EXHAUSTED: JOHN C. HOLMES, THE REAL STORY (1981)

“Everything in life is an act,” says John Holmes in the opening moments of Julia St. Vincent’s Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story, and, boy howdy, does Holmes put one on for its entire running time. A ludicrous hagiography and ode to the adult film world’s biggest superstar, Exhausted is a heaping helping of self-aggrandizing who-shot-john but, naturally, it can’t help but be a fascinating historical document that’s more than just a little priceless. Never has the delta between a subject matter’s image and real life been as wide as it was around the time Exhausted was cobbled together in July of 1981 and once you know the sad road Holmes was set to go down soon after shooting wrapped, you can’t not know it. And at that point, Exhausted becomes something else altogether.

If Bob Chinn’s California Gigolo was the fun and fictional look at John Holmes-the-lothario as he cruised through Beverly Hills while tripping over the women that flung themselves at him, Exhausted is its spiritual sequel. For Holmes, thinned out and hiding behind dark sunglasses, stretches to great lengths to spin tales as if he had actually become John Loftin, California Gigolo’s fictional stud-for-hire. And those tales are augmented by breathless narration and a copious amount of clips from the films Holmes made for director Bob Chinn and Freeway films from 1976 to 1979 (namely, Tell Them Johnny Wadd is Here; Liquid Lips; Hard Soap, Hard Soap; The Jade Pussycat; The China Cat; and Blonde Fire). As St. Vincent was the real-life niece of Armand Atamian and took charge of Freeway Films after his passing in 1980, it was her privilege to make a movie 85% of which was repurposed Bob Chinn material. But if one wanted to compare Exhausted to pop music, it would constitute a contractually obligated greatest hits package with two new studio tracks (or maybe it’s just repackaged K-Tel).

Despite its dubious reason for existence, there is an undeniably fascinating comparison of Holmes’s personas on display in Exhausted. First and foremost, there is the Johnny Wadd character. Then there is the John Holmes “on set.” Lastly is John Holmes during a crash and burn where he looks like an absolute train wreck while sitting in the Freeway offices. Here, during one of his many ramblings to the camera, we see Holmes produce a trickle of coke sweat which takes an escape route from a mop of hair that looks borrowed from Lt. Columbo. Exhausted, for all of its auto-fellating, is like watching the star of John Holmes burn as bright as he wanted it to as it was simultaneously scorching out amid the galaxy of twinkling stars that surrounded it.

In reality, John Holmes’s life was a five-alarm fire and an utter mess. Steeped in a crushing addiction to freebasing cocaine which caused his on-screen abilities to suffer mightily and had him hustling for cash to feed his habit, Holmes was also in the middle of a torrid affair with St. Vincent while also living with Dawn Schiller, a teenage runaway who was living a ghastly existence under his wing. And, of course, he was still legally married to his long-suffering wife, Sharon. Because… why not? Throw in the most salient example of “hanging with a bad crowd” you could possibly image and you have the then-chaotic world of John Holmes that was on the precipice of irreparably falling apart.

But that’s not what we get with “John C. Holmes, the Real Story.” Despite the film’s final credit thanking John C. Holmes “for being himself,” what the audience gets of him in Exhausted is pure fantasy. Holmes starts the proceedings off by acting bugged about all the rumors that circulate regarding him, an attitude that takes no small part of chutzpah given that he was the one who probably started the rumors. One could use the leftover white space on the envelope upon which the entire script of 1971’s Johnny Wadd was written to do the math that proves out that his supposed conquest of 14,000 women is an impossible statistic. Likewise preposterous is the tale regarding his pile of fallen underwear, all ruined from his snapping out the elastic due to his erections at inopportune times during his regular day (science… how does it work?). Listening to him spin yarns about himself is such a sad and groan-inducing affair because it’s clearly apparent he’s telling everyone stories that are patently false but which he desperately wants people to believe. For most everything out of Holmes’s mouth is an utter lie, most especially his flight-of-fancy regarding his graduate studies at UCLA. No doubt, this must have somewhat chapped the ass of Bob Chinn, an actual UCLA graduate.

Speaking of Bob Chinn, his actual appearance in Exhausted was more out of devotion to St. Vincent and the Atamian family than it was about highlighting the supposed greatness of John Holmes. In fact, Chinn and Holmes had split professionally the previous year after the headache-inducing stateside portion of the Prisoner of Paradise shoot. But it’s a good thing Chinn’s in the mix because he probably contributes the few slivers of truth that can be found in the film such as his passages regarding the early days of hardcore and how the Johnny Wadd films did a good deal to guide adult filmmaking onto a parallel track with conventional, mainstream trends in storytelling. Porn made a micro-duplication of Hollywood with its own penchant for sequels and franchises but it never had one as ambitious as the Johnny Wadd films. From the $750/day production budget and 24 hour schedule quickies to the lavish and globetrotting epics like 1979’s Blonde Fire, the series not only showed an organic growth in the filmography of Bob Chinn but it also served to highlight the evolution of the west coast hardcore scene. And another full point goes to Chinn for his incredulous and exasperated clapback to Holmes’s claim that he was allowed to block his own sex scenes, the only moment in Exhausted when Holmes gets rightfully corrected (a moment which was aped, along with a few others in Exhausted, by Paul Thomas Anderson in Boogie Nights).

Amid the many coke-induced word salads that come out of his mouth during Exhausted, Holmes eventually vomits up an interesting and well-delivered insight into the supposed exploitative angle of pornography. But it’s actually Seka who has an unexpectedly honest and upfront interview moment when she says that she wishes fans would allow porn stars to be real people once in a while. That being said, Seka also does her own part in contributing to the ridiculousness by coming close to drawing an actual legal offense for gilding the Lilly. Most flagrant is when she says Holmes has what boils down to a godly essence and we immediately smash-cut to him looking like he just spent the night in a bus station. It’s a little bit like the moment when Woody Allen says “Look, there’s God coming out of the men’s room” to Shelley Duvall in Annie Hall. Regardless of some of her now (and probably then) eye-rolling pontifications on Holmes, her prominence in Exhausted conveys just how big of a star Seka was at the time.

The majority of the remaining interviews in Exhausted are made up of the man (or woman)-on-the-street variety. While she gets a lot of the best bits of the film in these moments, St. Vincent definitely hedged in ensuring she could get some folks who were definitely game to talk about porn by parking herself outside one of Carlos Tobalina’s theaters (specifically, the X) and grabbing patrons as they’re either coming or going (one such couple is standing in front of a lobby card of Undulations, Tobalina’s insane production from the same year in which Holmes brazenly takes a bump of cocaine on-camera). Here, special mention should be made of the British chap with the awful comb-forward who, while making some cogent points while standing in front of a one-sheet for Tobalina’s Champagne Orgy, purports to have been at a swingers party that also was being attended by Holmes where he completely understood the landscape and respected it without getting bent out of shape or feeling jealous. Cups up to you, sir, wherever you are.

While also being a fascinating document on John Holmes, Exhausted is also a small treasure due to the way the clips from Chinn’s films were utilized and, quite by accident, preserved. In this day and age of titles that have had poor stewardship on home video due to transfers that should land some people in prison for derelict of duty, it’s a true joy to see all of the clips from Chinn’s Freeway films reconstituted in this context as the many snippets from Blonde Fire and The China Cat haven’t looked as clean and clear since they played in actual theaters and it gives audiences an opportunity to see just how amazing the lighting, camerawork, and production design is in Chinn’s films. Also to the film’s credit is the inclusion of Holmes’s sex scene with Felicia Sanda from Tell Them Johnny Wadd is Here, replete with the explanation that it was approached as a softcore scene that ended up turning hardcore when Sanda got lost in the moment and decided to run with the ball, so to speak. Additionally, the closing supercut of John Holmes in action is edited to something that sounds like it could have been on Tangerine Dream’s Force Majure (which means I’m all for it) while the remainder of the clips are set against a synth version of “Moonlight Sonata” which actually renders everything a little appropriately mournful and fugue-like.

One bit of breathtaking detail in Exhausted which is the 6/25/81 date that is seen on the slate that’s used in the ersatz production that’s occurring during the backyard shoot portions of the film. It’s fascinating because, exactly four days later, the Wonderland gang, with John Holmes lending a big assist, robbed the home of club owner and all-around no-goodnik, Eddie Nash. Two days after that, the majority of those involved in the Nash robbery had been wiped out in a brutal, revenge-minded home invasion. By the time Exhausted hit the theaters, Holmes had gathered up Schiller and was on the run. On December 4th of that same year, he was arrested in Florida and extradited back to California to stand trial for the murders (for which he would be acquitted). He wouldn’t return to the business until 1983 and, despite his wish for eighteen more years in the business, as stated to St. Vincent when he’s asked in the closing minutes of Exhausted, he’d be dead within seven.

Exhausted, indeed.

(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain