HOME

 

Born 9/55, director Bud Bennett Lee has three older sisters and an older foster brother who died of AIDS in early 1996.

Bud's parents divorced when he was four and his dad drifted out of his life. Lee still feels the pain of a father who shows little interest in him and has never met Bud's youngest son, born in 1990. The director also has a son born in 1987. The boys spend most of their time with their mother Hyapatia Lee. She says her ex-husband owes them $50,000 child support.

Bud's mother never remarried after her divorce. She raised the children and then attended college to become a psychiatrist. She died in March, 1988.

Bennett describes his childhood as normal. "Mom taught us to be self-reliant." The family attended the liberal Protestant church Disciples of Christ.

Bud led a Christian youth program in his teens and attended the Lexington Theological Seminary for a semester. He abandoned his faith at age 23 when he was raped by three black men. "Where was this protective caring deity when I needed him?"

A popular football player in high school who lost his birginity at age 13, Bud majored in Dramatic Arts and Film at Indiana University while experimenting with drugs and sex.

In 1979 he met Hyapatia Lee. Bud was a friend of her therapist. Bud manned a video camera for Playboy's coverage of the 1979 Miss Nude Galaxy contest won by Hyapatia that year. They married in 1980. Consonant with the Cherokee tradition, Bud took on Hyapatia's last name of Lee. The couple entered porn after her repeat 1981 Miss Nude Galaxy victory.

At the time Bud worked a vice-president of a finance company but he quit when Hyapatia asked him to be her husband. "Why don't we get married and travel on the road - I'll take care of the money." Bud accepted but found out the truth of the Talmudic dictum "He who marries for money will pay for it."

"We live in a "Never Never Land," says Bud about the porn industry. "Everybody's Peter Pan. The actors never have to grow up. They could be irresponsible little children until the day they die, and people will still hire them. We producers are so aware of what we're asking people to do that we're forgiving of their inadequacies. "You're willing to share your intimacy with me? Great, you can show up an hour and a half late - I'll still let you work. If you or I showed up an hour late, we'd get fired… Another thing that amazes me is how much people will abuse themselves. You put a dollar sign in front of a figure and they'll say, "Sure, I'll do it." Many women have penetration on camera who are almost totally lesbian. They hate men so much it doesn't f---ing matter to them.

"That's about 40% of the women. It also amazes me how long women hang on to losers. For a long time I struggled with whether I was a loser or not. Hyapatia told me, "Don't get a job. I need you or I can't do this job." It was excruciating to me to be what some producers call a "suitcase pimp" - a guy who's willing to accept that his wife or girlfriend f---s other men because it makes a lot of dough, but they don't like it, so they put her down for it. But they won't call her a slut unless they're really mad at her.

"After Hyapatia and I had been in the business three years, we became monogamous," Bud told Hustler Erotic Video Guide in 1994. "My girlfriend [now wife] Asia Carrera was saying to Hyapatia recently, "Come on, he's Bud Lee, he gets pussy all the time. Every girl wants to be in his films. They'll even ball him for it." But I won't be unfaithful. Hyapatia had sex with other guys when we were married because it was her job. The roles required it. Even if she acted like she was turned on, nobody could touch her. Only I could do that.

"I can deal with the woman I love having sex on camera. As a director, my job demands that I be impersonal about sex."

Bud's mother didn't approve of his career in pornography. One of his sisters also doesn't approve, another one doesn't care and another sister and her husband like his work.

Lee performed with his wife in their first movie Some Like It Hot and proceeded to act in about 20 flicks, mainly with Hyapatia before moving full-time behind the camera. The long-haired hippie directed the lush and expensive Ribald Tales of Canterbury. It's porn's version of Heaven's Gate with too much money spent on the peripheral.

"It's pronounced "RIB-ald" not "RYE-bald"," Bud's wife Asia Carrera interjected into our Spring 1996 conversation. "You've [Bud] been saying it wrong for fifteen f---ing years. I've looked up the pronunciation in two dictionaries."

"She's a scholastic geek," Bud explains with a smile. Asia has an IQ of 154.

Asia interrupted Bud several times that evening to correct his pronunciation of words. It didn't appear to bother him.

Bud, an ordinary looking man, first married while at Indiana University. It lasted from 1975-79. His marriage to Hyapatia ran from 1980 to 1992. The couple were famous for swinging, though both deny the reality of the rumors. In his book Raw Talent, Jerry Butler describes one incident where Bud supposedly told him that he wanted to eat out his ass while Jerry f---ed his wife.

Bud Lee joined Vivid in 1992. With help from Paul Thomas, Bud made the "innovatively directionless, sexless and downright stupid Blonde Justice 3," writes Pat Riley. "But it's not their fault. They're under a lot of pressure [from Vivid] to crank out two films a month."

In 1993 VCA released Bud Lee's Centerfold to enthusiastic reviews from the smut press. Hyapatia Lee plays an X-rated model turned skin photographer who is coping with low self-esteem and trying to turn her life around. But she's caught up in turning the tables on the people whom she once was mistreating her models.

"An excellent, big-budget production and the crowding achievement of director Bud Lee. He expertly puts together a first-rate script, cast and grouping of sex films. The only drawback is the wooden acting...." (AFW 1996D p. 253)

Bill Margold calls Bud "the yuppie pornographer" for his soft approach to hardcore.

Lee made 1994's Hardcore which twists The Prince and the Pauper theme. Nikki Dial plays a cynical porn star eager to escape her life, and a double wanting entrance to porn. "Writer Richard Pacheco and Lee turn this potentially one-joke story into an engaging tale of subtlety and nuance. Nikki fashions two distinct characters and locates the sexual center of each." (AFW 1996 D p.131)

Vivid released Supermodel in 1994. "Producer Paul Thomas helps Bud Lee craft his own slick erotique shot-on-film feature, though the lighting would never have past muster in one of Thomas' own films. It's hard to go wrong with a cast of top-shelf sluts of this magnitude, and it doesn't take a genius to realize Asia Carrera and Isis Nile need to be immortalized in the lush flattering medium of film for porn posterity. Raven Touchstone's savvy script is set in the world of porn photography as we meander through a cable friendly world murder mystery/soap opera featuring solid performances from Buck Adams and Lene as a pair of gumshoes digging into a model's suicide. Certainly Bud Lee's best yet." (AFW 96D p.271)

The subtitle of Supermodel is "Lene's Day Off", and since every time Lene shows up on screen, she's working, it shows you how coherent the story is. The two major plot developments are explained in a 30-second voice-over an hour into the film. If you include part one, the film runs three hours. The story meanders with little interaction between the main characters. " Its strengths are Vivid's ever-present top-notch technical qualities - but that's not enough to hold an audience. Lene on the boxcover will cause the tape to move, but consumers remember who disappointed them last." (AVN 10/94 p.60)

Starlet, 1994, is another solid sex film with a "clever premise which nearly collapses under its own weight." (AVN)

"I'm not done exploring everything I want to do as a filmmaker," Bud promised Hustler Erotic Video Guide in 1994. "Paul Thomas is a wonderful man. He treats me like part of his family, and I appreciate his creative input. We support each other. I want to stay where I am for a long, long time.

"What P.T. and I are doing is telling stories with more honesty than anyone has ever done before. We don't deal with fantasy. What goes on in the lives of ordinary people is more interesting to us than whatever is running through the mind of some porn producer."

Bud says two kinks particularly interest him. One is cross-dressing. Men are fascinated with it, he claims. They won't admit it because they are afraid to be labeled gay. "We're told from the time we're little boys, "Go out and hunt." But men have a feminine side. I do… If that's repressed, perversion happens - cross dressing happens."

Bud's second fascination is bondage and S-M. "Not the violence, but the question of why people get into wearing leather and latex garments. People have no idea why they want to wear a spiked-studded dog collar.

Bud remembers making love to a woman who called him "Daddy" whenever she got turned on. He says that was her way of getting the love she never received as a child.

Lee enjoys fantasizing about rape, which he likes to "lovingly explore... I'll create this scenario. She goes into the bathroom, and then comes out into a dark room. She asks "Where are you?" But I don't answer her. She feels around for the light switch and as she's reaching for it, I grab her hand. I "attack" her. Fear and terror bring out sexual feelings. Hyapatia and I frequently reversed the roles. She'd roll on top of me, wrap a hand around my throat, slap me, and say: "Eat my pussy, and you better make me feel good. Understand?"

"Coming on a woman's face is debasing to her, but if that's what she wants, it's ok. I'd rather have a woman swallow my cum because then I feel that she's experiencing me in every way. She's saying, 'I accept you, Bud. I accept you fully.'" (HEVG)

Bud says urinating inside someone after you come is also interesting.

Some of Bud's explorations of violence are not loving. He has a long record of beating his porn star wives. Hyapatia says that on half a dozen occasions, he beat and choked her severely.

In its January 1995 issue, Adult Video News wrote:

An incensed Bud Lee tried to head off rumors claiming that Lee pistol whipped his current girlfriend Asia Carrera in a drunken frenzy. According to Lee, the story was being spread by Carrera's ex-boyfriend Tony Tedeschi (you'll remember Tedeschi's participation in the Johnathan Morgan "gay" incident).

The story supposedly had Lee being fired by Vivid, going on a drinking spree and being committed to an alcohol sanitarium, thus touching off the incident.

While Lee admits that, yes, he entered a 30-day program (paid for by Carrera, by the way) back in October, he has been sober since that time. Making the Tedeschi-reported incident appear even more ludicrous, Lee said that he has asked Carrera to marry him and that she has accepted. Lee, of course, states that the pistol-whipping incident is a fabrication and Tedeschi's desperate act of sour grapes.

"Asia and I are close and in love for as long as can be," says Lee. "We were very happy with one another.

"But I feel very vindictive about Tony Tedeschi and would be tempted to destroy his career, though he's very good at doing that himself," Lee went on to say.

"I want the truth to be known that he (Tedeschi) is talking out of his ass. As far as the rumors about Vivid, I AM their director."

Soon after the 1/95 edition of AVN hit the stands, Vivid fired Lee. Rumors swirled that Bud's alcoholism was a big factor.

I interviewed Bud and Asia Carrera at their apartment in the Spring of 1996. The director confessed to the pistol whipping of Asia that he denied in AVN. Carrera still carries scars from the thrashing.

Bud's three years working for Vivid sapped him, he claims. "When you work for a big company, they have rules and regulations that crap on people. And when you carry out those rules, you get the reputation for crapping on people. So you have to throw off that cloak and show your true colors.

"I went from being one of the better filmmakers in the business to being the second person on the totem pole asked to make one or two day films. My product was never as good as it was. Asia didn't even believe me that I was as good as Paul Thomas until I sat her down and showed her some of my best films pre-Vivid.

"All their big projects went to Paul Thomas. I got the stuff he wasn't interested in. I was the only person who shot one-day films. That's film, not video. I got two days to make pictures while PT took up to five days.

"I put up with that because they paid me regularly.

"Paul Thomas and I were initially complimentary. I thought that I was being groomed for PT's position because PT appeared to be moving on to the R-rated genre. But that failed. So PT had to make X."

"Certain people look forward to every day as an opportunity to screw over other people," says Bud. "I'm not one of those people but I became that way - manipulative, producer-like, controlling - through working for Vivid. I didn't like myself. It got to the point where I stopped wanting to go to the set, and I love going to the set.

"Vivid operates by screwing people over. They tell each contract girl that she is going to be the big star this year. "You'll be in our big movie." They say this to everyone but it only works out for one of the girls.

"Vivid makes agreements and then weasels out of them. It was my job to make deals with the talent. I'd tell someone she'd get $1500 for two scenes, but the person in control of the money, Paul Thomas, would say that she's only worth $1400 and write that check. I'd look bad. Invariably what would happen is that Bud would reach into his pocket and make it up to them."

Bud maintains his friendship with Paul Thomas but says he doesn't like working with him.

Bill Margold, along with Jim Holliday and other knowledgeable pornographers, take a harsh view of Vivid. "Vivid essentially packages s--- in cellophane and sells it like chocolate," says Margold. "They sell the gloss but gloss can be dross. Vivid has no depth. Their concern is less with turning America on than on turning it to sleep. They market their product in many different ways. They take movies and edit them down for cable TV. They make comfortable, sanctified porn, porn that you can put on the coffee table.

"Vivid girls sweat Channel. If you work for Vivid, you leave your emotions at home and then you get them back when you leave. Ashlyn Gere and Barbara Dare survived their time as Vivid contract girls and moved on to better things."

"People don't jack off to Vivid movies," says Margold. "They tolerate them. I wanted to be jacked off to. I want to create images that will get you up and off."

Bud's favorite porn directors are Michael Zen, Andrew Blake and Cameron Grant.

"I make movies for educated white-collar couples 25-50. I was raised by women. I'm not into humiliating women. I don't like porn. Porn means rape and degrading women. I make adult movies. People who degrade women hate their mothers. I don't hate my mom. I loved my mom."

Hyapatia Lee wrote to me in 1997: "Funny to read Bud loved his mother. Why are her ashes still at MY house? I have asked several times for him or one of his sisters to come and get them. After all, we have been divorced for six years. If he loves the women of his family so much, why does his sister… say she had not heard from him since Christmas [ten months ago]?"

Bud Lee: "I have a rule. I will not make anything that I will not sit in a room with a jury and say that the reason I did that is because. Gregory Dark can't do that. He goes into a court room in Alabama or Utah and he's shot."

For the record, Utah is a porn-free state and Bud Lee's work is as legally obscene there as Gregory Dark's.

"I don't say to women, "I need a cum shot on your face. I like internal cum shots where he pulls out and the cum drips out of her pussy. That's more realistic. I don't like sex for no reason.

"Porn is now a means to an end for women [performers]. It used to be a lifestyle. It's like professional sports. Oscar Robertson loved to play the game. Now people first want their paychecks. So you get better looking women and a better quality product. The men are still average looking. They used to be ugly."

Bud and his wife Asia Carrera made the best selling film of mid-1996 A is for Asia where Asia shows off her newly augmented breasts, and for the first time takes facial cum shots and cocks up the ass.

The demure soft-spoken sex performer appears in 150 videos of dramatically varying quality. She generally saves her best work for big-budget features like Aroused, Backstage Pass, Satyr and Babewatch.

Asia and Bud split up in late 1997, though they remain friends. Asia posted on RAME 11/17/97 in response to inquiries about how the ordinary looking pornographer manages to attract such beautiful women: "Bud isn't particularly influential or powerful, nor is he hung like a horse. (Bud used to work as talent with Hyapatia in her earlier movies, so I'm not giving away any secret info there.) He's just a nice guy. Truly nice. He would never do anything spiteful or vindictive, would never tell me 'no' on anything I want to do, and has nothing but praise and support for me in all my efforts. He would also tell me daily that I was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he would willingly make me dinner or run errands for me while I worked online. In other words, Bud treated me like a princess, which was all I ever wanted. I don't want a guy who's rich, or handsome, or hung like a horse. I don't want a guy who thinks he's great, or a guy that all the girls want to steal away from me. I want a sweet, humble guy, who's content to sit at home with me, just one on one, for the rest of our lives together. It's sad that Bud and I didn't work out, but we're still very, very close, and we still spend a lot of time together. He just came over for dinner last night, and my boyfriend did the cooking. The three of us still work together on sets, and we're all good friends. P.S. Hyapatia and Bud had problems because she's a bitter, vindictive person who feels that the world owes her a living for hardships she endured when she was younger. Hyapatia is extremely spiteful, and becomes truth-impaired when it comes to getting what she wants. I had to ask Bud to make her page him instead of calling our answering machine, because I was afraid to check the messages anymore. The rants she would leave for him were... interesting."

Here's an excerpt from the www.adulttventertainment.com site by Kelly Holland: "The Sweetest Drunk Award" [at the XRCO show in early March, 1999] would have to go to director Bud Lee. He'd had a few too many margaritas and was picking up actresses, throwing them over his shoulder and heading off in the crowd, much to the amusement of girlfriend ANITA CANNIBAL."

Lee told the 3/99 AVN that he's "evolving... People who have come up against me in the past and have found me irritating, or an asshole, or feel that they've been abused by me... I want to them to know that for a long time I was an alcoholic; still am. I drank a lot... Alcohol killed all the pain of trying to work as hard as I could at a relationship for years [Hyapatia Lee], and failing... And I was an asshole to a lot of people. I treated a lot of people without the respect that I believe is due to all people. And I want to apologize, and tell them that I've grown up a lot, and I've done a lot of soul searching.

"The mistakes that I make now are made out of innocence and ignorance, instead of blatant acts of hostility or deception."