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A graduate of Columbia University, he appeared in off-Broadway classical plays like Hamlet and drove cabs until answering an ad in the Village Voice in 1971 for nude modeling. "But this "nude modeling" was really all about a dirty basement on 14th Street where some guy shot sex movies. So I showed up there, worked for about an hour, had a good time, made as much money as I would driving cab, and that's how I started. Actually, a lot of people started there in that dirty basement - Linda Lovelace, Eric Edwards, me ... But there were no stars in those days, no industry. It was all underground. Later on, this same guy in the dirty basement put me in a Times Square sex show in the afternoon because I was still doing the plays at night. And one day the manager of the live-sex theater said, "Next week you can start working at nights." And I said, "What are you outta your f---in' mind? I'm doing 'great' plays at night." (Laughs) And during the live shows, I'd even be reading poetry or reciting Shakespeare because there was always the threat that the police would bust you, so it was a way of giving it socially redeeming value." (www.spectator.net) Jamie enjoyed one of the industry's famous romances with porn star Serena. "Jamie Gillis, for instance," writes Kitten Natividad, "likes to take his girlfriend Serena out for a walk in public wearing a dog collar. Or, he enjoys bringing home a bunch of Puerto Rican gang bang types he's just met on the street, and asks them to f--- his old lady." "Harry Reems and Jamie Gillis loved to smash chicks around," remembers Veronica Hart. Around 1973, Gillis appeared with Marilyn Chambers on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show. The two flirted so much that the studio crew's nervous laughter could be heard. Gillis says Snyder knew lots about Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat, but when the show came on, he asked "There's this woman in the industry, Linda… what's her name?" (Sex American Style) Author Linda Alexander interviewed Gillis (around 1992) for her 1999 book Dorothy of Kansas Meets the Wizard of X. "This man [Gillis] does not want to be known... His image is dark and foreboding... Whoever Jamie Gillis was before he began in the X-rated business, he is probably less than a shadow of that person now... I know now how he regularly and so effectively, portrays on film that dark, evil side of his nature." (p. 261-2) Jamie starred in Jonas Middleton's Through the Looking Glass. Bob Rimmer called it "a sexvid classic that mixes a Daphne du Maurier or Stephen King kind of story into a terrific gothic drama... "Middleton gives you a 15-minute cinematographic tour of madness that must have been inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. It will scare the hell out of you - or make you want to throw up - and Jamie Gillis as Catherine's daddy is at his worst. A demon, laughing insanely, tells Catherine: "There are no mornings here, no nights. You'll never grow old, Catherine." But after a few minutes of floundering in his sea of despair, Catherine looks haggard, and so will you if you watch it to the end." (X-Rated Videotape Guide , p. 213) In Gerard Damiano's Skin Flicks, Gillis plays a rapist after Sharon Mitchell. Jim Holliday recommended the 1975 film The Story of Joanna in his 1992 AVN column. "The only challenge to John Leslie as the best actor in the history of porn is Jamie Gillis when he wants to be. Here, he wants to be in the role of Jason, a possessive misogynist who first charms women, then lures them to the depths of personal humiliation and abuse. It is perhaps the best role in Jamie's long career. "One brief moment that should interest the female viewers is the oral sex scene between Zebedy Colt and Gillis. Zebedy goes down on his master for nearly a minute for the turnabout-is-fair-play people." Bisexual Jamie Gillis excelled in nasty roles such as that of the enema bandit in 1975's Waterpower (incorrectly attributed, often, to Gerry Damiano). "He'll scare you to death in this one" promises Bob Rimmer. "Jamie plays a sex pervert - an enema bandit who accosts women in their apartments, ties them up and before he rapes them gives them an enema (supposedly based on a true incident). Thinking about his first victim, an airline stewardess whom he has watched screwing through a telescope in his apartment, he says: "She's dirty. Just a toilet. If I cleaned her out she would be clean again. She'd thank me. She'd be glad I cleaned her out." Damiano gives this sexvid a long, scary buildup with Jamie discovering that he is orgasmic when he watches an enema being given to a woman in a sex palace called Garden of Eden, which specializes in B&D, S&M, infantilism, cross dressing, French and Greek cultures and high colonic irrigations. Suspected by a policewoman, C.J. Laing, he captures her and tortures her in a long frightening sequence. The agony of the enemas is written on his victims' faces. Whatever your shock feeling may be, you'll watch this from beginning to end, and you'll have to admit that both the acting and cinematography are great. Worth owning - if only to initiate discussions on whether a film like this should ever be made." (X-Rated Videotape Guide, p. 237) Gillis also appeared in what is generally regarded as the best porn film of all time, The Opening of Misty Beethoven. "I remember saying to the crew members, many of whom had worked on 'legitimate' projects, "You know, this will probably be the best porn movie ever made," at least up until that time. And they just sort of looked at me as if I was nuts. "What does that mean, 'best porn movie?' that's like saying 'best pile of dog s---.'" That was their attitude. But it was a film which brought together the top people in our field. And Radley Metzger had a sense of how to make a movie. It's a lovely film. Still very much watchable. Actually, while we were making it, I loved getting up every day to shoot because I was just crazy about Constance Money. Nuts about her! John Leslie was nuts about her, too. I remember going to see her in another movie she did with John called Mary, Mary, and we just sat in the theater, watching the movie, kicking the seats in front of us, that's how much we really liked her. Wonderful. A bitch but wonderful." (www.spectator.net) In the R-rated 1997 film Boogie Nights, the Burt Reynolds character imitates Jamie's short-lived On The Prowl pro-am series at the end of the '80s. Gillis rented limousines, and took porn girls for a ride. They cruised the streets of San Francisco picking up single men and videotaped them boinking the girls in the backseat. Gillis told San Francisco's Spectator magazine 10/99: "On The Prowl was the first video of its kind to be labelled "gonzo." These days, however, everyone else is really not doing what I consider gonzo. My idea was to do live, spontaneous stuff with real people who were not connected to the porn industry. I wanted to find people on the street and say, "Hey, buddy, you wanna get laid?" I mean, that doesn't always work, either; people are a little bit mystified by the whole thing. But the upside is that they're not performers with really fake energy which you see so much of in porn today, which I hate. It's that 'ooh-ah, ooh-ah, do-me-baby' thing. Gimme a break. It was boring for the most part - and today it's even worse. And after I did the original On The Prowl, other people caught on and made it more of a set-up situation, more of a commercial product." Next, Jamie hooked up with Ed Powers as the Nasty Brothers, doing on-camera interviews with amateurs before defiling them in hotel rooms. Since 1989, Gillis has lived in San Francisco. Around 1990, Jamie made a series of untitled urination and defecation flicks for a sex shop in New York City. He wore a mask during the shooting, but even though his face is not visible, the body and soul clearly belongs to Jamie. Real2reel@webtv.com says the following comes from Media Mobs online catalog at http://www.dnaco.net/~mediamob/ MediaMob # 077 Title: Unknown Alternate Titles: Walking Toilet Bowl 1 & 3 Country Of Origin: USA Language(s): English Stars: Jamie Gillis Approximate Run Time: 01:45 Video Quality: Good Features: s---, Pain, Domination, Description: Features Jamie Gillis and Carol in two episodes. Jamie abuses Carol. He slaps her in the face, spits on her, and commands her to do things. He s---s on her and makes her rub it on her body and masturbate with it. She is forced to eat and swallow pieces of his s---. He pisses in her mouth and she swallows it. Near the end she gags severely and vomits into her hand. This is the nastiest video I have. Carol protests vigorously and cries throughout the video, especially when Jamie is commanding her to puke while she is gagging on s---, which happens several times before she loses control. This is a severely twisted relationship, but I have no doubt that it is consensual. It does, however, confirm my long-held suspicion that Gillis is an utter pig. There is an ironic moment in which Carol sings a Hymn ('The Act of Love is a Gift From God') while accompanying herself on a casio keyboard. Her voice is beautiful. Gillis did his first gay bondage flick in 1996, Power Play, in which he verbally and physically dominates five guys but does not have sex with any of them. Industry insiders have known for decades that Jamie is bisexual. "Jamie Gillis, brunette and often bearded, has a bad-boy edge," writes the Wise Woman's Guide to Erotic Videos. "He looks like the person you were involved with just before the doctor finally gave you a prescription for Prozac. When he plays the hero, it's a hero whose ethics are up for negotiation. His ability to act and deliver on carnal cue was one of the many reasons the late '70s and early '80s are called the golden age of erotic films." Neither animal, vegetable nor mineral, male nor female, are reportedly safe from Jamie's insatiable sexual appetite. Porn fan Beto writes: "I saw Jamie Gillis in Dirty Debutantes 4 in which he and Ed Powers three-wayed an asian girl and it was a turn-off to see his demeaning attitude toward her. He wasn't abusive but he lacked the respect that Ed generally shows. There was no chemistry, he considered her just a piece of meat to stick a dick in and get off." Pat Riley: "Gillis is like this in all of this videos. If you didn't like him in 4, wait until you see 5 where he lies on top of the girl telling her she's such a slut and how bad this will make her parents feel when they see their little girl being f---ed by him, etc.. "Max Hardcore is just crude in comparison. It achieved the desired result - queasy as this may make someone feel - because he identified her reason for being there as rebellion. The girl was Ariel and she's only 18." (RAME) Jamie appears in numerous mainstream flicks such as Sylvester Stallone's Nightwhawks. Elvira showcased his starring role in the Night Of The Zombies horror film. Gillis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, "and can often be found in the cafes of North Beach, enjoying a cigar at an outdoor table," writes Jack Boulware in Sex, American Style. "Most of his contemporaries who still work in the business live in LA, but prefers the laidback anonymity of the Bay Area, appearing in the occasional feature and video. One sunny afternoon we strolled through the annual Folsom Street Fair together, held on the streets of the gay S/M district, checking out the latest videos and spanking accessories of the current sexual underground. It was quite interesting to see, in spite of his low-key Northern California lifestyle, how many people recognized his face from his three decades of porn films, and treated him like the rare appearance of royalty." D.O.G. - Devious Old Gillis Pat Riley writes on RAME: This movie is only for the advanced, really-jaded pervert so if you're a young innocent or your idea of good porn is yet another fake-boobed slut getting it from six guys at once with lots of copious facials, you might be well advised to look elsewhere. Ckong might be interested because there's a scene with a REALLY small-dicked PL but he looks Hispanic, not Oriental (hey, you can't have everything). While watching this it occurred to me that there's another Oriental male in the porno business: Lilienne Li. She...er, he does have a dick but it might be bigger than 4 inches. The other person who might be interested is David Aaron Clark who should especially note the use of attractive (Sami Moon is butt ugly and belongs in a Rodney Moore tape only) non-Oriental (Oriental females should be ultra-submissive) girls. Gillis by his presence poses an interesting conundrum. We moan, and I do my share too, about the old guys in the business and how the guy shouldn't be more than a few years older than the girl, blah, blah...but just what sort of male could you get to play this sort of role? It's quite clear, to me at least, that a young guy would be laughable. The only possibility would be a young Gillis, and frankly, having re-watched the 1976 movie Waterpower a couple of weeks ago, I don't see Gillis as being too different either in appearance--he was never the handsome stud--or in demeanor. Since the industry claims extreme difficulty in finding vapid masturbators, how much harder would it be to obtain a pervert of Gillis's stature? So why isn't Gillis out there replacing Rocco with his swirlies and Max with his "cocksockets". Perhaps because the degradation here is mental and the Max and Rocco fans are simply too visual--maybe BritPOP is right about the corrosive effects of MTV etc. Or maybe it's because Gillis cuts to the bone with his portrayal of the PL's in the video store. Hopefully you don't see them as yourself. Apart from one or two movies with drop dead gorgeous (at the time) young girls, this is the only MUST SEE I've given this year. It's on a par with the aforementioned Waterpower. D.O.G.: Devious Old Gillis MUST SEE Alternate Name: DEVIANT OLD GILLIS 1999--Elegant Angel Video Producer/Director: Jamie Gillis Featuring: Pebbles, Lola (1998), Gayle/Freckles, Carlee Stevens, Allison Kilgore, Torri Tease, Mariah Kane, Jack, Brad, Chavez, Manuel, Jamie Gillis Quite unusual and very hard to classify. To appreciate it you have to understand that in Gillis's world view females are perfidious contemptible whores who serve only to excite the beast of sexual desire that we (males) are cursed with and from which we can only obtain transient physical relief. The beast is only mollified temporarily because it exists in our mind and cannot be excised. We can occasionally achieve revenge by treating females as the disgusting sex objects they are but most of the time it's they who manipulate our desires and force us to show our vulnerability and to spill our valuable seed. So on the one hand you have Gillis demonstrating his power and contempt for the female--in the toilet scene, for example--and then the other Gillis as the filthy masturbating wimp, controlled and dominated by the female. Strangely it's the latter type scenes that are the more erotic, especially the closer with Mariah. The combination of food and sex is normally a going-though-the-motions purposeless effort but here the food is a metaphor for excrement and the point is not so much a fascination with excreta but to demonstrate the extent to which the male has sunk and the filthiness of the female. The movie is padded out by scenes reminiscent of Gillis's old {On The Prowl} series but even these show a similar sense of degradation: the pathetic losers who are so desperate for sex that they're willing to debase themselves on camera for a chance at some female contact, and females who are willing to allow perfect strangers to masturbate on or screw them. The sex scenes in the movie are not the important part and if you can't live without the ten minutes of in-out per scene, the interminable pistoning close-ups, and the endless fascination with ejaculate then this movie is not for you. The cum here is a sign of failure--that she's won again--rather than something to be celebrated. But if you like a more perverted approach, the tape is certainly looking for. In contrast to his earlier series, Gillis was smart to put in a few cute girls who heighten the sense of domination by being worth agonizing over; an ugly broad instead of Lola, for example, would have changed the feeling in her scene to one of "Who cares?" Pebbles is a marginal but not-fat black girl with medium tits; she can be seen in {Sugar Walls #12}. Lola is the tiny titted quite pretty Cuban girl. The guy with Lola is credited as Jack but appears in other movies under a different name. Gayle is called Crystal in the movie and is a gorgeous Canadian cutie who can be seen in {Freshman Fantasies #19}. Carlee (credits: just Carlee) can be seen in {Cumback Pussy #18}; she's a hefty blonde with a pretty face. Allison you should know. Torri is also a fat blonde with lots of tattoos and can be seen in {Dirty Dirty Debutantes #19}. And, Mariah (credits: just Mariah) should be familiar. Condoms are used in Lola and Torri. There are only two facials (Pebbles and Torri). The opener is probably the least powerful and has Pebbles on her back with her head resting in the open toilet bowl. Gillis has her lick his asshole and crawl around saying, "I'm a good toilet." She changes clothes and sucks his dick while he's sitting on the john and eventually he jerks off on her face. Gillis returns home to find his wife (?) Lola being fondled by Jack, a black guy. She tells Gillis, "You can't cut it anymore," and then while Gillis meekly videos the action, the black guy screws her ending without a visible cum shot. The inference is that Lola prefers the black guy's sperm to that of Gillis--he's a failure as a male. Back in the bathroom, Gillis has Gayle sitting on the bathtub with hamburger and french fries on a plate on the nearby open toilet. She eats from the plate without using her hands and then at Gillis's instruction strips to her bra and panties. He stuffs the food into her underwear and crushes the hamburger into her pussy and asshole, makes her pee in her panties (they blank the screen--wimps!), and then joins her in the tub to rub the panties on his face, eat the residue from the tub (which looks like s--- now), and has her smear some of it over his face. He jerks himself off into his hand. Unfortunately Gayle smiles a lot which somewhat limits the feeling. Gillis takes Carlee to an adult bookstore where he offers her to all and sundry. Brad, a ugly wimpy guy, jerks off on her butt and then Chavez (called Jose in the movie), a Hispanic guy with a very small dick, gets some oral and he too jerks off on her butt. With a dick this small he should probably just have the operation and get a vagina (heh, heh). Back in a hotel room, Allison pees in the toilet through her panties (the blank screen again) and Gillis puts his head in the bowl and licks it up like a dog. She licks his asshole and then with a lit cigarette singes his pubic hair leading to some more asshole licking and then some actual in-out with Gillis cumming on her belly. Torri, who sounds really dumb, sucks Gillis's dick and he gives her a facial before heading out to the bookstore we've seen before. There Gillis persuades Manuel, another loser, to screw the "dirty filthy f---ing whore" which he does on a mattress in the back. There's only anal sex in this scene and the guy cums on her large tits. In the last scene Gillis breaks into a hotel room where Mariah is sleeping. He fondles her butt but then she wakes and under the pretense of calling a girlfriend, calls the front desk and asks them to send for the police. Gillis who is masturbating and whining apologies all the time thinks this is dishonest but does nothing except masturbate. She tells him that he's going to jail for a long time but she'll give him something to think about. She strips and masturbates keeping up the patter about what a contemptible piece of barely-human trash he is and eventually throws a paper on the floor so he won't soil the carpet. He ejaculates just as the police arrive. Date of production: 7/28/99.
In January, 2000, Gene Ross asked Gillis about Rough Sex. "My feelings are that we're talking about sexual fantasies that are being acted out by paid performers. This has nothing to do with dragging girls off the street and beating them up. There are a lot of girls, a lot of men, for that matter, who love being abused, sexually both in fantasy and actuality. And why people who are not into that particular thing feel that they cannot allow this, is stupid, outrageous, hypocritical crap. I can't tell you how many girls have come to me over the years because I have that reputation. They tell me they can't find this kind of treatment, that men are wimps, men won't do this. 'You try to get a guy to do something like this and they don't want to do it. They don't understand it.'" 4/1/01 Catching Up With Richard Pacheco, Jamie Gillis In the January issue of Richard Freeman's zine Batteries Not Included (BNI@aol.com), Richard Pacheco talks about turning 40 years of age. He says he photographs young and has kept his body in good shape and often thinks about returning to porn, even though he's married with teenage daughters. Pacheco says he never retired from porn. He just stopped performing until there's a cure or vaccine for AIDS. Richard complains that he's earned about 30 cents in the past three years - pointing out one of the more painful and least talked about problems with working in porn. It's no platform to other work. Most jobs are gained through working other jobs. Most jobs lead to other jobs, except porno. Porno attracts anti-social people with minimal skills. This outlaw world allows those who dip into it for a few months or years the option of delaying reality. Porn provides little opportunity for refining the skills that make for life success. Pacheco got to know Jamie Gillis "while working with the ogre, Svetlana, one of the worst people God ever put on this earth...and by far, the worst director I ever worked for. Jamie pulled me through that nightmare and I have loved him ever since." Gillis is a wild man, with few sexual boundaries. Like Harry Reems and Rocco Siffredi, he delighted for years in sexually pummelling chicks. Jamie tells BNI that he never officially retired though he did recently leave porn for a year for the sake of a woman he lived with. She hated porn. So Jamie left porn and in the process of a year with the woman, he went broke. Gillis sold everything he owned. He wrote a few articles for different magazines, including "The Mad Satyr" for Screw. "I was living with this girl," Gillis tells Pacheco, "who told me to give up porn and I said okay. Of course, the upshot of all this was...she had this broken down bum who she eventually threw out because he didn't have any money." Scared of AIDS, Jamie moved to New York City where he drove a cab. "I used to freak out when I got on airplanes. I'd think, Oh, God, I'm going to cash, crash, crash... So, I think the statistics now for AIDS and heterosexual sex...one in 500 if you have sex once with a person who has AIDS..." But these stats don't necessarily apply to Gillis as he does not necessarily restrict himself to heterosexual sex. Fred Lincoln flew Gillis to Europe to do a couple of films. Then one night, a passenger in his cab worked for Bizarre Video. She suggested he call the company which he did. Jamie began hanging around in their offices and eventually became general manager. 4/4/01 I got this message from veteran male performer Jamie Gillis: Jamie: "Luke, it's Jamie Gillis. A friend of mine pointed out on your site last week that you put a notice of catching up with Richard Pacheco and Jamie Gillis. I don't know if anyone bothered to point this out to you, but that interview was done about 15 years ago. So catching up from pretty far back. BNI just published it but it was done about 15, 16 years ago. "And I don't know who your sources are, the other comment about my private life and unsafe sex practices, but I can assure you that they are entirely unreliable sources."
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