Porn Valley- Last time I had a chance to chat with director Mark Kismet [pictured left] was on a Hustler set www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=10539 where a storyline had Evan Stone being shot. The headline, of course, read that Stone was shot. Simple as that.
Talk about a clamor and a tightening of sphincters. Both Stone and Kismet to this day have a good chuckle about it. Others not so much.
"It was the most amazing thing that happened," laughed Kismet. "When that story broke, you wrote it in such a way that there was more to come. By the way it was worded, everyone believed that he really got shot. All the notice boards on the Internet lit up like it must have been some deranged husband. We were getting phone calls non-stop. My phone rang non-stop. AVN, everybody.
"I called Evan directly as soon as this started happening. He said that was great. 'I'm not going to answer the phone for two days. Everyone will think it.' This doesn't sound good. But he did it and the next day my phone never stopped ringing. Then AVN called. I said, look- it was part of this movie. They said we're going to have a reporter call you. He'll call you in a minute. The reporter called me back and Barry Wood grabbed the phone. He answered and said what are you calling about. Barry sounds like me and they said we're calling about the story. Barry said I'm not aloud to talk about it and he hangs up. So that just started all over again.
"Then AVN called back screaming," Kismet continues. "I said, no, it was just Barry messing around. And they said we'll rub his name off all the trophies. That was funny. Later on I noticed an Internet story [satirical] that came out. It was about the bombings in London and they blamed me for it- they said it was all porn stars.
"It was just funny how the whole industry reacted," Kismet goes on to say. "To me it was amazing."
Kismet, who lived in Michigan for a couple of years, has just moved back to LA.
"I just started shooting and directing again for Hustler," he explains.
"But the whole time I was commuting, I was directing for Hustler. Hustler slowed down. So I moved over shooting for Internet companies. I'd fly in for two weeks, work, fly back and spend two weeks at home. I came backwards and forwards and my wife got pissed off that she was becoming a single parent and said we should come back here. And the flying- I was doing more miles than most pilots. I was just literally flying all the time and it got to be too much. I would be at home for a very short time it seemed to me. We've been back now for four weeks and living up in Valencia which is nice."
Though he ran a modeing agency in England and was a still photographer, Kismet got his real start of note with Loretta Sterling and Totally Tasteless Video.
"I started doing my Horney Henry series years ago," Kismet explains. "I think I was one of the very first people to do POV. The reason why I did POV was I didn't want any other guys around. I thought these guys are way better at it than me. I was intimidated so I did it myself. It seems like a lifetime ago."
Kismet talked about the time he was photographing a girl with big boobs.
"I was shooting some video and put my hand out grabbing her boobs," he recalls. "I thought it was funny. It was just a gag and she let me do it. It was nothing creepy. Then it wound up in the movie and the company got a bunch of letters from people who thought it was great. The buyers of the videos thought that was the best thing about the video. And Eddie DeRoo [Sterling] said do something like that. So we created Horny Henry and off he went peeping in windows.
"As Horny Henry I'd chat the girl up, then I'd grope her and maybe get a blowjob. Then a guy would come in and they'd have sex. It was great. I was getting blowjobs, having fun and we did a whole load of them. We went to Europe and I was getting money to shoot these movies. I was getting the best European actresses to have sex with and it was a fun time. These girls were great. I was single. Then I got married. That was it. You get married, it's all over. I had to 'retire.'"
Kismet also did a similar series for Gabor at Heatwave titled Rump Man.
"It was the same type of thing as Horny Henry," Kismet observes. "But pretty much when I got married I had to pull back and just do directing, shoot pictures for magazines and pretty much be celebate."
"And I loved shooting pictures," he continues. "I did that for Hustler for many years and still do. I just shot a set for Barely Legal. My heart is in photography but I also like doing the movies. I love directing."
Before he came to this country in the late Eighties, Kismet had the London-based modeling agency for many years.
"Again it was sex and starting off in life going I like women and this would be a good way of doing it. So I started the modeling agency. It was one of the biggest, then two more started about the same time- Bill Wright and John Graham. The three of us used to share the same girls."
According to Kismet, the extreme end of the bookings at the time would be for "pink" shots.
"Spread shots were very taboo," he notes.
Before he got acquired an agency, Kismet used to sell computers.
"When I left school I did a few jobs and one of those was selling computers," he says. "I very quickly thought it would be better if I could make a service company to that company, then I wouldn't have to do that much work. It was kind of a lazy type of an idea. If I could sell products without having to sell them, and have others sell them for me, I thought that might be a good idea."
So Kismet placed an advertisment in the paper for models to work an exhibition [trade show].
"I thought it would look better with models selling, so I did that," Kismet relates. "Then I got all these replies and half of them were pictures of naked women. I thought that was pretty cool so I picked the best two girls- one of them had a lot of experience in selling exhibitions. And the other girl did some nude modeling. I took them both out to lunch and the one that did the nude moldeing, I picked her brains because that seemed much more interesting and it was pretty cool. Then she introduced me to photographers who introduced me to more. They all had a need for girls. So I started running ads in town- girls for nude modeling. I just built it up from there.
"Then John Graham started- he bought a model magazine and it had a subscription list of about 5,000 girls that wanted to be models. He had a massive amount and started shooting them himself as a photographer. Girls would come to London, he'd shoot them to death himself and start putting them out on jobs. They'd jump agencies to me or to Bill Wright who started a dance circuit with strippers. In the end it was the three of us. And I've never been out of the business after that. I stayed in it.
"And then I came to America around 1987 with a girlfriend," continues Kismet. "I thought I might as well start off here and bring English girls here to work. That was my plan. I was here in LA when John Graham turned up and Bill Wright. We all went to lunch and I thought, fuck it, I was here first. Everywhere I seemed to go, they followed. It was quite funny, really."
Kismet then shot some pics of his girlfriend and a magazine paid him $2,000.
"I thought this is alright, it was fun, then instead of booking 20 girls, I'll book just one and make money doing pictures." Kismet then began working with the late Clive McLean at Hustler.
"We had that thing going- English people tend to stick together," Kismet observes.
Then Kismet started doing movies through another contact at Hustler.
"That's where my heart lies- with Hustler," says Kismet, noting that the industry has changed a great deal.
"There's a very big division now- on one hand you've got the Wicked big feature-type stuff. Then you've got the Internet and there's not a lot in between. It's really cool and I'm glad that Wicked has a market for that because it's a really tough market. There's so much stuff and so much information coming into people through the Internet, you can get porn everywhere, through VOD, and magazines are going down the drain.
"You have to shoot Internet stuff, though. It seems to me that's the bigger market, but if you're going to do these big 10 day features you've got to have all your sales in place- European sales, soft, hard.
"Otherwise the smaller companies are selling to the Internet where you make this much money, therefore we can only have this much budget, we can't hire this many people, and you end up doing the camera and the pictures yourself, directing it and everything. But the more things you can do, I think the better."
