Wank Not (Or, How I Didn't Become a Pornographer)

by David Hoffman Monday, February 24, 2003

"Oh Christ" I tell my borderline psychotic roommate (I live in downtown Hollywood. It's hard to find normal roommates); "I'll probably have to jerk off before I go. I won't be able to hold the camera straight!"

An hour later I'm trying to shake my my wannabe cosmetician roommate out of a manic-depressive crying fit. We're going to be late for my first shoot with Seymour Butts.

Real name Adam Glasser, Seymour was kind enough to try out my latent pervert skills. As I've never photographed a woman with a penis in her mouth, most porners were loathe to talk to me. I guess for people with doorknobs for brains, ten years of photographing models in all types of situations didn't qualify me to shoot girls with dicks in their mouths.

I could relate to Glasser - a tall, thin Jewish boy with curly hair. His 73-year-old mother did his accounting. It was a nice, traditional, Jewish family-run business, sort of like an erotic bagel shop.

People warned that Glasser was only hiring me because no one would work with him now that he was a defendant in the industry's biggest obscenity case - the "Tampa Tushy Fest" anal-fisting flick.

I preferred to think that Adam was just being a mensch.

Ten minutes later I pull my dripping, 85-pound roommate out of the shower, then wait another 20 minutes for her to slap on her make-up (we're already 30 minutes late). I toss my photo gear into my little lemon, and anxiously zoom off to meet my fate in Porn Valley.

Now, what I expected from Seymour Butts was some serious anal eroticism. Instead, my task was to photograph lesbian f-ck scenes, including a girl peeing into a kitty-litter box on the concrete floor of a warehouse. Butt's models were skanky. My Polaroid-backed Nikon malfunctioned for the first time in 15 years. My psychotic roommate did a lousy job on the make-up. The shots came out less than perfect. Seymour was not pleased. He didn't want to pay my roommate, which resulted in maniacally hysterical threats and satanic hexes placed on his head.

So began and ended my first job for the world of wanking.

***

I had decided to be a pornographer three years ago while writing books about government corruption. I wanted to make real money and meet the kind of hot, horny women that I didn't get to meet while investigating terrorist bombings and CIA hits. Cops, informants and government criminals aren't very sexy, especially when you're making $21,000 a year. Besides, as a talented photographer with more than a doorknob for a brain, I knew I could do a better job than most of the photographers in the business. All moral considerations aside, pandering to the prurient interest by producing erotica (I never liked the word 'porn') was far more virtuous in my mind than pandering to the criminally psychotic pathos evoked by Hollywood.

My first introduction to the world of wanking landed me at the LA Erotic Expo, courtesy of friend Robert Sterling of The Konformist and porn actor Ron Jeremy. I was excited. It would be my first chance to interact with some real porners!

Robert and I stopped off to meet Ron at his Hollywood apartment. Ron Jeremy is that big, fat, hairy slob you've seen in hundreds of f-ck-flicks and those late-night infomercials hawking a pill called EXTENZ - a dubious snake oil which claims to grow two inches on your cock, as if anybody with anything more than a doorknob for a brain believes that. **

Now, why a cute young thing would want to f-ck a fat hairy slob like Jeremy is a mystery to me and most of the wanking world. I have a tape of Jeremy screwing a beautiful, apparently blind, 18 year-old nymph. I was told that putting Ron Jeremy in their movies appeals to the fantasies of fat, hairy slobs everywhere who will think that they, too, can get beautiful young nymphs.

I've heard that some actresses actually have an "I won't f-ck Ron Jeremy" clause in their contracts.

Still, I can't say Ron's not nice. I didn't have a pass to the Expo, so Ron removed his and wrapped it around my wrist.

Expecting to rub elbows with solid, salt-of-the-earth porn industry folk, we instead smashed shins with hundreds of squat little beanheads, the kind that drive little cars with extra-wide tires sticking out the sides hanging out in the parking lots of McDonald's; and geeky, nerdy Asians who came to gawk at porn starlets because that's as close as they'll ever get to a beautiful woman.

Now, when you think about it, porn is really quite silly. It's entire premise is predicated upon the act of people f-cking. All the politicking, the rumor-mongering, the press releases, the fans... it's all so, well... silly.

You just can't take this stuff seriously.

Many people do take it seriously - people like Jim South. South has run a professional wanker agency for more than 20 years. His World Models is a shabby, non-descript hovel located in a tacky part of Van Nuys across the street from a McDonald's inhabited by squat beanheads driving little cars with extra-wide tires sticking out the sides.

As a photographer in New York, I could phone Elite Models and have half-a-dozen girls at my door the next day, all eager to prostrate themselves before the great master. Attempting this in LA produced loads of derisive laughter from Jim South. Apparently, a wannabe porn actress could go to a producer with a Polaroid taken when she was three, and get work. Still, Jim, a gaunt, gregarious, 50-ish Texan with a loquacious southern draw and a black pompadour toupee, invited me by.

I had been warned that Jim South could be a little paranoid and a bit sleazy. I quickly found out about the paranoia when South threw me out of his office for the crime of accepting a friendly girl's phone number. According to an actor acquaintance, I was not the only one summarily dismissed from South's office for innocently accepting a girl's phone number.

I discovered the sleazy part upon announcing my desire to use my own actors. Apparently, not wanting to use men who looked like South's 50 year-old beer drinking buddies (I was later told they were) disqualified me from using his girls.

"Well we don't know your guys," complained South's son Jim Jr. "We know our guys. We know they're safe." Apparently, "safe" included characters such as Jim's friend Max Hardcore, who stopped by to select his next victim while I was there. It seems that throat-f-cking girls until they vomit, then peeing in their asses and making them drink it, qualifies as 'safe' in South's book.

My actors - some of whom where mainstream Screen Actors Guild pros and hadn't f-cked 500 girls in the ass - were not. (What this really boiled down to were extra fees for World Models.)

Maybe I could have hired Jim himself, since he is known to have sex with his clients. South told Los Angeles magazine that he doesn't socialize with his girls and that he has a strict 'no dating the clients' rule. As L-ke F-rd writes: "World Modeling abides by these rules as much as the Mafia sticks to its prohibition against drug dealing."*

Having had enough of skanky girls, bad locations and sleazy agencies, I decided to put a business plan together for an upstart called EROTICUM. A few calls to the Small Business Administration produced a pair of advisors from the Service Core of Retired Executives who were eager to help. This included a very friendly and helpful retired right-wing Christian fundamentalist Air Force Colonel with a buzz-cut haircut who made it known that he did not condone my new career. Two months later I gave birth to a beautiful 43-page business plan that would have been the envy of any venture capitalist yuppie pornographer.

Now the real trick was convincing investors that the bottom hadn't fallen out of the business with lines like: "The adult industry is currently bigger than ever, generating close to $4 billion in annual revenues", a line scripted right out of Adult Video News. Most investors shot back with lines like: "Well you get it started and I'll invest later," a line right out of the movie 'Catch-22'.

Six months and $750 worth of Investor Wanted ads later, I still hadn't received a dime. My most promising sucker, a paunchy, 50 year-old Jewish real estate magnate named Ed, always had a handy plethora of excuses: his dog got hit by a car, his house burnt down, there was an asteroid heading for Earth... I decided what I needed was a short, geeky Asian who liked to gawk at porn starlets. Didn't Japanese businessmen have lots of cash? Maybe I could cut a deal with the Yakuza.

Or with Johnny Cappa, the long-haired Asian [purported] owner of X-BIZ who wanted to turn my little studio apartment into a 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week webcam brothel. Johnny had an unusual method of doing business that apparently included not signing contracts, not using business cards, not paying girls and not spending money for equipment.

And I thought Jewish investors were cheap!

My other money-men (there were two-dozen in all) included a venture capitalist who only did million dollar deals, a former tank commander from Desert Storm, and a retired strip-club owner who seemed more interested in having me ghost-write his book about has-been movie stars than investing in my business.

I eventually decided it was all a cosmic plot by my Guardian Angels - a consecrated monkey wrench tossed into the machinery of earthly miscreancy - to prevent me from descending into the deep, dirty and depraved dark side.

So, having bought my ticket to Hungary, I now await my fate, temporarily relegated to the scrap-pile of wanker land like another L-ke F-rd, interviewing porn starlets who never show, heaping scorn upon a porn world that rejected me.

Perhaps, after all, I am destined for better things.

----

* Note: As Scotty Schwartz, former World employee, said: "World has definitely straightened things out and now running the way a talent agency should."

** Ron Jeremy is working out at Gold's gym as we speak. He says - no more buffets and smorgasboards, I'm trimming down.