PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

Issued: 6 March 2004
word count: 4250 Approx.

Reforming Porn?

Interview with Director Hart Williams

Hart Williams (see bio) worked in �the trenches� of porn from 1977 to 1987, first as a writer, then as a reviewer, then as a screenwriter and on sets as a camera assistant, production assistant, grip, gaffer, set design, continuity, security, truck and shuttle driver, and, finally, as an extra (FULLY CLOTHED) when needed. Later he acted as a Assistant Producer and director on various commercial projects. During this time, Mr. Williams maintained his freelance career, as a book critic from 1976 through the present day for newspapers ranging from the (late) Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (1970s & 80s) to the Kansas City Star (1980s & 90s) and the Washington Post (1995-7). Currently he reviews for The Portland Oregonian. (2003-?)

Q: You left porn in 1988. Why come back to do a feature?

In 1996, I won an international design gold medal for my website, �His Vorpal Sword,� basically for just screwing around. I have been screwing around on computers in one form or another ever since I got to college in 1973. The prize I�d won came with a thousand dollars� worth of stuff. What I mean is that I got, quote, several hundred dollars, unquote, worth of last year�s computer books and software. For example, [software company] Corel kicked in the CorelDraw 6 graphics suite even though they�d released CorelDraw 7! Kind of like giving you last year�s Almanac as a prize. All I know is that I had to pay taxes on the prices printed on the software and books I got, not what I could have picked them up on the sale shelves for � taxes on about a thousand bucks. So, it was a thousand dollar prize now marked down to $29.95.

Q: Are you complaining about the prizes?

And the t-shirt was too small. No. By a staggering cosmic twist of fate, Corel6 came with a simplified version of a 3D animation program called RayDream Studio. So I started playing around with digital animation and morphing video on my old Pentium 166 WinTel machine. The computer crashed ten and twenty times a day, but I was hooked. This was really cool stuff. All these effects we�d only dreamed about when I was working steadily in Hollywood in the seventies and eighties were now on your computer.

Q: And how is pornography connected to this?

One of the things I always hated about porn was that there was never any money to do any post-production. We had a guy who did all of Drea�s movies on his Casio Keyboard, stuff that no self-respecting elevator would play. We called him, for some strange reason, �Mr. Casio.� I understood. There was no money to pay for it. But now you could do these unimaginable things on a computer. I wondered what a porn video using the new digital effects could look like. And I kept playing with animation all through 1997.

Q: So you decided to make a digital porn feature?

Not exactly. In the fall of 1997, there was a happy accident, where a man was sent by a friend to see me, because he wanted to shoot a digital amateur film. He had the first Sony VX-1000 in town, if not in the state.

Q: Why did you make this movie?

Good question. I really wasn�t interested in doing the same old dumb porn tape. After all, with 10,000 titles coming out every year, catering to every conceivable fetish and specialty, what could I possibly do that was different?

Q: Yes, what WERE you thinking?

I could make the kind of movie that people had been asking me about since

I got out of� the Industry in 1987. And one day, back into the �real world� it was finally OK for my relatives to talk to me again. I didn�t make a big secret of my past, but I didn�t mention it unless I was asked, and even then not all the time. But I guess word got around, and friends and relatives confided to me that they�d seen porn flicks, even liked them on occasion. But ... why were they so bad?�

Q: What did you tell them?

I had to admit that I knew them porno tapes was bad. Not bad morally, but bad as television. Bad as movies. A couple I�ve known since high school asked me to recommend ten good films for them to rent, and, frankly, try as I might, I could only recommend three. I probably could have gone as high as five, but they�d served a very nice wine with dinner.

Q: What were the three films?

That�s a question for AVN [Adult Video News � ed.] OK: The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, Talk Dirty To Me and Cafe Flesh. I�ve changed my opinions since then, but that was all I could recommend that night. The point was that I realized that I�d always been disappointed in what we did in porn. The videos were so lousy. The acting was bad, the music was bad, the story was lame, and the lighting was often, well, let�s say less than flattering. Everybody has objected to that at one time or another. And that offended the professional in me.

What I really objected to, though, was the unspoken sensibility that says that sex is fundamentally �dirty,� and, therefore that depictions of sex are fundamentally dirty. It�s the one thing that Pornographers and Bluenoses believe in common. You censor it because it�s �dirty� or you make it because it�s �dirty.�

Q: You don�t believe that sex is dirty?

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn�t. It depends on your intentions. And that�s fine. Everybody�s entitled to their opinions and practices. But where was the �clean� porn? Over ten years in and ten years out of porn, I really felt that pornography needed a fundamental re-examination, not just in terms of the clich�s of porn cinema, but in terms of the fundamental sensibilities and assumptions.

Are you saying that you disliked the films you made?

Hell yes. I started out writing for Bill [Margold] and Drea. And Drea, heaven help her, could foul up a locked-down shot of a tree. They would take these pretty little movies I wrote, and turn them into mindless, artless doggy-doo.

Drea would ruin them?

On virtually every conceivable level. She had this incredible anti-talent. She�d be directing from another room, watching the cameras on the two monitors � they were all two camera shoots on those sets, with �internal editing� via a master deck and switching between cameras, to save money. Primitive stuff. When I did continuity for a movie I�d also written, Bachelorette Party � keeping track of time codes, and making notes for the editor on takes, problems, etc. � I watched Drea shoot the entire movie on the wrong camera! The movie I saw never shot was incredible. She was always on the wrong camera! When I saw it, I was tearing my hair out. I�d written this funny little movie, and the final tape was mean-spirited and dumb. Well, that was the footage the poor editor had to work with. The funny, lovely footage had escaped into the ether while Drea was committing the special all-stupid version to videotape!

How many movies did that happen on?

I don�t know. My roommate, Mark Weiss, another porn screenwriter, told me not to watch them, and I�d at least preserve the �wonderful little movies� inside my head. It was profoundly wise advice and I took it. So I�ve only seen a few of them. But I was a reviewer for several magazines, including Hustler and Adult Cinema Review, so I saw everybody else�s stuff at screenings or on BETA cassettes. That carbon-dates me, doesn�t it? (laughs) I just didn�t watch anything on video that I�d written.

So you don�t like porn movies? That�s a pretty radical claim for a porn director.

Well, come on. I have watched thousands of them, over the years, I�ve written 32 produced videos and movies, I wrote two mainstream paperback �sex� novels for Berkley /Jove, I�ve written hundreds, if not thousands of �real� letters, interviewed, written about and done just about everything you could think of in porn magazines and films, and I worked on dozens of sets. Hell, in one movie, I was even the designated lube holder so the stud could �reload� between takes from my industrial-sized tub of Albolene� cream. I think I�ve got some basis for making a professional judgment.

Still, it�s an unusual stance to take ...

Still, nothing. The simple fact is that porn movies don�t reflect MY experience of sex, either, and they don�t reflect the experience of anyone that I know � well, Ron Jeremy, maybe. I�ve been married five times, I�ve been with Playboy models in the biblical sense; my second wife appeared nude in Penthouse, and I�ve had dumb �seventies-style affairs with women ranging from lady private eyes and disc jockeys to nurses, property managers and stewardesses. I don�t mean that boastfully. As Walter Brennan used to say: �No brag, just fact.� It�s just to say that porn reflects NONE of that sexual reality. And I�ve got some small amount of experience.

Why do you think that is?

I think it�s a direct result of porn�s history. Porn started out as �smokers� which were invariably illegal, and, therefore inextricably intertwined with �dirty� and �crime� and �sin.� Back in the so-called �Golden Age� of the 1970s the one question filmmakers used to ask was �Would Pussycat play it?� If the Pussycat Theater chain picked up your movie, you were virtually guaranteed a profit. If not, probably the opposite. So one man�s tastes really became ingrained in the biz, and those tastes were firmly rooted in the past. But �JJ� was the arbiter.

�JJ�?

Force of habit. Back in the old days, you didn�t name names. If you know whose initials those are, then you know. If you don�t, you don�t need to know. �JJ� was the buyer for the Pussycat chain. If he didn�t like your movie, you didn�t get it shown in Pussycat Theaters. The point is that porn movies were made to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of sailors on shore leave, and that was fine for its day. But while the market has moved on, the movies have stayed stuck in the same groove. It�s masturbation material for perverts. Since I don�t use them in that manner, and since I�m arguably not a pervert, I have to wonder who they�re making these movies for.

You�re NOT a pervert?

References on file. Just ask any of my exes. They�ll tell you what a schmuck I am, but they�ll also tell you that I�m a pretty vanilla guy when it comes to sex. No Rocky Road for me. My sex life is an open book, or soon will be. (laughs)

Back to Porn Valley: Over ten thousand titles were released last year. Someone must be buying them.

Buying them, sure. I think that�s only because that way of seeing is the only game in town. Porn Valley is a highly self-referential realm, and porn is incredibly dogmatic. They make movies for each other, and they all lost their sense of smell a very long, long time ago. So they don�t know how Ma and Pa middle America �do it.� They only know the Porno Way.

You say they lost their sense of smell?

I mean that porn doesn�t nauseate them, no matter what they�re watching. I still remember what I felt like when I saw my first porn film. I felt mildly queasy. And after I left the biz in 1988, it took awhile for me to get that sense back. You cannot exist in the business without becoming inured and desensitized to the �product.� That product is the porn film. But that very desensitization is what causes this endless round of �follow the leader� copycat porn flicks.

Could you give us an example?

Back when I wrote Wild Nurses In Lust for Peter Balakoff, he said to me � referring to Kirdy Stevens� Taboo movies � �Incest is real hot right now. Write me an incest scene.� Now is that insane or what? To me, incest is one of the most damaging things I�ve ever witnessed. So many women I�ve known have admitted to being molested by male relatives at one time or another, and the scars incest left have NEVER healed. That�s tragic! To a normal sensibility, I mean, what is sexual about that?

We take your point.

Let me take it further, though. I don�t think Peter is a bad guy. In fact I know he�s not. And I know he�s not insensitive to the trauma of incest. But being in the business had desensitized him to the point that he could casually say: �Hey! Let�s throw in a little incest!� the same way you or I could say �sunny side up� or �over easy.�� The same thing goes on in Porn Valley every day. Whatever the perversion du jour is, they will all toss it in if it looks like it�s selling. And the business has gone further and further away from actual experience. In writing fiction, I know that the closer to reality you can make it, the more powerful the writing will be. That�s called �verisimilitude.� Porn flushed that down the toilet a long, long time ago. I don�t know about you, but I find that ejaculating inside of a woman is infinitely better than ejaculating onto a woman � which, frankly, strikes me as abusive in most contexts.

Isn�t this getting a little heavy for talking about a little porn flick?

That�s certainly a popular attitude. But why isn�t sex a legitimate artistic and intellectual interest? We live in a society suffused with it. Good lord! They sell friggin� chewing gum with sex! I was a National Merit Scholar and a philosophy major in college. If you think I spent a decade in porn and didn�t think �deeply� about these things, you�re nuts. I spent a lot of time asking myself why porn was so at odds with the reality of most people�s sexual experience. Worse, I watched certain porn practices follow the textbook path to fetishism as porn became more and more accessible.

�Fetishism�? What do you mean by that?

Well, suddenly, women were telling me: �Pull out and cum on me!� or asking for other dumb things that they could only have learned either by watching porn, or by having a boyfriend who watched porn teach them. It was obvious that the blind had been leading the blind. Back in the old days, most porn ladies I knew used to laugh with me about how little porn reflected THEIR sexual lives. More than one porn actress told me: �If they would just film sex the way I like to have it, it would be so much better.� Instead, we got a generation who copied bad porn sex as their paradigm for sex. Now anal sex and such grotesqueries as A2M are commonplace. Believe me, without porn they�d never have found any place in popular practice. Of course, without porn, oral sex would probably have remained a few and far between thing, so there�s been some positive things come down the wire, too. I�m not anti-porn, per se. I�m just anti BAD porn. And the vast majority of it is just atrocious.

What about the so-called �couples films� and the softer core stuff that venues like The Playboy Channel are doing?

Feh. I hate saxophones. Just once, I�d like to see a so-called �classy� sex scene take place without some whiney saxophone playing on the soundtrack. Who ever came up with this idea that a saxophone is the ultimate sound of orgasmic sensuality? Sounds like a tom-cat being neutered without benefit of anesthesia most of the time, if you ask me.

We just did.

Touch�. OK. The other thing that I really hate is how we sell sex, sex, sex, sex, but we never show it, outside of porn and a few clinical tapes. The curiosity about sex, about how people �do it,� what other people do, that kind of thing, well, that�s completely NORMAL! I realize that we still live in a highly puritanical society, but this bait and switch crap is just a con. You can show an underage teen being graphically disemboweled by a madman � hell, you can win an Oscar� for it! Just look at Silence of the Lambs. But you can�t actually show a couple �doing it.� That�s nuts. And, if you do, you adopt the idea that it�s �dirty,� or else you plasticize them a la cable TV, and it�s about as erotic as watching paint dry.

So what is �different� about your movie MOYST?

�MOYST� is an attempt to make a fundamental break with porn�s past � to make adult films that not only LOOK like they were made by adults (in contradistinction to so many of the titles that�ll be released in 2004, most of which look as if they were tailored to a junior high school �Beavis and Butthead� sensibility). We wanted to make a movie by adults who are comfortable with their heterosexuality and with the orifices most specifically designed for sexual gratification. If the reviews are any indication, we succeeded. Reviewer after reviewer � including AVN�s Mark Kernes, who hated the movie � have mentioned the �passion� of our couples. One even talked about the �surprising tenderness� of the movie.

Why �surprising�?

Because you NEVER SEE IT, that�s why! Think about what that means: here you have an industry devoted to the graphic depiction of human copulation, but passion and tenderness � hallmarks of my sexual experience � are conspicuous by their absence? Is that loony or what? That�s like making war movies without any uniforms, guns or battle scenes. Nutso.

�

So why have anything to do with porn at all, if you feel that way?

Why? Because porn can either be reformed via the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick hasn�t worked at all in the past thirty-odd years (if not the past century). If the bluenoses want to censor and stop porn, it�s already a lost cause. That goes for the Ayatollahs and the Mullahs in the puritanical Arab nations as well. But when I look at the history of this business, I can�t find that anyone has even attempted to use the �carrot� approach. So I thought I would.

But why not just make erotic films? Why hard core, explicit pornography?

I think the difference between �erotica� and �pornography� is a difference of sensibility and not a difference of content � of style and not substance. I reject this silly notion that NOT showing sexual relations between men and women (while pandering to the natural curiosity of humans to observe others engaged in sexual congress) is �classy� and/or preferred to the graphic depiction of same. I think that approach is fundamentally dishonest � it�s a �bait and switch.� On the other hand, I don�t think that the explicit depiction of sex requires grotesquerie. I think it�s beautiful, and I�m not ashamed of it.

But nearly 12,000 titles were released in the US alone last year!

Are you kidding? I�ve got a monopoly here: the whole damned civilization sells sex without giving you what was promised. And when you do get to see explicit sex, it usually goes a lot farther than you really are interested in seeing. For instance, I really am not at all interested in anal sex. I can sit through it, that�s about all. But then again, I used to wait by the Emergency Room door for my mom to get off work at 4 pm when I was in grade school, so I can sit through just about anything. But being able to sit through things doesn�t mean you like them.

So we take it there�s no �cable version� of Moyst?

No. If you don�t want to see it all, then why are you watching? If you want touchy-feely, buy a romance novel. Oh. Whoops. They�re hard-core pornographic too. Sorry. They just substitute some terms, like �his manhood� for the traditional slang terms for the phallus, and �his hardness� etcetera. But they�re out and out pornography, too. So even the readers of romance novels are curious about the mechanics of the process.

Were you consciously trying to make a �midnight movie� here?

I don�t know. Does anybody? I do know that I wanted a story that was offbeat and funny. I amused myself by adding in-jokes and strange little clues throughout the movie. For instance, how many surrealist painters can you find references to in the movie? But, really, I just wanted to entertain the audience. I didn�t want there to be a boring frame in the entire film.

You keep calling it a �film� but isn�t it just a video?

Er, I�m going to stick to my guns on that one. Digital tape is a metallic oxide adhering to a plastic film, so it�s a film. The picture moves, ergo it�s a motion picture. The slang term for �motion picture� is movie. It�s a movie, all right. It has as much right to call itself a movie as any silver-iodide based process. What, do you have an inherent prejudice against 29.97 frames per second as opposed to 24 frames per second?

We were just asking.

Fair enough. But in the immortal words of Mr. Stubbs (the plush pseudo-animal): �Talk�s cheap; whiskey costs money.� OK, Mark Weiss, my late friend and roommate and fellow porn scriptwriter borrowed that phrase from the late Harry Carey, the Chicago Cubs� announcer.

Yes. Isn�t there some kind of long in-joke in the film about Mark Weiss and Mr. Stubbs?

Mark found a teddy-bear at a garage sale and gave it to Bill Margold, after they removed the �Los Angeles Rams� t-shirt that the bear was wearing. Bill started sticking Mr. Stubbs in porn films. Mark started writing references to Mr. Stubbs into scripts. There�s an amazing scene in the Marshaks� �Space Virgins� where Kimberly Carson does a dramatic scene with Mr. Stubbs. Anyway, I joined into the game, and Mark and I �interviewed� Mr. Stubbs for Hot Times Magazine, which I was then editing. The editor at Adam Film World, Scott Mallory liked the piece so well he reprinted it in AFW, but for some odd reason, the art department screwed up and didn�t have space for both our names, so the interview came out as being by �Hart Weise� which was supposed to be a combination of our names, except they spelled Mark�s name WRONG. That was Mark�s first magazine publication by the by.

That�s not the whole story, is it?

No. There�s a lot more, but I�d prefer to kill fewer trees. So let�s move on.

Is Bill Margold involved in the film?

No. Bill gave me the �Free Speech Coalition� mouse pad that Mr. Stubbs � the character, not the teddy bear � uses, and he gave me permission to use it. Now that he�s out of the FSC, I don�t know what the pad�s status is, but it�s in the movie as a little homage to him. I mentioned the �Coldwater Cats� but it got cut out of the movie. I added it back in on the final credits page. Just like the Russ Meyer homage, and the little Ron Jeremy thing hidden in the movie. If you like watching the background for secret stuff, there�s a lot of it in this movie.

Yes. Speaking of which, you dedicate the movie to three deceased men and the �Coldwater Cats.� What on Earth do you mean?

Well, Mark Weiss was my roommate, fellow X-rated screenwriter and friend, and he passed away in 1991.

Who was Bill Rotsler?

Bill Rotsler was a long-time critic, cartoonist, photographer, film-maker and writer in the men�s magazine/adult film world who I met at a science fiction convention in 1976. In fact, I met Bill on the 4^th of July, 1976, and at his party, I met Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer who was my mentor as a writer and critic, and I got into Adam Magazine through Bill, where I wrote for ten years. They published the first magazine article of mine ever in print.

Ralph Weinstock?

Ralph Weinstock was the day-to-day boss at Adam/Knight/Players/Film World/ etc. etc. Ralph was very good to me, and I owe him a great debt as a writer and as a person. Example? When my motorcycle was stolen, Ralph scraped together a package of things I�d written and things I WOULD write for them so that I could take the afternoon off with a check for $1000 and go buy a used car. That was the kind of guy Ralph was. I can never fully repay his many kindnesses to me.

The Coldwater Cats?

The Coldwater Cats were a pickup bunch of football players that used to play at Coldwater Canyon Fire Station, and when the City of Beverly Hills tried to shut us down, we came up with a million-dollar insurance policy and they wrote us up in Los Angeles Magazine. The Northridge Earthquake destroyed the field � which, I guess, was over a reservoir, and was never rebuilt. The Coldwater Cats are no more. But Bill and Mark and I wrote references and the address 2200 Coldwater Canyon� into a million 80s videos and movies, and one of these days, Mr. Stubbs and the Coldwater Cats will probably be game-winning answers for the Porno Version of Trivial Pursuit�. (Laughs)

Thank you, Mr. Williams. We appreciate your time.

Think nothing of it.

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