_{Kauai Video Productions}

THE DAVID I FRAZER TELL-ALL

Before I was a novelist…before I was a videographer…before I was an event and family photographer, long before then, boy did I live a steamy adventure. Judge me if you want to but this is how I discovered porn star Ginger Lynn, made Ron Jeremyfamous, and became known for directing the most gorgeous models for fully explicit films that were heavily influenced by my appreciation of arthouse erotica.  Many called my 5½ years in that saucy cottage film industry the real Boogie nights.  This is my story of how I rose rapidly from struggling film editor of mainstream films in Hollywood with hardly a penny to my name, to owning a multi-million dollar adult film studio, producing and directing ultra-stylish 35mm XXX films that I shot in exotic locations, such as Kauai Hawaii, with stunning Playboy, Penthouse, and Club Magazine models in lead roles.  No other director, no other company did it like this!  

 In 1978 I was a young aspiring film director, who did film gigs here and there and hadn't yet directed anything. But I was at the doorstep to a 5½ year stretch of my life where I’d be directing 17 films, none of which were the kind I’d aspired to during my formative years in film production. It’s not that I told myself one day “porn is the way to go!” I had just moved to the states from London, having worked my ass off in mainstream TV—the Emmy winning series “The World at War.” 

Like many things in life, a singular moment in time dramatically altered the trajectory of my life.  An Israeli friend in Los Angeles begged me to aid him with the editing of a 16mm film,  “Little Orphan Dusty.” He said it was X. I was so green back then that his comment flew right over my head. The day I walked into his editing room in Hollywood was the first time I’d ever seen a porn flick. Larger than life, in my face, were graphic close ups of anatomy that surely only gynecologists ever got to see.  Analytically, I thought it was horrible, the acting appalling, the pacing diabolical.  But within this blaze of quivering skin and heavy moaning there were a few moments that really showed off some dramatic excellence and had my pulse racing. My friend Ellie turned to me and said deadpan, “They pay $2000 for a script. We could do way better than this in our sleep!”  I still didn't tell myself porn is the way to go. But obviously somewhere in the recesses of my brain, the idea was born. Whereas writing and selling a script in mainstream movies was a virtual pipe dream and directing one, well, that was like winning the lottery. But doing that in the adult film industry, yikes, the door was already cracked open!  Ellie had already told several adult film producers that I’d just come off an Emmy winning TV series and I was brilliant—a dose of hyperbole no less. But I still frowned at Ellie. Right,  there was no way that I was going in that direction. Sordid films, my ass!  

Then I met Svetlana. 

Well, kind of. I first saw her on the set of a film and we never spoke.  She was tall, blonde, slim, absolutely striking. I thought she must be a movie star. But no, she was the director and the movie was “800 Fantasy Lane,” an adult film that Ellie had once again lured me into, to be the sound recordist for a day.

I could have never imagined that in less than a year I would be married to her. Svetlana and I glanced at each other especially when I called out “Rolling!” The sound had to be rolling before the camera rolled.  She acknowledged with a smile and a nod of her head. I want to add that just because I was crewing on an adult film, I still wasn’t thinking “porn is the way!” I just considered it a reasonably lucrative paying gig. Back then in the late 70s adult films were made using regular film production crews: directors of photography, editors, grips, gaffers, sound guys, all working on adult and regular films and TV shows, just using a pseudonym on the adult stuff in case later on they got famous. 

So over the next few months, I worked on a couple of adult films and I also gigged on studio and indie pictures. Ellie finally won me over to co-write an adult script.  We called it “Star Whores,” for the spoof reason. While we never sold it (the title was later used by someone else) our script landed on Svetlana’s lap, and then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from her. 

‘Hi, do you remember me? Svetlana. You worked…” I cut in, ‘Of course I remember you.” Then very nervously she proceeded to tell me that she’d wanted to call me for months. Yes, she’d looked at the script Ellie and I had written. But she wasn’t calling about that. She wanted to ask me out.  After one week of dates, we moved in together. Seven months later we were married, and working on preproduction of our first film together: “Ultra Flesh,” already written by Svetlana and a friend of hers. The script had a zany spin, leaning toward her “800 Fantasy Lane” view of fantasy. I told Svetlana that from what I’d seen of  American adult films, they were not erotic cinema, just hardcore.They were missing the French style eroticism in films such as “Emmanuelle,” a soft core 70s film that aroused audiences worldwide. Svetlana hadn’t seen “Emmanuelle” so I described it in a word: “tease.” I relayed that to be erotic the audiences needed to be teased into the mood and then the hardcore would be a payoff.  I suggested that such a formula would work exceptionally well in an XXX film.  She quipped back, “You didn’t think “800 Fantasy Lane” was erotic? Guys were telling me the moment they laid eyes on Nancy Suiter they got a boner!  You didn’t?”

So we had a discussion about beautiful girls and big and bold sets (locations if you’re thinking the other kind) and a lavish look that was completely different from the norm. Svetlana assured me that now that she knew about the tease element being so important, she was going to direct in such a way that every guy’s zipper would burst open.  

I get it, I told her, “a throbbing adventure!” 

 She laughed so hard that her belly hurt. A throbbing adventure would later become the tag line on our first Hawaii film, “Surrender in Paradise” a throbbing adventure. 

So for “Ultra Flesh”  Beauty was Svetlana’s game plan: gorgeous girls not regular porn actors, beautiful sets, mansions, estates, a big glistening swimming pool, no shady motels and dingy office buildings. Although we did settle on using a very well known for the lead, Dottie Hundley, known in the industry as the queen of porn, stagename: Seka. When I met Dottie and her then husband for the first time at their house just outside of Los Angeles I was surprised by her earthiness. She was smart, collected, nicely not sluttily dressed. Still, her shapely form was undeniable, her platinum blond hair, in a bun, striking.  She looked the furthest girl from porn imaginable. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t earlier reviewed her portfolio. We hired her on the spot.    

For “Ultra Flesh”and every adult film I made I decided to use the nom-de-plume David I Frazer. On the first day of shooting at a very large estate in Pasadena, California,  Svetlana pushed me forward to contribute on the set; she quickly saw that I was good with the cast and crew. “Do you want to direct this scene?” She asked. Not that I didn’t want to direct, I felt it was her show and I didn’t want to step on her toes. While I’d helped enormously with pre-production stuff, the decisions on cast and crew had been all Svetlana; she'd negotiated the locations, taught me how to break down the script—a very necessary task in order to schedule a shoot and ensure that all the elements of production jelled, such as the right data on call sheets for the cast and crew, props on set when needed, extras coordinated, even food and craft services to be present. I shook my head, held her hand and said, “Don’t worry, I’m learning; you go ahead.” 

“You learn when you get thrown in the pool, baby. Sink or swim!”

I grinned, and let her continue doing her thing, being in charge.    

A few days into the “Ultra Flesh” production,  calamity struck. The art director was supposed to build an ice cavern,  à la Superman’s base, in this mansion we were filming at. When Svetlana walked into the ice room, she gasped, then shrieked. The art director had dangled a bunch of christmas tree type icicles from the ceiling and spray-frosted the windows with similar Christmastime decor. It was ridiculous. Svetlana, almost in tears, was about to scrap the scene when I had the idea of bringing in a truckload of dry ice and building ice corridors. I got on the phone with an ice company and six hours later, we had an amazing looking ice cavern. Svetlana hugged me and told me to direct the scene. This time she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I looked at the breakdown—our shot list—walked over to Jamie Gillis (a major star in adult movies) and gave him my first ever directive on a film. After that day, Svetlana and I pretty well collaborated on every scene. On some I took the lead, on others Svetlana did. This was the pattern that we assumed for most of our productions. Later in our adult film careers, we often hired a larger pool of cameramen and sound recordists so that we could shoot two separate scenes simultaneously, Svetlana directing one, me the other. We did this extensively on the productions we filmed in Hawaii—more on this later.  

The “Ultra Flesh”production, with Gary Graver as our director of photography—I learned a ton from him—went off relatively smoothly. A few hiccups, like the ice room, a few overly long days, but all in all a good shoot. For me, a great shoot because I got my first taste of directing. After the shoot, I edited the film—traditional editing in a cutting room with a flatbed, a Moviola, and a film bench for syncing and rewinding reels. This is the way all editors worked in those days. It took me six weeks to complete the 90-minute film.      

The movie we chose to do next was “F…and lots of it!” 

This movie had an even bigger budget than “Ultra Flesh.” You might ask, where did the money come from to make such big budget erotic films? Well, Svetlana’s incipient film,  “800 Fantasy Lane” and “Ultra Flesh” were funded by investors, who mostly controlled the cost and returns of the finances. We were handsomely remunerated for the screenplays, producing, directing and editing of the films but we didn’t see back end profit. That paradigm changed for us with “Bad Girls.” I’ll get into that later. For “F” we had a new financier who hired a money overseer, who took to breathing down our neck from the getgo.  Svetlana had drafted the screenplay for “F” with her friend Gunnar. I read it; thought its fantasy elements were fun and I could see the creative spark, but it was not an erotic read. Yes, we were back to that conversation.  I didn’t find it sexy at all.  “That’s what directing is all about!”she scoffed at me when I told her my opinion. I argued back, telling her that “Ultra Flesh” was sexy but we didn’t get what wasn’t on the page. It had to be on the page first.  She thought I was being snarky and demanded I be specific. I told her it would be easier for me to write a scene or two than argue with her.  The first scene I wrote was the doll house scene in “F” where a gorgeous human-like doll (Scarlett Doll played by Kandi Barbour) stirs from the inanimate and says to Hank (John Leslie)  “Play with me.”  I wrote the scene by ink; I had white outs on the pages, scribbles,  paper cut outs and edits with celotape—the days before computers. It was an all night long affair. At five in the morning, I went to bed. A few hours later Svetlana nudged me awake. She was so excited, so apologetic for waking me, but she couldn’t contain herself anymore. She’d already typed up what I’d written, shown it to Gunnar, shown it to her best girlfriend Slavitza (an actress who later went on to play Goza in “Ghostbusters”  and cried, “It’s not good, it’s not great, it’s phenomenal.” After that, I did a rewrite on the entire script, very little alterations on some scenes, massive on others. On the pre-production end, we went together to San Francisco, met with Annette Haven, John Leslie and a bunch of adult movie actors. For the filming, most of the cast and crew flew up to San Francisco from Los Angeles with us, including Kandi Barbour, Laurier and Piper Smith, Niki Stevens, et all— gorgeous hot babes from the Jim South modeling agency—a Van Nuys, California agency for nude models. The 6-day shoot was arduous because it was so ambitious in design. The cast was bigger than most, the coordination brutal, producing long days. This was an aspect of production that I curbed later on with our films when I became more experienced, more of the lead in our partnership. But despite it being a relatively difficult shoot, the edited film was stunning. Svetlana and I were thrilled, the screenings immensely positive. 

The distribution of “F”came next, and that was far from rewarding. The film played everywhere where there were adult theaters, but our distributor pulled the same line that Svetlana got with her first film “800 Fantasy Lane,”  the cost of marketing had not yet been recovered.  These distributors were something else!  We were riding a dud train. What’s the point of working your ass off and not getting a piece of the deal, or to be blunt getting ripped off? 

Svetlana was the first to say, “We’re going again. This time we’re going to be in control! Every which way, in control!” To be in control we needed the film to be ours, financed by us, owned by us. We had some savings but not nearly enough to make a film, especially our kind of glossy budget erotic film.  Svetlana owned her house free and clear and it was her choice to borrow a chunk against it.  Between our savings and a loan from the bank we laid plans for a new adult film.  Not only were we going to produce it, we were going to distribute it and promote it like nothing else.      

 We brainstormed storylines. Then Svetlana came up with the title, Bad Girls – girls who are really sweet and good until…we brainstormed more storylines, knowing one thing, we wanted to make it a full-on tease movie. I ultimately came up with the idea of best friends on a roadtrip, teasing the heck out of everyone on their travels – only teasing has a price!  On the way to a fully flushed out screenplay I first wrote a treatment. She loved it. It took me 10 days to write the full screenplay. Back then, I wrote longhand and Svetlana typed my scribble.  I don’t recall her disagreeing with any of it. 

With the finished screenplay, the criteria we settled on was young hot girls that matched the written word—no that’s not right—they had to be so hot, so drop dead gorgeous that the adult magazines including Penthouse and Hustler Magazine would later on be all over us for production photos and stories. But the girls also had to be able to deliver their lines. From very early on we didn’t care for loading our films with well-known, heavily used porn talent, except for the males in our productions. So it was to be expected that some of the female actors might struggle with the scripted lines. It didn’t dawn on us that we were about to find talent that had never appeared in any film of any kind. True film virgins! We also didn’t realize that the type who wanted to appear in a sex film were types with easily excited labidos but we soon found that out. So did our audiences! Yes that came with the territory—pardon the unintentional pun! 

Shooting “Bad Girls” summer 1981, with a dropdead gorgeous cast—Jasmine Du Bai who had never before appeared in an adult film, now starring in one was a babe who could tease your pants off; Victoria Knoll, stunningly beautiful nineteen-year old, also new to adult film fare; Lenora Bruce—shy and demure and gorgeous, a breath of fresh air; Pia Snow, gorgeous, in her very first appearance in a film. Pia would soon become a famous glam scream queen of the horror movie genre under her real name, Michelle Bauer. In smaller acting parts, we had other beauties including the model Sylvia Wright who took my breath away when I first saw her, Sylvia Benedict, adorable,  and Copper Penny, one of the prettiest redheads I’d ever seen, and the list went on.  We filmed most of the interiors at a stunning mansion in the Echo Park/Silverlake area of Los Angeles; then rented a camper for scenes and transportation as we headed north to the forests around the river Kern, southern Sierra Nevada mountains. Over a 10-day period with a cast and  crew of about fifty people, we also filmed scenes on Kern Lake. In tandem with the filming, Svetlana directed multiple photoshoots with the starlets. Staging and posing the girls was something Svetlana was fantastic with. Nobody did it better, and our staff photographer always gave way to her staging creativity. Having great photosets was instrumental for the release campaign. We already knew how the promotion needed to go.  After 8 months searching for the most beautiful girls and two years in the making comes the SEXIEST movie that’s ever been made. “Bad Girls” will burst your zipper!  

The tease element in “Bad Girls” is something I can easily describe as piling it on. What’s a hamburger and fries with ketchup? A little ketchup, no. Pile it on. More and more! You weren't going to find a sex scene in “Bad Girls” without a forerunner tease scene.  No meet, say hi, and snap cut to hardcore pumping. I wanted guys watching the finished film to feel their members swelling; I wanted chicks moist. This is the naughty side of me, the side that got stirred when I first saw the movie “Emanuelle.”   

Back home after principle photography had concluded,  I edited the film day and night. We needed to make money, as soon as possible.  With the film done,  Svetlana and I went around the country and took meetings with potential sales outlets everywhere. We flew to every major state. We showed the distribution agents pre-release copies of  Penthouse with the back cover advertisement of “Bad Girls.”  Svetlana said, “We’ve got a slate of films coming, one after the next.”  It wasn’t hyperbole. For “Bad Girls” we bought magazine advertisement covers in a dozen magazines and gave all the magazines glossy photosets free of charge. When the sub distributors realized we were a new supply of the highest quality porn, they were eager to distribute for us.  

 The nationwide theatrical distribution was only half of our plan to secure legitimate profit. In late 1981, we started our own video duplicating and marketing company: Collectors Video, launching it with  the video releases: “Ulta Flesh,” “F,” “Bad Girls,” and a title named  “Little French maid,” which wasn’t one of our produced films but a friend’s who was also tired of getting ripped off.  Before its video release “Bad Girls” premiered at the Circus Theater and New World theatres in Manhattan. I sent my brother-in-law to New York to count ticket sales.  We didn’t count on the cinema owners to give us a fair accounting. There were lines around the block.  Just like that, we knew we had a major hit on our hands!  The video release, also fully in our control, was an even bigger success. Growing pains were immediate. Our single-story house in West Hollywood was our first marketing and sales base. With boxed videos of our films suddenly stacked floor to ceiling in every room, with the phone ringing off the hook and video orders coming in by the thousands, we found an office and marketing space in North Hollywood. But it was only a thousand square feet. After just one month, we were out of space. We expanded to two thousand feet, and six months later a ten-thousand-square foot studio space to keep pace with the demand of our films.

The look and style of “Bad Girls,” the unique storyline with the emphasis on tease, the upscale exotic locations we chose, big budgets, and the most stunning girls to grace the screens of adult films became our trademark and the look of our follow up films, the next two being  “Sex Boat,” then “Bad Girls ll.” Both were soon in the can.  In some of our later films we hired co-writers including Sherman Hirsch who also co-wrote, “The Lords of Magick.” But Svetlana and I never diverted from our core style—teasing elements in the scripts, extensive preproduction, keen-eyed location scouting, the most gorgeous girls for the parts, screen testing and auditioning their acting chops. 

We were doing more than well. For my 30th birthday Svetlana surprised me with a bran new Ferrari. She knew I’d always loved racing cars – I used to go to Brands Hatch racetrack in England and Ferraris were my dream cars. So suddenly I had one – that’s Svetlana for you!  

We also purchased a beautiful new home in the Hollywood Hills. 

In 1983 a friend, Robert Gallagher, who was also a line producer (a person who does the nuts and bolts job of a producer without being involved in the financial endeavors, casting, and post production) came up to us and said, “Have you ever thought of doing a film in Hawaii?”

We hadn’t. But after a very enlightening discussion, we were piqued enough to explore the idea further, particularly the oldest of the Hawaiian islands, Kauai. Svetlana and Robert took a flight to Kauai to scout locations. I couldn’t make a trip because I was finishing up our film “Sex Boat,” in which two horny guys don wigs and dresses to get aboard an all girls cruise ship, only to have the ship hijacked by stumbling idiots, so the two dudes have to save the day, whilst screwing as many girls as they can. It was a sex spoof on a famous TV show “The Love Boat” mixed with a spoof of a famous Billy Wilder movie from 1959 “Some Like It Hot,” that starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.   

Svetlana called me from Kauai and told me excitedly,  “It’s so remote, so stunning, we can shoot here without anyone spying on us.”  I knew what she meant was cops. But flying out an entire film crew from Los Angeles, housing and feeding them, and policing them ourselves, seemed like a daunting, unbelievably expensive endeavor. When she returned we spoke seriously about how shooting in Kauai might work for us. But first I needed to see the place for myself. It took a few weeks for me to find time from my schedule, then we both flew to Kauai. We spent four days there, unwinding and location scouting. Svetlana and I had already gotten into the mold of shooting separate scenes simultaneously using a larger film crew, which shortened our shooting schedule, resulting in cost effectiveness. It dawned on us that we could take this one step further, to shoot two films simultaneously, or at least one on the back of the other, utilizing the same cast and crew, save for perhaps one or two of the actors. It still meant doubling the amount of days on Kauai, doubling the cost of accommodations and food. “Let’s do an “A” movie and a “B” movie, one not so scripted” I suggested. “We can get through it quicker; and the girls won’t have to fret so much about their lines. We can get it wrapped, both films in ten days!”Svetlana agreed.  The locations, gorgeous cast, and enough peppered tease was going to sell it anyway. We were so excited. We were going to make films in paradise. The gloss, the cinematography, the enormous production value: night and day from the dingy x films that had been the staple of the industry since the 60s.   

Once again we tossed back and forth storylines and kept returning to shipwrecked babes. Lost in paradise, a potential title, didn’t quite fit. “Surrender!” I cried. “It’s not just capitulation, it’s also submissive, which can be extremely erotic. Surrender in Paradise!” And that became the title of the first Kauai film, a “Gilligan's Island-esque” tale of stunning beauties washed ashore onto a desert island, where they find one young man, an escaped prisoner, who knows the ways of survival. 

We found the perfect Robinson Crusoe type of hunk in Paul Seiderman AKA Jerry Butler, a New Yorker with sparkling blue eyes, pumped muscles, and long hair. He became our prisoner on the loose, wrongly convicted, but in the right place to save the damsels in distress.

As always, we did substantial casting, searching, searching, searching for our gorgeous castaways. Then Jim South, the talent agent that found all the girls called Svetlana and told her, “I believe I’m looking at your lead girl!” Her name was Ginger Lynn Allen. She’d never acted in an adult film before. We met her at Jim South’s office. Right away we could see that Ginger was lively with an infectious personality. I handed her sides (pages from the script), and told we could come back the next day to do the audition. But she said she just needed a few minutes. Sure enough that’s all she needed. Her audition was completely relaxed and honest, as natural as a real moment; she didn’t read the part, she moved around and played the part.   Boy oh boy, Ginger was a natural. Looking at her, and she was quite a looker, I couldn’t help thinking, why an adult film? Not that I ever said it. We gave her a contract and she agreed to get back to us in a day, letting us know if she was in or not. 

Early next morning, Ginger called Svetlana, and told her she was in. We invited her up to our home in Mount Olympus (Laurel Canyon Hills) to give us the signed contract, and to go over shoot details, which included a “B” movie which we now had titled “A Little bit of Hanky Panky.” We gave her a rough verbal outline of the story as I was still working on the script.  We went over lodgings, very early call times, and shoot duration, at least ten days. Yes. Yes. Yes.  

So we had Ginger Lynn and Jerry Butler on board for our two Hawaii movies. Soon we booked another natural named Lois Ayres, and then another and another, each cast member drop dead stunning and fresh-faced for adult cinema.   

With a cast and crew of thirty we boarded a flight to Lihue, Kauai. Man, did the girls tease the passengers. All in good fun. 

For the next ten days we had the most fun and productivity we could have imagined. We employed a beach hyppie named Friederman to help us with the best locations. Back in those days Kauai was not a busy tourist spot so every place we shot at there was only our cast and crew, the crashing waves, the rugged misty green mountains, and miles of empty beach all for us—the way it should be for a desert island love story. 

For the “B” movie “A Little bit of Hanky Panky” we had a few new cast members fly out to join our production for our second week. Joining us was Jamie Gillis, Bunny Blu, Ron Jeremy and a few others.  I recall the hardest part of the two shoots was waking everybody up before dawn each morning so that we could head out to our desert island beach for first light. Most of the gang were hard partiers. I didn’t get involved with who was cavorting with who, but I knew that crew and cast were having a ball.  We were staying at a resort complex of bungalows on the north shore in Princeville, right on a misty bluff. Predawn,  it was chilly as we went bungalow to bungalow, banging on the cast and crew's doors until we heard a yeah okay okay, and those okays didn’t come quickly. But worst of all, the grass outside the bungalows attracted literally thousands of large black cane toads. Hard to see them in the dark without flashlights but these buggers were everywhere. Walking out to the cars in the pitch black, crisscrossing flashlights galore, the yelps and squeals from squeamish cast members, and Svetlana was everywhere. Yes, we should have rolled sound.  I’m not sure how many toads got squashed.  

Once back home in Los Angeles I set about hiring a small team of editors, an audio engineer, a musician, and a negative cutter as the volume of work had outgrown my ability to do much editing or sound design anymore. I oversaw all aspects of post production, however. My studio saw vast and expensive improvements. We built a new sound stage for insert production. We modeled new edit suites. I purchased new Kem K800 flatbeds, as well as one of the world’s first polyphonic Synclaviers, a quarter of a million dollar orchestra and sound effects piano made by innovative New England Digital. With our 32-track mixing board, wide projection screen and analogue and digital multi-track recorders we could edit, score, and mix our films to completion. A one stop production and postproduction house. 

Svetlana and I fell into a groove of everyday film-making even when we weren’t shooting.  At our core, we were film makers who just so happened to make feature films with uncensored erotic content. We made them for theatrical release and the booming VHS home video market.  Every once in a while I’d read something in an adult themed magazine describing us as pornographers - “Pornographers David I Frazer and Svetlana at the adult film awards…”  I really didn't care for the term porn. Maybe a silly idiosyncrasy.  To me, pornographer was a term for someone who put sex participants in front of a camera,  not someone who scouted scenic locations, jungles and paradisiacal beaches, who spent weeks writing a single script, and spent more than a month on pre-production, who worked 60-80 hour weeks, created original music and scored the soundtrack and mixed the films in a real recording studio.   

But pornographer was also a term that made me anxious.  Legally anxious.   The cops often went after pornographers. You could be raided whilst shooting or whilst marketing. Over the five and a half years in that industry, we made two, sometimes three films a year, a tiny volume compared to many other adult film makers because we weren’t interested in pumping out adult content but each time we got ready to shoot we were careful; we watched our backs and often changed our filming plans. Backup shoot locations were in our bag. The first day of shoot jitters were plentiful because the first days were when the cops mostly struck. All this weighed on my shoulders enormously.

I remember one time, we were at Svetlana’s mom’s house in West Hollywood. Her mother came rushing into the kitchen and told us there was a cop in a car right outside. We were on the way to a location shoot on the other side of Hollywood, so we hid inside, waiting to see if the cop would leave. Eventually he did but it took a long time. Another time we got a letter from someone claiming to be a cop, saying we were being watched, and he didn’t agree with it. He said they knew all about the films we were shooting, and he told us we should change our shooting plans to northern California. The letter was signed by Anonymous.

 For sure the money was a driving force keeping us glued to that industry but it wasn’t the only force: what we gleaned in production experience, especially directing and learning how to expedite a scene, was invaluable.  Financially, we were set; we had lawyers on speed dial, just in case.  One of our lawyers tried to soften my angst.  “Don’t worry, they have no grounds to bust you.” Maybe he was correct. The issue of legality was a well probed question mark. But that didn’t make any difference to us, knowing that at any moment we might be in the back of a cop car. 

As successful and ubiquitous as our films were, we didn’t do public appearances and didn’t give interviews. We preferred anonymity. My Hollywood Hills neighbors knew me as  David Marsh; they didn’t have a clue that I was also David Frazer—a well known director of XXX films.

Surrender in Paradise” and "A Little Bit of Hanky Panky” were huge hits for us so we boogied back to Kauai for another round, two more back-to-back films. One was the sequel to “Surrender in Paradise” — “The Pink Lagoon,” which we filmed near Poipu on the south side of the island, inside acres of privately owned land that offered us a sparkling bay, small beach, jungle, river, forest, and weird looking structures that could have come straight out of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They worked amazingly well for our story.  Once again we’d put together a gorgeous looking cast. I knew and trusted my crew. The locations couldn’t have been more perfect. Could anything go wrong?  

Well, time is money—the truism was never more apparent than on our film sets. We scheduled for 12-hour days—first light to last light—knowing that If we went over 12, the cast and crew would become irritable or angry or even defiant, and rightly so. We’d learned that from experience.  All of our films had been a quintessential model of run-and-gun film production: shoot quickly, expediently, go to the next scene, repeat.  When we were shooting in public places we had to be ridiculously fast; the shots had to be in the can before we could be stopped for not having a permit, which would have required a fire marshal and at least one cop with us.  Yeah, imagine that! We’d learned that if anything cropped up to slow us down like a missing actor, missing prop, technical issue, we had to make an instant decision: scrap that scene or try to correct the issue even though it meant the clock was running. Scrapping sex scenes, however, wasn’t an option.  Only sometimes sex action doesn’t go as planned. The tease and foreplay scenes always went well for us but we also needed hardcore, ‘hard” being a monumental part, only sometimes it wasn’t, er, hard. In my first movie, Svetlana’s second one, “Ultra Flesh” male co-star Richard Pacheko, suffered this issue. His thing wouldn’t cooperate. Too many eyes observing him, we figured. So we removed all nonessential crew from the stage. And we waited,  cameras ready to roll,  and the clock ticked on and on, and he still couldn’t find his manhood… and the clock ticked on and on and on…and he got all the devotion and caressing and stroking in the world and that thing still wouldn’t stand up…and time is money and that was costly.  I learned a valuable lesson that day: to have a back up. 

So back in Kauai, filming “The Pink Lagoon,” deja vu showed its face. Co-star Jay Serling was failing in his proud moment. This time, there weren’t any unnecessary ogling eyes on him, but he still couldn’t get it up. Fortunately, I’d sent for stunt cock. The penis stand-in was Jasper Helms, my star salesman and tennis partner back in Los Angeles who’d joined our crew as a second grip. Jasper had convinced me to bring him to Kauai. “Just in case you need me for something big, to save the day, I’m your man.” So Jasper hurried up behind me, his eyes agleam because the starlet I needed him to satisfy was Raven. I knew he was smitten by Raven. He’d already told me a half dozen times. ”Hot!” 

So time is money and Jasper got his monkey spanked, and Jasper saved the day!  “The Pink Lagoon” sailed into calm seas from then on. The worst thing about the film was its title. I know, cheesy. I don’t recall if it was me or Svetlana or one of our full time team members who  came up with “The Pink Lagoon” spoofing its blue forerunner.  I did, however,  love  our “B” feature title, “Panty Raid.” I’d never heard of the term—not an English thing—but I knew right away what our tag line should be. The best thing about panties is taking them off!  We all laughed when I spat that out but sure enough it’s the line we used on the movie poster.    

By 1984, the  home video market was the hottest thing as adult cinema moved into bedrooms and living rooms worldwide to the demise of the red light districts that had once been sole arenas of smut. But I was seeing a profusion of video releases hitting the market, hordes of direct to video pornos made on shoestring budgets.  In 1985 video giant Blockbuster began a new rental paradigm which brought about an instantaneous market shift. Unique sales dropped precipitously as Blockbuster and other video stores switched to renting videos. Instead of selling ten or twenty initial units of a title and more when the store/s sold out, our numbers dropped to one or two, with no upside of selling more unless the title was lost or destroyed. Some of our competitors upped production tenfold, fiftyfold, forgoing quality for quantity.  In my mind, we’d have to be true pornographers not filmmakers to keep pace. I looked around and what I saw was crazy.  Many companies who’d previously produced high quality x-rated films were producing a film a week.   Svetlana and I had to make a decision: whether or not we wanted to continue in that business. I certainly didn’t want to. The last xxx feature film we made together was “Nice Girls Do” starring the late Shauna Grant.”  It was our most expensive x-rated film with a budget of $190,000. We filmed it both as an “R”rated movie and a XXX.  We never released it. Instead we sold the edited “R” rated version plus all the x-rated outtakes and the rights and masters of our entire library of films, video and theatrical, to a major competing distributor, Gourmet Video. In that moment, I was out of the business. Our buyer  reedited “Nice Girls Do,” added the hardcore footage we shot,  and retitled it  “Bad Girls lV.” They also created a number of other Bad Girls spinoff videos from the raw footage.  

While I had quit the adult industry, Svetlana made a decision that I wasn’t on board with. It transpired when Mike Missile, a fella who used to work for me approached with an offer from his uncle, a very wealthy man, who was interested in having me make two adult films.  I said thanks but no thanks. But Svetlana said she’d do it. Those were the ‘Miami Spice’ films. So Svetlana went ahead and made those on her own, in Miami. It momentarily put our relationship on a rocky road. Needless to say we survived that hiccup. Our marriage went on solidly and unwaveringly until her untimely death in June 2024.

Back in 1985 going into 1986, I was out of the industry and I was fine about that even though our overhead remained sky high because our post production and stage studio with 20 employees wasn't part of our library sale to Gourmet. We were mostly able to balance the overhead by doing freelance work for mainstream producers and television networks. But we were about to take a massive financial hit.  When we’d sold our library of adult features to Gourmet Video / VCX, they hadn’t paid us up front the full purchase price; instead they paid us a deposit with a schedule for increment payments over two years. But then the Traci Lords underage shocker exploded. Traci Lords, featured in four of our films, declared publically that she had been a minor in all of her adult films appearances except for one film, "Traci I Love You,” which she’d produced herself. Conveniantly, the FBI had received an anoymous tip of her real age. Overnight all of the films she had appeared in, about 80, became contradband, save the one she’d produced; it transpited that “Traci I Love You” was filmed when she'd turned 18. Now remember that once a film was released and the first wave of sales was in the books, continuing long term returns were not great due to the video stores rental paradigm.  While we’d sold our entire library of films to Gourmet including four Traci Lords films, the overwhelming value of the sale was in the unreleased title, “Bad Girl 4.”  But the Traci Lords issue gave our buyer an insurmountable leverage tool, an advantage we could not overcome, and it shattered our increment payment deal. The company told us,  “You sold us titles we can no longer use, so we’re gonna stop paying until we iron out a new agreement. If you wanna sue us, go right ahead.” They knew we couldn’t go to court over Traci Lords movies. So Svetlana and I settled with them. Traci Lords cost us $300,000, an enormous sum, way beyond the risidual value of those four films. In today’s money, that’s close to $900,000. Being real money, not an inflated property value, it really hurt; it messed up our entire financial portfolio.  However, looking at this from a different perspective, because we were already out of the adult business when the Traci Lords debacle occurred, we were probably spared a police/ FBI visit and possible prosecution which happened to several adult film producers at that time.   It’s worth stating that we never knew or suspected that Traci Lords was underage.  We had copies of her drivers license supplied to us by her modeling agency as was the norm with all the talent on every shoot. That her license was a forgery took us all by surprise. 

Once the adult film industry was fully out of our system, the stigma of it began to rear its head—at least we began to notice it.  Once at a Hollywood party I was chatting with Academy Award winning director Alan Pakula when Ron Hyatt (AKA Ron Jeremy) dropped into the conversation and promptly told Pakula that “Bad Girls” a film he was in, directed by yours truly, outgrossed “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” in New York City. “You can’t discount porn!” I saw the roll in Pakula’s eyes. Then the man slid away from us as if we had Ebola. That moment stuck with me.  I started a regimen of never talking about my adult film days when I met   people. I’d mention I’d done a few low budget films, “You know indie crap, marketplace fodder  for the International markets, Mifed in Milan, Cannes Film Festival,” I’d loosely be telling the truth, if there’s such a thing as a loose truth or is that like a little bit pregnant? We had visited Cannes to try and sell one of my mainstream screenplays, and we had been to Milan to sell foreign buyers rights to "Stormswept,” an R rated film we made in 1992, not released in the USA until 1995. But I weaved a scenario to skirt the fact that we’d made x-rated films.  I lived this way for decades, never telling anyone. Neighbors, acquaintances, friends, didn’t know. Of course that’s living a lie, but overtime the lie became so natural, so matter of fact, it seemed right.  

Perhaps, omitting the experience of directing seventeen adult films hurt my chances of succeeding in mainstream production or perhaps not. That I’ll never know. But I can tell you that a few years after I quit the adult film business,  I was on a shortlist to direct a film for Trimark Pictures.  The budget for the film was around four million dollars. I didn’t share my full filmmaking experience because it was nearly all related to adult film productions. To the producer interviewing me,  I’d directed “The Lords of Magick” and I also showed him a reel of the unfinished film I’d just directed, “Stornswept.” The producer thought the “Stormswept” footage, a car crash into a lake followed by a woman fleeing through a stormy forest, was gripping. But overall I didn’t appear to have much experience.  The producer told me, “we had to go with more experience. We do like your work, David. Keep it up!” 

Despite the stab to my gut over the rejection, I didn’t change my stance. We still didn’t discuss or mention our past to anyone. Besides, how do you tell someone you've known for years, “By the way, we used to make X-rated films.”

And that’s the truth. We used to make adult films.  Am I defined by that past? The fact that four decades ago I made some of the most dynamic, erotic X-rated films of all time didn’t then and doesn’t today define me. Notwithstanding, to a degree I and everyone on this planet are emotionally shaped by our life experiences.  So I was once one of the pioneers of the golden age of adult cinema, ferried into that realm by a happenstance moment. It was there, in that saucy cottage industry, that I met Svetlana. We dated. Got married. Worked together and spent forty-four years side by side until cancer stole her away from me. 

As I wrap this up, you might be wondering, what am I up to today?

The financial hit due to Traci Lords, followed by soaring changes in the film post production industry led to us closing the studio and downsizing. I spent one decade in the car business while I began to write fiction. My first young adult book was “Into the Abyss.” It was optioned by a famous film producer, Joe Wizan. Unfortunately he was unable to get it off the ground.  I directed a few local car commercials and human interest documentaries: “The Cat House on the Kings,” was one of them, and I began to find relative success as a professional photographer.  Then we moved to Kauai, to the place where we shot those four adult feature films. Many of the locals in Kauai know about, or had heard stories about, the adult films shot here.  Some had seen our production lights at Secret Beach during our nighttime shoots. Maybe now that I’ve written this tell-all I’ll say, yes that was me.  Or maybe not. I’ll see how I feel. 

As a footnote:  Writing remains a passion of mine. Not screenplays but young adult/ teen fiction stories with fantastical storylines occurring in our familiar world, and I’m still a professional photographer. Maybe I’ll still make it big time! David’s novels

 -David