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Martin Brimmer's real name is Rodger Jacobs. Born in 1958, and raised in San Francisco, he moved to Anaheim at age 16 where he graduated college. He moved to Los Angeles, attended a junior college, then bumped around the mainstream industry for several years, serving as research coordinator on the movie THE LONG RIDERS. Jacobs worked as a reader for various companies, then for the late Warren Stein's Marquee Pictures which produced UNDER THE GUN starring Sam Neil and Vanessa Williams.

"I got into this industry the same as every other creative talent. So many people are immigrants to the City of Angels, buying into the lie that they will find prosperity and contentment here, and deliverance from the past."

While working for Stein as a development director, Brimmer met Wesley Emerson who was making a direct-to-video documentary that Warren was co-financing. During the course of writing the video, Rodger found out that Emerson used to work in porn, and, in 1991, decided to try his luck writing porn screenplays.

"It was a Faustian moment. I remember sitting with him in the editing bay, and going, 'let's make a couple of movies. This could be fun. And cash in on our talent.'"

Wesley and Rodger made VCA's Dirty Books with Ashlyn Gere and Erotique with Victoria Paris.

In 1992, Rodger's girlfriend got pregnant and he married her. They divorced in 1998.

"Pornography ruined my marriage. Don't get me wrong, the business has been good to me. I've made a good living off it… But I work from home, as an independent contractor. Everybody in this business is, except for three percent of…

"It got to the point where my daughter had turned five years old. My daughter had always been trained to stay away from my office. She knew better to not pick anything up in my office. It got to the point when she would come in and read things over my shoulder that I was writing on the screen. One day she saw the word "sex toys." Not knowing what they were, she decided that she wanted "sex toys." And that was it. Obviously there other pressures in the marriage…but my wife went ballistic…

"Let's also talk about the economic impact of working in porn. I learned within my first two years in the industry that the only way to economically survive is to diversify. We are independent contractors. We don't make that much money. When I first started writing, I was making $350 per script. Now my average is $500, up to $750 per script.

"With the market geared towards product with less story, it's hard to make a living. I ended up doing copywriting, screening videos for Russ Hampshire, creating databases for Wicked… It becomes the proverbial carrot in front of the horse. You just can't make enough money to stay afloat without working your ass off. You're constantly chasing a pay check. There's no security. There's no health insurance. These economic insecurities caused a tremendous stress on the marriage. "

Brimmer concentrates his talents on story-driven productions. "I've never even gone near gonzo. Over the last year, I've gotten away with stories that have anything to do with sex, like Indigo Delta. We got a slew of nominations on that. Tom Byron picked up AVN's Best Actor award."

Martin's greatest hits include The Sex Lives of Clowns, two Kelly O'Dell films for VCA - Raw Footage and Two AM. "Kelly's not much of an actress," says Brimmer, "and she's the first to admit it. This was to be a seven scene movie. Russ Hampshire [VCA owner] wanted Kelly [VCA contract girl] to be on the box. So I wanted to create a vehicle where I didn't have to give Kelly much dialogue. So I created this character Hannah, a typical suburban housewife Prozac nation thing, who goes over the edge one day. She snaps, walks out of the house, and starts wandering the streets."

Rodger has written all of the No Man's Land lesbian series from Video Team since volume eight. It's the only scripted lesbian series. "Chris Mann came to Wesley Emerson and I… I said, 'yeah, but I don't want to do movies about five girls stucked on a desert island with a bunch of dildos.' I wanted to write stories about women struggling with their sexuality… A few were kinda gonzo, like Nina's Birthday, which celebrate's Hartley's anniversary in the business. Overall, they are dark psychological portraits."

No Man's Land, due to its story-driven nature, is a unique lesbian series stresses Brimmer. "Every time the AVN nominations come around, we can't compete with The Violation Of… series and stuff like that because we're in a different genre.

"I've never won an AVN award and only been nominated twice despite my 150 titles. I probably should've been nominated many times over. This gnaws at me… Though I've written my share of crap… "

Martin Brimmer's principle competitors at writing porn screen plays are Cash Markman (who now concentrates on directing), Raven Touchstone, Jace Rocker and George Kaplan.

"Many outsiders laugh… 'There are screenplays for these movies?' My girlfriend was first exposed to gonzo product that I reviewed for magazines… Then she saw the types of films that I write, like Indigo Delta, Two AM and Thrustfault. And they were so story-driven that she had a hard time labeling it as pornography.

"The cable market approaches one billion dollars a year… And that stuff is mainly story-driven… Unfortunately, when people think porno, they think 'Co-Ed Cocksuckers' before they think Indigo Delta.

"Writing porn is sheer formula. You know how many sex scenes you have to write. The bitch is trying to plug seven sex scenes into a story, and make them flow from the plot, rather than just throwing in an extraneous sex scene like George Kaplan often does.

"I often get myself into a box, coming up with a story that is so good… Then I think, 'where the f--- am I going to get sex out of this? This movie has nothing to do with sex."

Brimmer has watched about 2000-3000 pornos in his life. "It's hard to say what effect it's had on my psyche. It's had none on my sexuality which shocks my girlfriend. A long time ago, I shut it down. When I first started screening product for Russ, and helping him put together a database for his titles… There was a time when I couldn't do it all day long. Gay porno is extremely hedonistic… There's rarely any attempt at a story unless it is something that Chi Chi LaRue does. I could only screen for three hours at a time… Now I can screen for ten hours straight if I have to… Now I have seen so much of this stuff that I can watch it in fast-scan and not miss a thing."

Brimmer says watching hours of gay porn has not developed in him a hunger for male-to-male sex.

The veteran screenwriter does not try to hide his real name. "MTV News is going to interview me in July… I was interviewed by German TV in February… I don't understand people who do [want to protect their real names] unless you're really young… Everyone in mainstream Hollywood knows what I do… Nobody has a problem with it."

Rodger wants to leave porn for journalism. "I've been writing for New Rave and Dirty the last three issues… I have my eye on writing some books based on my experiences in the business.

"I spent $10,000 on my divorce and got my wife out of the house… And found that I have no money… There's no protection in this business… There's four billion a year in video revenue. I give six years of my life and I'm begging for money…

"I'm working on a book called So You Wanna Be A Porn Star: A no-nonsense guide to surviving and thriving in the adult industry. It's a cautionary book. Yes, there's money to be made here, but you have to know how to get in, and when to get out. And here are the pitfalls. I can't go as far as you [Luke] go with your stuff because I still rely heavily on this business for a living… I have to hedge a bit… In my chapter outlines, I have STDS, the pros and cons of breast implants (mainly cons)…"

Martin Brimmer wrote 1996's Star Attraction for Director Fred J. Lincoln. "Jon Dough plays a Hollywood also-ran who alternately laments and exults in his newfound status as king of the porno scribes. The story is close to the heart of writer Martin Brimmer, but the preachy tone, particulary during Dough's long speech at the end, is a turn off." (AFW 97)

The Tongue. "Ron Jeremy stars as a washed-up grade Z filmmaker who gets struck by a brainstorm. Where can someone like he, utterly lacking in talent, still make a living as a director? In porn. Jim Enright directs Martin Brimmer's script in a video about awful movies that is unexceptional. (AFW 97)

Martin feels troubled by the harsher edge of the gonzo trend. "The Matt Zanes, Johnny Toxics, Rob Blacks have no history in this business. They haven't had to endure the legal challenges and subpoenas and scrutiny. They have no appreciation for the Russ Hampshires, Al Goldsteins… People who have done time.

"I was one who sat there for a year after Russell went to jail, to review Russ's stock [VCA] in 1993. We had our list of seven deadly sins - coercion aka rape, bestiality, urination, defecation, S-M, underage inferences, violence with sex… If you're doing a Miami Vice ripoff about a gunbattle in the marina, that's fine so long as people aren't f---ing in the middle of it.

"I wrote up a report on each film. If there was objectionable content, I made a note of the time code and what the content was. Then the judgement was made within VCA whether that scene should be excised or not.

"We were reactionary. There are some films we were too quick to cut... Such as a couple of minutes out of Café Flesh where Max is being dragged out of the cafe to be killed. And there was nothing wrong with that…

"But when you start getting back into rape scenarios, urination… You are crossing into the lines that get people in jail.

"Just because things are relaxed now… I had to write a flyer for a gay release called FAMILY VALUES. A wonderfully produced and acted film about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality by learning that his father used to be a gay porn star. So he tracks down his father and sleeps with him. Incest!

"The title alone is a red flag… Then they backed it up with incest. I advised the client to not carry the movie, especially in mail order. His response to me: 'This isn't the days of the Meese Commission.' That tells me where these people's minds are at."

Luke: Is your objection that these people could be fined and go to jail, and lose money, or that this material is truly obscene?

Martin: That's a damn good question. Sometimes, like the Rob Black stuff, anything involving rape, or crossing the lines with religion, I find personally offensive… My main concern most of the time is for the client, that they don't run the risk of going to jail.

Luke: Clinton has been good for pornographers.

Martin: Oh yeah. Check out the Morality in Media home page. They compare the prosecutions under the Reagen-Bush era with the Clinton era. They're trying to draw some correlation between Clinton and the rise of pornography. And they're probably right.

Since February, I've been concerned about the HIV outbreak becoming inevitable. That correlates with where the marketplace is going. I screen anywhere between 40-100 titles a month. When I'm not writing and producing movies, I'm generating advertising copy for Voyages Catalogue Group out of the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the biggest mail order houses. They used to be part of Dechtar Direct which has gone under. Now they are owned by Terry Hess. I screen product for them for compliance and content.

"And what I've been witnessing in the gonzo over the past year, has been the desire to get even more hedonistic, animalistic and out there… These horrendously numerical gangbangs… The gaping assholes. The double anal penetrations without condoms. You didn't have to be a physician to figure this out…

"I saw a film recently, shot on April 15th, well into our HIV outbreak… Mila did a gangbang with Byron Long [a black bisexual] and two other black guys that was just racist. She wanders into the room screaming, 'hey niggers, f--- me.' Then she gets DP'd. Byron Long comes in her ass, where her asshole turns inside out. Then she ejaculates the sperm out of her ass into a bowl…[and drinks it].

"When you see this s---, it's going beyond entertainment and eroticism… This maddening need to go beyond…is a disaster… That's what brought on this HIV outbreak."

8/5/98

I talked to journalist and screenwriter Martin Brimmer at 1PM, 8/5/98. For the past few months, he's lived with his first love - a girl he first dated seventeen years ago. An artist, she is not in porn.

Martin's writing a story for Hustler about Elegant Angel shooter Dion Giarrusso, a former drug dealer who reinvented himself as a pornographer.

"In the '70s, at the height of the cocaine era, Dione went to this club on Wilshire Blvd and La Cienega, Max 151. Dione made a deal with the owners to promote the club. After several years, the club goes into decline. He'd long been solicited by drug dealers to work for them. Finally he gives in. He makes a deal with Colombian drug dealers to run drugs. He became a major drug dealer, running thousands of kilos of cocaine and marijuana every day. He was the subject of six months of police surveillance. He became careless. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served eight years.

"While in prison, he decided to change his life around. He started taking correspondence courses from AFI - the American Film Institute. He wanted to make independent movies. While in prison, he met this guy he used to know from a biker club, who's one of Patrick Collins' cameramen who persuaded him to do porn.

"When Dion got out, a week after parole, he was invited to a party at Patrick Collins' house in Encino. He started working for Elegant Angel filing model contracts. Then Patrick let him direct a scene for Sodomania 24… Dion's been directing for a year now."

Martin reviews videos for New Rave and Dirty magazines. He likes Jim Gunn's new video Lesbian Virgins.

Brimmer was amused by the reaction on RAME to his review of The Cellar 2 by Rob Black… The Mila scene, where she walks into a room and says, 'hey niggers, f--- me.'

Brimmer writes: "Mila succumbs to anal, vaginal, double anal, double vaginal penetration… Byron cums in Mila's ass. She screams, 'where's the bowl? Get the f---ing bowl.' Mila bends her semen saturated rectum over the bowl…her asshole turns inside out… and she squirts the cum into the bowl. No human being on the planet should watch videos like this. I've seen autopsy tapes that were less stomach turning. But wait, it gets worse. Once the sperm has been ejaculated into the bowl, two raw eggs and a dolop of malt liquor are added to the mix and Mila greedily swallows it all down… There's a fifth and concluding scene of The Cellar, but I couldn't tell you what it was… I was too busy thinking about how Mila had so willingly allowed herself to be anally violated in an XXX feature shot on April 14, 1998, not long after an industry meeting was held where it was announced that the latest HIV scare in the adult business was possibly the epidemic we'd been fearing for some time now."

Martin says: "What's interesting is that people loved that review, and it made people want to go out and rent the movie. I noticed someone in RAME posted about reading a review of her rectum turning inside out. And he wrote: 'I can't wait to rent this movie.'"

Luke: "We're in a business that appeals to the lower parts of the human being. It's almost comical to try to uplift pornography."

Martin has written several scripts for coming Wicked productions. Johnathan Morgan is directing this month Double Feature starring Serenity. Later we shoot Knockout. Pornogothic just came out. "I love it. A vampire thing set in a goth club scene. We did two different cuts. The version that goes to the stores is softer than the director's cut.

"I interviewed Catalina L'Amour a few weeks ago. She has a line of about 60 pro-am videos. She won a national stripping contest in the '80s in Vegas ($10,000) and she parlayed that into an interesting [hardcore] career. She has a huge fan base. She only does her husband and doesn't do girls, but the line is still popular."

Brimmer and Wesley Emerson are still in post-production on their definitive shot-on-video documentary on John Holmes. They hope to finish by September first. They are now down to a four hour cut. There are over 40 talking heads. It's a Leviathan of a documentary. The director [Emerson] wants to bring it in at 120 minutes and the editor and I at 100 minutes. There will be an unrated cut with graphic clips."

Luke and Martin agree that The Porn King, John Holmes' supposed autobiography, is horrible. "She's [Laurie Holmes] an interesting person. We interview her. She says John had a heart of gold. Well, he used to beat women, he was an implicated in one of the most gorey murders in the history of LA. He was a habitual thief."

Luke: "I read the whole book [Porn King]. I think there are nuggets of useful information in there, such as the description of John's first loop, which corresponds with Jim Talmag's [Uncle Roy's] description of discovering John."

Martin: "That story is apocryphal.

"We talked to Sharon Holmes who still lives in Southern California. When they first met, John was a forklift operator. They lived in Glendale. Sharon says he got sick from going in and out of the freezer. So while he was mending, he liked to go to card clubs in Gardena because he liked to gamble. His discovery was like the scene in Boogie Nights. He was at the urinal, and this man came up and said, 'I want to make you a star.'

"Sharon did not know much more. She did not like the porno business. She did not do drugs. She says she never saw John Holmes in a porno. It was a marriage of love. John sheltered her from the business. She's only seen one porn film. John took her to I AM CURIOUS YELLOW. She walked out halfway through. We did the interview in secret. We shot her in half-light.

"We interviewed Detectives Van Atter and Lang. They said that it was the most gruesome murder scene they have ever seen.

"Eddie Nash wasn't interested in talking to us. In his late '70s, he's retired. We interviewed prosecutor Ron Cohen who still believes John played a role in the murders.

"There have been so many myths about John Holmes perpetuated by the media. This particularly one was even in Tony Lovett's piece in Hustler a few years ago. An apocryphal story about John's bloody handprint on the wall [at the scene of the four murders at 8763 Wonderland Ave]. There was not a bloody handprint. It was just a palm print on the wall above the bed…not a bloody palm print. The print could've been placed there at any time because John was always in and out of that house.

"Much of Boogie Nights' recreation of '70s porn is a direct lift from the 1981 documentary Exhausted, and from Johhny Wadd. I had an attitude when I went into the interview with P.T. Anderson, that I was going to confront him on this. Little did I know that he did this on purpose. He said: 'I wanted to have these reference points. I wanted to shoot scenes that represented typical '70s low brow porn. But I didn't want to be accused of making bad filmmaking myself. So I lifted these scenes from Exhausted so that anyone said, 'God, this is horrible.' I could point to the original source material.

"On the laser disc version, you can run the original clip from Exhausted and play that against Boogie Nights. Sometimes all he did was change camera angle… But he shot some of these scenes verbatim, shot for shot, angle for angle.

"I feel the same way about the movie that you [Luke] do. I liked it but strictly as diversionary entertainment, not as scholarly text on the adult entertainment business."

TALES FROM LUST ANGELES - "SHE'S NOT CLEAN!"

by Rodger Jacobs

 (Editor’s Note: As a rule porn stars engage in an enema before succumbing to any form of anal sex. But, as this tale from a literally sobering 1997 adventure illustrates, sometimes "s--- happens".)

"It's a very angry screenplay," Sharon Mitchell comments, standing by my side in the cavernous soundstage located somewhere in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley, that bleached panorama of strip malls and auto dealerships that was almost destroyed by the great Northridge earthquake.

The screenplay in question is for a Video Team feature, the fifteenth volume in an ongoing lesbian series called No Man's Land. The last eight installments of No Man's Land were written by me under the nom de plume Martin Brimmer.

No Man's Land 15, the segment shooting today, a hot August afternoon, is the story of an unstable porn star's descent into madness, hastened by her dependence on liquor and by the crushing responsibilities of directing an X-rated feature for the first time.

"It's based on a true story," I tell Sharon, "about the time I worked with Pamela Jayne on her first directing gig. She's a crazy-ass bitch and a raging drunk to boot." As I say those words my mouth feels like a hot stretch of two-lane blacktop and my stomach is throbbing in rhythm to the irregularly rapid beat in my chest as a monstrous hangover maintains a steady grip on my central nervous system.

On the movie set a few feet away, Sahara Sands, a lanky, aquiline-nosed blonde, essays the role of Pamela Jayne, launching into an outburst that's directed at her nubile assistant, played by raven-haired Alexis Dane.

"I don't want my movie to be full of sweet, cloying bulls---!" Sahara, as Pamela Jayne, shrieks at Alexis, gripping a dog-eared copy of William Burroughs's "Junky" in one of her slender hands. There are a lot of references to William Burroughs in the movie, one of the authors, along with Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, that I was reading voraciously at this troubled time in my life.

"I want dirt and grime and nastiness and sweat and cum!" Sahara continues, perfectly in character, capturing the real-life Pamela Jayne's hysterical and drunken mood swings to a tee. "I want my movie to be full of the animalistic passion of sex! Do you understand what the f--- I'm talking about?"

"This is too much for me," chestnut-haired Sharon whispers in my ear, slinking away from the set and seeking refuge in the relative peace and quiet of the soundstage lobby.

Sharon Mitchell, known to her friends as "Mitch", is a rather butch looking but feminine porn star who has been in the business since 1975. She is working as production manager on No Man's Land 15 and I took a liking to her from our very first meeting. I trailed her out into the lobby as production commenced inside the stage.

"I just can't stand to hear all that screaming and yelling," Mitch explains to me, "even if it is a part of the script."

"It came from a very angry part of me," I said, without elaborating that every part of my fibre and being was angry. Very angry. Porno was only supposed to be a transitory phase for me, a waiting room in which to ply my trade while I waited for that big break in HOLLYWOOD. The big break never came and like so many others I found myself working in porn exclusively.

"All of my writing is coming out that way lately," I said to Mitch as we puffed on cigarettes and waited for the red light outside the stage door to dim, indicating that they were finished shooting the scene. "After writing a hundred some odd movies I'm getting a little burned out; the stories are starting to get venomous and harder to write."

"You need a break from porno," Mitch says sympathetically. "It's like the other day I got a call from a men's magazine and they ask me if I want to write a monthly column for them. Well, they know that I'm going to school to get my doctoral degree to be a sex therapist or a psychologist so I figure they want me to write a column along those lines; y'know, like a sexual advice kind of thing? Guess what they wanted me to write about."

"What?" I asked blankly, wondering where I was going to find a store to buy my nightly bottle of bourbon once shooting wrapped up later in the evening. As the associate producer I was pretty much required to be on the set until the very last shot.

"Sex toys! They were gonna send me these new sex toys every month and I would write a column about the product!" Mitch snubbed out her cigarette in disgust. "After 23 years in the business that's the last f---ing thing I want to do."

Mitch has been clean and sober for several years now. As she told me about her battles with substance abuse I tried to imagine what it must be like for her to go home every night, turn down the covers on the bed, and fall into a deep slumber without the aid of booze or pills. The concept was alien to me.

"Rodger, can we make one small change in the script?" Sahara Sands requests, sidling up to me during a break in shooting. "You have here in the script that Pamela Jayne drinks bourbon straight from the bottle but every time I've worked with her she was drinking tequila."

"Really?"

"Really. She's a tequila girl."

"I wasn't aware of that. Sure. Go ahead. Have the prop guys find you a tequila bottle."

It's ten o'clock in the evening and we're in the fourteenth hour of production on No Man's Land 15. This will be a one day shoot, a "one day wonder" as it's called in the jizz biz, a 75 minute videotaped feature, complete with story and five sex scenes shot in one long and agonizing day.

Sahara scampers off to find the right prop for her character and I watch through the glass doors of the lobby as a sleek black BMW convertible screams into the parking lot and slams to a stop between two parking stalls. Kimberly Kummings scrambles out of the car, her long, flowing hair as black as the paint job on the imported car she drives.

Kimberly Kummings is a dead ringer for my first love, the one who took my heart and stomped on it mercilessly before vanishing out of my life forever. I had insisted on casting Kimberly in No Man's Land 15 despite the unsubstantiated scuttlebutt that this newcomer to the world of adult videos is nuttier than a fruitcake.

"If she f---s up the movie it's your fault," the director tells me half-seriously as Kimberly dashes through the doors and upstairs to the waiting make-up chair. "You wanted her in so badly, you pay the price if she screws up."

Evening bears down into morning. It is well past midnight when Kimberly Kummings and Nico Treasures, a beautiful young blonde possessed of an inexhaustible sexual energy, appear on the stage for their scene, the last scene to be shot before a wrap is called.

The set is of a dilapidated Mexican cantina, the last haven, in the story, for Pamela Jayne after she is ran out of the business for her fits of alcoholic dementia while directing and performing.

"You want us to f--- on top of the bar?" Nico asks the director.

"Whatever you girls want," he responds politely, "Anything at all so long as you make it hot."

Before the cameras roll Nico and Kimberly block out their lesbian scene. Kimberly insists that they use dildoes and vibrators and she wants Nico to shove a dildo in her posterior while she lays back on the bar.

The director, seated near the video monitor that captures all of the action live as it happens, calls for action and shoots me a nervous glance.

"It'll be okay," I assure him. "Kimberly's a good performer."

"You also told me her tits were real," he hissed back at me. "Look at 'em!" He pointed at the monitor, "They're pumped up!"

"So are the tits on every other girl in this movie," I frowned.

"Ashley's tits are real," he shot back.

"I'm not going to argue with you about whose tits are real and fake, okay? Can we just shoot this and go home?"

The first five minutes of the scene are going down as smooth as a shot of Black Velvet. Kimberly, it turns out, is not particularly into girl/girl action but she gives it her all. She hoists her slender frame onto the bar, spreads her creamy thighs as wide as a canyon and instructs Nico to lube up the long dildo and slide it into her ass.

"What the f--- is she doing?" the video technician almost screams as he observes the gynecological close-up of Kimberly's puckered ass in the monitor. "She's not clean!"

"Not clean" means that Kimberly forgot to indulge in an enema before succumbing to anal sex on camera. As the large plastic phallus invades Kimberly's rectum her bowels howl in protest, a loud passing of wind being the first warning shot across the bow, and she loses control of her excretory functions, depositing a copious amount of fecal matter onto the bar top.

Kimberly rushes to the stage bathroom and slams the door. The girl who tugged at my heartstrings for her eerie resemblance to my lost love took a crap on the bar. I can't even begin to contemplate the symbolic value of that.

Straggling into my suburban home at a quarter past one in the morning, I am not surprised to find my wife and daughter sound asleep. I take a couple of beers and a fifth of bourbon into my office, sandwiched between the master bedroom and my daughter's bedroom, and resolve to get a little work done before retreating to the living room for some reading and relaxation.

Aside from writing porno, I make quite a nice income developing computer databases for various adult film distributors. A database tells a manufacturer how many scenes are in each of his movies, what stars appear in each individual scene, and what sex acts occur in the context of that scene. With this information they can develop compilation tapes, two hour and four hour video cassettes that are nothing but wall-to-wall sex culled from their video library.

Over the course of five years, I have screened over 10,000 hours of hardcore footage on film and videotape. I have seen just about every sex act imaginable that is legal within the continental United States. I have observed every type of woman you can imagine indulging in sexual scenarios so vast and wide and varied that a chronic masturbator would have to beat his meat from here 'til Doomsday to envision all the images that I have seen.

Big tits, small tits, blondes, brunettes, black women, white women, European women, Asian women, Hispanic girls, and girls of mixed racial origin. I've seen them getting dicked in missionary, doggie-style, cowgirl (woman on top facing the man) and reverse cowgirl (woman on top facing away from man) positions. I've seen faces, chins, cheeks, noses, throats, mouths, lips, stomachs, legs, asses, and earlobes coated with semen. I have witnessed anal sex scenes that are so graphic they would churn the stomach of the most enthusiastic hedonist. Lesbian scenes? I've seen 'em all from soft and tender one-on-one to daisy chain orgies of labia licking to all manner of vicious strap-on stickings. I've seen every variation on oral sex that you can possibly imagine, girls who deep throat and girls who lick and nibble at an erect cock like it's a popsickle on a stick. I have watched dozens of interminable "gang bang" movies and sat through God knows how many "couples oriented" x-rated features, and hundreds of so-called "gonzo" movies, which is to say that there is no story, just wall-to-wall sex. Transvestites and transsexuals in hardcore action? I've watched hour upon hour of those cinematic delights as well as endless hours of hardcore gay male movies. I've endured bondage movies, sadism/masochism features and other fetish videos including, but not limited to, movies that highlight foot worship, spanking, enemas, and crossdressing. Thousands and thousands of men and women engaging in sex on camera. Sometimes it seems to me that everyone in America must have appeared in a f--- film at least once in their lives.

But as long as I had Jack Daniels and his carbonated cohorts from the Miller Brewing Company, none of it ever really bothered me. Jack and Miller were always there to lull me to sleep at night, to blot out the image of all those asses, tits, mouths, and assorted body parts that swim around in the muck and mire of my mind. It was the Roman writer, philosopher, and statesmen Seneca who said that drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. Following that line of thinking it seems only right to conclude that I was simply exchanging one form of madness for another as each day came to a close.

And then along came Kerouac and Bukowski and Burroughs and my life was about to change.

Sometime in late 1995 I stopped watching television altogether to quiet down the noises in my head, the repercussive sounds and moans and groans that stomped about in a disquieting march after screening porno or writing porno for eight or twelve hours on end. My evenings would be spent reading. I plowed through the collected works of Aldous Huxley and Jack London in record time and I sopped up the few Fitzgerald short stories and novels that I had failed to read early in my youth.

A friend recommended Beat writer Jack Kerouac's novels and poems. I had avoided Kerouc in the past but when I picked up Big Sur I realized that I made a huge mistake by dismissing him as a pretentious fool.

Big Sur follows the tale of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's fictional alter ego, who attempts to escape the pressures of sudden literary fame by retreating to a friend's cabin in the seclusion of Northern California's Big Sur wilderness. Once ensconsed in the cabin all manner of chaos ensues, not the least of which is Duluoz's nightmarish battle with delirium tremens. This was the literary territory that I loved in my book-filled youth, the adventures of destructive alcoholic writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner.

The screenplay for No Man's Land 15 was an extension of my preoccupation with the romance of alcoholism, an obsession that began in my youth and persisted until my thirty-seventh year, the year in which this tale occurs.

An acquaintance of mine, a noteable director of erotic films that are almost always centered around the amorous escapades of nurses and stewardesses, is a raging Malcolm Lowry fan. Even I, in my fifteen years of steady drinking and idolatry of boozing scribes, drew the line at Lowry, author of "Under the Volcano" and a juicer of such extremes that no clinical detoxification attempt, including the barbaric apomorphine treatment, would take hold and he was discharged from one hospital after another as a hopeless incurable. The fact that my Lowry-worshipping friend nearly died from a trio of insidious bloodsucking stomach ulcers speaks volumes, perhaps, about his own problems wrestling with the bottle and the stresses of the porn biz.

Another friend told me recently that his live-in girlfriend, a retired porn star turned make-up artist, joined a support group and is now five months sober.

"I used to find liquor bottles hidden all over the house," he told me, "in the kitchen cabinets, under the bed, in her bathroom cabinets, everywhere. But when I started finding them in my bathroom cabinets I told her she had to quit drinking or move out."

Why he drew the line upon discovering secreted bottles in his personal bathroom, when he knew long before this that she had a drinking problem of some magnitude, I'll never know because I didn't ask. Maybe that's his private domain that no outside reality is allowed to penetrate.

Anyway, in Kerouac I found a new literary idol. I breezed through his novels and then began to devour biographical works about his tragic life. A clear cut pattern emerged in each biography -- Kerouac, a horribly unhappy man who could not cope with fame, nor paradoxically with the cruelty of his critics, drank himself to death.

From Kerouac I graduated to William Burroughs, a logical leap of course since Burroughs and Kerouac were friends. Kerouac not only provided the title for Burroughs most famous novel "Naked Lunch" (defined as "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork") but he helped type and edit the manuscript as well.

For several nights on end in December 1996 I would finish up twelve hours of screening porno and then grab a bottle of bourbon and retire to the living room to wade through "Naked Lunch" while my wife watched her TV sitcoms and melodramas in the bedroom and my daughter slept peacefully in her own room. Although I hadn't switched brands, the bourbon I was drinking seemed unusually harsh, burning the s--- out of my esophagus and doing an equally fiery number on my stomach. I simply mixed it with soda water to alleviate the sting.

When "Naked Lunch" progressed from a fascinating record of the agony of life on heroin to a series of ghastly scenes based on the fact that men have erections and orgasms when hanged to death, I put the book down and never picked it up again. It was too much to endure after watching naked bodies writhing in mock passion all day long.

Through Kerouac and Burroughs I was learning that there was nothing romantic about chemical dependency, a lesson I wish I had learned before I picked up Fitzgerald and London and Hammett and Faulkner, and all those other talented bastards who made drinking seem so integral to a rich and full life.

Addictions, all addictions, are potential murderers, thieves of the brain and soul, and after reading Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs I had a real craving for the first time in my life to STOP abusing alcohol.

But I couldn't. Not yet.

"JESUS f---ING CHRIST!" I shouted one evening, jumping out of the recliner and clutching my chest where a fire certainly seemed to be brewing. The first fear was that I was suffering a heart attack. But then I felt an awful bile rising in my throat and I immediately recognized the symptoms of chronic gastrointestinal stress.

So I switched to beer. But that wouldn't give me the buzz sufficient to sleep.

So I switched to wine. Yes, I would only drink wine from now on because the bourbon was clearly starting to f--- around with my stomach. But the morning after from a liter of Merlot was just as treacherous and painful as any hard liquor hangover.

The simple fact of the matter was that I could not drink anymore. I had every symptom of gastroesophageal reflux (splashing of stomach acid up onto the lower end of the esophagus), a disorder that has afflicted almost everyone in my family on the maternal side.

After fifteen years of nightly dances with the bottle I quit cold turkey. There was no Ray Milland-ish Lost Weekend to deal with, no pink elephants, no trembling hands, none of the horrors that Kerouac, who died of a massive abdominal hemmorhage brought on by drink, was forced to confront because nature or God or the frailties of my body or a combination of all of the above spared me that agony, saved me from taking a self-destructive riff right up to the edge and into the abyss.

So now I am forced to confront the world of pornography stone cold sober. No more drifting through an opaque drakness. Porn is a hazardous enterprise to be engaged in. It's a soul-siphoning conveyor belt that entices the mentally addled to grab ahold of the caboose and come along for the ride; which is part of my point entirely: those who get involved in porno are a little f---ed in the head to begin with. Porno doesn't f--- people up, f---ed up people get involved in porno and get more f---ed up. You don't have to be a genius at subtext to figure out that my drinking problem started long before my ride through Porno Hell.

Well, it's a sober eye that now must be cast upon all those hours of X-rated footage and those live moments when porn stars accidentally move their bowels as the camera continues to roll.

"Something good will come out of all things yet," Kerouac wrote as the last words in Big Sur, "There's no need to say another word."

Martin Brimmer writes Luke 9/99: By the way, here are some of the critical accolades that Martin Brimmer received over the years, since you only seem to have mediocre ones in your bio of Brimmer. WRITING CREDITS AS MARTIN BRIMMER

LOOKER (PLEASURE LIMITED EDITIONS) 1999 AVN Award Winner: Best Screenplay Film, Best Director Film, Best Art Direction, Best Lighting, Best Cinematography, Best Music, Best Packaging, Best Supporting Actress Film (Shanna McCullough) " ... director Nic Cramer, cinematographer Jack Remy, and scripter Martin Brimmer are among the leading exponents of porn noir, and Looker is a fine example of the genre. It's well-paced and well-acted .... this is solid, satisfying storytelling with sex --- a lot of what porn should be." Adult Video News

INDIGO DELTA (WICKED PICTURES) 1998 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Shot On Video Feature, Best Actor (Tom Byron), Best Supporting Actress (Melissa Hill), Best Art Direction, Best Box Cover Concept 1998 A.V.N. Award Winner: Tom Byron (Best Actor)

NIGHT & DAY 3: THE LUST WEEKEND (VIDEOTEAM) 1997 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Actress (Jeanna Fine), Best Supporting Actress (Alex Dane) "AAAA ... Jeanna Fine's performance as a boozed-up babe is one of her best acting performances to date." Adult Video News

RAW FOOTAGE (VCA PLATINUM PLUS) 1997 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Sex Comedy, Best Non-Sex Performance (Justin Sterling) "A humorous plot with on the nose satire ... it should fly off retailers shelves." Adult Video News "Thermonuclear - Highest Rating!" Swank's Video World

NIGHT & DAY (VIDEOTEAM) 1994 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Jon Dough) Best Of 1994: Adult Video News " ... alert, alive, and thriving with an intelligently-driven acidity about the nature and politics of the mainstream film industry ... dry, funny, and very sultry." Adult Video News

BAD HABITS (VCA PLATINUM PLUS) 1995 A.V.N. Award Winner: Best Director, Video (John Leslie) Recommended in The Couples Guide To The Best Erotic Videos (St. Martin's Press) " ... a wonderfully written, strongly delivered sex drama." Adam Film World "Martin Brimmer has provided a top notch, complex script, with twists that work." Adult Video News

NIGHT CLUB (SIN CITY) 1996 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Cinematography, Best Supporting Actor (Tony Tedeschi), Best All-Girl Sex Scene, Best Tease Performance (Amber Lynn), Best Trailer, Best Packaging, Best Overall Marketing Campaign " ... a fabulous film foray into the at-times seedy world of club owners and those involved in dirty money ... a potent Molotov cocktail ... this is exactly how adult films should be." Adult Video News

RAZOR'S EDGE (ONA ZEE PRODUCTIONS) 1995 A.V.N. Award Nominee: Best Shot On Video Feature, Best Actress (Jeanna Fine), Best Supporting Actress (Ona Zee) Editor's Choice & Best Of 1995: Adult Video News " ... a great story ... reminds me of Psycho gone amuck and converted into an adult feature." Adult Video News

LONELY HEARTS (VCA PLATINUM PLUS) Editor's Choice & Best Of 1995: Adult Video News " ... a thought provoking script by Martin Brimmer ... tackles ethical dilemmas common to the adult industry with intelligence and heart." Adult Video News

THE SEX LIVES OF CLOWNS (VCA PLATINUM PLUS) Recommended Selection in The Couples Guide To The Best Erotic Videos " ... this story by Martin Brimmer is guaranteed to generate more laughs than any episode of Saturday Night Live this season." Adam Film World "... genuinely funny ... a nearly perfect gem of a sex vid." RAD Video

DIRTY WORK (VCA PLATINUM PLUS) " ... score another one for Brimmer, one of the most consistently original screen writers in the business." Adult Video News

Let's see ... favorite films that I wrote? "Lonelyhearts" for VCA, "Indigo Delta" and "Double Feature" for Wicked, "Night Club" for Buck Adams and Sin City (that was a 35 MM film, by the way), "Intimate Strangers" for Nic Cramer and Pleasure Productions. It's interesting to note that a lot of the stars that I started out writing for aren't in the business anymore: Ashlyn Gere, Diedre Holland, Victoria Paris, Leena, so many others.

On Tuesday, 9/7/99, Luke discussed pedophilia with porno dad Martin Brimmer, recently deceased, who took a courageous stance against the sexual abuse of children.

Brimmer, a veteran screenwriter who's decided to retire, and return to his real name Rodger Jacobs, told me: "Buccolini is right. Your site has gone downhill... All that Morality in Media crap... Those studies are so skewed. You may as well quote a porn industry study on porn."

Luke: MIM is the mirror image of porno. I find their stuff interesting. I'd forgotten what the other side was like.

Jacobs: "They lump everything together. Some pedophile, child porn, and the mainstream porn industry. It's all the same to them. Kiddie porn and a Sin City movie, they don't draw a distinction."

Luke: "There is a distinction? Anyway, I did not know the pro-pedophilia beliefs of the World Pornography Conference organizers like CSUN professor Vern Bullough."

Jacobs: "But that kind of stuff has nothing to do with our industry and it doesn't reflect well even lumped into a website that has anything to do with our business."

Luke: "I'm shocked and horrified that I may have run something damaging to the interests of the porn industry... Literally, pedophiles and child porn may have nothing to do with the mainstream porn industry, but figuratively it does. The porn industry promotes the expansion of sexual boundaries."

Rodger: "But I would argue to you that the internet has done more damage in that respect than the porn industry. The tons of readily available pornographic material on the net... Stuff promoting pedophilia and bestiality... The internet has done a tremendous job in breaking down barriers. It's almost as if the internet is going to force Western culture to redefine what is pornographic and what is taboo."

Luke disagrees. What will primarily define what is licit in Western culture, particularly American, is religion, particularly Christianity, which remains unalterably opposed to porno and all sex outside of marriage.

Rodger: "In Japan, for instance, they have some wild fetishes. They have a lot of teen sex videos. It's very popular there and it is not illegal. All these schoolgirl scenarios, particularly schoolgirl rape... Rape in general [as an entertainment theme but not in reality, Japan has low rates of criminal violence] is very popular in Japan, especially in the last ten years when women have become less subjugated and moved into the workforce, which is against [traditional] Japanese culture."

Luke: If violent pornography led to rape, one would expect Japan to be filled with rape, but it has very low rates of violence.

Rodger: "If you look at Japanese porno website, you'll find stuff that violates US standards... I wrote about this extreme and illegal porn for Hustler. Some of my points did not get through because David [Buchbinder, Hustler features editor] cut them.

"Our culture here is so puritanical compared to the rest of the globe, who has more tolerance... Canada and Great Britain have restraints against pornography, but in terms of TV and magazines and newspaper on a newsstand that a ten-year old can buy, they are still more liberal than we are... Britain and Canada has shown full front nudity long before the US. When I was 13 years old, I was turning on reruns of Monty Python's Flying Circus on PBS and seeing nudity..."

Luke: "I did that, also with Benny Hill..."

Rodger: Until they put him in syndication and he got sanitized... They had the uncensored stuff on PBS for a while."

Luke: What prompted the retirement of Martin Brimmer?

Rodger: Martin got tired. He wrote over 200 screenplays over seven years, finally won the AVN award [whooopy doo]... A big part of it was working with Johnathan Morgan and Wicked... They allowed me to expand and explore some boundaries... Not only making story intensive films but films that tiptoed around what was acceptable... Indigo Delta... How often have you seen an X-rated film where the lead character is a serial killer?

Luke: What progress.

Rodger: Pornogothic was a vampire film... We had a Hollywood make-up person who made up the vampires... We had blood and special effects... The lead character, played by Brad Armstrong, is a cop investigating these vampire killings who questions the existence of God. How often do you see a theme like that in an adult film?

So with Johnathan, I got to do a lot of the things I've always wanted to do.

Luke: Sounds homoerotic.

Rodger: It almost became, whenever I'd get an assignment after that, can I top what I did before? Can I fulfill myself creatively like I did with Johnathan? And the answer invariably was no.

Luke: Reminds of King David, in the book of Samuel, mourning the death of his buddy Johnathan. "Your love was sweeter to me than the love of women," said David.

Rodger: The assignments were getting harder and harder to write and there seemed to be less point in doing it. It's an extremely limited genre.

Luke: Duh.

Rodger: On No Man's Land... Emerson and I started out with volume eight to twenty seven, and I think I ran the gamut of every possible lesbian storyline you can come up with. It's like writing detective novels. Pretty soon you'll run out of mystery plots.

Over the years, as I did more and more magazine work, porn screenwriting accounted for less and less of my income. It got to the point where it was only 40% of my income... It became easier to turn down assignments and resign than to sit here and wrestle for weeks with something that normally would've taken me two days to write...

Luke: Do you find porn journalism more fulfilling than porn screenwriting?

Rodger: That too is a limited field. I'm getting tired of the reviews... After a while, there are only so many ways that you can describe the action. For a while it becomes a challenge, and then it becomes downright dull.

Luke: How do folks like Gene Ross and Paul Fishbein put in almost 20 years doing this?

Rodger: They're editors now. They have other people do the bulk of the reviews.

Luke: What do you tell people in your community [in Northern California] about what you do for a living?

Rodger: I don't talk to anyone in my community. It's a small town. I tell them that I am a magazine writer. Usually I admit mostly adult magazines and small mainstream magazines.

Luke: Like Panic, it's content was shocking.

Rodger: I didn't have a problem with it except for the interview with the necro-cannibal. It was just a typical sub-culture magazine. I'm writing an article for them on the death motifs in the novels and short fiction of Jack London. That's far removed from an interview with Alisha Klass.

Living in Benicia, it's been easier to pull away from the porn industry. The pace is more laid back... Rent is cheaper...

Luke: What does your girlfriend think of your work in porno?

Rodger: At first she thought it was unique and interesting and when she saw how inundated I was with the business, not only writing screenplays but ad copy and video reviews and magazine articles, it became overwhelming. There's a lot of pornographic material around me at any given time. She's glad to see me back out of the business and she's rightfully more proud of the stuff I do in mainstream than the stuff I do in porn.

Here's a sneak preview of a forthcoming book by Rodger Jacobs

"I don't have time to read the Star Attraction rewrite just now because we have another problem," Wesley Emerson says, and I breathe a sigh of relief to hear his voice over the telephone, comforted in the knowledge that all my family members, including Linda, will apparently live to see another sunrise. "Chris wants to bring the budget down on the new No Man's Land."

No Man's Land is Videoteam's highly successful all-girl franchise; directing chores on the first seven volumes of No Man's Land were farmed out to various directors but when Wesley and I assumed total control over the writing and directing chores on the lesbian themed videos at Volume Eight (titled "Eight Women Who Ate Women") sales quickly increased, owing in no small part to my insistence that the stories should henceforth be about hardcore lesbians, as opposed to hackneyed plots about otherwise heterosexual women who suddenly find themselves stranded on a desert island with nothing but each other and a box of dildoes and ... well, you know the rest.

"How many players do we have to cut from the show?" I asked Wesley, popping open another beer and wandering into the office, firing up the computer and pulling up the script for No Man's Land 11. "We have nine girls in the show now. Can we bring it down to seven?"

"Might be easier than you'd think," I mumbled, and I'm sure Wesley was surprised at catching me in such an agreeable mood. I scanned through the script to get to the bottom page where the breakdowns, the comprehensive production list that itemizes each character and what sex scenes they perform in, was located. "See, with the exception of two of the characters who were given names, all of the rest of the characters are peripheral and were assigned numbers instead of names. Give me an hour to work this out and I'll call you back."

The booze would have to wait because this kind of delicate operation requires sobriety and intense concentration. In less than an hour, two characters were excised from the screenplay, reducing the budget of the show by one thousand dollars.

"Get out your script and follow along with me," I instructed Wesley over the phone. "Sex scene number one is between Girl One and Girl Two, right?" "Right." "It stays Girl One and Girl Two; we change nothing there. Now, when you get over to page six, when the character of Desiree enters the bar -- " "That's supposed to be sex scene number two, a three-way between Desiree, Girl Three, and Girl Four -- " Wesley interjected.

"Don't get ahead of me," I scolded. "This is where the changes start. We're losing Girl Three and turning Girl Four into Girl Three."

"You just lost me."

"Okay. Look carefully at the beginning of the scene on page six. It says that Desiree enters the bar and sees a nude dancer gyrating on the stage -- that nude dancer is identified as Girl Three, right?" "Right. And the bartender is called Girl Four," Wesley says.

I can hear him leafing through his script and I can feel his mounting confusion. "Girl Three, the one who's dancing on the stage, was just a peripheral character; she has no dialogue or any special action other than participating in a three way with Desiree and Girl Four, okay? So we're axing Girl Three and we're changing sex scene two from a three way to a simple girl/girl between Desiree and the bartender, who was Girl Four but is now renumbered to be Girl Three."

"So there's no one dancing on the stage when Desiree enters the bar?" "No one. You follow so far?"

"I'm with you; go ahead, Butt Breath."

"Alright," I said, plowing forward to page eight of the script, "sex scene three was a three way between Girl Four, Girl Five, and Girl Six -- " "But you changed Girl Four!" Wesley wailed in protest.

"I know that. Calm down. Bear with me. This scene will simply be a girl/girl between Girl Five and Girl Six. Now, moving ahead -- " "Wait a minute, asshole, I'm making margin notes as we go along, alright?"

His margin notes gave me enough time to trek out to the refrigerator and grab a fresh beer; now that work was done the drinking lamp was lit once more. "Are you ready to proceed now?" I asked after swallowing half a can of cold suds. "Yeah, go ahead."

"Sex scene four was yet another three way, this one between Girl One, Girl Four, and Girl Seven. We'll change it to Girl Six and Girl One, losing Girl Seven entirely." "So now Girl One appears in two sex scenes?"

"She's always appeared in two scenes, nothing's changed there. What we have accomplished is losing Girl Seven. And as for the final scene between the characters of Desiree and Samantha nothing changes at all."

There was a long considered pause before Wesley said: "How do you figure we've lost two performers?" "Well, we cut Girl Seven and Girl Three out of the show." "Wrong. We still have Girl Three."

"No, " I calmly instructed, "The old Girl Three was cut and the old Girl Four was bumped up to become the new Girl Three."

"But we still have eight characters," Wesley complained, "Girls One through Six and the characters of Desiree and Amanda. So you've only lost one player, not two."

"How is that possible?" I blurted, kicking myself for screwing up and gazing at the breakdown sheet in bewilderment. "Alright, let's do this: in sex scene four let's change it from Girl One and Girl Six to Girl One and Girl Four." "That would put Girl Four in three scenes back to back!"

"We can't have that," I lit up a cigarette, threw open the office window to let in the cool night air and contemplated the dilemma for a beat. "I can't fix it any better'n that. The best I can do is axe one player -- anymore f---ing around with it and the entire script'll start to fall apart."

"Like it's such a great script to begin with," Wesley chided.