HS: Thanks for sharing an excerpt from you upcoming book Phil. Will this be your first novel?
PSJ: My short stories have been published before, but yes, this is my first book.
It's actually a collection of character driven travel stories anchored by the story "Diary of Puerto Rican Porno."

HS: Want to talk about that first since I brought it up.
PSJ: Sure I'm an artist so my mind can take on any subject in any order!

HS: So anyway, in the story "Diary of a Puerto Rican Porno," you are in a bar in Puerto Rico where you boldly ask a perfect sexy stranger...
PSJ: A stranger named Gura....
HS: Yes, Gura, and you ask him if he wants to be in a porn movie you're shooting then you ask him to accompany you to the bathroom so you could check out his goods.
PSJ: Hell Yes... That's how I am.. I've got to see a guy's shit first! I'm not going to cast a guy in a part without seeing what he's working with. The bigger the dick the bigger the movie!

HS: So, is a big dick is a staple in a Phil St John movie?
PSJ: I'm always looking to cast the next handsome guy with a big dick.

HS: What if the guy is hot but has a small dick?
PSJ: If the guy has a small one, he'd better have the body of a God and be ready to bottom, otherwise I'm not going to cast him.

HS: When you propositioned Gura in that bar was that dramatic effect talking or are you really that direct?
PSJ: You better believe it. Like I said before. I don't have time to waste with small talk.

HS: Has anyone ever taken offense or gotten belligerent when you said you'd like to
put them in a porn movie.
PSJ: Most people are flattered when I ask them. I' don't think anyone has ever been belligerent.
I've been given dicey looks but really it's the ultimate, flattering compliment to be asked to be in a porn movie...that someone thinks you're hot enough to turn others on with your body. Now and then I'll get a guy who is prudish, but they are usually cool and smile like a school girl and say 'no, sorry I just don't do that...."

HS: I could never recruit
PSJ: Well, I'm a really ballsy guy. I had one experience where a nightclub employee said "You better watch yourself or you're going to get thrown out of here!" My standard retort to those who say this is "I've been thrown out of MUCH BETTER places!" Then I turn my nose up high and leave calmly with dignity.

HS: That's a very Bette Davis-like response.
PSJ: I'll go with that.
You only go around life in this world, once and if you don't ask the all important question once you're never going to get that chance again. These folks, the guys I aim to cast, have never seen me...sometimes they have, but most will never see me again. I don't give a shit if they don't like the question. Of course I am much more polite and nice if someone is cutting me a big check for my art work. Then I'm very tactful...
unless they get on my ugly side and give me shit!

HS: You're different from 99 percent of the porn Directors in that you actually have hands on experience in mainstream film. Would you say working for Pier Pasolini's director of photography influenced your porn work?
PSJ: Sure it did. Porn is a genre. that's how I approach it. Every genre has rules. I'm an extraordinarily well-trained filmmaker so the rules of the genre make me conform specifically to the project at hand whether documentary, drama or porno. I have all the right tools to make a quality porno!
HS: You're the carpenter of porn!
PSJ: Thanks.

HS: When was your first film? I mean your very first film and what was it about?
PSJ: My very first completed film?
HS: Yes.
PSJ: My very first was one I made as my senior project at San Francisco state university. The title was "La'". It was nominated for a student Academy Award for best experimental film and PBS also aired it on their Independent Focus series.There was a lot of nudity in the film with very homo-erotic visuals. I was shocked PBS actually ran it, and ran it uncensored.
HS: I love PBS they show naked people!

PSJ: Me too.
HS: When was this
PSJ: That was in 1978 that they aired my experimental art film.

HS: What was it about?
PSJ: It was very arty and it was all in French, circa 1890. Being experimental meant you didn't need to know what the people in it were saying. It was about deriving meaning from context. It's protagonist was this bizarre, semi-autistic wild child who was naked throughout the entire movie. He laid on the floor of his living room mostly while he looked at images of decaying mummies through a stereo-opticon. (Laughing)
The very obvious homo-eroticism was the line of duck eggs that made a path all the way up between his legs towards his asshole.
It was kind of like a homo-erotic, Felini-esque,Twilight Zone. This naked young man could commune with his ancestors by looking through a mirror. One of those ancestors was a man in in a hashish club in 1930's Berlin. At the climactic moment of the film, the protagonist breaks one of the eggs in the mirror and there's all of this yolk running down his fingers.

HS: That does sound very homo-erotic.
PSJ: It was. It really was an elaborate effort. I used special effects in this film and brilliant colors like in the room where the boy's parents spent their dull lives. The walls were rose red and the parents ate giant red strawberries which they sliced with large cutlery. It was all very surreal in a sort of gay Twilight Zone way. This was my red movie.

HS: When you mentioned the roses I instantly thought of American Beauty and the scene with naked girl on the bed of red rose petals.
PSJ: That film inspired me to make a porno I called American Beauties much later on

HS: Ok I have to cut to the heart of my next line of questions because this is the Internet and folks want their infotainment quick and dirty, let's skip ahead a few years from the time you worked with Ponnio Delli Colli, Pier Pasolini's one and only director of Photograpy, the late great, Marcello Mastriani and equally great Vitorio Gazman all the way up to when you edited peep show loops for 2 ubiquitous porn shop owners on Time Square in New York city...when it was the dirty apple. Talk about that era.
PSJ: Well let me just say this before I go all historical on you.... I think cities need to have a little dirt in them to be real.
I despise the "Disney-fication" and the "malling" of America" It's turned
our culture into a mono-culture. Everything is Family oriented all the whores and homeless got chased away. All the stores are GAP or Starbucks. It's a horrible trend. Anyway back to my early introduction into New York's seedy porno biz.
I worked for Vinny and Joey

HS: Wait. Did you say Vinny and Joey? They sound like 2 mob guys
PSJ: I like to call them mokes. I love the mob ..they started the porn business. And Vinny and Joey were my bosses at the time. They ran huge adult theater emporium. Despite what people think most of the big porn shops and theaters were clean places and run like any other respectable business. But that era was wild. I loved it and those X-rated places.
The stores that showed the loops were big mega-stores filled with magazines and sex toys and of course peep shows in the back.
There were also tawdry little shops with glory holes in them.
You could pick up horny guys hanging out or gay for pay guys or you could have sex there in the balconies of these adult theaters.
Being gay at that point in time, was being a sexual outlaw.
Whether you had sex in the balcony or whether you owned porn, often times it was illegal to be gay, to sell porn, to watch it or posses. it. I come from that time of being a sexual outlaw.
A lot places like in Italy didn't have gay bars so you had sex in the park. the best and most active fuck park in Rome overlooked the Roman forum, a respectable outdoor amphitheater that showcased outdoor films for the masses. To beat the heat they would show Italian or Hollywood movies on a huge screen. It was an open air forum outside, so while the movies were playing guys were fucking in the park above you. The famous Colliseum was like that at night...full of pussycats and horny gay guys having sex.

HS: I'm sure all that's changed with the times and all of this security.
PSJ: No doubt it has.

HS: What are peep show loops and peep show theaters. I know what they are but tell those who don't know what they are.
PSJ: The peep shows started with loops. Basically there were 2 venues to see porn: 16 millimeter film prints on screen a theater screen shot through projectors or on those nonstop peep show reels called "loops.". All my movies for Vinnie And Joey were shot in 16mm The peep show theaters would make 8mm release prints spliced into 8mm endless loops. As long as you put your quarters in...the loop would never stop. That's how it went. And the theaters made a ton of money.
"Getting It" was my first major gay porn release on 16mm film. And that Showed in the last pay porn theaters projected as a real movie would be.
HS: Thats all changed now.
PSJ: Yes, as gay bars opened legally and gay sex became more acceptable the need for those places often time fell away. Once Will and Grace hit the airwaves being gay really became marketable and that era I'm talking about was over for good. Will and Grace I'm using as a metaphor because it single handedly served to give gays a seal of acceptability, not necessarily approval though.