Porn Valley- Henri Pachard had nothing to do with Wednesday’s Team Tyler shoot. Pachard was only at the TTS studios to check things out. Pachard was supposed to shoot there Friday- wanted to check things out, he says. I’ve always wanted to do Pachard’s story from beginning to end, just as I’ve started with Tommy Sinopoli’s. www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=10227.
Some guys in the business have stories that need to be told. Pachard’s is one of them. I wanted to get Pachard going about his days in New York when he shot movies like Lust Weekend and Scare Their Pants Off. Lust Weekend introduced a wannabe actor named John Keeler to the adult cameras. Keeler has gone on to become a director better known as Jane Waters. And Scare Their Pants Off is one of the looniest softcore adult films you’ll ever watch. Pachard tells me he got some of his film deals strictly by bullshitting his way into them.
Pachard tends to talk like a gravel road and this makes the story telling and yarn spinning even better to listen to.
Pachard’s first film deal was for Edgar Loew. “He was part of the Loew’s theater chain,” says Pachard. “He was one of the errant sons- the black sheep, ignored and neglected. He was left to his own devices. He had a lot of money. He said let’s make a movie. Okay. We made a movie called Lust Weekend. That was the first movie I had directed. Prior to that I produced a movie called Scare Their Pants Off- same thing, B&W, cheap.”
Pachard remembers approaching Sam Lake to do a deal. Lake International was distributing sexploitation films. “It was the Old Film Center Building back on Ninth Avenue, Pachard recalls. “I went in and told him I was doing a paper for NYU film school [Pachard was bullshitting him]. I told him I was researching the expanding sex exploitation market,” laughs Pachard. “It was burgeoning in New York and I asked could I hang out and take notes. I hung out. I looked at his movies and wrote out an idea. I called it The Bizarre Ones. He said it was pretty good why don’t you make it into a script, why don’t you shoot it. I did. I made five movies for this guy- I never went to NYU film school. But it got his attention. I’m thinking this is a pretty good story.”
Pachard doesn’t know if this is a fact but heard that Steven Spielberg might have bullshitted his way into Universal, as well. “Then he made Sugarland Express.” Film making wise, Pachard had been on a few sets. In 1964 he worked on some educational films. “I just hung out and learned camera,” he says. He then got an opportunity to go to Williamsburg, Virginia and worked on a film crew there for about a year. “That’s how I got my first experience,” he remembers. “I produced my first feature down there.”
Pachard explained how Colonial Williamsburg had given a grant of something like $2,000 to a movie student to make a movie that had something to do about colonial America in the 18th century. “This guy who gut the grant came down to check it out. He said I’d like to write a feature script; I said I think you should! I’m the assistant cameraman. I’m 25 years-old. We convinced Eastman Kodak to donate film and develop it. All of our vendors in New York also donated shit. We got towns people to be in the movie. We got horses donated. We tried to recreate the Revolutionary War- at least one small part of it.”
The lead actor, according to Pachard, was a Swedish actor who also appeared in The Great Waldo Pepper. “The other character was John Keeler who is now Jane Waters. The director of the movie, Paul Ronder, died. He choked to death on a chicken bone several years later.” After the movie was finished, Pachard met Eddie Lowe. Pachard was going to do Lust Weekend and still had Keeler’s phone number. “I said, John, I’m doing a sex exploitation movie. Do you want to be in it? He said fine, and he did it.” Pachard recalls the movie taking three days to film. Generally movies would be shot that fast and in theaters in a matter of a couple of weeks. Over a 1,000 such films were made in that era.
“They were coming out hot and heavy,” says Pachard. “We were making tons of money- money that was just obscene.” I mention to Pachard the fact that in Philadelphia, I was making the rounds of art houses at least 3 or 4 times a week because that many films were coming out.
“Those were Eddie Seretsky’s theaters,” he laughs. “I knew him and used to get high with him. Those were good days.” Pachard remembers the films switching over to color by 1970.
“We were still shooting primarily soft,” he continues. “By 1972 [thanks to Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com] we were shooting 50-50 soft and hard. Deep Throat took it over the top. Prior to that, hardcore was very tentative. There was a lot of oral sex bit we always kept more softcore prints than hardcore prints. We had to ship one version of each in case there was a problem. But hard back then was boring. There was too much public hair to get a really good shot. So we didn’t try. The scenes were shorter because we had a lot of story to cover. We had cars, drive bys and motorcycles that would fill up a lot of screen time for cheap. That was good. We’d have a lot of that nonsense and stuck to some simple interiors. Back then this wasn’t pornography- we were movie directors, so we’d spend a lot of time jerking each other off- stroking each other, playing movie makers. A lot of people on the crew would film themselves. They spent more time filming themselves with the other guy. There was a lot of talk and a lot of networking. This would go on and on and on.”
Pachard doesn’t recall anyone breaking their backs to shoot good sex, however. “I was one of them. I was considered perverse.” By 1978 Pachard had struck up a friendship with Cecil Howard. Pachard says he and Chuck Smith were ready to shoot a movie and Smith gave the script to Howard to read. Howard, knocking Smith for a loop, announced that he was going to put up all the money for the project.
“Cecil Howard was a rich man- he always had a lot of money,” says Pachard. “We made that movie in four days. It was Babylon Pink. It was my first all-explicit movie. That’s one I changed my name to Henri Pachard [from Ron Sullivan], and I never looked back. Asked about the reasoning behind his choice of names, Pachard said his first wife was a Jewish American Princess. “This particular wife said don’t use your real name because I’ll be embarrassed at the country club. I had become a Jew.”