Max Hardcore, minus, Gia, was on Ed Powers' show Saturday night via telephone hookup. Ed was in Denver on a promotional tour and had local swingers Randy and JJ in his studio with him. The subject never did get around to Scotty Schwartz, and Randy was the first to pose a question to Max.
Randy said he was concerned that Max was starting to push the extremes, and did he worry about the Federal government coming down on him.
Max: "It's a good question, but, unfortunately there's no simple answer for that. For those listeners who might be unfamiliar with the Max Hardcore videos and the difference between mine and Ed Powers', our videos are very aggressive - a very strong style of lovemaking. It's aggressive. It's vigorous I would say. As in real life it's hard to tell whether the girl's in pleasure or pain; if she's in the ecstasy of the moment. But I can tell you it's all done in good fun. The girls know what they're getting into. None of them have walked away on crutches. On the other hand, the other half of the question is this, am I concerned that the federal government or any law enforcement jurisdiction may decide to clamp down, put the screws on us and have some prosecutions? The fact is, there's attacks on the adult community every day. This is a very important issue. It involves a couple of different facets. The first is, as Ed was pointing out, and very rightfully so, before, what people choose to do and watch in the privacy of their own home is their own business. This is what our country was founded on, and it's a tenant of our Constitution that our federal government should not interfere with peoples' religious rights, their rights to view certain material; to write certain material - Freedom of Speech - to be able to say what you believe even though it may not be popular with a large segment of the population. That's one aspect.
"Let's not forget. There's video shops all across America that are under constant attack at the local level from law enforcement agencies who will go in, buy a video tape or several video tapes, and there's no rhyme or reason to what they choose to prosecute. They'll take four or five or a dozen videotapes in front of a grand jury. They'll impanel the grand jury. They'll have the grand jury watch the videotapes and the government will say we feel that these videos are obscene, and they'll present it to the grand jury and get their opinion. If the grand jury feels that they may be obscene but are not quite sure, that's grounds for indicting the book store that actually sold the videotapes. They won't indict me at that point. They won't indict my distribution company, Legend Video Inc., here in California. They'll go after the local level because they know that these small book shops and video shops don't have the resources to fight city hall. This is happening every day all over the country whether it be Dallas, Des Moines, Miami, Seattle, everywhere you look they're under constant attack.
"So far, in the last couple of years, no large distributors have been indicted on obscenity or trafficking in obscenity, since I believe the early 90's, but I stand to be corrected on that. What they do is they're chipping away at the local level. And this hurts us all. The reason that people came to America in the first place is that we wanted to be free. We didn't want to be told what to read, what to watch. We don't want to live in Red China. We don't want to live in these places like Iran or Iraq where the dogma comes down from the head of state and that's the only truth you get. We want to be able to watch non-violent, x-rated material in the privacy of our own homes and enjoy it; or reject it. Whatever. But we want that choice. I think most Americans want that choice.
"The final point I wanted to make is this. In America, we seem to be boiling everything down to the level of children. That's the final straw that the right wing and the anti-porn crusaders have been using - it harms children. That's not my problem. That's not your problem. That's the problem of parents to keep adult material as well as handguns and cigarettes and bombs out of the hands of children. I'm not a policeman. I'm not a social guidance counselor. I'm a pornographer. I have the right to make the material that I make. You have the right to watch it or not watch it. But you should have that right. We shouldn't have to boil everything down in our country that's made, manufactured or imported into the fact that it's got to be suitable for children. Not all medicine is suitable for children. Guns are not suitable for children. Cigarettes are not suitable. And certainly pornography is not suitable. We should not restrict our lives, or have our lives restricted or what we choose to view restricted because, well, maybe, just maybe, it could fall into the hands of children. It's a many faceted argument and I'm not here to defend the whole adult community. But you can see we're in a tricky situation, and I wanted to make myself clear on that.
Ed Powers: "That's why I say debate the issues, talk about the issues; see what we can do. We've discussed many things about safeguarding videos so that they would be adult-proof, that adults would be the only ones to access them through significant means. There's a lot of things to talk about - the chip on the Internet, and we really police ourselves a lot. There are a lot of out there who are naive to the fact that responsibility as an adult, in itself, is our responsibility. And that's where it lies, don't you agree?"
Max: "If you're asking me, Ed, I agree wholeheartedly. If you have children, you're the guardian of those children and it's up to the parents and the guardians of these children to make sure that they don't get their hands on poisons and drink them; that they don't fall off the balcony; that they don't run into streets and get hit by a car, that they don't smoke cigarettes, they don't take the whole bottle of daddy's tranquilizers in the medicine cabinet, and they don't watch pornography. But I got to tell you, of all those things I just mentioned. a children 8, 10, 12, 14, whatever, watching pornography is, I don't think, going to screw up their life like an overdose or getting hit by a car or falling off a balcony or any of that. It's just blown way out of proportion."
Ed Powers: "In any case it's harmful and we don't know to what degree. They should not see it. I'm sure you've seen these commercials where older brother-younger brother are playing and all of a sudden the younger brother sees the older brother smoking a joint, or attempting to smoke a joint. Aren't young kids seeing this? I'm not knocking the commercial, but do they interpret a commercial such as that as being my older brother shouldn't do that, or that it's wrong. What happens if the younger child watching that commercial can't read what it says? I think it's responsible upon the parent to explain that and not run away from that. Especially not run away from sex, to talk about it. You can't hide anything. If you hide anything from anybody, be it a small person or a big person, whether it be a child or adult you can't hide anything. Because you'll be harmful if you take something away without education. That's where education in the household, I think, is important. That's where we should be educating people more. We should be doing our best not to put it in the hands, one way or another, of our children of this country. The children of this country are the future of this country. Our time may now have passed, and the children are more important now than ever before. This has to be maintained, the strong country that it is."
Max: "Ed, you're sounding like a politician, here."
Ed Powers: "I'm more or less sounding like an American who really is fed up with people who are throwing stones, and throwing mud and bull crap and not being really serious about the things that really are important - that is to debate issues, not slam issues; to talk about things and not necessarily tell you things, that you can't do that and you can't do this. Why is it harmful? What's wrong with a son saying, dad, why can't I go out till eleven o'clock at night? Not questioning the judgment but wanting to know why. What is that there that I need to be home? Just because? That's not a responsible answer. Is it 'just because' what some of you out there say to your kids? Don't say just because. This is not a power-thing. Remember, you empower someone like that. You have no right to. Your privilege to have children is a privilege. Educate them. I don't know if that sounds like a politician, but that's how I feel."
Max: "I think you might be gearing up, Ed, and, hopefully, maybe you'll end up running for city council or something. We got to shake things up here in L.A., what with the Ramparts struggle. I wonder what hits kids and young adults and adults, for that matter, harder, when, every day, you know you can't trust the police. It's coming out that they've been caught planting dope on suspects and planting guns on them and shooting them and killing them. You can't even trust the police anymore. But I think we're straying a little far afield, and I didn't want to get off on the wrong step. I just wanted to say that we as Americans have the right and should have the right to view what we want and say what we want. We don't need Big Brother telling us what's okay and burning the rest of the books."
{Max gave a special hello to Julianna Sterling, Jade Marcella, Shauna Edwards, Cloey Adams and Allison Embers. Max said that Embers just worked for him at the Long Beach Grand Prix. He also said that he'd be in the Cannes Film Festival starting about May 15. "We're going to have the Hot Video Awards and parties over there," he said. "We're looking forward to that. As you know, they get porn stars from all over Europe and a few Americans, also. They all get together in Southern France on the French Riviera near Nice and Cannes and Monte Carlo. It's a big party and we're looking forward to having a great time. As some of my fans out there know, we always shoot when we're out there and come back with really great footage of the area and some of the prettiest girls that we've ever seen."
Max: "I thought there might be some people out there in radioland who are unfamiliar with our movies, and to bring people up to speed. I've been in the business now for about ten years., since 1990. I started getting things going with Zane and Cherry Poppers and those videos back then. In ten years I've made about 350 movies. I appear and star in most of my movies. And right now we're got a release of two movies per month coming out of Legend Video. And some of the lines people may be familiar with Hardcore School Girls; Maxed Out; Hollywood Hardcore; Max World; Planet Max and Max Extreme. In a couple of months we're going to be launching a line called Pure Max. At least that's the plan right now. We shoot about six months ahead. We shoot a girl today, she'll be out in about six months. We also have a website, maxhardcore.com for people who are connected to the World Wide Web. We also publish magazines worldwide and all our products and videos are distributed worldwide - and rubber goods, and playing cards and little knickknacks like that. It keeps us pretty busy."
Powers: "You said you put out two a month. Do you take turns with those?"
Max: "We have five video lines at any one time. I only take my releases to Volume 20 because I want to change things up. Some videos focus on newcomers. Some videos focus on traveling around the world like Planet Max. Planet Max will be released like six times a year. Hardcore Schoolgirls six times a year alternating every other month. In the meantime we're publishing magazines. To get the inside scoop to see what you're missing with the American releases, you have to go to maxhardcore.com. This is the stuff we can put on that can't pass the censorship board in the U.S. Of course in Europe anything flies. But on maxhardcore.com we have the more bizarre I would say. It's very inexpensive and there's also a lot of free stuff that people can look at. We try to keep it up to date, and every day or every other date we have new stuff on. It's got a chat board for members. We've got a couple of thousand members, now. A lot of thanks to this is my webmaster Gordy Cox. who is doing just a bang up job. What people will like about the website when they go to it, is, it's not what we call landmine.com where you enter a site and get taken goodness knows where- places you never want to see. It's what we call a boutique site and is very simple to navigate through it. The other great thing is if you don't like it, it's very easy to cancel. There's no complicated procedure to cancel. On there, we've got the Max magazine. We've got video clips that you can string together. We've got streaming video, polaroids we've taken from our sets, stories, quite a bit of good stuff that you can't get on the videos. It's really great so now people from all over the world can access our site, and if they have any questions for us, they can contact me directly right there at maxhardcore.com."
Ed Powers: "What does it cost to go onto your site?"
Max: "It depends. If you go in for a week, there's an $8 charge. If you want to stay on for a month, it's $19.95; for three months it's $39.95. The longer you stay, the cheaper it becomes. We also have a complete catalog of all my titles on there. And you can order easily with credit card or pay by check, or send in your money the old fashioned way. It's very easy to order. We have a fantastic mail order department run by a couple of guys that when the customer says jump we ask how high."
Ed Powers: "I think you missed your mark. Max and infomercials are synonymous."
Max: "We've got a lot of great products to sell because we've shot a lot of really great girls - some of the best girls that ever came to the business I was lucky enough to get like Barbie Angel and Lovette and Leanni Lei who just recently shot. There was some really great gals. And also some girls from Europe that nobody knows who they are. I don't even know who they are."
Ed Powers: "You actually have more girls now requesting to work with you than before. Is it more recent that I'm seeing this?"
Max: "Don't forget Anastasia Blue...I don't know. We get a lot of requests. The Max market is singularly popular, pretty unique. There's only a handful of people that are famous worldwide - there's Rocco, there's you to some extent except you don't get into the harder markets that I do."
Ed Powers: "Germany doesn't even want to look at my stuff."
Max: "They're not interested in that stuff. They only want hard stuff. We do real well there. So we got a real good market and a lot of people are writing in. We've got a section on the website, that if girls want to get involved, they can write in, send us an e-mail, a couple of pictures. We run a modeling ad on every single video that we do. We get a lot of requests and shoot a lot of girls that just come through the business. We just shot a great gal that's going to be coming out in September. Her name is Drew Allen. In fact I got in touch with her through JR Wolfe. She just came into the business and did four videos with us - cute as a button. Everybody loved her when she was out here. That was it and she's gone. We get quite a lot of that."
Ed Powers: "What do you mean she's gone?"
Max: "Out of the business. Basically done. Not interested in doing anything else. Just gone from California."
Ed Powers: "Where does she hail from?"
Max: "Baton Rouge right there on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi."
Randy asked Max how what he does in front of the camera affects his personal life.
Max: "It obviously has a pretty dramatic impact. First of all, I have little privacy. I'm recognized too much. But the most dramatic effect is, because I'm in this business, and because I'm constantly working, I found that it's virtually impossible for me to have a long term relationship with a girl. It may be fun at first, but, sooner or later, the girl I'm with, always gets jealous of the other girls that are passing through. It's only natural. That creates a lot of stress. So I've made a choice that I do not want a relationship. I don't want to be involved. I don't want to be married. I want to be extremely focused on my business. I wouldn't have reached a level of success unless I was driven by an intense desire to succeed and to make these movies. I want to make as many movies as I can for as long as I can. This is my life's mission. This is what I do. I enjoy my work. It seems like a constant vacation even though I can tell you it's a heckuva lot of work. It's not just performing in front of the camera, of course. You've got a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes stuff that has to go on to make the stuff work especially when you travel as much as I do. I'm out of the country two or three times a year. In terms of impact on my life I have very little privacy. The most dramatic thing is not to be able to sustain any long-term relationship. That's a little sad but worst things have happened."
