Robert Rosen

Another excerpt from my interview with Kendra Holliday, editor of of The Beautiful Kind, conducted at Shameless Grounds. In this clip, I discuss my working relationship with porn legend Annie Sprinkle, who was a columnist for Stag magazine in the 1980s. Click here to watch the complete interview.

In this five-part film, Kate Copstick and Jamie Maclean from Erotic Review magazine interview me about the impact on the porn business of cruder tastes, cheap technology and freely available online videos.

1. Porn Is No Longer About Sex

The shift in popular preference to record-breaking feats of extreme perversion, and how other adult niches are likely to be affected.

2. Reporting on Porn from First-Hand Experience

Robert Rosen recalls his initial experiences in adult entertainment, on both sides of the cameras.

3. The Rise of the Citizen Pornographer

Robert Rosen discusses the declining prospects of adult video as a business.

4. Does It Take More Than a Camcorder to Be a Porn Director?

The impact of online video streaming on the adult film industry.

5. An Investigative Memoir about Adult Entertainment

Author Robert Rosen considers the style of Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography.

On December 7, 2011, the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, I was invited on Rew & Who?, an Internet TV show, to discuss my Lennon bio, Nowhere Man. At the 2:20 mark in this segment of the interview, the conversation turns to Beaver Street, and later to the book I’m currently working on, Bobby in Naziland.

These are the trailers for parts 1 and 2 of my Beaver Street interview on the Sleazoid Podcast, a show out of Nashville, Tennessee. The host, Mike Ashcraft, is a filmmaker who treats each podcast as if it’s a movie. To listen to the interview, click here and here.

Part 1: I discuss everything from my days as the editor of a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York, at a time when the energy of the anti-war movement was giving way to an emerging punk sensibility, to my tenure as an editor at Swank Publications during Porn’s Golden Age.

Part 2: I talk about the Traci Lords scandal and my efforts to take journalism to a place it had never been before by posing for a porn shoot.

In Beaver Street, I write about my officemate at Swank Publications, who’s both the managing editor of For Adults Only magazine and a professional actor who specializes in playing Nazis. (He’s perhaps best known as The Weeping Nazi in the premiere episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien.) In the book I call him “Henry Dorfman.” Since Beaver Street was published, however, he's not only given me permission to use his real name—Paul Slimak—but has done a series of promotional videos for the book playing his favorite character, renegade Nazi Erich von Pauli. Also featured in these videos is Paul's wife, Agnes Herrmann.

Be sure to check out some of Paul's other films. He plays the Priest in Cookie and Jay, a john in Working Girls. Agnes has most recently appeared in The Road, as Archer’s Woman. This year, look for both of them in Boot Tracks, starring Stephen Dorff and Michelle Monaghan.

Erich von Pauli on Beaver Street: Episode Two. Featuring Agnes Herrmann as Diana Clerkenwell.

Erich von Pauli on Beaver Street: Episode Three. Featuring Agnes Herrmann as Diana Clerkenwell.

Erich von Pauli on Beaver Street: Episode Four. Featuring Agnes Herrmann as Diana Clerkenwell and Kevin S. Foster as Captain Derek Lancashire.

On December 7, 2011, the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, I talked about and read from my Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, on the Rew & Who Internet TV show.