In 1982 a television news crew from the Midwest arrived in Los Angeles to document the making of a pornographic film. The adult videotape market was just beginning to surge, inspiring these savvy TV journalists to take a behind-the-scenes look at a typical porn production. The news crew's presence on the set only added to a general atmosphere of controlled chaos: the entire film had to be shot over the course of eleven days in a small studio in the heart of downtown L.A.; electricity was being illegally patched in to power the equipment; and extras were recruited from a nearby blood bank and methadone clinic. After three days on the set the news crew went home, titillated and satisfied that they had gotten their story. It was not, however, exactly the story they thought they were getting; that is, though they were unaware of it at the time, they were not so much witnessing the making of a typical porno as witnessing the making of a cult film. While featuring hard-core sex, the film that they saw being made departed from many of the conventions of adult films and would find its greatest success not in porn theaters but on the midnight movie circuit. That film was director Stephen Sayadian's second adult feature, Café Flesh.

The works of Stephen Sayadian (aka "Rinse Dream") stand out as some of the most interesting and complicated in the adult genre. Sayadian made Night Dreams (1981) and Café Flesh (1982) in collaboration with writer Jerry Stahl and cinematographer Frank Delia, and both films are notable for their novel approaches to sound and performance as well as their complicated relationship with the audience. In reviews of Sayadian's films one often finds phrases such as "the thinking-person's porn film," suggesting their uncertain relationship to the porn genre. Indeed, both films feature idiosyncratic stylistic choices that were intended by the filmmakers to confound the generic expectations of the porn audience. Sayadian's distinctive soundscapes complicate the meaning of on-screen hard-core action and demonstrate the importance of sound in the cinematic depiction of sexual fantasy. Performance is one of Sayadian's central themes, and his films feature styles of acting that are typically associated with the avant-garde. Paradoxically, provocative stylistic techniques such as these provided their own powerful eroticism and helped the films to flourish in contexts of reception outside of porn. The style of Night Dreams and Café Flesh is best understood when placed in dialogue with a historical account of the production and reception of these films. Sayadian's career provides a lens onto a pivotal time in the history of the porn industry and can allow us to explore connections between porn and other forms of cultural production, such as the magazine industry of the 1970s, cultures of avant-garde and midnight movies in the 1980s, and the rise of the home video market.

From Hustler to Hollywood

Before turning to Sayadian's film work in the 1980s, it will be useful to begin by considering his earlier career in the magazine industry. Indeed, the team that produced Night Dreams and Café Flesh—Sayadian, Stahl, and Delia—met in the mid-1970s while working at Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine. Sayadian had come to the Columbus, Ohio, magazine as a satirist, having previously submitted work to Mad Magazine, Marvel Comics, and National Lampoon in the early 1970s. In the fall of 1976 Sayadian—then twenty years old—took his portfolio to Larry Flynt, who hired him on the spot as Hustler's creative director in charge of humor and advertising. This position entailed making the advertisements for Flynt's novelty sex products: "There were no advertisers," Sayadian recalls. "We made our own [End Page 15] advertising." In fact, Sayadian asserts that Flynt made more money from sex products than from sales...