Porn Valley Observed

Gram Ponante talks with comedian (and 2015 AVN Awards show host, now airing on Showtime) about comedy, drinking, promiscuity, addiction, and Massachusetts. "Shortly after I talked with Danielle, she became absolutely the best host of the AVN Awards in my personal 10-year history of attending. (This was not because I'd talked to her; I just happened to be there slightly before she went onstage.) Most comedians just don't know how to walk the line between the audience at home and the one at whatever Vegas casino convention center the awards are staged in. Either they watch too little porn and appear like an outsider or they watch too much porn and they come off as crass. Porn stars want to be seen as elegant and sophisticated. They don't need to be reminded of their movie titles and what a cheap joke that is. It's the same with porn consumers. So, knowing this, Danielle was fantastic.

This is Episode 4: A New Hope with Jack The Zipper. Jack the Zipper comes from a different time — He's an artist, he's a hustler, he's a Westie from New York, and the women he likes to shoot - he'll tell you himself - all possess a certain witchiness. So I guess you can say he comes from a time, mentally, when the commodification of porn was secondary to the aesthetic loininess of the pervert.

Today it's my pleasure to interview two pornographers, literally a couple of pornographers, whose work I admire: Jacky St. James and Eddie Powell. Both work for the long-established New Sensations. These are two people who have a signature, crowd-pleasing style. If you are wary of so much porn looking the same, you can't tell one scene from another, and your belief in the auteur theory has gone right out the window, watch the things that Eddie Powell does. On the one hand it is EXACTLY the same as any 4-or-5-scene formulaic porn movie, except in the way he films it. He is an excellent porn director who makes such great use of light and flesh that you are sure to be a fan. Later to the scene came Jacky St. James, who started off as a writer, and she has done an excellent job in creating scripts that porn actors can read, and developing casts that have increasingly been able to handle the things she writes. The great skill of Jacky St. James and her generation of pornographers is that they do really well with the raw material they have, and play to every strength available.

This is our second episode, featuring my friend the very accomplished, engaging, and kind photographer and director Holly Randall. We talked in a Las Vegas hotel room. Holly is the daughter of porn royalty. Her mom, Suze Randall, is a trailblazing erotic photographer who probably out-porned most of her subjects. Holly herself, as we'll hear later, also gets some excellent performances out of her cast because they know she will make them look good. But there's way more to her than that, and that's the meat of our interview, which covers growing up in the adult industry, alcoholism, and art. You are going to enjoy this interview with Holly Randall.

To hear Roy Karch tell it, he was the first person to shoot porn on video (as opposed to film), thus revolutionizing the adult industry. Gram Ponante talks to the veteran pornographer, now 68, about his decades in the adult business, including anecdotes about Seka, Christy Canyon, John Holmes, and hundreds of adult stars from the 1970s to the 2000s, as well as the options available to the senior citizen smut peddler.