Sources tell me that veteran actor Jamie Gillis passed on yesterday from melanoma, which had only been diagnosed a few months ago.

Jamie was one of the big names during the "Golden Age" of porn, and did movies all the way up to 2005.  He had also crossed over into some mainstream flix too, such as 2005's Die You Zombie Bastards.  

Gillis was 66 or 67 years old.

Kind of ashamed to say I've heard of him... :-golden age".

Kind of ashamed to say I've heard of him... :-golden age".

http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/04/eek2.gif  Well,  knock me over with a feather, Miss Tish!  ;D ;D

Kind of ashamed to say I've heard of him... :-golden age".


Oh yes.

The "Golden Age" of porn extended from roughly 1972 through maybe 1984 or so.

During the Golden Age, explicit "X Rated" movies were shown at all sorts of otherwise-mainstream local theatres.  Local newspapers would carry full-page ads for the latest films starring performers like John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes, Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers, Tony "The Hook" Perez, Harry Reems, and, yes, Jamie Gillis.  Sadly, all are dead now except for Harry and Tony.  :\'(

Around '72 there were a number of court decisions that made the showing of hard-core porn legal.  The Golden Age more or less opened with the rampant popularity of the classic film "Deep Throat".  In the beginning, porn movies were grainy 16MM or even Super 8MM films.  By the time 1978 rolled around, some productions were using full-on 35MM technology.  The standard bearer of the porn industry during the Golden Age was John Holmes, who starred as the hard-boiled Detective Johnny Wadd in the first porn film "series".  (His death of AIDS in 1988 also signalled, more or less, the end of the Golden Age).  During the Age, he was as much a household name as today's regular film stars.  Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace were the main female superstars at that time, too.

The emergence of VHS and Betamax home videotape players in the early 1980's were the beginning of the end of the Golden Age.  With video equipment being cheap, suddenly anybody with access to the appropriate body parts could be producing porn flicks; with all that porn flooding the market, prices dropped, and the fees paid to performers plummeted.  Likewise, now that people could rent porn movies without risking being seen at a porn movie theatre, the business at theatres all but evaporated.

One of the most incongruous aspects of the Golden Age was the newspaper advertising aspect.  I mean, these days we think that the media takes an "anything goes" approach.  But I can't imagine seeing even a small classified ad in the Beaver County Times these days to hawk the latest porn tape from Ron Jeremy.  But in the mid 1970's they were running full-and-double page ads.

So long, Jamie!
:\'(

Yes indeed Mr. Gillis was from the Golden Age of Porn, which consensus agrees with LB runs from about the time of "Deep Throat" to the prevalence of home video.  Mr. Gills was one of a handful of cocksmen in the biz who could actually act.

The Golden Age was more of a hope that porn would merge with mainstream, but it never happened.  AIDS, drugs, home video, right-wing crackpots, militant feminists, the Internet, they all played a role in dimming that glimmer of hope.  The movie "Boogie Nights" does a good job getting that across. 

When Gillis was big in the business 35 years ago, nobody would even recognize what today's porn industry has become.