BijouBlog

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

By Josh Eliot   I’ve been told my blogs tend to run long so I have to leave some fun stuff out of them. Below are a few previous blogs where I had to leave some “pertinent information” on the cutting room floor. What can I say, I’ve got “more than a mouthful” of things to say that don’t always fit on the page!In no particular order, I’ll start with

By Josh Eliot   For years, we were housing models at the Holloway Motel on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood. Not the most ideal of housing choices since it was located right on the outskirts of “Boys Town,'' but after visiting with the manager and explaining that we would be bringing in models every week, they came up with a $75 per night rate f

By Josh Eliot   “All Kinds of Action for All Kinds of Men”A slogan Catalina used in advertising for many years may not have been the initial business plan when Catalina Video was developed and named by founder William Higgins, but it quickly moved in that direction once Higgins stepped back from the company. As early as my first couple of shoots fo

Catalina’s slogan “All Kinds of Action for All Kinds of Men,” as I mentioned in part one of this blog, referred to movies with a wide diversity of cast members. I previously wrote about our Black Gold Series, the Freshman Features with twinks, our Far East Features with Asian casts and our Generation Gap Series featuring daddies matched with twinks

By Josh Eliot   By 1990, Chi Chi LaRue had a number of Catalina Video features under her belt including the award winner The Rise. The Rise received honors for Video of the Year and Best Erotic Scene with Ryan Yeager and Scott Bond (“The name is Bond, Scott Bond”) at the GayVN Awards. It was a definite high point in Chi Chi’s career with Catalina V

By Josh Eliot  One of my absolute favorite movies of all time is Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977). In the movie, a typical American family, with all their faults and neurosis, gets stranded in the New Mexico desert when their RV breaks down. To complicate things, they took the wrong “dirt” road and have no idea where they are. It turns out t

By Josh Eliot  Producer Scott Masters was able to secure some great talent to work for Catalina Video in the 1980s and early 1990s. One of his main discoveries was Matt Powers, who I wrote about in the blog “Some Real What The Fuck Moments While Making Scott Masters' LIFEGUARD ON DUTY.” Scott signed Matt to an exclusive contract, moved him into his

By Josh Eliot  From June 15th to the 18th of 2001, the Catalina crew and I were on the East Coast to work on scenes for four of our upcoming productions. The movies were Vermont Reunion, New England Summer, Party in Provincetown, and His Terrible Twin. This was not the norm to be shooting this many movies simultaneously - in fact, we normally didn’

This week, we're reprinting Joseph W Bean's illuminating interview with legendary S/M filmmaker Roger Earl from the Oct-Nov 1997 issue of International Leatherman magazine. Earl and his collaborative partner Terry LeGrand were behind many of the most influential classic gay S/M films and videos, including Born to Raise Hell and the Dungeons of Euro

By Josh Eliot  I was hired by Catalina Video in September of 1987 and worked in their San Francisco studio until December 1989, when they closed it up and moved me to Los Angeles. In addition to working as studio manager, set builder, and cameraman for John Travis, Scott Masters and Cameron Leight, I also worked my way into becoming a director. I d

By Josh Eliot   In my previous blog, I talked about the making of Runaways, my first movie for Catalina Video. My second movie, which we shot in our San Francisco studio in 1989, was Full Service. That movie caused me a lot of grief after it was released nationally, as I discussed in my blog, “DOWN BY LAW: My 1 Million Dollar Mistake.” Despite that