About book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History Of The Porn Film Industry (2006)
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?
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."
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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.
—Mikko
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.
—Grant Reynolds
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?
—Natalie
