Romance with porn stars became the stuff of much gossip during the 1990s. Before her marriage to TV actor Richard Mulligan, Rachel Ryan had affairs with actors Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Charlie Sheen dated Ginger Lynn, Domonique, Tanya Rivers and other porn girls while Pauly Shore, Billy Idol, Axel Rose, David Lee Roth, Slash and various other rock stars did Savannah. Tony Curtis did Danyel Cheeks, Andre Agassi did Jeanna Fine, and Magic Johnson did Heather Hunter. Artist Jeff Koons married and then divorced Illona Cicciolina Staller. For several months Robert DeNiro dated Charmaine Sinclair. Kylie Ireland had a one night stand with Michael Jordan. Devon Shire says she had Barry Bonds' child. Devon also did Al Cowlings, O.J. Simpson's friend. Tyffany Million slept with three famous men including Larry King. She found them all wimpy.

During Reagen's reign, pornographers like Robert McCallum (Gary Graver), Joyce Snider, Paul Ziller, Roberta Findlay, Walter and Gregory Dark, Fred J. Lincoln (Perna), J. Christian Ingvartsen, Steven Kaman, Svetlana and David Marsh, Hal Freeman, Jerome Tanner, Lauren Ross, Carlos Tobalina, Joe Gage and David McCabe left the medium for such mainstream genres as horror.

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"The market for adult films started slipping around 1982," Chuck Vincent told the 3/9/88 Variety. "In the past three years it's dried up. Five years ago (1983), the video companies such as VCA and Caballero would typically advance $40-60,000 for the video rights to a theatrical porn film. Then two years ago (1986) they stopped making offers - they decided they could do four shot-on-video programs themselves for the cost of video right to a single theatrical film. These programs are shot in a single day, with no theatrical value."

Screenwriter Rich Marx earned thousands of dollars from his X-rated scripts including Taboo but after the video revolution he found himself out of work. He went mainstream. Rich told Variety that "the fundamental difference between now and several years ago is that back then we wanted to make a real picture - which people would enjoy and had possibilities of attracting the crossover, mainstream audience. The best shot we had at this was Chuck Vincent's Roommates in 1981, which I cowrote.

"The new breed are amateurs who have picked up a video camera. Video had enabled them to bypass film technique and the entire film distribution business, so they can create a direct-marketing mail-order business to store and the public, even creating warehouses in their own homes."

Marx blamed sex magazines for allowing this decline in quality. "Their reviews have become a direct adjunct of the film companies' publicity departments. The companies provide for free the chromes [pictures] the mens magazines need for photo spreads to fill their pages. In return, the magazines want to keep a good relationship going and cannot run honest reviews of the films or tapes. About the only objective publication is Screw, which doesn't have to rely on the film companies."

Joyce Snyder, who produced the Raw Talent series, made the R-rated horror flick Hazing in Hell using director Paul Ziller who also started in porn. He later directed the straight comedy Ralph & The Rockets.

Joe Gage, a leading 1970s director of gay flicks, quit porn in 1980 and using his real name, he shot science fiction, horror and comedy flicks for independent distributors. David McCabe directed gay pornos such as Never Big Enough as well as heterosexual porn before directing a dozen horror movies.

Tom de Simone switched from making gay porn to direct The Concrete Jungle and other films for New World. The director-producer team for Western Visuals, Jerome Tanner and Lauren Ross turned to children's features in the mid'80s. Carlos Tobalina directed the mainstream films Flesh & Bullets and The Ghoulies.

Porn has long served as a training ground for the mainstream. Oscar winner John G. Alvidsen directed several X-rated flicks including 1969's X-rated flick Turn On To Love, 1970's Guess What We Learned in School Today? and 1971's Cry Uncle. Before Scott Cunningham hit it big with Friday the 13th, he co-produced and co-directed with the late Brad Talbot 1973's porno Case of the Full Moon Murders.

Exploitation directors William Lustig (Maniac), Gregory Hippolyte (Animal Instincts), Gary Graver, and David DeCoteau made numerous pornos. Lustig directed two X-rated films in 1977 under the name Billy Bag: Hot Honey and The Violation of Claudia. Hippolyte may be best known as pornographer Gregory Dark who directed 1984's New Wave Hookers. Gary Graver made over 30 pornos under the name Robert McCallum. Only DeCoteau talks freely about his porn past: "I learned everything working in adult films… when I started out I had no idea what I was doing…. But in adult movies, I learned."

Before directing the Oscar winning documentary Best Boy, Ira Wohl edited the 1973 black porno Lialeh. Using the pseudonym Abe Snake, Peter Loche directed such X-rated features as It Happened in Hollywood and Angela Fireworks Woman.

A 20th Century Fox executive, Scott Baumgarten, co-produced and appeared in 1974's hardcore feature Sometime Sweet Susan. Scott's partner for Susan, Brad Talbot, produced the 1981 Italian 3-D bomb Comin' At Ya'.

John Derek directed and Bo Derek produced but did not appear in the 1978 porno Love You starring Annette Haven. The late Andy Warhol produced, directed and photographed the sex film Blue Movie.
 

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Famous foreign directors who did X include Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses), Valerian Borowcyk (La Bete) and Marco Bellochio (Devil in the Flesh), though only Oshima's film contained abundant scenes of penetration. Playboy pictorial subject Kristine DeBell, a lifetime star of soap operas and B movies, performed in the X-rated feature Alice in Wonderland.

Mainstream director Bud Townsend, father of actress Patricia Townsend, directed soft and hardcore versions of Alice in Wonderland.

Born in 1941, actress Karin Shubert, who played opposite such actors as Yves Montand and Richard Burton, began doing European porn in the late '80s.

Harry Flecks, a well-known porn pseudonym, photographed Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat, Memories Within Miss Aggie, and The Story of Joanna. Using his real name Joao Fernandez, he worked as Director of Photography for action pictures featuring Chuck Norris and Fred Williamson. Ralf D. Bode, a mainstream cinematographer for Avildsen and Michael Apsted, shot Screw's hardcore 1975 feature SOS. Chuck Vincent's Director of Photography Larry Revere worked on numerous hardcore films before moving to R-rated material. Larry reminds Phil Rupp of the cameraman character in the 1997 movie Boogie Nights. "I worked for him [Revere] as an electric a few times and he talk a lot about "the look" (common cameraman speak), spend lots of time lighting something, then bash frontal fill over the whole thing, killing any effect. In Boogie Nights, the D lighting was a bunch of 1K Zips (the lights you saw moved around next to the camera in Dirk's first sex scene) right behind the camera--BANG--just like a camera flash.

"Also the way he was having a technical conversation while Little Bill's wife was getting laid in public. I remember once Chuck Vincent having this horrendous argument, I mean screaming, smashing, yelling, and the whole studio got silent, uncomfortable, and Larry just pipes in, 'Anybody see the Knicks last night?, Jim rig me a hair light.' He was very blase about everything." (RAME)

Crews often move back and forth between porn and the mainstream, but it's not easy. "A lot of people in the non-X-rated business pride themselves on never having sunk so low as to make an X-rated picture," says pornographer Ernest Greene. "Anyone who has done hardcore has a lot of resistance and snobbery to overcome… There will never come a time when X-rated videos will be viewed as great, undiscovered gems. Nor the people who make them. They will never be trumpeted as the great hidden talents, the real picture-makers, the guys who should be given a fair shot by Hollywood."

Porn actors rarely cross to conventional films though Chuck Vincent used many of them in his R-rated projects. "I cast for the best," Vincent told Variety, "and adult performers are experienced actors. They suffer because it is difficult for them to escape the connotation of having worked in porn films."

Director Brian DePalma flirted with using Annette Haven in Body Double until studio brass at Columbia nixed her casting because of her porno past. The role went to then unknown Melanie Griffith who learned how to strip on stage from Haven.

Carol Connors (the actress not the songwriter) appeared in many pornos including Deep Throat prior to becoming a regular on Chuck Barris' The Gong Show TV program. After that, she performed again in such sex films as the Candy series. Abigail Clayton switched from porn to costar with Gerard Depardieu in Marco Ferreri's Bye Bye Monkey and opposite Joe Spinellie in William Lustig's Maniac.

The late Wade Nichols (Dennis Parker) made the most successful acting transition. He starred in numerous X-rated films including Take Off before becoming Detective Mallory in the ABC daytime soap Edge of the Night.

Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione used Malcom McDowell, Sir John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole in Caligula but they were far away when the Sicilian shot the movie's few explicit scenes.

Spaulding Gray appeared in two 1975 porn films - Farmer's Daughter and Misty Beethoven. Sylvester Stallone appeared naked in 1970's A Party at Kitty and Stud's which features no hardcore action.

The above article was written in early 2000.  Things are slowly changing.

Reference: Paris Hilton.  Basically a TV Network uses the "illegal, secret" leaking of a porn tape of a celebrity on the cusp of launching a TV show with this relative unknown, outside the insular world of the New York socialite party scene.  The show made a ton of money.  The only lawsuit was filed against someone ELSE making money off the tape.  You tell me - what it leaked or stolen?

Then there are the geniuses like R. Kelly - who videotape themselves with UNDERAGE girls, and prostitutes at that.  He will likely go to prison.  She isn't in legal trouble yet, but Abi Titmuss, the blonde and busty British TV personality has footage out with a girl, and reportedly she makes the admission in THAT footage of her and boyfriend John Leslie filming Abi with yet another woman who didn't know she was being filmed.  There is also reported orgy footage of one of Abi and John's parties. 

On the legitimate crossovers to porn, however, Snoop Dog openly produces and partakes in Girls Gone Wild videos.  Even Ice-T, once and future rapper, and actor on the very straight NBC show Law And Order is featured in his own porn tape "Ice-T's Pimpin' 101".

Jaimee Foxworth, who was a child actress on the Fox TV show Family Matters did hardcore porn under the name CRAVE.  British glamour model and surgically enhanced Jordan has some footage that has been making the rounds.  Gena Lee Nolin has an ex boyfriend who has a tape of her - ah - it always seems to be the ex-boyfriends.   Croatian pop star Severina has some "stolen" footage that's circulated.   There's also been an instance recently of a newscaster, Catherine Bosley,  who wasn't in porn, but was totally nude and photographed/videotaped during a wet t-shirt contest and as a result, was fired.  The there's the rumor about Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher having some homemade "photos" stolen has kept this kind of story going.  There's even a snippet of The Simpsons that has been pornographically animated.

Curiously - porn has become mainstream.  It has now become quasi-fashionable for celebrities to appear overly sexual and even to have a hardcore sex tape of them "available" though they always claim it was stolen, or otherwise illegitimate.  Especially in the world of music.  Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, Brett Michaels (Poison) have all had hardcore sex tapes out.  So has Tonya Harding.  Pamela Anderson has featured in two separate ones.  There are some tapes purportedly of celebrities which may indeed be hardcore sex tapes - some professionally done, some amateur and done at home - but still - it's out there.  If your an actor or musician or sports star and you film yourself having sex and don't destroy the tape after you and your girlfriend watch it, you probably deserve what you get!

And the hits just keep on coming.