Cash Markman moved into directing in late 1995, making product for Avica such as The Breast Files and Golden Bush.

Michael J. Cox stars as unflappable secret agent James Blond in the Golden spoof of counter-intelligence agents.

AFW: "Directed by Cash Markman! Oh, god! The end is near! Well... Markman may reveal himself a better director than he is a writer. Unfortunately, he also wrote the script... Markman makes some novice mistakes... but this film is peppered with hot shots. Now if he would only let someone else write the script..."

Markman works mainstream entertainment under a different name which he won't reveal. He rewrites many of his TV shows as X-rated spoofs. Directing adult features is not profitable for Cash because his perfectionist drive makes him do most of his own editing, taking up too much time. In recent deals, he received exclusive rights to market his videos overseas and to domestic cable TV. Cash says it's the only way a director can make money these days with a $12-$25,000 budget.

Cash says $2000 is the maximum amount anyone gets paid for an X-rated movie script. He can usually knock out a 50-page script in two days. "Scripts are not written, but rewritten. Yet 90% of the scripts I sell are first drafts. I simply can't afford to spend any more time on them given what I get paid."

Many in the industry laugh at Markman's lengthy scripts which frequently get reduced on the set as the director runs out of time.

While some adult performers welcome the opportunity to act, many others such as Randy West don't want to do anything but f---. In the video age, performers are usually paid by the sex scene so there's no monetary incentive to hang around a set all day to do dialogue.

 

His own harshest critic, Markman experiences internal argument between his internal screewriter and director. The director part of him knows that he has only a day or two to shoot the movie, "and if that son of a bitch writer gives me thirty pages of script, I'm gonna kill him."

Markman writes numerous shallow 10-page scripts but he's only producing what directors demand. He spent a full week writing a 60-page script for The Kathy Willett Story.

Cash personifies an industry wide phenomenon - the desire for personal dignity and outsider's respect by making product that approaches art. But porn is much less art than its own unique entity. As Bill Margold and others repeat, porn belongs in the gutter. Take it out of there, and it's no longer porn.

Most persons in the X industry prefer to believe that they are adult entertainers. Sure they are, just as garbage collectors are sanitation engineers. Virtually no porn entertains as well as mainstream product. Porn exists primarily to aid the masturbation of solitary men.

No sexually explicit movie ranks among the top ten thousand movies ever made. Adult production values never sustain the same level as an ordinary network TV show, let alone a big budget movie feature. Nor should they. Good scripts, high production values, believable acting and special effects are not the primary element in porn. Eroticism is. Meaning - is the sex hot? Does it get you off?

Pornographers' longing for outsiders' respect explains the many awards showered by AVN and company on Michael Ninn films like Sex, Latex and Shock. Compared to other pornos, they are technically superb, but the pursuit of special effects and innovative (for X ) editing dampens rather than increases eroticism.

One sign of pornographer's longing for respect is the attention that the award shows receive and the anger that some in the industry feel when they don't win for categories like "Best Anal Scene." Generally speaking, the older and more mature the pornographer, the less he cares about such productions.

Though Markman says he prefers writing porn to mainstream, he'd rather make quality thought-provoking movies than f--- films. But just as rock music can be great rock music but can never be great music because of its four-four beat limitation, so too porn films can be great porn films, but they can never be great films because of the limitations of the masturbatory genre.

Porn by its nature can't elevate the human condition and its makers cannot gain respect from civilization because to be civilized means to act in an elevated way.

Porn reveals the human acting as an animal. Arguments can be made on the benefits of porn, but such immediately accessible material by its very nature does not stimulate the human to higher and finer pursuits. A great quarterback is a great quarterback but his football skills neither make him a great person or an artist. That is not his role as a quarterback. The quarterback qua quarterback is an athlete with a particular skill, not an integral part of civilization. A quarterback, Jack Kemp, for example, may contribute to civilization outside of the game, just as a pornographer may contribute outside of his craft. But the generic pornographer, sportsman, rock n' roll musician and romance novelist belong to disposable pop culture which lasts as long as paper plates.

The motivations for entering the business are primal - sex, power and money.

"There are individuals who've gotten rich in porn," says Cash, "but they started ten or fifteen years ago at the time of the big boom of the VCR. But then everyone got into the business and there developed a glut of product. The industry now releases over 100 videos a week. There's no way that any store can keep up with that much product. So they have to select what they're going to buy. Certain companies make a bad product but they sell for less."

Cash wouldn't name names, but Mark Carriere's Leisure Time is a prime example. Before Leisure, Mark ran Video Exclusives which dramatically drove down prices and product quality.

"That forced other companies to cut their prices. A lot of the retailers and distributors can't watch all this stuff...and by the time the reviews come out, the release is two or three months old. Its window of opportunity [for sales] is already gone. Stores buy based on price and boxcover. How good the movie inside is; they don't know and they don't care.

"The market's been choking on a lot of garbage.

"I only direct one movie a month because I don't want to waste my time directing crap. So I wait until I get a decent budget.

"Three years ago I made a movie a week because there was a lot of money out there to do productions. But that's no longer true."

Cash says the boxcover is the number one selling point of an X- rated video, followed by the beauty of the female performers and the heat of the sex.

"If you can tell a story and do other things, that's a bonus.

"Half of the stuff that I write fails to get people off," says Cash. He explains that low budgets for scripts and their execution is the prime reason for this rate of failure.

Cash enjoys the challenge of X-rated comedies. They are difficult to pull off because sex and humor are two involuntary reactions that easily cancel each other out. (Wally Wharton)

"The Sex Trek series I wrote for Moonlight attracts college students.

"I once rented a room in my house to a student. I told him that I'm a writer and he wanted to know what I wrote. So I told him about my mainstream credits.

"I came home one day to find him and a friend watching the Spice channel and cracking up. They were watching one of the Sex Trek movies. I told him I wrote it and you should've seen his face. "You're Cash Markman?" All my legitimate credits didn't

mean a thing to him.

"I write a lot of juvenile humor for 20-year old guys 'cause I'm a twenty year old guy at heart," says Cash, who was born in 1957.

"Many of my comedies are popular on college campuses. I provide a Howard Stern type humor and his audience enjoys my stuff."

Many persons in entertainment glory in how young they feel and act. Ernest Greene offers this perspective: "The adult industry functions as an asylum for people who refuse to let go of adolescence, a hideout for arrested-development cases... A hideout from the terrible demands of adulthood. It lets them remain forever in a state of overheated adolescent sexuality, the very place their personalities were formed, stuck where they discovered sex."

Dr. Robert Stoller: "They meet their audience at that point."

Ernest Greene: "Yeah. But the audience then turns the tape off and for the most part goes back to leading... an adult life... Porn addicts are mostly men who have arrested development and who relate to sexuality in a two-dimensional, objectified, obsessed form [that porn has always catered to]. But the typical porno viewer just takes a vacation back to adolescence to look at this stuff. Then he goes back, with a sigh of envy and regret, to real life. Whereas when we finish our day's work, we go into lives no more adult than those depicted on tape. Frankie's been in the biz for 15 years... and he lives the life of an 18-year old with a bunch of ne'er-do-well friends. They sit around all day in front of a big screen TV watching any junk that's on, smoking pot and eating frozen pizzas. Theirs is a male world in which no one does anything. He goes to work, does his job, comes home, does nothing." (Coming Attractions)

Many believe that a porn scriptwriter is an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms. "I don't take that personally," laughs Cash.

"About half of the "movies" don't have scripts. When you stumble across an adult film that's based on a script, it's refreshing. It may be a comedy with real jokes in it.

"At Moonlight Entertainment we tried to do serious stuff and we found out that we didn't have the talent to support us and that people were laughing at us. So we decided, why not have them laugh with us? If somebody doesn't act well, it's ok because the part is written that way."

Markman writes serious erotic scripts for Legend and Vivid, a mixture of comedy and drama for Hollywood Video and frequently dark material for director Jim Enright.

Cash felt particularly disappointed by the results of his script on Savannah's rise and fall. He initially wrote her life for a general release NC-17 film but his script ended up getting made in a hurry by director Buck "Bite Off More Than I Can Chew" Adams as Savannah - Little Girl Lost.

Markman believes females are a large untapped market. "Women want to be slowly seduced and most X-rated movies don't seduce. They're just f--- flicks.

"The way you judge if an adult movie is any good is the same way you judge any other movie. Does it feel real? Do you forget that you're watching a movie and get lost in the story? Do you feel as though you are there, perhaps seeing something that you shouldn't be seeing?"

By his own standards, Cash's Night of the Living Dead, along with most of his other movies, fails. In this 1996 parody, the dead come back to life as sex zombies.

"If you thought Cash Markman scripts were over the top," says AFW, "wait till you see one of the movies he's directed. Here, Mike Horner and his borscht-belt reject sidekick ham it up beyond belief, until this slight but amusing concept collapses under all the dead-weight... Despite the good looking cast, the sex in this video is D.O.A."

I talked to Cash Markman from 3-4PM, Tuesday afternoon, 7/28/98. "Kevin Beecham had nothing to do with it [The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang]. He didn't even know this movie was being shot. It was brought to him after it had been shot and edited. It was offered to him and several other companies.

"If I had not been involved in it, he may not have looked at it because we do have a relationship. Brooke's talking as if it was Kevin's idea to make it, and he should take care of her…

"I was directing for Dan Beck's company Hardcore TV {HCTV]. He was partners with Robert [Dupree]. We did shows called Ecstasy Girls Live and The Mating Game. We did that live every other week. Brooke was one of the guests… It was done live with three cameras from a broadcast studio. No one had ever done this before - live boy-girl sex scenes going out on this satellite channel. It was like David Letterman with sex. The Mating Game was like The Dating Game or Love Connection with sex, except the date would happen in front of the cameras.

"The producer was this monster named Dan Beck, who was new to this business. He had just come into town and I was one of the first people he ran into. We met in late September. I've done live TV in the past. He always treated me nicely but he was amazingly rude to everybody. He was from New York, an amazingly obnoxious, foul individual who believes that actors and crew are cattle to be mistreated. I'd plead with him constantly to be nice to people, and he'd say, 'Why?' And I'd say, 'if for no other reason than that word is going to get round that you're an asshole and nobody is going to want to work for you. And his response was, 'as long as I'm offering money, they will work for me.' Not that he was offering very good money. He'd lowball people to the max.

"People were always telling me that they were coming out because I was there. They told me, 'we heard bad things about Dan, but because we heard that you were doing it…' I'd try to touch bases with everybody before the shoot, and tell them: "It's a fun show but everything you've heard [about Dan Beck] is true.'

"It was difficult for me to say that because I don't like talking down people I've worked for.

"We did these live shows from October 1997 to February, 1998 when I quit. Around the end of the year, Dan decides that he wants to do this all-anal gangbang movie. I said, 'Dan, I don't do gonzo. I don't think it is a good idea to do this because Tricia Devereaux has just turned up [HIV] positive… I think the timing is bad…' He said: 'That's exactly why it is good timing.' He said that the guys that he respected in this business were Al Borda and John T. Bone, because they broke the rules. They were controversial. They weren't afraid to slam doors shut and hurt people's feelings.

"I kept saying, nobody is going to want to do business with you, and his response was - 'people do business with Al Borda, don't they?' He felt that he could behave like them and do well.

I turned the job down. I do story-driven couples movies. And he reminded me that I was his contract director for his live shows, and if I wanted to keep that job, I needed to come out and do the anal gangbang. So I agreed.

"He assured me that the show would direct itself. Dan said: 'I'll be there. I'll direct it. I'll be line-producing. All you've got to do is get me my cameraman and set up the technical end. Set this up like we did the live show. I'll line the guys up. I'll send one in to you every ten minutes. We'll have two fluffers.

"I started calling cameramen. Half the guys I called didn't want to do it. I found people who needed the money. We shot the thing at Gourmet. It was tough finding the talent because Dan was only paying the guys $150 each.

"Brooke was Dan's third choice. He already had other scheduled who backed out in money disputes. He called me up and asked, 'what do you think of Brooke Ashley?' I said, 'I like Brooke a lot. I've put her in at least a half dozen movies.'

"Brooke had done a lot of gonzo. Every time I'd go in the edit bays I'd see Brooke in a Jim Lane [Powers] gonzo, usually doing anal, usually unprotected.

"Dan had Brooke come on the live show and promote it.

"We shot in front of a crowd. Some guys came out from one of the local ball teams and watched. Then you had all the people in line who were doing her. That's why you hear so much chatter…

"She had agreed to do 50 guys and she only did 40. So she came on one of our live Ecstasy channel shows and did three guys live on the show to fulfill her contract with Dan. According to him, she was also supposed to do some promotion, which never worked out. I think Dan left town owing her money [about $2500, or 1/4 of her total payment].

"I resigned from the live show in late February. I couldn't stand the guy [Dan Beck]. I called his partner [Robert Dupree] to say, 'you need to come up to see what is going on.' Ecstasy came out and pulled the plug on the whole thing.

"Dan called me shortly after the news that Brooke was positive. Dan wanted me to do a bunch of new stuff and I said no.

"So, nobody twisted Brooke's arm to do the gangbang. She got a good chunk of change for little more than a day's work. We shot most of it in one day.

"I don't believe that Marc Wallice wore a condom… Because I remember her asking that some of the guys wear condoms, but she did not ask that of Marc. There were some other guys that she said she did not want to work with. So I pulled them aside and sent them home. That's the way I've always done my shoots. I've never made anyone work with anyone they did not want to work with. I've never made anybody do anything that they did not want to do. And I've never kept anyone from wearing a condom, if they wanted to wear a condom.

"So she had a lot of say in what was going on. And the guy she was working for was Dan Beck, not me. I was just an employee. Apparently she is not remembering things correctly, or reporting them correctly. Talk to anybody on that set and they will tell you that Dan was calling the shots. One camera was supposed to shoot hard, and one soft, and one general coverage.

"We had them send in a new guy every ten minutes. We stopped for a break whenever she wanted, which was about every 30 minutes."

Luke: "She says that there were times she was screaming out for a break, and nobody would give her a break."

Cash: "That's not true. We constantly asked her if she was ok. I would check out the positions in advance with her. I'd ask her what positions she wanted to do. Whenever she wanted a break, we gave her a break. When she wanted water, we gave her water. Whenever she wanted a towel, we got her a towel. Lube…lube. So, she's going to remember it the way she wants to… Maybe she's trying to play the victim and make it sound like the big bad porn industry gave her AIDS. Or maybe this is the way she's choosing to remember it, because she's having difficulty dealing with what she did, and its result. When you do that kind of movie, you're sticking your neck out. And you can't blame anybody for what it is - a business deal between her and Dan Beck. Two girls had already turned up HIV positive [Tricia Devereaux, Jordan McKnight, Nena Cherry?]. She must've known the risk. I knew the risk. That's why I told Dan to reconsider doing this kind of movie. Doing any unprotected anal sex is risky. Doing 40 guys is a big chance… Maybe she wanted all of them to wear rubbers and she didn't feel comfortable asking Dan Beck?

"I think there was one time when she was getting sore and wanted to stop. And I asked her if she could do one more guy, then we could take a break. We had trouble getting wood, and this guy had wood. He had to leave.

"I've never been a slave driver with any of my talent. You've been on my shoots. You know how I am. [True] I'm gentle with these people. It's a tough job. They deserve to get paid and to be treated well. Not all directors feel that way.

"About two years ago, for a show called Nineteen and Naughty 3, I called off an anal. This girl had never worked with Jake Steed before. She was really tight and he was really big. He started to do it and she started to cry because it hurt her so much. I took aside and told her, 'forget it. We're just going to do this as vaginal.' At this point I had already shot the other four scenes for the movie. So by not having her do an anal, I'm sticking my neck on the chopping block for the company [Midnight] I worked for, because they wanted an anal scene in that movie. Most companies want at least one anal scene. She said, 'I want to do it, because I need the money.' So I said, 'I'll pay you for the anal, but you'll only have to do the vaginal.'

"I'm not going to sit there and watch somebody get their butt ripped open, bleeding, and go to the hospital because they want to make an extra $200."

Luke: "What was the atmosphere like on the anal gangbang?"

Cash: "It was terrible, the worst shoot I've been on in my life. I got a horrible headache, which I've never had happen before. I had to send one of the P.A.s out to get me Excedrin. I almost walked off, which I've never done before.

"Halfway through the first day, I walked outside and smoked a cigarette, and popped some aspirin. I paced around and made a decision whether I'd stay. I decided to stay only because there were people there that I had contacted to work (cameramen, P.A.s), and I didn't want to leave them to the mercy of Dan Beck. And second, I didn't want to get a reputation for having walked off a shoot.

"Dan was so abusive that I couldn't stand watching it. I finally walked back on and threw him off the set. He'd come on the set and start screaming at everybody. It was his way of being - a hyper New York mentality. Guys would immediately lose their wood.

"I had set up the cameras and he kept changing them around, which made them a nightmare to edit. One camera doing hard, one soft and one coverage. He'd come on and see an angle that he wanted to get, and he'd start screaming at the cameraman to get this other angle, which screwed up the formula of how we were shooting. The editor quit. The footage was a mess. A tape labeled hard, halfway through, suddenly switched to soft. A tape labeled soft, suddenly switched to hard. It was a nightmare for the editor to put together 15 hours worth of footage from these different cameras. So I told Dan, either you get off this set or I'm leaving. I will not sit here and fight with you. We all acknowledge it's your show… So he left the set for 30 minutes and we got a lot accomplished. Then he came back on and started screaming again. I was too exhausted at that point to fight him.

"Dan even made Brooke cry at one point. She was lying down in another room. And Dan walked on to the set and started saying some off-color remarks in his big booming voice. We gestured to him to shut up, but he didn't get it. Suddenly Brooke screams out that he's a f---er. And she starts crying. And we look at Dan like 'you are just the biggest jerk who ever lived.'

"The cameraman and I walked into her room to see if she was ok. We said: 'Brooke, Dan's an asshole. He talks about everybody like that. He's not singling you out. Don't take it personally.' It was a horrible, degrading experience. It was a turn-off for the guys to have to watch five other guys standing in line jerking off. Each one steps up to her for ten minutes and you can tell that she's not enjoying it. It stunk. It was a bad experience for everybody. The only person who seemed to be getting off on it was Dan Beck who walked around counting the money he was going to make.

"I gave the editor a lot of input as to how I thought it should look. Dan told me to not write a script. We're just going to have all the guys line up and have two fluff girls keep them hard. There's nothing erotic or interesting about that. It's the crudest gangbang you can imagine. So I told the editor - 'You've got 15 hours of footage. Shake it up. Get artsy. Do it MTV style. It's one room. Visually it's going to be boring. Cut back and forth from the different angles. Go back and forth from color to black and white, from film look to video look. Use many extreme close-ups and don't go more than several seconds without doing a cut until you come to the actual hardcore and you can leave the camera on for a bit.

"I watched it. I think the first ten minutes are interesting to watch. The music is good. The editing is like watching a music video. Lots of cutting and dissolving. But after 10-15 minutes…let's change the channel. How long can your attention be held by one girl doing 50 guys? We had her doing a couple of guys at once. She'd give someone head while someone else f---ed her. She wasn't in the mood to let a lot of guys get on her at once. Besides, we had a lot of wood problems. The guys weren't turned on. When it is apparent to the guy that the girl does not want to be there, and you have the maniac [Dan Beck] screaming constantly, it's hard to keep wood. We had planned to have five guys on her at once. She'd be sucking one guy, jerking off two, taking one in the ass and another in the pussy… But we couldn't get five guys to get an erection at the same time.

"So, under the circumstances, it's not a bad job. I can't take a lot of credit for it. There's no script. It was Dan Beck's idea. I was not supposed to get a credit on it. Cash Markman is the name I use for cable. Bill Dollars I use for cheaper stuff. Yet my name is up there as director, because when Dan finished the movie and went to go sell it, the only way he was going to sell it was to stick my name up there. People know who I am. I have reputations with some companies. Nobody knew who Dan Beck was. Nobody wanted to know. The only way he could get them to look at the movie was to say that I directed it.

"He began to call companies that I worked for, including KBeech. Dan got Kevin on the phone: "I've got this 50 guy on one girl anal gangbang movie with Brooke Ashley. It's never been done before. Cash directed it. I think you should look at it. You can get three movies out of it. Elegant Angel and Patrick Collins are interested in buying it.' With that pitch, Kevin said 'come on in.' He looked at the movie. He bought the movie. A short while later, Dan is gone. I find out that there are a bunch of people that he owes money to. Some talent and crew. I called everybody I could think of, to get word out there… If HCTV owes you money, I'll try to get you paid through KBeech.

"Kbeech paid these guys because Kbeech still owed HCTV a final payment. Nobody had heard from Brooke at that point. Her home phone number was disconnected. Dan Beck and Robert [Dupree] were partners at HCTV. Robert put up the money and Dan put the deals together. What gave Dan his edge was that he had met these guys who run Ecstasy Channel, and he'd suggested to them to do a live sex show. They liked the idea.

"Robert put up the money to do the show. Then he needed a director and a video company to release it, because Ecstasy was only putting up half the money. He contacted a couple of directors and the first two shows were disasters. Ecstasy said 'if you can't get the third one right, we'll pull the plug.' So I came in.

"I really enjoyed the live show. It was a great adrenalin rush. I wish that I had not done the anal show. I don't think Dan would've fired me. I wish that I would've stood firm in my beliefs. I feel bad that I was even there.

"Kbeech released the first 12 episodes of the live show on video… The Mating Game and Ecstasy Girls Live which was retitled for video Latenight Sex With Johnathan Morgan.

"I asked Dan to not take the gangbang into Kevin Beech, because Dan wanted a lot of money. I feared that it would drain Kbeech [$35,000] and they wouldn't be able to do any movies for a couple of months. That is exactly what happened. I did not shoot for them in April, May or June."

Luke: "Brooke said there was something in her contract which said that no more than half of the guys in her gangbang could use condoms."

Cash: "That's probably true. That sounds reasonable. I wouldn't know. I never saw the contracts."

Luke: "What about checking the HIV tests? Were PCR DNAs required?"

Cash: "This was a transitional time. DNAs were not required. News had just come out about Tricia Devereaux [November, December]… Dan was the producer. It was his job to check the paperwork [AIDS tests]. I did not see a single HIV test. A couple of people started to hand me their AIDS test, and I directed them towards Dan. 'He's the producer. He's the guy who's paying you. He's the guy you give that too.'

"After the shoot was over, Randy Munee [aka Joe P. Straight] called me. He told me that Dan Beck is going to get himself in a lot of trouble. He's taking photocopies of these AIDS tests, instead of originals. That's my policy [originals]. That's what I always instruct Randy to do when he works for me. Randy says that he brought this to Dan's attention, and Dan said, 'don't worry about it.' And Marc Wallice was one of the guys on that shoot. And my guess is that Marc probably came with a photocopy of his test.

"Randy and Dan had a big falling out. Randy ended up hitting Dan. You won't find many people who have anything good to say about Dan. Brooke is in a situation where Dan's gone. So she's got to find somebody responsible who's not gone. So, it's me and Kevin Beecham. But that's not going to get her anything."

Cash began directing movies in December of 1995, and has 60 director credits under his belt. "I do about three movies a month. I do one a month for KBeech Releasing, depending upon how many [movies] they want to put out with their contract girls - Sadie Sexton, Tabitha Stevens [departed], Farrah and Angelica Sinn. I also direct a cable feature a month for New Sensations/Prime Video - owned by Scott Tiller, Eddie Martinez and Jerry Langdon. I also shoot for Nitro. They've been reorganizing and haven't shot anything for a while."

Over the past year, Markman feels particularly proud of two shows - Schwingin in the Rain (Nitro) and Palace of Sin. "Schwingin in the Rain was a musical which was up for nine awards at the last AVN show. Everybody in the movie sings and dances. Like Singin' In The Rain, the first talkie, this one is about the first adult talkie. They're trying to figure out where to put the microphone. They put it under the bed and all they can hear is the squeaking of the mattress. Brittany Andrews was wonderful as the movie queen with the terrible voice.

"In June I shot Palace of Sin at the Palace theater in downtown LA on Broadway. That was built in 1913. An old movie palace with double balconies, one over the other. Nobody had ever shot there before. I did something like Cinema Paradisio. It spans 20 years. It's about the life of this old movie palace that becomes an adult movie theater and the projectionist who worked there for 20 years and all the things that he sees. Not only in the movies, and how the business changes, but in the people who come into the theater."

Markman wrote this letter which was published in the 10/7/90 Calendar Page of the Los Angeles Times:

Lyrics Too Foul for Porn-Video Writer;

This is in regard to daily and Sunday Calendar articles over the past months that have implied that Luther Campbell of gutter-mouthed rap fame is the victim of a bigoted campaign to take away his right to free speech.

Perhaps your paper will not print a few views opposing Campbell's relentlessly self-serving tactics, but Newsweek had the guts to publish some of his "lyrics" so readers could see what this man is trying to defend.

He's made the rounds of talk shows and has been quoted in many newspapers about how the racist cops passed by racks of adult videos before singling out his record (2 Live Crew's "As Nasty as They Wanna Be") for something to ban.

I write adult videos--more than 150 in the last five years. Other than the fact that consenting adults are having sex, I feel my work is as non-offensive as this type of "entertainment" can get. No violence, no profanity, no drugs, no bigotry.

I've even written a few murder-mysteries for this genre, and in them I couldn't go as far as to have one of the players carry a gun. That's how concerned the adult video industry is about bringing the scorn of censorship down on itself.

Millionaires like Luther Campbell have no such concern. They just use papers like yours to sell their obscenities.

As a representative of the "porn biz," I am offended that Campbell would mention my work and his in the same breath. I am further offended that The Times is so taken in by this opportunist. CASH MARKMAN North Hollywood