Las Vegas- Arrow Films’ Ray Pistol, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, has been in the strip club business so long he’s hard pressed to come up with the date when he bought the fabled Talk of the Town.

Pistol thinks maybe 15 years ago is when he bought the club from a guy who ran an outcall service then decided that money would be easier to come by with a strip club on the build it they will come principle. “He found out that it was harder work than the outcall service,” Pistol said. Pistol got a call from the guy asking if he’d buy him out. “He said name your price and I bought him out,” Pistol remembers.

“It was in sad shape- we had to drive around and pick up the girls. We had so few and they didn’t have any transportation.” Pistol says now he can see why the guy sold the club. “It was marginally operating. But we got some more girls through advertising. We changed a few things around and it worked.”

The shuttle service strikes you as a funny idea, but Pistol insists it’s offered in town. “The cabbies will make deals with girls to come and pick them up,” he says. “All they got to do is given them a schedule. But that doesn’t mean the girls will be there when the cabbie is.”

As in the porn industry as well as the gentlemen’s club industry, some girls have it together and some do not. “The girls that have it together get college degrees and have houses and drive in Mercedes convertibles,” says Pistol. But the ups and downs are there, too, where one night you might make $1,000; the next night, $20. “I have some girls that are highly successful and some who just don’t have it together,” Pistol notes.

Pistol says there have been a couple of girls who’ve been with him since time immemorial. One of them is named Jing-Jing, and Pistol even went so far as to create a movie around her, titled Net Dreams which came out around 1997. “She’s been with me forever,” says Pistol. “It was the first Internet movie and it was a high end thing with Asia Carrera and Roxanne Hall. Roxanne Hall was actually playing Jing-Jing and we were doing a twist off of her life.”

Pistol said before all this happened he set up a webcam where his girls could do shows when they weren’t on stage. “This guy in Florida fell in love with Jing-Jing,” Pistol recalls. “He flew out and spent tons of money on her and did everything in the world to get him to marry her and go back to Florida. That’s pretty much the plot of the movie, too.”

According to Pistol, Jing-Jing started leaning the suitor’s way, but, in the end she said no and “went back to her wife-beater boyfriend.” As if that plot twist is surprising. But Pistol said he gave the movie more of an up tempo ending where the good guy wins. Pistol said he got some criticism for the movie in that it wasn’t realistic [though it was based on true events].

For plot purposes, Pistol says he even put a commercial in the middle of the movie for an imaginary webcam. Although Roxanne Hall wasn’t playing Jing-Jing per se, Jing-Jing being a Filippino, she played the role of the girl based on her with the guy falling in love with her. Pistol didn’t use the name Jing-Jing, however. Though at one time Jing-Jing, coincidentally, went under the name Roxanne.

“Jing-Jing was maybe 5 feet tall and wouldn’t weigh 100 pounds if you wrapped her up in wet towels and a heavy robe,” Pistol notes. “But I watched Jing-Jing. She is so good because the guys will whip it out and show it to her either on the webcam, or in the booth they’ll whip it out.” What would crack Pistol up is the way Jing-Jing who ooh and ah at the size of a man’s penis, schmoozing a guy into believing that he had the biggest tool on earth. “That would break me in half, she’d say, I could never handle all of that. My boyfriend’s not nearly that big! It’s so monstrous.

“What guy wouldn’t want to hear that,” says Pistol. “I don’t care what size you are, every guy wants to hear that kind of talk. Jing-Jing had the act down pat.”

Regardless of what some critics might have had to say about realism, Pistol says he was very proud of his work. “It was a very good movie. Asia Carrera played the more experienced working girl there who was trying to lead the Roxanne Hall character, a recluse who stayed on the Internet all day long, down the primrose path.” According to the movie’s plot, the Roxanne Hall character had an abusive father who paid her no attention at all. “He just gave her money. Then she wound up with a guy who basically didn’t give a damn about her. He took her money, and Asia Carrera talked her into leaving that life and going to Las Vegas with her and starting a whole new thing. It was hard but she finally got her out of her house.”

Once Hall gets to Vegas she captivates a guy who is also an Internet nerd. “It was a good little love story,” if Pistol doesn’t mind saying so. “There was good acting and good production value. We also had a huge orgy in it that included maybe 30 people. It was a costume orgy. The concept there was that the bad guy was blackmailing everybody.”

Pistol is not shy about letting you know that he spends big bucks on his movies. “Between $70,000 to $80,000,” he says. “All shot in Las Vegas. Huge casts complete with scripts.” And Pistol isn’t shy about telling you how a lot of critics would “ding” him on his movies despite the lavish accoutrements. Pistol would write the scripts along with the help of his significant other, Treasure Brown. And Pistol would often rely on directors like Bud Lee and Thomas Payne.

“Because they had Playboy deals,” he explains, “but I had a feeling we were getting dinged because people thought they were going to be ‘soft’ movies because these guys were shooting them. And nothing could be further from the truth because Raymond Pistol was producing them.

“And I don’t like soft,” Pistol continues. “I like elements of both. Great sex but with a reason.” Pistol also recalls Steve Drake- an actor that he was almost set to do a porn version of Gladiator- being one of the bad guys in Net Dreams along with John Decker who was Hall’s boyfriend at one time.

Pistol: I’d put things in my features that would be allusions to literature but nobody ever picked them up. I would take and rework a classic tale.

Gene: But when you’d start whipping out those plays from Aristophanes I think that’s when your start to lose your audience.

Pistol: But I’d clean them up so good, nobody would ever recognize them!