I spoke with Holly Randall as she drove through the Valley to the Rndall family ranch in Malibu. Our cell phones kept giving out. We talked very briefly about the reissue of her mother’s classic porn films from the 1980s – that was the reason I called – but we mostly discussed Holly’s own life in the porn industry, from getting an eyeful of Randy West when she was three to her impromptu counsel of the dissolute of the adult journalism racket.
We started by talking about her mother, veteran photographer Suze Randall. I get the impression that a lot of conversations with Holly begin that way, but she seems not to mind, and the conversation quickly veered off.
“For some reason, my parents never discussed my name in all the time my mother was pregnant,” she said. “When I came out, all they could think of was the Hollywood sign.”
“Good thing you weren’t born in La Crescenta.”
Holly is working with her mother now that Suze has returned to directing. Suze Randall has a distribution deal with PurePlay Media. Drew Dixon, PurePlay’s head of sales, marvels at Suze’s ability to attract talent. “Everybody in the industry loves Suze; she’s been around so long,” he said.
GP: Suze, Suze, Suze. That’s all anybody ever talks about. What’s it like working alongside your mother? Are there significant differences in your styles?
HR: At first it was odd. We’d both be in side-by-side director’s chairs. She’d drive me insane. She was air-humping, shaking her hips, getting really into it. When she shouts, she’s really loud.
The two Randalls have since worked out an arrangement in which Suze sets up the shot and takes still photos and Holly steps in to shoot the video.
“She feels she’s too old to do it in the first place,” Holly said. The Randalls’ deal with PurePlay calls for one new title and one reissue a month, Dixon said, “until the reissues are done.”
Holly has said that her work gets better every time she does it, and that she’s ready to branch out on her own. She’s not sure of her chances, though.
“I don’t have the clout to shoot a feature film,” she said, but that’s a little hard to believe. She is good friends with Wicked head Steve Orenstein, and Wicked, she said, would be her first choice for a feature product. She mentions another company, too, saying, “basically they stole a bunch of our shit.”
Around this point in the conversation I realized that my original reason for calling was dumb, and that I couldn’t print half of the things Randall was saying. Offending people was not her concern, however. (It is often mine.)
“I don’t give a fuck what you write,” she said, and I immediately signed her up to sponsor the inside and back covers of my trade publication. “I just went back on birth control, and I have bitched out so many people in the past few weeks. It’s great.”
GP: When you get the contract with Wicked or New Sensations or whomever you choose, what do you want to produce?
HR : When I was at UCLA I had affairs with some professors. Not UCLA professors, but sort of visiting professors. I am going to write a script about the teacher/student relationships that I have fantasies about. I’ve always had a thing for teachers.
I mention a feud between an adult industry trade magazine and one of its former employees, a long-time editor and current pornbloggeur . The publication refers to him as a “frustrated English teacher.” He refers to the publication equally harshly.
GP : That sort of fantasy? An English teacher fantasy?
HR : More of a dominant teacher-type thing. My dream cast would include Ben English as the teacher.
Speaking of trade publications, Holly mentions that her boyfriend is AVN’s Acme Andersson, a cool guy and friend to Gram Ponante.com’s BananWatch editor Stephen Ochs. Randall said that Ochs will be writing a profile of her in a coming issue of XBizWorld. The world is small.
GP : Who else is in your dream cast?
HR : Jana Cova, Cytherea, Devon, maybe. I need someone to play the headmistress who, you know, has to give the girl some extra counsel when the teacher catches the girl masturbating. It needs to be realistic so I need a kick-ass chick. Maybe someone older.
GP : So you’re writing the script this weekend?
HR : We’ll see how that goes.
Randall can’t escape her second-generation porner status, but she has been accepted on her own merits.
Her obituary on AVN’s blog about Hustler photographer Clive McLean was very simple and touching, and she relates well to people in the porn world.
“I am the world’s fucking therapist,” she said. We talk about guests at McLean’s funeral, and how Scott Fayner’s blog has been sad recently, like the last episode of M*A*S*H , as he undoubtedly prepares to pull another Eddie Tour or Eton Veterans. “I saw him the other night. I spent half the night being his shrink. He said he was a hack. He said people didn’t respect him.
“I said, ‘Just because you work in porn doesn’t mean you aren’t a human.'”
Still, she constantly encounters people who knew her when she was a little girl.
“I was at Jenna Jameson’s birthday party the other night. Jenna goes, ‘I remember you when you were this big !’ and I was like, ‘You’re not much older than me, Jenna.'”
Holly was three when she caught Randy West masturbating in her parents’ garden.
“I’d gotten away from my nanny or something and Randy West is in the yard getting himself hard for a Playgirl shoot my mother was doing. I said, ‘Ewww! What are you doing ?’ That was the quintessential example of my youth.”
Her parents taught Randall that sex wasn’t shameful or something to be hidden. “My mother told me that sex is a beautiful thing and not to let anyone tell me it isn’t.”
GP : My mother taught me just the opposite.
HR : I’ve always been a pervert. Am I into porn because I was raised in it or because I’m just a pervert? I don’t know.
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