A recent article in Eye magazine made it pretty clear that editor/writer Rodger Jacobs wasn't going to see eye to eye with XXX Gen Magazine. Jacobs quit the fledgling adult publication as its West Coast editor after his article on the making of the documentary, Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes appeared in the mainstream mag.
"Creative differences," says Jacobs, laughing. "There was a misunderstanding on the exclusivity issue. They [XXX Gen] have a thing about wanting anyone they sign to be exclusive. They kept delaying getting my contractor's agreement to me. Essentially they wanted to take me off the adult magazine marketplace. I told them how much a month they would have to shell out for that. Then I ended up writing an article on the making of Wadd [the documentary] for Eye magazine which is a mainstream magazine. They went through the roof. They weren't happy about it. I told them taking me off the adult market market is one thing, but when a mainstream magazine commissions me to write an article on the porn industry, I'm going to write it. That's different. We differed on that issue, and I just resigned."
Jacobs was asked if a lot of those issues hadn't been ironed out before they became issues. "I thought it was pretty apparent," said Jacobs. "The language was right there in the emails I communicated to them. There was paranoia. They were starting to concede my point but they asked, 'How do we know that you're not researching a story for us then going around selling it to someone else? We weren't going to see eye to eye on it." Jacobs says he's still writing for Swank and Swank's Video World plus doing mainstream.
Then, again, the fact that Jacobs didn't quite see eye-to-eye with director Cass Paley on the making of the John Holmes documentary, all of which is documented in the Eye magazine article, lends credence to the suggestion that Jacobs won't be getting Thansgiving invites to the Paley household any time soon, either. Jacobs, who says he was hired on as associate producer for the documentary, calls Paley in the article "Captain Ahab incarnate".
"I signed on board Paley's version of the Pequod solely to escape drudge work on dry land - namely, the sun-baked pavement of LA's San Fernando Valley, where the adult film industry flourishes," Jacobs goes on to write. Jacobs says he spent seven years "trolling" through the murky waters of porn, prostituting his writing talents for "spare bits of coin". That's the stand-up-and-cheer part of the article. Jacobs goes on to chronicle, among other things, his divorce setllement along with an interview with, and impressions of Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson. Jacobs is of the opinion that Boogie Nights, inspired by Holmes, though a "mesmerizing" film, was looked at with a dim view by the adult industry. That being the perceived case, Wadd, according to Jacobs, "set out to be the social document that would set the record straight about the life and times of John C. Holmes specifically and the adult entertainment industry in general". Jacobs lends the impression that Paley was whitewashing his subject. "The movie would be colored by a pornographer's sensibility, a flesh peddler's urgent need to defend the morality of a lascivious enterprise," Jacobs says.
That Paley and Jacobs shared differing views of Holmes is rather apparent when Jacobs writes, "In the end, my vision of Wadd as a dark Faustian tale would be overruled by Cass Paley's vision of the film as a "bacchanalian, trailer-park Rashomon." In Jacobs' opinion, Holmes was "a vile piece of scum".
"He was pure fucking evil," Jacobs goes on to say. "The joke of it all is the way people reflect back on him as a nice guy. It's like the closing line in The Usual Suspects :The greatest trick the devil ever played was in convincing man he didn't exist." Possibly in an attempt to earn additional brownie points with Paley, Jacobs describes the director's efforts to submit Wadd to as many film festivals as possible, thusly, "Like a farmer desperately milking the udder of the only cow in the barn." J
