Friends Remember Golden Age Adult Filmmaker Carter Stevens

POCONO SUMMIT, Penn.—In any list of the top adult directors of the 1970s through the early '90s, one name is sure to appear: Carter Stevens, who died at his Pocono Summit home on Dec. 30 of undisclosed causes—he was 76—and whose geniality and wry humor made him extremely popular among New York City's adult performers of that era—not to mention the fact that he let a lot of them stay rent-free in his basement apartment and later his loft as long as they (well, most of them) were willing to fuck him.

"We always joked about 'Carter Stevens' Home for Wayward Girls'; that's what we called the loft, and he had so many girls, starlets who wanted to be big porn stars, and of course, he slept with all of them except for me; I'm the only person that ever lived with him that never slept with him," recalled Jeanne "Long Jeanne" Silver, one of the more famous stars of the era and co-creator of a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for Stevens' funeral expenses. "It's because we valued our friendship so much that we did not want to put anything between that. I mean, it wasn't as if it couldn't have happened; it wouldn't have happened because we respected each other too much as friends. You value the closeness that you have, that can be destroyed by one sexual encounter, and then things get awkward. Not that I didn't hear him having sex. The cock crows."

Stevens penned a remembrance of Silver when she was inducted into the Legends of Erotica Hall of Fame in 2015, recalling that he met her in a New York City bar named Bernard's, that she moved in shortly afterward and "in short order, became the den mother to all the other casual occupants... In an amazingly short time, she became like family; she became like a little sister to me, and I a big brother to her."

Stevens not only bedded a variety of actresses; he even married a few of them, perhaps most notably Honey Stevens, who bore him two children, Braden Frost and Heather Treible, before they divorced. Another wife, Kathy, was a stripper who danced under the name of Baby Doll, and as Frost recalled, "She had a burlesque act, a lot of costumes and outfits; she was a former gymnast," and she bore him his third child.

According to Frost, who continues to post information about his father's death on the Carter Stevens Facebook page, Stevens, whose real name was Mal Worob, started off at the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, where he got a degree in photographic science and went to work for filmmaker Eastman-Kodak and later Movielab in New York until about 1970.

"I worked at the Motion Picture section of the Eastman Kodak Company and was shift supervisor at Movielab, the largest independent motion picture processing facility in New York," Stevens told AVN in 2008. "But like the old joke goes, I always wanted to direct."

According to Silver, Stevens was also proud of having been taught camerawork by mainstream cinematographer Bruce Sparks.

But with no filmmaking experience himself, Stevens pounded the pavement for a couple of years until he met a distributor who promised to distribute his first film if he could bring it in on a budget of less than $25,000, and after hitting up his old compadres at Movielab for the capital, he made Collegiates in 1972, starring a little-known actor fresh from his role in Deep Throat, Harry Reems.

Stevens' next film was High School Honies, of which little is known except that it starred Serena, a top starlet of the day, and included a hardcore scene with Bill Margold, but not long after that, Stevens ran into a Hollywood producer who asked if Stevens could make some XXX fare for him. That deal resulted in two films, Lickity Split and Highway Hookers, which included then-up-and-coming actor Eric Edwards.

"I was in that one," Edwards recalled for AVN. "Mal was just such a fun person to work for; wonderful, kind, jovial—I have nothing but good memories of being on a set with him, and Highway Hookers I remember was one of his earlier films, and I think he had t-shirts made for all the girls, and I think they said 'Mother Truckers' because the film involved a towing company. He came up with some of the wildest and craziest scripts I'd ever known and they were just fun to be on the sets of."

According to the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD.com), Stevens made a total of 43 films over the course of his career, but AVN's research has uncovered several more that aren't mentioned, including his Spanks-A-Lot series—AVN's review of the first volume begins, "It's rather difficult to take this tape seriously, as the overall tone is somewhere between the Three Stooges and 1920's silent melodrama where every action is overplayed to compensate for lack of sound."—as well as 1986's Hot, Wet and Wild and Hot, Wet and Wilder, so Stevens' entire oeuvre may never be known.

Although Frost was aware of his father's adult career early on, he wasn't allowed to see any of his dad's films or interact with any of the performers until he'd reached his 18th birthday.

"By now, I've seen most of them, not so much the early '70s ones because that was a bit before my time, and he actually never let me get around the business or deal with it too much until I was 18," Frost told AVN. "He was very specific about that. He kept me away from it, although when I visited, him, he always had a loft with sets in it for shooting different films but I wasn't allowed to be around it until I was 18."

Eric Edwards, on the other hand, has plenty of remembrances of those early days.

"In Sarah's Eyes (1975) is one of my favorite movies. That was about a girl who kind of drifts off into fantasy la-la land, and he would zoom in on her eyes and then pull back in a fantasy where she's in a room with a sexual situation," Edwards recalled. "It's kind of a woman's fantasy movie, which, for the time, was quite a step. He was going for a female audience.

"In Pleasure Palace (1979), I realized during the filming that I wasn't cast in a sex scene, and I asked Mal, 'Why don't I get a sex scene?' And he said, 'Because I hired you for your acting talent only.' That was the biggest compliment that anybody has ever given me before. We shot that movie in 36 hours straight with no sleep,, and people were dropping like flies, crashing in the corner of a room all curled up, and he'd come by and wake up us to do a scene, to do some dialogue, what-have-you, simply because we had to get out of the location; the owner of the—it was a real house of ill repute—wanted us out of there within a certain amount of time because they had to open up for business for real, so we had to finish up this movie, and basically it was a 36-hour marathon of getting it in the can. That was an experience."

Edwards also noted that Stevens wrote a scene for him and Ashley Brooks in 1980's Tinseltown that turned out to be the only fisting scene the actor has ever done.

"I have nothing but wonderful memories and thoughts of Mal. He was one of the good guys, and there were some sleazebags back in the early New York days. He was one of the really nice, kind, fun guys to work for."

In an AVN interview in about 2000, actor Rod Fontana recalled his first meeting with Stevens in 1976 after he'd been laid off as a New York City policeman.

"I had a friend who was doing adult stuff at the time, films and loops," Fontana stated. "He said why don't you come visit one of the shoots. I went and saw Carter Stevens. He says why don't you do this. I needed the money, so the first scene I did was with a guy named Jamie Gillis and some young blonde girl. I worked in loops, and 8mm knock off stuff until about 1980 when I went back into the army... One of the best anal scenes I ever did was in 1977 for Carter Stevens. It was a girl—I had no idea who she was—it was for a loop we did on a pinball machine."

One of the reasons Fontana may have been unable to recall his pinball partner's name is that Stevens attracted a number of women who just didn't stay around the adult business.

"A lot of the girls would get into a movie, but they would do one movie and then they would just disappear because they realized, 'Hey, you actually have to work on a set sometimes'," Silver recalled. "The sex wasn't necessarily fun, and back then, we had to remember dialog at the same fucking time."

However, for Silver, being on set with Stevens was an upbeat experience.

"When I worked on set with him, everything really went smooth," she said. "I don't remember any kind of drama. I remember everything was upbeat, happy and just freakin' ran smooth, and I've been on sets where there was drama, so working with him was pure joy."

When not making porn, Stevens had several outside activities, including attending comic book and science-fiction conventions in New York City, as well as corresponding with people around the world who shared his bondage fetish.

"He chatted to a lot of people around the world," Frost stated. "He was part of several different chat groups, not just Facebook but some international groups. I know he talked to a lot of people overseas that were kinky and he got more involved in the B&D and S&M thing as he progressed; I think that was a hobby of his. He made several pictures in the time after his straight porn stuff, a lot of fetish films, foot fetish, bondage stuff, and I think that was not just a business thing for him; it was kind of a personal thing he enjoyed, and enjoyed that community."

In fact, he enjoyed it so much that in the late '90s, he published a newsletter, S&M News.

"I moved here to PA in the summer of 1996, and in early '97 decided to look for a job," Stevens' former staffer Robin Gainous wrote on Facebook. "Lo and behold in the local paper was an ad for an office manager for a local adult magazine publisher! What? In the Poconos? I answered the ad, went over to talk to him and we hit it off right away. He hired me, and it turned out to be the best job I ever had! Thru that job I met so many interesting people, had a great time at all the Spring and Fall Flings, that maybe some of you have been to. (Held at Birchwood, and Rainbow Mountain Resorts) I always loved the stories Carter would tell about his early days, and loved the fact that as much as he wanted me to work as a Dominatrix, he respected my not wanting to do so. Running the office, making sure the magazines got put together on time, layout and writing the horoscope column (LOL) for the S&M News, and making sure he took care of himself was enough for me... I was sad when I had to leave the job, but he understood that I needed something where a paycheck was more reliable. I still to this day carry my business card in my wallet. He was really a great man, and I will never forget him."

According to one source, however, the reason Stevens abandoned filmmaking was that he suffered a stroke in the late '90s which left him unable to continue working, leaving Social Security as his only real income.

But even though he was no longer making adult films, Stevens wasn't forgotten by the industry. Free Speech Coalition awarded him its Anthony Spinelli Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, and AVN inducted Stevens into its Hall of Fame in 2009. He also created the Facebook group, "Stars of the golden and silver age of adult films," which currently has 200 members.

Several of Stevens' friends have posted memories of him on Facebook and elsewhere. Joe Rubin of Video repackager Video Syndrome wrote, "Best remembered for his genre bending classics like the sci-fi sex comedy Rollerbabies, the gritty, hardcore neo-noir Punk Rock, and his numerous titles for New York’s notorious Avon Productions, Carter’s work gained a sizable cult following in recent years as he became recognized as one of the major auteurs from the ‘Golden Age of Porn’... In addition to making his own movies, Carter was one of the larger-than-life personalities in New York’s indie film scene and discovered actors such as Sharon Mitchell, while his Manhattan studio loft was also used to shoot many other productions, including the infamous ending of Michael and Roberta Findlay’s grindhouse classic, Snuff."

"Say what you will about the adult film industry of the 70's, Carter was an accomplished filmmaker," wrote admirer Karl Kaefer on Facebook. "Punk Rock was one of the first of its kind (R-rated) [sic] and the ONLY film to be shot at Max's Kansas City, the Premier NYC club." (Punk Rock was actually hardcore and featured 12 sex scenes, though it was reissued in a softcore version in 1985 as Teenage Runaways.)

But as late as December 8, Stevens himself was still active on Facebook, writing, "Thanks to Covid I've added netflix streaming to my Netflix DVD membership (which has really gotten slow thanks to the US Mail which seems to be running at 1/2 speed). As a result I'm spending more and more time each day laying in bed watching movies."

Fans of Stevens' work will be happy to hear that much of his early hardcore films are still available through AlternativeCinema.com, including footage never before seen, such as Carter Stevens' Dirty Home Movies. But one thing's for sure: Carter Stevens was unique in adult film annals, and will be sorely missed.

Once again, that GoFundMe campaign is here.