The Rialto Report

In 1979, Dennis Posa was on the verge of stardom. Against all odds, as Dennis Parker, he’d just released a disco record on a major recording label and was managed by the same team responsible for many of the biggest disco acts of the time. I say, against all odds, because less than 10 years earlier, he’d been a college dropout, the product of a difficult childhood on Long Island who struggled with...

I’ve always loved movies, especially the films I grew up with in the 1970s. I was seduced by their gritty realism, social commentary, complex characters, and a more honest portrayal of the human condition. And I was fan of that generation of film stars too: always surprising, sometimes conflicted figures, artists more than the celebrities that we have today. Movie genres seemed less important to m...

This past week I phoned Paul Thomas , former adult performer and film director, also known as PT. I’m heading out to LA shortly and was calling to set up a date with him and his wife. Seeing the two of them when I’m out west is one of my favorite things. It starts sitting together in their backyard under the Los Angeles sun, catching up on what’s been happening since my last visit. Then strolling...

Years ago, I first saw the 1970s adult film Barbara Broadcast (1977) on the big screen, and it made a big impression. In the film, there’s a scene which shows a man standing behind an industrial kitchen worktable, a shirtless, mustached piece of beefcake that was Wade Nichols . Rugged yet pretty. Lean, toned, and handsome. He looked like the Marlboro man from the distant plains, if that cowboy had...

Who was the original actor cast in the lead role of the golden age blockbuster, The Devil in Miss Jones (1973)? Not Georgina Spelvin , the talented doyenne of adult films who starred in many pre-video era features, first in New York then in California, and who was the eventual star of the film as ‘Miss Jones.’ No, Gerard Damiano first chose another actress, Sue Flaken , to fill the role, only to c...

In the first part of our interview with Susan Hart , we heard about Sue’s early years in 1970s Los Angeles, growing up in a strict Catholic family, running away from home when she was 15, and becoming involved in a bad relationship. She escaped – into the army of all places, before finding a different kind of home, of sorts, as a prolific performer in the early adult video industry. But what is un...

Perhaps one of the less obvious aspects of The Rialto Report is that it may lead to the impression that people involved in the adult industry forty or fifty years ago are all pretty comfortable talking about their pasts and have led serene lives, free of incident, since they stopped making sex films. After all, our podcasts and interviews are filled with people talking pretty openly about their ex...

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida: After Dolores Carlos ’ retirement from acting in South Florida nudie films in the late 1960s, she still remained close to her circle of Cuban filmmaker friends, and none more so than José Prieto , Greg Sandor , and Rafael Remy . They would still meet regularly, and all three took an active interest in her daughter M...

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida: You may remember Marcy Bichette ’s start in life from our earlier episodes: she was born Marcelle Denise Bichette in St Petersburg, Florida in August 1950 to a young married couple who had distinctly different ambitions in life. Her father, Maurice Bichette, had married looking for a settled, quiet existence, but he...

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida: Manuel Conde had lived several lives even before he moved to Miami, Florida. He’d been born José Conde Samaniego in 1917 in Galicia, in northern Spain, though his family fled to Cuba after General Franco’s fascist coup d’état in the 1930s. And then, in 1959, Castro overthrew the government and enforced Communi...

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida: Dolores Carlos was from a fiercely Cuban family, even though she was born in Tampa, Florida in October 1930, and never visited her country of origin. Her Cuban heritage and good looks, not to mention her patriotism, came from her father, Gus, and grandfather, Carlos, who had run the family’s cigar making business. G...

Cuba may only be 90 miles from the southern tip of the United States – a leisurely boat trip on a calm day – but since the 1950s, the island has seemed part of a distant world, too many communist miles away. It wasn’t always the case. For years, Cuba was almost an extension of America, almost another star on its star-spangled banner. Links between the two countries dated back to when the Cuban cig...

A few years ago, I was researching an article for The Rialto Report when I came across a 1980 radio program from WBAI, a popular New York City station that specialized in progressive and alternative voices at the time. This particular show featured a prostitute named Iris De La Cruz. Iris wasn’t directly connected to the adult film scene in New York at the time – though she was friends with severa...

Howard Ziehm , the pioneering adult film director, theater owner, author, polymath, and friend of The Rialto Report died last week in California. Over the years, I visited Howard on several occasions at his beautiful hill-top house in Malibu in California – “It’s the home that porn built”, he would joke. And he was right: Howard had enjoyed a long career making and exhibiting adult films, and in h...

By the mid 1990s, Dian Hanson could’ve been forgiven for thinking that she’d finally made it – and that nothing was going to derail her career in magazine publishing that had started two decades earlier. She’d had an improbable and volatile journey, from a troubled upbringing and difficult marriage, to working as a nurse in rural Pennsylvania, before somehow launching an explicit men’s magaz...

In the first part of ‘Dian Hanson, Chronicles,’ Dian spoke of her upbringing in the northwest United States, an often shocking family life with a difficult and frightening father – who just happened to be the supreme grand master of a sex-magic cult. It was  a difficult childhood that included bullying, sexual assault, and running away from home, culminating in an unhappy marriag...

Dian Hanson is a unique figure from the world of men’s magazines in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, a world that overlapped strongly with the adult film business. Last time, in the first episode of this podcast series, we heard about her surprising, and often shocking, upbringing: a hippie and high school dropout from Seattle, her father was supreme grand master in a sex-magic cult, and a childho...

If the name Dian Hanson rings a bell for you nowadays, it may be because she’s a senior editor and writer for Taschen , the gold-standard, high-end book publishing company, where she has over 50 books to her credit. In fact, she’s also the so-called head of the company’s Sexy Book division where she’s overseen impressive and weighty tomes that include The Art of Pin-Up , The Book of Butts , Breast...

Geri Miller may not be the most famous name from 1960s sex films, but she may well be the most interesting. With a story that includes Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Joe Sarno, the Peppermint Lounge, Ringo Starr, Joe Dalessandro, Mick Jagger, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Young Rascals, and stripping in front of the Queen Mother’s house, Geri lived a technicolor life in a psychedelic era. Th...

The Rialto Report recently acquired a collection of behind-the-scenes photographs and stills from the Stephen C. Apostolof / Edward D. Wood Jr. film Orgy of the Dead (1965) which we are sharing below.  Many of them feature Pat Barrington , which gives us the chance to revisit our podcast about her remarkable life If you’ve never heard of her, Pat was big in the 1960s, when she was a popular actres...

On the previous episode of Svengali – The Chuck Traynor Story : On the heels of a very public divorce, Chuck Traynor and Linda Lovelace were finally separated and began to forge their own paths. Chuck wasted no time partnering with up-and-coming adult star Marilyn Chambers , becoming both her manager and her husband. Linda combined a professional and romantic relationship with producer and choreog...

On the previous episode of Svengali – The Chuck Traynor Story: To everyone’s surprise, the sex film Deep Throat (1972) had become a financial hit and a cultural phenomenon. And everybody involved was determined to capitalize on the film’s success – and that included Chuck Traynor , husband and manager of Linda Lovelace , the movie’s leading lady. When the film blew up, Chuck put Linda throug...

F.M Bradley died last month just a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday. I can’t say I was surprised – Bradley had been in a nursing home ever since I found him in 2021 after years of looking. He was bedridden, and we had a few false starts before we finally settled down for our interview due to his ill health. But even though he was unable to walk, whenever we’d video chat it was easy to see...

Michael Findlay was a young New Yorker, fascinated with film and the mechanics behind it. Julian Marsh was his alter ego, a movie director possessed with a singular twisted vision. Richard Jennings was a sadistic, deranged movie character, one-eyed, confined to a wheelchair, and hell bent on revenge. The films Michael Findlay made seemed to be so single-minded, unique, and personal, that they begg...

Sex and violence have been part of movies since the very beginning. Ever since Thomas Edison made and exhibited ‘The Kiss’ in 1896, an 18 second clip of a couple embracing, moviegoers have been shocked by onscreen depictions of lust. The outrage over ‘The Kiss’ was understandable: it was one of the first films ever shown commercially to the public, and kissing in public was prosecuted at the time....