The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry, just published by Regan Books, is the first story of the adult movie business in the words of the people who lived it: the producers and performers who made the movies and the lawmakers who tried to stop them. The book is the fruit of seven years of labor by Legs McNeil and his associates Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia.
In the course of a recent promotional tour, the trio of authors met with AVN Senior Editor Jared Rutter in McNeil’s Century City hotel suite for a roundtable discussion of their work. It was the day after a West Hollywood book signing, followed by a party, and the remains of a merry evening still littered the room. First question, to McNeil, was about how he got involved in the project.
McNEIL: Basically I’m a guy that grew up in the 60s, came of age in the 60s, and looked at Playboy and Penthouse. I remember I had a nudist magazine, I had a shot of a naked woman, probably the first time I’d ever seen it. So I mean, I grew up on this really kind of repressed, especially now where there’s so much porn, but anyway, later on in life, I became the assistant director on this movie called, very, very bad porn movie called Blow Dry.
AVN: What year was this?
McNEIL: This was in 1974. I realized later that the modern porn industry was only kind of like two years old, and I had been witness to something that I wasn’t really quite sure of, but I liked the people. Also was repulsed by some of them. Anyway, after I did Please Kill Me [The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Rock], I wanted to try my hand at another oral history, and I thought that I’d been involved in the porn industry, I always wondered what happened to them. I also thought it was a perfect oral history because you had a core group of about 25 or 30 people, and they were intimately involved with each other for about three decades, which is the core of the oral history, if you want to do it right.
AVN: When did you start doing the interviews?
McNEIL: I started in ‘97. When you start out with an oral history, you use the shock approach. You just, ya know, go after everybody, by hook or by crook, you just get them. And then you follow different people’s paths.
AVN: How many people did you speak to?
McNEIL: About a thousand.
PAVIA: Is that right?
OSBORNE: Oh yeah.
McNEIL: You haven’t seen the tapes, the discs. We’re up to 3,000.
PAVIA: I saw a growing pile at one point when you had the place in the Valley, but I lost track…
McNEIL: No, they’re up to 3,000…
OSBORNE: Just a ton of stuff…Unbelievable. Which made it really fun when you were going back looking for one line. (Laughter all around.) And it’s three o’clock in the morning… Where the fuck is it! Just beating your head against the wall.
AVN: Did you start in New York with the New York people?
McNEIL: I sent my girlfriend out to first buy all of the [John] Holmes [murder trial] transcripts, which were about $10,000 a piece. I realized I didn’t know what the story was, and I had to go through all the old core transcription, read everything, and basically learn the story. And that was another thing that was exciting about it, because the punk scene I had been involved in, I knew those stories. This I didn’t know, and I thought, Can I do oral history about something I really don’t know that much about? And that was a big fear of mine. That was my big self doubt. And also kind of exciting.
AVN: When did you start interviewing porn stars like Sharon Mitchell?
McNEIL: Sharon Mitchell was probably very first off. I knew Mitch sort of vaguely. I knew she was very important to the story. I went and interviewed her, she was living in the Valley. And I pulled in and there were these beautiful trees over the street, it was a really beautiful tree lined street, and she lived way back, and I said, “Wow, this is great. This is like the witness protection program!” So I moved around the corner from her. It just had this great hideout feeling that I loved. Although Mitch did not have a pool or hot tub, so Mitch did use my pool and hot tub, which she misses desperately. So do I.
AVN: How many hours of tapes did you do with Mitch?
McNEIL: We must have done about 30, over about two years. Mitch didn’t want to talk about a lot of this stuff. And I felt bad, because my job is, like yours, to push. But she was also a friend. And I knew that it was important, and I knew that it was important for her. So a lot of times she would stop and say, “ I can’t… Legs, you’re asking about my whole fucking life… Would you leave me the fuck alone?” Which, being a journalist, is a pain in the ass, as you know! And a lot of times I would, and then a month later, re-start. But Mitch was just the same.
AVN: How long did the interviews average?
McNEIL: Two to six hours, I would say. [FBI agent] Bill Kelly’s, what were those? Those were long.
PAVIA: Those were long.
McNEIL: See, a lot of times, we knew we only had a couple of days, so we did Bill Kelly. We went to Bill Kelly’s like seven times.
AVN: I was wondering about Bill Kelly. Was he receptive to you?
McNEIL: He was receptive. See, Pete comes off like a cop. Pete was very, very important in this book. Pete has a very officious blowhard manner, and I don’t mean that offensively, because you need someone like Pete to get in—“Hey buddy, how ya doing?”—get on the phone. Bill Kelly said, No, he’d never talk to anybody. And Pete singlehandedly got Bill Kelly. And Bill Kelly really helped make this book. Because once he knew we were not, “What do you think of porn?” And Pete, I think, got on the phone and said, “OK, you don’t want to do this interview. Let me ask you about the Perainos, and this guy …” You jump in here …
PAVIA: I think that the connection I originally made with Kelly was through my admiration for J. Edgar Hoover as the premier law enforcement officer in the history of the United States, and I’m not kidding. I mean, he was in the job for way too long, and he did some really messed up things. But he professionalized law enforcement to a degree that we have not seen before or since his day. And I may have said something along those lines, and Kelly stopped, and I think we ended up, he said, “Let me get back to you on this.” I think what he did was he checked up on me. Like, who is this guy? Who are these people? And then he agreed to talk. I think that’s kind of what won him over.
AVN: Let’s talk about MIPORN [FBI sting operation] and the undercover agents? How did you research that?
McNEIL: MIPORN was probably the hardest story any of us worked on… We already had Bill Kelly in our pocket. We had to interview Bruce Ellavsky, who was still working at the FBI in Boston. He was the head of the Boston undercover office. So we had to go there, Pete did. And of course, whenever you interview an FBI agent who’s still working, there has to be a media representation from the FBI, and this woman was horrible. This woman had a cold, and she was like “.” Ya know? And we’re there, we’ve got like four hours to do … Bruce was a dynamite guy.
PAVIA: He was a doll.
McNEIL: And I think in the end he felt that he got the short end of the stick because Pat got to leave and he had to say, and he took care of undercover operations in Boston. So I think Bruce was very upset, and he died a year or two after he retired.
AVN: Can you fill in who Bruce and Pat were?
McNEIL: Pat Livingston and Bruce Ellavsky are two FBI agents who went undercover in one of the FBI’s first undercover operations, at the same time at Donnie Brasco, because the FBI did not have any type of undercover operations during J Edgar Hoover’s reign. The guy who wrote I Led Three Lives for the FBI was not an FBI agent, he was a paid informer. They did a lot of that. But no single FBI agent had ever gone undercover, and that is because Hoover believed that they would become tainted by the money, by the corruption. And Hoover was nothing if not a genius public relations man, right? So this was the beginning of the undercover operations. And Pat is very, very good. Bruce and Pat worked, which is not in the book, but they worked at Tiger Town in Detroit, and they worked as fences, and they got a lot of guns, and they really made a name for themselves as undercover operators. When Wayne Clark and Al Banani, who were the two local metro day cops who came up with this undercover sting operation, it was called the Operation Amore, and they realized that it was too big for them, that it was interstate. So they handed it over to Bill Kelly. Now Bill Kelly was ecstatic because finally he could prove that pornography was tied to organized crime, so he then went to Phil Smith and went up the chain of command. They accepted it, and they got Pat Livingston and Bruce Ellavsky to go undercover for three years. Now they didn’t know what undercover did to you.
OSBORNE: Even the FBI has written things saying that no person should go on it for more than six months, because it just messes with your head. I mean, they can’t carry guns, they can’t … you know what I mean? They’re just in there with their wits and nothing else to protect them.
McNEIL: And they can’t have any backup because their cover’s gonna be blown.
PAVIA: Key figure—because Legs and I talked to him down in Florida—key figure in the architecture of the FBI’s undercover policy is an old time agent by the name of Joe Yablonsky.
McNEIL: He was a great guy, too.
PAVIA: Who was writing about undercover. Great old guy.
McNEIL: See, we liked everybody. We liked the FBI agents, we liked the porn stars, we liked the mobsters. We didn’t have any ax to grind with anybody. We were just like, “What did you do? How does this work?”
OSBORNE: Just trying to sell the story.
McNEIL: And we thought it was a fascinating story.
AVN: You told me earlier that you weren’t aware there was so much mob involvement.
McNEIL: I wasn’t. I knew about the Perainos, but I didn’t know how much it carried on. No, I was not aware. [To Pavia] Were you? See. Pete’s our organized crime expert, which I’m so glad he’s here.
AVN: Did you talk to the Perainos while they were still alive?
McNEIL: No, I wanted to talk to Butchy, but …
OSBORNE: He called me on the phone. He was like, “I heard you’re looking for me. How the hell did you get involved in this? What, mommy and daddy didn’t love you?” And he runs off really quick. Because I’d been looking for him and trying to get to him… I think he was just a little worried that somebody was looking for him. I talked to him for a minute, but he wouldn’t really verify anything.
McNEIL: We also used cutouts and things. We used kind of classic intelligence operations—and I don’t mean to say that we’re big James Bond super spies, but we had a very tight team, and we would discuss how to approach someone, always. Which is very smart, because the way you approach somebody going in, if they say no, they’re gonna say no forever. So we have to be very, very, very careful how we go in. And one of our first things, and Pete can tell you this story, and it was a nightmare for him, and I still feel so badly, but we sent Pete to make contact first with Pat Livingston. He had to drive like six hours from Miami to Tampa, and I’ll let you jump in here, Pete.
PAVIA: Yeah, it was a long drive, and there were a couple of postponements, and maybe a cancellation involved. Maybe a day. And I was in Miami at the time, interviewing Kelly, actually, and Livingston was next up, and I had to go to Tampa the next day, which was a much longer drive than I thought it was. I bought him a steak lunch. He stonewalled me. I turned around and drove back to Miami. That was my first contact with Pat Livingston. And Kelly said, “That’s Pat!”
McNEIL: Yeah. Right. So we had to work on Pat.
AVN: What do you mean by cutouts?
McNEIL: Well, nobody knew I was involved. See, Legs McNeil is a big name, for better or worse, and I’m very sorry to say this, guys, but for better or worse, my name has some commercial merit to it. And if someone knows I’m on the story, they’ll want more money; they’ll pull back. So I try to stay as far in the background so no one knows what I’m doing. I try to look very, very anonymous—which is why we’re doing this big fucking interview in this big fucking hotel.
AVN: Who were some other big names you talked to—or didn’t?
McNEIL: The one person I’m really sad who wouldn’t talk to us was Harry Reems, who is now talking to everyone in the world because Brian Grazer [producer of Inside Deep Throat] paid him off a couple of million dollars. And that really made me … because Harry was a good name. And we also had tons of stuff about Harry’s drinking problem, which I decided to cut out of the book, because it was too sad. Plus, the book, basically, you’re in and you’re out of the whole history. You’ve gotta keep going. So to dwell on people, unless there’s a purpose to the story for you, you’ve gotta drop it.
AVN: Did each of you have a different beat?
McNEIL: Pete was kind of our liaison with the police and the FBI. Jen was our liaison to … how do we say…
OSBORNE: I would say… the guys who were kind of in it from the other end. When they were originally doing the MIPORN stuff in Miami, I was actually out here. I came out to write a proposal for another project after I had met Legs in New York. So this name of a bar kept coming up, Boardners, which is over on Cherokee [Ave., in Hollywood], and it turns out that it used to by owned by the guys who had [made] these…
McNEIL: … old, old-time nudie-cuties and the first founders of the adult film industry movement. Jen went and found them on her own. Jen became our liaison to that side of the book, and as Pete did with the cops. Jen did the most marvelous job of getting them to at least … Most of them were not gonna talk to us, but they were not pissed off at us, they were, “OK, you’re doing a book, and we like you.” At least they didn’t kill us, OK? And I think they’re gonna like the book, too. I think Bill Kelly’s gonna like the book. Someone finally knows what he’s done, because he’s spent a whole life, and no one knows what he did. And also, these other guys, they made a fucking industry, ya know? And we love those guys. And we’ll be honest with … Ruby Gottesman [former video distributor]—as full of shit as Ruby is, he’s a great talker. He’s hysterical. Now, would I want to be in business with Ruby Gottesman? No, of course not. But as an interview guy …
OSBORNE: Excellent stories.
McNEIL: And you need that balance. You need Bill Kelly being the tough guy, and you need Ruby Gottesman going, “Yeah, I knew this was a good, good accident. I was gonna take these guys for all the money there…” He was just funny, funny, hysterical.
OSBORNE: It’s shameless.
PAVIA: I think that what the book is perhaps most successful at is that these guys who were referred to as “organized crime associates” were just hustlers. They were just guys chasin’ a buck.
OSBORNE: Well, they’re telling these stories, too, about “We’re driving this truckload of shrimp down, right? And these guys say they’ve got these guns. So we were gonna go pick up these guns and drop off these shrimp, and that was for the restaurant, and then we had these films …” There’s just 80,000 things going on there. The gang basically that couldn’t shoot straight, anything for a buck. But it’s great!
PAVIA: Yeah. And I think that Ruby, who Legs referred to, I think we have him on an FBI wiretap talking about, “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, I haven’t made no fucking money today. What are you guys doing to me over here? I’m trying to eat!”
McNEIL: And you’ve gotta kinda of like that guy! So we kinda, I think, I can’t speak for you two guys, but I think I fell a little in love with everybody I interviewed, men or women.
OSBORNE: I would agree with that.
McNEIL: Because you really have to see the world from their point of view. It’s not about you. You spend six hours talking to somebody, and just … it’s exhausting.
AVN: So, you’ve traveled all over in the course of this project, Florida, New York...
McNEIL: We traveled everywhere. Went to Anniston, Alabama. Jen drank Dave Friedman [sexploitation film producer] under the table, which was a sight to see, because Dave Friedman could drink … they started drinking martinis, and I don’t drink, and, I’m sorry to say, I needed someone to drink with people, to get them loosened up. And they went martini for martini.
OSBORNE: Well we got the story, didn’t we?
McNEIL: Yeah we did.
AVN: I was going to ask you about Dave Friedman, because he was a very colorful man and very important in the industry.
McNEIL: Extremely important.
OSBORNE: And it’s such a great story, and the way that he tells the stories. He’s articulate, boisterous. And he’s such a gentleman. If you walk through his house, it’s like a museum, y’know? Each thing is an artifact. He’s got this garage out back with all the posters from all the movies, and he has these wonderful stories. And it’s just this memory … it’s amazing. Amazing. He was just fantastic.
McNEIL: He was such a carney guy, too. What I loved about the early porn guys was … also, when you’re doing an oral history, you really need good slang. And these carney guys had the best slang going, man. They were just great.
OSBORNE: Well he’s got one of my favorite quotes, too. After all of his burlesque shows, everybody was talking about, ya know, sometimes the dancers would show up. Sometimes they wouldn’t. The weather would be bad then they’d loose money and all this stuff. So I believe it was Dave who said, “Well hey, let’s put this crap on film!” And low and behold: the perfect porn. That’s one of my favorite quotes in the book. It’s great.
McNEIL: He’s really a wonderful guy. I wish him long, long health.
OSBORNE: Me, too.
AVN: That was interesting, the transition between the strip clubs to the movies. I didn’t know about that.
McNEIL: Neither did we.
AVN: Let’s talk about the John Holmes case?
McNEIL: Oh God. That was about three years. Basically, that’s the first story I started on. I bought all the trial transcripts. They were about $10,000 a piece. When you buy, when a court stenographer transcribes them, they own them. Luckily they were appeals court. I know where to get trial transcript now. And I sent out a girl, and she rented a Xerox machine, so I output three complete sets of the Holmes trial. So then I had to just start going back and interviewing one person at a time. It took a long time…
PAVIA: I thought that you guys did a fantastic job with Tom Lange talking about the Holmes stuff. That was fantastic. Did you find it that way as well?
AVN: Tom Lange was…?
McNEIL: He was the chief investigator. That was a long complicated story, because a lot more happened, and we couldn’t put it all in the book. And the story is so complicated just to lay it out. That’s why the movie [Wonderland] is so horrible. It’s just such a bad movie. And that director came to us, and maybe Jen, you should take over here …
OSBORNE: Well, they basically wanted all the information with nothing in return. And we sat there with these two arrogant kids, basically, who were just asking for stuff for free. I mean, they didn’t even have their facts straight, which just drove us nuts. We’re like, no, you don’t understand, you’re dealing with people’s lives here. They’re like, eh? Didn’t matter.
McNEIL: Oh, we’ll get her to play her, and she’ll look great, and no one will care…
OSBORNE: Yeah. The characters are so complex. They were great, the people in the story. And ya know, Legs made the point to them, look, it’s a love story. There’s a lot going on. But they wanted that typical shock value …
McNEIL: Hollywood crap… Listen. John Holmes was kind of a scumbag. The real love story is between Sharon and Dawn.
PAVIA: If you didn’t already know the story, what would you have gotten out of that picture, Wonderland? I just wanted to say one thing. That I think that the version of the Holmes story in The Other Hollywood far surpasses any thing that has been done with that material to this date. And Jennifer and Legs have done the definitive, I believe, version of this.
AVN: I thought so, too. In fact, I wrote it [in review of The Other Hollywood, AVN, February 05].
PAVIA: Did you? Okay, maybe that’s where I got it from.
McNEIL: You’re quoting him!
OSBORNE: I don’t know if I told you, Jared, but I loved the review you wrote.
McNEIL: We loved it. We thought it was the smartest... Because no one … and this stuff’s important, like the Hal Freeman decision, and just everything you wrote about, I’m like, God, this guy gets it. Because when you write a book, you don’t really expect anybody to get it or read it. I don’t, at least. Do you?
PAVIA: You always hope, but it’s just tremendously gratifying … and look, you could love us or you could hate us, but it’s tremendously gratifying to read a review by a write who obviously gets the material.
McNEIL: Bill Kelly, I must say, also sent us your review, with all the “fucks” crossed out. I’m going to frame it because it’s… and he has a little note attached.
AVN: So he sent you a copy of the AVN review?
McNEIL: Oh yes. And he loved it. Only with the obscenity marked over. There’s a line that says, “He blanked everybody while we’re waiting to blank, we’d blanked before, we blanked after, we blanked during.” And they were all crossed out. I wanna frame this, because this is history! This is Bill Kelly sending us an AVN review. I didn’t want to say, “Bill, what are you doing reading AVN?” Of course I know. Bill Kelly, we love Bill Kelly.
PAVIA: He’s a loyal subscriber, in fact—he’s been subscribing to AVN for years. I actually stayed at his house last April, I went to visit them, and he had left a copy of AVN like on the coffee table, and he and his wife had gone to bed, and I was still up watching TV, sort of eyeballing the AVN, thinking, Hmmm …. Kelly came shuffling out of the bedroom in his slippers, took his magazines, and went back to bed. Didn’t want to corrupt me, I guess.
AVN: Did you try to talk to Traci Lords?
McNEIL: No. Why? She was one paragraph in the book. I mean, John Waters told us all about … John Waters was hysterical. I mean, John Waters … he’s probably the most, I mean, the transcriber couldn’t transcribe the tape, because I was laughing. I had snot coming out … John, he’s just one of the funniest guys in the world.
OSBORNE: I think one of the lines we ended up using, he said something to the effect of “obscenity, people being arrested for obscenity. I wish I could arrest the people who made Forrest Gump.” You know what I mean?
McNEIL: Yeah Right. “Obscenity! That was obscene to me!” It was hysterical. And he liked Traci a lot, and I didn’t want to alienate John, because I liked him. But after talking to Tommy Byron and all the people we talked to about Traci, and her just downright lying. You know what really hurt me about Traci? She never called Tommy Byron back. She never had anything to do with the porn industry again. I mean, Tommy said, “Well, it probably wasn’t love, but I was, as a young kid, I was really in lust with her. I really dug this chick. And she never even called and said, ‘Are you OK? Did I cause any …?’” Ya know? And guys like Ruby selling her tapes afterwards, well he probably should have gone to jail, OK? But guys who, y’know, really liked Traci—and there were a lot of people in the industry who did—it just seemed so mean of her. What a mean little girl. Ya know? I didn’t like her.
OSBORNE: It’s not like we haven’t had ample opportunity to hear how she feels about everything. So what are you gonna get from her? She just came out with a book that basically says the same thing she said before …
McNEIL: Published by Harper Collins, but not by Regan Books. They wouldn’t touch that book with a 10-foot pole, because they knew she was lying.
AVN: How did you get the deal with Regan Books?
McNEIL: I tried selling [the concept], and no one wanted to buy it. Everyone was afraid of porn. So we did a three-hour special with Bert Kearns and Brett Hudson, and Pete was also an associate producer. And that’s really when we got [attention]… because using TV to get to people is really good. And the TV show was absolutely brilliant. And I’m not saying that because I’m the producer. We just had great writers. And we made this three-hour special for Court TV, and that’s when I went and sold the book, because they can’t read proposals. You’d think the publishing industry is very, very smart. You’ve gotta put a video in and say, “This is what we’re gonna do.” Once they could see the video of what we were gonna do, they bought the book in two minutes.
AVN: So the book was seven years in the making?
McNEIL: Eight years from conception to birth. Well, the last four months were a bit tough, because I always thought this birth was coming out … because, after … you work for something for eight years, I think everybody’s, “This book’s never coming out. Legs is never gonna finish it.” These guys were fed up with me, which I don’t blame them. I worked everybody to the bone. I was a jerk.
PAVIA: I wasn’t fed up with Legs or Jen, I was really fed up with the process.
OSBORNE: I agree with you on that. I was just exhausted. We were working 18, 20-hour days every day. There were no holidays. There were no weekends. There were no … this is years … Your life was not your own. We went back and forth across the country like 10 times. You don’t have a life. You can’t do anything. And when we’re driving we’re talking about the story and where we’re gonna find this person and we’re calling. And if you get a day where you’ll have an interview for the first few hours of the day, then you’re in a courthouse going through transcripts and there’s somebody who didn’t order the right box, and you’re like …
McNEIL: I think I’m really blessed to have such good co-writers. Everything I asked these guys to do, they did. These two people here sitting at this table are really like the reason why the book is so good.
AVN: Jen and Pete, at what point did each of you get involved?
OSBORNE: I got involved four years ago. I was working on sort of an ill-fated documentary of a friend of mine. Legs was gonna be one of our interviews. And actually we’d been interviewing Eric Danville. So Eric Danville contacted Legs for us and then said, “Hey, you guys want to interview him?” We were gonna go over, I think we’re gonna stop and have dinner or something, right?
McNEIL: And I thought if I bought them dinner I could get out of the interview, because the interview didn’t sound real good.
OSBORNE: Let the record show, I was doing this as a favor for a friend of mine. You know what I mean? She as trying to put this thing together, we go to dinner, and I had food poisoning. You tell the story!
McNEIL: It’s a really boring table, and there’s this little girl sitting at the end of the table, and she was coming at me with questions that are really good. Everyone else was being very nice to me, and I thought, I’ll just have this dinner, I’ll just get out of here. And here’s Jen in the corner going, “So what do you think of this? Why are you doing this? Why?” And I thought, “She shows some promise!” So Jen started as an assistant. Pete got married and had a kid during this. And I didn’t want to punish Pete for having a kid, Pete and I were very good friends. I didn’t want to punish him. But I needed someone on the road with me, and Jen came on the road with me. Peter was our backup man. We had so many different aspects of this book. “Hey, Pete, could you do the Gravesend section while we go to Columbus, Ohio?” We were all over the place. We were having meeting about Pat Livingston, how do we get him? Y’know, we were screaming at each other.
PAVIA: We did have a number of similar storylines happening at the same time. The way that Legs actually drew me into this project is that I realized the material was not being framed in terms of a First Amendment argument. I found that very compelling.
OSBORNE: I would agree with that. It’s not like I was a huge porn fan …
PAVIA: We weren’t huge porn fans or anti-porn fans.
McNEIL: I learned that through Walter Kendrick’s book, and he made a very good statement in The Secret Museum, he said, “Pornography is not a thing, it’s an argument.” And I thought, You know what? I’m gonna stay away from this argument, because that kills everybody. Every book I have about porn is whether it’s good or bad.
OSBORNE: It’s all theory.
McNEIL: It’s all theory. Let’s forget about that, and let’s just talk about what happened. If we can do that, we’ll have done a good book.
PAVIA: And that was the way Legs approached me. He said, Ya know, we’re not taking a position. We’re
