Legendary Director Jerry Douglas On His Many Awards, Drug-Addicted Porn Stars, and Why He’s Done With Making Porn

When softcore porn pioneer Radley Metzger spoke at an event in NY after a raucous screening of his 1974 bisexual sex comedy Score this past weekend, the director made a point of singling out the writer who gave his gleeful masterpiece its subversive wit and charge: Jerry Douglas, the pioneering gay porn director behind acclaimed classics in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, including Flesh & Blood, Brotherhood, Buckleroos and more.

Based on Douglas’ hit play of the same name, Score told the story of a pair of married bisexual swingers, Elvira and Jack, who each pursue a homo-coupling with a pair of repressed newlyweds, Betsy and Eddie. Eddie, played by legendary porn star Casey Donovan (working as Cal Culver) eventually has passionate and explicit sex with Jack, played by Gerald Grant, though their hardcore scenes were cut out of the initial release and only restored for the Blu-Ray a few years ago. Asked by the clueless co-host whether Douglas approved of how Metzger imagined the sex scene that in the play version had happened offstage, Douglas voiced his approval. But the truth is that Douglas, who was on set directing the actors, was probably more responsible for putting this scene together than Metzger, who had little knowledge of gay sex or gay porn. In fact, when Douglas sold the rights to Score, he was shrewd enough to ensure he was allowed to be on set, which turned out well for both Douglas and gay porn fans everywhere. What Douglas learned on set he put to use in his incredible debut film, The Back Row.

But Douglas wasn’t exactly green when it came to directing or writing. A childhood job as an usher gave him the opportunity to witness legendary performances by Mae West, Monty Woolley, and Ethel Barrymore. His love of the theater took him first to Yale, where he got a degree in theater and writing, and then to New York, where he became the premiere director of sexually charged plays like Score that featured full frontal nudity. Then came Metzger, then The Back Row and his follow-up film Both Ways, which lost money. Douglas then stopped making porn, instead focusing on founding and editing Manshots magazine, one of the most celebrated publications that featured in-depth interviews with gay porn directors — both current and past, as well as legendary actors, cinematographers, and producers. Finally, in 1989, Douglas made his return with Fratrimony, and a flurry of award-winning films soon followed, all of which did something few other filmmakers were seriously attempting — to make films with engrossing and unusual stories where sex was seamlessly integrated into the story. Only Douglas’ friend Joe Gage has had the type of long-lasting career and made the kind of impact he’s made on the industry.

I met up with Douglas at his DVD-filled apartment on Riverside Drive where he smoked copiously and took me through his career highs and lows, his process for achieving a strong performance from a porn actor, and what he thinks of the industry today.

Adam: So last night, Radley Metzger said in his Q&A that Oh! Calcutta! was this pivotal play that started people making nude plays. Is that what inspired you to start doing them?

Jerry: I suppose that’s true but there were plays that came before it. The first play I ever saw that had nudity was a play called Geese. Then I was asked to come in and doctor a show called Circle in the Water which had the biggest advance sale of any off-Broadway show in history at that time, but from the first preview people were breaking down the box office door and demanding their money back. And I was called in and I got 11 weeks out of it by fixing it. That was probably the single most valuable theatrical experience I ever had in my life. Because I learned how to fix a show.

What was it about, and why did you need to fix it?

It was about a murder at a boy’s academy because somebody had sex with somebody and they didn’t want the secret to be exposed. It was embarrassing. Badly acted. I fired half the cast. I cut it to under an hour the first night I got there. We took no curtain calls, for ten days. And I’ll never forget the first night we decided to take a curtain call and got applause, and I knew I was doing something right. Circle in the Water was the first play I ever did that involved nudity. Tubstrip was the second. Score was the third. I did three plays in a row, and Score was pretty successful.

Tubstrip, I’m assuming, was about the baths.

And Terrance McNally wrote a play at the same time called The Tubs, and as soon as Tubstrip opened he changed it to The Ritz. So the point is that it was a very easy transition. I obviously had a knack for working with people nude. I treated them like they were clothed. One of my proudest bows was that I have never ever been to bed with anyone I ever worked with — in publishing, theater, porn, forget it. You don’t shit where you eat. Though I’ve been tempted more than once. About the time that Tubstrip came about or maybe a little before, some people came to me saying, “Jerry you know how to do nudity why don’t you do a porn film?” That brought me to The Back Row. But before I did that film, Radley Metzger approached me and offered to buy the rights to Score. I said yes.

You went to Yugoslavia with Metzger to observe the filming of Score, right?

The whole purpose when we sold him the rights to Score, is that it was in the contract that I got to go and I got to be on the set because I wanted to learn how to make a movie, and boy did he teach me. The very first day on the set, Radley motioned to me and said, “Always put something in the foreground of the shot. Shoot through something, it gives it depth and makes it look silky. There were little things all the way through but I always remembered that lesson. We got along fabulously well together. Radley was very busy and under incredible pressure because he hadn’t gotten as many crew people as he wanted. He only had one cameraman. And on the second day he said, “Jerry you take care of the actors, I’ll take care of the technical stuff.” So I got to direct the actors and it was wonderful and I’d gotten exactly what I’d gotten onstage. I was not happy with the cast originally. I’m enormously happy now. I can say these things now because they’re all dead. I loved Claire but she was a cunt. A very difficult woman but I adored her and we got along fine together until she sued me. But that’s another story that I will not go into.

The two husbands in the movie are played by Casey Donovan, working as Cal Culver, and Gerald Grant who were both in gay porn. Casey later starred in your first film, The Back Row.

Cal was a good friend of mine. I wrote the introduction to his biography and in it I said I worked with Cal more than any other director. Twice on stage, twice on film and he wrote a column for my magazine Manshots for ten years until he died. But I never knew him. He was all things to all people. A chameleon. Whatever you wanted him to be, he would be. But I loved working with him. We went out to dinner and to movies and theater. My spouse John and I have been together 35 years and happily so. Luckily, Cal and John got along very well together, because John does not have a great deal of empathy for the porn industry. He dines out on the line, “The only fuck films I have ever seen are the ones I had to: Jerry’s.” It always gets a laugh. On the Score set, Cal and Gerry Grant had a game going to see how many crew members they could go through, and they went through them all like a dose of salt. They were keeping score themselves. When I began planning The Back Row, the first thing I did was call Cal. We had a wonderful time making it. I watched it about a year ago. My god it’s a curio. It’s antique. But Cal is beautiful in it.

Going back to Score, did you take inspiration for the characters of Eddie and Betsy from your own marriage? When Cal’s character goes to the bathroom to jerk off, I thought that might have come from your relationship with your wife before you came out.

That’s interesting. I know where the jerk off scene came from. I was married when I was at Yale. My wife Barbara and I had two very close friends at Yale, who were also married. One day Barbara came home to me. And she said, “I caught Paul jerking off today in the bathroom. And it destroyed her. Barbara had never caught me. That’s where that came from. Clear as day. But it’s what Radley sort of touched on last night that in those days there was the gay community and the straight community and the old joke about anybody who was bisexual was just a stopping place on the road to being gay. And I still sort of believe that. Anyway what I was seeing was not what the newspapers and magazines were saying. That there were bisexual individuals, but quite honestly what influenced Score was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I mean it is transparently obvious.

But in a wonderful way.

It’s a variation on a theme.

That’s one of my favorite things about genre in general, and that that the porn genre — when it does it well, it really does it well. 

Every one of my films is a variation on something else. Flesh and Blood is my Hitchcock film. Buckleroos is my John Ford film.

Even Jock-A-Holics is a take off on Schnitzler’s La Ronde, right?

Yes. Exactly.

When Score came out, did it raise your profile at all and do things for you in either the porn or non-porn world?

Neither. First of all, one of the reasons I had whatever success I had in the adult film industry was because I only made one film a year. I had a very good job in New York that I was making a lot of money at. And I had a very wonderful relationship that made me very happy. So on my vacation each year from the magazine, I went to California and made a fuck movie. I was the auteur who came to California once a year and made these incredible story films, which nobody else seemed to know how to do. I made fifteen, sixteen films. Eight of them won Best Picture [at the GayVNs]. That’s a pretty fucking good track record. Eight won best actor, eight won best director, and seven won best screenplay. So you know, the adult film industry was very, very good to me and I was good to it.

But I read that after your first few films came out, you gave it up for a while.

Well I did those three films in the early 70s, The Back Row, Both Ways and Score. I was making a wonderful living, I’d met John and we got screwed badly on Both Ways. I never saw a penny on that. And also I didn’t want my knees broken by the Mafia. So I stayed away for twenty years. Then when I started Manshots magazine. I did two or three interviews with porn stars in each issue and one interview with somebody behind the scene. The first person I ever interviewed for Manshots was Matt Sterling. The second or third one I interviewed was Rick Ford from All Worlds Video. Rick and I got to be really good friends, and I was always calling him and saying, “I haven’t gotten your new film yet and we’re on deadline you better send it to me.” Every time we talked he asked me, “When are you going to make another movie Jerry?” And I said never. And one day I was incredibly piss elegant. I said “Alright Rick, I’ll make a film for you, but you have to give me final cut, you have to give me a royalty and you have to give me Tim Lowe who was the biggest star around those day. He said, okay I’ll talk to you later, bye. Two days later the phone rang and he said, “Hi Jerry it’s Rick. I have Tim Lowe here and he wants to talk to you.” And that’s how Fratrimony came out. That’s how I got back into the industry. And of course Tim won best actor that year.

Next came More of a Man, which starred Joey Stefano.

More of a Man was really an incredibly elaborate film. By anyone’s standards but particularly by Rick’s who had no money. We had planned to do this elaborate overhead shot during Gay Pride for the final shot, but in a moment of inspiration these rosary beads fell out of Joey’s pocket onto a condom and that became the final shot of the film. After that year, I was sitting in the apartment one day and I picked up the phone and the voice on the other end said, “Is this Jerry Douglas?” I said yes. “Is this Jerry Douglas who makes films?” I paused and said, “Well yes.” He said “Hi, I’m a student at NYU and I’m writing my masters thesis on you.” Well, I mean that was jerk-off time. Anybody who has even the slightest ego would — well that was a lovely day. About a month later a friend of mine went to London and came back and handed me this publication like New York Review of Books, and do you know what the first article was? “An analysis of the Judeo Christian symbolism in Jerry Douglas’ More of a Man.” That was a great moment for me too. I still have that article someplace. So you see, I really do believe, and I’ve always said, I really believe that a hundred years down the pike, people are going to be looking at my movies, the same way that they’re going to be looking at Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton’s movies, because they were considered the devil’s workshop at the turn of the last century.

Which of your films are your favorites?

I love Flesh and Blood, that’s my favorite. And Dream Team. Those are my two favorite films.

I was just jerking off to Brotherhood.

Really? That’s the last film I did. You know Danny Roddick died about two or three days after shooting ended.

Yeah. He was such a beauty.

He was a drug addict and it was unfortunate. And it was sad too because he and the German boy — what was his name? I can’t remember. [Editor’s Note: Jan Fischer] I really am getting a little senile these days. Anyway Danny and the German boy had been having an off-camera affair and I had to go to them both and say save your semen for the film, because they were fucking like bunnies. And it really shook up the German boy. That film came about because John Rutherford from Falcon and then Colt, and I had been friends for 20 years. I always joked with him and said I will never make a film for Falcon until Chuck Holmes dies. We always laughed about that. Then when Chuck died and John went to Colt, one of the first things he did was hire me, and that’s how Buckleroos came about.

Another fine film.

Yeah, I’m very proud of that one.

It sort of comes later, but I was going to say the amount of times I’ve jerked off to the Mormon scene I can’t possibly count.

Oh the Mormon scene is my very favorite scene in that.

I love that.

The two boys are just so dirty but also innocent at the same time. When they first appear at the door in their white shirts and ties, I get hard. And I don’t get hard at my own work. Although there is a certain amount of truth at what Tom of Finland used to say,“If I don’t get a hard on while I’m drawing a picture I throw it away”, I’m always too busy on a set to get a hard-on. I will think nothing of going up to an actor and saying, “Move your dick over here,” and take hold of his dick and move it. And it means nothing. It’s like I was adjusting a prop. People knew that. I always started my meetings with my actors by saying, “I’m in a very happy marriage and have been for X number of years and I’m not out to seduce you. But I’m a very touchy person and my hands are going to be all over you for the next six days or whatever it takes to make the movie.” And they understood that. As a result I’ve remained friends with many.

 

Now let’s talk about your way with story. I’m the kind of person who will cum during the porn set up scene. Those are the most erotic scenes to me.

Oh yes! I always told an actor, and I believe this very strongly, “Did you ever go to bed with anyone for the first time and were absolutely sure it would happen?” The answer has to be no. It’s the sexual tension before the fly was unzipped that’s part of it. That’s why the shit on the internet is worthless. That’s why Joe Gage is such a brilliant filmmaker, because he saves that tension. I learned so much from Joe about sexual tension. Joe does that brilliantly. He and I have known each other since he was Tim Kincaid. We talk on the phone once every month or so.

Was there a film or films that influenced your porn filmmaking?

I can’t really say that there was a single film that influenced my porn filmmaking because each time I tried to choose a genre or a seed that was different. I’m not sure where Flesh and Blood came from except that I’ve always been obsessed with twins. I would have killed to have been twins. That’s the Narcissus thing.

Brotherhood has twins too.

And my first novel.

You’re also the only director who does something nobody does anymore and which the internet doesn’t allow for either: Your films usually feature one character who goes on a sexual odyssey and who play a part in almost every scene. Which goes against the late 80s porn cliché where each film would be two guys, two different guys and three other different guys for the finale.

Yes but you have to understand that I fought that all the way too. “You’re using Mark in too many scenes.” (Kurt Young) “You’re using Casey Donovan all the way through The Back Row! They wanna see fresh meat.” I said “They’ll see it, there will be fresh meat in every scene, but Cal will also be in every scene.”

Is the Mormon scene in Buckleroos the scene you consider the hottest you’ve ever filmed?

No. The hottest is the scene with Jeanna Fine, Kurt Young, and Hawk Mcallister in Flesh and Blood with all that gauze and all her desperation and wanting it, and him playing, keeping her at bay and getting everything he wants out it. That is the best scene I’ve ever done probably. The other scene I’m very partial to, and the only scene that’s ever given me a hard-on is the first scene in Dream Team in the back of the truck with Rick Chase.

Incest has also been a common thread in all of your films. When did that take hold in your mind?

I have no idea. I have no interest whatsoever in either of my brothers or my father, I am sure of that, and certainly not my mother. But the only thing I surf are twin sites. I’m not interested in that sort of thing except for twins. I’m obsessed with twins. I just finished my new novel which is about the pedophile priest scandal in Boston and I have great hopes for it being commercial. I’m at loose ends trying to decide what to do. I keep going back to an incest theme, and I think, Jerry you’ve done that so many times already!

You want to do a film?

No, a novel. I don’t think I’ll ever do another film.

Why?

Nobody wants me to. It’s like Billy Wilder said, when you get to be a certain age, they’ll give you all the awards in the world and won’t hire you. I knew the day I walked off the set with Brotherhood that I would never make another film and I said that to John that day. I said, “You heard me call wrap, that’s it. This is the last film I’ll ever make.” I’ve written several scripts since then, one I’m enormously proud of — mainstream film scripts. But I don’t know how to get it to the people who could produce it. It’s a huge film.

What’s it about?

I delight in telling people about it. John and I are both fascinated by the Holocaust and one day he brought home a book that he found in a junk bin some place and I looked through it and read through it, and there was nothing new in it and then I came to a paragraph about an Orthodox Jewish family who had hidden out in Berlin all during the war and it was getting to be the end of the war and the Nazis were closing in on them, they had to go into hiding. And they had to separate — the mother and daughter went one place, the father and the son went another, and the only person that would take the father and son was the madame of the best whorehouse in town. Is that not a great premise for a film?

It’s a great premise!

I’m very proud of it. I wrote it about four years ago. It’s a superb script and I’m pretty much my own worst critic and I do have an ego but it’s good. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written in any genre, any form, any format. It’s a wonderful story because you know, a Jewish kid who his so repressed and oozing juices, and this woman who runs a whorehouse for the Nazis who are in the place all the time, and she’s a resistance fighter hiding Jews in her whorehouse. And his dick comes alive. It’s not a porn film in any way. It demands two stars, a woman and a teenage boy. I’m really proud of it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s called Bordelloland because the boy’s favorite book is Alice In Wonderland, and that’s where he is.

Let’s dish about porn. Who’s dead that you can speak ill of?

Well I’ll tell you a story but I won’t tell you who it’s about. I was in the middle of a sex scene, when one of the actors came up to me and said, “You’d better finish this scene pretty soon because I’m a drug addict and I have to have my heroin within the next half hour.” That’s my favorite one.

At least he was honest.

The people I’m bitter about in the industry and there are very few, are still alive.

Who was the best to work with?

Kurt Young was one of the two or three best actors I’ve ever worked with in any form. He’s a brilliant actor. Go back and watch Flesh and Blood, he’s incredible. The scene with Tony Donovan in Dream Team. Wow.

Do you cast by looks or performance ability?

I’m a face queen. They have to have a face. It’s a movie. There are close ups. I’ve said there are four things an actor has to have to be cast by me. They have to have a face, a body, a dick and I have to get along with him.

One of the things that comes through in your films is that the actors themselves feel so suited for their roles.

It’s not that it’s because I spend a lot of time with them, which nobody ever did in this industry. I always started my relationship after the interview and the hiring.

Take me through that process.

Alright. My secret was that as the editor of Manshots magazine I got a review copy of virtually every film being made in the world. I watched every one of them. When there was somebody I found interesting, I assigned the interview for Manshots to me, so they didn’t know they were being interviewed for a film. They thought they were being interviewed for a magazine. The day I interviewed Kurt Young we went out to my car because we could not smoke on the premises. During the interviews with the actors I’d get a sense of how much of a veil was up, how many barriers were up, and if I could work with him. By half an hour into an interview with Kurt I gave him the script for Flesh and Blood and hired him. Then there’s usually a gap before we get around to the shooting schedule and I always came out from New York a day or two before and one of the first things I’d do would be schedule dinner with him or the two stars of the film — there were two — because I’d wanted to see what kind of interaction I’d get between them and we’d go out to dinner. And then I’d say, “Why don’t you kiss each other goodnight?” Or if they’re sitting in the backseat of the car I’d say go ahead and play with each other but don’t take your dicks out. They’d tease each other and have something to think about for the next 24 hours.

That’s a good bit of directorial manipulation!

Chuck Holmes believed you should never introduce your stars to each other until the day they walk on set. I didn’t agree with that. I agreed with the principle very much, but not the implementation of it. And I always encouraged them to kiss each other goodnight after our dinner. They couldn’t wait to get at each other the next day. The first thing I say to an actor is about being touchy-feely. I also say, “You’re not playing Joe Blow, you’re playing this character.” This is what I tell any actor in any production. Movie or play or stage or screen. I ask them to think, How am I like this man? How am I not like this man? How much of myself can I use and where do I go to find the parts that turn me into this man? Friends, famous celebrities?

You find that care almost nowhere in porn these days.

Absolutely. Let’s go walk now. I have to walk because I need the exercise.

When did you and John meet?

November 15, 1979. My 44th birthday and I was feeling very depressed and all alone and staring 50 in the face. I went to the Thalia Theater and that was back in the days when they were showing wonderful movies. And of course if you didn’t like the movie the audience was always terrific there too. John sat down in the row in front of me and he kept turning around and looking at me and I kept flirting with him and I put my feet on the back of the seat and poking him, and then I went out to the john after the movie was over and when I came back he was sitting next to me in the seat where I had been sitting. That’s how it happened.

How did it turn into such a long lasting relationship?

Not without its detours. That’s all I’ll say about that. We had our rough times. We had very rough times. We went to couples counseling for a year and we made it against all odds. I think half the secret was his mother adored me. John and I were separated for a year. He moved out and during that year his parents used to come over for dinner every month or two to plan how to get John back. Isn’t that something?

That’s another good premise for a movie.

His parents both adored me. And I adored them. I miss his mother more than he does. She was a wonderful woman. She was about this tall. Tough as boiled owl and underneath was a marshmallow if you got through the armor. I got through the armor very quickly.

But they didn’t know what you did for work?

No, but when they found out they didn’t blink. They never asked to see any films. But they were the first ones we called whenever I won best picture.

So it’s been over ten years since you last made a film, and you really don’t have any desire to make another?

Well I’d like to but I’m not looking for it.

What about the porn that’s being made today — is there anyone you like?

There’s no one.

Directors?

There’s no directors. Well there are three names that are well known today — Randy Blue, Sean Cody and Corbin Fisher. All three have really beautiful men who are mostly straight, although I have problems with what makes someone straight and not straight. And what I see on the internet is exactly where the industry was when I started in it: loops. You rent a motel room and hope you remembered to tell them to take off their socks. Nobody makes films anymore. Nobody certainly makes story films. And you know a Corbin Fisher loop when you see it, you know a Sean Cody loop when you see it and you know a Randy Blue loop when you see it.

Do you think it’s possible things will turn around and go in another direction?

The pendulum always swings and yes it will probably swing in the other direction. Because first of all, mainstream films and porn films are becoming closer and closer together. I mean, there have been mainstream films that have shown erections and all that. Did you see Blue is the Warmest Color? I never saw so much labia in my life.

What do you think about bareback porn? The mainstream studios are converting, because of things like Truvada and serosorting.

From the time I came back after the three films in the early seventies, when I came back in 1989, when I made Fratrimony, I never made another film without rubbers, but in my films rubbers were always part of the action. The rubber fairy doesn’t automatically make it appear. I thought it was an obligation I had to my audience and mankind. These days there’s a whole generation, yourself included, who never lived through it. John and I had to start again and build a whole new circle of friends. To that end I would love to make a film without rubbers, but I vowed when I was coming back with Fratrimony that I wouldn’t make a film without rubbers until there was a vaccine that was 100 %. So I wouldn’t make a film without rubbers, until maybe a year from now when Truvada is proven efficacious.

Well they’ve studied it.

But you need time. I’d love to do a film without rubbers. But in my downtime I have a couple of films in my head I haven’t put down on paper that I would really like to make and things I never got around to doing. In every film I tried to do something I hadn’t done before. That’s the secret to longevity both from an actor’s point of view and a directors point of view. Every film you have to do something different or you lose your audience. I always tell an actor, in every film you do find something that you’ve never done before. It may be as big as bottoming for the first time. It may be as small as kissing his ear. Always find something to keep your audience interested in you. Do you know what’s in my last film, Brotherhood, that was never in any other? Toe sucking. Which doesn’t do anything for me, but it does for some people and I had a very hot toe sucking scene — with Danny Roddick and Jan — that’s the German boy’s name! See? Not so senile after all.

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Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Check out his previous columns in the Fisting For Compliments Archive.