HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—For the first time in more than 30 years, Café Flesh, director Rinse Dream's phantasmagorical post-apocalyptic hardcore film, was again shown on Saturday night in Hollywood, thanks to the programmers of Cinefamily, which screens a variety of independent and artistic films at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax Avenue.
The film was shown as part of Cinefamily's "artcore" program, which also included a collection of short films shown under the label "Sexperiments," and also Dream's first hardcore effort, Nightdreams, which played on Sunday night.
But what made Saturday night's program particularly interesting for adult movie fans was the appearance of Rinse Dream himself, under his real name, Stephen Sayadian. Also on the ticket was Sayadian's frequent collaborator, writer Jerry Stahl, who had co-written Café Flesh with Sayadian.
"This guy who looked exactly like Marty Allen [from the old comedy team of Allen & Rossi] said to us, 'Stephen, this man will give you $90,000; just give me a nice collage of cumshots. Take out the story; just make it beautiful. Just give me six beautiful cumshots'," Sayadian told the audience. "I said, 'So that's all you want?' He said, 'Yeah.'"
But it's not as though Sayadian was a stranger to porn. After seeking jobs at magazines like National Lampoon and the Playboy spin-off Oui, someone suggested that Sayadian try approaching the owner of a "strange little porn magazine" named Hustler, which was then based in Ohio—and the rest is history.
Since Sayadian was primarily a visual artist, Hustler owner Larry Flynt put him to work creating, with writer Jerry Stahl, ads parodying familiar products, several of which were displayed on the theater's screen. For example, Sayadian made a huge mock-up of a box of Cream of Wheat, with a live black man's head appearing in the center of the logo, and a young woman kneeling down in front of the box, with her mouth at about the level where the man's penis would be. Similar types of ads were created for Liquid Paper, Alka-Seltzer, Texaco (showing four guys in spotless white uniforms), Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix ... and Marlboro cigarettes.
"We used to have Marlboro as a client at Hustler," Sayadian recalled. "This was in the early days, like in ’75. Then when the magazine started doing all the outrageous stuff that Larry and I and other people started creating, they pulled out, and Larry, being the trailblazer that he is, said, 'Fuck you; I'm gonna do my own ads.'"
That Marlboro ad was a perfect example. The setting is a hospital cancer ward, with several beds occupied by obvious cancer sufferers—and a life-size camel, perhaps a nod to Marlboro's competitor, Camel cigarettes.
Hustler was also one of the first adult magazines to sell sex toys, and Sayadian created a series of often-humorous ads to sell the products.
"I had to come up with ideas for these new products, like a dildo in a vibrating doll, and we had a whole veggie department, so I said, 'Why don't we make a vibrating pear?'" he explained. "And I remember, it came in three types you could order: Anjou, Bartlett and Bosc. I just think it's great because Bosc was just outselling everything two-to-one. It was our biggest selling item, was the vibrating pear. I actually got a bonus for that."
However, Sayadian refused to say what part, if any, he had had in creating the Jerry Falwell Campari liquor ad, which became the basis for Falwell's suit against Hustler and Flynt, which case was eventually decided in Flynt's favor by the United States Supreme Court, enshrining a nearly bulletproof defense for ads and other writings parodying the rich and famous.
It was Sayadian who got Stahl, his friend since 1967, his job at Hustler.
"We hired Jerry because he was winning prestigious writing awards," Sayadian recalled. "He won a Pushcart Prize, which is really a very prestigious award, but we hired him and brought him in. He would come in on Monday about 10:30 from New York, stay till about Thursday night, and by Friday, he was back on a plane to New York. But the best story is, about a year ago, I was with Larry Flynt, and he said to me, 'Stephen, I see Jerry Stahl's novels and all these great TV credits he has; did he used to work for me?' I said, 'Yes, he was the best writer you ever had in 40 years of putting out your magazine.' So he goes, 'Why didn't we use him more?' So I said, 'You're asking me that now? I was screaming about it then!'"
Regarding Café Flesh, Sayadian explained that it had been shot in a 2,500-square-foot loft on Hollywood Boulevard, right across the street from the famous Musso & Frank's restaurant, and just down the block from a Pussycat Theater.
"It was an exciting place to make a film; a lot of creativity," Sayadian said. "We were just around the corner from one of L.A.'s first punk clubs. ... That's how I met Wall of Voodoo. I thought they were the greatest sound, and I just said, 'I'm going to steal some of this.'"
In fact, Sayadian hired Wall of Voodoo to perform the soundtrack for Nightdreams, and it was Sayadian who created the beautiful desert motifs for Wall of Voodoo's first hit music video, "Mexican Radio."
"We shot everything in what was called tungsten light," he explained. "Most still photographers use a strobe; we used tungsten all through this stuff ... so we had a lot of experience with composition because of the photo shoots, so in a way, it was bringing these fixed-composition photo shoots to life."
Indeed; Café Flesh as a "look" unlike any other adult movie of its time ... or any time. In its review of the film, AVN reviewer I.L. Slifkin called it "a brave, creative step in adult filmmaking. Indeed, it is as strange a film as you’ll ever see, adult or not, and its makers, director Creme Rinse [sic] and writer [sic] F.X. Pope [Frank Delia] are to be applauded for continuously keeping the film interesting, both visually and sexually."
However, even Sayadian admitted that it would be hard to jack off to the movie. Virtually every scenario is beautifully designed and eye-catching—but the hardcore sex is barely shown, and those who perform it are dressed in unusual (to say the least) costumes: A man wearing a mouse head mask licks one gal's pussy and eventually fucks her, while another wearing a striped suit and a giant yellow pencil tip for a head is blown by a secretary and fucks her missionarily. Nearby, another nude secretary taps aimlessly on an old typewriter, asking, “Do you want me to type a message?”
What's more memorable, though, are the characters that populate Café Flesh, starting with the club's Master of Ceremonies, Max Mellow-Drama (Andrew Nichols), who early on informs the audience (many of whom were hirees poached from a local blood bank when Sayadian realized he needed more audience shots to complete the film) that since the nuclear war left 99 percent of the population "sex negative"—that is, unable to engage in any sexual activity without becoming nauseous—the only place to see actual sex being performed by the 1 percent who remain "sex positive" is at Café Flesh.
Two frequent visitors to the club are Nick (Paul McGibboney) and his girlfriend Lana (Pia Snow aka Michelle Bauer, in one of her few hardcore appearances). Nick and Lana are introduced to Angel (Marie Sharp), a girl "just in from Wisconsin," whom government inspectors discover is a "sex positive," so she's immediately recruited to take part in Café Flesh's hardcore sex shows, one of which has her fucking two guys (including Ken Starbuck) while an animation of oil wells pumps away in the background.
One other interesting note: One uncredited—and non-sexual—appearance in the audience is then-nearly-unknown comedian Richard Belzer, who went on to fame and fortune on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The finale has Lana abandoning Nick to fuck the club's newest arrival, Johnny Rico (Kevin James), and the film ends just after the cumshot.
"I remember everybody said, 'The ending looks like it's been cut off so quick. What happened?'" Sayadian related. "What they don't know is, in the original film, he [Nick] hung himself off the stage, and he would swing in front of these people having sex, and it was a beautiful ending, but the guys who were funding it, they saw what we were doing and they said, 'No, you can't.' ... And Jerry had an idea for a better one, which was having the hero cut of his penis and hand it to her. I thought that was brilliant, and I really wanted to do that."
Even the filming of Café Flesh had its humorous moments.
"We had to hide the fact that we were shooting a hard, hard XXX film upstairs, and the landlord noticed all this constant activity, so he said, 'Stephen, what the heck's going on up there?' And I said, 'Sy, I got a deal with the Ice Capades.' I said, 'We're in rehearsal; that's why you see all these pretty girls.' And he said, 'What do you mean Ice Capades?' I said, 'You know; we're doing the choreography.' He said, 'But there's no ice up there.' I said, 'Well, you know, it starts with the lighting.' And on top of that, we needed 220 [amp] electricity to do the lighting, and we didn't have it, so we had to patch in the 220, and then my prop maker, he rebuilt the wall so that we had this wall covering the electricity."
But even in this more liberal time period, Sayadian had trouble selling his adult films to theatrical venues.
"There was a time where it was sort of post-Eraserhead, post-New Wave ... and we were so misguided, we would screen it all over town for all the wrong people. I would send stills to a bunch of low-budget companies, and they would see the stills and they would flip: 'This is great!' We didn't tell them that it was pornographic ... Jerry said that in the [screening] rooms, it was so quiet, you could hear a career drop."
So Sayadian gave up adult filmmaking, though he continued to work for Hustler for several years, and eventually drifted into mainstream, becoming the production designer for the first season of the detective series Silk Stalkings.
Also shown on Saturday evening was a six-minute excerpt from a Minneapolis news magazine program on local Channel 5, which had sent a reporter and camera crew to the Café Flesh set for a report on the rising interest in adult movies on videocassette. Of particular interest today is the fact that their report included, besides a few moments with two members of Morality in Media, a mini-interview with the late sexploitation (and occasionally hardcore) director David Friedman:
"Dave Friedman, a past president of the American Adult Film Association," the show reported, "believes that within the next few years, X-rated moviemakers will find it economically feasible to 'forgo the theatrical market, forgo the foreign theatrical market and strictly go for cassette and for cable ... I wouldn't be surprised if there's an X-rated satellite in the next three to five years that strictly handles X-rated material.'"
"They [news crew] were on the set more than I was," Sayadian said after the clip had been played. "And by the way, the woman, Mrs. Reid, the anti-pornographer, six months after that was filmed, she was busted for running a dominatrix business. She was known for giving the best spanking in Minneapolis," he claimed.
Sayadian also intimated that he's currently working on another hardcore movie, but gave no details.
