The Golden Age of Porn: Jamie Gillis Gave the Porn World Gonzo

Golden Age Star Didn’t Straddle Next Wave of Porn, He Created It.

Chances are good that anyone interested in the history of sexual motion pictures has wondered at least once how we got where we are today. The influence of “Gonzo” porn and its scripted-plot-free descendants is everywhere. How did we go from The Opening of Misty Beethoven to Double Penetration Temptation? Praise him or condemn him for it, the consensus is that it was Golden Age actor Jamie Gillis who introduced Gonzo porn to the world.

Although plot and dialogue-inclusive porn will likely always exist, ever since Gillis got his hands on the medium with the introduction of his groundbreaking series On the Prowl, the adult industry hasn’t been the same. With the advent of camcorders, a whole new world of porn creation became possible. Gillis, who Screw Magazine founder Al Goldstein once called “sexually the wildest, most decadent, off-the-wall guy in the business,” had a brilliant idea. He would drive around with one or more hot porn chicks in a vehicle large enough to fuck in and then find a regular guy willing to do it while the cassette tape was rolling.

With more than 100 Golden Age acting credits behind him, Gillis entered the 1990s as a director-performer, as well as the father of, or at least major creative influence behind, Wall-to-Wall, Point-of-View (POV), “reality” porn, and more. But first, in 1989, he had Rene Morgan get comfortable in a rented limo and cruise along the streets of San Francisco’s North Beach with him in search of appealing man-meat to bang inside of it. Cameraman Duck Dumont taped them, and Gillis made comments. The first scene for On the Prowl took a night to shoot and could be purchased on video tape for $20.

Able to shoot hardcore footage anywhere one or more people could have sex and for as long as a camera battery could last, On the Prowl expanded its locations for intense, degrading, rough sex with genital close-ups to adult bookstores. With AIDS still fresh in everyone’s minds, scenes without condoms made the taboo settings even more erotically forbidden.

It didn’t take others long to realize the potential to save on production and performer costs while becoming stars themselves. Or at least their dicks officially became stars. The vibe was usually varying degrees of seamy, cheap, sensational, sleazy, predatory, raunchy, objectifying, misogynistic, and compelling in its raw in-your-face fuckery. After he worked with Mia Powers and then showed the resulting first scene in what would become the Dirty Debutante series to fellow director and performer Ed Powers, the two men co-produced the first six as the Nasty Brothers.

Gillis once told AVN that when Powers released the first of his Bus Stop Tales series, the end credits included an acknowledgment from his then-friend that Gillis had introduced the genre. With Gillis and Powers (and the Nasty Brothers) leading the way, a new crop of directors, performers, and director-performers emerged. Once again, his career dovetailed with that of a fledgling Gonzo mega-pioneer. Gillis appeared in the first Buttman video directed by John Stagliano, whose name soon became synonymous with what became a wildly popular Evil Angel series.

Stagliano, as the Buttman moniker suggests, keeps the butts of women front and center of his camera’s lens. Shapely female butts eager to be kissed, licked, nibbled and, as Stagliano refined his craft, fucked with increasing frequency and intensity. When the World Wide Web sparked to life adult companies took a while to realize that it had been made for what they produced, but by 1997, there were 900 X-rated websites. According to the 2012 book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, that number had risen to 2.5 million sites by submission time.

Since then, Stagliano has taken the lead in the world of Gonzo with series including Nudes a Poppin’, Buttman Goes to Rio, Buttman’s Bend Over Babes, Buttman’s Bend Over Brazilian Babes, Buttman’s Big Tit Adventure, and Buttman’s European Vacation. Perhaps even more importantly, Evil Angel brought male talent and directors including Roccoo Siffredi, Manuel Ferrara, Christoph Clark, Gregory Dark, Nacho Vidal, Jules Jordan, Joey Silvera, Vince Vouyer, and more to the attention of an audience eager to see beautiful women with at least one, if not more, large penises plumbing the depths of their assholes.

Gone were the likes of Radley Metzger, Gerard Damiano, the Mitchell Brothers, and Bob Chinn. The late 1980s and early 1990s became the time of Randy West, Ben Dover, Seymore Butts, Shane’s World, Max Hardcore, Rodney Moore, Belladonna, Ashley Blue, and Lexington Steele. Although plotted movies with stories and dialogue still existed, the bulk of what became available on VHS and, eventually DVD and via the internet was Gonzo.

Unlike Golden Age films, this new niche showed porn from the inside, through the eye of not a dispassionate camera but in front of a cameraman whose existence is acknowledged by the performers and who may even be intimately involved with the sex action. Instead of being a passive member of a viewing audience, the new fan experience was far more immediate, immersive, and first-person. The era of you-are-there porn had arrived.