Some Came Running

Ron Jeremy on Brian DePalma's "Dressed To Kill"

Ron Jeremy and I, some of you may be delighted to learn, go back a long way. Although maybe that's not the right way to put it, because that implies that Ron Jeremy and I have an ongoing relationship, which is not the case. I met Mr. Jeremy, who was then being introduced to people by his non-stage name, that is, Ron Hyatt, pretty much 31 years ago to the very day that I'm writing this, coincidentally enough. I had taken a two-week job as a production assistant on an "adult film" then entitled The Family Jewels, which would be released as A Girl's Best Friend. These were in the waning years of porno chic, when a good deal of production was still done out here in New York, and a large percentage of the "talent" "pool" subsisted of actual actors or at the very least trained performers who weren't quite making it in what Variety may still call "legit." Video had not yet rolled over celluloid, and Jewels, which was directed by the late Henri Pachard (Ron Sullivan) was in fact being shot on Panaflex cameras and the whole crew was a bunch of jaded moonlighting pros who had some time off from their regular gigs doing segment work for That's Incredible or some such series. When I got the job (the circumstances of which getting will be available for your reading pleasure in my memoir My Life In Pornography, provided I ever complete and/or sell the damn thing) I was informed that my P.A. work would not have me around during any sex scenes, which were supposedly shot on a "closed set;" some time later, during what I recall as being one of the hottest post-Labor-Day weeks I'd ever experienced, as I crouched behind a large potted plant, my hand poised above the switch of an electric fan that I was to turn on between takes as Mr. Jeremy and a performer nicknamed "The Singing Cocksucker" attempted a form of sexual congress, that promise seemed a distant memory. Anyway. 

Back in 1980 Mr. Jeremy was even more peculiarly delusional than he is depicted in the strangely poignant 2001 documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy—albeit, perhaps, with better reason. A buff and boisterous 27 years of age, he was crowing to whoever would listen that he had just acquired his SAG card, and also completed some extra work in the new Woody Allen picture, which, as was even then the case with Woody Allen pictures, was as yet untitled. (My calculations put it as Stardust Memories, and I don't believe Ron made the final cut.) Because porno chic really still was a thing, and because of what was being perceived as the "new" or "newish" permissiveness in mainstream film, Ron believed that the porn thing would soon no longer be a stigma and that he'd be able to make a relatively painless and strain-free entry into the Hollywood firmament. I remember him waxing particularly eloquent on this topic with then-Playboy-writer David Rensin, who was visiting the set for an article and who sat around quietly dictating his notes into a mini-cassette recorder. Ron, I remember, had just done a threesome scene with two blondes that had sufficiently discombobulated him that he emerged from the bedroom set with his Fruit of the Loom briefs on inside-out. Warming to his topic, Jeremy ultimately decried the hypocrisy of the ratings system. "Did you see Dressed to Kill?" he asked Rensin. Of course he had; we'd all seen DePalma's Dressed to Kill, which had been released earlier that summer and was something of a succès de scandale. (Hey, look, I did the accent grave!!) I think I had seen it two or three times, 'cause me and my boys were big DePalma fans. Ron wasn't quite so sanguine about the picture. "I can't believe they gave that picture an R! It's total bullshit! I mean, come on. That shower scene in the beginning? I saw that finger go up there, you can't fool me. And they call US perverts."

Ron was referring of course, to the film's notorious opening shower-rape-fantasy scene, in which Angie Dickinson and, alternately, her nude double Penthouse Pet Victoria Lynn (and boy did Penthouse make hay out of THAT connection, if I recall correctly) are violently taken by an unknown hunky assailant. It was Mr. Jeremy's contention that the sex play in that scene indeed crossed the line into "hardcore," e.g., "penetration" and was getting away with something. Mr. Jeremy's subsequent public pronouncements, inasmuch as I've followed them, have not infrequently taken a similar why's-everybody-always-picking-on-me-when-somebody-else-is-doing-worse-stuff tone.

I bring this up because I think about Ron Jeremy all the time, and I can't stop doing so. No. I bring this up because I've been looking at the brand-spanking-new Blu-ray disc of Dressed to Kill—the unrated version, yet!—and so of course with all the enhanced detail and stuff I thought, "I wonder if Ron Jeremy was right?" As it happens, no, I think not. But since I don't have the capacity to get Blu-ray captures off of my computer, and since, you know, I don't run a PORN WEBSITE, I'm not gonna run the frames to prove it. So take my word for it. I think Mr. Jeremy may have been a little confused; there's a shot near the end of the fantasy scene in which the attacker lifts Dickinson and/or Lynn by hoisting her up from the, um, groin area; the attacker's naked thigh is visible in the shot, and the whole thing goes by sufficiently quickly that the impression of penetration—not so much in a sexual sense, but the same sense of that bit with the meathook in the first slaughter sequence of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—is relatively strong. And that, as they say, is the Magic of Filmmaking Illusion! Whoop-dee-doo! I'll be rating the Blu-ray in the upcoming Blu-ray Consumer Guide, which, God willing, will be up before September's out, but I'll say here that I'm pretty happy with its look, which is VERY in keeping with what I recall of its theatrical appearance (and as I mentioned, I saw it more than once!), and I'm actually enjoying the film quite a bit, its idiocies of dialogue and plotting and its hysterical incidental racism notwithstanding. "Yeah, but what a kid!"

A few words from Stephanie Swift

From "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment (It Turns Out)," Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet, Premiere magazine, September 1998 issue: 

To be fair, some of the nominees' titles really are confusing. Triple Penetration Debutante Sluts 4 is up for Most Outrageous Sex Scene—along with Wild Bananas on Butt Row and 87 and Still Bangin'—but loses out to a scene the program entitles "Anal Food Express" [...] from something called My Girlfriend's Girlfriend. Paul Thomas's Bad Wives wins Best Film. Evil Angel's Buda wins Best Shot-on-Video Feature. Bad Wives also wins Best Actress (Film) for Dyanna Lauren, Best Supporting Actress (Film) for Melissa Hill, and Best Anal Sex Scene (Film) for Lauren and Steven St. Croix. Ms. Stephanie Swift wins Best Actress (Video) and tells the crowd: "Thanks, everybody. My gang bang was a blast."³⁶

^36. Though Ms. Swift won for Miscreants, she is here alluding to her and director Rob Black's real breakthrough video in 1987, Gangbang Angels, which is essentially a one-woman show and features the years' most infamous scene: twelve woodmen line up and do an about-face, and S. Swift performs analingus on each one in turn; she then adopts a prayerful/compliant posture as the twelve do a right-face and form a patient line and take turns hawking and spitting in her face. 

In addition to Best Actress (Video), Swift took home an award for Female Performer of the Year, perhaps in at least partial recognition of her game, shall one say, participation in the above described film. Well do I, and several other veterans of Premiere magazine, recall the fact-checking sessions for that piece; sitting in the section of our offices that we called "the pod," legal pads in our laps, counting one, two, three, four, yes, all the way up to twelve gobs.

That was several months after the actual awards—we had to wait some time before we had sufficient room to publish the piece—so let me flash back a moment to the actual AVN Awards of late January 1998. The actual author of the piece was, of course, David Foster Wallace, who would publish a somewhat different version of the piece under his original title "Big Red Son" in the collection 'Consider The Lobster' and Other Essays. (One indication of how different is that footnote number 36 in the Premiere version is footnote number 51 in the book version.) On the evening of the awards themselves, our photographer Nathaniel Welch mostly stood in the hallway outside the ballroom of Caesar's Palace, taking portraits of the various award winners; hence, the portrait of Swift with her two statuettes. We had devised a little game, Dave, Nat, our fourth musketeer Evan Wright (future author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation, at the time very unhappily ensconced at Hustler), and myself: throughout the weekend, at the various parties and receptions that surrounded the awards, at least two of us (and I always had to be one of the two) would approach a porn star and begin chatting him or her up. We would drink in their complete indifference and annoyance for a bit (for in addition to being "civilians" and probable "mooks," Dave and myself in particular were pretty poorly dressed), and then at a strategic point I would present the porn person with my business card, which of course had the Premiere logo very prominently placed therein, and have a good interior chortle as the individual's demeanor and approach changed. "Oh, you really should interview me," I recall Jill Kelly saying rather breathlessly, "because this is a very important weekend for me, it's the weekend I'm going to decide if I'm going to stay in the adult industry or not." Indeed.

Now I myself had a little bit of a "thing" for none other than Ms. Swift—considered her "my type," or what you will—so it was a peculiar moment for me when Dave and I chanced to encounter her, along with the aforementioned Ms. Melissa Hill, on the steps of Caesar's after the ceremony had wrapped. How peculiar? Allow me to quote again from the essay: "Because porn films' worlds are so sexualized, with everybody teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse—a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake—to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there's a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/hope that this is what might happen right here in Max Hardcore's hotel room. Here your correspondents find it impossible to overestimate that this is a delusion." I remember after the piece came out that some clod or other argued that the whole "expectation/dread/hope" trope was an indication of immaturity on Dave's part. Must be nice to be so advanced; it almost goes without saying, though, that the "grow up, it's just a fantasy" stance tends to ignore the reason the fantasy exists in the first place. In any event. When we spied the object of my whatever the hell it was, Dave and I were saying our good nights; he  was suffering from a flu, and really needed to get back to his room and rest; in the meantime, Evan, Nat and I would work reconnaissance by crashing a party thrown by porn star Vince Voyeur. For some reason we had gotten on the subject of music, and he was asking me to outline the differences between Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett edition and Pink Floyd, post-Syd Barrrett edition. And then we saw Swift and Hill—like Swift, Hill was known for being a porn star that didn't look quite like a porn star, and no doubt at least partially due to this affinity, the two, aside from performing with each other on occasion, were known to be personally tight—and Dave was all like, well, here's your big chance. Dryly, that is. He didn't really MEAN it, in case the person who scolded the "expectation/dread/hope" thing is reading this.

So we made our approach, and rather than play any games I had my business card at the ready. For all of their not-looking-like-conventional-porn-stars, the male escorts of Hill and Swift were pretty, well, conventionally mooky—brightly colored satin shirts over tanned and buff physiques, overly moussed post-New-Wave pompadours, the works. One of them grabbed my business card out of my hand as I tremblingly offered it to Ms. Swift, gave it a thorough going over, and announced, "I think this guy's legit. His card is embossed."

No, really. 

And that was pretty much that. Swift went on to work as a "contract girl" for the adult entertainment concern Wicked, which put out far milder products than Gangbang Angels; when that agreement ran out in 2004, she spent a couple of years at a distance from the industry, but made a comeback a few years back doing material that tended to capitalize on the "Cougar" or "MILF" vogue that was sometimes credited with keeping the "legit" adult video business afloat. 

"In June of 2009," Swift recounts in a video that was recently posted on the XXX Church website, "I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I really feel that cancer saved my life." And, yes, as you might have inferred, Swift is now not only a cancer survivor, but a born-again Christian. The story she tells in the brief video will not necessarily be an unfamiliar one; there was, it happens, sexual abuse in her childhood. She is very calm and clear as she discusses how she felt during the creation of what she terms "over 300 movies:" "There was this always...not really nagging, but just like a...uncomfortableness in my stomach." "I always wondered the real reason why I was in the business, and why did I win the awards, and why did I get the recognition...because in the industry...it's not a real accomplishment, I mean it's just a false sense of accomplishment, it just covers up..." And so on. 

It is odd, remembering all that, and reading Dave's words, and then watching Swift's largely calm but entirely...rueful recounting of what was her career. I post all this not to be, well, a prig, nor to get all hypocritically "You see! Porn is bad!" buzz-killish, or what have you. I do, on the other hand, believe Swift's words are worth a listen, and that while it is a coincidence that this news is coming out at around the same time as a rather squirm-inducingly-large portion of the pop-culture-consuming populace is having a not-so-good laugh over Charlie Sheen's porn-star "goddesses," it is perhaps a potentially not uninstructive coincidence. If you know what I'm saying. And of course I do, as is often the case, have to wonder what Dave might have made of this. 

Blu movies

Believe it or not—and I know you want to believe it, really I do—I'm not too often prone to professional jealousy. My dislikes and resentments, and I admit, they are many, generally stem from who people are and what they do, what they stand for and what they don't, rather than any position they hold relative to my own. On the occasions when I do feel a pang of "I can't believe they gave him/her that job"-ness, I try to keep it to myself. But I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge when I read earlier in the week that Michael Atkinson was taking the position of DVD reviewer at Movieline. 

Now Michael's been reviewing DVDs for the IFC Independent Eye website for a while, I know. Hell, I even made fun of one of his DVD reviews there a couple of weeks ago. And while he and I have had our tussles on the internet (Jesus God almighty, is there anyone I haven't had a tussle with on the internet?), when all is said and done I consider Michael a fine fellow and a distinctive writer. A little blustery at times, for sure, but you know, he owns his bluster, much as I own my...raging dickheadedness? No, it shouldn't be that. It's something. But I'm not sure. But anyway. The point is that it really caused me no pain to learn that Movieline now wants to pay the guy to compose prose poems on Marlon Brando's jawline as said jawline is rendered in a leading home theater format. No, this was the sentence in the announcement that irritated me: "Michael will provide excellent reconnaissance from the DVD/Blu-ray front several times per week." 

Blu-ray? Really? Goddamnit, I didn't write the book on Blu-ray (now that I think of it, that might not be such a bad idea), but I did write the Popular Mechanics article on it (the entirety of which appears to no longer be online, but here's the first page), and I made only one mistake in it, mixing up Super Technirama with VistaVision, which given the technical similarities of the format, could have happened to anybody!!!! Also: I started my career at a magazine named Video Review. Editing the Test Reports. You know, the ones with the luminance numbers and the signal-to-noise ratios and the goddamn footcandles/footlamberts. I've forgotten more about this technology than most of these schmucks who yammer on about this and that but probably couldn't set a goddamn clock on a  VCR back in the day to save their life ever even learned. I was IN JAPAN to see the very first demonstrations of the MPEG video compression format that wound up MAKING DVD AND BLU-RAY EVEN POSSIBLE! ("This will never work," I said at the time, so crappy did the results look back then.)

Back when I was running the Home Guide at Premiere, I rather developed a horror of DVD reviews that functioned as de facto late critiques of contemporary pictures. My perspective was, well, the film critics have had their say, and if you're reviewing the disc version of the movie, then review that. (Although I recall that when Christopher Kelly was writing most of the reviews for the section, his perspectives could yield some interestingly counterintuitive results; a positive notice for The Other Sister, for instance.) Now obviously it's a whole other kettle of fish when you're dealing with classic or repertory fare on disc. Dave Kehr, who's completely The Man in this department, is invariably brilliant when discussing both the films in question themselves, and also how they've fared in the transit from celluloid to the digital domain. This issue is, I think, particularly crucial when you're discussing Blu-ray. I don't mean to sound rude or anything (well, maybe I do), but with rare exceptions I've got to say that unless you are Dave Kehr, I really don't give a shit what you think of any given movie on Blu-ray. I just want to know how it looks and why it looks the way it does. (See DVD Beaver...and even they can get it wrong, as they did here, a review that needs updating since the recent correctly remastered version.) The rest I can figure out myself. Whether Michael Atkinson's gonna talk about that in his Blu-ray writeups remains to be seen—I haven't seen him tackle a title in that format yet from his Movieline perch. But I wish him all good fortune in the gig in any event. 

All this is also by way of guiding you to this week's topics, questions, and exercises at The Auteurs' Notebook, which contains a chat with Warner Home Video's Vice President of mastering Ned Price, about the gorgeous new Blu-ray of Doctor Zhivago (not depicted above, in case you were wondering) and the upcoming digital rethink of Citizen Kane, and a bit more. All very wonky and technical...just the way I like it when we're talking film preservation and Blu-ray and stuff.