And when I’m there, I always make it a point to drive Mulholland, my favorite street in the city. writer/artist/muse/minx Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve. I write about Hollywood-whether it’s a cover story for Vanity Fair on an actor or actress, or a piece on Joan Didion’s screenwriting period, or my book on L.A. Why did you want to broaden the scope of the story so much? This is Traci’s story, but it’s also an examination of the porn industry as a whole.
![documentaries about the gay porn industry documentaries about the gay porn industry](https://outvoices.us/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNzc5MjI5MS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY5MDg1OTUwMX0.XRvXbk5LgxJ_ya-tn3694LEc2W7_XLUer0Rj3RKiJWU/image.jpg)
Plus, Ashley has his own special connection to Traci, which will be revealed in episode six. This was a real-life mystery: Who ratted out Traci Lords? Who told the FBI she was underage?Īnd I teamed up with Ashley West to investigate the mystery, because how could I dream up a better partner? He’s the creator of the Rialto Report, a web and podcast channel that documents the golden age of porn, and was a consultant on all three seasons of HBO’s The Deuce. And as a writer and a journalist, I was attracted to the contradictions and the ambiguities.
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Needless to say, Traci’s version and the adult industry’s version were at odds. Her version of the story was a cross between a cautionary tale and a survival guide: She was an innocent victim, a 15-year-old kid who’d gotten caught in the clutches of the scummy adult industry and had made it out alive but only through sheer luck she certainly hadn’t tipped off the FBI. Naturally, I immediately went out and bought Traci’s memoir. Why was Traci Lords the wound that refused to heal for the adult industry? And who was this Traci Lords anyway, this teenager who’d single-handedly almost taken out an entire industry of hardened professionals? And the anger of both these men was still, all these years later, hot to the touch.
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The way they told the story was as a noir, with Traci as the ne plus ultra of femmes fatales: She’d scammed the adult industry with a fake ID had made one movie after the age of 18, a movie she owned the rights to and then she’d blown the whistle on herself to make more money and become more famous. Not for part of the lunch, for the whole lunch. Traci, and what happened 25 years ago, was the topic of conversation between these two. (This is obviously way before I was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.) One afternoon in 2012, I went to lunch in the Valley at a Hamburger Hamlet with adult veteran Bill Margold, who’d codirected Traci, and adult agent Jim South, who’d represented Traci. I broke into print by writing about Al Goldstein, founder of Screw magazine and a major figure in the adult industry in the ’70s and ’80s. In her conversations with porn industry insiders that inspired the podcast, Anolik learned that the Lords saga was “the wound that refused to heal for the adult industry”-and also a mystery that remained, tantalizingly, unsolved.Ĭonfession: I have my own porn past. Lords was the biggest star in the porn industry for several years in the mid ’80s, until a dramatic FBI raid revealed that she had gotten her start when she was just 15, and nearly all of her films were thereby illegal. “It’s the movie industry without the pretense. “The porn industry is overtly about what the movie industry is covertly about: sex and fantasy, objectification and exploitation,” Anolik said. But for Anolik, host of the new podcast Once Upon a Time in the Valley, Hollywood and the porn industry that Lords dominated in the mid 1980s are far more closely related than either might admit.
![documentaries about the gay porn industry documentaries about the gay porn industry](https://cdn-o.fishpond.com/0066/152/875/189150279/original.jpeg)
The story of Traci Lords, though, doesn’t seem like the most obvious Hollywood saga-after all, it takes place over the hills in the San Fernando Valley. Simpson, and Eve Babitz for this magazine. For him, doing straight porn was "Last Resort At The Moment for Pay".“Hollywood isn’t only my beat, it’s my obsession,” said Lili Anolik, the contributing editor to Vanity Fair who has written about, among many other things, Scarlett Johansson, O.J. Ace Rockwood just saw an opportunity to make money, probably bc he wasnt getting work from the gay porn circuits he started out working in, and went for it.
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The thing about that is there is no Straight for Pay, bc no gay men are running to a porn scene to fuck women, especially in the world of porn where there is free access at anyone's disposal. There def is a double standard when it comes to the gay One-Drop Rule…Like you can have kids and tons of straight sex and ppl will still call you gay if you got one blow job from a dude 10 years ago, even if said dude looked like a lady. I don't think he or anyone else would say that makes him Straight or even bisexual now. Openly Gay porn actor Ace Rockwood tried a semi-successful run at doing Straight porn under the name John Johnson. Actually we kinda discussed "Straight for Pay" porn actors on here before: