Porn Valley- Porn legend Ron Sullivan passed away this morning at 9:45 after a three year battle with cancer. Sullivan recently suffered a stroke and remained pretty much comatose. He had been under hospice care at home.

Pachard, who had been treated in the past for squamous cell carcinoma in his jaw, was diagnosed in May with throat cancer.

Sullivan, who up until that point was till active in the business directing, shooting and writing scripts, was going to an oncologist two or three times a week for hydration,

The pain was described as overwhelming and Sullivan had been prescribed some pretty heavy narcotics for the pain.

In recent months the porn industry attempted to rally around Sullivan by creating a feature titled, We Are The World XXX, which would help defray his medical costs. But the project soon became the focus of squabbling, bickering and in-fighting. Ron Miller, an attorney and porn performer was brought in to settle differences. Hence, parts of the project had to be re-edited, and will now be distributed by Hustler Video.

……..

I first met Sullivan aka Henri Pachard around 1987. I had just reviewed a movie of his and some girl was getting her head used as a surfboard in a toilet bowl. Pachard liked bringing toilets into play in his movies. Now battling cancer, Pachard, in his prime was a handsome man with a thick head of black hair and a booming voice that could apprehend a room. I think the point where we bonded is the fact that I had actually seen Pachard’s first movie, Scare Their Pants Off. It was a nudie flick.

Here are some pieces about him from the memory lane file.

April 5, 2007: Porn Valley- I’ve seen Henri Pachard in the best of times. I’ve seen him in the worst of times. Now I’m seeing him in the better of times. A couple of months ago, to look at him, you wouldn’t have given Pachard a chance in squat to beat cancer. He was frail. Thin wisps of hair were trying to grow out of his head after grueling sessions of chemo, and he was hobbled by a foot cast.

Other guys the same age- 68- might have packed it in. Except Pachard kept on working through it. The hair is back in full pompadour. Last week he moved into a new house with his wife Dolores and this morning he lights up a cigarette.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he whispers conspiratorially. “Of course the whole world will know after this.” Pachard’s puffing the cig like a 1940’s P.I. He’s roaring at his little joke.

The last time we had a chance to chat at length was maybe two years ago- before Pachard found out he had The Big C and we talk a little about that. Pachard was first detected with colon cancer.

[He warns me to get my asshole checked yearly.]

“They took it right out and I didn’t have to have any chemotherapy or any radiation,” he relates. “Fine, no problem. In the meantime while I was in the hospital, I couldn’t open my jaw. I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to eat bites of food. They said antibiotics will take care of that. Five days of antibiotics, I still couldn’t open my jaw. I go to a dentist- no problem. He said we’ll take out a wisdom tooth, five days you’ll be fine. Seven days I couldn’t open my jaw. Finally they said, well, we’ll take you to an oral surgeon. Good. I go to an oral surgeon, I can’t open my jaw. Oh, no problem.

“They said you have an infection and this antibiotic will get rid of it. Seven days, I can’t open my jaw. Finally they cut out part of a tumor, send it in for a biopsy, and, sure enough, it’s a squamous cell carcinoma in a very aggressive advanced stage. They take me in for immediate surgery. They take out part of my jaw bone, replace it with my leg, put a tube in my stomach so I can eat and give me a tracheotomy so I can breathe. Now my head’s the size of a basketball. Finally I’m out of the hospital. I see a radiologist, an oncologist, a blood doctor and they set me up for chemotherapy to burn all this stuff out.

“I was able to swallow before the radiation even after,” he relates. “But not good. I was able to eat something. Half my diet was through my mouth and the other half was through my tube. But the radiation keeps a lasting, lingering effect. It keeps shutting me down. A year from now I’ll be lucky if I can cough. God help me if I should have to vomit, I’ll drown. I won’t be able to get it out of my mouth.”

Pachard’s an obvious example of life’s ironies, having had this booming voice and compelling oratory which could intimidate a room. I remember a time he verbally kicked the shit out of Jerry Butler on a set when Butler was doing his usual acting up But now Pachard finds it difficult sometimes to talk. Even more difficult to swallow. Though he still manages a good rousing laugh from time to time.

“I’m not afraid of death or dying,” he shrugs. “It’s a very undignified process, especially with cancer. That scares me. Being dead is dead. I’m okay with that. It’s not a matter of how many years you live. It should be a matter of how you live the years.”

And in his, Pachard became one of the true legends of the business.

“You made me a legend back in the Eighties when you wrote about my bathroom sex scenes,” he acknowledges graciously. “You bowled me over.” Pachard’s just wrapped up shooting a scene for Rob Spallone Thursday morning between Tony Eveready and newcomer Aziza Diamond. Later, Pachard kids with her. He thinks she’s “magnificent” because of her attitude and sexual appetite.

“I have enough money to last me the rest of my life,” he tells Diamond.
“Provided I’m dead by Tuesday.” Pachard revels in gallows’ humor.

“For the record, I feel good,” Pachard states conclusively as I warn him about the ciggies.

“Put it this way,” he answers. “I can’t swallow. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. I can’t talk very well. I can’t bullshit the girls.” Otherwise, he feels great.

“All I got left is smoking,” he reasons. “If it kills me, it kills me. But meanwhile I’m having a good life. I’m uncomfortable with my face being numb and I can’t speak as well but I’m having a good life. I’m working again.”

I tell Pachard how I always regarded him as the industry’s Cicero- the supreme orator.

“You had that command.”

“I used to,” he concedes, sadly. “That was my Marine Corps training. I always had a good way with the words. I had a good voice. I went into the Marines when I was 17. I joined the reserves then I went active right after high school when I was 18. I did military reserve time until 1955. And I think part of my living is because of that training and the fierce resolve I have. As you get older you don’t take things for granted any more.

“Although I get tired. God, I get so tired. After two scenes I want to stop shooting but I can’t. People would think I’m wussing out so I push out the next two scenes. Today I’m shooting five.”

Pachard is more than thrilled about his new town home- something he wanted to give Dolores.

“She’s a good woman- she took care of me when I was sick,” he says. “She’s great. I want to work another ten years so I can get that mortgage way down and she’ll have some equity in it. She’ll have something for all her trouble. She did not get the best of me. She says she did. She got the worst of me.”

Pachard and Dolores met ten years ago when he was working for LBO shooting fetish movies.

“She came in one March day, looking to do movies,” he recalls. “She’s 40 years old, a big breasted black woman and with a very limited income. Ten years ago a black woman [in the business] could not work all that much especially if she was over 30, let alone 40. I didn’t have any work for her but I asked her to have dinner with me. She said fine where shall I meet you? I said, my house, I’ll cook you dinner. She came over. I made dinner. Instead of making my usual sleaze move, I didn’t know what to say. I just blurted out, stay with me. She said we’ll see what happens tonight. And she never left. That July we got married. We had some great times.”

I wonder if he still gets aroused after shooting porn- and Pachard’s career has spanned five decades.

“Not as often or as much or as intense as I used to,” he answers. “Either I’m more discerning, or more jaded or less interested or all of the above. I try to shoot fast. The girls always amaze me. I try to find something different in each girl. Today they’re so young, they don’t really excite me that much. Now we’ve got a lot of 40 year-old women in the business. So I like doing that. I don’t know why I’m more attracted. Probably because I feel I have a slightly better chance of scoring with them than a girl who’s 20. It’s hard enough when you’re old enough to be a girl’s father, let alone her grandfather.”

Pachard expresses his interest for getting back more into the porn loop. He has a series idea to pitch and wants to talk to a few people about it.

“I talked to my son about shooting it for me and he’d love to do it,” he says. “Maybe I’ll stop shooting myself, get in front of the monitor like I used to and direct.” Pachard figures by the time he’s 78 he’ll be too tired to work.

“I can’t play golf any more,” he also announces. “I had to give away my clubs. I’m crippled from the leg. And I used to play touch football on the lunch breaks when we were shooting. The crew and cast would go outside to play football. That was back in the Eighties.”

“Maybe a lot of people don’t realize that you were the guy who was nasty before nasty got invented in this industry,” I tell him.

“I was doing that wasn’t I?” he says. “But it was the dialogue that did it. Now I think the girls are better looking and more abundant. And the sex is more extreme and there’s less pubic hair to deal with. And I guess that counts for something but there’s no mind fucking. Most of the time. And most of these kids don’t know how to act. Some of the men are very good actors. But most of the women are not.

“To get them to play roles, you got to bring back the time when they were children and used to play make believe. Then they had a role to play. Then you’d be surprised how good they can be if they get that back in their minds. Get them off the script and get them to make eye contact. Then these kids can act. Once they realize they can do that, it gives them a different sense of dignity.”

Asked about some of the hottest women he’s ever shot, Pachard names Nikki Sinn, Colleen Brennan and Jacqueline Lorians. Pachard reminds you that he and Sinn had an affair going on at the time.

“Those were some women I had intimacy with,” he freely admits.

In the early Nineties it was Pachard who started up Rosebud along with Alex deRenzy and Mike Rubenstein. Rubenstein was the youngster of the group being only 21.

“Me and Alex wanted to do something and I had a lot of other people interested,” Pachard recalls. “When I brought the kid in, no one wanted anything to do with him because he was too young, they thought. Except Alex. And what was good for Alex was good enough for me. We formed a triumvirate and Alex thought up the name Rosebud. I put up most of the money because I had money after my father passed. We shot up at Alex’s place and Alex did most of the shooting. I filled in the X’s and O’s so to speak and the kid was setting up sales.

“Before you knew it we were starting to make money and to keep busy I’m shooting for other people because I had nothing to do. One day I get a phone call from Rubenstein. He said, this is a hard conversation. It’s going to be tough. He wanted to buy me out. I said this isn’t a tough conversation. It’s a joyful conversation, let’s talk. So he made me an offer.”

According to Pachard the negotiations went back and forth, back and forth, Pachard always wanted twice whatever figure was put on the table. Finally they agreed to one.

“And Mike never missed a payment,” he says. When his son Jason wanted to begin a line shooting young amateur black girls, Pachard told him there was only one guy he could recommend – his ex partner, Rubenstein.

“He won’t screw you- and sure, enough they were together for ten years and my son made a fortune with them,” Pachard adds. “Eventually Mike sold Rosebud, then he sold Devil’s Film. I don’t know what he’s doing now except maybe counting his money. He was very good- you could take his word to the bank.”

I was curious how Pachard met Rubenstein since I remember Rubenstein from being at some industry poker games back in those days.

“He was in the music business and he was managing a group in San Francisco,” Pachard recalls. “Andy Anderson was the leader of that group and to this day is still with Devil’s Film. They wanted to make a rock video. Somebody told them what you need to do is get a guy who can make pornography, shoot films and keep a low budget. We made a rock video. And I didn’t tell anybody for the longest time I did a rock video because I needed the money. I made about $10,000 shooting that video and it came in handy. All my friends were involved- Patti Rhodes managed it; Freddy Lincoln played a small part; we had it taking place in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. It was fun. We shot it for two days and had a ball.”

As far as getting deRenzy involved in a prospective company, Pachard said it was easy because he and deRenzy were very tight.

“After Mike bought me out, he then bought out Alex after which Alex died. He died shooting for Mike whenever he needed some money. So we never had a falling out. When Alex died, Mike threw a memorial service and paid for the whole thing. There was a lot of people there and it was very generous of Mike to do that. I was close to Alex and got a few people to come up to San Francisco.

“It was then I realized when Alex and I laughed so much,” Pachard continues. “We’d be on the phone and he’d laugh and laugh. When I’d see him in person he’d laugh and I realized because of a motorcycle accident he had his face rebuilt. He couldn’t smile but he could laugh. And that was so infectious. I loved Alex. I wish he had stayed alive. His widow is gorgeous- Mrs. deRenzy. I had fantasies about her after Alex died. I’m ashamed to say it. I was married to Dolores but I had fantasies about Carol.”

This is the first I’m hearing of this and I’m sure Pachard’s got a lot more where that reflection came from.

“I’m trying to get a book written,” Pachard states as if reading my mind.

“People keep urging me to write a book.” To that end Pachard’s been compiling articles he’s written. [He wrote a pornographer’s journal for AVN for awhile].

Raven Touchstone has been writing a book as well and Pachard hopes maybe she’ll help him assemble photos for his book.

“She’s got some great ones,” he says. “And I need an editor- somebody who knows how to write and wants to make some money.” Pachard gives me a dig in the ribs.

“We’re going to cut a deal,” he tells me. “I’d be honored.”

July 7, 2006: Porn Valley- KSEX on Wednesday nights broadcasts its “best of” in the 5pm time slot. On a recent edition, a show was aired featuring Henri Pachard as a guest of the late Mike Rick, founder of the station.
Pachard mentioned how he acquired his porn name, noting that his wife at the time suggested using one.

“We’d be so embarrassed at the club,” he said. “It was in White Plains, NY and I was a member of a private yacht club.” After two weeks as a member, questions started being asked as to what he did for a living. He said he made movies.

“You know anything about adult movies?” Pachard was asked, them someone brought up a movie titled Babylon Pink.

“I said I know that movie- I produced that movie. I sent them a screening copy and I was their hero.” Pachard shot his first adult movie in 1967, a movie titled Scare Their Pants Off.

“It was a scary movie that had some bare breasts, nipple and pubic hair,” he said. Rick observed that if a girl solicits you, and you offer her money, you can go to jail.

“But if you announce in advance that you’re going to do a film and you say to a girl, hey I’ll give you $100 to go down on me- it’s totally legal. It’s not soliciting. It’s not pandering. Back in your day before all this air kind of got cleaned out, did you guys run the risk of being busted?”
Pachard told a story about a woman who came up to him saying, “I’ll do anything you want for $200. I said will you paint my house?”

Pachard said he always enjoyed the company of prostitutes.

“Because I know exactly where I stand with them,” he explained. “I tend to think that most of the women that I cast and book and film every day in this business are very flexible in their own lifestyles. They might appear in a scene for me that I put in a movie and release and they have a word for it. They call it a private scene. That’s a scene they don’t care about it. There’s no director. There’s no actor. It’s a guy that’s paying them X-amount of dollars to do what they’re going to do. That’s fine.”

Pachard felt if there’s going to be any kind of women’s independence it would have to begin with the right to sell their pussy.

“If they have the right to do that, their independence will be forever.”

It was mentioned that Pachard directed The Devil in Miss Jones Part 2, and it was one of the biggest budgeted porn films for its time at $350,000.

“Back in the film business we would spend from $150,000 to $350,000 for an adult film,” he went on to say.

“Today we spend anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000 for an adult video. Anybody can do it. There’s no magic to it. You buy a camera, it’s point and shoot.” And back in the day, Pachard continued, you had to rehearse. Asked if ever worked with Marilyn Chambers, Pachard said only met her several months prior to the KSEX interview to talk about a project. Prior to that it was 25 years before in Kansas City when she was appearing in a theater, The Dove.

“What the hell was that movie she was in- not Behind the Green Door but the next one.”

Pachard first began shooting movies in 1964, in the “educational” genre, he said.

“We shot frogs changing,” he laughed. “I started shooting adult movies in 1967.” Rick seemed to remember Madonna having done a couple of pornos.
“One was called A Certain Sacrifice and it was softcore, artistic movie,” said Rick.

“The other one Rick couldn’t remember but said he had some stills from it. But this one is a triple hardcore. She’s licking some girl’s anus and going down on some dude. She’s wearing a tie. It is Madonna. These very nasty people owned it and I refused to take a copy because they said even if one copy gets out…”

The subject got on to fitness, and Pachard said he always felt intimidated around women in that field.

“I drink straight whiskey, I smoke cigarettes and I play poke, and stay up late,” he explained.

Rick was curious if Pachard felt heat from the law when he was shooting in New York.

“Did you have to pull curtains and made sure no one knew you were shooting?” Pachard said it was interesting he brought that up and recalled making a movie with Vanessa del Rio.

“We had hired a new actor for the very first time- a little skinny guy- and we’re shooting a scene with Del Rio who was a major star and Jerry Butler who was an outrageous performer. And this little skinny guy. We were shooting film. And we built this city that looked like a public bathroom. Next thing this guy drops his trousers. I though he’d poke the wall down.” Rick observed that Del Rio’s clit was probably bigger than his own penis. Pachard noted that Del Rio started weightlifting and taking steroids where women acquire a little dick.

Pachard went on to talk about how he did cocaine back in the Eighties, pointing out that coke is not your dick’s friend.

Pachard then talked about having sex at various stages of your life, feeling that older men make better lovers because they don’t give a shit.

“In the final analysis we’re not in such a big hurry, so when we do have sex we take our time with it and it’s a lot more fun- if we don’t cum it’s no big deal.” Rick wondered if that thinking applied to erections as well.

“There’s two times when it’s tragic,” Pachard mused. And then Rick translated: “It’s bad enough that it was the first time you couldn’t do it twice.”

“I rely on Viagra a lot,” said Pachard. “I love Viagra. I carry it around with me just in case I get mugged. I beat them to death with my dick. It seems to add length, a good inch.”

May 18, 2000: In the early days of his film making career where, Henri Pachard, aka Ron Sullivan made demented, pre-hardcore flicks like Purity & Innocence on a regular basis for the 42nd Street art house crowd.

We talked to Sullivan this past weekend on the set of Babewatch where he was just simply hanging out and enjoying his wife Dolores’ tri-tip steak recipe. Many of Sullivan’s films from the mid-1960’s are available from Something Weird Video in Seattle.

Sullivan: “The very first movie I did in New York, that I produced with my own money was Scare Their Pants Off. The director was John Madden who got lost at sea in a small sailboat off of Cape Hateras. I had to finish the movie. I didn’t know what I was doing. The movie was so bad, I couldn’t give it away.”

G. Ross: “Sez you. I remember it being wonderfully demented where two guys in masks invite these girls to their house..”

Sullivan: “Yes…yes. And they scare the shit out of them. The thing unique about it is when it was shot, the camera picked up a glimpse of this girl’s pubic hair. We looked at it and figure we could cut that out. I showed the scene to Lee Hessel who put out films like Cry Uncle. I was showing it to him in the screening room, trying to make some kind of deal. We saw that few seconds worth of beaver. That’s when I first heard the word. Hessel said, ‘They’ve been experimenting with the beaver out on the coast.’ This was 1967. They’ve been experimenting with the beaver. Then the next phrase I heard about a year later, because beaver was becoming more pronounced in the movies, was, ‘there’s a lot of beaver and a little bit of pickle.’ That was the movement of the business. It was beginning to heat up.

“But Scare Their Pants Off was my very first movie and I followed that up with Lust Weekend, the very first one that Jane Waters starred in. And we had the same girl with the beaver in this movie. I directed that movie and had Edgar Loew, who was one of the heirs to the theater empire – he was a loney kid with a lot of money – his family was always in Europe. They left him alone with a caretaker in this great big old house on the upper East side. I got him to put money in the movie.”

G. Ross: “Things haven’t changed too much.”

Sullivan: “We put up a whopping $7,000 and shot this film in three days. I was able to make a deal with that movie and unload the Scare Their Pants Off movie at the same time with Art and Howie at Distribpix. That was my career. I got the entree into the adult business. My next picture was The Bizarre Ones with Sam Lake. That’s the one where we had a girl tied to the topf of a Volkswagen – Mary Claire Sharma. That was also in 1967.

Then we made The Erotic Circus and Headless Eyes. I didn’t direct Headless Eyes, I produced Headless Eyes with Kent Bateman the director. [Sullivan’s recollection is that it stars Bo Svenson who was in The Great Waldo Pepper.] This movie Headless Eyes was a little horror movie made on the same budget as a sex movie. I helped make it because I needed to make a pay check.

“I worked on a horror movie instead of a normal sex movie.

“In fact I did a rock video in 1990 [for the music group Two Bit Thief]. Rock videos are tough, they’re very degrading, dehumanizing to make. To make a rock video you get people from New York who represent the label and their publicity people flying out. They must rent a whole plane because there’s about 30 or 40 of those people that follow you and ask too many questions. I spent two days shooting that movie just to make a paycheck. That was the only two times that I got away from pornography.

“Two Bit Thief was the worst heavy metal rock band I ever heard. They were out of San Francisco. The leader of the band was Andy Anderson, one of the nicest guys and a very good friend of Mike Rubenstein [Devil’s Films].

“They were tight friends and it was through Mike that me, Mike and Alex de Renzy put together Rosebud. About six months later, Mike and Alex bought me out for so much money I couldn’t say no. Mike never missed a payment. When my son began that Cheerleader Search line, I took him to see Michael. They’ve been a team for the last three years.

“But my career began with the nudie cuties, the horror/splatter sexers, sexploitations, the roughies – they had all kinds of names for them. We were doing this in New York while in California they were shooting the beach movies.”

G. Ross: “The subject matter of films in that era are pretty much akin to what you’ve seen in the Rough Sex videos.”

Sullivan: “Same thing.”

G. Ross: “Except you have the hardcore. You had girls getting tits cut off…”

Sullivan: “Tongues cut out… like in Olga’s Place.”

G. Ross: “People shooting up.”

Sullivan: “That’s the only way you could get them in the theaters. They had no real sex but they had sensational trailers…you could run 15 minutes of trailers. Sometimes you’d buy a ridiculous movie from Europe then you’d cut in two minutes worth of stuff of girls opening their blouses and that would be it. They’d pack these porno houses. They had the Rialto Theater, the Hudson Theater in New York..”

G. Ross: “Philadelphia had the Studio, The Palace, the Art Holiday…”

Sullivan: “That was Eddie Seretsky’s place. I wonder if he’s still alive….there were so many of them, Harold Sugarman, Sam Lake, so many of these guys died starting in the mid-seventies, early eighties. They started dropping off like flies. The business became more hardcore and more outrageous. When we first started in hardcore it was all experimental. I remember Surepix came out with all those blowjob movies.

“All that stuff out of Surepix was making a lot of money for the art theaters. Then we just kept getting hotter and hotter. Then we started using the story concepts from the softcore days that had a lot of violence. This all started in the early seventies when Deep Throat was already running. These things started opening up in more theaters. Then somebody got scared. I think it was a mail order operation [Sullivan suspects it might have been Adam & Eve] that had a lot of influence on what we were about to shoot. They really influenced ther industry out here.

“Cut out the rape. Make sure it’s all consenting, make sure it’s all happy, smiling vanilla sex. They wanted to cast the biggest possible net and not get busted; and for good reason. It costs so much money to defend yourself.

“Now comes video with more and more product being shot. All the more reason why you have to go safer. You put out ten movies a month, you better not have one movie in there that’s going to start a controversy. In the last ten years we’ve been making movies for the wholesale buyer and the retail owner, the guy that’s got a whole lot of stuff. But we haven’t been making movies for the end user. The video series, however, is succeeding more and more because the end user can find it. He can find what he’s looking for.”