Tim Connelly, the editor of Adult Video News, the adult film industry’s most authoritative trade publication, says that porn is now a $13 billion-a-year industry, and everyone wants a piece of it, including Hollywood.

But Tinseltown likes to maintain a genteel distance from the notion of whoring attributed to the film industry on the other side of the hills, so when they need the facts, they come to guys like Legs McNeil. But, McNeil says, they don’t listen. He and his coauthors Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia spent eight years and umpteen dollars convincing porn stars, vice cops, pimps, theater owners, and mobsters to spill their guts for their book, The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. Like McNeil’s previous book, Please Kill Me, it’s a thick tome of quotes, full of apocryphal and often conflicting stories and unsupported suppositions. It’s got dirt from the days of Bunny Yeager’s pin-up photos to the mega-stardom of Jenna Jameson. It’s also impossible to put down.

Years into his research, McNeil produced a three-hour special for Court TV which featured the last exclusive interview with Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace (she died in a car crash in 2002). Soon he found himself in talks with Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind, currently making The Da Vinci Code), who was trying to cajole McNeil into giving him access to his roomful of floor-to-ceiling file cabinets (I’ve seen them) for Grazer’s 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat.

First Grazer’s guys told him there wasn’t any money – then he went on to spend tens of millions on the film. McNeil found himself in exactly the same position as many of the stars in his book: ripe for exploitation. And it wasn’t the first time. In town for a reading at Book Soup, he and his co-authors heap scorn on the exploiters.

CityBeat: How does your account of John Holmes’s involvement in the Laurel Canyon murders differ from Wonderland, the Hollywood version?

Legs McNeil: Well, Wonderland was a piece of crap. They had a script, and the director was this little prick. I said, “Look, John Holmes was a jerk. He’s not a hero in this story.” The only heroes – and I had built up a really good relationship with them – were Dawn Schiller, who was John’s 15-year-old girlfriend at the time, and Sharon Holmes. They turned around and sold their rights to this little creep. I thought, “They’re broke. They need the money.” And they did include that in the movie, after my suggestion.

Jennifer Osborne: They basically tried to steal what Legs said that day at lunch. They didn’t have their facts right. Had they been two guys who said, “We really want to get involved with this and understand it,” that would have been something else. They just had no respect for these people’s lives.

Did your book break any new info about the murders?

McNeil: Yes, but we had to choose our material. We went into a meeting with 15 FBI agents, I said, “Listen, I can walk you through the murders.” I knew every aspect of the murders. I knew who did it. I had spent five years researching this. I had every trial transcript. I had everything on [L.A. mobster] Eddie Nash. I had Eddie Nash’s divorce papers. It was a very, very corrupt L.A. story. And I was, “Okay, we’re doing a porn book. Do we want to do the corrupt L.A. story, too?” It’s a very far-reaching story, and we had to contain it.

You said in the New York Post that the makers of Inside Deep Throat stole your stuff.

McNeil: I made a Court TV special, and that’s how I got the book deal. Because no one could see this book, and the Deep Throat parts were great, and it was funny, too. Our Court TV documentary was the highest-rated original programming in their history. Then these two guys come in, and they’re so smug, and … they made a crappy movie. I mean, it’s funny, it’s camp, it’s got some nice scenes. They based it on – I did the last interview with Linda Lovelace. Now, Deep Throat isn’t the greatest movie ever made, but the wealth of material behind Deep Throat is astounding. I just said, “You spent $20, $30 million and you made a shitty movie.”

Tim Connelly: Grazer had these guys [producers] World of Wonder fronting for him, saying there’s no money. “It’s a labor of love. We’d like you to share your archives.” And Bob Ellison, who I was talking to the other day, said, “This is what we call in Hollywood ‘dry anal rape.'” [Everyone present howls with laughter] They offered something along the lines of minimum wage.

Osborne: Plus, he was going to make it based on Ordeal, from the early ’90s, which we proved is mostly lies. I hate to speak ill of Linda Lovelace, but you can’t corroborate what’s in there.

McNeil: They made The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I think that you have to fall in love, a little bit, with everyone you interview. I think they’re giggling behind their backs. They’re the reason that the porn industry hates Hollywood.

Do you think that you broke anything as far as the mob connections to porn?

McNeil: I was a little nervous when I started, because [Deep Throat financier] Butchie Peraino was still alive. He died during the book. A lot of them did.

Osborne: Although his son did call me one day, and ask, “I hear you’re looking for me.” Heh. “Wow, as a matter of fact, I am.”

McNeil: But I found, with most of the guys, you could sit down with them, and say, “Look, I don’t want to go here.” We were not trying to trap people. We weren’t trying to say, “Did you go for these murders over here?” We were just trying to follow our story, but, while doing that, we did go off on a lot of those other stories.

Are we in a new era of Porno Chic now?

Osborne: A lot of these earlier women considered themselves early feminists. They were having sex, they were talking about it, they were masturbating, they were sleeping with other women, and they were proud of it. They were like, “You can be a woman and do this, and you’re not a slut, you’re not a whore, you’re just a sexual person.” And that’s what was so cool about it. And that’s what’s not chic about right now, because, uh, that already happened. And it flew in the face of that backlash against feminism, where you had the Andrea Dworkins and the Catherine McKinnons putting women back in a box.

McNeil: In the very beginning, it was so open and no one was doing it – it was loose, so anybody could do anything. I think that once Deep Throat made $100-600 million, they kind of shut everybody down. Made it like women have to be protected by men. Which infantilized women again.

Why did people trust you with their stories?

McNeil: I didn’t want to come in as what they call a “porn mark.” You don’t want to come in as a guy who loves porn; you also don’t want to come in as a guy who wants to pick up all the women. I wanted to come in as a porn worker. [Porn producer] Jane Hamilton said, “I hope you’re not offended, Legs, but you became one of us.” Jane hired me to write Still Insatiable, Marilyn Chambers’ comeback movie. Very few people knew who Legs McNeil was. So we lived pretty anonymously.