Trama

In the Summer of 1972 I agreed to direct and act in several porno loops. I contacted William Markle, a local New York Cinematographer, and asked him if he had an interest in creating a documentary, in partnership with me, about a day in the life of a pornographer. He jumped at the chance. In 1972 porno was all the rage, and we thought that a documentary, or docudrama about the making of XXX rated films might just be successful at the box office. The actors who participated in the shooting of the loops were: Myself, Harry Reems, Fred Lincoln, Lucy Grantham, Sargeant Tina, and several Gypsies. The footage turned out to be hilarious, but it needed another element in order to hold an audience's interest for feature length. I wrote a story about a film maker, who was making porno on the side, unbeknownst to Mrs. Film maker. We Hired an actress/belly dancer named Cathy Joyce to play my wife, and shot the script I had written. We intercut the new dramatized scenes of the film maker and his wife with the original documentary footage of the making of porno loops, and the result was a feature length docudrama, or docucomedy called "LOOPS". In the Fall of 1972 Bill Markle and I began the process of screening our project for potential distributors. Everybody saw it; MGM, Avco Embassy, Columbia, Paramount, Warners. Heady times for a couple of young film makers. In the end none of the majors had the guts to pull the trigger on this kind of project. We came close with Warners, but they finally decided against it. During one of the screenings, Sean Cunningham (Last House On the Left, Friday the Thirteenth)began weeping. He saw "LOOPS" as the story of his life, right down to having the same first name as the main character. (Me) So Bill and I sold the picture to Cunningham. The sale figure didn't exactly break the bank, but it was way more than it cost to make so Bill and I were Happy. After some re-shooting and re-editing, Cunningham opened "LOOPS" to mixed reviews and pretty negative box office. This movie seems to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth. In the mid Seventies "LOOPS" was in the archives of the Lincoln Center Film Society, but since then has fallen through the cracks. Cunningham may, or may not still own the rights to this picture, but to my knowledge, no attempt has been made to release "LOOPS" in video or dvd.—Shaun Costello