Earlier this year, we brought you a five-part article on the life and times of legendary Sleazoid Express founder Bill Landis. Shortly after it ran, multiple people reached out to us with their own stories and memories of Bill, including a few folks who provided letters, writing, and other material that shed light on some of the more mysterious periods in his life. It was enough information to expand that article into a full length book- LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42nd STREET, which will be releasing on December 7th as the inaugural book in a new Daily Grindhouse literary imprint under Encyclopocalypse Publications. In anticipation of the book’s release next week, we’re happy to provide you with this exclusive excerpt, and hope it piques your curiosity enough to place an order!
LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42nd STREET
“A picture you won’t ever forget because it touches the full spectrum of the bizarre, the forbidden, the twilight areas of a life destined to be spent in shadow and agony. The screen may never again relate to this subject matter. It will certainly never again approach this treatment… The only ones left to mourn, the last witnesses to the execution; suspended in time by a puppeteer with blood on his hands. Little dolls that go on dancing after the music has stopped…”
— Ad copy, THREE ON A MEAT HOOK
Prologue
It’s a sweaty Autumn afternoon in a motel in Nyack, and there’s a panic in the air. It’s 1985, the tail end of the Golden Age of Pornography; video has supplanted film as the genre’s preferred medium and the shoulder-mounted camcorders are humming. The problem: that all important climax is critically missing. Maybe it’s nerves; maybe it’s inexperience; maybe it’s too high a dose of the party drug of the day — ubiquitous, omnipresent cocaine, heaped around porn sets like mountains of Alpine snow free for the snorting; but the male star of the hour is unable to perform. His sequence has already been shot; stubble-beards are being stroked, damp foreheads dabbed. Thousands of dollars are riding on the ability of an overly-muscled, overly-narcotized man to blow his load for all of perverted posterity. The clock is ticking. Our leading man can’t be counted on any longer; it’s time to call in the ringer.
Out of the shadows steps a man short in stature and swarthy of complexion. He looks boyish in comparison to his fellow costars; doffing the oversized plastic sunglasses that swallow the upper portion of his face, his eyes bulge in manic anticipation of what’s about to transpire. In short order his shirt, jeans, and undergarments have joined the sunglasses on the loft floor in a costume change worthy of an oversexed Clark Kent. He is eager; he is willing; he is ready; and he is more than capable.
He is a man of many talents: writer; ethnographer; critic; historian; porn star; IT guy. His name today is Bobby Spector; he was born Bill Landis; he is twenty-six years old and he is one of the New York porn industry’s premier stunt cocks. When the man on the video box can’t finish the job, Bobby can — he has been in over a dozen pornographic films since 1982 and he has come in every one of them. Over the course of the next thirty-five years, he will add husband, father, trailblazer, influencer, and grindhouse icon to his curriculum vitae.
Today is his day. He will perform the scene admirably; hugs will be given, high-fives accepted. Tonight, he will return to his apartment on 14th, write a critical essay on a recent popular horror film, and spend the rest of the evening in a cocaine and heroin stupor. Before the decade is over, he will codify an entirely new school of cinematic journalism. In another two decades, he will write one of the definitive texts on exploitation film criticism. Before he’s fifty, he’ll be dead.
Introduction
Bill Landis is a ghost.
He haunts not just the fabled 42nd Street that he chronicled at both its apex and nadir but the halls of genre journalism itself. His spirit manifests in fragments — a cautious mention here as a source of unlikely inspiration, a shuddering anecdote there as a malign presence whose malice still looms large over the lives of those survivors of the Deuce still left alive to tell the tale.
He haunts me. It was his book Sleazoid Express — written with his wife, collaborator, and muse Michelle Clifford — that gave me my first introduction to grindhouse cinema, peeling back the curtain on an entire subgenre of film and subculture of filmgoers that continues to influence and impact me as a creator almost two decades after I first entered Bill’s realm. For a teenager growing up in rural Oklahoma, in a small town still inhabiting the Reagan age sixteen years after it ended, Bill and Michelle’s words were nothing short of a revelation. I’d rented HEARTBREAK MOTEL — the more artistically minded, less rape-fueled producer’s cut of POOR PRETTY EDDIE — sight unseen and was both scandalized and fascinated by what I’d just watched. Where had it come from? What did it mean? Those were the questioned I wanted answered when I googled the film one frozen Oklahoma day in 2004. Among the first hits I got was an Amazon link to Simon and Schuster’s Sleazoid Express- A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square. I eagerly ordered the book, and I was not disappointed. It was the window into a forbidden world every adolescent growing up in one of America’s lost backwaters dreams of.
I was no longer in Oklahoma; I was on The Deuce, inhabiting an entire ecosystem of the damned that felt more familiar and comforting to me than my Rockwellian surroundings. Bill Landis made me. Without his writing, I would have no bylines, no books, no awards. There would be no Our Lady of the Inferno, no Fangoria, no me. I owe my life’s trajectory in life to Bill Landis; and when I went to finally offer him my thanks, he was already dead. Since his death in 2008, I have tried to learn about the man who set me on my life’s path. Especially in the internet age, we can be so profoundly touched and guided by those we never meet; I wanted to know about the flesh and blood human behind the words responsible for where I’d ended up.
But Bill Landis is a ghost.
There is no comprehensive biography of him. In the wake of his passing he left behind a scant IMDB bio, a few obituaries of the sincere and sarcastic variety, an extensive pornographic filmography, and a body of work that remains largely out of print for reasons that have as much to do with the legal as they do with the esoteric. The vast majority of his friends, enemies, acquaintances, and cohorts predeceased him; more leave us every year. He inhabited and encapsulated an era defined by a live-fast, die-young ethos that would astound Joplin and Hendrix.
So I decided to chase the ghost — to follow it down the neon-drenched remnants of the Times Square he loved, through the scattered remnants of his own writing, into the memories of the few surviving compatriots he left behind.
In that lost, damned, golden age we call the ’80s, there was a porn star named Bobby Spector and a writer named Mr. Sleazoid. Most importantly of all there was a man named Bill Landis. This is his story…
Click here to place your order for LANDIS: THE STORY OF A REAL MAN ON 42nd STREET, releasing December 7th from Encyclopocalypse publications!
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Tags: 42nd Street, Andy Milligan, Bill Landis, Features, Golden Age of Pornography, Grindhouse, Guttertrash, I Love Lucy, Michelle Clifford, Midnight Cowboy, Simon & Schuster, Sleazoid Express, Taxi Driver, The 1980s, The Deuce, The UK, The US, Times Square, Village Voice
Where is part 2? I’m riveted.
Hey Lou! Parts 2-5 are available on the DG patreon!
Where is part 2 of the Landis series? Part 1 ends with a promise of Part 2 appearing the following day… a few days ago. Really interesting so far!
Whats up with the rest of this article? Parts 2 thru 5???
I can’t find your original five part article. Is it still online?