Mr. Max Hardcore—a.k.a. Max Steiner, a.k.a. Paul Steiner, né Paul Little—is 5'6" and a very fit 135. He is somewhere between 40 and 60 years old and resembles more than anything a mesomorphic and borderline-psycho Henry Gibson. He is wearing a black cowboy hat and what has to be one of the very few long-sleeved Hawaiian shirts in existence anywhere. Once the PA guarding the door mellows out and introductions are made (H.H. managing to drop the name of this magazine several times in one sentence), Max reveals himself to be a genial and garrulous host and offers everybody disposable plastic cups of vodka before settling in with yr. corresps. to discuss what for Max are the most pressing and relevant issues at this year’s AVN Awards, which issues are the career, reputation, personal history, and overall life philosophy of Mr. Max Hardcore.
Pioneered (depending whom you talk to) by either Max Hardcore or John (“Buttman”) Stagliano, “Gonzo” has become one of this decade’s most popular and profitable genres of adult video. It’s more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and the Hell panel from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. A Gonzo film is always set at some distinctive locale or occasion—Daytona Beach at spring break, the Cannes Film Festival, etc. There’s always a randy and salivous “host” talking directly to a handheld camera: “Well and we’re here at the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks like there’s going to be lots of excitement, John Travolta and Sigourney Weaver are supposed to both be in town, and there’s also the world-famous beach, and I’m told there’s always some real seriously good-looking little girls at the beach, so let’s us head on down.” (That’s the approximate lead-in to a recent Max-at-Cannes Gonzo, a type of signature lead-in that Max refers to with a 56-tooth grin as “always mercifully brief”—and please note the “little girls at the beach” thing, because this is another of Max’s professional signatures, the infantilization of his videos’ females as dramatic foils for his own film persona, which is always that of a sort of degenerate uncle or stepdad.) Then the shaky but ever-focused camera heads on down to the ocean or mall or CES or whatever, scoping out attractive women 20 while the host moans and chews his knuckle in lust. Then pretty soon host and camera start actually coming up to the women they’ve been looking at and engaging them in little cameo “interviews” full of sideways leers and salacious entendres. Some of the interviewees are actual civilians, but some are always what Max refers to as “ringers,” meaning professional porn actresses. And so the viewer is treated to the classic frathouse fantasy of moving, via just a couple of singles-bar “Hey there babe” lines, from scoping out an attractive woman to having wild and anatomically diverse sex with her, all while one of his buddies captures the whole thing on tape. 21
The issue of who exactly invented Gonzo being impossibly vexed and so notwithstanding, it is true that Max Hardcore is famous as a director for several things: (1) Being incredibly disciplined about budgets and tactical logistics, right down to forcing his crew and staff to wear identical jumpsuits of scarlet nylon so that they look like a national ski team—Max’s shoots are described (by Max) as “almost military operations”; (2) Not only employing ringers but actually sometimes being able to talk real live civilian “little girls” on the beach or in the mall into coming on back to the special MAXWORLD RV and having anal sex on camera; 22 (3) Being the first in “mainstream” (meaning nonfetish) adult video to perpetrate on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. W/r/t item (3), Max, after detailing for yr. correspondents the vo- and avocations that led him into the adult industry (a tale too literally incredible even to think about factchecking and trying to print), informs us that he is and always has been adult video’s “cutting-edge blade,” and that other less bold and original filmmakers have systematically stolen and used his, Max’s, degradations of women as a blueprint for their own subsequent shabby and derivative films’ degradations. 23 (Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, by the way, have heard Max hold forth many times before and are now outside the circle of discourse—D.F. in the bathroom for what seems like a peculiarly long time, H.H. on the couch with the actresses hashing out the implications of Seinfeld’s retirement for NBC’s ’98 lineup.)
Alone and in a place of conspicuous honor on a wood-finish shelf above the suite’s minibar is an actual AVN Awards statuette. The trophy resembles an Oscar/Emmy/Clio except that the figurine’s arms are up and out (making it also look a bit like Richard Nixon at the climax of the ’68 GOP convention), and something slightly blurry about the casting gives it a sort of cubic-zirconium aspect. Whether the statuette is heavy and solid vs. hollow and Little Leaguish remains unknown—there is no invitation to touch or heft it. One of the B-girls on the couch is now either laughing or weeping into her hands at something Harold Hecuba has said; her bare shoulders heave. It would be totally fantastic if the Seinfeld rerun on the huge TV were the episode about everybody trying to refrain from masturbating, but it isn’t.
Asked by one of yr. corresps. what he won this AVN Award on the shelf for, Max Hardcore slaps his knee: “I fucking stole it.” It’s now that hard middle-distance inspection reveals that the MAX HARDCORE on the metal strip at the trophy’s base has been scratched in by someone who is not a professional engraver. It looks done with a screwdriver, in fact. Max expands on the statuette caper: Shut inexplicably out of the Awards for years, he last year, upon exiting the stage (he’s always a presenter every year, which he regards as the AVNAs’ way of twisting the emotional blade), espied in the wings a large cardboard box filled with blank and unused AVN Award statuettes. 24 Whereupon he thought, as he now puts it, “What the fuck, I fucking deserve it” and snagged one, hiding it in his enormous Stetson and deriving no little satisfaction from attending various post-Awards parties with an illicit statuette under his hat. Max’s crew all laugh very hard at this anecdote, though the actresses don’t.
Alex Dane is now telling Harold Hecuba about a stray dog she found and has decided to keep. She is excited as she describes the dog and for a moment seems about fourteen; the impression lasts only a second or two and is heartbreaking. One of the B-girls, meanwhile, is explaining that she has just gotten a pair of cutting-edge breast implants that she can actually adjust the size of by adding or draining fluid via small valves under her armpits, and then—perhaps mistaking your correspondents’ expressions for ones of disbelief—she raises her arms to display the valves. There really are what appear to be valves.
So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes. 25 Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie.
Good old Max Hardcore, for instance, is a total psychopath—that’s part of his on-screen Gonzo persona—but so is the real Max/Paul Steiner. You’d almost have to have been there in that suite. Max sits holding court in his hat and pointy boots, looking at once magisterial and mindless, while his red-suited acolytes laugh on cue and a jr. high dropout shows off her valves. In truth, the first ten minutes of the impromptu interview in the Sahara are spent passing around a copy of something called Icon magazine, which Max has told us is doing a profile on him—we are expected to leaf through the magazine and comment favorably on its content and layout while Max watches us in the same hyperexpectant way that parents watch you when you’re looking at a snapshot of their kid that they’ve taken out uninvited and pressed on you. This is the actual chronology. There then f
ollows a torrent of autobiography and background that yr. corresps. have decided to deny Max the satisfaction of seeing reproduced here. After which is a kind of Max 101-like survey of personal philosophy and Gonzo theory and the statuette anecdote. The vodka is top-shelf and the plastic cups dusty. Then one of the starlets decides that she’s hungry, and Max insists on escorting her down to the Sahara’s restaurant and wants everybody else to come along, which eventually results in the B-girls and crewmen and yr. corresps. 26 all standing there awkwardly at the maître d’s podium while Max personally conducts the starlet to her table and pulls out her chair and tucks a serviette into her cleavage and pulls out a platinum-plated money clip and announces in a voice audible to everyone in the restaurant and foyer that he “want[s] to take care of the little girl’s damages in advance” and shoves bills into the hanky-pocket of the maître d’s tuxedo and then leaves her there by herself and herds us all back out and into the elevator and jabs impatiently at the button for his suite’s floor, almost jumping up and down with fury at the elevator’s delay; and we’re all rushed back up to the suite because it’s occurred to Max that he wants to show your corresps. something from this week’s filming that he thinks will sum up his particular porn genius better than any amount of exposition could … and then, reseated, he starts flipping through a notebook to find something.
“What it is is we got this one little girl back in the [infamous MAXWORLD] trailer, and after some face-fucking 27 and reaming her asshole and, like, your standard depravities, we get her to stick a pen—no, a what-do-you-call …”
Crewman: “Magic Marker.”
Max: “… Magic Marker, stick it up her asshole and write all this … this stuff,” holding up the notebook, opened to a page; again he has us pass it around:
is thereon written in a hand 28 that seems impressively legible, considering. Dick Filth makes a waggish inquiry about future film plans involving this girl and a typewriter, but Max doesn’t laugh (we noticed that Max never laughs at a joke he hasn’t told), and so neither does anyone else.
Doubtless most of this is going to get cut by Premiere, but it’s worth also observing—when this magazine’s assigned photographer (who’s also gotten in here with us this afternoon on H.H. and D.F.’s coattails) begins wondering aloud about the possibility of getting some good portraits at the Awards of winners holding their statuettes—the way Max right away jumps in with his idea of the perfect photo for the title page of this very article. The proposed shot is to be of Max Hardcore, holding several of the AVN Awards trophies he pledges either to win straight up or to gain possession of in other ways, seated in some kind of imperial-looking and really nice chair that is itself set up on the palm-studded boulevard of the famous Las Vegas Strip—so the photographer’ll get lots of smeary neon and appropriately phallic bldgs. in the background—with a retinue of scantily clad starlets either draped swoonily over him or prostrate at his feet, or both. It is important to note that there are no audible scare-quotes, no irony or embarrassment or self-awareness of any sort on Max’s face as he sketches this photo’s tableau for us; he’s in the kind of earnest that one imagines Irving Thalberg was always in. 29 Your correspondents immediately begin to lobby hard for Max’s idea, figuring that the photo would make a great illustration for the story of Max’s proposing this very photo—i.e., that it would point up the megalomania far more powerfully than mere reportage—but the Premiere photographer, who is no actor, does such a poor job of disguising his repulsion at Max’s self-regard that the atmosphere of the whole suite gets stilted and complexly hostile, and the rest of the interview is kind of a fizzle-yield, and overall Dick Filth said that we failed, in his phrase, to “penetrate to the core of the essence of what it is to be Max Hardcore.” 30
The 15th Annual AVN Awards are actually split over two consecutive nights, a tactic that Max H. thought the legit Oscars would do well to emulate: “Get all the bullshit out of the way the first night—best packaging, marketing, best gay, shit like that. Who wants to sit through that shit?”
Held in a different, slightly smaller Caesars Palace ballroom, Friday’s Awards show is indeed brisk. The ephemeral categories include Best Videography, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Music. Each category’s nominees are listed in the program, but only the winners are announced onstage, and they’re announced four at a time, and applause is discouraged, and the master of ceremonies keeps telling the quartets of winners that “If you’ll come on up quickly and help keep things moving it’ll help us out a lot.” Friday’s only food is big wheels of vegetables and dip near the cash bar. The emcee is not headliner Robert Schimmel but a hypomanic guy named Dave Tyree, whose interpolated banter is 78 rpm and consists of stuff like “If God didn’t want us to jerk off he would’ve made our arms shorter.” There are maybe 1,000 people in attendance, most only slightly dressed up, and there are no assigned tables, and everybody in the ballroom is moving around and chattering and treating the onstage proceedings the way people in a cocktail lounge treat the piano player.
Q. $4,000,000,000 and 8,000 new releases a year—why is adult video so popular in this country?
A. Director and AVN-Hall-of-Fame inductee F. J. Lincoln: “It’s always a little funny how it’s called adult. What it really is, you get to be a kid again. You roll around and get dirty. It’s the adult sandbox.”
A. Veteran woodman Joey Silvera: “Dudes, let’s face it—America wants to jerk off.”
A. Industry journalist Harold Hecuba: “It’s the new Barnum. Nobody ever goes broke overestimating the rage and misogyny of the average American male.”
A. Porn starlet Jacklyn Lick: “I think a lot of fans are very lonely people.”
Q. There don’t seem to be a whole lot of condoms used in hard-core scenes.
A. Harold Hecuba: “Never have been. They’re viewed as a turn-off. This business is about engineering fantasies.”
Q. But even just venerially—all these anal shenanigans and everything. Is there much worry in the industry about HIV?
A. Harold Hecuba: “There’s not as much worry about AIDS now. Everybody gets tested on a schedule.”
Q. What about herpes?
A. H.H.: “I think it’s rampant.”
Last year’s Best-Sex-Scene-in-a-Film winner Vince Vouyer’s real name turns out to be John LaForme. Rhetorical Q.: How, if one’s real name was John LaForme, could that person possibly feel the need for a nom de guerre?
Mr. Tom Byron describes being able to tumesce and ejaculate more or less on demand as an exercise in “control, like meditation or surfing. It’s like a gymnast staying on the balance beam. You practice enough, you can do anything.” 31
Former woodman and current auteur Paul Thomas was a member of the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar.
The tall, crazed-looking, and ever-rampant Mike Horner, three-time Best Actor winner and a member of the AVN Hall of Fame, 32 is actually a classically trained opera singer.
Deceased starlet Nancy Kelly’s real name was Kelly Van Dyke. She was the daughter of TV’s Jerry Van Dyke and so, of course, the niece of Dick.
Exotic rookie actress Midori, one of the nominees in the ’98 AVNAs’ Best New Starlet category, is the sister of ’80s pop star Jodi Whatley. Midori has stated publicly that she views upscale contemporary porn as a stepping-stone to a mainstream career, not unlike becoming Miss America or doing a couple seasons on SNL. Harold Hecuba characterizes Midori’s career strategy as “grievously ill-advised.”
Adult Video News VP and Executive Editor Gene Ross, presenting the aforementioned 1998 AVN Award for Best Director/Video to Miscreants’ Rob Black, will hail Mr. Black as “a guy who can take buttholes, midgets, and fried fish, and make a love story.” 33
From The New Yorker’s 1995 article on the psychosexual plight of the adult industry’s woodman: “The Cal Jammers who are part of this feminization feel they have stormed the walls of female ornament to reclaim male prerogative, only to find themselves lost in a garden of
gender irony.”
Mr. John “Buttman” Stagliano—CEO of Evil Angel Inc., a man described by US News & World Report as “the nation’s leading director of hard-core videos”—not only has publicly announced testing positive for HIV but has identified the infection’s vector as a transsexual prostitute in São Paulo with whom Stagliano had unprotected anal intercourse in 1995. He’s anxious that people not get the wrong idea: “I am not particularly interested in guys, but I am interested in dicks. Forbidden taboos lead to all sorts of neurotic behavior, which leads to me being fucked in the ass without a rubber.”
Are the AVN Awards possibly rigged? Max Hardcore (he of the purloined statuette, keep in mind) calls the Awards “a total conflict of interests.” After all, he explains, Adult Video News is heavily ad-dependent, 34 and they’re under “pressure from the big hitters like Vivid and VCA to like, you know, give the nod.”