The first time I called Rob Rotten to set up an interview, a sedated female robot-voice came on the line. “Please hold while your party is reached,” it said. Next thing I knew Guns ‘n’ Roses was playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” “Fuck,” I thought, this guy is a porn star.

Rotten produces, directs and stars in the “Alternative-Porn” he sells to big companies like Hustler, Metro, and VCA. Titles include “Scurvy Girls,” “Fuck the System,” which features a scene of him and Gia Paloma having sex in front of a live punk rock band, and “Porn of the Dead” where zombie chicks bite off dicks. The cover of “Anal Swine”, homage to Hunter S. Thompson, features Rotten in the green Vegas-visor. At age 25, he’s been a trendsetter in the industry for seven years now. His Punx Productions’ first film, “Little Runaway” has sold 95-hundred units and continues to sell after six years in an industry where five thousand units-sold is remarkable and a year-old DVD might as well be a granny-newspaper.

We sat down with him at the Hemlock, just blocks from where Thompson was once night-manager of the Mitchell Bros. Theater. During the interview he smoked at least 15 cigarettes, waived his arms and tapped his lighter on the table every time he made an important point.

[X]press: What’s your personal sex life like?

Rob Rotten: Sex life – in person? Fuckin’ great. I have no complaints for that.

[X]: Do you do the same sort of stuff on screen that you do off screen?

RR: Fuck no! I’m never going to fuckin’ do leg-ups on a chick, or a double leg-up, or even half the positions you do in movies for camera angles. Sex at home and sex on camera are entirely different things. How many times have you every fucked a chick doggy-style and put a leg up on the bed, let alone two legs? – never. Because it’s the most god-awful position in the world, makes your legs wanna fall off. It’s horrible, but you gotta remember, when you’re shooting porn, it’s all about the viewer. The camera needs to see what’s going on.

Doggy-style you shoot at an angle. You square your chest with the camera, the female squares away, wraps her head over her shoulder – camera can see her face, see the penetration. Not the guy. It’s all about the chick. Guys in porn are nothing more than life-support systems for cocks.

[X]: What’d you do before this?

RR: Well, I still am a Union Electrician in San Francisco. Porn is like the best part-time job you could ever have. In my mind, the minute you make it your full time job is the minute you start having problems. I tried it for like a year and a half and it’s really the most stressful thing… I’d rather roll through life having a good time, and just make ends meet and get by.

[X]: You film down in the San Fernando Valley.

RR: You can’t pull permits for adult movies anywhere else but San Fernando Valley. It doesn’t mean you can’t go film guerilla-style somewhere else, but the fear behind that is, if something does happen, you’re not just busted for filming without a permit and you pay five grand or go to jail for the weekend, you are now a registered sex offender. So there’s no fucking way that I want my name on Megan’s Law for filming a movie. Fuck. That.

[X]: So you don’t see yourself doing anything set in San Francisco.

RR: No, I mean, the only way to get around that would be to film cut-aways, all the random shit here and then do the actual sex in the studio in LA. If I was like a no-name just starting in the business… I could shoot up here, but … if word gets out that Rob Rotten’s shooting an adult movie in San Francisco… the wrong people are going to hear and all of a sudden there’s going to be cops breaking it up, and I’ll be in jail, and then I’ll be on Megan’s Law a few days later. So it’s not something I’m really interested in.

[X]: Is that something you pursued when you where starting out?

RR: “Little Runaway,” there is like a shot of the Pound in SF, a lot of cut-aways were shot in different streets of San Francisco. I did do a lot of it, but there’s no sex shot up here… It’s not worthwhile. Plus, honestly in LA it’s so film oriented – say for instance, I need a fish-eye lens for this shot. Where the fuck in San Francisco do you get a fish-eye-lens on Sunday afternoon or like 11:00 in the morning? You don’t. You just don’t.

[X]: There are rumors that in the early part of your career you only worked with Rachel Rotten.

RR: I did. I got in by a fluke by meeting Jim Powers. I did about 12 scenes without her. Then I met Rachel and we worked exclusively for about a year and a half.

[X]: What was your relationship – was it a working relationship?

RR: No, no, no. We had a relationship, like a normal relationship. At first it was open and then she got a little crazy and tried to make it all monogamous. And that’s when I kinda lost interest and she didn’t want to be in the business anymore. It was one of those things.

[X]: Any idea what she’s up to now?

RR: I have no idea. Hah.

[X]: Is there any coke use on set?

RR: You know, that’s a kind of a myth. As far as drugs go, in porn, porn is so corporate now, not many people tolerate it. Personally, I’m a drug user, I love drugs and I totally condone drugs all the time. Um, I always have weed on set, I always have nitrous tanks, you know. I try to make it more like a party, and it makes the sex scenes and everything so much better. Beer, everything, it’s all there. But, coke, I hate. I don’t like uppers. I’m a big downer guy. I’d rather be droolin’, watchin’ Beavis and Butthead than running around, stealing cars. The Vitamin ‘V’: Valium, Percaset, Vodka. Fuckin’ best cocktail there is.

[X]: I had a hard time finding your videos.

RR: They’re hard to get, they’re banned in a lot of places.

[X]: I did find “Fuck the System” on gonzo discount.

RR: Sweet! Porn’s life expectancy is very short. One cool thing about my movies, I’ve been pretty fortunate because, they kinda get a cult-classic vibe to ‘em. The companies I work for, and I, try to limit the amount of movies put out, that’s why they’re hard to get. I love that. That is one of my favorite fuckin’ things in the world. When people have to actually, like, work to try and get a movie, that means they really fuckin’ want it. And how do they hear about it? Word of mouth – the best fuckin’ advertiser in the world. If you have a movie that’s hard to get, a movie that’s actually good, that one of your buddies told you about… that’s fuckin’ perfect. You couldn’t ask for anything more. Once they finally get it and they go, “Fuck! This movie IS rad!” then they’re going to go, “Dude! You’ve got to see this movie.” And personally, I think all movies should be bootlegged. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t make any money off the back end. The more people see it the happier I am.

[X]: Are you making money?

RR: I make money up front, on the movie. I don’t want to make money on the tail end because … there’s a lot of liability in porn, laws that most people have no idea about – it’s fuckin’ insane. People are in jail right now for filming porn. Not like creepy, underground porn, but porn that was consensual. Everyone was over 18; legal fuckin’ porn where people pay their taxes, pull permits and everything because, you know, the Bush administration has pretty much been, “Oh! This is obscene. This is obscene! You can’t have a blowjob! You can’t fuck a chick in the ass! You can’t slap a chick, you can’t spit in her mouth. Chick can’t spit in that guy’s mouth,” like “Oh gahd!” You know? But it’s ok for them to fuck sheep on their farms in Texas.

So, by not being tied into making money on the tail end of the product, therefore I am less liable because I came up with the idea, I shot it, I made the movie, but hey, that company is making money off the finished product. Even though my editor edited it, I didn’t actually release it. They handle distribution… In the case of “Porn of the Dead,” which is now illegal in a lot of the Red States, it’s illegal in Canada, it’s illegal in the UK, it’s going to be fucking illegal everywhere pretty soon. So I won’t have to worry about it. You know?

[X]: Right.

RR: Now for instance, you can’t get Punx Productions – Rob Rotten – movies in Canada… I went up to Vancouver mainly to do an interview with the Vancouver Georgia Straight… we’ve been trying to get my movies up there for review for a month and a half, and it kept getting snagged by customs. So I had to hand deliver ‘em. I had to take the sleeves out, put ‘em in one bag, it was like drug trafficking, but it was porn.

[X]: Hunter S. Thompson?

RR: True American hero. That guy’s my fucking idol. I really wish I could have met him.
I went to a book signing he was supposed to be at when I was in NY. He didn’t show up. Go figure. Ha, heh, heh, heh.

[X]: You’ve read some of his stuff then.

RR: Yeah, I’ve read most of his books.

[X]: Generation of Swine, Gonzo papers 1, and 2…

RR: Yeah. You know, as stupid as it may sound, I’ve read “Fear and Loathing” I-don’t-even-know-how-many times. I never get fuckin’ sick of it. I could just read it over and over again. The Rum Diaries, again, I love that book, one of his few novels. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial. This is all shit – I’m 25 years old – you read his books and it makes you feel like you were fuckin’ there. That’s what I love about Hunter S. Thompson.

[X]: Yeah.

RR: The word Gonzo came from him and it’s been so bastardized in porn in general, it really has. One day I was bull shitting with my friend Jim, my camera guy, and he’s not a big Hunter S. Thompson fan, but I am, and he was bitchin’ about this name gonzo, he’s like, “Ahh, you know, that fucker, he didn’t create anything, gonzo’s just like these short little vignettes. I’m like, that’s… what… he created was these short bizarre little scenarios of stories that fit together to make one thing, even though they don’t tie together whatsoever. If you look at gonzo porn, what is gonzo porn? – it’s just sex it’s all sex. Where is the actual quote-unquote gonzo part of it? That’s what I really try to do in my movies is actually bring gonzo to gonzo, having bizarre intro’s, endings, mixed with sex. They’re all short, none of the scenes ever tie together. That’s one (thing) my critics always rip on me about, you know, “‘Porn of the Dead’ would have been a great movie if it would have tied together.” That was the whole point: it wasn’t meant to tie together!

[X]: Could we talk with Jim Powers?
RR: I don’t know… he likes to stay under the radar. There was a book on adult film by Legs McNeal, and he wouldn’t even talk to him. I went and talked to him, but he didn’t use me in it because I hate the Ramones.

[X]: What?
RR: Yeah. Legs wrote a book on the Ramones and threw me out of his house because I said I hate the Ramones.

[X]: Why do you hate the Ramones?
RR: I don’t fuckin’ know! Why do people like half the shit they like?! It just seemed like the Ramones got all this attention when I’m like Iggy Pop was so much better. Or David Bowie. The Ramones were just doin’ what they were doin’ anyway. Besides, how are you gonna pick the Ramones when you’ve got G.G. Allen?