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Wednesday, June 9th, 1999

Evil Angel's Tom Zupko tells AVN: "There is nothing like putting your dick in the tight ass of a wet whore, but equally entertaining is poking fun at the hypocritical religious, political and cultural institutions a desperate society holds sacred..."

Ron Miller Writes About Erotica LA

As a loyal daily reader of your online column I am somewhat surprised, and more than a little disappointed that EROTICA LA has gotten little or no coverage from you. This is particularly true since ELA is the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 11 - 13, 1999 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

I want to pass along my thanks to you for all the kind words and industry exposure you have give Brooke Hunter, it means a lot to her. Thanks, in part, to the positive exposure and press she has received she has recently been booked to appear in Jill Kelly's upcoming Purfect Pink, along with her first magazine cover, (which I'm certain you already know about). Copies of your column where you have said such positive things about her adorn the early pages of her professional scrap book and she will always be grateful for the exposure you have given to the early day's of her career in the industry.

It has come to my attention that the relationship between Brooke and myself has become a source of rumors around the industry although I am at a loss as to why, perhaps you might be able to enlighten me. Brooke Brooke1 Brooke2

Luke: People are saying that the relationship between you and Brooke is not strictly platonic, and that you have, at times, put your hand in the cookie jar, wink wink.

As for the ELA's meager coverage on my site. Truth be told, I specialize in scandal...and as there has been no scandal around your operation, I have little to say. Now if you could only add some Mafia, murder, international drug trafficking and money laundering, you could be all over l-keford.com.

Josh Alan Friedman's Tales of Times Square

In 1976, journalist Josh Alan Friedman published his first article. It was for Al Goldstein's Screw magazine. Soon after he also published in Screw his first comic strips with brother Drew, beginning a "libel-strewn" 12-year collaboration known as the Friedman Bros.

In 1980, at age 24, Josh tried out for a writing job at Saturday Night Live. It fell through and he went to work fulltime at Screw. He lasted on staff for two years until getting fired by editor Manny Neuhaus. Until 1986, Friedman wrote the "Naked City" beat for the weekly. Then he spent a year as managing editor at the magazine High Times before moving to Dallas, Texas with his sweetheart. Together since 1981, they married in 1988.

In the December 21, 1998 issue of Screw, Friedman reminisced:

"Everything about SCREW was the opposite of what outsiders might imagine. It was the only magazine out of dozens where I freelanced whose editors dealt straight, looked you in the eye and handled your work respectfully. It was the only men's magazine that paid like clockwork. The scale was low, but freelancers got paid from the same revolving two-week payroll as staffers.

"Goldstein was the only man alive who could legitimately claim hookers as tax write-offs. Likewise, SCREW reporters were reimbursed or fronted petty cash for research in the field, like peeps and whorehouses. Before I took over the paper's "Naked City" listings, I was a stringer. SCREW's comptroller, Philip Eisenberg, was a Soviet bureaucrat who kept Goldstein's tax ledgers neat as a Torah scroll. He was also in charge of expenses. When someone needed petty cash for undercover reviews, Philip counted it out as if he were donating blood. "Nothing more than a handjob," he'd soberly remind you."

In 1986, Friedman published his book Tales of Times Square, a collection of Screw columns. Later he published two books of comics with his brother Drew.

Tuesday night, 6/8/99, I talked by phone to Josh. He spoke from his palace in Dallas.

Josh: "I loved Screw. It was an amazing job. I was let go. I clashed with Manny Neuhaus. Eventually it came to a boil after my best friend Richard Jaccoma...and Gil Reavill [who wrote Al's editorials until 1996]... For 18 months, we had an amazing time. It was the tail-end of the sexual revolution, right before AIDS. Philip Roth spent the day observing the three of us and he called us the "nine to five anarchists." Even though we worked mostly until 10PM because we loved it so much.

"I'm cursed with a lifetime subscription [to Screw] from Al Goldstein... Even after all these years, it still follows me to Texas.

"I had one screaming argument with Manny where I almost threw him out the window. So I knew I had to leave. But I kept my Naked City column until 1986 (from issue 678 to 903).

"I'm editing a Terry Southern [novelist] anthology, so I have to get online. I'm doing it with Niles, his son.

"I met my future wife through a window at Screw. She was staying at the Markle Evangeline Hall on 13th Street. It was run by the Salvation Army for young girls from the south going to college. And I went back to Texas with her in 1987. I write for the Dallas Observer and I'm waiting on a couple of books... I play guitar fulltime. I have three (blues rock) albums under the name Josh Alan. I'm known as the atomic acoustic guitarist. That was always my second career in New York but here it tookover fulltime.

"Through working at Screw, I met my wife, my best friend Richard Jaccoma who I still talk with every other day... I got the Times Square book. We all quit smoking... It was the healthiest job I've ever had. I went in depressed, thinking I was ending up here, and within months of working there, I felt like I was in the most extraordinary job. I've never had so much fun.

"You're 24 years old and you're being sent out on assignments to hang out with young demented porn starlets. There's no AIDS. You're at the cutting edge of the New York underground. And in those days, Screw still had some weight. The Screw press card got you into a hundred places. You got laid.

"In those days they had Leisure Spas like Caesars Retreat, Tahitia... They were big theme-park whorehouses that the city shut down around 1980. They had extraordinary girls working there who were like Penthouse Pets. You'd be the man from Screw and you'd go in and the owner would comp you two girls and give you a big Vegas style suite for a few hours.

"You mention at a party that you work at Screw and women's ears would perk up and next thing you'd know they'd be confiding their darkest sexual secrets to you, because you were a Screw editor. I don't think it's like that anymore. Though... If you said you were the editor of Hustler... But the editor of Hustler, Alan MacDonnell never leaves his office. He's a homebody who doesn't have any fun with it like we used to..."

Luke: "How many women do you think you buffed while at Screw?"

Josh: "I couldn't count it... You did get turned down plenty of times. There were plenty of prudish porn stars (like Veronica Hart)... But I bagged my share."

Luke: "What happened to Screw? It has definitely gone downhill."

Josh: "Goldstein just uses it as a weekly paycheck. It's a repository for hooker ads. During the whole time that Manny [Neuhaus] was there, he was not there to be a thinker or an editor or to do anything revolutionary or daring. He was an administrator who got the magazine out every week and that he did well. He was a traffic cop. He didn't care about writing or ideas or setting satirical fires. He cared about getting the ads in, getting it out on time, without any effort towards putting any writing into it. It wasn't worth reading...

"I was always wanting to get us in trouble and to take chances... I wanted to get lots of writers to go out and tackle things that hadn't been written about... Manny was more interested in making things as easy as possible and recycling the same cliches. I think Goldstein's editorials are wonderful. I think he's the best editorial writer in America.

"The paper is a little better now since Manny left. It's picked up some energy. He was there 20 years grinding it out without any thought."

Luke: "I hear that Goldstein is terrible to work for?"

Josh: "I loved working for Al. I wouldn't want to be his personal secretary but I found him to be a fabulous heroic boss. I had Richard Jaccoma as a buffer and Gil wrote his editorials. Al just had fun with me. He always treated me with kid gloves. He was much tougher with Richard. Al never raised his voice to me or insulted me... He insulted everybody and it was your job to insult your boss in print. He would storm into the office and say, 'you didn't have me eating s--- this week.' You'd get chewed out for not insulting your own boss in print.

"Al is a giant character and his achievements are enormous. For all of his buffoonery and idiocy, he's achieved 100 more breakthroughs than Larry Flynt. Al went to jail several dozens times... If you want to say that somebody was a martyr for pornography, nobody was more than Al. He put his life on the line... He didn't get shot, but not for not trying. He went on TV many times when I worked there and begged people to take a shot at him. In Southern California on a TV show, he said 'you all are so inept in California, that if you tried to shoot me, you'd miss. I dare you.' Imagine 20 rednecks running to their pickup trucks with shotguns to go get him on that one.

"In 1976 in Wichita, Kansas, Al was put on trial by the federal government. Jim Buckley bailed out. Al was deathly at the time. He had a tracheotomy. They cut something out and put a pipe in there. It looked like if he didn't die, he'd go to jail for the rest of his life. He beat it. I've never seen anyone with his balls, figuratively. He's got the biggest balls in the history of the pornography industry. No doubt about it. He's the bravest man in the history of pornography.

"The whole obnoxious thing, and the whining, is all a front. He's a big clown. He's like a cartoon of antiSemitism."

Luke: "Do you think it is a good fight to bring porn into the mainstream?"

Josh: "I don't know. I've debated that all my life. Is it good? Is it healthy? Are we a better America for it? I don't know. I think so... At the bottom line, Al mainly tells the truth, more so than the other guys. And if you don't have the truth, what do you have? I think and I hope that it is all for the betterment of mankind but we'll never know for sure."

Luke: "The other guys? Meaning the other guys in mainstream media or the other guys in porn media?"

Josh: "Certainly more than the mainstream media. Al is the walking truth compared to anyone from the mainstream media which is riddled with lies and misinformation... The mainstream media is a little like the goverment was in the Soviet Union. It manufactures its own vision."

Former Screw writer Mark Kramer writes: "Josh's threat of throwing Neuhaus out the 11th floor window left Neuhaus with an iron determination that no other Screw writer would ever be permitted to accumulate the journalistic cachet that Josh had. You cannot imagine the decrepitude and low morale that permeated Screw when I was hired there in spring, 87--newly arrived from Texas. An ad for the editorial slot had run for weeks, if not months, in the Village Voice. Apparently no one wanted the job--and I was hired on the spot. Somewhere in my original notes for what was ultimately the Spy story on Screw, there's a description of the sour, sadistic milieu that Manny had created - leading to the hiring of career porners and drug addicts such as Eric Danville [from High Times and Carl Ruderman's porn empire] and David Aaron Clark [from Genesis]...both, I might add, Joe Christ apologists as well, thus immolating any erotogenic cred they may have on the altar of a dickless man who celebrates death..."

Annette Haven Comeback?

Wyvern writes on RAME: "There has never been another woman in all of porn as beautiful as Annette Haven. Or as frustrating. If she comes back into porn, I would be really disappointed. It would be embarassing. Unless, of course, she came back in a video with either Rocco or Max, or perhaps getting double treatment from Sean Michaels and Mark Davis, a-la Anabolic's World Sex Tour series. You know...full on facials, A2M, the whole enchilada.

"She could do a gang bang vid for Anabolic...take condom emptying lessons by watching the first 4 Gang Bang Girls series videos. Get Vanessa Chase out of retirement to play her daughter and do some sort of Mom/daughter incest thing with lots of cumswapping and rimming. Or, maybe she could do a double bill with Aunt Peg? Now, THAT would be a granny video worth buying. Otherwise, forget it. I'd rather remember her as she was, cum dodging and all, then see her come back and embarass herself. What would be the point? The key word for porn starlets these days is "nasty." If you're not "nasty" you're nothing. Of course, this whole story is probably Urban Myth anyway. Why would Annette Haven still have an agent? Has she performed anywhere since the 70's? Is she desparate for money? What has she been doing for the last 20 years?"

Luke: She married a rich fan of hers and lives near San Jose. None of the rumors about her returning to hardcore have come true.

NiceJewishGirl writes Luke:

And your mum, and your family, etc. Luke, I mean, they love you but they don't understand you because you're different. And they are normal type people and you just hear a different drummer. And normal mainstream types just don't understand anything that's different, ever. I mean, to use a christian analogy, look at jesus, he was different, preached peace, friendship with women, even tainted women and he was crucified.

If you think about it, there's a lot of class issues in porn. It's the working class that does all the work, I have thought about it, like is watching porn exploitive because it's essentially people who are the working classes who are doing this work to get money. Kind of like how our food gets to the table, the people in the fields, and the death from that. It's kind of related (at least in my head), and I think well, the people in porn, although doing degrading work at least get better pay. And then, if you follow that thread, almost all work is horrible and exploitive.

So, anyways, I think it is fine to be not accepted by one's family, one's society. In fact, it is probably better that way. To be accepted into the mainstream, for me, would be death. I don't want to be like everybody else, although growing up I sure wanted a mom to be there for me, not party with my friends, or have sex with my friends...

Luke, when did the Valley become the porn Valley? There were always these weird men trying to get us into the biz. And a lot of my friends, Lisa XXX; my neighbor who saved my life when I was a teen; another best friend of mine Laurie XXX....girls that were my very closest and best friends went into it. And then up here, in the punk rock days, anarchist days, etc. always, lots of friends in the sex biz. At one point I too thought about it, but I knew it would screw me up too bad, esp. about sex and love etc. My friend Luisa (who's Jewish and from a very wealthy family) her too. I guess I just decided that being a secretary would be easier, less wear and tear on my soul....and no money of course!!!

As far as Boogie Nights goes, it is soo true, those were real people I truly remembered, you didn't even have to be in porn. Those people really lived. I remember my parents having really wild parties with people throwing up, and tiki lamps. We never did have a pool, though all my neighbors did. The valley was a really wild place. Kind of like Twin Peaks, I'm sure there was wife swapping, etc. and I think my mother was involved into some really weird stuff, like infidelity, throwing big parties for your daughter when your husband isn't around.....hmmmm. Oh yeah, and they send me to hebrew school for years and years.