The legacy of Max Hardcore - Part 1
There are five things you need to know about porn producer Max Hardcore (his real name is Paul Little).
The first is that unless I am very much mistaken, and I really don’t think I am, the man was/is a card-carrying asshole and a menace to any woman who is unfortunate enough to come into his orbit.
The second is that he plainly has a problem with women. No-one can watch much of Max’s work without being very sure that Max hates women. Yes, there is acting in his work. But he conceived, scripted, and directed the work. And the misogyny reaches obsessional levels.
Third, much of his work is very ugly. Not merely ugly in what it represents, although that is also true, but just plain ugly to look at in the sense that there is often nothing pretty at all in a Max scene. The women in his films are rarely especially attractive although they were usually young and skinny. He would often go out of his way to make them look even less pretty than they were.
Fourth, as far as I am aware, he was the last pornographer to be prosecuted successfully in the United States on charges of obscenity. He spent two and a half years in prison between Jan 2009 and July 2011. For making porn.
The fifth is that Max did more to shape modern porn as we know it than any single other person. A lot more. And that means we have Max to thank for much of the freedoms that we currently (temporarily?) enjoy to watch any kind of porn we like that involves consenting adults. It also means, unfortunately, that a lot of Max’s desire to punish women has now become part of modern porn too.
Porn in the 1990s
Max produced porn between 1992 and 2007. The porn he made was very different from what others were making in the 1990s. In the 90s the predominant paradigm was a VHS video film (later, a DVD) of typically 90 minutes in length, with around four sex scenes, where the actress on the front of the box appeared in all the scenes, or if there was more than one actress then they each appeared in different scenes, but the scenes were often linked by some sort of weak story. Four or more professional male actors would also appear. The film was usually made in a cheap but professional studio and, by modern standards, the production values were, well, not very high. But there were standards. The actresses hair and makeup was professionally applied. There was a costume budget. Music played over the sex scenes. Max, on the other hand, filmed his work in hotel rooms or in his own home and especially on a small deck where a bright yellow waterproof sofa was placed against a natural backdrop of the Verduga mountains. Occasionally, he filmed outdoors. Once he got his formula down, he personally appeared in all the scenes as the sole male actor. Pale and white-haired (Max was 36 when he made his first porn film and in his fifties when he made his last but he always looked older), Max was always stark naked except for a pair of loafers or white tube socks and, sometimes, a cowboy hat. The production value of his work is almost non-existent. Typically, a single cameraman followed the action. The only soundtrack was grunts, repeated “oh yeah”s and Max hurling a string of vicious epithets at the actress. The only other expense was a small collection of cheap clothing bought at the junior section of K-Mart one suspects, that were reused time and again on women for whom they were too small to be worn properly. There was no serious attempt at any story but scenes involving Max and different actresses would be bundled together for video sales purposes often collected around a common theme.
Buttman
Max was not the only producer working in this low rent way. John “Buttman” Stagliano was also appearing in his own low-budget films around this time. Stagliano would perform roles as both actor and cameraman - something that had only recently become possible with smaller cameras but at the price of the best picture quality. Stagliano is credited with creating the gonzo genre that now entirely dominates modern porn. As founder and owner of the Evil Angel studios, he is one of the wealthier men in porn.
But very little is ever said about Max. This is despite the fact that, even if you have never seen one of his videos, you will immediately have recognised from my description above the genre he independently co-created with Stagliano. And Max went much further than the Buttman, who was satisfied with anal sex (and later, anal sex with transsexuals). But there are reasons why no-one mentions Max. And why almost none of his work can currently be found on xHamster nor on hardly any other tube site.
Outlaw pornographer
The mainstream porn industry in the States quickly decided not to like Max. Whilst they embraced Stagliano, they shunned Max. His work was considered dangerous. Industry insiders feared that Max’s constant pushing of the boundaries of what was permissible risked bringing the whole house of cards down on them all. Actresses were advised not to work with him. And for good reason. There are few established actresses in his scenes. He worked with newcomers to the industry who did not know any better and girls who were not pretty enough to get work elsewhere. Some of them, one suspects from looking at them, may not have been entirely strangers to a crack pipe or methamphetamine.
And Max did things to those girls that had not been seen on commercially made and widely distributed film before. He fucked their faces until they were entirely covered in a layer of thick spit. He pushed his cock so far down their throats that they puked their guts out. And then he shoved his cock back in before the girl had even got her breath back. He wrote on their naked bodies in red lipstick “SLUT” and “WHORE”. He applied lipstick to their mouths colouring broadly so that they looked like clowns. And then he fucked their clown mouths. He inserted gynaecological instruments into their vaginas, arseholes and their mouths. Then he stretched them open painfully wide to near breaking point. And he pissed and came into the gaping holes. He filled their asses with his cum and piss and then had them suck it out through a tube. He fisted them. He dressed them like pre-pubescents and fucked their arses. And this at a time when piss was rarely seen in mainstream porn. With few exceptions, the expression on the face of an actress in a Max scene is one of horror.
Max insists that he was merely playing a role and having fun with it. It was all a gag. The actresses were in on the joke. He does not hate women, he says, pointing to another, much less successful porn producer (Khan Tusion) who he says did much worse. This is nonsense. Max’s anger at the women in his scenes is plain. If you look at the women’s faces rather than their cunts, you will better understand what is really going on.
Asked whether he ever felt sorry for the women he worked with, Max compared making a video with him to a boxing match. No-one, he insisted, felt badly for the bloodied loser of the fight because the boxer knew what was going to happen in the ring before they entered it. Normal people don’t think like that. This is the language of psychopathy.
First prosecution
Together with his wish to punish women, Max also had an insatiable desire to provoke. When even the fattest, laziest bear is poked hard enough and often enough, it eventually notices. Max was prosecuted in 1998 on c***d pornography charges. The City of Los Angeles relied on a statute that made dressing an adult actress like a much younger person and then fucking her a crime. This was, of course, a bullshit law written by imbeciles and enforced by mindless idiots. Acting is not real. Infants understand this. Prosecutors apparently did not. In a separate unrelated case that came to hearing before Max’s case did, the U.S. Supreme Court explained it to the nation’s prosecutors in polite, legal language. They struck down the statute as unconstitutional. Of course, those were the days when the U.S. Supreme Court was actually composed of lawyers rather than the current malignant zealots hell-bent on returning this country to the magical time they believe existed before Elvis Presley was heard on the radio and black people started appearing on television. The prosecution against Max had to be withdrawn in 2002 before it came to trial.
If Max had been wise, he would have thanked his lucky stars, been magnanimous in defeat, and kept a low profile for a time. But Max was Max. And so he rubbed the noses of the authorities in it. Now, I am no expert on the U.S. justice system but I know this: justice has fuck all to do with it. If prosecutors really want to convict you, they will. They have long memories and Max’s card was marked.
Public perception of morality is always changing
But prosecutors also have a weakness and that is that the system in which they work moves very slowly. Public perception of morality can move much more quickly. And the irony is that by the time the authorities moved against him for the second time, Max had been pissing on, fisting, facefucking women, and making them puke for 15 years. His work was getting more and more popular. And the mainstream industry had been catching up with him. Moreover, porn had moved from an exclusively physical format to a substantial online presence. And online porn had more room for niche products. The demand for porn had increased massively. By the mid-2000s, pissing and fisting were established porn niches. Facefucking to the point of vomiting, much less so. Then. And it was Max more than anyone else who had made these things so.
What had plainly been outrageous to nearly all in 1994 was acceptable to many by 2004. This happens only by repeated transgression of boundaries until the boundaries give way. And then, those who had once lived by and supported those boundaries can suddenly no longer recall why they had been there in the first place. And those that come after are barely aware they had once been there at all. And Max had led the charge. This is, of course, why any suggestion that boundaries in the sexual sphere should be enforced by law is absurd. It is stupid to punish an individual today for transgressing a rule that millions may be freely transgressing in years to come without causing any ripples in the fabric of society. And it is not the role of the law or any individual or group to try to hold back the way anyone else may think or act in the future. The future does not belong to anyone until they actually get there. They may be hit by a bus tomorrow and never see it so they have fuck all right to try to veto it in advance. And yet, there are many laws that are plainly interested in maintaining a behavioural status quo. What a load of shit.
Continued in part 2. Read it here: https://xhamster.com/posts/10312155
The first is that unless I am very much mistaken, and I really don’t think I am, the man was/is a card-carrying asshole and a menace to any woman who is unfortunate enough to come into his orbit.
The second is that he plainly has a problem with women. No-one can watch much of Max’s work without being very sure that Max hates women. Yes, there is acting in his work. But he conceived, scripted, and directed the work. And the misogyny reaches obsessional levels.
Third, much of his work is very ugly. Not merely ugly in what it represents, although that is also true, but just plain ugly to look at in the sense that there is often nothing pretty at all in a Max scene. The women in his films are rarely especially attractive although they were usually young and skinny. He would often go out of his way to make them look even less pretty than they were.
Fourth, as far as I am aware, he was the last pornographer to be prosecuted successfully in the United States on charges of obscenity. He spent two and a half years in prison between Jan 2009 and July 2011. For making porn.
The fifth is that Max did more to shape modern porn as we know it than any single other person. A lot more. And that means we have Max to thank for much of the freedoms that we currently (temporarily?) enjoy to watch any kind of porn we like that involves consenting adults. It also means, unfortunately, that a lot of Max’s desire to punish women has now become part of modern porn too.
Porn in the 1990s
Max produced porn between 1992 and 2007. The porn he made was very different from what others were making in the 1990s. In the 90s the predominant paradigm was a VHS video film (later, a DVD) of typically 90 minutes in length, with around four sex scenes, where the actress on the front of the box appeared in all the scenes, or if there was more than one actress then they each appeared in different scenes, but the scenes were often linked by some sort of weak story. Four or more professional male actors would also appear. The film was usually made in a cheap but professional studio and, by modern standards, the production values were, well, not very high. But there were standards. The actresses hair and makeup was professionally applied. There was a costume budget. Music played over the sex scenes. Max, on the other hand, filmed his work in hotel rooms or in his own home and especially on a small deck where a bright yellow waterproof sofa was placed against a natural backdrop of the Verduga mountains. Occasionally, he filmed outdoors. Once he got his formula down, he personally appeared in all the scenes as the sole male actor. Pale and white-haired (Max was 36 when he made his first porn film and in his fifties when he made his last but he always looked older), Max was always stark naked except for a pair of loafers or white tube socks and, sometimes, a cowboy hat. The production value of his work is almost non-existent. Typically, a single cameraman followed the action. The only soundtrack was grunts, repeated “oh yeah”s and Max hurling a string of vicious epithets at the actress. The only other expense was a small collection of cheap clothing bought at the junior section of K-Mart one suspects, that were reused time and again on women for whom they were too small to be worn properly. There was no serious attempt at any story but scenes involving Max and different actresses would be bundled together for video sales purposes often collected around a common theme.
Buttman
Max was not the only producer working in this low rent way. John “Buttman” Stagliano was also appearing in his own low-budget films around this time. Stagliano would perform roles as both actor and cameraman - something that had only recently become possible with smaller cameras but at the price of the best picture quality. Stagliano is credited with creating the gonzo genre that now entirely dominates modern porn. As founder and owner of the Evil Angel studios, he is one of the wealthier men in porn.
But very little is ever said about Max. This is despite the fact that, even if you have never seen one of his videos, you will immediately have recognised from my description above the genre he independently co-created with Stagliano. And Max went much further than the Buttman, who was satisfied with anal sex (and later, anal sex with transsexuals). But there are reasons why no-one mentions Max. And why almost none of his work can currently be found on xHamster nor on hardly any other tube site.
Outlaw pornographer
The mainstream porn industry in the States quickly decided not to like Max. Whilst they embraced Stagliano, they shunned Max. His work was considered dangerous. Industry insiders feared that Max’s constant pushing of the boundaries of what was permissible risked bringing the whole house of cards down on them all. Actresses were advised not to work with him. And for good reason. There are few established actresses in his scenes. He worked with newcomers to the industry who did not know any better and girls who were not pretty enough to get work elsewhere. Some of them, one suspects from looking at them, may not have been entirely strangers to a crack pipe or methamphetamine.
And Max did things to those girls that had not been seen on commercially made and widely distributed film before. He fucked their faces until they were entirely covered in a layer of thick spit. He pushed his cock so far down their throats that they puked their guts out. And then he shoved his cock back in before the girl had even got her breath back. He wrote on their naked bodies in red lipstick “SLUT” and “WHORE”. He applied lipstick to their mouths colouring broadly so that they looked like clowns. And then he fucked their clown mouths. He inserted gynaecological instruments into their vaginas, arseholes and their mouths. Then he stretched them open painfully wide to near breaking point. And he pissed and came into the gaping holes. He filled their asses with his cum and piss and then had them suck it out through a tube. He fisted them. He dressed them like pre-pubescents and fucked their arses. And this at a time when piss was rarely seen in mainstream porn. With few exceptions, the expression on the face of an actress in a Max scene is one of horror.
Max insists that he was merely playing a role and having fun with it. It was all a gag. The actresses were in on the joke. He does not hate women, he says, pointing to another, much less successful porn producer (Khan Tusion) who he says did much worse. This is nonsense. Max’s anger at the women in his scenes is plain. If you look at the women’s faces rather than their cunts, you will better understand what is really going on.
Asked whether he ever felt sorry for the women he worked with, Max compared making a video with him to a boxing match. No-one, he insisted, felt badly for the bloodied loser of the fight because the boxer knew what was going to happen in the ring before they entered it. Normal people don’t think like that. This is the language of psychopathy.
First prosecution
Together with his wish to punish women, Max also had an insatiable desire to provoke. When even the fattest, laziest bear is poked hard enough and often enough, it eventually notices. Max was prosecuted in 1998 on c***d pornography charges. The City of Los Angeles relied on a statute that made dressing an adult actress like a much younger person and then fucking her a crime. This was, of course, a bullshit law written by imbeciles and enforced by mindless idiots. Acting is not real. Infants understand this. Prosecutors apparently did not. In a separate unrelated case that came to hearing before Max’s case did, the U.S. Supreme Court explained it to the nation’s prosecutors in polite, legal language. They struck down the statute as unconstitutional. Of course, those were the days when the U.S. Supreme Court was actually composed of lawyers rather than the current malignant zealots hell-bent on returning this country to the magical time they believe existed before Elvis Presley was heard on the radio and black people started appearing on television. The prosecution against Max had to be withdrawn in 2002 before it came to trial.
If Max had been wise, he would have thanked his lucky stars, been magnanimous in defeat, and kept a low profile for a time. But Max was Max. And so he rubbed the noses of the authorities in it. Now, I am no expert on the U.S. justice system but I know this: justice has fuck all to do with it. If prosecutors really want to convict you, they will. They have long memories and Max’s card was marked.
Public perception of morality is always changing
But prosecutors also have a weakness and that is that the system in which they work moves very slowly. Public perception of morality can move much more quickly. And the irony is that by the time the authorities moved against him for the second time, Max had been pissing on, fisting, facefucking women, and making them puke for 15 years. His work was getting more and more popular. And the mainstream industry had been catching up with him. Moreover, porn had moved from an exclusively physical format to a substantial online presence. And online porn had more room for niche products. The demand for porn had increased massively. By the mid-2000s, pissing and fisting were established porn niches. Facefucking to the point of vomiting, much less so. Then. And it was Max more than anyone else who had made these things so.
What had plainly been outrageous to nearly all in 1994 was acceptable to many by 2004. This happens only by repeated transgression of boundaries until the boundaries give way. And then, those who had once lived by and supported those boundaries can suddenly no longer recall why they had been there in the first place. And those that come after are barely aware they had once been there at all. And Max had led the charge. This is, of course, why any suggestion that boundaries in the sexual sphere should be enforced by law is absurd. It is stupid to punish an individual today for transgressing a rule that millions may be freely transgressing in years to come without causing any ripples in the fabric of society. And it is not the role of the law or any individual or group to try to hold back the way anyone else may think or act in the future. The future does not belong to anyone until they actually get there. They may be hit by a bus tomorrow and never see it so they have fuck all right to try to veto it in advance. And yet, there are many laws that are plainly interested in maintaining a behavioural status quo. What a load of shit.
Continued in part 2. Read it here: https://xhamster.com/posts/10312155
3 years ago
