I'm Too Sexy For This Doc

My old pal and former Premiere colleague Tom Roston blogs every Friday at POV—"Doc Soup," his perspectives on documentaries in all their manifestations. Today he names his Ten Sexiest Documentaries of All Time and he's got some interesting choices. I'm not sure I'm completely on board with his counterintuitive argument on Gimme Shelter, and I'm not entirely surprised that he hasn't been able to actually see the ultra-rare Europa di Notte. Maybe I'll lend him my Mondo Cane Collection to give him the proper flavor of that sort of thing. But then again, maybe I won't, as Tom's household contains a small child who ought not even be exposed to the packaging of such things.

The least sexy documentaries, of course, are documentaries about porn and/or porn stars.

Back in Park City in 1999, I got a double, um, dose of the subgenre. One of the official Sundance selections that year was Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, a picture about porn actress Chong, who had putatively broken some kind of record via an evening of sexual activity that produced a video entitled The World's Biggest Gang Bang. Chong and the production company had advertised for participants in the event, and the documentary had some footage from the shoot. The doc was incredibly uncomfortable to sit through; Chong is one of those educated porn types, who talks about the work in terms of challenging double standards; she drops names like Foucault and so on. Underneath all that, the doc showed, was a welter of pain, a lot of bad experiences, and a lot of lies; the movie's putative climax is Chong's trip to Singapore and a conversation with her mother wherein her mom is apprised, for the first time, just what Grace (for that's Annabel's real name) is doing in America. When Annabel showed up for our photo shoot, she requested that somebody go out and purchase a chicken. Not a live one, thankfully, but a basic roaster. She wanted to pose with it, because, she said, it was a perfect metaphor for what she was doing with her life. Oh my. Given that I was Premiere's resident porn expert at the time (I had edited the David Foster Wallace piece on the AVN Awards the year before), it was my task to interview her. There was a personal connection, too; somewhere in the interstices between her grad-school performance-artist persona and her porn career, she had dated a cousin of mine. I brought up his name late in the conversation.

"How's he doing?" she asked. "The last time I saw him, he seemed really depressed."

I nearly spit up my coffee. Dude, YOU seem really depressed right now, was what I was thinking. But I said, "Oh, he's fine..." And then somebody arrived with the chicken and it was time to shoot, in spite of photog Frank Ockenfels 3's objections to working with poultry.

The next night, or two nights later, I was up at some condo gathering—they told me it was going to be a "party" but that's not what I call a gathering where the refreshments subsist of Amstel Light, a big bag of M&M's and three-quarters of a joint—where I was introduced to the director of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, who was also, apparently, an ex of hers. "Oh, hello," I said. "I just interviewed Grace the other day."

"Oh yeah? Did you fuck her?"

I really didn't know how to answer that, so I kinda wandered over to where the M&M's bag was. I see from the IMDB that the gentleman hasn't worked again, which I'm glad for.

The other porn star doc was at Slamdance, then the upstart Park City competition for Sundance. This was The Girl Next Door, all about blond bombshell actress Stacy Valentine, a one-time housewife pushed into porn by her husband, who no doubt came to regret this once she got herself empowered, dumped the schmoe and became a near-Jenna-Jameson in terms of genre stardom and mainstream presentability potential.
But it's not all glitz and glamour for Stacy; the picture begins with behind-the-scenes footage of a porno shoot. On the floor of a brick patio, Ms. Valentine is recieving what the French might call l'une haute et dur from her male counterpart; the camera loses interest in this in short order, and begins tracking to the bricks steps that end at the patios floor. The camera then zooms in on a trail of ants who appear to be making their way to the copulating couple.

Such discomforts of the trade aside, Valentine seemed quite the happy camper as she traipsed up and down Park City's Main Street, and Frank expressed a great eagerness to shoot her. Then-Premiere-Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs was pretty dubious—he figured one porn actress was enough for our Sundance layout—but Frank and a couple of other photo department folks were determined, and, again, as the resident porn expert, I was deputized to corral her. Found her at some cocktail party and made the pitch, and she couldn't have been nicer. ("She really liked you," one of her "people" exclaimed to me later.) Frank had a terrific shoot with her, resulting in at least one staggering shot of Valentine naked under a fur coat. Premiere never ran it. I'm not sure it ever appeared anywhere. Trust me. It was nice.

Both ladies have retired from performing, incidentally.

Comments

[Bordeaux]

I always thought a great doc would be about what happens to porn stars after they retire from the biz. Not the Ron Jeremys who are still in it but the people who have just disappeared, like say, Bambi Woods.

[colinr]

I suppose if you wanted to go the really bad taste route you could recommend Raw Deal: A Question of Consent - that is just as depressing a film as the Annabel Chong Story (The documentary left Grace's story hanging but I was interested to see that she doesn't seem to have any more porn credits on imdb after 2000, so maybe she really did manage to escape the industry).

[bill]

M&M's have gotten me out of many a tight spot.

Also, regarding the Top Ten Sexy Docs link: "Crumb"?? Are there actually people who feel like having sex after watching that movie?

[Chad Channing]

I saw Stacey Valentine on the 4 Train in 2000, on my way to work at Beverage World Magazine. She had on a white leather miniskirt and a tight pink v-neck cashmere sweater, which complimented her platimun blonde hair and California-kissed skin vey nicely. She was with three large men, presumably her handlers. I had never seen a woman dressed like that on the subway, and judging from the amount of stares she was getting, polite stars imbued with just the right modicum of awe, neither had anyone else. She was a great porn star, one of the best, and had she been alive in the 1950's, may have even carved out a semi-legit career in H'wood for herself, a kind of poor-man's Mamie Van Doren. The Girl Next Door was kind of worthless as a doc, as are most docs on sex. The best Sex Docs are the behind the scenes segments that Vivid used to make back in the early 90's, when porn was available through the Spice Channel. A particularly memorable one included a scene of Jon Dough (R.I.P. Chester) arguing with a director about the intensity of a DP Jon and Peter North were working on. The director wanted the men to be more vocal, something with Jon apparently felt was out of bounds and not organic to the scene. "You're upset because you're not getting what you want," said Jon. "You're afraid that you're not going to get what you want." Jon said this to the director during the middle of the DP, and, for some reason, that told me everything I needed to know about the porn biz. Two men having sex with one woman while the director barked out orders to actors who didn't feel sufficiently motivated to make the scene work, and as such, let the director know that there was nothing he could do. Blah, blah, blah, I'm boring myself again. Today is one of those days I don't feel like listening to myself. Later.