Ray Bradbury Enters The Digital Age
Ray Bradbury Classics Finally Coming as eBooks
By Jason Boog
16 classic Ray Bradbury books are coming to digital booksellers for the very first time.
We’ve posted the complete release schedule below, but the list of new eBook releases includes beloved books likeDandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes andThe Illustrated Man.
William Morrow, the longtime publisher of the late, award-winning writer and cultural icon Ray Bradbury, announces the release of 16 of Bradbury’s classic backlist titles in ebook format for the very first time. An additional seven titles will be released in e-book format over the next several months.
Hunger for The Power Of Six
The Power Of Six | HUNGER magazine Spring/Summer Issue
When you’re a bi-annual magazine you really need to make a statement when you do put out an issue. HUNGER magazine’s Spring/Summer issue (due to be released this week) has done just that. They haven’t just settled for one big name cover star. Nope. Make that six of the most talked about female artists in the music industry right now (from l-r top-bottom: Rita Ora, Jessie J, Iggy Azalea, Grimes, Gabrielle Aplin and A*M*E). Styled in line with their individual stage persona’s and shot by Rankin, every cover is truly unique.
Jonathan Winters Remembered by Robin Williams
A Madman, but Angelic
By ROBIN WILLIAMS
ABC, via Photofest
My father’s laughter introduced me to the comedy of Jonathan Winters. My dad was a sweet man, but not an easy laugh. We were watching Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” on our black-and-white television, and on came Jonathan in a pith helmet.
“Who are you?” Paar asked.
“I’m a great white hunter,” Jonathan said in an effete voice. “I hunt mainly squirrels.”
“How do you do that?”
“I aim for their little nuts.”
My dad and I lost it. Seeing my father laugh like that made me think, “Who is this guy and what’s he on?”
Jonathan’s improvs on “Mork & Mindy” were legendary. People on the Paramount lot would pack the soundstage on the nights we filmed him. He once did a World War I parody in which he portrayed upper-class English generals, Cockney infantrymen, a Scottish sergeant no one could understand and a Zulu who was in the wrong war. The bit went on so long that all three cameras ran out of film. Sometimes I would join in, but I felt like a kazoo player sitting in with Coltrane.
On one of his first days on the show, a young man asked Jonathan how to get into show business. He said: “You know how movie studios have a front gate? You get a Camaro with a steel grill, drive it through the gate, and once you’re on the lot, you’re in showbiz.”
No audience was too small for Jonathan. I once saw him do a hissing cat for a lone beagle.
His comedy sometimes had an edge. Once, at a gun show, Jon was looking at antique pistols and a man asked if he was a gun proponent. He said: “No, I prefer grenades. They’re more effective.”
If you wanted a visual representation of Jonathan’s mind, you’d have to go to his house. It is awe-inspiring. There are his paintings (a combination of Miró and Navajo); baseball memorabilia; Civil War pistols and swords; model airplanes, trains, and tin trucks from the ’20s; miniature cowboys and Indians; and toys of all kinds.
We shared a love of painted military miniatures. He once sent me four tiny Napoleonic hookers in various states of undress with a note that read, “For zee troops!”
But the toys were a manifestation of a dark time in his life. Jonathan was a Marine who fought in the Pacific in World War II. When he came home from the war, he went to his old bedroom and discovered that his prized tin trucks were gone.
He asked his mother what she did with his stuff.
“I gave them to the mission,” she said.
“Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” she replied.
Bill Cosby Dancing With One Leg Shorter Than The Other
“Writers used to be cool… now they’re just sort of wimps.”
from The Sydney Morning Herald
Badder but wiser
Jane Sullivan
 The ever-excessive Hunter S. Thompson. Photo: Getty Images |
I think I’ve finally worked out what’s gone wrong with my brilliant literary career. I need to smoke opium, swig absinthe and keep a pet bat.
It worked for Baudelaire, and it’s a comparatively modest aim. Unlike Lord Byron. Not content with having sex with hundreds of women and men, firing pistols indoors and drinking wine out of a human skull, Byron also kept a menagerie of exotic pets: a bear, a goat, a wolf, horses, an eagle, a cow, a falcon, peacocks, several monkeys and an Egyptian crane.
The poet who was ”mad, bad and dangerous to know”, according to Lady Caroline Lamb, is No.1 on the list of Andrew Shaffer’s famous bad boys and girls of letters, closely followed by Hunter S. Thompson, who once said: ”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
They are front-liners in a ragged army of scribblers, from the Marquis de Sade to James Frey, who romp, stagger and crawl through Shaffer’s entertaining book Literary Rogues. The tone is set in an epigraph from T.C. Boyle: ”There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything.”
Of course, there’s a sad side to all this literary badness. Careers were cut short, lives were ruined, deaths were sordid and painful. Edgar Allan Poe drank not to raise hell but to stave off depression. And, in the end, maybe excess and abuse didn’t have much to do with literary genius. As Shaffer points out, wayward authors appear more human and less remarkable when you get up close. ”It wasn’t because of their shocking behaviour that they left behind anything of value – it was in spite of it.”
And yet there’s still this curious elegiac tone to Literary Rogues, a lament for the good old days, even though they probably weren’t that good. ”Writers used to be cool,” says the last of Shaffer’s rogues, James Frey – a writer notorious not just for hellraising but for fabricating stories for his tell-the-truth memoir. ”Now they’re just sort of wimps.”
Room 237 pshaww
Giant guffaws at a pompous art world
Dark Roots of a Pop Master’s Sunshine
By BLAKE GOPNIK
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Paying a visit to Claes Oldenburg, one of the last surviving giants of Pop Art, you’d be forgiven for expecting a wacky guy living in chaos. His crowd-pleasing masterworks — a canvas hamburger the size of a couch, a rusting clothespin as big as a house, a lipstick tall as a tree — can easily be read as giant guffaws at a pompous art world. His gorgeous sketches for those projects are as wild and woolly as could be. So yes, you’d be forgiven for expecting a scene from a shaggy New Yorker cartoon by Ed Koren — forgiven, and mistaken.
Mr. Oldenburg’s five-story studio, on the western edge of SoHo, is utterly tidy, its classic loft spaces furnished with rigorous Bauhaus classics and hard-edge Minimal pieces by Donald Judd. Mr. Oldenburg, who is 84, wears stylish round tortoiseshell glasses and receives his guest with more Old World gentility than New York pushiness. (He was born in Sweden, into a diplomat’s household.) He reveals a sense of humor, joking about how a big newspaper ad for his forthcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art, opening Sunday, has been upstaged by one for a show about whales. But there’s no trace of the clown, and there’s plenty of orderly retrospection.
“If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times,” he said. “I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I’ve moved from one place to another, the work has changed.” He came to New York in 1956 from Chicago, where he was mostly raised, and settled on the Lower East Side, which he describes as New York’s “most creative and stimulating part.”
When you get that little red beaver right up there in front of ya…
Beaver Bites Man To Death In Belarus Attack
The beaver pounced as a man went to take its photograph after spotting the animal on the side of a road during a fishing trip.\
A fisherman has been bitten to death by a beaver after trying to take its photograph.
The man was on a fishing trip at Lake Shestakov in Belarus with two friends when they spotted the animal on the side of the road.
He stopped so that he could take a picture but as he approached the beaver it pounced on him, biting him in the thigh.
His friends attempted to stem the flow of blood from the wound but the animal’s bite had severed a main artery and the man, who came from Brest, bled to death.
Beaver attacks are rare and according to experts those animals that do go for humans are usually rabid.
Ars gratis armes
Gun culture gains popularity in art, fashion and decor
As nation debates mass shootings and gun restrictions, weapon motifs spread
By Megan Finnerty | The Republic | azcentral.com
Even though Phoenix craftsman Brandon Gore already owned an AK-47, he had to buy a new assault rifle when it came time to make the piece of wall art he had in mind.
He wanted to make a life-size composite concrete casting of the gun, but the process of creating the mold would destroy the weapon.
“So I bought a plastic one on eBay,” said Gore.
Now, the glass fiber-reinforced concrete tile titled “AK All Day” sells for $295 in his central Phoenix shop, Hard Goods. It sits near tiny concrete cactuses and a concrete bench that Gore makes by hand. The tile is one of about 100 he’s made and sold since 2006.
In the 14 years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., mass shootings have become commonplace enough that they can be discussed using shorthand: Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown. All of it — but most notably the deaths of 20 first-graders in their Newtown, Conn., classrooms on Dec. 14 at the hand of a man carrying a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle — has turned up the volume on the gun conversation at dinner tables and on Capitol Hill.
As Americans stock up on guns, mourn those killed by guns and debate how best to regulate the buying and selling of guns, they are also buying gun soaps, gun lamps and gun ice-cube trays.
These are not the kinds of recognizable products that have been popular for decades, the six-shooter lampshades, Wild West footie pajamas or hunting-rifle welcome mats.
These are, rather, machine-gun-print tights, AK-47 bullet-shaped ice-cube trays promising “a killer drink,” and glittering handgun necklaces and earrings. There are AK-47 wooden hangers, 9mm ceramic wall sconces, sleeveless dresses printed with guns, and a handgun table lamp. You can buy chocolate guns and ammo or soap handguns that “blow the stench away,” packaged in “a real, hard-shell, foam-lined gun case.”
There are even T-shirts printed with a Hello Kitty lookalike holding an AR-15, the gun that saw a spike in sales after Adam Lanza used a version of it in the Newtown shootings.
The Percentified World
Murderer Spills The Memes
The first ever ‘murder confession’ by MEME?
Reddit user is reported to the FBI after he ‘admits killing his sister’s abusive meth-addict boyfriend with his own drugs’ using a picture of a bear
A Reddit user has been reported to the FBI after he used a popular cuddly bear meme to seemingly confess to murdering his sister’s abusive boyfriend.
The user, named Naratto, posted a thread with the title ‘Finally have the guts to say it’ to Reddit’s AdviceAnimals subforum late on Saturday night.
The thread linked to the meme known as Confession Bear, and Naratto’s startling admission, which read: ‘My sister had an abusive meth addict boyfriend. I killed him with his own drugs while he was unconscious and they ruled it as an overdose.’
The meme is usually reserved for innocuous confessions so, within minutes, stunned Reddit users began commenting on the photo, asking if the disclosure was true and if so when it happened.
BILL HAYES: A Year In Trees
A Year in Trees
By BILL HAYES
Rebecca Mock
SOMEONE asked me the other day how I had gotten over the sudden death of someone I loved. What I wanted to say but found myself unable to explain (for it would have sounded too strange) was that I learned a good deal about moving through grief from some trees I once knew. They were not my trees. I didn’t plant them. I lived in an apartment surrounded by them. The only tending done was to give them my full attention over the course of four seasons.
When I moved in it was April, still cold, and the branches were bare. Facing northeast, my view of Manhattan was unobstructed, seen through a latticework veil. There were five trees, each distinct. They were not beautiful. My next-door neighbor, a landscape designer, told me that the species, Ailanthus altissima, is an urban weed. But I never expected beauty. That they were tall and strong and present was enough. I found that Ailanthus derives from an Indonesian word meaning “tree of heaven.”
I didn’t cover the windows with shades or curtains. I would wake with the sun and lie in bed and watch the tree limbs for a minute. Some mornings, the branches looked as if they were floating on wind drafts, as light as leaves. With a stormy sky, they turned black and spindly, like shot nerve endings.
Two years had passed since my longtime partner’s death, and though I had largely adjusted to his absence, I still experienced intense pangs of grief — painful unpleasure, in Freud’s exquisite phrase. At times, I’d be tempted to take out old photos, just to look, just one picture, just for a minute, like a junkie on the verge of relapsing. But I resisted. I had seen the trees stand up to strong winds and hold their own against the elements.
Willy Out The Window
from Johnson City, TN News Channel 11
Witnesses: Man drove 90 mph with genitals hanging out the window
By Kylie McGivern, Weekend Anchor / Producer / Reporter – email
WJHL-TV: News: Weather, and Sports for Johnson City, TN
KINGSPORT, TN (WJHL) –
Three women testified against former Mount Carmel Vice-Mayor William Blakely, graphically recounting times he exposed himself while driving. News Channel 11 had the only reporter in court for Thursday’s preliminary hearing in Kingsport.
“I was scared that I was gonna wreck, he was gonna cause me to wreck,” witness Deborah Sturgill said.
“It seems that every victim would tell the same story. But I knew all the victims did not know each other,” Kingsport Police Detective Terry Christian said.
“He was taking his hand, wetting his mouth, and masturbating,” Sturgill said.
“At over 90 miles per hour, he had his penis out [the window]… he was masturbating… and that’s when it got really, really bad. I wouldn’t look over any more, and I wrote his tag number down on my hand, which I believe he noticed, and he exited very quickly,” Street said.
Detective Terry Christian says it’s Street’s writing down of the license tag number that served as a catalyst for William Blakely’s charges.
“It went on for so long an nobody’s addressed it,” Christian said, referring to the dozens of phone calls the department has received over the course of three or four years – she said, related to Blakely’s behavior. Ages of the alleged victims range from 16-65.
Terry’s POPwater
Roger Ebert Gone
Thank you (and Gene Siskel, too) for helping so many know, love and understand film.
Nurse Ratched Slept Here
Once a ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Now a Museum
By KIRK JOHNSON
The movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. The new Museum of Mental Health honors the experiences of the patients who have lived there over the decades. More Photos »
SALEM, Ore. — Nurse Ratched slept here.
The punctiliously cruel psychiatric ward tyrant in the book and movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was brought to cinematic life by the actress Louise Fletcher during filming here at the Oregon State Hospital in the 1970s.
But the melding of real life and art went far beyond the film set. Take the character of John Spivey, a doctor who ministers to Jack Nicholson’s doomed insurrectionist character, Randle McMurphy. Dr. Spivey was played by Dr. Dean Brooks, the real hospital’s superintendent at the time.
Dr. Brooks read for the role, he said, and threw the script to the floor, calling it unrealistic — a tirade that apparently impressed the director, Milos Forman. Mr. Forman ultimately offered him the part, Dr. Brooks said, and told the doctor-turned-actor to rewrite his lines to make them medically correct. Other hospital staff members and patients had walk-on roles.
Now jump cut to the present: the office and treatment rooms of the hospital, which opened in 1883, have been turned into a Museum of Mental Health — one of only a few around the world that are part of a still-functioning hospital, which sprawls behind the old brick structure.
Big Daddy Gates Bankrolling Development of Next-generation Condom
from International Business Times
A Brief History Of The Condom, From Tortoise Shells To Bill Gates
Bill Gates has already put some of his money toward building a better toilet, and now he’s turning his attention to another kind of bodily function. The Microsoft billionaire is putting up money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in hopes of spurring enterprising inventors to make a better condom.
Though condoms are cheap to make and fairly reliable both for contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, many men do not use them due to a perceived trade-off between protection and pleasure.
“Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure?” the Gates-backed organization Grand Challenges asks. “If so, would such a product lead to substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or other STIs?”
Until May 7, Grand Challenges is accepting proposals for next-generation condoms. For winners of an initial $100,000 grant, there’s the possibility for an additional $1 million in funding later on.
“Condoms have been in use for about 400 years yet they have undergone very little technological improvement in the past 50 years,” Grand Challenges says.
Actually, the history of the condom may go back even further than four centuries.
Drag King Di In A Bar Full Of Hairy Gay Men
from Bang Showbiz via AZ Central
Freddie Mercury dressed Princess Diana as man for gay bar?
Bang Showbiz
Freddie Mercury once dressed Princess Diana as a man and smuggled her into a gay bar, it has been claimed.
The late Queen rocker and comedian Kenny Everett reportedly gave the British royal – who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 – an army jacket, cap and sunglasses to wear for a night out in South London homosexual haunt the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the 1980s, according to comedienne Cleo Rocos.
A piece in Cleo’s new memoir ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’ – which is serialized in the Sunday Times newspaper – explains: ”Freddie told her we were going to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a notorious gay bar in London. Diana said she had never heard of it and said she’d like to come.
”Now this was not a good idea. ‘It’s not for you,’ said Kenny, ‘It’s full of hairy gay men. Sometimes there are fights outside.’ This didn’t put her off in the slightest.”
Happy Easter
Chainsaw Man
The Whizzinator
Lake St. Louis Man Accused of Using Prosthetic Penis During Drug Test
ST. CHARLES. Mo. (KMOX) – A Lake St. Louis man accused of using a prosthetic penis to try to pass a drug test is facing criminal charges.
According to police, 34 year-old Sydney Levin was submitting a urine sample last week as part of his probation when an officer allegedly spotted him using a prosthetic penis, known as a Whizzinator.
The prosthetic is advertised as a discreet device way to use someone else’s urine.
Levin was charged with possessing a forging instrument. He was arrested and released after posting $25,000 bond. He pleaded not guilty Monday.
This is not a new scheme in 2005 TV action star Tom Sizemore passed several mandated drug tests using the Whizzinator, but was eventually caught.
The Power Of Six
THE POWER OF SIX… THE MERCEDES G63 6X6 AMG
Published On March 13, 2013 | By David | i-BLOG, Videos
I have a dream and that dream involves rocking up in Chelsea in a Mercedes G63 6X6 AMG. Range What!?
The ‘normal’ Mercedes G63 AMG is hardly a subtle vehicle. It’s a boxy four wheel drive with a twin-turbocharged 5.5-litre V8 under the bonnet which produces 544hp. Thankfully in some parts of the world more is most certainly more. Mercedes have recognised this and revealed the new G63 6X6 AMG. Yes that means three axles, six wheels, six wheel drive and hits sixty in under six seconds. This car could make Gok Wan seem manly and make a Range Rover look small.
Clearly this isn’t for our market, that is why Mercedes show it in the video below ploughing across deserts with no trouble at all. But what if someone did ask AMG to build them one in right hand drive. What would that look like on the streets of London? Would all of the Mums in their Chelsea tractors feel as safe if they knew this thing was prowling the streets?
To turn left, pee left … to turn right, pee right.
Minor League Baseball Team to Debut Urinal Video Games
Games feature “intuitive controls,” according to the company
A minor league baseball team in Pennsylvania will become the first professional sports franchise to offer urine-controlled video games in its restrooms when the season starts in April.
[PHOTOS: Baseball Spring Training 2013]
Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley IronPigs will debut the “Urinal Gaming System” in its men’s bathrooms—the custom urinals feature a “pee controlled” video screen that will entertain fans as they use the restroom.
The system is designed by a British company called Captive Media—in a demo for the urinal, the company shows a snowboarding slalom game in which the character is controlled by where the player pees.
“To turn left, pee left … to turn right, pee right,” the video says. At the end of the game (an average of about 55 seconds, according to the company’s research), players will get a code to put their score on a leader board.
Where In The World Is Pablo Picasso’s Penis?
Hedge fund billionaire buys Picasso’s Le Rêve for $155m – $16m MORE than the price he agreed on before previous owner tore a hole in it with his elbow
A billionaire hedge fund manager bought Picasso’s Le Rêve for $155million – t$16million more than he first agreed to pay right before its previous owner tore a hole in it with his elbow.
Steven A. Cohen, whose SAC Capital just settled two insider-trading lawsuits with the government for $616 million, bought himself the belated gift after first agreeing to but it for $139milllion in 2006 from Vegas mogul Steve Wynn.
The price is estimated to be the highest ever paid for an artwork by a U.S. collector.
But Wynn – former owner of the Bellagio and Mirage hotels in Vegas – put his elbow through the 1932 painting while he was showing it off to friends the day after the sale was agreed and caused a six-inch tear in it.
The hotelier agreed at the time to release Cohen – who is worth around $9.3billion – from the sale and repair it. Now he has sold it to Cohen for $16 million more than the pre-damaged price.
The painting – meaning The Dream – has since been restored to its original state.
The erotic content of the painting has been noted repeatedly, with critics pointing out that Picasso painted an erect penis, presumably symbolizing his own, in the upturned face of his model, who was his mistress at the time.
Piggly Wiggly for the Passive-Aggressive
Park Slope Food Coop and the Holy Kale: The alternative grocer, where celebrities can be spotted stocking shelves, has fed Brooklyn since 1973
Insiders dish on New York City’s most pretentious grocery that involves a strict, seven-step application process and enrolling everyone in the household. A member can, however, find wild boar for 20% less than the competition.
By Stan Sagner AND Nicole Lyn Pesce / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
A kale shortage incites widespread panic. A 4-year-old melts down when his parents won’t buy him dried papaya spears. And members debate natural childbirth while bagging nuts.
It’s tales from the front lines of the Park Slope Food Coop, temple to locally grown, antibiotic-free, passive-aggressive grocery shopping where you’ll find equal doses of corn and scorn.
“Do we have …” is a constant drone heard over intercoms the community market installed throughout the store so shoppers and employees can get info about product availability and pricing.
“There was a day when we ran out of kale and people were ready to burn the co-op to the ground,” one member tells the Daily News. Like other members we spoke to, he asked that we withhold his name for fear of being booted out of the cult-like co-op. “The intercom went crazy with ‘Do we have kale!?’ ‘Do we have kale!?’ ‘Someone needs to get fired!’ It was doomsday.”
The chaos extends deep in to the meat aisle, too.
“There is always a generally high level of neurosis regarding running out of anything,” one member shares under the strict condition of anonymity. The thirtysomething artist has been a member since 2010 and usually works in the cheese department or bagging nuts. “There was no brisket as of Friday. That may be an anxiety-volcano in the making.”
While working with a doula from California one shift, the subject of natural childbirth came up.
Huell Howser and Tony Danza Eating Pink’s
When Huell Howser Met Tony Danza
by Drew Mackie
One of the great things about Huell Howser’s interviews is that he didn’t have them edited to death. You can actually watch a conversation unfold naturally instead seeing it chopped up into something that’s different from how it actually happened. The clip you see here — Huell’s 1981 interview with Tony Danza at Pink’s Hot Dogs — is also presented mostly unedited, to the point that you hear Danza let slip a swear word that probably wouldn’t have made the cut for CNN.
Gravity Glue + The Ultimate Zen
Gravity Glue is designed to record and share Michael Grab‘s experience and journey through the art of Stone Balance. Gravity is the only “glue” that holds these structures in equilibrium.
Chinua Achebe Has Died
The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has passed away. He was 82 years old.
Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in 1958, his first novel and also his most well-known book. He also wrote Anthills of the Savannah, Arrow of God, and many other books. As a poet, he also released his Collected Poems. Exiled by civil war and politics, he spent many years teaching in the United States.
Former “doctor helping a patient… with a sexually sensitive area at the back of her throat” Harry Reems Gone
’Deep Throat’ porn star Harry Reems dies
Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY — Harry Reems, the male star of the 1972 cultural phenomenon “Deep Throat,” which brought pornography to mainstream audiences, has died at age 65.
Reems became famous for his role in the adult-film classic “Deep Throat,” which drew middle class audiences to the theater and became a forerunner of today’s hardcore adult-entertainment industry.
Reems was born in in New York in 1947 as Herbert Streicher. He served in the U.S. Marines before he ended up in the entertainment industry in the 1970s. He aspired to become a serious actor but was thrown in front of the camera while working on the production crew for “Deep Throat.”
At the 2005 premiere of a documentary about “Deep Throat” at the Sundance Film Festival, Reems told The Associated Press that the film was the first to “drop any pretense that it had educational value.”
“There was no socially redeeming value, and so the word of mouth went out from people who saw it saying ‘This is just a comedy. It’s great. You’ve got to see this,’” Reems said.
When the original male lead didn’t work out, Reems, the lighting director, stepped in. He played a doctor helping a patient, played by Linda Lovelace, with a sexually sensitive area at the back of her throat. Lovelace died in 2002.
The movie, an unlikely box-office sensation, became a touchstone for obscenity laws and a target for anti-smut activists.
In 1976, Reems was convicted of obscenity for his role in the film and faced a potential five-year prison term. Celebrities including Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty came to Reems’ defense, and the conviction was overturned.