BijouBlog

By Josh Eliot   Hands down, the very best part of my career with Catalina Video was the projects I shot with adult film icon Sharon Kane. Muse is a word that comes to mind when I think back about all the projects we worked on together. We first met when Chi Chi introduced her to me. The movie was Valley of the Bi-Dolls and I was casting the role of

By Josh Eliot I didn’t give interviews often, back in the day. Not because I was opposed to them but because Mike, our general manager, started alienating the company from the competition. There was a time when he stopped running advertising campaigns, taking part in industry functions and even shunned the critics and award shows. It was like pulli

By Josh Eliot In the spirit of All Hallows Eve month, I thought it might be appropriate to write about a very sinister sounding fellow. The sheer mention of his name draws fear and anticipation of an upcoming doom. This guy will cut you if given a chance, and trust me you’ll be in stitches. Okay, enough of this dramatized text. The haunting charact

By Josh Eliot My beautiful home state of Rhode Island, “Little Rhodie” as we affectionately call it, is famous for its sandy shores and seaside Colonial towns. It is most known for its capitol Providence and, attached by a bridge, the islands of Jamestown and Newport. Newport prides itself on starting the very first jazz festival, America’s Cup, an

By Josh Eliot In 1993, I was videographer on the Catalina Video movie The Bite for director Chi Chi LaRue. It featured a great cast headlined by Jon Vincent, and featured Derrick Corbin, Dillon Reid, Londun, Max Holden and Rob Cryston. We shot it at the same time as a movie I directed called Sex Between The Lines in a Hollywood Hills house formerly

By Josh Eliot The biggest movie in context of size, scope and budget I ever made was called CatalinaVille. I was tasked by our general manager to come up with a title that incorporated the company name. It took a couple of days going crazy before I finally came up with one that I somewhat liked. One of my very favorite movies is Peter Bogdanovich’s

By Josh Eliot   When I left off last week in my blog "The Making of CatalinaVille," Steve Rambo's lover was killed by underworld hoods trying to get a floppy disc Steve possessed. Steve was on the run with the disc, via a ferry taking him off Catalina Island. He makes his way to Breckenridge, Colorado to meet up with his professor (Ray Harley) from

By Josh Eliot Catalina releases The Young Cadets (1987) and Private Dick (1990) both stand out to me as milestone movies for many reasons. Dan Allman worked on many of William Higgins movies and all of John Travis and Scott Masters' Catalina movies until 1989 as art director and videographer. He also directed under the name Cameron Leight. I previo

By Josh Eliot I’m not sure what is going on, but it seems that “breakfast with the porn icons” is an ongoing occurrence! Maybe this should be a new show for HEREtv. I’ve talked about Catalina Exclusive Ray Harley numerous times in my past blogs - the fact that he was discovered at the host hotel of the International Mr. Leather Contest, the fact th

By Josh Eliot When I saw a recent special offer on the BijouWorld email for the restored and remastered movie Gold Rush Boys, it reminded me instantly of a West Hollywood gay landmark bar called The Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is no longer operating, in fact it closed its doors in 2020 because of COVID-19 and rent negotiation gone south. The proper

By Josh Eliot Yves-Claude Theriault aka MARK RUTTER  I am writing this on Saturday January 13th, 2024. I specifically blocked out time on this day as it was exactly 25 years ago that my partner (from 1992-1999) Yves-Claude Theriault aka Mark Rutter passed away. When I was pulling photos for my last blog about the Gold Coast Bar and writing about Ma

By Josh Eliot Big Guns cover & Chad Douglas with Kevin Wiles in the standout scene  Arguably the best movie director William Higgins ever made was the bestselling hit Big Guns. Released in 1987, it quickly became the movie to see and to share with friends. Big Guns was the winner of Best Gay Film at the 1987 XRCO Awards and honored again in 200

By Josh Eliot  In 1990, Scott Masters was finally ready to put Matt Powers in front of the cameras again for his next big star vehicle movie. There was a lot of hype, mostly from Scott Masters, about “Jimmie’s return.” Jim was Matt’s real first name. We were under no illusion that things would run smoothly on this project, because when Scott Master

By M. Webster Gene Lamar in a publicity photo for Bullet Videopac 12: Black Bullet  Prompted by the beautiful piece on vintage gay porn icon Gene Lamar just penned by author/dancer/musician Brontez Purnell for Them magazine, I wanted to take a moment to highlight this legendary performer through a very brief tour of Lamar's work via photos and inte

By Josh Eliot   Now I know by the title of this blog, you are thinking: “Oh Sweet! Josh is writing a blog about Bijou Video’s Beat Cop Donnie Russo," and it would make sense to think that by the way I formed the title. The truth is, I’d love to write a blog, again, about Donnie Russo. Some of the most hysterical times on and off the set were with D

By Josh Eliot Scott Bond in Josh Eliot's Object of Desire   When I was casting my movie Object of Desire in 1990, my producer Scott Masters was excited to let me know that a brand new guy on the scene from Canada was going to get the lead role. We sat at Scott’s kitchen table looking over the photos of this new model. His real name was Jeff and he

By M. Webster   Skimming through our physical files on performers, I recently spent a few minutes poring over some archived magazine pages containing quotes and interviews with a popular '80s star I'd always enjoyed on screen but had known little about – Michael Cummings, a stage and video performer with a magnetic, playful presence and a specialty

By Josh Eliot   A “tight” asshole? Lips wrapped tightly around a hard cock? Or a hand with a tight grip jacking you off to climax? The word tight in the title of this blog has nothing to do with any of those statements. Having said that, I do remember yelling out: “Your ass is so tight” or “Tighten your ass cheeks on my cock” about a million times

By Josh Eliot   In my very first blog for Bijou, “Coming Out of My Wet Shorts,” I wrote briefly about the Rustic Drive-In in North Smithfield Rhode Island, where I saw Sharon Kane for the first time in Alex DeRenzy’s Pretty Peaches. The drive-in, by the way, is now the Rustic Tri View Drive-In, which features three screens, all very family friendly

By Josh Eliot   In 1987, before opening the San Francisco studio and hiring me to work for Catalina Video, Scott Masters and editor Chet Thomas had stopped productions for Nova Studios and started working for William Higgins. William Higgins was getting ready to hightail it out of the country for Amsterdam and was prepping Scott Masters to become p