Johnny knocked on their office door one day and explained that he wanted to have sex on camera. He left out the part where he also wanted to take his costar to a candlelit dinner and ask her about her hopes and dreams.
“They took one look at me and laughed in my face. I wasn’t hip. I wasn’t a flower child. I didn’t have long hair. I was probably wearing what I’m wearing now.”
He gestures down at high-waisted khaki pants, a belt and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s true. This is an unfuckable outfit if ever there was one. But Johnny persisted, coming back week after week until the Mitchell brothers relented. Mystifyingly, Johnny did not have to try out in any capacity. In Boogie Nights, Rollergirl fellates Dirk Diggler in the back of a club before recommending him to the director. While I do not assume real porn casting is all blowjobs and roller skates, dropping one’s pants seems like it would be industry standard. But apparently all you had to do in this pre-AIDS, post-sexual-revolution flesh carnival was hop into the back of a VW bus and drive to a house in Walnut Creek.
When Johnny arrived, two men and a woman were already waiting, lounging naked on a circular sofa. Upon seeing this scene, he and his priapic penis became anxious about the straw they were about to draw.
“I told them I was heterosexual and they told me not to worry. They said, ‘You’re all just going to be relating to her at the same time.’”
“Relating,” I interject again, once more with the air quotes.
No response.
“I was so nervous,” Johnny says, “I had to pee every fifteen minutes while they were setting up. Then I couldn’t get an erection on camera. They had to shoot the whole thing around me.”
In the end, they gave him seventy-five dollars and, to Johnny’s surprise, a second chance. This time with just him and one woman. And that was all he needed. So strong was Johnny’s desire for a steady relationship, even his dick was in on the plan. And while a relationship never did manifest, a career did. Before long, Johnny was a regular in movies. Then he began managing productions. Then he became a line producer (this was when there were lines, before the dialogue had moved from “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” to “Shoes”). Then he became a producer, coordinating with location scouts and catering people. (Prior to this moment, I had not imagined there would be catering on the set of adult films. Though it makes sense—sex requires more energy than a monologue unless you’re doing both wrong.) When Johnny started directing his own films, his parents flew out to San Francisco for his first premiere.
“What did your mother think of it?”
I had always imagined my great-aunt’s expression upon opening the dirty magazine, and it didn’t jibe with her flying out to California to support her son. She was one of those mannered ladies with flawless taste in clothing, husbands, and houses. After she died, her wine collection went to auction. And while the idea of some scandalized East Coast lady in a San Francisco porn theater is appealing in the abstract, I couldn’t picture this particular East Coast lady there.
“She had a one-word review,” Johnny says. “She found it ‘repetitious.’”
This is as fair an assessment of pornography as I’ve ever heard.
“But she was proud?”
“She was relieved. She liked me being on the other side of the camera.”
* * *
All Uncle Johnny wanted was to take his work home with him. Which, in a way, he did. Just not in the way he’d hoped. He got to know the industry so well, he made “a booklet of tips” for guys getting into porn for the first time. When I ask him if it was called “Just the Tips,” he stares at me blankly. It dawns on me that Johnny’s life has been so chock a block with sex jokes, he doesn’t have the capacity to let another one in. His innuendo days are over. Instead, he tells me about how he took these guys under his wing and taught them how to fuck on camera. He speaks with such fondness for his costars that I am momentarily transported, forgetting that knowing how to fuck on camera is not a life skill.
“We ate dinner on each other’s porches,” he says. “Everyone thought we were having orgies but never. We just … we just really liked each other.”
I tell him what I know to be true: He was adored by these people. I’ve read the interviews. I’ve been reading them for years.
“Yeah,” he whispers, “that was my world. We were outlaws together.”
He means that literally. San Francisco was the hot spot for porn. In Los Angeles, police would drive around, following the actors, raiding sets. Tailing porn stars was a trickier business in a semi-walkable city. They could film where and when they wanted. For the most part. Once Johnny was part of a crew that borrowed a Rolls-Royce and drove up to Mill Valley to shoot a sex scene on a hill overlooking the city. Johnny was in the film, in the midst of “doing crazy sexual things” to Annette Haven, one of the industry’s more famous faces.
“We were on the trunk, on the roof, on the motor, inside the car, on the—”
“I got it.”
“The next thing you know, a police officer comes charging out of the woods and
