Billy Eye's 'Porn Credit' - TVparty! Books

Excerpt from
PUNK
by Bily
Ingram
#1 in our
Role Models
For America
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If you wanted to watch a porno film pre-1980 you had to go down into the
basement where an 8mm projector was set up, clip on the small movie roll,
thread it through the machine and turn it on. Chances are the only sound
you would hear would be the clacking of the projector for about seven
minutes; at that point the film unspooled and was slap-slap-slapping it harder
than you were.
Video cassette players were prohibitively expensive for the average American
consumer but once the price point dropped below $1,000 around 1980
the hardware started to move. Accessibility to pornography was a primary
sales motivator, there were so few commercially available Hollywood movies
on video cassette it made no sense to buy one of those expensive machines
otherwise.
Gene’s TV, located on Sunset Boulevard near Silver Lake, marketed their
high end discount electronics exclusively to gays. Gene (nice guy) sold RCA’s
lowest priced VCR, the SelectaVision 250, for $769.00 in 1980, around
$3,000 in today’s dollars. Only one percent of Americans owned a VCR but
there were so many degenerates in Hollywood Gene could hardly keep them
in stock.
Video was easier and astronomically cheaper to edit and distribute as well,
guys who made a decent living pumping out short 8mm films were collecting
and redistributing their mostly silent reels on videotape for an ever expanding
marketplace. The money was huge. It would cost the modern equivalent of
$50.00 just to rent an adult film from the Drake Bookstore in 1980, something
akin to $250.00 in today’s cash to buy one.
Another aspect of my job at Data-Boy was designing the elaborate, full-color
video tape boxes for Trade!Mark, Laguna Pacific, and others. My desk was
cluttered with overly lit pictures of blank faced, bleached blond mannequins
in their mid-twenties committing acts that looked neither pleasurable nor
particularly sexy.
Producer William Higgins exploded in 1979 after Boys of Venice, starring
Derrick Stanton and Kip Noll, blew the doors off the X-rated theaters.
Higgins’ sun burnished California beach boys set against radiantly golden
outdoor scenarios upended the genre. He took the piles of cash from that
success, ramped up a production company, Laguna Pacific, and a distribution
wing, Catalina. He was already planning the sequel, Pacific Coast Highway,
which would prove to be a smash hit in 1981. Higgins exhibited his artfully
directed features through a network of X-rated venues, most notably the
Century Theaters in Hollywood and San Francisco and the Adonis in New
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York. Video cassettes could now be simultaneously distributed via twenty
thousand dirty bookstores around the country. With two robust distribution
channels and visceral content Higgins’ money came hand over fist. He did
it by casting against type, young guys with lean swimmer’s builds instead of
the decidedly older idols of the 1970s, then positioning the horny pups in
intriguing locales with non-linear but cohesive narratives.
Higgins’ casting couch was the faggle of gay geese on Santa Monica. He knew
how to separate diamonds from the dust. Confident, compactly fit, tussled
dark hair, stubbled tanned face, William Higgins was incredibly attractive,
not so much physically, more as a force of nature. He roamed the halls with
musky co-stars and hangers-on in his wake, a lost boys entourage made all
the more alluring by having obviously just rolled out of bed.
Michael Panknin theorized Higgins only brought around his rough hewn
companions to determine whether or not they could hang in decent
company. Or whatever it was we were. I’ve been told one of the muscular
eighteen year old thoroughbreds Higgins chaperoned was Jeff Stryker who,
a few years later, became the most successful male adult film star of the next
two decades. I’d witnessed
plenty of their
randy antics from the
photos on my drafting
table. I wanted to
dash into the blaring
sunshine with these
worshipped gods,
retreat to their sexual
Valhalla, never returning
to the netherworld
we lesser mortals
inhabited.
The guy I replaced at
Data-Boy did exactly
that. Whenever he
called to arrange Higgins’
advertising placements
his voice rang
out with the raspiness
of late night partying.
I burned with jealousy.
35

Even before Boys of Venice, Kip Noll was a cottage industry for Larry
Ginsburg at Trade!Mark with short films, slick magazines, and photo sets
featuring Kip wearing nothing but that ubiquitous blue accented yellow
Waipahu High School nylon jacket he’d worn since his silent movie days
jacking off to pictures of Fonzie from Happy Days. In one layout he was
posed kneeling on the bedroom floor queuing a Barry Manilow album on
his portable record player, like a coquettish Sandra Dee if she’d had seven
inches of flaccid pipe hanging between her legs.
Kip was generating so much money Nolls were popping up everywhere
to cash in the family jewels. Brother Nolls, cousin Nolls, all with little in
common other than a complete lack of discretion as to where they thrust
their penii. Of course none of these guys were really named Noll nor were
they related; they didn’t even bother to cast kids that looked remotely like
each other.
It was only natural that producer director Larry Ginsburg tapped Kip Noll
for Trade!Mark’s first feature length dickfest cleverly entitled Cum'ing of
Age. Kip’s California dreamy looks melted through the celluloid thanks
to a buoyantly clueless gaze betraying not a hint of self-awareness and
abundant pouting lips that had long ago forgotten how to smile. Adorned
with copious blond hair bleached solely by chlorine, a naturally muscular,
smooth body and ramrod cock, Kip was the archetypical 1970s man child,
the vacuous pool boy cougars pounced upon. Kip was a radical departure
from the hairy porn bears of the past decade, the David Cassidy of raunchy
films, now universally recognized as the first Twink because of this film.
36

He had already starred in three features, Roommates, Kip Noll and the Westside
Boys, and Grease Monkeys, the latter of which was currently playing at
the Century Theater on Hollywood Boulevard where success was measured
not at the box office alone but by the amount of cleanup the back of the
seats needed. Grease Monkeys was apparently a two handkerchief picture.
Larry Ginsburg (who also sported an alias, Mark Reynolds) had an appetite
for doe-eyed innocents or, if they were on back order, their Bizarro world
counterparts. I’m not positive if the sweetmeats he paraded around the office
were strictly legal tender but a promising career as a Noll brother might have
been one of his lures. Larry sauntered over to my desk with his meat shadow
one afternoon, “Billy can you help me out tonight?” “That depends,” my
eyes locked on his newly bejeweled pet being groomed for the track.
“I have a recording session set up for tonight at Cherokee Studios and one of
my actors can’t make it. Can you do it?” It just so happened I was the only
actor in history to move from North Carolina to L.A. to get away from performing.
“I have the film edited, we’re just going to run the movie through
twice and you’ll talk as if you’re Kip Noll. It’ll take a hour or so and I’ll pay
you a hundred dollars.”
“Why?!?” I was told every adult film made up to that point was shot on
16mm film, it was prohibitively expensive, unless you cared about the
product, to sync sound to picture so the voices had to be dubbed in later.
Someone along the way thought it would be a good idea to layer cheesy
stock synth music over the soundtrack in a vain attempt to distract the
viewer from how pathetic the entire production was.
37

At first refusing the offer, Larry pleaded that he had a lot invested in this
project. Not from what I could see. But Cherokee was an established
recording studio and it paid for my date that night to see a new band in
Topanga Canyon called Missing Persons. What I didn’t know, Saul told me
later, was that I had been Larry’s first choice to voice the character from the
beginning. There was no dropped out actor. Who was it being groomed for
the track again?
Overdubbing an entire sixty minute ‘feature’ was an absurd idea. Not
as ridiculous as hiring a guy with a southern accent to voice your quintessential
California surfer dude but a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks.
That evening in a large darkened room where Saturday Night Fever and
Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall were recorded Larry screened his tawdry
photoplay for myself and two other actors, one being his barely conscious
knucklehead from earlier in the day.
I was familiar with Kip’s latest release working on the video box and the
Cum’ing of Age color magazine that sold for $12.00. The storyline, if such
a thing could be said to exist here, opened with Kip tossing a Frisbee with
his younger brother Scott and their pal Steve. After
Scott runs upstairs to his bedroom to whack
off to pictures of his adoring older brother
he’s busted. Kip, unappreciative of Scott’s
enthusiastic interest in his modelling career,
spanks little bro’s bare ass with a hairbrush before
plowing his lower forty. After spying on
this semen soaked family feud, freakishly hung
Steve decides to jizz out with his biz out.
The cartoonish nature of the goings on made
dubbing a breeze, just a silly improv, I just
had to remember not to talk when Kip’s
mouth was full. Larry admonished me as I
was leaving the session, “Next time try not
to sound so black.” There would be no next
time despite rave reviews for Kip’s performance.
Michael Panknin was an especially sharp
observer when it came to people, he loved
Old Hollywood and the stars that made it
great, always going on about Bette Davis,
38

Kip Noll.
39

Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow. I didn’t know who any of those people
were except by name so his stories were lost on me. Michael accepted the
hardcore film players that wandered through the building as an extension
of the exploitative nature of the motion picture industry writ small.
One afternoon Assistant Editor Larry Scantland was completely frazzled,
attempting to get Dave Hodgson to assist someone at the counter. “Who
is it Larry?” “I don’t know David they asked for you!!!” Michael Panknin
poked his head around the corner, “It’s the Noll brothers...” Larry Ginsburg
had brought along Kip and Scott to look over the final color proofs
for their magazines and the box art for his latest opus. In reality it was
because David Hodgson wanted a close up look at the stars.
40

Kip’s tan was a faded memory, alabaster skin accenting a spotted face,
surprisingly dressed in his signature Daisy Dukes, those aquavescent eyes
too blurry to focus on much. Not that they needed to, he didn’t have any
say about anything. The raw attraction was undeniable but there was no
sense of him enjoying any measure of success. In any other circumstance I
would have assumed he was a hustler that hit his sell by date.
Then there was Kip’s protégé. Dewy with the scent of Herbal Essence
shampoo, he expressed an interest in the proofs for The Summer of Scott
Noll his first (and final) starring role where he proved once and for all it
wasn’t just Maxwell House that was good to the last drop.
As Scott was looking over the layouts Michael Panknin and I exchanged
knowing glances because, well, Scott was pretty darn cute trying to appear
professional in his mesh rope muscle shirt and clinging blue Dolphin
shorts with white piping. He seemed like a good kid from a nice family.
These “brothers” existed in two different worlds, at least for that moment.
I liked Larry; he was a fun guy. After I left Data-Boy in 1981 he called and
asked if we could meet at his penthouse apartment just above Sunset in
West Hollywood, one of those
smoky glass, 1970s moderne
places like you saw in episodes of
Columbo. He wanted to talk to
me about doing some freelance
design work for his video boxes,
at least that’s what he told my
roomate Susan. His offer was
of a freelance nature but not at
all to my liking. I opted for a
much slower descent into hell
which fell outside the time frame
of this book, thank God, or I’d
have to tell you about it.
Scott Noll’s cat meets
canary moment.
41