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someone who said, “Well, we need someone to scout some locations for us.”
    I said, “You got it! What do you need?”
    So I began to get a reputation as someone who could get things done. And the next thing I knew, I was getting calls to do casting.
     
    MARILYN CHAMBERS : Ray Stark takes me by the hand; he’s about seventy-something—all the old guys like me, ha, ha, ha—and he takes me upstairs to a room, and there’s a whole bunch of women in there auditioning.
    I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, right, there’s no way I’m going to get this.”
    They call me in, there’s a whole bunch of people sitting around a table, they asked me some questions, I go back out, and they come out and say, “You got the part.”
    I went, “What?! You’re kidding?!” It was like being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore.
     
    HARRY REEMS : I was broke. I was taking out small loans to pay the rent and telephone bill. So I put the question to a buddy in the National Shakespeare Company. “Do you know how I could get some fast bread?”
    He said, “Yeah, I do, if you consider $75 ‘bread.’”
    I said, “I consider $75 ‘bread.’”
    He said, “You can pick up $75 a day doing stag films.”
    Stag films! Was he kidding? What would that do to my burgeoning career as an actor on the legitimate stage?
    So I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
     
    JAMIE GILLIS (PORN STAR) : I was driving a cab a few days a week and doing Shakespeare at the Classic Stage Company in Manhattan at night. Driving a cab part-time is pretty brutal. You know, I’d wake up at dawn, drive a cab twelve hours a day, and then I’m doing Shakespeare all night, you know? Pretty heavy.
     
    MARILYN CHAMBERS : So they take me down to the set of The Owl and the Pussycat . They get me undressed and throw me in bed with Robert Klein. And I was supposed to be topless, but Barbra Streisand said, “Absolutely not.”
    Then we did a thing where I’m walking to the door with him when we’re leaving. It took me about two or three days to shoot it; I was so nervous. But that’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild card. And that’s how I moved into the city, got my first apartment on Thirty-third and Third—and started going to acting classes.
     
    ERIC EDWARDS : About six months after I submitted my photo to the ad in Screw, I got a call. A guy said, “Can you do it? Because we’re having problems with the guy who’s supposed to do it right now.”
    I said, “Sure, man. I’m a swinger, you know, my wife and I are cool. No problem.”
    I hung up the phone and the shakes started to settle in. I was thinking, “Oh my God—I’m gonna go over there! Can I really perform?”
     
    JAMIE GILLIS : I was looking at the ads in the Village Voice for jobs, you know, to see if there was something else I could do besides drive a cab. I would never have looked for it, but under a part-time job listing I saw something like “modeling” or “nude modeling”—something that sounded easy enough.
    So I call up the guy and then went over to this dirty basement on Fourteenth Street, next to a funeral parlor. There was a mattress on the floor and this guy in overalls, with long hair, who looked sort of like a hippie, says, “I’ll take your picture.”
     
    HARRY REEMS : Then a letter arrived from the bank threatening to put out a warrant for me if I didn’t start showing good faith, so I asked my friend if the stag film offer was still open.
     
    JAMIE GILLIS : So the guy shoots a black-and-white Polaroid of me—and sure enough, he calls me to come in and do a loop. And that’s how I started working for Bob Wolfe.
     
    FRED LINCOLN : I was still doing legitimate commercials and stage work, but when Paul Matthews asked me to do that first fuck film, I said, “Well, who am I gonna be working with? What’s the girl look like?”
    I figured it was some beast they were gonna get me.
    He said, “Oh, I’m meetin’ her tonight. We’re gonna have a coupla drinks; come