Follow Gene Ross at twitter@GeneRoss3; Follow AdultFYI at twitter@Adultfyi1
Over the years porn historian Bill Margold and I have had honest differences of opinion. However we do share a mutual love of the cinema so we don’t let adult industry politics get in the way too much.
When Margold says the Free Speech Coalition is a useless organization, I’m right there with him on that score. When he calls AVN an absolutely vacuous nuisance, brother, he doesn’t know half of it. Where Margold and I differ, though, are on some of the current issues.
When the Mr. Marcus syphilis story broke, Bill ran to Marcus’ defense saying that Marcus didn’t give anyone else the drip.
Using Margold’s line of reasoning, my argument to him at the time was that some psycho opening fire in a movie theater can slide if his attorney argues he didn’t kill anyone.
Knowing that Margold idolizes John Stagliano I’m pretty sure where he stands on the Katie Summers lawsuit. Yet being around Margold as long as I have, I’m even surprised when this week on the Alesia Pleasure podcast, Margold sort of dismissed the Kellys Wells incident www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=59129 where Wells got her jaw busted on an Evil Angel set.
Throw in the Brian Pumper scandal, and you got a pattern of reckless behavior, I think. If you need a recap here’s what happened in the Pumper situation.
Pumper was a director for Evil Angel and was cut loose. Karen Stagliano called it “creative differences.” But when more probing was done on the issue, it was revealed that Pumper played fast and loose with STD testing requirements on three separate occasions. A report circulated that Pumper was faking STD tests.
In two instances female performers’ STD tests hadn’t come back before the scenes were shot; in a third instance (which subsequently led to Pumper’s dismissal), the performer had not tested prior to shooting a scene with Pumper. A post-scene test revealed that the female performer was positive for chlamydia.
In all three cases, it was Pumper who worked with the female performers in question. In Pumper’s mind he didn’t put anyone else at risk. Sounds like Margold’s Mr. Marcus argument.
Pumpergate was discovered by Evil Angel’s record keeper when certain production dates, and the performers used in those scenes, didn’t correspond with valid negative test results.
“That’s not true about the testing,” Pumper told XBiz. “And yes, it’s true that we had creative differences. Simple, that’s it. That’s all.”
Margold, on the other hand, termed Wells’ receiving a broken jaw to be a “badge of honor.”
If that’s the case, you wonder what must be accomplished to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor in Margold’s book. Methinks Margold didn’t want to take in account the fact that Stagliano would have been implicated because in Margold’s estimation, Buttman can do no wrong.
Wells got her jaw busted [I’m told someone threw a punch] during a rough sex scene. She was subsequently paid $40,000 to keep her mouth shut as if that hadn’t already been done for her.
Maybe or maybe not, Margold remembers when performer Vivian Valentine sported a shiner during a rough sex scene she shot for Anabolic Video. The resultant publicity on the Internet pretty much forced Anabolic to drop the series, but the hue and cry went on because the company continued to employ a director named Khan Tusion who essentially lived up to his name.
While I have enormous respect for Bill, I think he needs to turn the air conditioning on in his abode and clear his brain. Margold, incidentally, told Pleasure he doesn’t like air conditioning. In these sweltering days we’ve been having, maybe that explains it.