The SPOILED BRAT

By Josh Eliot

Back in the late 1980s, Catalina’s general manager left the company to start a new position as head of production at a straight adult company called Video Team. We loved our original GM, Chris Mann, because even though he was straighter than straight, he never placed restrictions on movie content and was extremely effective moving the company forward after William Higgins left the helm. His office always had a lot of reading material in it - all the great publications of the day from the gay and straight adult industry. Randomly one day while breezing through Adult Video News magazine, I came across a movie that caught my eye. The movie was called Brat Girl and I thought it was a fun take off on Batman, but Chi Chi LaRue told me that it was a title in the series Vivid Video started a few years earlier to promote their first official “Vivid Girl,” Jaime Summers. In my opinion, a brilliant concept. Paul Thomas started the series and produced the original movie, aptly named The Brat (1986), which cast Jerry Butler as the Brat’s husband, with, in later in follow-up movies, Tom Byron taking on that role. A slew of follow-up Brat movies were made with Jaime Summers, Nikki Randall and, lastly, Julianne James. For some strange reason, over the years I was always intrigued by the Brat series, even though I never actually saw one of them. I always imagined the Brat character to be like Sammy Jo from Dynasty, just naughtier. The series name and premise was a great marketing scheme, and I always appreciated seeing the new release selection of movie posters for the series. It made my imagination run wild.

Jump ahead to the year 2000: Catalina Video was starting our Freshman Features selection of movies, which would cast young twinks in most, if not all of the roles. We were looking for a limited series of sorts to get the ball rolling, when I started considering a “Brat series” take off with young gay men instead of hot babes. I proposed the idea of a young stud who was a troublemaker in school, with a cast of characters reminiscent of those found in the mainstream movie, The Breakfast Club. I suggested we call it The Spoiled Brat, but even the current GM had his own idea for a title, which we settled on. We would name it The Rascal. The search was on for someone to play “Little” Ricky Haskell, a horny young teen, over 18 of course, who lived with his grandmother, Granny Haskell. We thought that whomever got the role needed to be an unknown who had only worked very minimally in the industry. The role ended up going to Brandon Weber, a relative unknown from El Paso, Texas, whose real personality was an almost identical match to that of the Rascal. The role of Little Ricky Haskell was based on the name and personality of the character Eddie Haskell from the 1957-1963 series Leave it to Beaver.

The first movie in the series, The Rascal, came out so much better than I could have ever hoped for. The characters were fully developed and the movie was filled with hijinks and really good sex scenes. The downside was that I was still in my thirties and was in no way shape or form into twinks, so making the movie initially felt like a chore. Luckily, once I started on the scripts, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite John Hughes movies of the 1980s like Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and Fast Times at Ridgemont High! Ricky Haskell’s best friend and schoolmate is Sparky, played by Sebastian Jaymz, with a supporting cast as follows - The School Bullies: Mack Rollins and Ethan Richards; The Foster Home Bullies: Tuck Johnson and Danny Chance; and Ricky’s small group of friends played by Coby Kinkade, Jesse Martin and Ryan Stevens. The Racal himself gets into trouble when he exacts revenge on his terrorizers by putting “itching powder” in their underwear during gym class. Coach Collins, played by my real life spouse, Tony Fontana, is a recurring character throughout all six of the Rascal movies. Additionally, at the helm of the chaos and supplying humor for the movies was Ms. Narkwurst, the school superintendent, played to the T by Sharon Kane. Honestly, it was Sharon Kane’s character and situations in the movies that kept me inspired sequel after sequel. Ms. Narkwurst has a soft spot for her “Little Ricky Haskell,” no matter how much damage he causes or how many innocent students he seduces at the school. Over the course of the series, her eyeglasses are pulled off her face and thrown to the ground by Coach Collins to prevent her from seeing the wrestling team going at it. Once on the ground, the assistant principle stomps on the glasses, breaking them into pieces. In a later follow-up movie, Ms. Narkwurst gets Lasik eye surgery to correct her vision, but because of an itch she jerks her head, causing the laser to burn her retina, which causes blindness. The students watching over her at home take full advantage by turning her place into a sex den, and even though she thinks she can hear them, she’s not able to see them. Determined to find out where the sexual noises are coming from, she leaves the safety of her bed and tries to make her way downstairs, running into anything and everything along the way. A hysterical show-stopping performance from the master Ms. Kane!

After shooting The Racal, The Rascal Joins the Wrestling Team (2001) and The Rascal Stows Away (2002), I finally got the green light to start a new series using my original title idea of The Spoiled Brat! I debuted the character Lawrence Porter, played by actor Jake Woodman, in the newest Rascal release and called it The Rascal vs The Spoiled Brat (2002). This new character was a Richie Rich type, a cartoon from the 1970s. Porter is more of a preppy jock stuck up brat in contrast to the troublemaking Rascal. The new star, Jake Woodman, was previously in Jet Set Fraternity Gang Bang (2002), for Jet Set Productions, so he was totally unknown at the time. I was excited to start this new series with its new and different cast of characters. As fast as it was green lit, The Spoiled Brat never made it any further. No follow up movie was ever shot; The Spoiled Brat series never came to fruition and Jake Woodman never made another movie. I honestly don’t remember the details, but shooting his scene must have been pretty brutal for one of two reasons: the sex or the attitude, don’t really remember - I must have douched that from my brain. In fact, it was after that movie that I decided I was out of the Rascal series altogether - I guess I must have really been traumatized! I think around this time, Brandon Weber was actually becoming the Rascal and the Spoiled Brat in real life and that in itself made it easy for me to walk away. Since we had two more movies to go in Brandon Weber’s contract, I handed them off to Brad Austin for The Rascal Goes to Boot Camp (2002), then Peter Romero for The Rascal’s Graduation Gang Bang (2002). Brandon Weber did a number more features for other studios in supporting roles, then stopped shooting movies in 2003. 

The series was successful for the company and it did jump start our Freshman Features series of movies, which also included Junior’s Nude Cleaning Service and The Foreign Exchange Student. Moving along with the times and audience desires, future content of Freshman Features segued into the Generation Gap Series, combining freshman twinks with daddies for features like Junior Meets the Bear Patrol, Daddy’s Reform School Playmate and Daddy’s Bubble Butt Boys. All in all, it was a fun series to work on, until it wasn’t, but I am happy to have been able to create it and finally bring my own version of Vivid Video’s Brat series to fruition.

Bio of Josh Eliot:

At the age of 25 in 1987, Josh Eliot was hired by Catalina Video by John Travis (Brentwood Video) and Scott Masters (Nova Video). Travis trained Eliot on his style of videography and mentored him on the art of directing. Josh directed his first movie, Runaways, in 1987. By 2009 when Josh parted ways with Catalina Video, he'd produced and directed hundreds of features and won numerous awards for Best Screenplay, Videography, Editing, and Directing. He was entered into the GayVN Hall of fame in 2002.