Porn Valley- There was a time in his life when Shane Bugbee lived out of a Chevette. That alone would scare the hell out of anyone which is probably why Bugbee went over to the dark side, operates www.radiofreesatan.com, a newspaper called The Adversary and recently directed a movie for Extreme Associates called Club Satan.

The fact that Bugbee has a long standing relationship with Matt Zane who’s now at Extreme also has something to do with the creation of this movie.

Surprisingly, Bugbee tells me he’s been reading my stuff for years and was sorry to have missed me at Extreme’s recent “cookie party.”

Otherwise Bugee and Matt Zane have been working together for almost ten years on a variety of projects.

“I released Matt’s first non-porno movie, Contrasting Views,” states Bugbee. “That was about eight years ago. It was Matt’s first attempt at documenting some of the weird people he runs with. It has a girl who passed away from a heroin overdose, a priest he sat next to on a plane. What I saw was an interesting film.”

At the time he saw it, Bugbee was working for some people out of Vegas.

“I was pimping Dana Plato’s Last Breath,” Bugbee explains. “The gentlemen who started www.clublove.com paid me a bunch of money for those audio tapes. They asked me to come out to Vegas.” Bugbee explains that he was the last person to speak to Plato and has interviews of her including her dying.

“She passed away on the phone with me,” he says. “Her boyfriend was trying to lay down an alibi as she was dying. He stuck the phone at her. On these recordings you can hear what I was told later was the death rattle. You can hear a real weird sound. She just got back from doing the Howard Stern show. It’s not only so bizarre, it’s crushing for me. I started off wanting to exploit her, get her naked on the Internet and try to make some money.

“She knew this and as I’m talking to her, we became friends. I was her only friend and she’d talk to me eight hours a day, every day for like a month. We talked about doing a book, so I hooked up a recorder to the phone and we recorded her life story. She told me how she didn’t want to be Dana Plato any more, that she wanted to be Tyler’s mom, that she just wanted to bring her kid to school and hang up laundry.”

With the fact that she did the Stern show, Bugbee said all these offers for Plato started coming in from magazines and newspapers.

“They were talking about her acting- not her drug use- the legitimate media was calling us the day she was coming home from Stern. Then she died. She literally had a comeback that she never knew about. It was happening. She was calling me from this hotel room in Dallas. She was stranded. She had no money. I was telling her don’t worry about it, things are happening. The next day on Mother’s Day I get a call from her son asking where mommy is. And on the other line I’m hearing Dana’s dead, Dana’s dead. I’m thinking these are crack addicts trying to rip me off. It was horrible. Next day the National Enquirer is digging through my trash, people are outside my house.”

Bugbee later put out a book titled “Dana Plato’s Last Breath.”

“It includes a CD with a lot of these recordings and at the end you hear her death rattle,” he says. “It is the spookiest thing. But I think it’s weird that the police never contacted me.” However Bugbee’s of the opinion that Plato’s wasn’t a suicide, that she was fed a deadly combination of pills. Almost sounds like an Anna Nicole scenario.

“It’s a horrible injustice that her son has to go through life thinking his mom killed herself on Mother’s Day,” views Bugbee who says the entire story is very difficult for him to personally deal with.

“I know it doesn’t seem that way when you see the book,” he admits. “It’s really ugly but the situation was ugly, very sad.” Bugee also has the distinction of doing the last interview with Anton LaVey who headed the Church of Satan as well as GG Allin considered the true cult figure of the rock and roll underground.

“Some people say it’s a curse,” muses Bugbee who notes that Allin a rocker promised to kill himself on Halloween and take out a bunch of the crowd with him.

“He had a bunch of devotees who were ready to let him shoot them. He died of an overdose.”

Among his current projects, Bugbee has released an updated version of Might is Right.

“It’s basically a lot of where the Satanic bible came from,” he notes. “It has the last thing Anton LaVey wrote. The head of the Church of Satan, now- Peter Gilmore did the afterward.” Bugbee’s also working on a site for www.evilnow.com which is turning itself into an auction block for serial killer memorabilia.

“I collect a lot of that stuff.”

Bugbee who mentions that “evil” in the Satanic world means live, was about 15 when he began getting into all of this hocus pocus. At the time he was living in a car and involved in a movement against Tipper Gore during the whole obscene lyrics craze.

“She was what really influenced me to get into all this stuff.” Bugbee then began working on anti-censorship coalitions.

“I was putting out a ‘zine and living in my car, selling ads for the ‘zine. I used to spend summers at my aunt and uncle’s funeral home. Some say that’s probably where I got my morbid curiosity.”

I assume that, since then, Bugbee either moved to an upper scale car or more conventional living arrangements. Bugbee said more conventional arrangements since he’s been self-employed for at least 20 years since.

“I don’t even know how I’ve done that- I just live life.”

I ask Bugbee if one were to make a Faustian bargain, is Satanism a good deal.

“Satanism is less of a religion and more of how you’re born,” Bugbee replies. “You’re a natural go-getter, a mover and shaker. President Bush wouldn’t consider himself a Satanist per se but a Satanist would consider Bush a Satanist. I’m politcally opposed to him and that’s the good thing about being a Satanist. You can literally hate the people that are involved in the group next to you. I can hate the leader of the Church of Satan and still be a priest in the Church. It’s about survival of the fittest. It is what it is. Is it better than organized religion? I think organized religion is good for some people. My mom seems to enjoy that stuff. But in the Church of satan they don’t even consider Christianity or Catholicism any more. It’s really outdated. I think the biggest problem we have in the world is organized religion.”

“It’s fucked up more people…”

“But without it we wouldn’t be able to sell any porn,” answers Bugbee. “There wouldn’t be that guilt.”

Last year Bugbee and Matt Zane got together to do a 666 Eve event bringing in the new satanic millenium.

“I put out a DVD- it sold really well and we began discussing other plans that we had,” says Bugbee. “He’s working on his own transcendental satanism and a book to do that. We just wanted to work together for a long time. It started as a conversation between friends. I mean even as a young man I wanted to touch a porn star. What guy hasn’t?”

Bugbee was told by Zane he could make that happen.

“Rob Black is the only one who would listen to that and so I came up with the idea and Rob said okay.

“People can say what they want about the guy,” Bugbee continues. “But as far as creativity goes, and letting people go at their vision, I felt really cool working there because that was something they really let me do. There was no argument about it. As far as creativity went, it was really freeing over there. It was very nice.”

In the Club Satan movie, Paris Gables plays a character named Lilly who’s coming of age.

“She starts off young and innocent and wonders why she goes to church,” Bugbee goes on. “She asks the priest why these thoughts are bad, why thinking about penis is bad. She goes throughout these scenes finding her way to Satanism. You should not refrain from pleasure. Life is short. Live live, enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. She goes to the Witches’ Sabbath afterwards.

“Within the movie we actually filmed a Satanic black mass. I was there- I oversaw it and Matt performed the ritual with me. That’s the first time something like that has been filmed in 30 years. Since Anton LaVey. That was a big deal and a big deal in the world of Satan. Usually that’s a private affair.”

Bugbee explains that a Black Mass is about exorcising the beliefs of Christianity. Since then he’s received offers from overseas to do similar projects.

“As much as people say this is a big taboo, I’ve gotten nothing but great response,” he says. “I’ve been pre-selling it on the www.evilnow.com auction site.”

Bugbee’s also got a sequel to Club Satan in the works. It’s subtitled Bleed, Angels, Bleed.

“I’ve got a scene down and I’m working on it.” According to Bugbee, his wife helps him write the movies.

“Put it this way I’ve got a wife who lets me do whatever I want. We do whatever we want in our day as long as it brings happiness to us. As long as my wife’s happy that’s all I care about and she feels the same way about me.”

Bugbee, who ran a gallery at the time in Chicago, met his wife there.

“It was the first gallery in the world with black walls,” he says. “Black really made the art pop out. Marilyn Manson stopped there on one of his first tours and really enjoyed it. I hear he has a gallery in L.A. with black walls inspired by moi.”

Bugbee’s gallery was also the first to feature works by Mike Diana.

“He put out a book called Boiled Angels- he’s the first artist in American history to be jailed for drawing pictures. It was because his book was titled Boiled Angels that no one’s heard about him. The media never ran with it. I started publishing his work and started the gallery because no one would show his work. That’s how I met my wife.”

Bugbee said it was First Amendment issues, however, that really brought him to Rob Black and Extreme.

“I’m really attracted to their case,” says Bugbee who takes umbrage at the negative comments made by Larry Flynt against Black.

“I found this article where he really goes after Rob,” says Bugbee. “I was so amazed that he made them. If Rob’s case ever goes to court, that’s what the prosecution nails his coffin shut with. And it’s amazing how people hold Flynt on this pedestal in the porn industry.”

The way Bugbee sees it, the real enemies of the First Amendment are the artists or intellectuals who keep their mouths shut, sit on their hands and not say a word.

“I consider these people traitors,” he says. “I’m really upset that anyone, like Rob, is being put through the grinder based on what people want to buy.” Bugbee saw the PBS documetary that created all the brouhaha and loved the way Black got in John Ashcroft’s face.

“I think it’s a shame that people don’t speak their minds and a shame that the people in the industry did not speak up for him. People on boards like ADT are how can you do this to the industry? How can you put out a satanic film? We don’t need this kind of attention. It sounds like lunacy to me because you’re going to get this attention whether you put out the lamest fucking Vivid crap. They’re going to champion something like that and put down Rob? If they want to go after votes they’re going to attack whatever porn is out there. What looks worse is people not having a united front.”