Warren William would have played a perfect sex fiction charlatan…

Today, as noted by some of my friends on Twitter, is the birthday of the king of the pre-Code movies, Warren William–that master interpreter of likable scoundrels, charlatans, and sleazeballs. I couldn’t resist making this screencap off my tv the other night when he was up to his orbs in trouble pretending to be a successful Park Avenue doctor (!) in Warner Bros.’ 1934 BEDSIDE. The movie was shown on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) the other day.

“I’ve always made it a point to be strictly ethical,” says “Dr. J. Herbert Martel” aka Bob Brown (Warren William) as he hires “Sparks” (Allen Jenkins) to get him some publicity as a medico in BEDSIDE.

 

One of the fun aspects of editing sex magazines was assigning fiction to my writers, one of whom, who went by the byline “Luther Selleck,” created a character named “Mr. Baxter.” In various guises in many stories, ranging from World War 1 fighter pilot (“Ass Aces of the Great War”) to New York City cockroach nemesis (“The Nutty Exterminator”) to ancient Greek judge of a butt beauty contest (“Assmasters of the Acropolis,” there under the name “Baxocles”), Mr. Baxter went his cheerfully amoral way through adventures with an assortment of fetching ladies–and depending on the magazine’s title (I edited CHEEKS, LEG WORLD, and GIRLS OVER 40), their chief attractions physically for Mr. B would be either derrieres, legs, or overall “cougar” appeal.

Although my writer Luther didn’t model Mr. Baxter on Warren William, when we later discovered Warren William (after Mr. Baxter was created) both Luther and I agreed that Warren would have been perfect in the role had there ever been any “Mr. Baxter” movies!

So, a tip of the hat to Warren William today on what would have been his 124th birthday!

Born December 2, 1894, died September 24, 1948.

 

Remembering a sensuous nude by Andrew Loomis…

One of the reasons I write this blog is simply to give readers an idea of what one porn writer’s work has been like. I also do it to get readers interested in my erotica ebooks, which are available on Amazon here. I have basically been a hard-working and knowledgable writer/editor, with forays into nude photography, porn screenwriting, and even modeling and acting.

Of the various influences I’ve had on my work in porn/erotica/whatever-you-wanna-call-it, a strong one has always been the culture of illustration and pinups. When I was growing up, my family had various art instruction books in the house, two of which are highly regarded today–Andrew Loomis’ Fun With A Pencil and Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth. You can find the latter on Amazon here, and the former will be re-released soon. After many years Loomis’ books have come back back into print; before that they were hard to find collector’s items. I was recently lucky to find a battered old copy of Fun With A Pencil at the flea market, a late printing from the 1960s, and I picked it up. It got me thinking about him again.

In the numerous offices and cubicles I’ve had over the years while editing magazines, I always put up examples of art that inspire me. For example, in the 1980s I had a few pinups by the late Dave Stevens, who created The Rocketeer and was important in the revival of interest in Bettie Page. You can see his amazing work here.

And this picture by Andrew Loomis has always been one of my favorites since I was a teenager, and hung on the wall of my cubicle in the 1990s when I was editing Sex Acts, Cheeks, and Girls Over 40 magazines out at the publisher in New Jersey, as well as writing stories, interviews, and columns for Leg Action, Swank, and D-Cup for the same company.

Fun with a pencil, indeed, although this is from Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth.

Although the magazines I edited were as hardcore as any on the newsstands, I’ve always loved the softer and more sensual kinds of images as well, as exemplified by the Loomis nude above. The magazines I edited from 1981-2009 were therefore a mix of the pinup and porn aesthetic.

 

Fifty Shades of the Fiend!

With the approach of the holidays, and especially the first frenzied shopping day known as “Black Friday,” I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is ONE femdom ebook you MUST read this season!

Here is a tale that captures the kinky underside of the festive scene…as our submissive hero Brian takes his Chinese stripper girl friend Orchid shopping, and ends up buying presents not just for her and her family, but for a stud she picks up at the department store and takes home to screw in front of Brian…

Just click ahead to my Amazon page here to find SHE MADE ME A CUCKOLD ON BLACK FRIDAY and the other perverse volumes in my “Irv O. Neil Erotic Library”…with their covers illustrated in the wonderfully crude and sleazy style of the underground fetish booklets once sold in the sleazier porn shops around Times Square in the days before the area was “cleaned up” to become more “family-friendly.” (And do take with a grain of salt my pomposity in giving my books that “Erotic Library” label, because it is meant to a certain extent to be tongue-in-cheek. A sense of humor is an essential component of the skilled pornographer.)

On other fronts, I did the In Bed With Dr. Sue podcast last Tuesday and that was an interesting experience. I hope everybody out in podcast listening land enjoyed our chat…

Both Sue and her callers asked some stimulating questions, so if you want to get a little insight into the working process of four writers of erotica, check it out in the archives here. The first half concentrates on smut/porn/erotica scribes Angela St. Lawrence, Louis Friend, Ed Cantor, and myself. With the arrival of a surprise guest, a literary agent/editor named Lori Perkins who was promoting a book of musings and opinions about Fifty Shades of Grey, that mammoth erotic romance/BDSM bestseller, the second half of the podcast focuses more on the current workings of the publishing industry in the wake of that literary phenomenon.

Meanwhile, my own dedication to vintage publishing and its products remains as strong as ever. I went to a memorabilia show on Saturday and picked up these lovely paperbacks from the 50s and early 60s:

I also found this 1975 book about the “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s and early 1940s. Its 1975 cover by Mike Kaluta, which was probably done specifically for the volume, captures the feeling of how publishers conveyed images of women in bondage long, long before Fifty Shades of Grey.

Actually, the later 1978 paperback edition of The Shudder Pulps used a vintage illustration from one of the original magazines, instead of Kaluta’s modern interpretative painting of the weird menace style:

And a bit of history: much of pulp is interconnected with later magazine genre forms. Martin Goodman, the man who published these examples of damsels in distress–Fifty Shades of the Fiend, you might say–

…eventually published this in the early 1960s:

…which everybody knows about. And his son Charles aka “Chip” Goodman eventually published this in the late 1980s…

…which I created and edited as a true labor of assman’s love.

Anyway, you’ll forgive my nostalgic ramblings…it’s just that after doing the podcast I couldn’t help but reflect on how things have changed, cover-wise, from Uncanny Tales to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ironically, the recent reprint of The Shudder Pulps goes the more subtle route cover-wise, judging by this image from the Amazon store:

Political correctness? Ah, thy minions are legion!

——–

I found the weird menace covers in the article “Pulp Horrors” by Don Hutchison here. I found the Amazing Fantasy cover here. And you can find back issues of my seminal ass journal CHEEKS at the great online store OldMags.com.

Finally, I found the vintage shot of radio listeners here.

 

Memories of the porn trade, Part 2…

It just keeps raining and raining here in New York tonight. There is an awning just outside my apartment window and the sound of every drop is magnified on its surface. Makes the rainfall sound more pointed and relentless to me. I don’t mind light rain, but heavy rain tends to keep me inside and I feel a bit of cabin fever.

I’ve been busy writing my newsletters for porn websites as well as my product review column about everything from horror movie documentaries to sex toys. I’ve also done a couple of good columns in my weekly “Notes of a Rebel Subbie” series for a very kinky site called Domme Dose. It’s definitely “for adults only” but if you’re interested in various aspects of the erotic practice of female domination, especially what is known as “financial domination” or “findom” (where subs “tribute” their dominatrixes with gifts and money) check out the link here.

To relax my mind on the weekends, I like to go to flea markets sometimes, and last weekend I was making my usual rounds when my attention was drawn to this colorful tapestry:

Maybe I should check out REAL bellydancing again sometime soon...

It took me a moment to realize that this fun, if somewhat cheesy item, was another copy of the same tapestry that I had bought on 14th Street and hung in my office at Charles “Chip” Goodman’s publishing company in the mid to late 1980s when I was the editor of magazines such as Stag, Cheeks, and Girls Over 40.

As you can see, Stag was a venerable men's mag title...

This title was my brainchild, and I edited it lovingly from 1988 until 2005.

When I started doing this mag in the late 80s, the term "cougar" had not yet been coined.

I had a nice comfortable private office crammed with books, magazines, and besides that tapestry, pinup art on the walls. There was one particular poster by the late Dave “Rocketeer” Stevens of a beautiful blonde that I remember fondly; I wonder if I still have it somewhere in my archives. This was my personal headquarters in the corporate hive where I edited my writers’ stories and articles and erotic letters, hammered out the “girl copy” for the pictorials (the seductive prose inducing the readers to take out their weiners, if the pictures hadn’t already accomplished that), and where I edited the sets of 35mm slides that would make up the layouts of the models in the magazine, as well as provide the covers for each issue.

I used to sit with that bellydancer tapestry opposite me as I smoked cigarettes (not that many, as I never smoked heavily, and all I did was puff, not inhale), drank coffee, had a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast, and threw around ideas over the phone or in person with my various talented contributors who provided some very entertaining copy. (I’ll do another post sometime just about my writers, so that’s why I’m not giving their names now.) Occasionally a potential model would come into the office and I would take a few test Polaroids of her, often posing her in front of that bellydancing tapestry.

Sometimes I listened to Big Band music when I was writing in the office, and a younger colleague said when he heard the number “Goodbye” by Benny Goodman he thought of me sitting in that office working. I used to also sometimes wear vintage clothes in those days, double-breasted jackets and topcoats from the 50s, and I could dangle my cigarette under a fedora with the best of ’em.

Like any hard-boiled scribe, I kept a bottle of Jameson in my desk drawer for spiritual emergencies. Not that I’m a big drinker, although I do like my shots of that fine Irish whiskey.

Can’t believe that ended almost twenty-three years ago, when I became a freelancer. Seems like, you know, yesterday. Almost…

Well, back in the present day now, the rain seems to have slowed down a bit outside my window. Maybe I’ll go out for a little walk…not too far from my house is the building where I used to work for Goodman. These days, the building is right next to the only Hooters in Manhattan. Too bad it wasn’t there in the 80s…I’m sure it would have been a regular spot for our expense-paid lunches with porn scribes, porn photographers, and the occasional porn stars!

Come to think of it, I got to enjoy a bit of the Mad Men type of work life, even if in a more modest way.

———–

I got the scans of the magazine covers from a site called OldMags.com, which sells a huge selection of vintage adult magazines, as well as other kinds of publications. They even have pages which feature issues of Fox, when it was put out by Montcalm Publishing, for which I did many porn star interviews and video reviews in the 1990s. Those pages can be found here. I don’t work for Old Mags, but I’m just acknowledging the source of the cover photos above. I obviously took the snapshot of the bellydancing tapestry myself.