except, of colurse, in the early days of his film making career where, Henri Pachard, aka Ron Sullivan made demented, pre-hardcore flicks like Purity & Innocence on a regular basis for the 42nd Street art house crowd. We talked to Sullivan this past weekend on the set of Babewatch where he was just simply hanging out and enjoying his wife Dolores' tri-tip steak recipe. Many of Sullivan's films from the mid-1960's are available from Something Weird Video in Seattle. nnSullivan: "The very first movie I did in New York, that I produced with my own money was Scare Their Pants Off. The director was John Madden who got lost at sea in a small sailboat off of Cape Hateras. I had to finish the movie. I didn't know what I was doing. The movie was so bad, I couldn't give it away." nnG. Ross: "Sez you. I remember it being wonderfully demented where two guys in masks invite these girls to their house.." nnSullivan: "Yes...yes. And they scare the shit out of them. The thing unique about it is when it was shot, the camera picked up a glimpse of this girl's pubic hair. We looked at it and figure we could cut that out. I showed the scene to Lee Hessel who put out films like Cry Uncle. I was showing it to him in the screening room, trying to make some kind of deal. We saw that few seconds worth of beaver. That's when I first heard the word. Hessel said, 'They've been experimenting with the beaver out on the coast.' This was 1967. They've been experimenting with the beaver. Then the next phrase I heard about a year later, because beaver was becoming more pronounced in the movies, was, 'there's a lot of beaver and a little bit of pickle.' That was the movement of the business. It was beginning to heat up. nn"But Scare Their Pants Off was my very first movie and I followed that up with Lust Weekend, the very first one that Jane Waters starred in. And we had the same girl with the beaver in this movie. I directed that movie and had Edgar Loew, who was one of the heirs to the theater empire - he was a loney kid with a lot of money - his family was always in Europe. They left him alone with a caretaker in this great big old house on the upper East side. I got him to put money in the movie." nnG. Ross: "Things haven't changed too much." nnSullivan: "We put up a whopping $7,000 and shot this film in three days. I was able to make a deal with that movie and unload the Scare Their Pants Off movie at the same time with Art and Howie at Distribpix. That was my career. I got the entree into the adult business. My next picture was The Bizarre Ones with Sam Lake. That's the one where we had a girl tied to the topf of a Volkswagen - Mary Claire Sharma. That was also in 1967. Then we made The Erotic Circus and Headless Eyes. I didn't direct Headless Eyes, I produced Headless Eyes with Kent Bateman the director. [Sullivan's recollection is that it stars Bo Svenson who was in The Great Waldo Pepper.] This movie Headless Eyes was a little horror movie made on the same budget as a sex movie. I helped make it because I needed to make a pay check. I worked on a horror movie instead of a normal sex movie. nn"In fact I did a rock video in 1990 [for the music group Two Bit Thief]. Rock videos are tough, they're very degrading, dehumanizing to make. To make a rock video you get people from New York who represent the label and their publicity people flying out. They must rent a whole plane because there's about 30 or 40 of those people that follow you and ask too many questions. I spent two days shooting that movie just to make a paycheck. That was the only two times that I got away from pornography. Two Bit Thief was the worst heavy metal rock band I ever heard. They were out of San Francisco. The leader of the band was Andy Anderson, one of the nicest guys and a very good friend of Mike Rubenstein [Devil's Films]. They were tight friends and it was through Mike that me, Mike and Alex de Renzy put together Rosebud. About six months later, Mike and Alex bought me out for so much money I couldn't say no. Mike never missed a payment. When my son began that Cheerleader Search line, I took him to see Michael. They've been a team for the last three years. nn"But my career began with the nudie cuties, the horror/splatter sexers, sexploitations, the roughies - they had all kinds of names for them. We were doing this in New York while in California they were shooting the beach movies." nnG. Ross: "The subject matter of films in that era are pretty much akin to what you've seen in the Rough Sex videos." nnSullivan: "Same thing." nnG. Ross: "Except you have the hardcore. You had girls getting tits cut off..." nnSullivan: "Tongues cut out... like in Olga's Place." nnG. Ross: "People shooting up." nnSullivan: "That's the only way you could get them in the theaters. They had no real sex but they had sensational trailers...you could run 15 minutes of trailers. Sometimes you'd buy a ridiculous movie from Europe then you'd cut in two minutes worth of stuff of girls opening their blouses and that would be it. They'd pack these porno houses. They had the Rialto Theater, the Hudson Theater in New York.." nnG. Ross: "Philadelphia had the Studio, The Palace, the Art Holiday..." nnSullivan: "That was Eddie Seretsky's place. I wonder if he's still alive....there were so many of them, Harold Sugarman, Sam Lake, so many of these guys died starting in the mid-seventies, early eighties. They started dropping off like flies. The business became more hardcore and more outrageous. When we first started in hardcore it was all experimental. I remember Surepix came out with all those blowjob movies. All that stuff out of Surepix was making a lot of money for the art theaters. Then we just kept getting hotter and hotter. Then we started using the story concepts from the softcore days that had a lot of violence. This all started in the early seventies when Deep Throat was already running. These things started opening up in more theaters. Then somebody got scared. I think it was a mail order operation [Sullivan suspects it might have been Adam & Eve] that had a lot of unfluence on what we were about to shoot. They really influenced ther industry out here. Cut out the rape. Make sure it's all consenting, make sure it's all happy, smiling vanilla sex. They wanted to cast the biggest possible net and not get busted; and for good reason. It costs so much money to defend yourself. nn"Now comes video with more and more product being shot. All the more reason why you have to go safer. You put out ten movies a month, you better not have one movie in there that's going to start a controversy. In the last ten years we've been making movies for the wholesale buyer and the retail owner, the guy that's got a whole lot of stuff. But we haven't been making movies for the end user. The video series, however, is succeeding more and more because the end user can find it. He can find what he's looking for. nn"Right now I got two video lines that I do for All Good Video, Dirty Little Sex Brats, we're about to shoot part 12, and Submissive Litle Sluts which is the perfect format for me. It's the vignette with dialog. It's ideal. We have two days to shoot it in. Eli takes good care of me. They not only pay me well, they treat me like I'm a director and writer. Imagine. Then I do two or three lines with Gentlemen's Video. What I've been doing with Gentlemen's is less directing and more actual shooting, working with new directors and encourage them. I really enjoy doing that. I never had a chance to that with my own son. But I know I can help these young people. I enjoy working with new technicians. nnThere's this fellow Matt Holder, I use him as our director of videography on the All Good series. The guy has just got a gift. He's a young man with a bedside manner, so when he gets down there to shoot a sex scene, he gets as close to these kids and talks to them and heats it up.
All models were at least 18 years old at the time of their performance. 18 U.S.C. 2257 Record-Keeping Requirements Compliance Statement.
