Porn Valley- I spoke to John Bowen Sunday night and he informs me that J.D. Bishop passed away over the weekend. Bishop was a lighting guy and had worked for Bowen five years.

“He came out of the real movies,” says Bowen, noting that Bishop died Saturday night in the Philippines. “He was with me for about five years. There was a time when all of my crew went on to work in the real movie industry. He came sort of backwards and forwards with them. He worked on a lot of multi-million dollar movies, a lot of television and a lot of big time stuff. He was a big fan of the business. He loved pornography.”

But at the same time Bowen notes that Bishop had to combat a drug problem which caused Bishop a lot of problems. “Finally a couple of years ago his body gave out,” Bowen notes. “He just couldn’t work any more so he went over to the Philippines to live on his pension. His biggest problem was that he was hurt very badly in the Vietnam War. He was a Marine and was living on a pension. But over the last few years the pain got to be so bad that he couldn’t work any more.”

Bishop, according to Bowen, had been living in the Philippines the last two years and passed away in his sleep when his heart gave out.

“He was around in the golden age,” states Bowen. “He must have worked on more than a 100 pictures with me.” Bowen says Bishop was the guy who’d supply drugs to everyone. “He used to have pills for everything- he was like the set doctor. He was just an enormous fan of the industry. He loved everyone. He reveled in working. He worked with Spielberg and John Woo. I remember him working on a picture with Woo and on his days off he shot with me. He was a true Hollywood story. A had a lot of kids that came to work for me and he was the conduit that got them on to things like Battlestar Gallactica. He helped some major players in Hollywood transfer from porno into the real Hollywood. He got them into the unions. He got them on to the big shows. He was a terrific guy. He struggled all of his life with drugs because of the wounds from Vietnam. He was about 60.”