Porn Valley – I had the following interview with Max Hardcore about ten years ago but never had the opportunity of posting it. It seems kind of relevant now, though, given the present circumstances. I asked Max about the first ass he ever fucked.

“Oh my God, high school,” he says.

“They didn’t even invent anal back then,” I kid him.

“I know,” he laughs. “It was 1973 and I had a girl – she was willing to try anything.”

Max says he’s forgotten her name but remembers that she was a high school party girl. A blond.

“There was a couple of beers,” he recalls. “It was a friend’s house. The parents were out, that type of thing. I wanted to try it out and tried doing it with some other girls. She didn’t say a word and I just eased it on in. God it must have been horrible because I didn’t use any lube at all. I remember having a tremendously difficult time getting it in. What the fuck did I know, but it worked.”

“Then I didn’t get ass for three or four years,” he continues.

“You said it was high school and obviously you picked up the idea somewhere, because I don’t think that people instinctively think about doing their first anal unless given the idea.”

“I think it was instinct with me,” he says. “I was looking to do something different. And I was looking for a girl who was basically dumb enough to let me fuck her.”

Max is laughing at this last remark.

“But she was a sweet girl,” he recalls. “I think she burped. She had a couple of beers by that time but hadn’t passed out yet. She passed out later.”

“It’s always better when they pass out,” I comment. Max laughs.

“All things considered, you’ve been practically accused of fucking corpses. What’s your take on some of the things that have been said about you, the rumors, the inferences that you’re brutal off camera…?”

“Max Hardcore the character represents an aspect of the male sexuality,” replies Max.

“I believe that’s in all men. It’s a universal trait. There’s a little bit of Max in every guy. Max just epitomizes this aggressive, self-centered, self-satisfying urge. He’s the guy that grabs on to the steering wheel and slams the pedal to the floor and goes full throttle. I think every guy would like to do it at some point. But most never have either the opportunity, the drive, or self-confidence.”

“And there’s a bit of aggression there, too,” I add.

“Yes,” Max agrees. “But I always tell people. I say we’re making entertainment and this only represents one small portion of the overall body of adult entertainment. We make videos for several reasons. To make money, for sure. But, more over, even if I didn’t get paid, we make it for entertainment and educational purposes.

“It should be looked at in the light of those terms. People who know my work and are really familiar with it realize there’s an underlying current of humor and game playing going on. You’ll never see Max really hurt a girl. I go after it, and the girl might get a little sensitive in the ass, but you’ll never see Max throttle a girl or bring a knife into play or threaten in any way. Because there’s a definite line which I will not cross.”

“How about the scenes with cock gagging?” he’s asked.

“You mean throat fucking- tonsil surfing,” Max clarifies. “I don’t want to defend it but speak about the positive aspects of it. A lot of girls- I have found- really like an aggressive guy. Whereas if there’s a little bit of pain involved, not only is that okay, that’s preferable to the girls.

“They like getting it- I don’t want to say roughed up- because when people say roughed up they really think of getting slapped or punched around. That’s not Max’s gig at all.

“In fact, I’ve never made a bondage film and I also don’t do much ass-slapping,” he adds.

“But I do things a little bit differently. One of which is the throat-fucking. A lot of girls really like it.”

“Do they actually tell you after a scene that they liked it?” he’s asked.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s funny. A lot of girls ask me to put handcuffs on them and stuff like that. I say we can’t do that. If you like to do it in private we’ll talk about it later. But we can’t do it for the movie. So if you watch in some of my movies the girls will have their hands behind their back. Like holding on to their feet, or their hands together. Because in their minds, they’re simulating being tied up at the same time.

“The feeling I get from talking to the girls, they just like a guy to take over and use their bodies,” he goes on to say.

“Whereas the guy who’s really hard and is forcing their cock down their throat, there’s a certain perverse thrill they get from that. And I like it too. There’s no doubt about it. In a way I kind of look at it like for all the girls that gave me a hard time and didn’t show up for a shoot, or before I was in the movies, it’s kind of pay back time. But, oddly enough, a lot of girls seem to really enjoy it.

“It’s tough for them. You can see where the tears start coming out the sides of their eyes,” he continues. “You know it’s tough but a couple of girls- just recently I can think of- Mila, Courtney, Barbie Angel and Lil’ Cinderella, all have no problem with it.

“I like shocking people,” Max also points out. “That’s part of my job, I think. If I don’t shock people a little bit, then I feel I failed. My opinion of pornography is that our job is to be outrageous, be beyond the pale and to make people experience other things. Yet, as I said before, I have definite lines which I will not cross.”

“Such as…?”

“As odd as it may seem, I’m dead set against beating girls,” he answers. “What’s really repulsive for me is a big, strong guy who’s slapping or beating the shit out of some 110-pound girl. That’s obscene to me. I’m not a big fan of horror movies or sexploitation movies- the cheerleader, Texas chainsaw-type thing where girls are getting impaled on metal rods, stuff like that.

“I think it’s really horrible and I hate to see it because it reflects badly on what I do. A lot of people who aren’t familiar with my work get the two genres mixed together the same as they do regular pornography with child pornography. Some people, I’m sure, think the same guy’s making regular films, and in their spare time is making kiddie porn. And we know that’s not true. I think some people have the impression that the next step for me is to tie these girls and strangle them. Whatever. It’s not that at all.

“It’s good, hard, aggressive fucking, for sure. And if you can make it all the way through the scene, you’ll find that in the end the girl is always smiling and looking right at the camera. And, obviously, not in any great distress.”

“What’s your physical ideal of a woman?” I ask him.

“The perfect girl for me is about 100 pounds and 5 ft. 2,” he answers. “Any shade will do. I like petite girls. Especially where movie making is concerned, it sure makes the gymnastics and the geography easier to get around. When you got a big girl with a big fat ass, it’s hard to get yourself situated and lift them up. I’ve been known to lift the girls up and do things like that.”

“What’s the biggest ass and fattest ass you’ve fucked?” he’s asked.

“Oh jeez,” he mutters, “I’ve put those out of my mind. There was a girl- I can’t recall her name- Sahara Sands. She was the biggest girl I ever fucked. We did a good scene and all. But I’m not built like TT Boy or Peter North. My equipment isn’t that big. So it’s in my benefit to work with a smaller girl. I look bigger. Plus I think just from a handling standpoint it’s easier to maneuver a girl.”

“One of my favorite positions is reverse cowgirl,” he adds. “So you get the girl standing on her legs and her ass right here so you can hold it and off to one side. You got a 140 pound, 150 pound girl up there and whoa. That can really wear you out. And with the small girls- it photographs better, I look bigger, and we’re open to more things, more positions. But I love ‘em all. The thing about big girls is you can fist fuck ‘em pretty easily. Sahara Sands was no problem.”

Asked how the Max character evolved, Max says he knew early on that if he was going to be successful, he was going to have to establish an identity, something “people could get a grip on.”

“The name was a no-brainer,” he says. “It took some time to come up with it, but the beauty of the name was that everybody, what walk of life you came from, as soon as you said the name, they knew what it meant. That was a good start. Max is for Maximum hardcore.”

“There’s heavier hitters in this business- TT Boy, Peter North- guys in tremendous physical shape who can hammer away on end – and I have the greatest respect for them- but they tend to be homogenous and they’re almost like robots. They rarely speak. They almost say nothing during a scene and grunting is about as much dialogue as you’re going to get out of either of those guys doing a scene.

“That’s where Max is different. Max verbalizes his actions. And we have an expression for it. We like to make porno that a blind man can appreciate. So what I do, not only do I say things to the girl, it’s also descriptive as to what’s going on at the time. For instance I’ll be fucking her ass and saying, ‘spread your ass, you little cunt so I can fuck it deeper.’

“Well, you know even if you can’t see it, you know what’s going on and, for sure, which hole it’s in, in case there’s any doubt. The girl at the same time we encourage to speak. And that’s another thing that separates our scenes. Most of the girls in ordinary mainstream porno never look at the camera and never verbalize what’s happening. We do it exactly opposite. We have them looking at the camera most of the time or as much as they can handle it. We also have them verbalize what’s happening. What I say to the girls is, instead of saying oh yeah, oh yeah, describe what’s happening; ‘fuck my ass!’

The best girls can take the ball and roll with it, according to Max.

“’Oh your cock feels so good in my ass, slam my ass, fuck my ass.’ Descriptive so we know what’s happening,” says Max.

“I think what this does is raise the heat value of the scene a notch,” he says. “Then it’s not so anonymous. Then it’s more personal. I also do tricky little things that might pass you by if you’re not looking for it. That is, you’ll see where I’ll be fucking one girl, I’ll be talking to her about fucking her friend, like are you going to bring your friend over so I can do the same thing to her? Or a sister or something like that. There will be a couple of passages like that in any given video tape. And that also, I think, makes it more personal.

“I endeavor to give an identity to the girl, even in our simplest scenes,” adds Max. “I think if we can show a little bit about what’s going on in a girl’s head by camera movement and her actions, then it’s going to matter more. To me it’s not that erotic to see an ass with a cock going in and out of it. It doesn’t have too much eroticism to me. But if I can see the girl’s face in the shot, and she’s talking right to the camera, oh fuck my ass, it creates a bond between her and the viewer.

“There’s two ways of shooting,” he continues. “There’s the staged events which are pretty much universally done. And there’s the way we do it which is to create that bond between the viewer and the girl. I know from all the letters and so forth that we get, that it works. That’s what we endeavor to do and that’s why we’re successful.”

Max says in the fan letters he receives, the thing most mentioned is the congratulatory acknowledgment that he’s making porn the way they want to see it.

“They also tell me I love the positions you put the girls in,” he adds. “They love the fact that it’s well lit, in your face and the girl looks to the camera. They also love the dirty talk. Then it breaks down into comments like I love to see her toenails, I like to see her in different panties. That kind of stuff. Then breaking it down more, they’ll ask for more of a specific girl.”

Max’s personal favorite at the time of the interview was Barbie Angel.

“Because she’s living with me now,” he laughs. “But I love ‘em all. I love the girls that really give it back to me as good as I give it to them. I give ‘em a couple of lines of dialogue, then they get it in their heads and then are able to work with it.

“Then you have an intense focus right on camera. They’re getting it up the ass in an uncomfortable position- reverse cowgirl for a girl is very strenuous- yet they’re still able to look right at the camera, ‘fuck my ass- drive your cock right up my ass. Oh, it feels so good right in my ass!’

“When they can do that, those are my favorite girls. They’re with the program. Girls in the mill are just doing factory work. They punch the clock. They want to know how many minutes in a position. That’s the thing I don’t want to hear because I know they’re just thinking of this as an ordinary sex scene. I have a saying. We don’t hire models. We make models.

“A perfect example of that was Mila. She met my profile. I called her up. She came over. I gave her the song and dance routine- I tell them what I can do for them. She liked it and we set up a scene. The scene we did blew me away. She did tremendously. She wasn’t able to look at the camera too good and she wasn’t able to verbalize very well the first time. But you can see how hard she’s going and it didn’t take her long to learn it.”

Max often got requests from fans to do a scene with Debi Diamond, a big girl in the Sahara Sands mode.

“I’d write back to them and say what can I do with Debi Diamond that she hasn’t done already done ten time,” he responds. “To me it’s no thrill if a whore fucks. Of course a whore fucks. That’s what they do. The thrill, and another reason for my bias with younger girls, is that because it’s much more thrilling to see a girl who’s not exactly innocent but, for sure, has never been exposed to the type of hardcore treatment that I’m going to show them. That’s thrilling because you don’t know if the girl’s going to bolt any second. I don’t know if she’s going to have a nervous breakdown.”

At the time of this interview, Max had done well over 600 scenes and says three girls had bolted altogether or walked out.

“I think that’s a pretty good batting average,” he concedes.

“We had girls breakdown in makeup. We had girls gone into the scene a little ways and breakdown. One girl three-quarters into the scene ran off. She mentally couldn’t cope with what was happening. Mighty strange stuff goes on in this business you’ll have to admit. I’ve had girls call me up, tell me they’re on the way, then I won’t see them for weeks. Or I’ll never hear from them again. They just decided to quit on the way to work. But that’s the risks and pitfalls of our business. Especially with the new girls.”

Max recalls a time when he got rousted by cops in Brazil.

“He was going to take us in for filming on the street,” he recalls. “He held a gun to my head. He said he was going to arrest us and take us in. I didn’t argue with him at all. That’s not going to get you anywhere. I just said, listen, 50 bucks and we’ll call it even. I gave him 50 bucks then he just stands there and is keeping people away from our photo shoot. So he sticks with us. I had a good feel for the guy and said let’s take this picture of you arresting me. That was pretty weird.”

According to Max, his people skills have averted similar potential disasters.

“I deal with people and put them at ease,” he explains. “For instance one time we went down to Costa Rica where I had a cast and crew of 30 people. I wanted to shoot a scene in a bar. Instead of pulling a permit I told everyone get on the bus, we’re going downtown. From our compound we drive downtown. We find a bar and me and Francois [Clouseau] go into the bar, order a couple of beers and start talking.

“Things are pretty cool. I say what do you think about shooting here. Within two hours we had all the lights set up. We had cops directing traffic and half the neighborhood watching. Everyone in the bars are extras, now. We had the bartender and his wife with speaking parts. We basically took over the whole thing and everybody was happy. We got the deal for less than $500. Now if you tried pulling a permit, it would take you six weeks through the system down there. I found if you treat people nicely and are not too aggressive, you can get amazing things done.

“On an Amtrak train, one time, we had people getting us pizza.”