Original subtitles

Teenagers, young girls.

Problems. They got problems.

They find solution to problems through sex.

And that's the premise of the story.

A lot of the girls and guys had their heads on straight and

understood what they were doing.

It was business. A lot of them didn't.

We had a lot of sad injuries.

People get addicted to this sort of thing.

It's like getting addicted to narcotics or liquor.

It can be fatal.

There's no advantages that I can see except making money for the underworld.

Debbie, I'm so proud of you. What do you think of, daddy?

Debbie Does Dallas, released in nineteen seventy eight,

is one of the top five grossing porn films of all time.

Over the years, millions of people have seen it.

Millions more have heard of its catchy title.

Few, however, are aware of the dark history connected to this piece of

standard seventies porn.

The film isn't famous for what's in it,

but for what happened to it after its release.

Don't get college bumpy.

A high profile court case involving America's leading football team,

the sudden death of a mafia boss during an FBI raid,

a drugs overdose,

and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Bambi Woods,

its leading lady.

These are the ingredients that make up the mythology of the film.

Twenty seven years on,

we decided to try and track down everyone involved in the

film so they could tell us in their own words what really

happened after Debbie did Dallas.

It wasn't an easy job as many had changed their names and

identities since their porn days.

The person we wanted to talk to the most was the director of

Debbie Dastalas.

We met up with him in the deep south of the US in Savannah,

Georgia.

These days, he's a respectable businessman,

and one of the conditions for him giving this interview was

that we didn't use his real name.

He wanted to be known as Jim Clark,

the name that appears on the credits of Debit.

Get the business you get He was in Savannah on Business,

and that's where he finally consented to give us an interview.

With that half a ton trying to Jim Clark didn't conform to the

image of a sleazy pornographer.

He began his career in the New York radical press of the sixties.

By the seventies,

he was making both porn and legitimate films in New York.

His porn work was financed by Mickey Zaffirano,

a high ranking mafia boss.

Zaffirano had risen in the mob to be one of New York's most

powerful pornographers.

I'm from the godfather of a generation, you know.

I mean for me,

the so called mafia or whatever it is that

control the kind of what I call black

market or underground or whatever it is,

these guys who were very powerful at that time

were simply to me another country.

They had their own set of rules.

They had their own administration.

Everything was set up accordingly so that

their way of life could

Texas to be a Texas cowgirl, and we don't have any money.

It was while he was planning a film for Zaffarano called

Teenage Services that the idea for Debbie was born.

And, a young woman came into,

the studio that I was working in at the time and told me her

story of, woah, coming back from, Dallas.

But I've got a warning I'm trying out for the cheerleaders now.

In the box.

So I called up, my partner at the time, and I said, you know,

I I got an idea. Why don't we scrap this and we'll do this?

He says, sounds like a good idea to me.

And that's how it was born.

It was really born out of her personality.

She was as bubbly as you could get and seems to be healthy in

her attitude towards,

it's actually the only thing that she had a problem with

that I was not aware of at the time,

where she had a drug problem.

This is Bambi Woods, by the way.

This is Bambi Woods.

I named her Bambi Woods, by the way.

There wasn't any real reason behind it.

Bambi, a deer in the woods.

I mean, you you wanna get deeper?

Mickey came to me one day and he says,

what do you think it is?

I said, what? He says, Debbie does Dallas.

I said, it doesn't make any sense grammatically.

He says, yeah. That's why people are gonna like it.

And he was right.

He was a brilliant man.

Debbie, what are you gonna do? Raise some money fast.

When do you have to leave? In two weeks.

The plot was simplicity itself.

Debbie wants to become a cheerleader for the Texas

cowboys football team, but has no money to make the journey.

Her college girlfriends decide to help out,

and they find selling themselves for sex is the most

lucrative method of raising the cash.

We've never done anything like this before, mister Bradley.

You're our very first customer.

It was shot entirely in New York where the filmmakers

constantly ran the risk of being busted under obscenity laws.

Debbie Does Dallas was not a,

movie which had a massive dress rehearsal nor script.

It was a cute little fun TNA,

twister little movie by Car Wash, like teeny buns,

like all the little pair of these that they did in their seventies.

And that's pretty much what the seventies were.

Evenings and especially on weekends.

Weekends Here are my friends. Here I am.

Babysitter and hopes to stop Hey. Look.

I don't like anyone in the burn on my date night,

at least before my date herself.

Look. They think they can boost her morale if they go with her.

After all, she's so These are some of my closest friends right here.

One's a doctor. One's a writer in the Bay Area.

Hey, Mark. I'm a Hey, buddy, man. Hi.

Government says Here I am indicating everything.

Porno acting. It's a great school of acting, really.

Would be proud.

It was sort of like a catch as you can, location shoot.

We found places that we really weren't supposed to be in,

and I guess the, producer director saved money.

And, of course, we took the risk of being busted, but we weren't.

And you think maybe you got a couple of hundred dollars for

this, if that?

I probably got a hundred fifty a day. Probably what I got.

Maybe two hundred.

So if I was on this film a couple I I maybe I made five

hundred on this movie,

which in today's dollars would be six hundred.

This is my scene. I can see that.

Now I really feel bad. I'm going to hear you bad.

My, mister Greenfield. How big you are.

I've always dreamed of being a quarterback.

I am making love to the captain of the cheerleaders.

I always felt like a stunt worker.

Sex scenes didn't seem to be like sex.

It was more like stunt work.

You know?

Because you weren't sure if you could pull the trick off of

being able to perform, you know,

in front of everybody.

You're always worried about that.

It was one of the few sex scenes that

I felt good about.

I didn't feel it was slimy or she was too,

innocent for it to be vulgar.

Am I interrupting something? Uh-huh.

Please let me interrupt anyway. Oh, so do you have a go away?

There I am. Oh, my God.

I don't know.

I mean, I look at myself in this movie and,

it's it's almost embarrassing, first of all, the hairstyle.

Twenty five years ago, my God.

That's supposedly my wife, Robin Byrd.

I played, missus Hardwick.

Missus Hardwick was the owner of the candle shop

with mister Hardwick, who was Eric Edwards.

And he was mister Hardwick. Get it?

Hardwick candle shop.

I remember doing this

and,

and bring out the old candle.

Okay.

And, well, that's just about enough.

This is about where I normally would fast forward.

With the film finished,

Clark and Zaffirano set about making this production line

porn movie into one of the most infamous films of the seventies.

In the next part,

we'll find out how they did it and how an undercover FBI sting

the Debbie story.

In nineteen seventy eight, Debbie Does Dallas,

one of the most famous porn titles of all time,

was about to go on release.

This was the era before home video and Debbie was to play in

porn cinemas across the US.

Director Jim Clark and mob financier Mickey Zaffirano came

up with a marketing strategy that would ensure the film's success.

I knew that it would make a lot of money,

and I didn't think it would make a lot of money because of what I did.

But Mickey came up with the, poster,

and I looked at the poster.

In those days, I think I was smart enough to know, you know,

what would and what wouldn't work.

I said, wow. This is gonna be a big success.

I never met Bambi Woods. You know?

I saw the film afterwards,

and I regretted not meeting her because the I think one thing

that that works about this film,

even though technically speaking, it's,

you know I mean, come on.

It's a porno film.

It's not it's not good on on many levels.

But the fact that that that you this girl is the object of the

viewer's desire, and no one actually gets to have sex with

her really created a great tease.

I mean, back then,

Bambi Woods was considered really beautiful for this business.

There were there weren't a lot of great looking women that

went to do this.

Bambi was the girl next door. She was a cheerleader.

She had that cheerleader

look.

She had that girl next door look.

Girl next door look is the girl next door look is still the

most single faceted thing in the porno industry.

There's an old saying,

anyone can no one wants to wanna watch to see the horror get fucked.

They wanna see the girl next door gets screwed.

Debbie Does Dallas used an all American icon, the cheerleader.

Not only that, the cheerleader uniforms look suspiciously like those of

America's number one football team at the time,

the Dallas Cowboys.

A lawsuit was soon on its way to the makers of the film.

The basic idea in those days was to get people to sue you.

I mean, if you can get them to sue you,

and that's free publicity.

And the longer you could keep that running,

the more attention the film got and the more money you made.

The Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders were huge at that point.

I mean, they were like the biggest thing.

So this this is the oh, look. There's Eric.

That's one of the main reasons this was such a big hit because

it traded in on the Dallas thing.

It was just a brilliant move.

Remember the Dallas cheerleaders were totally sold on sex.

Wasn't that the first? That was sold on sex.

You didn't see an ugly fat girl being a Dallas cheerleader.

Come on.

Sex is the primary seller of anything in the entertainment industry.

This created a chain of events which did nothing but propel the,

the notoriety and the huge popularity of this minuscule

little film that by all means should have fizzled away.

The first installment of the film's notoriety had been the

court case brought by the Dallas cowboy cheerleaders.

Over a thousand miles from New York in Miami, Florida,

an FBI agent was planning the second installment and it would

involve the film's financier, Mickey Zaffirano.

Used to go to their conventions openly and take pictures of

them and talk to them.

They didn't much like it, but they all knew who I was.

Bill Kelly, because of the war he had waged on porn,

was known and feared by every pornographer in the US.

I've probably looked at more hardcore obscenity than

probably any law enforcement officer in the history of the

United States.

Not the only thing that,

bothers me are people having sex with snakes

or,

defecation films bother me.

Urination doesn't.

Vomit films, they bother me a little bit.

And child pornography, I get upset with

depending upon what's involved in the child pornography.

But now I can sit there, you know,

I've I've had people vomit on me in court while I was showing the film.

I got too close to a lady juror one time and she vomited right

down the back of my neck.

Well, that's the kind of people I want on juries,

but it isn't it's kinda hard on the clothes.

People get addicted to this sort of thing,

and it's like getting addicted to narcotics or liquor.

It's not helpful no matter what doctor Kinsey might have said

about it fifty years ago.

There's no advantages that I can see except making money for the underworld.

It was with films like Debbie Does Dallas that the mob

realized what huge profits could be made from porn films.

Fearing that the situation was getting out of control,

the FBI sanctioned an operation called MyPorn,

short for Miami Pornography.

For the first time in its history,

it allowed agents to go undercover in an obscenity case.

In August of nineteen seventy seven,

the bureau transferred Patrick Livingston,

who was then in Detroit, to Miami, and Bruce Olavsky,

who I think was in New York, I'm not sure where he was,

down here to be trained by me to be undercover

pornographers, to penetrate the national,

level of of high ranking organized crime figure.

Well, that's an unusual request.

That never happened in the FBI before.

Well, I know how to do it.

I mean, I know how to be a pornographer,

but I couldn't be because everybody in the business knew

me either by sight or by reputation.

From Miami, we traveled to Orlando to speak to one of the agents,

Pat Livingston.

He'd never gone on camera before about my port.

After the strain of spending three years undercover,

he'd rebuilt his life as a golf pro.

But he agreed to talk to us about the times when he played

the part of mob wise guy, Pat Salamone.

You had to be consistent in everything you did.

You know, if you're a golfer,

you better be able to play golf.

If you said you were something,

you'd better be able to to back that up.

They knew my criminal record in Detroit better than I did.

I forgot a couple because it was made up.

They knew about it. He was asking me about it.

But what about this one? I said, yeah.

Yeah. That's right. I mean, you know, you do it so many times.

You forget one or two.

They knew it they knew it to the to the and the letter.

They were in serious

danger of of being either physically destroyed,

damaged, or killed during that entire period.

It was risky business because a lot of these guys had violent

records themselves or were tied in with people that would kill

you just like like that.

How dangerous were the people that you were dealing?

Dangerous. Well, okay.

There were four or five wise guy joints in Miami.

One of them was a bridge restaurant.

Went to the bridge restaurant, and the style there was,

you know, you come in, you're supposed to be Pat Saloni, the,

you know, the wise guy.

Two guys are there,

pull out a gun, say, let's go.

Take me out the back door, throw me in a car.

We drive out west of Fort Lauderdale,

turn off on a a sand road, get out of the car,

they take a shovel out of the trunk,

and they tell me to start digging.

And the only the only chance I had was to be Pat Salimoni.

Didn't have a gun, couldn't tell him I was an agent,

couldn't tell him I was an informant.

The only the only way you could survive is to be who you were.

It got down to calf level, and they said, fine.

Okay.

Threw the shovel and trunk, got back in the car,

went back to the bridge restaurant, walk in,

and Di Bernardo's sitting at the table.

He ushered me over, sat me down, and we talked,

and he's just like, you know, walk my board.

Just wanted to see how you could handle it.

And then ate with him, and it was like eating cardboard.

Because I've been scared a lot of times, lately,

but that's the scared as I've ever been.

The early days of the MyPorn operation saw Pat Livingston

pretending to be a porn producer.

As it developed, he worked his way up the mob hierarchy,

getting ever closer to Debbie Does Dallas money man,

Mickey Zaffirano.

Zaffirano controlled,

distribution of of films.

If you wanted to make a film like I was trying to make,

he would control what shows that went into,

and he controlled the money.

We talked about doing a movie.

We talked about, you know,

what protection do I have?

And he talked about Deep Throat.

He said Deep Throat made a lot of money.

You just have to, you know, play the game the right way.

And he talked about, a problem in in, Chicago.

They were coming up short. They weren't getting enough money.

Well, they broke the fingers of the guy that delivered it.

Okay.

And that's a message that went back to Chicago that you gotta

do a little better.

Well, it didn't help.

And they ended up blowing up the owner of one of the

theaters while he's in his car.

That's the kind of protection that he provided for me as a

financier for the movie that was gonna be distributed.

While Debbie Does Dallas in its first year was raking in an

estimated two to three million dollars for Zaffirano,

the my pawn operation was coming to its end.

Three years in the making,

it reached its climax in early nineteen eighty.

Zafrano was one of its chief targets,

but he wasn't going down without a fight.

We got the warrants issued for all of these people and

went out to arrest them on Saint Valentine's Day.

It's a massacre day from Chicago. Remember that?

Well, it took about four hundred FBI agents for that

one day to arrest all of these people that we could find.

Two of them we couldn't find.

I think they're out of the country.

But we got fifty three of them the first day.

Well, one of the warrants was for Mickey Zaffirano

for interstate transportation of obscene matter.

Well, he had two businesses on forty second Street.

One was a theater and one was a bookstore.

So agents go to the say they go to the theater first.

We got a warrant for Mickey Zaffirano.

Well, apparently,

Mickey or some of his employees saw them coming and knew that

they were the law.

So he takes off through some kind of a passageway.

I don't know whether it's a tunnel or just the connecting

doors to it to his other business, the the bookstore,

which was not immediately adjacent as I understand it,

but down on the same block.

So he runs down to the bookstore, for example.

Well, he gets down to the bookstore,

and his agent's looking for him down there.

So he runs back down the passageway to the theater,

and agents are looking for him at the theater.

So he's up and down the corridor. How long it was?

It might have been a hundred feet.

It might have been a hundred yards.

I don't know.

But on the third or fourth trip,

Mickey has a heart attack, falls over, and drops dead,

which made our day.

A court case in the death of Zaffirano had added notoriety

to what was a standard seventies porn film.

The film's fame got a further boost from being one of the

first to be distributed on the new format of VHS.

But it was the mysterious disappearance of its star, Bambi Woods,

in the mid eighties that really added to the infamy of Debbie

Does Dallas.

Did you ever go out with Bambi?

Yeah. I went on one date. One date with her.

And what was she like?

She was very sweet. That's why I went out.

We we went out actually, the next night after shooting.

That was the only time I went out with her.

I didn't I lost track of her.

She had to go somewhere to do something.

Bambi Woods was set to be as famous as other seventies porn

icons, icons, Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers.

But no sooner had she arrived on the scene than she disappeared.

Some claimed she had died,

while others pointed to sightings of her in strip

joints and at Hollywood parties.

After making Debbie,

Jim Clark had tried to work with her one more time.

Unfortunately, the reason why that picture got so messed up is that a friend

of hers from Brooklyn came up and

turned her back onto things that she had been off.

And

went off the deep end.

I heard that

in nineteen eighty six, she died, or eighty nine,

I'm not sure, of an overdose,

but I'm I'm certainly

not sure.

Which wasn't uncommon.

It happened a few times.

I mean, most of the women than than men.

From what I have heard,

from other sources,

I think that her parents rescued her from this industry

and took her away into seclusion away from it.

And probably gave her counseling or or what have you

or maybe now she's living in Wisconsin making cheese.

I don't know.

From what I remember, she had a religious upbringing.

She ran away from home, got married,

and was referred to this by someone who said

that they needed money.

She was a little bit shy and a little bit hesitant because she

was uncomfortable with the crowds around her.

This was her first movie.

She was a private girl from a tremendously different upbringing,

and she was all of a sudden in a whole different world.

She was uncomfortable, but she performed fine.

There's a few, frames in the movie if you watch where she kinda looks

like a deer caught in the headlights.

A lot of the girls that that that came along that I talked

to have had

highly religious backgrounds.

It's an awkward thing for a girl

of such upbringing to come into porn and spread

her legs for for nine guys to come in there.

It just doesn't make any sense unless there's something more to it.

There was one figure in the industry, however,

who was convinced that the rumors of her death weren't true.

Las Vegas was our next destination if we wanted to

find out what happened to Bambi after Debbie Does Dallas.

Since its release in nineteen seventy eight,

Debbie Does Dallas has found itself at the center of a court

case, an FBI undercover sting, and in the mid eighties,

a mystery surrounding its leading lady.

Rumors of the death of Bambi Woods from a drug overdose had

never been fully substantiated.

One person who was convinced Bambi hadn't died was the

film's distributor, Bob Burge of VCX.

We traveled to the company's HQ in Las Vegas to talk to him.

In the warehouse,

the shelves are stacked high with copies of Debbie Does

Dallas.

The title proved so lucrative that years after it was made,

Bob was keen to trade in on her name and set about tracking her down.

I had talked to Norm Orno about making a sequel to Debbie.

And, he said he he couldn't find her.

So I got a private eye to try to find her.

I found her parents.

I think stepmother and stepfather and mother,

I I think.

But, you know, I, you know,

I I only talked to him on the phone,

so I never got to meet with him.

But you didn't get any closer to her?

No. What do you think happened to her?

I think she's probably living a very happy life somewhere,

then that's the way she wants to keep it.

And I felt like that after I talked to the parents,

that was it and leave it there.

So I didn't pursue it.

Before we left Las Vegas,

Bob gave us what he thought was her real name, Barbara Woodson.

We hired an LA based detective, Dan Hanks,

who specializes in film industry cases.

But the trail led nowhere, and without Bambi's real name, we were stuck.

In normal cases, I'm dealing with with having real names.

But here, you've got a total unknown.

Fictitious name.

All of her friends knew her by this fictitious name,

and she may have closely guarded what her real name was

during the entire time she was in porn.

Back in those days,

porn was still operating under the wire.

It wasn't

really considered a legal business,

and there are old vice cops that kept what they call

moniker files, files that have all the AKA names and

connect them to their real name.

I need to find out what this girl's real name is.

You rely on people that put up their own sites and their

stories about her and that sort of thing.

And what I found is everybody's saying she's dead.

If she's dead,

somebody had to have to know her real name.

What was her real name?

What was the name that she gave to you?

Oh, I've forgotten.

And the reason I won't say that I who it is is that if she is alive,

she her her anonymity should be respected.

Her anonymity should be I have no right not knowing who she is

or how how she's lived over these these years and what

she's put behind her to, bring it up.

Even this conversation that you and I having,

I've spent most of my life putting behind me those days.

If Bambi was alive, she had hidden herself well.

We tried to track down the other female leads,

but unlike their male counterparts,

they were reluctant to talk.

Some we couldn't trace.

Those we could refused to be interviewed.

They'd moved on, built new lives,

and didn't want to be reminded of the past.

The millions of dollars that Debbie generated was based on

the appeal of these women,

but they didn't get to profit share.

One told us via email,

I wish no more intrusions in my life regarding a career that

gave me nothing but exploitation.

However, one woman did agree to talk,

but then only for a strictly timed fifteen minutes.

There really wasn't actually.

Robin Bird appeared in Debbie early on in her career.

Now she has a cable access show in New York interviewing

today's porn stars.

Of all the cast of Debbie Does Dallas,

you're the only woman who'll talk to us.

Why do you think that is?

Really?

I'm not ashamed of what I did.

Maybe some of the women were

one time only

doing it for the money.

Let's let's sit and talk for a minute.

Me, I was an aspiring actress thinking, gee,

I can get experience from in front of the camera by doing

porn and then move on to bigger and better things.

There are women that come in the industry with a specific

goal to make this amount of money,

get their own other career going, or create websites,

buy real estate.

There are some smart people that that take something out of

it and aren't victims later on,

but I I would say that's a minority.

They're victims because they allow themselves to be victims.

They wanna be called victims. I don't look at it as victims.

I was not a victim.

Didn't pertain to me. I'm not a victim.

I I just think it's it's harder on a woman because

we're still in the same society.

We judge, you know, that,

that's because men are probably jealous of women.

You know? Women can get it.

You know?

And most most likely,

they won't leave a bar alone if they don't want to,

whereas men can't do that.

You know? So there's a kind of anger, I think, at women.

I'm strong headed. I have a good support system.

That's me.

I love myself.

And I really believe in what I'm doing is right.

It's there's nothing wrong with what I'm doing.

So you think it's a harder industry for women than it is for men?

Yeah. Yeah.

You're a whore if you're a woman.

No matter how you slice it, no matter what you do,

you're a whore.

Everybody's a victim of pornography.

You are

Because of your age and your exposure to it. I certainly am.

The actors and actresses are fringe type characters,

got poor moral values or they wouldn't be in this sort of thing,

and they're just in it for the thrills and the money and the drugs.

That's been my experience with them.

The world of porn has a long list of casualties,

mainly self inflicted, and Debitoz Dallas has its fair share.

And now I think we should get down to business.

Before I go any further,

does everyone agree with this method of making extra money?

Sure. Yeah. I'm fine.

Tammy?

I guess so if everyone else says yes.

Yeah. There's Arcadia in the background.

Alright.

Cute little thing, four foot eleven,

ninety pounds.

Debbie Does Dallas was one of Arcadia Lake's first porn films.

Rob Everett had got her into the industry and the two became lovers.

In those early days,

there were only a handful of regular porn stars and they

were a tightly knit family.

I was the one who met her in New York,

and she was in desperate need of a job.

So I got her her first role working with me in a

western, and I forget the name of it,

but it was it was a cute little movie.

It was fun. We had one scene together, and that was it.

I'd say probably for the large majority, it's very difficult.

If you're both working in the industry,

it's like you really have to have a kind of an open mind to

that kind of thing.

You know? You you know?

I mean, you can do it assuming you know that your woman is not like,

you know, a real whore, you know,

who just loving the sex so much,

you can't wait to be screwing around on you when you're not around.

She was on the methadone program in New York,

an ex heroin addict.

And she was on this program and she stated to me that she

wanted to get off of methadone.

She wanted to be straight and they weren't gonna do it for her.

And I said, well, is there anything I can do to help?

So for the next year,

I took off of work and

I helped her.

I've always wanted a relationship to work.

I've always wanted to be a monogamistic person, always.

I love the fact that she did what she did.

She went through hell.

Unfortunately, it didn't last.

What happened?

She She found somebody, got back into it,

died of an overdose.

And how did you hear about her death?

It was at an award show, I think,

where I got my lifetime achievement award, actually.

A lot of the girls and guys had their heads on straight,

understood what they were doing.

It was business. A lot of them didn't.

We had a lot of sad endings.

A lot of the girls and some of the guys did not belong in

doing what they're doing.

Their self esteem levels were so bad

that they didn't belong in this industry.

Those that had great self esteem go on today and are

successful and living good lives.

But again, that's the same thing in all industry, isn't it?

In Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles,

outside what is now a rundown gay porn cinema,

we found the handprints of famous seventies porn stars,

including Rob Everett, AKA Eric Edwards,

who over four decades had made more than a thousand porn films.

This was porn's tawdry version of the Hollywood walk of fame.

You're stopped on the street by people saying, oh, man.

I love you, Herschel. You're you're the greatest.

You're this.

You're that.

In the meantime,

there's absolutely no security financially in this industry.

So you you people are talking to you like you're a star, but, yeah,

you we we all know that most stars are financially set for life.

I mean, if you get any kind of fame, I mean, you know,

we're the poorest famous people in the world.

But what happened to performers like Rob and Herschel once they

no longer had a porn star's fame?

We traveled to Santa Clarita,

a sleepy town just outside Los Angeles,

to find out how you live your life as an ex porn star.

I miss those old days.

I miss, when my boys were young and depended on me when I could

drive them down here to school, school, pick them up,

and watch them grow up into their class.

That's very special.

Robert stopped performing when he had to raise his two sons single handedly.

He wouldn't let them appear on camera,

but he was happy to talk about

them.

He's still connected to the porn industry

He's still connected to the porn industry as an editor.

His workplace is as far from Hollywood clips as you could get.

I didn't really want to be recognized that much anymore

because I was being recognized constantly.

I still am.

In fact, somebody came up to one of my sons the other day and and

said, what does your dad do for a living?

And he said he edits adult movies and he said,

I thought so.

He's probably got a lot of my movies in his closet.

I didn't wanna get recognized for

peer pressure in school.

So I basically stopped as an actor

for my kids sake.

I have been totally open with my kids and honest with them.

I they they know why I gave up the industry.

They see my awards on the wall, lifetime achievement,

best actor and stuff like that and hall of fame.

They have been brought up in an atmosphere of

I'm dad, I'm me and I love you.

And

you know, I'd I,

I think they're cool with it.

Hershel Cohen got out of the industry in the eighties when

he felt he had reached rock bottom.

He now lives in Los Angeles.

I wasn't doing live sex shows on in Times Square at the time,

which was, under the I mean, you have to understand,

I'm somebody that came from a a very traditional background.

I was embarrassed to walk around in my underwear.

I was not I was very self conscious about my body.

I always have been and probably for good reason.

I don't have the greatest body in the world, but,

for me to even be doing live sex shows with an audience,

it was just like the Twilight Zone.

I mean yeah.

And,

but nevertheless,

I was doing that six shows a day or something like that.

It was kinda crazy.

Pretty much ninety percent of the porno industry is pretty sleazy.

I mean, there's not there's not a lot of care for the people or the

women, and that tears away at you.

It really is, pardon the pun, hard labor.

After ten years out of the industry,

Hochul took the unusual step of going back in.

I really never thought I'd come back,

but through a series of unfortunate financial

circumstances, I found myself drifting,

and I needed to get some kind of base.

And, you know, I came back in my forties,

which is unheard of.

You know, my first experience back was was a a five on on

one a five guy on one girl gang bang, which I never did.

And, I just remember going to this location,

this studio and everything,

and I just thought everyone was really skeevy.

I mean, I just they just didn't seem clean to me.

And I'm like, I'm real meticulous about my body and everything else.

And and I remember here I was in my first situation in ten

years with a relatively attractive woman.

And, and I start to relate to her,

and I I start to get a little aroused.

All of a sudden, somebody's tapping me on the shoulder,

and I turn around, and there's a hard penis in my face.

I'm ready.

Could you move over, man? And I'm going, oh god.

This is a I can't do this.

Herschel keeps working on his legitimate acting career by doing theater.

But what about the lives of the other actors in the film and the director?

And what about the FBI agent who had spent three years

pretending to be a pornographer?

How are they fared after Debbie does Dallas?

In the next part, we'll find out.

We had tried to find out what had happened to the cast of

Debbie Does Dallas after their porn careers ended.

The three male leads had all started out as legitimate actors.

One of them, Robert Kerman,

was still trying to be an actor while all the time suffering

because of his porn past.

In retrospect, I'm really sorry I ever did it in my heart.

I'm sorry I ever did it because I think I I probably

ruined the best years of my life

as an actor.

In the late eighties,

Kerman left the porn world and decided to concentrate on what

he'd always wanted to do, legitimate actor.

He'd managed to get himself an agent.

This one little agent was getting me little parts.

I

bigger parts, you know, Hunter, Hill Street Blues,

Academy and Lacey, Simon and Simon, no way out.

I was starting to cook.

People in the studios knew I said, I'm out. Forget that.

It's gone. I figured here I come.

And then this agent, about six months into working with her,

came in her office one day, and she said to me,

we can't work together anymore.

And I have no idea why.

I have no idea why.

I was depressed for weeks in my I didn't leave my house.

I really was messed up.

I started to do coke, a lot of it. I went into debt.

I drank a lot.

It got quite heavy and just did nothing.

Despite all his regret about the wasted years of his career,

he's still out there looking for work and has had small

roles in the recent Spider Man movies.

It wasn't just the Debbie actors who feel damaged by

their work in the Ex FBI agent Pat Livingstone

had spent three years being mob wise guy, Pat Salamone,

in order to break the mafia's hold over pornography.

In the end, the experience broke him.

It went from, say, the first six months being,

you know, ten percent Pat Salmony and,

you know, ninety percent Pat Livingston.

Towards the end of the operation,

it was ninety nine percent Pat Salmony,

one percent Pat Livingston.

So you lose your total identity.

And, in in some sense,

Pat Salmony was much more powerful and more,

able to affect, you know,

the criminal investigation than Pat Livingston ever could have

been.

You could tell that he was psychologically

adversely affected by having been undercover that long.

His wife, his his home life was in shambles.

His wife, eventually divorced him as as

the Velasquez wife.

They were never home.

They were traveling around the United States and Hawaii for a couple years.

I was making inroads that had never been made before,

and it was as an agent.

And I'm on the white horse.

I'm I'm the good guy, and the bureau will always protect me.

When in reality, the bureau couldn't care.

All they cared about was the information I was gleaning,

not not the agent.

I think it was November nineteen eighty one.

He drove a bureau car with his four year old son in it,

that's a no no, to a department store outside of Louisville,

and he got arrested shoplifting about a hundred and fifty some

dollars worth of jogging clothes.

And when he got arrested,

he did not identify himself as an FBI agent.

Agent.

He used his undercover name of Pat Salamone,

and he got thrown in a can, this little town outside.

And he didn't tell him for some time, a day or so,

who he really was.

Well, that's when it hit the fan.

And the bureau in two weeks fires him.

How many people came to his defense?

Two that I know of, including me,

said he did wrong.

He should be censored.

He should be penalized, but you shouldn't fire him because

he was wounded in the line of duty mentally.

But they fired him anyway.

How long did it take you to lay you Pat Salamone to rest?

What is today?

Pat Salamone is still there.

I mean, there I still I mean,

there there is probably a part of my personality that will be

passed salamony forever.

After the MyPorn operation, the FBI changed the rule book.

No one was to go undercover for longer than six months.

For Jim Clark, director of Debbie Does Dallas,

a former pornographer,

it's not what a now respectable businessman wants on his CV.

Do you change when they know about your background?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, usually, they if if if they find out about,

especially Debbie, they'll say, well, you know, he made Debbie.

You know, they yeah. They do they do change.

They,

yeah, they do change.

Absolutely change.

I don't let it bother me because I kinda reject

it.

It's not something I wanna spend my time

pursuing, because it would only bring me more pain.

We never did solve the mystery of Bambi Woods' disappearance.

Maybe she did die of an overdose in nineteen eighty six,

or maybe she's living somewhere in small town America where the

inhabitants have no idea of her fame as Debbie.

For those we did speak to,

looking back was a bittersweet experience.

It just makes me sad that my life is passing me by.

And,

I'm older, and I haven't done anything besides this.

Great legacy.

Yeah. You've done lots of things.

You've done other things.

Oh,

I did Debbie.

That's historic.

I guess how many people you think have seen this?

God. Millions.

Right?

Much beloved by Eurotrash,

the sad end of Lolo Ferrari in Death of a Pornstar tomorrow

night at ten fifty five.

Next tonight, Cat House exposes life and lust at America's notorious bunny

ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.