[Note: The following review is from a veteran of the xxx-rated movie industry, who worked in it from 1978 to 1987. This reviewer has requested that I withhold the name, and so I will, but I think you'll find this "insider's look" at the movie interesting. -- Hart Williams.]

by "Eddie Meese" - originally appeared in THIS WEEK WITH TEETH, May 1998

There were only a couple of guys who worked regularly, because they could do their business in front of fifty people under hot lights with some girl they’d only just met. I wouldn’t want to do it

I used to work in porno movies in "The Golden Age" in the Seventies. When I was there, we used to shoot 35 mm, Panavision and Technicolor, with crews and scripts and even good acting sometimes.

The people I used to work with were pros. Some of them worked on Hollywood sets during the week and work with us on the weekends. A couple years ago, I saw a guy I used to crew with win an Oscar.

This movie really makes me mad. Most of it is his idea of what it was supposed to be like, but it wasn’t anything like that. I oughtta know. I was there, and he wasn’t.

The first howler I saw was that the "director" played by Burt Reynolds picked this kid up before he was eighteen at a disco in the Valley. Nobody I ever knew went around "picking up" actors or actresses for porno movies. You got your actors from agents. Period. What we were doing was illegal -- not as bad as selling pot, but you sure could end up looking at serious jail time if they caught you.

People in the "business" knew we could all get busted. If I rent lights and the cops show up, they’d grab the lights, and I’d be stuck with the rental for the months the LAPD would hold them. Sometimes they’d just drop the case. They knew they were ruining you. It didn’t matter if some judge let you off -- Ed Davis was the Chief, and he didn’t want any rock concerts or porno movies shot in LA, so all this stuff about big porno parties and heaps of cocaine on the tables is just so much hooey.

We shot a lot of movies in Los Angeles because we were good and we knew how to move in and out quiet as cats. When you’re moving a couple of trucks worth of equipment and fifteen or twenty actresses and another forty crew members around the Hollywood Hills, either you know how to be invisible, or else you’re headed for jail. Most of the porn movies shot then were in San Francisco or New York, anyway. After a bunch of busts in the late seventies, nobody wanted to shoot in LA.

The other joke was this dumb idea that just because the kid [Mark Wahlburg -- ed.] had a big schvance, that he could work in porno. There were only a couple of guys who worked regularly, because they could do their business in front of fifty people under hot lights with some girl they’d only just met. I wouldn’t want to do it. Nobody really cared how big anybody was as much as if he could do what he was hired to do. I saw a lot of guys who thought they were god’s gift to women make like a raisin.

Hardly anybody who acted in them ever hung out together. There were a lot of smart people in porno then and I was insulted by the movie where the director seemed to be saying that everybody in the business was a feeb. The people who made the movie were the feebs.

They threw in child molesting, and prison rape and cocaine and none of those things were in porno that I ever saw. Some people had real problems with coke, but everybody in Hollywood was having problems with it. If you wanted to see tables of the stuff, the rock and roll executives and the studio schmucks were the place to see it.

I haven’t said all the things I wanted to say, like who in hell every got enough money from a donut shop cash register to open a stereo store and advertise it on TV? The movie is just a bunch of lies and stereotypes that nobody would believe if they said them about black people or minorities. We’re people, too, and I hope that people know "Boogie Nights" is a bunch of lies, but I think they’re going to win some Oscars and that’s a damn shame.

I’d tell you my name, but every time someone learns that I used to do porno, they get ugly and abusive and say things they’d never say to anybody on the street because they think they know everything about porno, and they don’t know anything, just like whoever made this putz movie.

return to reportage page

return to home page