Tom De Simone is one of the original pioneers of the gay genre. He began making films with gay content at the height of the sexual revolution. His films were always polished productions with strong stories, hot sex scenes, a good-looking cast, and superb cinematography — as you would expect from someone with university degrees in filmmaking.
But his expertise began even before college. "I’ve made films since I was ten years old," De Simone says. Each Christmas and birthday from that age on, his parents gave him a new piece of filmmaking equipment. "Actually, all I did when I was a kid was make movies."
Back in 1969 when someone said, "If you make an X-rated movie, you could probably make some money," De Simone approached a theatre owner and showed him a couple of his student films. That led to a friendship (that continues today) and De Simone’s first film, The Collection.
“It opened at L.A.’s Park Theatre in 1969," De Simone recalls. "The problem was, the film started to get busted because of the subject matter. There was no hardcore in it — in fact, even no erections. There was a lot of simulated sex — and they hadn’t seen that yet. And there was a lot of hardcore simulated S&M stuff, like branding. The police got really uptight about it. And then in ’72, Nixon did this report on pornography in America, and The Collection was cited as an example of the kind of stuff we shouldn’t be watching. That was my entree into the business. In those days, everything got busted."
Unlike today, De Simone says, when he was making these pictures, there was no video market. "People would come into movie theatres to sit down and watch a movie. They wanted to see ‘a movie’ — but with sex in it. So, where do you get your ideas for movies, but from the movies? In other words, everyone who went to see Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis would have loved to have seen them naked, rolling around together. So, we just did that. We gave them that pleasure of watching the same story, but with sex implied or heavily implied.
“What made my pictures different or unique," he continues, "and why people always liked them, is once the picture started, there would always be that section of the film early on where you got to know the characters, and so viewers would get sucked into the story. By the time the sex scenes came, they were more erotic, because it wasn’t like disembodied cocks. You were watching people you knew having sex, and so it became more real and more erotic. I can’t sit and watch loops, unless the people are drop-dead gorgeous, and even that doesn’t matter to me as much as if the sex seems real to me. And what makes the sex real is if I sense that I know those people."
Finding performers in the early days wasn't easy. “Very often, you had to get people almost off the street, or you’d go to bars and proposition people," he says. "I rarely knew what their backgrounds were or where they came from. Nowadays it’s a legitimate industry — there are models and model agencies, and these actors have followings and fan clubs, but I’ve been in the business since 1969, and in those days you were very underground about what you were doing."
De Simone’s porn career prospered during the '70s and early '80s. Often directing under the name Lancer Brooks, he made such hardcore classics as Skin Deep, Catching Up, Station to Station, Hot Truckin’, Heavy Equipment (in 3-D), Bi-Coastal, Bi-Bi Love, and The Idol.
Shot in 1977, The Idol was De Simone’s 51st film. It was based on a treatment written by a former lover of Sal Mineo, and cast with virtual unknowns.
Idol's star, Kevin Redding, was discovered through Nick Rogers, an actor De Simone had used in Hot Truckin’. Redding had never made a film before and never made another — not because it was a bad experience, but because he felt that appearing only once in one of the most highly regarded gay films of all time would prevent him from becoming “just another porn star.”
De Simone explains, “This way he could always remain The Idol. He created a mystique around himself and the film.” Today, over two decades after its theatrical release, The Idol remains as fresh and sensuous as ever, arguably the best piece of gay erotica ever filmed. It’s a classic coming out story, so honestly written and directed that virtually any gay male can relate to it. It truly touches the mind and the heart without in any way overlooking the heat. And it’s shamelessly romantic.
Nightcrawler, a dark surreal film about life in a bathhouse, was De Simone’s last foray into gay porn. With the advent of video (and AIDS), porn theatres were closing. And his mainstream film career had taken off big time. There was Hell Night starring Linda Blair (often referred to as “the other great Linda Blair horror movie”), The Concrete Jungle with Jill St. John, Angel 3 with Maude Adams and Richard Roundtree, and the '80s cult classic, Reform School Girls starring Wendy O. Williams. The latter served as his entree into television.
De Simone's television career includes 162 episodes of shows like Super Force, Swamp Thing, Dark Justice, Acapulco Bay, and Freddy’s Nightmares (based on the Nightmare on Elm Street films).
Tom De Simone has done it all, proving that nothing is impossible. He currently resides in Southern California and remains active in the entertainment industry.
Photo courtesy of Tom De Simone.
