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.”
Ms. Ellen Thompson, AVN Associate Editor and an Awards judge who votes under the n.d.g. Ida Slapter: 35 “We’ve heard this for years. I hear this complaining also goes on in the mainstream. I don’t like insulting anybody, but sometimes there’s sour grapes. What are we supposed to say? Vivid and VCA put out good product. We truly, honestly do vote fairly.”
Mr. Dick Filth: “The best perception, backed up by tons of anecdotal evidence, is that they are totally, totally fixed and rigged.”
Saturday’s the big night. The banquet, the onstage entertainment, the headline Awards. See & be seen. Gamblers and conventioneers and mooks of all ilk are massed at the Caesars cabstand to watch the starlets arrive. There are camcorders and flashbulbs but no paparazzi per se. Some of the performers come in limos, others in shiny penile sports cars; others seem to mysteriously just suddenly appear. There are even more starlets here than there were at the CES, and they are seriously dolled up. There are cerise halters and pear-colored Lycra bodysuits with open-toed pumps of burgundy suede. There are platinum lamé gowns slit all the way to the tenth rib. Bottoms less covered than shellacked look like they by all rights should have panty- or at least thong lines but do not have such lines. There are lime-green vinyl leotards and toile bellbottoms and fishscale bustiers and miniskirts the same texture and length as a tutu’s ruffle. Garter straps flash and Merry Widow bodices shade the interiors of translucent blouses. Several of the outfits defy very basic precepts of modern physics. Coiffures are towering and complex. The starlets are all on the arms of men, but none of these escorts are male porn performers. Average heel-height is 4"+. A loud-voiced civilian in the cabstand crowd actually utters the phrase “Va Va Voom,” which yr. correspondents had never before heard anywhere outside a Sinatra movie. Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement. Max Hardcore is under a Stetson the color of weak chocolate milk, and his adjustable B-girl — arrayed in a type of scarlet cowboy suit that’s mostly fringe — has inflated her breasts to what’s got to be maximum capacity.