Page 51 - AVN June 2015

and five hundred people, applause and press—and of course the New York Post used to run ads for some of the films. And there
were ads for porn movies just like there were any other kinds of film at that time. … There were a lot of New York University
graduates making films. They just got out of film school and wanted to try shooting. Everyone thinks they can make a better
porn film,” Sprinkle laughs.
New York native Candida Royalle attended New York’s High School of Art and Design, the Parsons School of Design, and
the City College of New York, where she majored in art and psychology. Moving to San Francisco in 1972, she became active
in underground theater.
“I always liked people who were different,” says Royalle, “who dared to think for themselves and are more Bohemian. So
my influences really came from a lot of different places, including the San Francisco and Los Angeles punk scene, the theater
scene, and the art scene.”
After six years in San Francisco and two years in Los Angeles, Royalle moved back to New York.
“I wanted to get back to my home town. I decided I would go back and make a few more movies that I could feel proud of,
because that really was where the best movies were being made at the time.”
Royalle starred in films by directors such as Chick Vincent and Henri Pachard. Uninterested in the seedy nature of some
adult New York clubs, Royalle managed to do live performance her own way: ”I trained in dance and voice, and so I put
together this really fun burlesque show. I used to call it ‘Gypsy Rose Lee Meets Isadora Duncan’, and I did about maybe five
shows around the country.”
“The closest I ever came to swing clubs and sex-positive places was when I would go to some of the clubs to write articles
about them,” Royalle tells me, “because one of the ways I made a living between the time I [stopped performing] and stepped
behind the camera was I wrote for a lot of men’s magazines. I had a regular column in High Society and Cheri, and I did a really
fun piece about my career for High Times. I love writing, and so that’s how I made my living for a while.”
Royalle continues, “My friends were really from so many different walks of life. My friends were from the theater. They
were writers and artists, and I definitely had a bunch of very close girlfriends from the adult industry.”
“I always felt a family feeling,” recalls Barbara Nitke, a still photographer on porn sets in the 1970s and ’80s. (Nitke’s book
American Ecstasy is one of the most exquisite documents of New York’s adult film scene.) “It would be hard for me to say
exactly what caused it, but I think in a way part of it was that we were outlaws. Were outsiders. We were a subculture.
I don’t want to make it too dramatic, but … we only had each other. We were banded together in this shared world that
nobody really understood except for us because I think we all felt that our world was often misunderstood by the people
outside of it.”
“There was a real sense of people looking out for each other,” says Nitke. “You would be on one shoot and everybody
would tell each other who was doing the next shoot so that we could all get jobs on it. If there was somebody who was not
good to work for, the word would go out. People would know that right away. Banding together, looking out for each other—
that was very nice.”
“Absolutely,” replies Veronica Hart, when I ask her if New York’s adult industry had a sense of family to it, “but that wasn’t
only true then. It’s also true now. The difference is our family has gotten huge, as all families grow. Back then we were
outlaws. So we were a kind of band of brothers—a band of naked brothers, if you will!—heading toward one goal: the idea to
make a particular film.”
“We’ve always been one big dysfunctional family,” continues Hart. “And what I [mean] is that every family is dysfunctional.
One of the big huge fairy tales we’ve all been fed in this life is that there’s a perfect family. Perfect families don’t exist. I have
yet to find anything perfect about humans except that they are perfectly human, which makes them filled with imperfections.
So having said that, we were one big, fun dysfunctional family then—and we are now. It’s just a lot bigger, and now it’s for
the most part legal.”
The Industry Leaves
The downtown Manhattan neighborhood known as SoHo (South of Houston Street) is a remarkable place. Here, the grid
pattern that defines the streets of Midtown begins to ever-so-slightly fall inward as one nears Manhattan’s southern tip.
Cobblestones replace asphalt on narrow alleys, and the numbered streets disappear into named roads cutting through a
quaint, tightly packed storybook warren of lofts, art galleries and little shops.
I’ve come here to see Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship, an exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian
Art in which six of Barbara Nitke’s black-and-white photographs of New York’s underground S&M scene from the mid-1990s
are included. They are beautifully dark, atmospheric, and intensely personal—and they come from a time after the adult film
industry that was Barbara Nitke’s home for so many years had already left New York for California.
“It felt really sad, because it was like my family,” Nitke says. “It was the place I felt most at home in the world.
“I could have moved out. I probably would have had tons of work. But you know, I just don’t like L.A. So I ended up
staying here. It was probably the best thing for me, but really it was hard.”
Nitke soon found a new community.
“I ended up going into fetish porn, and then I ended up going into the BDSM world. So I found a different underground …
I started to work in that world, which was very scary to me in the beginning, and then it became another home for me.”
Veronica Hart moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where she directed rich, plot-driven productions for VCA—
including Ginger Lynn’s comeback movies—and produced projects for Michael Ninn and the Adam & Eve Channel. She
described for me some aspects of the industry’s New York-to-California transition: “The two main places where things
happened were San Francisco and New York City. Those were the two places that people converged upon to make movies.
Sometime after the Freeman Law [People of California Vs. Harold Freeman, 1987] came into effect, the movie business effectively
“I want to start
an incubator
accelerator venture
fund for radically
innovative sex and
porn start-ups.”
—Cindy Gallop
moved from San Francisco down to Los
Angeles. You really saw a shift away
from New York. There were still some
pornographers there, but they were
mainly fetish filmmakers.”
Unlike other industries that leave
behind hollow-out factories, shuttered
mills and decaying warehouses, what
remained was an independent spirit
and a love of the city that inspired some
who stayed to launch courageous new
ventures.
“It was four years between the time
that I left being in front of the camera
and stepped behind the camera,” says
Candida Royalle, who founded the
ground-breaking, New York-based,
woman-focused adult film studio
Femme Productions in 1984. “An awful
lot happened. That was 1980-1984,
and that was a pretty pivotal time in
the sense that there were so many
changes, not the least of which was of
course the AIDS crisis. But also a lot of
things changed. I think the changeover
in terms of style and music and fashion
from the ’70s to the ’80s is relatively
dramatic compared to some of the other
decades.”
>>
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