"My Life In Pornography," Part 1: "A Girl's Best Friend"

From the end credits of A Girl's Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

My Life In Pornography is the title of a memoir I completed in the summer of 2012. Its first section, titled "A Girl's Best Friend," about the making of the motion picture of that title, is now published on Thought Catalog. You may read it here. 

The book, which I'd been messing around with in some form or other since the early 2000s, has five parts. The second part, titled " 'Goin' Through The Motions' " is about my relationship with Susan Merchant, later Susan Walsh, and contains a misadventure at a live sex show. Susan, a fine writer and a dear friend, disappeared in 1996; iterations of her story have been told on two different television series, Unsolved Mysteries and Investigation Discovery. The third part is called "Meet Dick Filth" and recounts a trip to Las Vegas with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch to cover the AVN Awards in 1998, and the editorial challenges that ensued a little thereafter. Part Four is "The Connoisseur," about my participation in the motion picture The Girlfriend Experience. It is a different—less jovial—account than the "set diary" published by MUBI in 2009, a piece that had originally been commissioned for GQ by Dan Fierman and ultimately rejected by editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. The fifth and final section is called "Documentation" and wraps everything else in a manner that one reader complained was "too postmodern," but I like it and I'm keeping it as it is until some actual editor talks me out of it, or something. 

Why publish this section now? Well, after seeing the New York Times feature on the DVD label/film distributor Vinegar Syndrome titled "Smut, Refreshed For A New Generation," and  then learning of Williamsburg venue Nitehawk Cinema's "Nighthawk Naughties" series of midnight shows, which kicked off with a screening of Radley Metzger's 1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven (from which my Erotic Connoisseur quotes a line in GFE), I thought, "Well I've had a pretty good retro-porn tale on tap for a few years now, why just leave it lying around?" Obviously I am also hoping to generate some interest from editors and publishers. But mainly of course I'm doing it for YOU, my readers...well, yeah, actually why else, right? I hope you enjoy it and I do hope the opportunity to get the whole thing out there in dead tree form and/or otherwise arises soon. 

Comments

[Stephen Whitty]

Wait.. THE Tiffany Bolling of "Wicked, Wicked"?

[Glenn Kenny]

The same.

[Jeff McMahon]

I know her more from Kingdom of the Spiders and The Candy Snatchers.

[jbryant]

For me it was a now completely forgotten TV series called THE NEW PEOPLE, and a movie called BONNIE'S KIDS. Man, she was gorgeous.

[Glenn Kenny]

Bolling was never on set as far as I knew. I believe she knew Ron Sullivan/Henri Pachard from back when the latter was directing grindhouse fare. In less-than-fallow periods in the acting career, she looked after his correspondence and such.

[ClosepersonalfriendRon]

A moment of silence for Gloria Leonard, who passed away this week. She picked up the mantle, as it were, during the crossover from the Boogie Nights era to camcorder ready-set-go.