Director Jim Gunn who wound up on the front cover of The New York Daily News Wednesday morning says he's being interviewed by Inside Edition on the Star matter. The interview will appear in the next couple of days.
Gunn: "The New York Daily News has my picture from an article from two years ago. I might have done Marylin's last two movies. She had done Strap On Sally 13 & 14 and Penis Envy 1 & 2 this year in 1999 when she was living down here. After the summer I lost contact with her. I think she retired. I had nothing to do with Marylin Does Miami. She did that herself with one of her friends. As far as I know it never got released. She promoted it a lot. She's a very good self-promoter.
"In 1997 there was a five-page article in the entertainment section of the New York Daily News about porn. It came out at the time of Boogie Nights. One of the Daily News writers [Chris Erickson] and photographers came and spent a long day on my set of Strap On Sally 11 &12. Those guys who came were really nice. They had a lot of fun on that set. But it was one of the better industry articles I've seen. A picture of Marylin was in that article, but I think she was only mentioned in it once. But they did have a lot of pictures of her.
"But I guess somebody at the paper remembered that and put two and two together about Marylin."
[This is the story on Gunn which appeared in The New York Daily News 10-19-97]
It's days like this that make Jim Gunn glad he decided not to pursue a career in marketing. It's a few minutes after 1 p.m. on a sparkling October Saturday, and Gunn's workday is just getting underway. Dressed in a T-shirt, nylon warm-up pants and Nike Air Jordans, he's perched on the deck of a handsome, secluded home in the Hamptons, which is equipped with a pool, a hot tub and a platoon of voluptuous young women who've come to spend the weekend with him.
There are complications to contend with, however. Right now Gunn is worried about the neighbors. "Listen," he says, addressing two of the women, who are naked and writhing a few feet away in a state of apparent sexual ecstasy, "You don't need to be so loud. The mike is right there." Duly lowering the volume a notch, the pair turn their attentions back to the business at hand.
Gunn, 28, has come to the Hamptons to shoot a sex movie. As the mainstream film world buzzes over "Boogie Nights," a fictional account of a '70s porn impresario, Gunn is in the middle of a three-day shoot that will yield the 11th and 12th installments of his "Strap-On Sally" series, a triple-X lesbian love fest geared, he says, to "the all-girl aficionado."
An agreeable sort with pale, boyish features and a nervous laugh, Gunn is director of production for the New Jersey-based Pleasure Productions, one of the country's largest purveyors of adult entertainment. The company manufactures and distributes 25 movies and CD-ROMs every month, several of which Gunn produces and directs personally.
"We do gay, straight, amateur, she-male, bisexual, fetish-oriented stuff," he says. "We have every oar in the water."
As such, Gunn, who holds a degree in business administration, has a hand in the lion's share of the adult movies filmed in and around New York City, which is only a bit player in the West Coast-dominated porn industry, accounting for only a small fraction of the country's product.
As a director, Gunn's efforts include the "Canadian Beaver Hunt" and "East Coast Sluts" series, but the Strap-On Sally films, the first of which he shot four years ago in a porn actress's New Jersey home, are his most popular. So this weekend he's assembled a cast of 11 women from up and down the East Coast and a crew of five - an assistant director, a cameraman, a still photographer and two make-up artists - to crank out a couple more.
So far the shooting, which wrapped the night before at around 2:30 a.m., has been largely trouble free. Two women had arrived without proof of a recent negative AIDS test, which is mandatory on such a shoot these days, and had to be driven to a lab in Manhattan that gives Gunn a discount. But otherwise all is going smoothly.
One reason for this, explains cameraman T.H. Royal, is that the "girl on girl" nature of the film has eliminated one of the business's biggest potential complications.
"You can literally count on one hand the guys who can perform time in and time out," he says. "You can end up with problems periodically."
A balding, mensch-like fiftysomething clad in shorts and sandals, Royal is a veteran of dozens of sex films. His is not a job for the bashful - in order to get the kind of intimate shots the genre requires, he spends much of his time maneuvering around flailing limbs. He enjoys the work, he says, because of the laid-back attitude and the friendly camaraderie on the average porn set.
"It's a nice group of people," he says. "It's nothing like the way you see it portrayed. Every time a porn shoot is depicted on TV it's made out to be extremely sleazy. It's not that way at all. People have a lot of fun."
The scene inside the house bears him out. Women in robes and curlers chat amiably around a table strewn with cosmetics. Several have brought their husbands, who sit across the airy living room watching football and reading magazines, as a sweatsuited blond stretches in preparation for an upcoming scene. Coffee and Diet Coke are the strongest substances in sight (and will remain so until after sundown, when a few of the husbands switch to Budweiser).
If it weren't for the adult video trade mags on the table, the occasional exposed breast and the boxes of sex toys that dominate one corner, this could be a group of friends assembled for a weekend in the country. That, of course, and the graphic sex acts being performed outside the sliding glass door.
By 2 p.m. the porch scene - which features the star of the Strap-On Sally series, Chantilly Lace, and a hanging contraption that's halfway between a hammock and a gynecologist's examining table -has been completed. Lace, a slight woman with a cascade of red curls and a pair of mammoth breasts, gathers her things and heads inside while her scene partner, Nicole Landon, rejoins her husband, who has been watching the proceedings intently.
Landon, a six-year strip club veteran at age 25, is a newcomer to the porn world - this is only her second feature. She and her husband, Rob, 24, rode the bus ten hours from Toronto to do this shoot and one other. Having been married five months earlier, they consider the trip their honeymoon.
How does Rob, a former construction worker with a goatee and a hoop in each ear, feel about his wife's budding career? "I love it," he says. "This is every man's fantasy, whether they choose to admit it or not."
His enthusiasm doesn't extend to the possibility of his wife being filmed with another man, however, she'll do "boy-girl" scenes with him only. (Such a policy is not uncommon - it's shared by several of the women on the shoot. But, says Gunn, it's a hard one to maintain for women who want to get steady work, and is often abandoned.)
Both Rob and Nicole are emphatic in their conviction that porn is a respectable career choice, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a hypocrite. "It's a legitimate job like any other. It's what I do and I'm okay with it," says Nicole. "Hollywood using sex, or Budweiser using girls in their ads - people think that's respectable and this is not. The only thing different with this is that the cards are on the table."
Her father, she acknowledges, is not inclined to see it that way. Part of the problem, she and Rob agree, is that people are misguided about the business. "It's a lot of hard work," says Rob. "The perception is that all we do is drink, do drugs, and that we're all sex fiends. I don't do drugs; I drink, but not on the job; and I have sex, but it's with my wife."
While the crew and cast get ready for the second scene, the owner of the house, a friendly middle-aged woman who did not want her name or the house's exact location disclosed, lays out a meal of pasta and salad. The woman, who is getting somewhere around a thousand dollars a day for use of the house, met Gunn through a photographer friend, and agreed to let him shoot at the house last fall. She had no reservations about having him back,she says.
"Listen, these people are absolutely nicer and more considerate than the yuppies who rent my place during the summer," she says, as the crew digs in.
While "Boogie Nights" examines the fledgling days of the mainstream porn industry, in 1997 the sex business is exploding. Almost 8,000 hardcore titles will be released this year, according to the trade journal Adult Video News (AVN), compared to 3224 in 1994 and less than half that in 1991. This year the porn industry will generate over $4 billion, double the figure from 1993.
While expanding global communications have created an bigger market for porn, Gunn attributes much of the phenomenal growth to an increased aura of respectability around the once-shady business.
"It's not so taboo anymore. It's not like it was back in the '70s, when there were a couple dozen people doing it. Society as a whole is becoming more tolerant," he says.
"The Penthouse Pets of the Year for '96 and '95 are both adult movie stars," he points out. "If you had suggested that to Bob Guccione ten years ago he would have laughed at you. The business is being glamorized. Girls see that and they're coming out of the woodwork."
Budgets for porn movies range anywhere from $4-5,000 for the "down and dirty" variety to $65,000 for a top-end feature. Gunn says the budgets for this weekend's projects - $10-15,000 apiece - is about average. Much of that goes to pay the talent, who get between $200 and $1000 a scene, depending on their star quotient and the exact nature of the scene. While there are extremely sketchy story lines - one involves Lace's efforts to put together an Internet broadcast - there are no scripts: Gunn feeds the actresses a few lines of dialogue to open and close each scene.
After lunch it's back to work. The next scene, which involves a love connection on a poolside chaise lounge, is interrupted when voices are heard over the back fence, which borders on an empty field. While the shoot is perfectly legal, Gunn is not anxious to be discovered - if the police are called, as has happened before, hassles and wasted time can result. Shooting resumes quickly, though, and soon another scene is in the can.
For 26-year-old Jennifer Worthington, one of the scene's leading ladies, performing lesbian sex acts on camera is a far cry from both her last job - as a social worker helping mentally retarded adults - and her upbringing. As a student at a private Christian school from kindergarten through 12th grade, the Allentown, Pennsylvania native was "shy and repressed."
That began to change after she graduated from prestigious Lafayette College in nearby Easton, when she took a job stripping to pay off her student loans. The transformation took a while, however.
"I cried the first time I got naked on stage," she recalls. "I thought God would strike me dead."
Two years later, with the money rolling in, she quit her social work job. Now, between shoots for magazines like Swank and Hustler, she spends much of her time touring strip clubs with her manager/husband, trying to build a career as a "feature entertainer." Like a lot of porn actresses, that goal is what brought her to doing films - movie credits help to build a name on the competetive strip circuit, where a top entertainer can earn up to $5000 a week. "The club owners want movie credits. So I figured I'll do a few girl-on-girl movies and shut them up," she says.
While she likes her work, particularly the travel, she plans to retire in a couple of years, to have kids, and maybe to pick back up on her initial career goal - to be a herpetologist, taking care of exotic animals. For now, though, she's sticking with the sex business. "Once you get a taste of living a certain way, you can't go back to making $350 a week," she says.
In his years of shooting pornography, assistant director Neville Chambers has learned a thing or two. Right now, in the kitchen, he's putting one of them to use: his recipe for fake semen, which will be used later in a scene featuring squirting dildos. (The ingredients: egg whites, half-and-half and confectionery sugar.) A somewhat rogueish Brit with a background in the music business (he's worked for the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix), Chambers is a director in his own right, most notably of the "Streets of New York" series, which features couples having sex in various public places around the city. "I haven't been caught yet," he says, knocking on wood.
The next order of business is the "box shoot," a still photo shoot featuring Chantilly Lace and the film's other "name" actress, Marilyn Star, which will produce an image for the video box. As the vinyl-clad starlets strike an endless series of poses in the front foyer, the third scene gets underway in an upstairs bedroom.
As the day wears on, it becomes clear that one thing porn shoots have in common with regular film production is that they involve a lot of waiting around. Perhaps slightly more than average on this particular set - while Gunn is well liked by the cast and crew, there is occasional grumbling about his laid-back approach to the shooting schedule as afternoon creeps into evening.
Gunn has been with Pleasure Productions since 1991, but his first foray into the sex industry dates back to his days as a student at SUNY Albany. A porn enthusiast, he sent a story in to a flesh mag in response to an ad, and got a $50 check in return. Encouraged, he began contributing regularly to a series of publications. Meanwhile, he recalls, "my friends were working in the greasy cafeteria cleaning forks and knives" for their spending money.
After graduating, Gunn figured he was headed for the corporate track, but the economy was in a slump and jobs were hard to come by. After a series of interviews at "boring, stupid marketing companies," he shifted his strategy and sent resumes out to a few porn companies. Pleasure Productions took him on in the marketing department, and he moved into production a year later.
He's never looked back. He enjoys the work, he likes the people, and he loves being surrounded by attractive women. "Believe me, I'm very happy with my choice," he says. "I'm doing something that I'm interested in, and I get to exercise my creativity, such as it is. It's a challenge."
He's well aware that not everyone holds pornographers in the utmost regard. But he rejects as prudishness the notion that porn is an unwholesome business that degrades women or is otherwise harmful.
"What's so wrong with sex that women have to be degraded by it?" he asks. "Society's idea is that there's something wrong with sex. I reject that idea. Sex isn't bad. What we're doing isn't bad, and people who think it is are wrong. I'm proud of what I do."
As the clock ticks toward midnight and tins of takeout Chinese make the rounds, nerves are beginning to fray a bit. The owner of the house becomes upset when she finds polaroid stills in the trash, where they might be later discovered, and the make-up artists are getting frustrated with the slow pace. "It's late, I'm exhausted, and I've seen too much sex," says one.
For some, though, the night is just beginning. RayVeness, a doe-eyed porn starlet from Jamestown, North Carolina, and Delaine, a beautiful and extroverted 19-year-old dominatrix from Boston, whose tart tongue and lack of inhibition impress even the seen-it-all porn crew, have just arrived. They've been cast in the day's final scene, an orgy involving five women.
A former certified nurse's assistant, RayVeness got her start in the porn business several years ago, when she and her husband, inspired by a Sally Jessie Raphael segment on amateur porn, made a video of themselves having sex and sold it. At the time they were both having trouble finding work, so when the company asked for another, they obliged. A lifelong exhibitionist by her own account ("My dad wanted me to be a sweet little girl next door. But I used to dress like Madonna"), she then had the idea to become a dancer.
"I wanted to make some fast money and I thought, 'I could do that,' " she says. "The money was triple what I would have made doing something in the medical field."
Since then she's made over 100 movies, and racked up thousands of miles on the stripping circuit, where she's an established draw with her own fan club and a signature line of sex toys. In fact, her notoriety just got her booted from the volunteer fire department in Jamestown, a small burg where she was born and raised. She likes the work, but says it's time for her to get out.
"There are too many girls getting into the business. On the feature circuit they either want some huge star who's going to line them up around the block, or someone younger who'll do it cheaper. And right now there are so many girls who are 18 who'll do anything for a couple hundred bucks. How are we supposed to compete with that?"
So right now RayVeness is chasing a new ambition - to become a country singer. In pursuit of her goal she's been writing songs and establishing contacts in Nashville. "I figure as a singer I can keep my clothes on and get the same kind of attention I get as a stripper," she says. She doesn't have a record deal yet, but she already knows what the title of her first record will be - "Second Chances."
It's now 1 a.m., and the long hours are beginning to wear on Chantilly Lace, who's shooting a desktop scene with Star in the second-floor office. "I can't even think. I've been here too long," she says, after flubbing a line. Gunn is tired as well - at one point he dozes off a few feet from where the women are going through the paces. But the scene is completed, leaving only one to go. A few cries of "orgy" go up as the wrap is announced.
Downstairs, RayVeness's husband, himself a porn star who goes by the name Red Boan, is echoing his wife's gripes. After seven years and over 130 films, he wants out of the business as well. With the current glut of both product and porn star wannabees, pay has dropped and demands on the actors have increased as the companies try to outdo each other, he says.
Boan attributes the flood of new talent to in part to exposure from TV talk shows. "The girls go on these shows and talk about how much money they make and how much fun it is and how glamorous the lifestyle is," he says. "And where are the girls who are 14, 15? They're at home watching."
Talking to the women on the set, it becomes clear that despite whatever attitudes Middle America may have toward porn stars, the business does in fact offer them a sense of allure. The word "glamour" is one that comes up regularly in discussing the business. After all, porn stars are highly paid entertainers, with fan clubs, Web sites and busy itineraries.
Landon, who "always wanted to perform and act," notes the similarities between her lot and that of a "legitimate" actress. "You have a call time, you have make-up, you have wardrobe," she says. "There's a fine line between the sex industry and the Hollywood industry."
While most of the women say, in answer to perhaps the most oft-asked question about porn, that actual on-camera sex is more about work than sexual gratification, some are clearly are attracted to the erotic nature of the business, and the opportunity to be around other sexually uninhibited people. A candid and straightforward bunch, the women all speak of pride in what they do, and reject outright the notion that it's degrading work.
"When you go in to do a movie, they ask what you're willing to do and they tell you how much you're getting," says Ray Veness. "You know what you're getting into or you wouldn't be doing it. How can that be degrading?"
After 3 a.m., the orgy scene finally gets underway. It begins with five clothed women lined up on a couch, who occasionally giggle with each other as they prepare to shoot, and ends some time later in a vigorous tangle of limbs and sex toys.
Then, by 4:30, it's over and the day is finished. Gunn will later pronounce the project to be "a very successful shoot, one of the best I've ever done. We had really pretty girls, and every scene was hot." After the movies come out early next year, he thinks he's got a real shot at winning Best All-Girl Movie or Scene at the next AVN Awards, the porn equivalent of the Oscars.
There's a smattering of applause as the proverbial curtain comes down, then people quickly gather their stuff and make tracks. A few hardy souls head for the hot tub, but most are off to nearby motels, or bedrooms upstairs where there are matresses covering the floor. They're tired after 15 hours of shooting, and they need their rest - tomorrow they've got to get up and do it all over again.
