The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

The best thing about this book is the cover. The book consists of titillating but not terribly illuminating snippets of interviews that reveal little except most of these poor folks were borderline dysfunctional. Studs Terkel does oral history much better.

There are some funny scenes. “"When I arrived to shoot my first loop, Tina Russell was dressed like a hooker-in a short, short ribbed maroon miniskirt and a black pullover jersey and high heels. And no bra. Then a handsome, thin, bearded young man joined us. "Hi," he said. "I'm Jason. Tina's husband." My erection dropped like an express elevator. "Are you going to be in the film, too?" I asked Jason. "Nope. Not today."

The aggregate effect of the book is totally depressing. The show more average career for the women lasted two years; the men often much longer, and the involvement with the mob and how little money they made is dispiriting. Marilyn Chambers (remember the Ivory Snow box cover?) was an exception who managed to garner a percentage of the take from Behind the Green Door and the scandal surrounding her face on the pure soap helped push box office receipts. Linda Lovelace, real name, Linda Susan Boreman, who died quite young from a car accident at age 53, related a bizarre conversation with her father: My father went to see the movie-[guess which one] because he wanted to see if it was really me. And he came back and said, "Yup, it's her, but it's some kind of trick." Then he went and sat down on the couch with his peanuts and beer and watched Wild Kingdom." show less

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A book with outsized ambitions: even after doing away with gay porn entirely, claiming, probably rightly, that it's "another book unto itself," there's still at least three major strands operating here: a biography-oriented approach, dealing with major players within the world of porn; a true-crime-ish approach focused on mob involvement, industry murders, high-profile busts, etc; and, finally, an overview of major developments within the industry as an industry (the famous rise of video, for instance).

Although these three strands often overlap, they're distinct enough that the book often struggles to manage the welter of material. (To get a grasp of the show more magnitude of the topic, remember that the life story of just one figure in this world, porn merchant Reuben Sturman, constitutes an entire third of Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness.) Consequently, the book manages the unenviable trick of both being nearly 600 pages long and feeling like it's barely scratching the surface.

I've never been much of a big reader of true crime, and so that facet of the book is the least interesting to me (although the life story of FBI agent Pat Livingston, and his identity confusion with his undercover alias Pat Salamone is weirdly gripping: another "book unto itself" lies there). In reality, it's the third strand—what seems to me to be the "true" history of the industry—that I was the most interested in, and at times the aversion to this material struck me as frustrating: why two chapters on a porn oddity like John Wayne Bobbit and not even a mention of industry-wide efforts to come into compliance with Section 2257? Why does the discussion of the star system that dominates porn today seem to end with Ginger Lynn? And for that matter, where's the Internet? (The book closes its history in 1998, with the discovery (and swift containment) of HIV in the post-testing industry, but it was published in 2005, so certainly Internet porn could have at least warranted a brief epilogue?)

Quibbling in this way is easy and perhaps a bit cheap: sure, this book isn't definitive, but I'm pretty certain that at this stage of the game it's next to impossible to write the definitive history in a single volume. And so if this ends up being a history—rather than the history—does it matter? What matters more is that the book is consistently fascinating (although the short-sighted lack of an index does make the task of keeping track of the hundreds of recurring figures who crop up somewhat more of a chore than it, strictly speaking, needed to be). So, ultimately, recommended, albeit with reservations. show less

Maybe one of my favorite books of all time. Studs Terkel and Legs McNeil will one day share an office in heaven. Between this work and [book: Please Kill Me], I owe McNeil a drink.

Maybe one of my favorite books of all time. Studs Terkel and Legs McNeil will one day share an office in heaven. Between this work and [book: Please Kill Me], I owe McNeil a drink.

Maybe one of my favorite books of all time. Studs Terkel and Legs McNeil will one day share an office in heaven. Between this work and [book: Please Kill Me], I owe McNeil a drink.

Maybe one of my favorite books of all time. Studs Terkel and Legs McNeil will one day share an office in heaven. Between this work and [book: Please Kill Me], I owe McNeil a drink.