Porn Valley- Hall of Fame director Roy Karch, an adept harmonica player and frequent Sardos attendee, was on KSEX Monday night. Karch who, attended X-Con Sunday and talked a little bit about that, traces his porn career back to stone carvings and cave etchings was a dancer at one point in his career.
Karch: There was a time when we were doing life sex shows in New York on 42nd St. I was a school teacher in the daytime. I taught high school P.E. What they had was live simulated sex acts in the early Seventies. We’d be an hour on the stage, then they’d show an hour film. I would leave the Bronx where I was teaching, drive to Manhattan, meet my old lady who was a dental assistant on the West Side. We’d meet on 42nd St. We’d go and do a performance. It was simulated sex acts and we got busted several times. We did a little show. I came on as a gym teacher. We had to kill an hour. The show started at 3. My school let out at 3. From there we did loops. Loops were old 8mm films. They were 3 minutes long, no sound. The reason they got called loops is because once the machines came in, the peep shows, they would automatically loop around.
Wankus suggested that gay peep shows were, by definition, fruit loops.
Karch also did hardcore sex in the loops. “There was no sound- you couldn’t hear me moan.” Karch, who currently does a lot of projects for VCA and Adam & Eve, also broke ground by being the first to have a public access cable TV show. “It was X-rated,” Karch noted. “We had live people doing live sex acts on television. We were on every Friday night, 10 o’clock live from New York City. Every Friday night until 1977 we did 150 hours of programming.”
Asked if there were community repercussions, Karch said after an incident in which Betty Dodson masturbated with five women on the air, the cable company pulled the plug. “We brought the case to the Supreme Court and they upheld their original ruling that there must be a channel that cannot be censored.” Karch said to this day, “public access is really uncensorable by federal law” [try telling that to Adelphia Cable when they pulled Playboy].
“Very few people do it because that have to go through the political ramifications,” Karch said. The show lasted three years and it was then that Karch decided upon moving to Los Angeles. “I left my loft on the lower East Side and just moved to L.A.”
According to Karch, Al Goldstein pretty much took over his slot. “Al was a guest of ours a couple of times. At the end of ’75 he brought on Midnight Blue.” While he was in New York, Karch noted that he also worked together with Legs McNeil on a show called Blow Dry. Then when he got to California, Karch worked as a production manager on the Dracula Sucks shoot which starred John Holmes, John Leslie, Paul Thomas, Annette Haven, Kay Parker, Seka and Bill Margold among others.
Karch, who helms Roy Karch Productions, was hard pressed to come up with a figure but thinks that it’s reasonable to assume that he’s shot over 5,000 sex scenes. “I’ve been 34 years doing this.” Karch said he didn’t need a website. “What do I need a website for?” Wankus noted that new directors in the business like Guy Capo are developing a fan base. Karch said if fans wants to get a hold of him, he’s at Sardos on Tuesday night, the booth on the right. Karch who prefers to “fly under the radar,” would prefer that fans didn’t e-mail him.
Karch talked about how an agent he met at X-Con wanted to e-mail him pictures. “I said I don’t want pictures.” Asked how he hires girls, Karch said the girls either know him or they don’t. “I give them a card. If they call, they work. I’m so non-computered.”
Asked if he did any mainstream productions besides Jurassic Park [an age dig], Karch said he did a lot of music videos in the Eighties such as for Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and Donna Summer. “We did a lot of music stuff.”
Wankus than asked Karch about the story at the Rio in Las Vegas in which Karch spilled red wine on the white carpet. “I still feel terrible,” said Karch. “Every day I can’t drink wine. It’s good for the heart and I can’t drink any more. Every time I drink red wine I see Rio de Janeiro. I see Carmen Miranda.” Karch said it wasn’t his room. But he walked into a party and did a toast. “There were three of us there- white carpet, red wine.”
Shayla LaVeaux was another scheduled guest, and Karch had been doing some work with her. But LaVeaux never showed during the evening. “We had done a few shoots with Shayla,” said Karch. “A couple for Adam & Eve. We did a show called Pillow Talk and one just recently called True Hardwood Stories.”
Karch, who said he was enjoying the life of Riley, was asked if there was money in directing. “It depends who you are,” he said. “When I started there was no money. It was take the bus and meet us there and we’ll give you some fun and then you go home. Now it’s a wild industry. It’s a very lucrative industry.”
During the rhyming rap jam portion of the show Carmen Luvana filled in for Shayla LaVeaux who was AWOL. Luvana and Karch began mixing syllables soon enough. Karch, begging for restraint from rules that would require him to show skin, had Luvana in an uproar.
“Rules are rules,” yelled Luvana. “If he leaves I’m leaving! He has to play by the rules.” Karch said it wasn’t happening. Wankus suggested that Karch not mess with Carmen and tactfully suggested that Karch show some ass cheek. “That ain’t happenin’,” Karch insisted. Wankus said the game has rules.
“Part of the rules is if you fuck up you gotta show some skin.” Karch pointed out that Luvana had fucked up on several occasions and wasn’t penalized. “I’m not here to get naked,” Karch insisted. Luvana said she’d see Karch naked. Wankus told her she was a sick bitch and needed to calm the fuck down.