“But it don’t snow here, it stays pretty green.
I’m gonna make a lot of money, then I’m going to quit this crazy scene.
I wish I had a river to skate away on.”
Joni Mitchell – “River”
Captured in glorious 35mm with as much cold, hard cash writer/director/star Alain Patrick sunk into making it as his on-screen character pours into renovating his boat, Blue Money is a forgotten gem and an important part of both Patrick’s and producer Bob Chinn’s careers. With so much history and truth are packed into its 89 minutes, it is a veritable docudrama of how the porn industry actually functioned in the early 70’s and a bronzing of the filmmaking exploits of Patrick and Chinn, producing partners who had cut their teeth working for Ed De Priest.
Shot mostly around the beachfront condo community on Westwind Street in Marina Del Ray, home of the original Johnny Wadd adventures from the same year, Blue Money concerns itself with a few days in the life Jim DeSalle (Patrick), 25 year-old smut filmmaker with a wife (Barbara Mills, credited as Barbara Caron) and a newborn baby (Alain’s real-life daughter, Vanessa Chappuis who, it must be noted, looks EXACTLY like him). Jim longs to quit the porn business and live with his family on the boat he is constantly renovating while also trying to finish a picture, juggle a mistress (Inge Maria), deal with his family pressures, and try and stay one step ahead of the L.A. vice squad.
Far from a hedonistic paradise envisioned by most, the porn industry in Blue Money is portrayed as a maddening world of ever-shifting duties that sometimes lacked a guaranteed or steady payoff. Jim and Mike (Jeff Gall) run the fictional Redwood Mountain Films where, when they’re not producing the films, they’re haggling with the distributors who’ll plug them into the theater chains across the country. This part of the adult world, where product was sometimes created for regional taste and distributors would shortchange the producers and dare them to complain, is rarely touched upon in cinema but was also such an enormous piece of the reality of the business. In a world built on a theatrical model, movies are worth a lot less without an exhibition space in which to project them to a paying audience. Take it or leave it.
So Blue Money is a fun little insider picture that really does have some nice and prescient things to say about the hardcore industry and toiling within it. It has a closer that suggests a paradise that Bob Chinn finally would achieve in 1987 when he would leave the business and move to Hawaii with his family, but, like Jim, it was a dream that proved ever elusive as there was always one more movie to make. In one of the more telling moments in the film, Liz, Jim’s wife, asks him to take a break from repairing his boat and come below deck to have a glass of wine. His response is, “In a minute; I just have one more area.”
That line might encapsulate the domestic drama in Blue Money but it also shows how similar the grind of reality collides with one’s dreams, regardless of occupation. And, to that point, Blue Money makes porn work look like the actual work that it is. Along with Gerard Damiano’s Skin Flicks (1978), Blue Money may be the best film about the business of pornography that I’ve ever seen. Impressive is the starkness of the porn shoots with their cramped, hot spaces and the awkward cacophony of panting and coughing and shouted direction, all of it captured with simple lighting which sometimes flares on the edge and moves the film closer to documentary in approach and style.
Alain Patrick and Barbara Mills are absolutely gorgeous as the central couple whose marriage begins to fracture under the weight of his profession and all of their domestic material plays out very well. A little less successful is the bit regarding his casual affair with Ingrid (Inge Maria), the girlfriend of a regular on Jim and Mike’s shoots. Jim’s reticence to use her in his films because he immediately develops feelings for her is pretty unconvincing, mostly because nobody’s going to risk it all for Inge Maria, especially not an Alain Patrick who’s married to Barbara Mills. That’s just crazy talk.
Blue Money has a forward progress but a somewhat jerky pace due to Patrick not really having much of a raw enthusiasm for filmmaking. After the picture was finished and screened, surveillance footage with Bob Chinn’s narration was added to help expand the running time. It works mostly due to its increased frequency as the film moves towards its climax and the law begins to close in on Jim and his productions, lending the film a minor level of tension. It also works as Chinn himself shows up as a plainclothes vice cop who assists in busting Jim’s shoot.
Though it’s a solid drama and a fascinating and accurate expose, Blue Money is especially great fun if you’re a fan of the early career of Bob Chinn for a lion’s share of the cast are veterans of Chinn and Patrick’s nascent, catch-as-catch can productions. Maria Arnold is the starlet in the shoot featured in the opening and she’s paired with Chuck Lish, both of who were featured in Chinn’s The Naked Nympho the year prior. The second shoot comprises of Elaine (Sandy Dempsey), arguably one of the best of Chinn’s early hardcore starlets, and Alex Elliott, vet of many a Chinn production (usually playing a loutish heavy), playing the sound man. Chinn’s film, Fires Down Below, gets a name-drop and Chinn and Patrick’s professional introduction to John Holmes is humorously approximated well before the gag was reconfigured and reused in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997).
Though it didn’t turn out to be vehicle to elevate Patrick’s acting ambitions, Blue Money, along with the Mark Haggard-directed The Love Garden, did signal an important shift in Chinn’s productions from the primitive hardcore features to his role as a producer of softcore material and director of general release material like Panama Red and The Devil’s Garden. Not unlike George A. Romero’s Knightriders, itself a self-reflexive look at the specific hassles of being an independent artist in a creative world in flux that’s populated by the same people who had long helped create the art, Blue Money is also a celebration of the beginning of an end. For when Chinn would move back to hardcore in the early days of 1974 with The Married Woman, the landscape would look a little different and the harsh orange glow of the dawn of the industry would be a little less searing and a little bit higher.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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