Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers, and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school. There are cliques, anticliques, alliances, betrayals, conflagratory rumors, legendary enmities, and public bloodlettings, plus involved hierarchies of popularity and influence. You’re either In or you’re not. Performers, being the industry’s fissile core, are of course In. Despite their financial power, studio execs and producers are not very In, and directors (especially those who’ve never undergone the initiation of having on-camera sex themselves) are less In than the performers. Film reviewers and industry journalists are even less In than execs; and nonindustry journalists are way, way non-In, almost as low-caste as the great mass of porn fans themselves (for which fans the Insider term is: mook18).
The foregoing is meant to help explain how exactly your correspondents ended up in porn titan Max Hardcore’s personal suite at the Sahara and got to hang out in the suite’s living room with Max, certain of his crew, porn starlets Alex Dane and Caressa Savage, and two B-girls — which is to say that it was actually Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth who were invited to hang out in the suite on Friday afternoon, but yr. corresps. clung almost like papooses to their backs, and the burly MAXWORLD Production Assistant wasn’t quick enough about slamming the door.
So yr. corresps. were, for a couple hours, at least logistically speaking, In.
For a regular civilian male, hanging out in a hotel suite with porn starlets is a tense and emotionally convolved affair. There is, first, the matter of having seen the various intimate activities and anatomical parts of these starlets in videos heretofore and thus (weirdly) feeling shy about meeting them. But there is also a complex erotic tension. Because porn films’ worlds are so sexualized, with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time and it taking only the slightest nudge or excuse — a stalled elevator, an unlocked door, a cocked eyebrow, a firm handshake — to send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices, there’s a bizarre unconscious expectation/dread/ hope that this is what might happen in Max Hardcore’s hotel room. Yr. corresps. here find it impossible to overemphasize the fact that this is a delusion. In fact, of course, the unconscious expectation/dread/hope makes no more sense than it would make to be hanging out with doctors at a medical convention and to expect that at the slightest provocation everyone in the room would tumble into a frenzy of MRIs and epidurals. Nevertheless the tension persists, despite the fact that the actresses are obviously tired and disassociated from the day’s CES, 19 plus, it emerges, somewhat sore — it turns out that Max Hardcore is shooting one of his “Gonzo” porn spectaculars right here at the 1998 Consumer Electronics Show, using the CES as a hook and backdrop, and the girls have been alternating CES booth-duty and riding-crop shenanigans with a tight and SS-intensive filming schedule. (Max, being a firm believer in the fait accompli method of filmmaking, has not yet gotten around to chatting with the CES’s administration about his featuring the world’s biggest consumer-tech tradeshow by name in a “SEE PRETTY GIRLS SODOMIZED IN MANNERS MOST FOUL” video.)
Mr. Max Hardcore — a.k.a. Max Steiner, a.k.a. Paul Steiner, né Paul Little — is 5'6" and a very fit 135. He is somewhere between 40 and 60 years old and resembles more than anything a mesomorphic and borderline-psycho Henry Gibson. He is wearing a black cowboy hat and what has to be one of the very few long-sleeved Hawaiian shirts in existence anywhere. Once the PA guarding the door mellows out and introductions are made (H.H. managing to drop the name of this magazine several times in one sentence), Max reveals himself to be a genial and garrulous host and offers everybody disposable plastic cups of vodka before settling in with yr. corresps. to discuss what for Max are the most pressing and relevant issues at this year’s AVN Awards, which issues are the career, reputation, personal history, and overall life philosophy of Mr. Max Hardcore.
Pioneered (depending whom you talk to) by either Max Hardcore or John (“Buttman”) Stagliano, “Gonzo” has become one of this decade’s most popular and profitable genres of adult video. It’s more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and the Hell panel from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. A Gonzo film is always set at some distinctive locale or occasion — Daytona Beach at spring break, the Cannes Film Festival, etc. There’s always a randy and salivous “host” talking directly to a handheld camera: “Well and we’re here at the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks like there’s going to be lots of excitement, John Travolta and Sigourney Weaver are supposed to both be in town, and there’s also the world-famous beach, and I’m told there’s always some real seriously good-looking little girls at the beach, so let’s us head on down.” (That’s the approximate lead-in to a recent Max-at-Cannes Gonzo, a type of signature lead-in that Max refers to with a 56-tooth grin as “always mercifully brief”—and please note the “little girls at the beach” thing, because this is another of Max’s professional signatures, the infantilization of his videos’ females as dramatic foils for his own film persona, which is always that of a sort of degenerate uncle or stepdad.) Then the shaky but ever-focused camera heads on down to the ocean or mall or CES or whatever, scoping out attractive women 20 while the host moans and chews his knuckle in lust. Then pretty soon host and camera start actually coming up to the women they’ve been looking at and engaging them in little cameo “interviews” full of sideways leers and salacious entendres. Some of the interviewees are actual civilians, but some are always what Max refers to as “ringers,” meaning professional porn actresses. And so the viewer is treated to the classic frathouse fantasy of moving, via just a couple of singles-bar “Hey there babe” lines, from scoping out an attractive woman to having wild and anatomically diverse sex with her, all while one of his buddies captures the whole thing on tape. 21
The issue of who exactly invented Gonzo being impossibly vexed and so notwithstanding, it is true that Max Hardcore is famous as a director for several things: (1) Being incredibly disciplined about budgets and tactical logistics, right down to forcing his crew and staff to wear identical jumpsuits of scarlet nylon so that they look like a national ski team — Max’s shoots are described (by Max) as “almost military operations”; (2) Not only employing ringers but actually sometimes being able to talk real live civilian “little girls” on the beach or in the mall into coming on back to the special MAXWORLD RV and having anal sex on camera; 22 (3) Being the first in “mainstream” (meaning nonfetish) adult video to perpetrate on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. W/r/t item (3), Max, after detailing for yr. correspondents the vo- and avocations that led him into the adult industry (a tale too literally incredible even to think about factchecking and trying to print), informs us that he is and always has been adult video’s “cutting-edge blade,” and that other less bold and original filmmakers have systematically stolen and used his, Max’s, degradations of women as a blueprint for their own subsequent shabby and derivative films’ degradations. 23 (Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, by the way, have heard Max hold forth many times before and are now outside the circle of discourse — D.F. in the bathroom for what seems like a peculiarly long time, H.H. on the couch with the actresses hashing out the implications of Seinfeld’s retirement for NBC’s ’98 lineup.)