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Rob Black

Rob Black Scandals Interview 10/27/98 Interview 11/3/98 More Rob Black More Rob Black

"Everybody wants to have their products known as the dirtiest, filthiest shows on the planet," notes HEVG Editor Michael Louis Albo. "From the arty decadence of Gregory Dark, through the cartoonish mayhem of Max Hardcore to the more inept offerings from Al Borda, Jay Ashley and Johnathan Morgan, it seems that being The Bad Boy of Porn is an end in itself."

Robert Black, the maker of Cellar Dwellers, is the latest white man to challenge for that title. Rob's father was one of the original Zane brothers. "They started with bookstores back East," says Rob, whose Uncle Chuck Zane hates him. "I was a kid who worked in the wharehouse. At the age of 12, I'm jerkin' off to Ginger Lynn takin' loads in the face. By the time I was 15, I was lookin' to piss and s--- on people. I definitely could say it desensitized me.

"Andy (the Ass-Grease Man" in Cellar Dwellers) and I worked together in these various adult bookstores. So what you see in Cellar Dwellers is almost identical to what Andy and I did in real life in those bookstores. …We'd get some incense burning, kick out the joints, sell tokens to people, and just laugh at everyone as they came in." (AVN)

Rob describes his approach to degrading women. "I like my girls to eat guys' asses. It's the most disgusting thing I can think of. I'll have 20 guys all bent over and the girl gets in there and does one after another. If you look at the average female-to-male buttslurping scene, the girl is not eat' ass, she's not spreadin' that asshole, openin' it up, and f---in' stickin' her tongue in there. And to me, that is the nastiest thing that you can have anybody do. When a woman's suckin' dick, she can pretend she's suckin' something else. But when she's got her tongue in a man's ass, you know it's a man's f---in' ass." (Swank's Video World, 1/98)

"We also have a girl kneeling and get a line of guys to come by and spit in her face. Loogey after loogeys. Then they all take turns slapping her.

"Patrick Collins [who distributes Rob's product] says that I make Bruce Seven look like a f---ing choir boy." (AVN)

Robert, who was engaged to Tricia Devereaux, describes his new series Cellar Dwellers: "A friend and I own a pawnshop called Cellar Dweller Collectables and people come in and we give them their fantasies. For instance, a guy comes in and wants to get revenge on his girl because she's been cheating on him. So he goes into the backroom and there's his girl in an electric chair. But instead of getting fried, she gets f---ed by all the henchmen who were supposed to fry her." (AVN)

"Anyone who's seen the mainstream film Clerks will recognize the badly plagiarized premise and style of the video Celler Dweller," says Roger T. Pipe. "Instead of wise-cracking, hilarious clerks in a connivance store, the two main characters are shallow, drugged-out pawn shop scum who are neither funny or interesting."

"My next movie is called Shooting Gallery," says Black. "It's about heroin addiction."

"Robert Black has picked up the ball in pushing the envelope and has proven that being on the edge is not always better," says Pipe. "All he is doing is taking what Max Hardcore, Gregory Dark and John T. Bone have been doing and making it even more ridiculous and hateful." (RAME)

Most Americans would find Black's work obscene.

But what is obscenity? Whatever someone says is obscene. Something must be obscene to someone. "Nothing is inherently obscene, though disgust, a closely related experience, is present in humans at birth," says Dr. Robert Stoller. "But obsceneness and disgustingness are not synonyms. Disgust is in the nose, mouth, and gorge; it has to do especially with smells, tastes, and palpable qualities of objects. The obscene is more in the mind than the mouth, starts out more as an idea than as nausea...

"What good is obscenity? It lets everyone - the righteous and the guilt laden - hate (themselves and others).

"The meanings of obscenity overlap those of perversion, pornography, dirty, and sin, conditions of sensual pleasure to which hatred (or violence, brutality, cruelty, shaming, insult, hostility, anger, aggression, dislike, teasing, jesting - a continuum of lessening rage) has been added. And hatred? The desire to harm. Harm? To humiliate, debase, violate for revenge. Revenge? To punish others with punishment I say they deserve and that I deny I deserve.

"Let us add more poles to our list of excitement's oscillations: goodness and evil, Heaven and Hell, aliveness and deadness, buoyancy and boredom, pleasure and pain, clean and dirty, food and feces, obscenity and shame. For to be obscene is exciting: will we get away with it?" (Observing the Erotic Imagination)

Robert Black carries on a struggle that all babies have with their mothers - Who will win the battle of the excrements? "Victim is to become victor by dumping the dark, moist, smelly, hidden, mysterious, swollen interior's contents onto society's sin-sniffers."

This struggle has no point unless people oppose us and judge our naughtiness. "Here we find a link with humor, art, and the erotic, where what is gentle, audacious, cruel, or obscene is a matter of aesthetic judgments and skills. One person's obscenity is another pornography is another's joke is another's research study."

AVN 5/97: "We hear that sick f--- director Rob Black asked Nici Sterling to star in his new video. The nasty British performer, known for taking it up the arse with reckless abandon, called Black back and said she'd checked out his reputation and decided she didn't want anything to do with him.

"Could it be the sick f--- has gotten too f---in' sick even for Elegant Angel head Patrick Collins? Our sources tell us that Collins called Black into his office recently and "politely suggested" that he scale back on the choking and other violent acts in his productions."

Collins watched Rob's movie Ass Gas and the Mystical Glop in May, 1997, one day before its scheduled release and decided it wasn't good enough to go out under the Elegant Angel banner because "the camera work was shoddy, the lighting horrible, and the sex pedestrian."

Toby Dammit: "Rob starts off the movie talking about his last video, War Whores, and never stops talking about himself, his movies, his camera man, his girlfriend or anything else that pertains to him. It's a study in self-gratification."

Collins eventually changed his mind, and distributed the movie.

Black owns Extreme Productions, and like Tom Byron, is distributed by Patrick Collins' Elegant Angel, which is a different company from John Stagliano's Evil Angel.

"Black has that "satanic possession" look down pat in an AVN ad for him in the January [1997] issue," notes Brad Williams, "and he certainly looks convincing."

Parts of the ad read: "Meet Robert Black. He's equal parts Tarantino, Greg Dark, and Satan."

"Robert Black is one sick f---."

"This guy makes Bruce Seven look like a f---in' choirboy." Patrick Collins

"He writes, produces, directs, coming off like the carnal equivalent of Tarantino." Jeremy Stone, AFW

"People that get pissed that American porn companies are afraid to show S&M with penetration will like Black," writes Brad Williams on RAME. "Black has no hesitation to have plenty of face-slapping and two-handed choking during his sex scenes, and he likes to shoot in the grubbiest locales possible, like on top of trash or dirt, or next to a dumpster, or on, around, and through a toilet seat..

"Blacks' other notable difference (all his scenes have anal, most have DP, and all end in facials) is saliva. He likes it. Plenty of disgusting, drooling "lugies" going from one performer down another's throat, as well as the "tamer" spitting-in-the-face constantly during the sex.

"I miss the Tarantino connection except for the fact that Black is going into an area nobody else has fully attempted like Tarantino did in Hollywood, but beyond that, the comparison ends for me. I can definitely see the Greg Dark influence however, all the way down to the "Satan" image that Dark likes to project, and some of the weirdness that Dark comes up with.

"In short, Black is going for making sex as "dirty and disgusting" as anyone can imagine. This schtick doesn't turn me on, but some are bound to like his commitment to anal, DP's, and messy facials. If you can stand the choking, spitting, and lugee-swallowing, you will love Robert Black. I didn't."

"There's a scene at the end of Sexual Atrocities that shows a card "Rob Black Is Dead"," writes Pat Riley. "Unfortunately it was a lie."

Another poster to RAME disagreed. "Cellar Dwellars: Lots of slapping, spitting in mouths, choking, a rape scene that looks realistic, plenty of extreme gutterf---ing and some funny lines. This was one of the best films made in '96.

"Shooting Galleries: At least as good as Cellar Dwellars, if not better. A great scene where Courtknee is stuffed into a garbage can and gets DPd. Also has a nice scene where two guys pick up a girl and stuff her head into a toilet after going ass to mouth.

"WarWhores: plenty of choking and spitting but this time, the women fight back and spit in the guys faces. Not worth the rental.

"Sexual Attrocities: lots of nasty, abusive sex. Well worth the rental."

AVN's 1-98 issue features an interview with Black. "If I can shock someone," he says, "titillate them, arouse them… make them say, 'What is this?,' I'm doing my job. Look at how many directors there are, and how many movies come out a year. And if I can be distinguished with my stuff, and have the Internet and the magazines full of my name, then I'm doing my job.

"Pornography is about fantasy. The average person can't pick up a girl off the street and f--- her without a rubber and not worry about things like AIDS. But in the movies you can do that. And we can choke, spit, get violent… overdose. We can do things you can't do, wouldn't want to do, in real life. I mean, I don't practice beating the s--- out of my girlfriend.

"The only two people I've been influenced by are John Leslie and Greg Dark. And of the two now, Leslie continues to do good quality stuff while Dark as an old, tired has-been. His movies now suck."

Black likes to jerk off to videos showing a "dick shooting a load in a girl's mouth and watching her choke on a bunch of sum… That's why Max Hardcore movies have always been great. Because every scene ends with him choking them with his dick, cumming in their face, and they blow bubbles with that. It's great." (AVN 1-98, by Mark Kulkis)

On a piece of string around his neck, Black wears a tiny piece of parchment which reads: "Whoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire."

From the 11/22/97 Guardian:

A hefty, boyish type in denim shorts, Black wears his baseball cap back-to-front, a tuft of hair poking out at the front. Leaning back in his leather chair, his goatee beard overgrown with stubble and a silver ring through his right eyebrow, and swinging his huge DM boots up on his desk, he seems to have escaped from a particularly twisted Beavis And Butthead fantasy: at just 24, he is an established porn director who drives a brand new BMW and shares with his porn actress girlfriend [Tricia Devereaux] a $500,000 house - complete with diving pool, tennis courts and stables - in an 'exclusive, gated community' in nearby Bell Canyon.

To get people talking about his movies, Black, whose real name is Robert Zicari, uses bizarre, drug-inspired storylines and cartoon-like characters. Even in a world not noted for its political correctness, Black's penchant for bad taste and sick jokes is outstanding. His films are peopled with blacked-up 'pimps' carrying watermelons, with dancing and singing midgets, with 'fellatio flowers' that must be watered with semen.

All this might have won him some kind of hip cult status, were his filmic degradation of women not so violently extreme: they are slapped, spat on, knocked around and penetrated from all angles in every available orifice with mind-numbing monotony, usually in the most ignoble circumstances - with only their lower bodies protruding from, say, a toilet bowl or a dustbin. Nobody could begin to shrug this off as parody, and Black doesn't even try.

'Yes, it's degrading filth,' he says. 'Sure, it degrades people… When Ice-T maks a song about shooting the police, does that make people shoot cops? Yeah, I guess some people, but are you gonna be responsible for that? It's a movie. People will do s--- even if they don't see a movie or hear a song.

Black believes he's making a kind of ironic porn, with the same intensity and authenticity as Collins and Stagliano, but with a kind of sick humor that will appeal to a younger, jaded, post-AIDS audience that still associates porn with their parents.

…After spending his college fund on making his first porn movie, against the wishes of his father (who owns a porn bookstore), Black came to Chatsworth and landed a job as a sales rep for Elegant Angel.

From the 3/5/87 LA Times:

Los Angeles County sheriff's officers Wednesday raided a modeling agency in Sherman Oaks and homes in Thousand Oaks and Malibu in an effort to arrest the producers of a sex film for pandering.

Only two of the five men sought for their part in the production of "Backside to the Future" were arrested during simultaneous raids in California, Texas, Miami and Rochester, N.Y., according to sheriff's officials.

The raids, following a four-month investigation, represented an expanded use of California's 1982 pandering statute against people who make sex films. The law prohibits the payment of money to people to engage in sex acts, and police previously have used it to arrest producers, directors and others as actors and actresses were being recruited or performing.

In this case, however, the arrests were made well after the film's distribution last year, Deputy Drew Basey said.

"It's unique," he said. "We're working backward from the finished product."

Allegedly Supplied Performers

The raid at the World Modeling Agency resulted in the arrest of James Souter, 47, of Thousand Oaks, who also was arrested in October by Los Angeles police on felony pandering charges. Souter's agency, in the 4500 block of Van Nuys Boulevard, was described by investigators at the time as a clearinghouse for performers in pornographic films, allegedly supplying more than 600 of them to producers over the years.

Also arrested was Milton Ingley, 40, in Arlington, Tex. Authorities still are seeking John Lee, 43, of Malibu, and brothers Charles Zicari, 36, and Dominic Zicari , 47, both of Rochester.

Performers Not Sought

Authorities did not detail the alleged involvement of each man in last year's production of "Backside to the Future," but said it was filmed last year in Lee's Malibu home. Performers in the film, which is sold for home video use, are not being sought, Basey said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert F. Kuhnert said the raids were facilitated by an appellate court decision last month upholding the state's right to prosecute film makers for pandering, a charge usually used against pimps.

In years past, film makers and publishers of pornographic magazines were charged under obscenity laws, but obscenity was difficult to prove.

Rob Black

Rob Black

Rob Black