“The splashiest directorial success story of this year … would have to be that of John Stagliano. After a couple of years of steady effort and working at his chops, he exploded into porn’s most vital prolific director, releasing a sizzling series of Buttman tapes almost as fast as he could shoot them, pausing only to offer WILD GOOSE CHASE, a wonderfully erotic and attention-grabbing tribute to the 35mm films of the ‘70s …
The BUTTMAN tapes established Stagliano as something of a poet, a bard and a fool, full of rapturous, unfulfillable yearnings for something so big he can never embrace it for more than a second. Stag is a pornographer in the proudest sense of the word, obsessively describing the parameters of his own personal obsession with brave conviction that the rest of the world will have no choice but to share in it …
BUTTMAN BACK IN RIO and BENDOVER BABES II were the best examples this year of the director’s mock-verite style, as his Woody Allenish persona ran up against an Apollonian series of sexual encounters. CHASE, meanwhile, proved that you can go home again, as Stag wrote and directed a light-hearted detective flick that, though contemporary in its references, harkened back to the golden years of porn, when DPs and editors actually labored over set-ups and pacing with the hope that the end product would be something of which they might be proud. CHASE is fun and funny, a real film in every sense of the word.”
–David Aaron Clark, “Best Smut of 1991,” SCREW magazine, Jan. 6, 1992.
Geez, has it really been 16 years since I wrote those words? A wild-eyed, young & enthusiastic smuthound of a porn scribe inhabiting the senior editor’s office at the infamous Al Goldstein’s notorious weekly sex rag, I would start the morning, like my fellow editors, with a quart of coffee, a joint & the daily papers, before plunging into the porn du jour that came in an unending stream across our desks: Big black VHS video cassettes nestled in thin plastic trays so they wouldn’t bang around inside the gaudy, oversized cardboard boxes that made them stand out on the rental shelves in the backrooms of endless mom & pop video stores, as well as on proud display in the kiosks of Show World, Peepland, Manhattan Video… these were the days before Guiliani had completely raped Times Square of its raw vigor & sold the denuded corpse off to Disney, long before the internet could come along & make it moot. In those days, NYC was a joyful bachanaal of delirious porn consumerism, & perverts would turn to the venerable SCREW “peter-meter” for help determining which smut might best scratch their very personal itch.
All the video companies from out West (where the REALLY crazy people lived) would inundate us with review copies of their latest releases, looking for some notice that might set them apart from an ever-growing annual inventory of releases. The Golden Age of Porn might have petered out a few years before, but there was no lull in production. The genre, however, had come to something of a standstill. Crude video technology had replaced the elegance of film, & though the home market was just exploding, the porn product available was, for the most part, harshly predictable & far too often diffidently executed.
Then came a little production outfit with a kind of bold, punk-rock smirk of a name: Evil Angel. Finding its feet with a roster of dark-minded directors not afraid to mix casual psychodrama with relentlessly intense & extreme sexual hijinks, its star skyrocketed quickly. Of those founding directors, all of whom defied convention not only onscreen but off-screen, by forming a collective where each owned his own titles (rather than serving at the pleasure of some bloated corporate porn bureaucracy), the one who most embodied the emerging sexual zeitgeist of the ’90s was indeed John Stagliano.
As a porn critic & journalist, I recorded & commented on the inevitable rise of this weird new hybrid form he played the largest hand in creating, a sexy, surprising, riveting subgenre that Mark Kernes of Adult VIdeo News soon dubbed “gonzo,” noting that it shared the audacious spirit & mercurial originality of the outlaw writing of subcultural hero Hunter S. Thompson. Eventually, on trips out to Las Vegas & Cali, I would meet & interview the most important of this new breed of porn auteur, including not only Stagliano but actors-turned-directors like Joey Silvera & John Leslie. It was an incredibly exciting & heady time (no pun intended).
Now, in 2008, finally something of a industry veteran myself, here I am working at what just about every fan & pundit has come to regard as the finest porn dynasty ever created. Trust me, my surprise is greater than that of anybody reading these words! To celebrate this unlikely turn of events, I’ll be reprinting in this blog some of my more incisive writings on the Evil Empire from the ’90s, so we can all acknowledge just how far we’ve come, & how much the Empire has changed – & evolved with – the hormone-fueled dreamworld of moving-picture pornography. Hope true fans will enjoy these postings & follow the links to the site, where the greatest moments of gonzo are archived for your easy reference, waiting to be relived again & again!
