The Other Hollywood: The History of Porn Told By Those Who Lived It
 

CHATSWORTH, Calif. - The adult movie industry has been written about extensively, pro and con, in theory, polemics, gossip, and tell-all autobiography. But until now its tangled history has never been told in full, certainly not by the people who lived it.

That?s what makes the February 15 publication of The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne with Peter Pavia, a milestone event.

Published by Regan Books/Harper Collins, it traces the history of the XXX movie business from its first stirrings in the late 1960s until the end of the last decade?entirely in the words of those who participated in it.

The book is the result of hundreds of interviews with producers, performers, law enforcers, both friends and foes. Most were conducted in person; some quotes, from the deceased or the uncooperative, were taken from published sources.

?For a storyteller, this is a great story,? McNeil told AVN.com, ?and nobody had done a book on it. The books I found about porn were all theory.?

McNeil, the author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, had his first introduction to porn when he worked on the movie Blow Dry in 1974. ?I met a lot of people and I liked them,? he said, ?and I wondered what happened to them.?

For an oral history, he said, ?you need 30 years and core group of people who have been together all that time,? and the porn industry filled that requirement perfectly.

He began work on the book in 1997, the year after his punk book was published. He learned about porn as he?d learned about punk, by talking in depth to the people involved.

But selling it wasn?t easy. The subject was taboo.

?I pitched the idea to every publisher in New York and everybody turned it down,? he said. It wasn?t until 2000, when he produced a three-hour Court TV documentary, Adults Only: The Secret History of the Other Hollywood, that interest was shown.

He made a deal with publisher Judith Regan in 2000, the same year his co-writer Jennifer Osborne came on board. It took them four years to weave a narrative from the enormous amount of transcribed talk.

?It was a ton of work,? Osborne said. ?It took as long as it did for me to get my bachelor?s degree.?

Like McNeil, she had her eyes opened along the way. ?It was so much more complex than I originally thought when I first entered into it,? she said. ?Every time we talked to somebody, new facets of the story would open up, new layers would peel off.?

McNeil feels the book will open everyone?s eyes to the reality of the adult industry. It used to be, he said, that ?people could say anything they wanted about the porn industry, because nobody knew what they were talking about.? The Other Hollywood, he hopes, will change all that.

McNeil and Osborne will kick off the book?s publication at a party in New York on February 15. After that they?ll go on a national promotional tour Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, New Haven and other cities.

I cant wait to get it