her personal motto. Her work done for the weekend, Jollee then told the AVN reporter in Prague that she was booked to do a seven-man gangbang on Monday back in the United States.
However, folks, you ain’t seen nothin’ till you’ve seen Devinn Lane’s Guide to Strap-on Sex, released in April 2006, in which gonzo superstud Kurt Lockwood (last seen in this book in chapter three, “Plot? What Plot?”) cheerfully bent over for his first-ever, on-camera strap-on scene—in which two girls, Samantha Ryan and Sandra Romain, took turns banging him up the butt chute. It was produced by none other than Shane’s World. “We knew a lot of fans were looking forward to seeing us take the leap into the strap-on niche,” quipped the producer, my pal Jennie Grant herself, in an AVN news report of April 10, 2006. (Another girl who had worked with Lock
wood told me he had been paid a truly obscene amount, something in the five figures, for that scene alone; “I think it’s disgusting,” she sneered, but didn’t explain whether she meant the strap-on method or the massive fee.)
I remember being on the set of a Nic Cramer movie, Skin Deep, in which Silvia Saint played an escort agency madam; her dialogue was very much secondary to the sex, limited mostly to picking up the phone to take orders for her girls. But this was a feature film, not a gonzo, so why did I remember being on the Skin Deep set? It remained burned into my brain because of one particular scene—between Gina Ryder and Eric Price. I got to see the real spirit of gonzo sex first-hand.
We were on a balcony of a massively impressive house in Bel-Air, shooting Gina going down on Eric like her life depended on it, just as the sun was setting. Nic and his long-time cinematographer Jack Remy called for a break, and they both strolled off to huddle at the far end of the balcony, pointing frantically to the sky. They were trying to determine exactly when the sun was really going to set—so as not to “miss the light,” as they say in filmmaking, as the twilight “magic hour” descended. This would never have happened in a real gonzo film, which always eschewed continuity in favor of spontaneity, and I admired them for paying such attention to cinematic detail.
But they were missing out on the real action: Gina and Eric didn’t give a damn about the light and they continued their interplay, rutting furiously even with the camera shut off.
“Hey guys,” I thought, “you’re missing the sex!” Meaning I was the only one who saw them do it, with Gina flushing red from a real orgasm. Naturally, when they decided to resume shooting, she carried on like nothing had happened, and finally took a huge load of Eric’s come on her face. “That was really good,” I told her later, after she’d washed off and changed into her Gap civilian clothes. White t-shirt, blue jeans. She smiled, thanked me, and grinned, like any working actress savoring a compliment.