There's a new mystery kid wandering the alleys of Porn Valley right now, and his name is Jack the Zipper. Just who is this Zipper guy, you ask? Well, as you'll read below, he's a mighty enigmatic sort, the kind of wanderer who you can tell just from the way he talks has been a lot of places and seen a lot of things.
He also happens to be, arguably, the most original porn vision to come down the 101 in awhile, if one can make such an assessment based on a single movie. That movie is Stuntgirl, originally put out by Jack the Zip's production company, Clockwork Productions, and recently picked up for distribution by Hustler Video.
Watching Stuntgirl is like taking a heavy hit of some hallucinogenic drug and then jerking off to a David Lynch movie. It's hot, it's beautiful and it's totally original. Below, we take you along on a journey into the mind of Jack, upon which you'll learn where he came from, where he's going, and what his dreams are made of. Prepare yourself.
AVN: So answer this however you want to, but where did you come from? It's like you kinda came out of nowhere. So what's the story?
Jack: I don't know.
AVN: Who are your heroes? What are your influences?
Jack: In porno, Rocco and Andrew Blake.
AVN: What about non-porno? Because your stuff looks very different from any other porno I've seen.
Jack: Non-porn, I like David Lynch. Millions of movies. So many different movies. Chopper. Sexy Beast. Weird movie called Forbidden Zone that I like a lot. '70s porn. A lot of '70s porn. '60s porn. Early '60s porn, a movie called The Pickup, I absolutely love. It's like a gangster movie porno from, like '63.
AVN: I think just from looking at your stuff it's obvious that you have other artistic sensibilities. So what other kind of artistic areas are you involved in?
Jack: I've been a tattoo artist for seven years. Get a lot of structure from that. Been a musician my whole live There's a musical element there. And then it's just all my experiences traveling. I've been traveling a lot. All over. A lot of strange situations. A lot of crazy girlfriends.
AVN: Do you feel like all of that sort of shapes the way you view things visually, and the way you construct your scenes?
Jack: Oh yeah. I used to live on the Sunset Strip when I was 21, back in the heyday. So there's a scene in Stuntgirl that's my idea of what a Hollywood porn would look like, I call it rock star sex, like a rock star scene would be like with Kurt Lockwood and Jessica Jaymes and Kimberly Kane. That was my exaggeration of a Hollywood porn scene. But then, I'm from New York, so, you've got scenes shot in the Chelsea Hotel. You've got scenes shot in and around where I'm from. You have local girls that have never done anything else before. You have big stars from the Hollywood system. All kinda swirling together, in my mind, as I do it. And then it's just, where's the Zipper gonna turn up next? What's gonna happen?
AVN: I guess the big question is, why porn?
Jack: Porn is the punk rock of movies. I thought that as I got older I'd end up being a filmmaker, because I assumed I'd mature into being able to cut it. And as I progressed I realized that the porn industry is wide open to anybody. It's a very democratic system. And there seems to be a void in a sense that a lot of people love porn, spend billions of dollars on it every year, yet complain about it visually quite a bit.
AVN: Has it been a conscious effort of yours to sort of fuse legitimate moviemaking with pornography and bring that back and make it a legitimate art form again?
Jack: That is a conscious decision on my part, yes.
AVN: And where do you draw your inspiration from? Where do you get your ideas?
Jack: From people. From people I know. From knowing beautiful women. From spending time with beautiful, powerful women, that's where the ideas come from.
AVN: And why the title Stuntgirl? Where does that come from?
Jack: I came up with that probably seven or eight years ago, and it was for a very different idea, but it just stuck in my head. I picked it off the Name Tree. Plus at first, I was kind of doing these dare devil experiments with pushing girls to be dare devils, psychologically, in situations. Putting girls in — well this is good, because Andrew Blake and I actually discussed this yesterday — you're not humiliating girls on film, you are putting them in pressure cooker situations, and you're seeing them rise to the occasion and be beautiful and be sexy at the same time. That's the experiment.
AVN: So who is Jack the Zipper, and what's his philosophy on life?
Jack: My philosophy is ... not my philosophy, but my take on it is that Jack the Zipper is at his best, at his best, Jack the Zipper is almost like a really good DJ, spinning porn. And the other side of the coin for me is that every male character and every male fan is in fact Jack the Zipper. So anybody ends up being Jack the Zipper, in the right circumstances. Jack the Zipper is male energy, and it can show up anytime, anyplace.
