Date of Birth: 13 January 1943
Place of Birth: New York, USA
Porn Debut: 1970
John Seeman was one of the original pioneers of porn. Raised in New Rochelle, he was a good, but not a great student, and was eventually drafted in 1965. After he got out of the military, he packed up his car and moved to Fort Lauderdale to "figure out what life is all about." Then he moved to Minneapolis, then Denver, and finally San Francisco.
"I arrived in 1970 and everyone was openly smoking pot and I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty wild'. At first, I was living in a residents' club. It was cheap and you got to meet a whole new group of people before everyone went in different directions. It was really delightful."
His first job in San Francisco was selling cable subscriptions door-to-door.
"The cable company was required by law to have a channel that was available to the public. And they needed a host. So I wound up interviewing people, and they supplied me with a cameraman. I interviewed exotic dancers and artists. They filmed me getting a massage. One day I interviewed this guy who published a magazine for the Sexual Freedom League and I was intrigued. They had some wild parties - nude parties, sex parties - and I attended those. Anyway, I started distributing the league’s magazine in vending machines. I had never even seen an adult film at that point. So I went to a theater downtown and I was awed by what these people were doing up on the screen."
According to John, his reaction at the time was, "My God, that woman seems to be having a great time! How do I get in on that?"
Adult film director Lee Utterbach, better known as Harry Lewis (one half of the Lewis Brothers), met him soon after and remembered him as "a truly wonderful man. John told me he came to San Francisco a year earlier, wanting to be in adult films. He went to the Mitchell Brothers for an interview. They told him he was too homely-looking to ever get into films. He went on to be one of the most successful supporting actors in the industry."
John would later say, "They [the Mitchell Brothers] took one look at me and laughed in my face. I wasn’t hip. I wasn’t a flower child. I didn’t have long hair."
He eventually pursuaded them to give him a chance and they cast him in a loop.
"I was so nervous, I had to pee every fifteen minutes while they were setting up. Then I couldn’t get an erection on camera. They had to shoot the whole thing around me."
By 1973, Seeman had moved on to feature films. Over the next 7 years he appeared in some of the best adult movies of the 1970s and was lucky enough to have sex with some of hottest porn stars of the time, including Seka, Annette Haven, Desiree Cousteau, Candida Royalle, Serena, Chris Cassidy and Desiree West.
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| John Seeman, late 1970s |
"We got in trouble one time, but it was our own fault… It was my idea really. In 59 Mill Valley you can get up very high, it’s a National Park area I think. Just endless acreage with nothing there but woods and then openness. You can get to an area where you could see at least 270 degrees! The whole Bay, the East Bay, San Francisco and looking all the way down towards San Jose. And I told the producer about that. He got a Rolls Royce and drove it up there and myself and Annette Haven. She was a star in the early days. We were filmed on top of the Rolls Royce, on the engine, inside, you know, all this stuff. All of the sudden a policeman comes running out of the woods and he said, 'Don’t move anybody.' And there were about 15 or 18 of us (with crew members and everything).
"He arrested Annette and myself, and seized the film. I produced identification so I didn’t have to, I could leave. Annette was taken to the police station, but she said she was just there a few hours and then she spent almost the whole-time signing autographs. So, it was not a problem for her. Then there was a trial, but there was a debate: how would they get the film processed? Could the County, or whatever, could they really devote money to processing a pornographic film? What ended up happening is we got probation for two or three years. There was a fine that the producer paid, and so life just went on.
"What had happened was a woman was walking her child through the woods and saw us, and she has every right to be upset! You know, you can’t… I’d like to be able to walk with my child through the woods without having to see people doing that. So, she called the police and that’s what started it. But you know, [getting arrested] was one of the, I have to say, it’s one of the proudest moments of my life. Oh, I loved it."
In the early 1980s he moved behind the camera, eventually directing the classic porn film Ten Little Maidens, starring Ginger Lynn, Amber Lynn and Nina Hartley. He left the industry around 1987.
Years later, John Seeman said:
"I was always self-conscious about saying I was a porno person, whether it was as an actor, director or production manager. I was always proud of the connection from a sensationalistic stand-point, but I was always self-conscious about it and felt guilty about it from the stand-point of, is this really the way to earn a living? In myself, I wasn’t sure I wanted to end my time on earth with the only career I’ve had being in porno. I wanted to try something else.
"But porno was a fascinating learning experience for me. My only regrets about leaving porno are in relation to the sex. I really loved the sex, and I miss that. I miss what I call the easy sex, the guaranteed sex with a pretty cooperative woman. That was like a fantasy that went on for years. And the money. I consider it good for the amount of time I put in. I don’t regret my time in porno at all. I really followed through in what I was interested in. And I made some great friendships in the business. People I’m still friends with today. But it was time to move on."
Author and journalist Sloane Crosley is related to John Seeman: "He’s my mother’s cousin, which makes him my first cousin once removed." She wrote about him in her book Look Alive Out There: Essays, which is where some of these quotes are from.
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