An Interview With John Blakemore
While we are wallowing in memory and sentiment, how about those old HOM and Cal-Star movies? You know the ones I mean — they all had a certain look in common, they were rougher and more explicit than anything else then on the market, and they were everywhere that kink was sold — loops in the coin booths, stills in the bondage magazines, .gifs on the dial-up BBSs, you name it. I’ve published a few examples over the years:
Utterly Classic Outdoor Bondage Photo
Vintage Rope Rider
Captured And Suspended And Interrogated
They were all the work of a film-maker known variously as “Jason Whitman”, “Jeremy Whitmore”, “Jason Whitworth”, or “John Blakemore”. And here is an incredibly-detailed interview with him. If you’ve ever wondered how those old movies got made, you’ll look long and hard for better info than this.
It’s an interesting glimpse at a long-lost era, frankly. He never saw most of the movies he made — he just mailed the footage off to California and cashed the checks.
JB: Oh, that’s probably one of the best movies [I made]. I haven’t seen it, either.
R: You haven’t seen it for years, in other words, right?
JB: No, I haven’t seen it. Period. I have seen virtually none of the movies I have made because the sound movies were edited in California and I wound up never getting a copy of most of them. Of course, that was on VHS, but a lot of them I have never seen.
R: That’s pretty amazing that you haven’t seen some of your own work.
JB: Yeah, but part of it is that I had to remain absolutely, completely anonymous in the part of the country that I live in. And the community is very religious and you don’t mess with God, you know. They’ll get ya. So I stayed as low profile as possible. I had a full-time job. This was all part-time, always. Worked me to death. But I didn’t push it. There was no need. Once the thing was done, it was done and I’m ready to start figuring out what I have to do to make another one.
Those of you without a sense of how erotic sensibilities have changed over the decades may find parts of this interview disturbing. The dude was making these movies in an era before the “safeword” meme had been crafted:
R: When you were actually doing the production, did the actresses have safe words to get out of something if it hurt too much?
JB: No. Nobody had heard of such. Well, yeah, there was, but we didn’t call it a safe word. If something was really wrong, the girl yells “Cut”. Or even if she’s gagged, she yells (simulating gagged sound) “”Cwut, cwut, cwut”.
R: Did that happen a lot?
JB: No, very rarely. If you’re careful and get your rigging done right, the girls are gonna be okay. She may be in pain, but it’s not damaging.
He definitely enjoyed sex with his models, too, and at least one of his stories lacks anything we recognize as consent, here in the 21st century:
And so…I think it was my second or third model, I don’t even know who it was, but I had ended the shoot and finished the set of stills, and I purposely had her tied in a position where her pelvis was arched up. Her pussy was right there available. She’s still tied up and gagged. And when I shot the last shot, I just turned off the lights and simply went down and started eating her pussy. And she didn’t protest. And that led to my models bringing other girls. I didn’t even have to look for them. They came to me. Because I had established a reputation of being the best pussy eater they had ever seen. And that is not a joke.
I’m old enough to remember when doing something sexually to a woman without asking first was called “making a pass” and “she didn’t say no” was very much the standard of consent. Not trying to say that era was better — it wasn’t — just mentioning that it existed, for the youngsters in the audience who didn’t live through it. However, even then, “she didn’t say no” would have been kind of a stretch when she was bound and gagged.
You don’t have to like the guy, though, to be interested in how he made his movies, or in his views on pussy whipping and the law:
JB: Over the years that I did that work, I had probably 4 girls that were very dear friends. One would quite often call and say she wanted to have lunch with me. We would meet at the studio and I would do things to her that I couldn’t possibly do on film.
R: Such as…?
JB: Such as whip her pussy…oh, I’m not even gonna go there. There’s still the law. And most of what I did would have been illegal and is probably still illegal. But it was consensual. They got off on it.
R: But in a consensual relationship, that’s not illegal, is it?
JB: Well, it doesn’t matter. For all you guys and girls out there, it does not matter what is legal and what is not legal. What matters is that the police will use any means, illegal included, to destroy your life. They will lose in court. They will not be successful in prosecuting you but they will have completely succeeded in destroying your life. It will take all the money you can get. You may lose your house, your car, your family. Although you’re innocent, that doesn’t make any difference. Make no mistake. This is not the land of the free. This is the land of the court. And the courts are not fair and they are not honest. Now, the court will maybe throw a thing out, but the police have had the time and the media to wreck your life before that ever happens.
R: Are we talking first-hand experiences here?
JB: Sure.
R: Okay, I won’t go into that.
JB: No, don’t want to.
R: Right, I understand.
It’s a huge long interview. These are only the tiniest excerpts. You know the drill — click through to see the whole thing. And special thanks to the gang at the Girls In Merciless Peril (GIMP) forum for tracking him down and getting him to talk!
See also: Whatever Happened to John Blakemore?
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