all about the porn industry appears in the March 31-April 6 issue of LA Weekly. Or perhaps it's more a question of Wright, the former entertainment editor at Hustler, feeling compelled to tell on himself. Nevertheless, it's a chatty, beautifully written, introspective, goodbye yellow brick road obituary of a former porn journalist - these being not so much scenes as skillfully manipulated Puccini arias.
Wright readily admits that his other life as a screenwriter had been flatlining for several years when he chanced upon his job at LFP. Prior to that, Wright says, "I failed at other jobs simply because I didn't get out of bed." Welcome to the porn biz, Ev.
Wright adds: "By the time I left, I had achieved rank on the list of the Top 50 most influential people in the adult industry. Granted, I had written that list myself, and it was published in Hustler." [Mike Albo takes particular issue with that statement, and we'll run Albo's comments at the end.]
Wright says porn, like Hollywood, has the capacity to create seductive illusions. "But porn is a crude business," he adds. "Even the fantasies it sells have the feel of cheap disillusionment." Ev, you're much too young to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Wright: "I would come to joke that porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art. The cheesy aesthetic - shag-carpet backdrops, tanning-salon chic, bad music, worse hairdos - and the everyman approach to exhibitionism are honest expressions of life in the land of mini-malls, vanity plates and instant stardom."
In assessing The World's Biggest Gangbang II that stars Jasmin St. Claire, Wright describes St. Claire: "She moved imperiously with her head held high and her surgically augmented D-cups thrust forward. Jasmin's ethnic origins were a mystery. Her skin was a coppery brown, like a glass of tea in sunlight. She told people her dark complexion came from Sicilian blood, and there were rumors that she was a granddaughter of a New York mobster. She denied those and claimed to have been raised by an international-financier father, to have been educated in Continental boarding schools and to have an undergraduate degree from Coumbia University."
Well, you're probably waiting for the punchline and it comes in the form when Wright quotes Jasmin's agent Charley Frey as saying, "I don't know about her dad...Jasmin's mom is a dot-head Indian."
Wright describes the set of The World's Biggest Gangbang II much like other porn sets where he would experience a sense of numbness "that I can only compare to accounts I have read of combat," he writes. "Unlike combat, I was not overwhelmed by the horror of it, but by the grand-scale stupidity...." Wright goes on to quote a gangbang participant as saying that, "Jasmin is cold....she's not friendly like Annabel [Chong] was." Further along in the article, Wright tells how Jasmin was trying to persuade him to write an expose on Kendra Jade supposedly having the clap, but, nevertheless, as describes her: "Attractive, confident, sure of her career, possessed of an entertaining if sometimes cruel wit but revealing hints of an underlying compassionate nature, Jasmin sometimes struck me as the ideal girlfriend."
Wright relates an encounter with Brooke Ashley when he visits her at her apartment, bearing an advance copy of The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang, the tape where she is reputed to have been infected with the AIDS virus.
Wright: "Like other porn stars I know, her [Ashley's] biography might have been lifted from the more twisted copy in Barely Legal [which Wright associate-edited]. As Brooke told it, she was born on an American air base in Korea, the offspring of a U.S. soldier and a Korean mother. She was raised in Kansas City and molested at the age of 7 by 'the old man down the hall.' According to Brooke, the old man pretended he was an invalid and needed a walker, but was actually very strong when he got her alone in the apartment. He had lured her with ice cream." Brooke subsequently grew close to an uncle who was later sent to federal prison on money laundering charges.
During the apartment meeting, Wright hears Marc Wallice's voice on Ashley's answering machine: "Pick up the phone, Brooke. You bitch, you whore. Pick up the phone." Wright who a few days earlier met Wallice at Walice's mother's house quotes him as saying, "I used to be a big, famous star. Now, I'm a nobody." Wallice, in turn, played phone messages he got from Ashey: "You fucker. You don't have any friends." Wright says in earlier, happier times Wallice and Ashley had been fuck buddies.
Wright says Ashley tried watching the tape but confessed that she needed to get high in order to do so. Ashley's comment as the action on the screen progressed was, "I'm so humiliated." Oddly enough, during the moment of truth when Wallice's dick was going into her ass, Ashley was on the phone with a cab-driver friend inquiring whether he would bring over a bottle of French champagne for her.
"In addition to being a porn star, Brooke hustled men," Wright says. Sometimes she did so professionally as a call girl." Wright desribes the next scene as being one where Ashley prances around naked in her apartment while insisting that she's going to make porn movies again.
Wright's subsequent treatise on director Greg Dark would sound like an existential work of fiction, that is, unless you knew something of Dark, in which case, the whole episode makes absolute sense. Wright says Dark's persona was based on several essential myths. "His father had been an anthropologist who disappeared in Haiti. Or he was a criminal who disappeared in the state prison system, depending on which story Greg was telling."
Wright: "His mother had been a 'party girl,' a Las Vegas entertainer who had raised Greg with a series of common-law stepfathers." According to Wright, Dark attributes his street-wise education to a pimp who taught him the essentials of the "whore-con." Despite all the generous insights bestowed on him by that education, Dark, according to Wright, fell into the trap most men do, he got married to "a giant blond bondage performer."Six months after the honeymoon," Wright says, "Greg called to report that marriage was as bad as everyone he knew told him it was: 'I'm depressed all the time,' Dark told Wright. "He [Dark] concluded that there was no happiness to be found anywhere."
Mike Albo sez: "In his article Mr. Wright claims that his tragedy in life was working as a pornographer, but by the time his tenure ended here that he achieved rank among the Top 50 influential people in porn. He says he wrote the list and that it was published in Hustler. He also says lies and deceptions are also a part of pornography - apparently not as much as mainline journalism because I wrote that fucking article....what happened was it was killed, then I pitched it to Hustler. They decided to go with it. Then I rewrote it. Evan did edit the piece, but he didn't write the article."
