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Hardcore.
    Pioneered (depending whom you talk to) by either Max Hardcore or John (“Buttman”) Stagliano, “Gonzo” has become one of this decade’s most popular and profitable genres of adult video. It’s more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and the Hell panel from Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights
. A Gonzo film is always set at some distinctive locale or occasion—Daytona Beach at spring break, the Cannes Film Festival, etc. There’s always a randy and salivous “host” talking directly to a handheld camera: “Well and we’re here at the Cannes Film Festival, and it looks like there’s going to be lots of excitement, John Travolta and Sigourney Weaver are supposed to both be in town, and there’s also the world-famous beach, and I’m told there’s always some real seriously good-looking little girls at the beach, so let’s us head on down.” (That’s the approximate lead-in to a recent Max-at-Cannes Gonzo, a type of signature lead-in that Max refers to with a 56-tooth grin as “always mercifully brief”—and please note the “
little girls
at the beach” thing, because this is another of Max’s professional signatures, the infantilization of his videos’ females as dramatic foils for his own film persona, which is always that of a sort of degenerate uncle or stepdad.) Then the shaky but ever-focused camera heads on down to the ocean or mall or CES or whatever, scoping out attractive women 20 while the host moans and chews his knuckle in lust. Then pretty soon host and camera start actually coming up to the women they’ve been looking at and engaging them in little cameo “interviews” full of sideways leers and salacious entendres. Some of the interviewees are actual civilians, but some are always what Max refers to as “ringers,” meaning professional porn actresses. And so the viewer is treated to the classic frathouse fantasy of moving, via just a couple of singles-bar “Hey there babe” lines, from scoping out an attractive woman to having wild and anatomically diverse sex with her, all while one of his buddies captures the whole thing on tape. 21
    The issue of who exactly invented Gonzo being impossibly vexed and so notwithstanding, it is true that Max Hardcore is famous as a director for several things: (1) Being incredibly disciplined about budgets and tactical logistics, right down to forcing his crew and staff to wear identical jumpsuits of scarlet nylon so that they look like a national ski team—Max’s shoots are described (by Max) as “almost military operations”; (2) Not only employing ringers but actually sometimes being able to talk real live civilian “little girls” on the beach or in the mall into coming on back to the special MAXWORLD RV and having anal sex on camera; 22 (3) Being the first in “mainstream” (meaning nonfetish) adult video to perpetrate on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. W/r/t item (3), Max, after detailing for yr. correspondents the vo- and avocations that led him into the adult industry (a tale too literally incredible even to think about factchecking and trying to print), informs us that he is and always has been adult video’s “cutting-edge blade,” and that other less bold and original filmmakers have systematically stolen and used his, Max’s, degradations of women as a blueprint for their own subsequent shabby and derivative films’ degradations. 23 (Harold Hecuba and Dick Filth, by the way, have heard Max hold forth many times before and are now outside the circle of discourse—D.F. in the bathroom for what seems like a peculiarly long time, H.H. on the couch with the actresses hashing out the implications of Seinfeld’s retirement for NBC’s ’98 lineup.)
    Alone and in a place of conspicuous honor on a wood-finish shelf above the suite’s minibar is an actual AVN Awards statuette. The trophy resembles an Oscar/Emmy/Clio except that the figurine’s