PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—Shaun Costello, the director of roughly 70 features during adult's "Golden Age" of the 1970s and early '80s, died on July 5 at the age of 79, AVN has learned.
Survived by his daughter Erin Costello and sisters Deborah Rumney and Laurie Costello, the storied helmsman succumbed to a battle with cancer after starting treatment about two months prior, according to friend and fellow Golden Age veteran Jeanne Silver, the AVN Hall of Fame actress best known for her partially amputated left leg.
"We are just finding it out so I'm a bit shocked," Silver told AVN. "Shaun was quite the curmudgeon in his later years, but I loved him nonetheless. We had fabulous phone conversations and hoped that we could hang out one last time before the inevitable."
Having worked under a number of aliases, including Warren Evans, Harry Gordon, Jack Hammer, Kenneth Schwartz, Amanda Barton and Helmuth Richler, Costello's body of work consisted in large part of notoriously hard-edged BDSM fare shot in New York City and shown in Times Square's Avon theaters. Among the most widely known of these were 1973's Forced Entry, starring Harry Reems of Deep Throat fame, and 1976's Jamie Gillis-led shock pic Waterpower, which marked Silver's first appearance in adult, though the extent of her performance was receiving an enema.
Of the latter, Costello is quoted on his IMDb page as recollecting, "In the fall of 1976 I got a call from Sid Levine, an elderly, gentle grandfather type, who was the front man for the porno unit of the [Carlo Gambino] crime family. As I sat across Sid's desk he says, 'I'm ashamed to have to say this, but I need an enema picture.' He had been given an audio cassette called 'The Enema Bandit,' and some articles about a guy who was convicted of going on a cleansing spree at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and forcibly giving enemas to coeds. I had recently seen Taxi Driver (1976), and thought that Jamie would make a great Travis Bickle, but on foot rather than driving a cab, and bent on a quest to cleanse evil bitches in order to save their souls.
"Then a strange thing happened. Sid was ashamed of his involvement in this, the goombahs were too macho to participate, and DB, their boss, didn't want to see it. 'Just make the thing,' I was told. At this point I realized that my position was unique. I could make this ridiculous enema movie without any interference from any of the people who were paying for it. 'Just make the thing,' they said, so that's exactly what I did. I wrote what I thought was an absurd story, hired my favorite actors—Jamie, Marlene [Willoughby], Rob Everett [Eric Edwards], Al Levitsky [Roger Caine], C.J. Laing, etc., and set about making a movie about a tortured soul who was so demented that he truly believed that his quest to cleanse evil bitches of their vile humors was the answer to all of his problems.
"Without adult supervision, I turned the movie into a parody of itself. Of course there was always the chance that the boys would catch on to what I was doing and I would sleep with the fishes, but I didn't think so. The picture played to empty porno houses. The theater owners were afraid of it, and the audiences didn't know what to make of it. So on the shelf it went, and after a few years someone came up with the idea of distributing [it] in Europe. Bingo ... cult smash. I guess the Germans and the Dutch are a bit kinkier than their American cousins. The picture opened in Germany under the title Schpritz.
"[To] this day I think it's the funniest movie I ever made."
Silver shared her own memory of that time with AVN, saying, "I met Shaun for the first time on the set of Waterpower. Credited as Joan Beatty, I had a very small part, but it was quite the eye-opener. His reaction to finding out I'm an amputee was epic. He panicked at first, but then just rolled with it.
"He was a brilliant journalist, filmmaker, writer, author and friend."
In fact, Costello—who was born and raised in New York and served in the U.S. Army—went on after leaving adult in 1983 to have a long and successful mainstream career directing television commercials and documentaries, receiving awards for work he did for Time-Life and ABC. He also wrote a biography of Harry Reems, Wild About Harry, which is available on Amazon, and had two more books completed but not yet published, including his own memoir, Risky Behavior: Sex, Gangsters, and Deception in the Time of Groovy.
A 16-hour box set of Costello's most infamous titles—including Forced Entry and Waterpower—was released by Alpha Blue Archives in 2004, and reviewed in full here, with reviewer Ian Jane calling it "probably the most interesting compilation of vintage porno movies to come to DVD since the beginning of the medium" and observing, "They're still shocking, they're still dirty, and they're still wildly entertaining."
More information on Shaun Costello and an extensive collection of his writing is available on his blog at shauncostello.com.
