Last Friday, Porno filmmaker Radley Metzger passed away. This week The Rialto Report is paying tribute to him each day with a different article.
Ashley West remembers Jamie Gillis and Constance Money, the two stars of Radley Metzger’s ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven’, and an attempt to engineer a reunion for the two of them over 30 years after the film.
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The Zen of Jamie Gillis.
It was late in the evening, and a smile appeared across his tired features. Father Time was catching up with Mother Nature, but the handsome charm of Seymour Love was never far away.
It was 2005 and we were quietly hunched over an afterhours table in the back of the midtown Mexican restaurant that his girlfriend owned. Every so often I’d throw a question his way. Had he ever retained anything from any of them? Any keepsakes perhaps, whose mere existence could bring back a few forgotten memories? I’d pretend I was being casual. Eager to appear uneager. After a 35 year itinerant career in adult films, I wondered was he was ever sentimental about any of them?
He drifted off into his own thoughts, and an eloquent silence suggested that to ask the question was to misunderstand the man. The sights, smells, and treasures of a lifetime of women and pleasure were curated lovingly in his head. He surely had no need for physical items, I figured.
I knew his sister had kept scrapbooks about him. These artifacts all remained in boxes in storage, seldom referred to. Fans had sent him copies of his films and magazine articles which over-intellectualized or under-estimated the industry he had inhabited. Porn detritus from a life on the edge.
But then he smiled. Sure it was beat up, and its luster long faded, but there was something. He’d remembered something, he admitted. For some reason he said, it had always followed him around.
He’d started out in the early days of adult film in Gotham in the era of the dirty mattress and the 8mm camera. And finally he’d worked in the City of Angels, when the bastard grandchild of hardcore was dominated by cheap video and dashed dreams. In fact he was proud of it. And wherever he went, somehow this memento ended up going with him. He’d moved to Frisco amidst the industry’s forlorn dreams of a cross-over hit.
It was the statuette for best actor in the film ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven‘.
Sure he’d won a bunch of other acting awards, he admitted. He took me back to his place, where he showed me the trophy that he kept on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. A bauble from a happy time and a happy place, he said.