The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne, Peter Pavia

A raucous and revealing oral history of the birth of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood peels back the candy coating to let the true story be told -- by the stars, movie makers, and other industry players who lived it. And what a story it Through hundreds of original interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, police reports, court testimony, and more, Legs McNeil and coauthors Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia trace today's billion-dollar industry from its makeshift, mob-connected origins to the Internet age. Along the way we encounter porn stars such as Linda Lovelace, John Holmes, Traci Lords, and Savannah -- along with countless mainstream stars, politicians, FBI agents, and more. Epic, hilarious, and moving, The Other Hollywood contributes to the porn industry the one thing missing in all previous a vivid, tragicomic, irresistible humanity.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Film, Sexuality, Oral History, Media Tie In, Pop Culture

620 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2005

About the author

Roderick Edward "Legs" McNeil (b. 1956 in Cheshire, Connecticut), is the co-founder and a writer for Punk Magazine. He is also a former senior editor at Spin Magazine, and the founder and editor of Nerve magazine (print only; 1992).

At the age of 18, disgusted with the hippie movement that seemed to be going nowhere, McNeil gathered with two high school friends, John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn, and decided to create "some sort of media thing" for a living. They settled upon a magazine, assuming that people would "think [they were] cool and hang out with [them]" as well as "give [them] free drinks". The name "Punk" was decided upon because "it seemed to sum up...everything...obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side". In Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, McNeil said that the magazine was inspired by two chief influences: Harvey Kurtzman and The Dictators' debut album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, indicating that the magazine was started strictly so that its creators could "hang out with the Dictators".

Nicknamed "Resident Punk" in the magazine, he claims (to much dispute) that he was the first person (along with co-founder John Holmstrom) to have coined the term "punk" to describe a certain type of music, fashion, and attitude. He says he came up with the name punk because Telly Savalas used the line "You lousy punk!" on the show "Kojak." According to McNeil: "After four years of doing Punk magazine, and basically getting laughed at, suddenly everything was "punk," so I quit the magazine."

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

If for some reason you need additional evidence that punk scenesters are relatively boring, this book is it! The Other Hollywood is infinitely better than Please Kill Me (which, by the way, I also really liked), and I cannot fathom why it's not more widely read. You don't need to find porn especially interesting to love this, though an appetite for sleaze is probably mandatory. The Other Hollywood is kind of more disgusting than that rat book I just read, but it achieves the transcendence I complained was missing from Rats, then just keeps going.... and going.... and going....

I spent my overcast, drizzly Independence Day this year lying around my sister's West Philly apartment, having at this thing with wild abandon. I was seriously crying out every few pages, shouting and carrying on a bit ridiculously. It's one of those special books that takes over everything else and shoves you into this alternate world of people with values and lives completely different from what you know, so that for 24-48 hours, your perception and world view are totally altered, and all you can think about is porn.

In other words, it was great!

Of course, despite having had the ride of my life, I'm not without a few criticisms and complaints:

#1. I don't think this book even once mentioned the issue of race in porn, an omission I find throughly inexcusable. Would it have killed them to interview Mr. Marcus and a couple other important non-white porn people?? I understand this thing was growing a bit long to take, but they could've sliced out the completely gratuitous chapter on John Wayne Bobbit. I mean, who wants to read about that crap, and what did it really have to do with the history of porn? Stupid. I would've definitely cut that....

#2. Needed more pictures. I was dying to know what all these people looked like, and what was there was good, but I really, really, really wanted more. More!

#3. Needed an Appendix with a cast of characters. There were so many people involved that I couldn't keep track of them all! At times this started to seem like one huge, confusing gangbang. It would've been helpful to have a list in the back reminding me who they all were, since at times they blurred together and it could get tough to keep them all straight.

Mostly, though, this was just fantastic. I mean, I totally loved it. My experience of reading this was very similar to the one that I had with Please Kill Me: all-absorbing and thoroughly addictive. I was basically incapacitated and couldn't do or think about anything else until I finally finished. And some of the stuff in here seriously blew my mind! I appreciate that. Sometimes I feel jaded and over it, like nothing can shock or appall me anymore, and now I'm just numb to human depravity. But clearly, I'm not! In fact, I'm embarrassingly naive. There's a lot of stuff going on out there that's so crazy and fucked-up I never could have thought of it, and there're people running around making decisions and living lives based on logic that is just totally alien and incomprehensible, and you know, somehow that makes me feel so happy and relieved.

Not all of this was shocking new information, even for a relatively porn-inexperienced reader like me. Still, it never helps to have certain bits of wisdom reaffirmed, such as:

* Freebasing is bad.
* Silicone implants -- especially involuntary, third-party funded, illegal silicone implants -- are gross (I've chosen not to quote the most disturbing passage in the book, which covers this topic).
* Drugs are really dangerous.
* Dealing with the Mafia has its downsides.
* Ditto pissing off the Feds.
* Everything Annie Sprinkle says is always so sweet that I just want to cry, and I wish she were my aunt or my Girl Scout troop leader or something. Seriously, I bet she knows how to cure a really vicious UTI like nobody's business! I just think my life would be so much better if Annie would hang out with me once in awhile, and give me matronly advice about my problems. If she or Sharon Mitchell ever need a social worker for anything they're doing, I hope someone somewhere will give them my card. I love these ladies!
* Becoming a porn star is not always the safest way to deal with a terrible childhood, low self-esteem, mental health problems, and a desperate and unquenchable thirst for attention (although hey, it does work for some people).
* Bottom feeders and sleazebags are everywhere, but you find an extra lot of them on the bottom, among the sleaze.
* Film is better than video.
* Powder is safer than smoking.
* This version of Traci Lords's career is a nice complement to Underneath it All, Lords's own rather tepid and dubious account. I wish Traci would've womanned up and talked directly to McNeil, instead of just having them reprint crap from that book that she obviously didn't even write herself. This book did such a great job of capturing people's voices! The wooden, ghost-written tone there was a real boner-killer.
* If you are John Holmes, you can be the worst crackhead ever and get a whole lot of people brutally murdered, and still manage to maintain a certain amount of grudging respect among peers.... but if you're a very young, horrifically screwed-up blonde girl like Lords or Savannah, no one will ever forgive you for being a stuck-up bitch and will make candid comments about how much you sucked, even after you die. Makes ya think, huh?

I could go on, but what's the point? You're either the kind of person who'd enjoy something like this, or you're not. If you think an oral history of porn is something you might be into, you should seriously drop everything that's going on in your life right now, stock the fridge, draw the shades, and hop into bed with this thrillingly long (though not oversized) bad boy. I had lots of fun with it, and I bet you will, too!


Sample:

Tim Connelly: I was hanging out at the Melody, watching Helen Madigan strip, and I went into the bathroom to take a piss, and I hear this porn actress I know in the next stall selling a vial of urine to a guy.

He's going to pay a hundred dollars for this vial, but only if she can pee in it while he watches.

I just thought, "I love my life! I love my fucking life!"


Another sample:

Sharon Mitchell [aka, Jessica's new favorite celebrity ex-junkie]: I had been working steadily. Gloria Leonard was editing High Society, and I was working there during the day and babysitting for her at night. I was doing a couple Off-Broadway plays, and I was in a rock and roll band. You know, we'd do these a capella versions of "Peter Gunn" and we'd all dye our hair flamingo pink and drive motorcycles around the Mudd Club and then scale the side of the building. Just some fun shit. It was great to be young and alive and creative. It was a great life. That was when I started getting into drugs.



wait! wait! One more!

Sharon Mitchell [yeah, again]: I could go anywhere I wanted; I could do anything I wanted. I didn't wear fucking clothes -- I wore maybe a G-string and a mink coat. I had a lot of money. It was great then -- just great! Coke really helped because I was afraid I was going to miss something. I was really enjoying life so much. Coke really helped me stay up for quite a few years.

Then I started shooting it. And that was fabulous!


This book contains such remarkably clear-eyed, non-judgmental, unglamorous, dead-on accurate descriptions of the horror that is serious drug addiction, that I'm for a federal program to distribute copies in schools, to prevent substance abuse in the youth of tomorrow! Seriously, I bet it'd work. Good for the abstinence-only crowd, too.... I'm personally never having sex or doing drugs after reading this stuff. The Other Hollywood should be on public school reading lists all over the country, to ensure moral standards in our nation's children! C'mon Sarah.... pilot in Gresham?

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

hi, so I'm bored at work and after all the weird "sexual" conversations today well I can't help but start thinking about porn.

I want to open with the fact I actually have read this book and I recommend it to everyone in the entire world. Except if you have a bad gag reflex it may not be for you. I mean there is definitely some beastiality. But what do you expect it is about porn. This book is about porn back when porn was fun. (I have no actual knowledge of this fact but it seems to be the position of the people in the book). This is not unlike all the punk books which are about punk before it was punk. How did porn come about? is linda lovelace batshit crazy? who was the hottest pornstar? You will find all those answers and more in this book.

The intro to this book is also great it is about McNeil's girlfriend dying of a flesh eating virus... yup the world use to be so much more fun back in the day.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This rather lengthy book purports to be 'the uncensored oral history of the porn film industry' from 1950 until 1998. While much of it is oral history, only some of the interviews were conducted by the editors, many of them were obtained from other published sources and all of them are supplemented by newspaper and police reports. And while the porn film industry is the major topic, it's only the industry which is based in the United States that is addressed.

So what you have are snippets, usually quite short, obtained from a variety of sources, roughly chronologically arranged around themes, themes like the Traci Lords age scandal or the suicide of Savanah or the AIDS epidemic. Some attempt is made, when possible, to make it seem like there's a conversation going on about the chapter's topic, but in most cases it's clear that it's a cut-and-paste job.

I've just written about the degeneracy of the British Royals (the book '17 Carnations'). There's a lot of degeneracy here, too, but, with some exceptions, the actors here have the excuse of poverty. Porn is a way to make a living and a surprising number of the women appear to have been single mothers. The money, at the beginning at least, seems to have been with the mobsters, although here it's amusing to learn that many of the older Mafia types refused to invest in the porn business for moral reasons.

Other than the connections with dirty investors, the 'degeneracy' of the porn industry covered in these pages appears primarily to have been drug related. LSD and other illegal 'mind enhancing' drugs weren't the problem, uppers and downers, liquor and cocaine were. Lots of young persons, many of them from hardscrabble backgrounds, suddenly had lots of money and the attention of rich capitalists, actors and rock stars, being invited to their wild parties were drugs of these sorts were freely available, their use encouraged. (I was shocked by how many famous actors, actors I appreciate, were involved the drug-and-sex scenes detailed in this book.) Not all the souls were lost souls, however. There are some decent people in the business, some kind hearts and even a hero or two.

The biggest disappointment in reading this book is that it lacks any editorial voice, any overarching portrayal and analysis. One learns some bits and pieces of information but one cannot trust the big picture, the impression left behind. There is no science, no sociology here. I know enough about porn movies to have noted the lack of mention of many prominent actors. One wonders how much this book depended on the prior social or business contacts of the editors and how accurate its overall portrayal is.

[Eric_W · Rating 2 out of 5]

The best thing about this book is the cover. The book consists of titillating but not terribly illuminating snippets of interviews that reveal little except most of these poor folks were borderline dysfunctional. Studs Terkel does oral history much better.

There are some funny scenes. “"When I arrived to shoot my first loop, Tina Russell was dressed like a hooker-in a short, short ribbed maroon miniskirt and a black pullover jersey and high heels. And no bra. Then a handsome, thin, bearded young man joined us. "Hi," he said. "I'm Jason. Tina's husband." My erection dropped like an express elevator. "Are you going to be in the film, too?" I asked Jason. "Nope. Not today."

The aggregate effect of the book is totally depressing. The average career for the women lasted two years; the men often much longer, and the involvement with the mob and how little money they made is dispiriting. Marilyn Chambers (remember the Ivory Snow box cover?) was an exception who managed to garner a percentage of the take from Behind the Green Door and the scandal surrounding her face on the pure soap helped push box office receipts. Linda Lovelace, real name, Linda Susan Boreman, who died quite young from a car accident at age 53, related a bizarre conversation with her father: My father went to see the movie-[guess which one] because he wanted to see if it was really me. And he came back and said, "Yup, it's her, but it's some kind of trick." Then he went and sat down on the couch with his peanuts and beer and watched Wild Kingdom."

[Legs McNeil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I co-wrote it, so you tell me.... Best, Legs

[Darrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine if you will an unfilmed Ken Burns/Errol Morris talking head documentary with a cast of hundreds recounting the blue film business - I'd watch it (and subsequently fall asleep a couple times) and recommend it to patient friends but reading it is a wearying business....like being a non smoker stuck on a balcony with talkative smokers at a party with people you meet in the elevator at work.....and discovering your ride has left....
applause to Legs McNeil for coordinating such a feat - i liked the first half of the book - the Rueben Sturman/mob machinations were running neck with the Traynor/Lovelace abusive relationship as the best threads but I got tired/creeped out at the halfway mark....

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up from the library (!) so I could read about the saga of Traci Lords, hoping I cold get the real story on her. This may never be possible, as Ginger Lynn and others say in the book that she was a compulsive liar. At any rate, there's some great stories here about the rise and fall of countless porn legends, as well as some gossip about Warren Beatty, Max "Jethro Bodine" Baer, Francis Coppola and other mainstream Hollywood icons. Conspicuous by their absence: Jasmin St. Clair, Samantha Strong, and a few others. If you want to read about my experiences with porn stars: read here: http://blackhairedboy.blogspot.com/se...

[Jim Dooley · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE OTHER HOLLYWOOD: THE UNCENSORED ORAL HISTORY OF THE PORN FILM INDUSTRY opens with John Waters talking about the advent of the “Nudie Cuties” (very tame nudist camp films) and ends with an unorthodox HIV love story. In between is non-stop commentary from people who had intimate contact with the porn industry in America (from participating to prosecuting) primarily from the beginning of the 1970’s to the end of the 1990’s.

The path will take the Reader from early loops and short films to the advent of feature films, the onset of videotape, and the eventual move to the Internet. Many of the filmmakers and the mega-stars talk about their participation, and many may be surprised that most of them took a real sense of pride in their work. (I was particularly fascinated by a filmmaker describing the difference in mental attitude between film and video … he would wake up in the mornings excited about shooting a film, but he felt that even no-talent filmmakers could shoot video.) Personal lives and gossip are detailed in addition to what it was like to work on the set. As performers grew older and disenchanted with the changes, their interviews disappear from the timeline just as they disappeared from the industry.

There are many chapters about the investigations into and prosecutions of pornography, beginning when the sex act was clearly seen on the screen and the cross-country tempest caused by “Deep Throat” and “Behind The Green Door.” Extensive coverage is included about the main undercover investigation done by the FBI … and the aftermath that hung one of their agents “out to dry.”

Of course, there are also the organized crime connections. To be honest, I grew tired of so many chapters being devoted to this. The central story always seemed to be the same. It was only that the players changed. However, for the Reader who is interested in the “true crime” genre, this information would have to be fascinating. (It was eye-opening to learn that the Mob-controlled company that released “Behind The Green Door” was the same one that released “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”)

The Reader who wants to learn more about their favorite “porn celebrity” will be pleased if they are fans of Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, John Holmes or Sharon Mitchell. Annette Haven, Serena, Jamie Gillis, Ginger Lynn and Harry Reems receive moderate page space. Others like John Leslie and Lisa De Leeuw receive no more than mentions. There is a lively chapter dedicated to the most famous “celebrity porn” tape featuring the “vacation footage” of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. And the Traci Lords story reveled several aspects that I hadn’t known before.

The format was initially very disconcerting for me. Usually, with interviews, there is a specific topic with each of the people being interviewed giving their perspective. This book often had various interview blurbs of a sentence or a paragraph that were not topic-specific. After a while, I could see how these disparate interviews converged, and that was often quite fascinating. So, hang in there … it will eventually make sense.

The book is massive at over 600-pages. Yet, with the exception of the aforementioned “organized crime” chapters, I was always highly involved with what I was reading. The “superstar” deaths (such as Shauna Grant) always presented aspects that were new to me. And even though the writers state that this is not a “comprehensive history,” it does provide an extensively detailed look at incidents and trends that directly influenced the changes.

[Licha · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book could have been a lot shorter than the 600 pages it is. The book is told in a choppy, fragmented way, with snippets of interviews pieced together to tell the story. It worked for the lighter chapters but not for the whole book. Sometimes two stories were being told within a chapter so the style of writing did not work. Much of the book also did not give a brief intro about each story, so if the reader was not familiar with the story, I don't know how much sense it made to the reader.

I enjoyed reading about Linda Lovelace. It gives a completely different perspective of how "Deep Throat" came about. In her book "Ordeal", she claimed she was a victim who was forced into pronography, but according to a lot of interviews from different people, no one ever saw her being coerced and many claimed that she was a willing participant. It seems lots of people were not very fond of her or thought her a complete dingbat.

I also enjoyed reading about John Holmes and the Wonderland Murders, but again, it doesn't really give you a background story. All I knew of it was from the movie with Val Kilmer.

The end felt rushed, as if the author was trying to cram all the research he had done so it wouldn't go to waste. I can imagine that there is just too much to the porn indudtry for it all to be covered in one book. In my opinion, he could have done without the whole mob element and the FBI attempts to take down the industry. That could have been a book all on its own, but it was the most boring segments of the book anyway.

There were too many players mentioned in this book and it would have been nice if the author had included more pictures of who these people were. Because the story was told in snippets, it was hard to keep track of who some of these people were.

I will end this review by saying that the short chapter the author had on AIDS and pornography was really quite sad. I wish he had made that a little longer and had included how the actors now view this disease. I love that he included how these people viewed AIDS when people first started getting wind of this terrible disease. It was honest and frankly quite sad to see how the actors reacted to it. No one knew at the time quite what it was and sadly, a lot of them believing that they must have it because they had all had sex with each other did nothing to protect themselves and continued filming. Tragic.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Porn stars lead very, very different lives from you and me. I don't know why I find these very, very different lives (which often double as cautionary tales) so bloody interesting, but this is my third or fourth True Tales of Porn book. I think it activates the sociology nerd part of my brain or something. The Other Hollywood is presented in oral history format, with well-edited and spliced-together interviews from porn's major and minor stars, producers, directors, and even the cops, FBI agents, and U.S. federal attorneys who wasted a lot of time trying to bust them.

Hey, I even learned a thing or two. Annie Sprinkle is a lot cooler and smarter than I'd previously given her credit for. John Waters calmed down a hysterical Traci Lords on the set of Cry Baby when she was getting arrested by pointing to Patty Hearst, Johnny Depp, and himself and telling her "no one here hasn't been arrested." John Holmes was a profoundly twisted, pathological, severely drug-addicted, fucked-up individual who was involved in the beating deaths of four people, but he's still remembered more fondly than pathological, severely drug-addicted, fucked-up twenty-three year-old Savannah, who killed herself and whose death was met with a chorus of "Oh... sucks" and a round of shrugs. Linda Lovelace, who wasn't terribly bright, had the saddest, most pathetic life and death imaginable, and was only paid $1500 for Deep Throat, which went on to gross $55 million. Also, drugs are bad, mmmkay?

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Please Kill Me, but about porn.

[Andrew]

Like Please Kill Me, this is a collection of voices from around a specific milieu, in this case the porn industry, from its start in underground loops made by failed off-Broadway actors in East Village flops to its mafia-run “classic” period to run-ins with Evangelicals and the people who would later be dubbed SWERFs and TERFs, to the appearances of various betes noires who made tabloid headlines in my early childhood – John Bobbitt, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, and the rest. It's captivating at times, but the only problem is that (kinda like porn itself) it gets pretty damn repetitive. There are only so many tales of girls fresh off the bus from Nebraska who wind up coked out and getting DP'd by sausage-skinned domestic abusers you can read before you just kinda get bored with the story.

[Blaise · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the co-editor of "Please Kill Me," the oral history of punk, comes this even more engaging, surpisingly emotional oral history of the American hardcore pornography industry, beginning in the days directly preceding "Deep Throat" and continuing on through the AIDS epidemic to the present day. To my mind, this is a better book than "Please Kill Me." Unlike "Please Kill Me," it does not cover a subject I have a personal interest in. Like "Please Kill Me," it contains stories, all real, all told through a collection of quotations, that grip me by the guts as good as any novel. In this case, it contains more of them and, for some reason, they grip harder. They cover the whole range of human emotion and genre association, humor, depravity, crime, love, tragedy, murder, and, of course, sex. It's all here. The editors choose to focus on a wide range of subjects, from well-endowed male stars to undercover feds with split personalities to producers to actors and all points in between. The greatest beauty comes in the most unexpected places, as does the greatest horror. If there was a theme to this book, I would say it was that, and imagine getting all that out of "The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry."

[Karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay. I was enjoying this book for the first 200 - 300 pages. I then got a bit bored. There are interesting parts and scandal (Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, John Holmes, Traci Lords, etc.) hidden in the middle of tedium. I think if the book was cut by 200 pages, it would have been a more interesting read, but far less comprehensive. I think the main problem was that there were many times that I had no clue who the person talking actually was. When a person was first introduced, they are credited as 'porn star', 'porn director', 'FBI agent', etc... But since there are so many people giving their stories, everyone but the most famous names are quickly forgotten. Legs McNeil got around this in his other book ('Please Kill Me') by including a roster of people and a brief description of who they are at the end of the book. The only reason that I can see it was not included was that there were so many people involved that to list them all in summary would have added another 25-50 pages to an already thick (600 page) book.

[Cwn_annwn_13 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Hollywood is more or less a history of the porn industry from the 1950's through the mid to late 90's done in an interview style using direct quotes from the interviewees. Its a huge book although I think a lot more stuff could have been covered. This book starts the early days of pin up models, Russ Meyer movies and the bizarre nude volleyball film genre. Then it moves on through the evolution covering a wide range of people and topics that were involved. Criminal involvement from the top of the food chain mafia down to the petty hustlers and criminals that gravite towards the porn world, femanazi, Christian and especially FBI harrassment, drug abuse and other self destructive behavior being the norm from the porn stars themselves, the sagas of Linda Lovelace, the Mitchell brothers and John Holmes are covered at length, the general process of making and distributing the movies themselves, the heyday of porn theaters, peep shows and porn shops, the outbreak of AIDS are topics covered in this among other things. This was a good fun at times and depressing at times read.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really don't enjoy pornography all that much. I have enjoyed some on occasion, but usually something will happen in a pornographic film that I find unsettling and then I am immediately turned off sexually and disgusted with humans. Anyway, that is neither here nor there I suppose. But nonetheless, the porn industry is endlessly fascinating. It is a really long book, but totally worth it!

[Jason Coffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly epic history of the porn film industry, tracing the roots from the nudie films of the late 50s to the explosion of "porn chic" in the 70s and through the introduction of video in the 80s, as told through interviews, newspaper and magazine stories, wire taps, etc. etc. etc. Highly entertaining.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I actually had to give up on it-just couldn't get thru it

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a good oral history and Legs McNeil is the master.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read. At times it’s a true crime book, at times is a sociological look at people’s hidden (or not so hidden) desires, and at times it’s simply a chronicle of a billion dollar industry that rarely gets its historical due. Basically every story in here could justify an entire book on its own (though, to be clear, you never feel like any of the stories are short-changed or not covered enough in this one). Given that it only goes up to around 1998, and therefore stops right as the internet is entering the picture. I’d love to read a follow-up.

[Jj Burch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this for the most part, but felt some of the mafia/mob chapters got a little long. I think I’d have preferred to look at trends, which this kind of does in a roundabout way.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book, regardless of what you might think of the subject matter. Most accounts of the porn industry tend to hew to obvious cliches about predatorily exploited lost souls with self-esteem or child molestation issues, and while the stereotype is common enough to have a fair amount of validity (although I'd wager it's not appreciably more common than it is in the legit film business), and while the book does depict its fair share of victims and casualties (John Holmes, for instance, seems to have been a genuinely fucked-up person, while Linda Lovelace comes across as damaged goods from the beginning, but many of the book's interviewees come across as surprisingly articulate and with a refreshingly clear-eyed perspective on their past), Legs McNeil and his collaborators here paint a more nuanced picture.

Now admittedly the book concentrates primarily on the Boogie Nights era, and the industry has changed a lot since then. Given the the near-ubiquity of porn nowadays, thanks largely to the internet, it's easy to forget the peculiar cultural niche porn occupied in the 70s: back then traditional notions of propriety were changing rapidly. The Production Code had lost its grip on Hollywood and mainstream filmmakers were pushing the limits of acceptability with pictures like Carnal Knowledge, Midnight Cowboy, and A Clockwork Orange, while plays like Hair and Oh! Calcutta! were hits on Broadway. While X-rated films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door never quite achieved the same level of legitimacy, it did briefly seem like there was a period when porn might go mainstream.

It didn't happen of course. The hostility of the Nixon and Reagan Justice Departments saw to that. Add to that first the home video revolution, which killed off the theatres, and the AIDS epidemic, which rang down the curtain on the party, and those days now seem like a lost era. A smutty one, naturally, and one fueled by drugs and bankrolled by organized crime, but one that in retrospect nevertheless had a curious sort of free-spirited innocence that couldn't exist today and that McNeil & Co. manage to capture in all its sordid glory.

[Grant Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this after a recommendation on some podcast I was listening to and it was really interesting. I had no idea the connection to the mob and all the prosecution early on. Some of my favorite parts were from two undercover FBI agents tasked with bringing the mob down. The stuff about the Wonderland murders was also really interesting.

The book was amazing from a quotes perspective, some of my favorites were;

Chuck Traynor: I wanted to own a topless bar because I wanted to be around topless girls, and that's a great way to do it.

Sharon Mitchell: Larry hit me- and I remembered, you know, about my mom and dad. My dad hit my mom once, and that's all it took. My mom said, "That's it." Because once that happens- it never f@#$ing gets better. I mean, guaranteed that it never gets better. You've just got to move on with your life- because all of that heal-change crap will never work.

Sharon Mitchell: (after an overdose) I went, "Oh my God! F@#$!" I thought I was dead, and I was having some sort of flashback thing- you know, "I've seen the light... and it's Ron Jeremy!"

Fred Lincoln: Everybody blames their childhood for what they do when they're adults. How f@#$in' stupid is that?

Henri Pachard: I'm a lousy f@#$ on camera, and I'm a lousy f@#$ off camera. What's the big deal? I'm not gonna kill myself over it!

Henri Pachard: Poverty is just nature's way of telling a man he's in the wrong line of work. I mean, if you're broke all the time, it's time to change jobs.

And my absolute favorite;
Annie Sprinkle: My hemorrhoids saved my life- because I'm sure I would have gotten AIDS if I had had more anal sex.

[Tripp · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is an oral history, so it consists entirely of interview transcripts from key players in the world of adult film, including the actors, directors, the mob financiers, the FBI team that chased the mob, the girlfriends and the occasional tangential player like John Waters. On the face of it, this sounds like the authors didn't do much work, but the organization and selection of the interviews is excellent. You get a story from many angles and directly from the participants.

Many of the stories are quite amusing, many are more than a little shocking and quite a few are just tragic. The story of the famously well endowed John Holmes is a thread for much of the book. The character of Dirk Diggler in Boogies Night is at least partially modeled on that of Holmes. While Diggler experienece a rise and fall followed by a partial rise, Holmes's fall was uninterrupted. The robbery scene from Boogies Nights is based on a real robbery that ended in murder and questions remain about the role Holmes played. The Wonderland killings saw four people die as a result of being brutally beaten. Holmes certainly led the killers to the apartment, but may have even been one of the killers.

Then there is the story of Shannon Wisley who killed herself after she was injured in a drunk driving crash. The belief is that the suicide rose from her belief that her injuries would preclude her from working again. Okervil River wrote two songs about her, one from her father's perspective and one from her own. They are both great songs are terribly sad as you might imagine

[Mikko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alaston Hollywood on hyvinkin siisti ja aihettaan asiallisesti lähestyvä esitys yhdysvaltalaisesta aikuisviihdeteollisuudesta 50-luvun "nudisti-dokumenteista" aina 90-luvun loppupuolelle asti. Aiheena ei ole porno sinänsä, eikä teoksessa revitellä juurikaan elokuvien sisällöllä. Sen sijaan keskiössä on otsikon mukaisesti pornoelokuvateollisuus, siinä toimineet ihmiset ja ympäröivän yhteiskunnan suhde pornoon; esim. sensuuri, valtavirtamedian asennemuutos, järjestäytyneen rikollisuuden rooli ja HIV-epidemia.

Alaston Hollywood on toteutettu kokonaan haastattelumateriaalilla. Jokainen pääluku käsittelee tiettyä teemaa ja ajanjaksoa. Alaluvuissa 3-6 ei haastattelua vuorottelee, käsitellen jotain yksittäistä henkilöä tai tapausta. Ratkaisu toimii hieman vaihtelevasti, erityisesti tapauksissa joissa jonkin kiistan molemmat osapuolet kertovat rinnakkain omia näkemyksiään lukijalle jää täysi vapaus päättää ketä uskoo, mikä toimii eittäin hyvin. Vastaavasti joitakin, varsinkin mafiaa käsitteleviä lukuja on vaikea seurata, koska ihmisten nimiä, lempinimiä ja elokuvanimiä vilisii tekstissä tuhottomasti. Kerätyn haastattelumateriaalin määrä on joka tapauksessa kunnioitettava ja teos on hyvinkin suositeltava alakulttuurihistoriasta kiinnostuneille.

[Ruz El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best book you will read on the history of Porn. Instead of putting together an academic look at the industry, morality, place in culture and all of that, Legs and his team culled quotes from what has to be 100's of interviews and sources and let the people involved tell the story. From actors, to producers to court transcripts and wire taps, the stories are contradictory, but over all telling. The truth is somewhere in between I'm sure, and it makes the whole thing more honest than what a traditional look would be. That said the stories, from well known scandals like Traci Lords and Wonderland Murders, to lesser known ones like "Plato's Retreat" are all equally fascinating, horrifying and hilarious. Never boring, I hope they do a follow up, they apologize in the intro that gay porn isn't looked out due to it being a book in itself. Seeing how insane the "legitimate" porn industry was, I can only imagine what that side of the story is.

So yeah, I recommend it. The subject matter might seem pervy, but it's a hell of a story for what is now a multi-billion dollar industy. Halfway through the book I went out and picked up McNeil's other Oral history "Please Kill Me: The Oral Hostory of Punk", that should be a hell of a book too.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably an embarrassingly lame thing to admit, but I just couldn't get into all the money/mafia business in this book. Too many names, too many infractions, too many pages! I loved Goodfellas and all, but maybe mob stories just aren't my thing. I mean, the stuff about FBI agents going "undercover" and positively reveling in their ability to get paid (by the federal government) for acting like sleazy, porn-loving, opportunistic, drug-addled coozehounds was riveting and all, but, generally speaking, my eyes would glaze over a bit whenever the talk turned to the mob, capos, bags of cash, lawyers, woodchippers, and the like.

I understand you can't talk about the history of porn without spending a good amount of time talking about where all the cash/muscle came from and what the industry was up against, but I much preferred reading the stuff about the performers and the sex and the drugs and the murders/suicides and the fucked up, miserable lives. The standard storyline trajectory is predictable because it's obvious: Shit is really fun for a while (if you're into that kind of thing), but when it goes south, it goes south fast.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read McNeil's other book Please Kill Me and continue to be blown away by his oral histories. Sure the name is a pun in this instance but he takes what should be a pretty cut and dry industry: the porn industry and goes in-depth on the sex, murder and money that came from it. At times this novel reads like a mafia story with all the discussion of people possibly being killed and the people who went from obscurity to riches. It shows all the elements from both the bad men collecting the money to the cops trying to take it down and still getting caught up. The fact that it's comprised of interviews gives both sides of the story making it completely unbiased. I knew the basics like the scandal of Deep Throat and a few of the suicides but this goes into every element from the scandals to the broken dreams and shattered lives. It goes up until the present day showing how the porn industry has become a cop-out for most and doesn't have the worldwide notice that it once had like in the 70s and 80s. Whether you're for or against the industry this movie shows it as essentially the rise of another Hollywood, making the sex element seem completely secondary.

[Dayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the literary equivalent of a talking-heads documentary, which usually is the most boring kind. I was planning on ditching this after the first few chapters, but by then had gotten used to the style and I subsequently couldn't put it down. The most boring parts were about how the Mafia financed/finances pornography, but all the other stuff about the stars and the drugs and HIV and the evolution of porn were fascinating. As other people who have reviewed this book have pointed out, the use of drugs is so rampant and destructive and just downright unpleasant that it should be required reading for teens. I am amazed that more of those people weren't killed by it, although many have been.
One of my favorite things about my copy (and I forgot to mention this when I originally wrote this) is that the section headings had photos and many of those pages were ripped out. So, I can't say I read the entire thing; I was missing some bits, which, I am sure, are being used for grander purposes!

[Rabbit {Paint me like one of your 19th century gothic heroines!} · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of interviews with different people connected to the porn scene/industry through out the decades. The interviews are spliced together under topics and decade, with their name next to their quote from the interview. I really enjoyed that format. It was like telling a story with different perspectives at once.

The people interviewed are former FBI agents, porn stars, producers, directors, partners of porn stars, and others I am probably missing.

The authors tried to remain unbiased as much as possible, and presented various opinions and stories.

It doesn't turn a blind eye to anything from drugs, abuse, scandals, murder, rape, death, and etc.

This book also references various different types of porn and porn acts, so it's not for minors. [I gotta put this disclaimer in. LOL]



It was really hard to pick a gif. I wanted something sexy but not to the degree where people would, ya know, freak out. :P