For the first time in over 30 years, the comic book version of the movie I scripted, Sordid Stories - which later graced the cover of Cult Movies magazine - will be back in print, for the first time in color. The current publishers at Hillcrest-born Carnal Comics are planning a digital edition with goodies not seen in the original 1995 publication, which was released in tandem with the big-budget adult film that marked one of the first appearances of future documentary star Annabel Chong.

I wrote the screenplay based on a one-sentence commission from the producer/director John Bowen, AKA John T. Bone: “Write a sexy penny dreadful with heroes and villains that uses a bunch of costumes and sets we just bought from a huge Hollywood studio.” I couldn't have guessed that star Annabel Chong would become the subject of an award winning documentary film, not to mention a guest on countless TV talk shows, one of which I recently uploaded to YouTube (already earning 138,000 views, along with over 40,000 views for a handful of Pink Stiletto clips).

There’s a book by Steve Crompton with a chapter about how the film came to be made, Carnal Comics: The Inside Story of Art, Sex & Porn Stars, but what I want to talk about here for a moment is Miss Chong herself, whose infamy and popularity has always somewhat bedeviled me. Seeing as how her very first public appearance was standing at my side dressed as the Pink Stiletto, promoting one of her first films at L.A.’s famed Golden Apple comic shop, I wrestle with whether I should be thanked or blamed for my role in her singular career. If you chose to read on, be warned of NSFW mature content – these Carnal Comics tales aren’t exactly bedtime stories (unless your bed is setup in a sex dungeon) ----

The facts about Annabel have been well-Wiki’d - born in Singapore, studied in London and moved to America to study art, and then, while still a student, started shooting porn in a succession of increasingly bizarre films that led to a 200-plus man sex scene, an acclaimed documentary film called Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, and a Singapore bestselling book called Singapore Rebel: Searching for Annabel Chong by fellow San Diegan and Playboy/Penthouse/AVN writer Gerrie Lim. The book carries a photo of Annabel dressed as the character I created on a commercially-inspired whim on the cover. That photo has helped the book sell over a half million copies. So far.

Annabel grabbed the media’s attention by making self-consciously bizarre films with the same guy who commissioned me to script Pink Stiletto, the late John Bowen, who was already somewhat involved with early Carnal Comics publications. But the thing that propelled her to talk show headliner, aside from approaching sex scenes like a catastrophically over-caffeinated stuntwoman, was her enthusiasm for speaking her mind. 

Her highly educated, articulate, weird, grandiose, and nearly completely unhinged mind.

I’ve entertained friends with tales of my interactions with Annabel that are simply too graphic, and even gross, to share here. But I will tell you that my very first time going to her actual home gave me somewhat of an indication of what to expect. Carnal’s art director Heather and I picked her up at her L.A. apartment to take her somewhere, I forget where or why (probably a promotion, though I seem to recall that we had to physically track her down just to get her to sign something crucial, and that may have been why we were at her door). To this day, I’ve never seen a messier, crazier looking place that someone purportedly lived in. And I’ve been everywhere from Paul Reubens/Pee Wee Herman’s place to more than one crack house.

Annabel’s place made them all look like bed and breakfasts by comparison. It looked as if someone had taken everything rejected by a skid row Salvation Army, thrown it all carelessly into an abandoned semi-truck, and then rolled that semi off a hill. I could barely spot tiny Annabel amidst all the personal debris, muttering to herself as she tried to gather the various items required by the day’s forgotten task.

I couldn’t understand more than a few words of what she was saying. She had this weird accent that mixed her heritage with geographical happenstance that resulted in the elocution of someone constantly trying to swallow a mouthful of very soft beans.

My inability to understand much of what she was saying certainly didn’t deter her from talking. She talked a lot. We can’t have driven very far, but I’m pretty sure I already knew most of her life story by the time we dropped her off (I can’t recall if we took her home or somewhere else). I could tell she was at least as remarkably intelligent as she was remarkably weird.

She also seemed to glow with a spark of creativity, with a lot of artistically inspired ideas, not only about her Pink Stiletto persona but about her overall planned career arc. Which of course she fully expected to end in superstardom, she was quite matter of fact and sure about that. I wasn’t so sure myself. But I wasn’t ruling it out, either. I’d never met anyone quite like Annabel Chong.

I was on the film set of the Pink Stiletto film shoot, a big budget production for its time, shot at a fully equipped film studio in Chatsworth, California. I’d seen photos of sets like the President’s Oval Office, the stone Lair of the Dragonwitch, the Beast’s gigantic stone Viking dinner table, and Pink Stiletto’s Batman-like kitchen conversions like a microwave oven that doubles as a microwave radio. But it was a special kind of thrill to walk onto a standing set that I dreamed up from a catalog of available backdrops and props. 

There were the Batman TV-show style sound FX balloons, the elaborate costumes geared for the specific superpowers of the Mighty Muffin Vixen Rangers, and holy cats, somebody actually went and built a working puppet to play a sarcastic pet vulture who sits on the Beast’s shoulder! That’s right, Vixen Rangers and a talking vulture puppet. Did I mention Pink Stiletto is a spoof?

Now here’s one crazy thing – on the set that morning was an old guy with a beard who I immediately recognized as a former employer of mine, when I worked part-time at a video store in the old Ramona train depot circa the late 80s. I hadn’t seen him since around 1990 when his store closed down and, seeing as he was something like 70 already by then, I was pretty darn surprised to see that he was one of the crew guys putting together those aforementioned sets! He was just as surprised to see me, two hours north of San Diego, years later, with no idea that either of us were gonna end up with decidedly different careers than when we last worked together.

I’m not sure if I knew ahead of time that prolific porn performer (and future convicted felon) Ron Jeremy was to play the villain, the Beast. I’d first met Ron on the very night that Carnal Comics was born, at Gene Simmons birthday party in an L.A. bowling alley, when Gene handed out my business card to every porn star in the room (a lot of them, it was a Gene Simmons party!) and told them “That guy wants to do comic books about porn stars” (something we’d only discussed in passing during a meeting about our Kiss comics).

Ron Jeremy made a terrific Beast, he’s a funny actor. He later kindly appeared at the big launch party for my Triple-X Cinema Cartoon History book, also at Golden Apple. And, hey, in another crazy small world example, in 1999 I found out the woman who’d lived next door to me for a few years was a porn star named Sunshine Blue – I’d never really interacted with her, so the way I found out she was a porn star was that Ron Jeremy was standing in our shared driveway one day, and it turned out he was dating her!

So I was happy to see Ron on the Pink Stiletto set, as well as longtime adult film actress Bunny Bleu, who I was already working with on a bio comic. Miss Chong herself, I wasn’t so happy to see. First, I should admit that I wrote the Pink Stiletto role specifically for a different actress at John T. Bowen’s studio, with that woman’s specific look, mannerisms, voice, and even body type in mind.

To this day, I can’t understand half of what Annabel Chong is saying in that movie. And I wrote every word coming out of her mouth.

On big budget productions like Pink Stiletto, all the dialogue and fight scenes are filmed first, before the sweaty sex scenes. This took alllllllll day. If you’ve ever been to any kind of TV or film taping, you know how endless the yawns become as everything stops and restarts time and time again. And these weren’t performers used to doing a lot of actual acting. People think I’m joking when I say that a couple of porn stars were so ready to start having sex that they had some on their own of the floor of the green room lounge between scenes, while everyone else relaxed nearby with Kraft Services snacks, but that really happened. Gotta warm up somehow, I guess, and at that point we’d all been there at least 10 hours.

People also think I’m joking when I say we left before they were done filming the sex scenes, but we were vegetarians who needed something a lot better than those sex room snacks. The thing that sent us packing was Annabel’s “Mongolian Clusterf*ck” scene, which I can’t really describe without risking a content moderator spanking other than to say that the level of dexterity required is nearly Olympian. They kept trying to stack and pack all the orifices and obstructions like a communally directed game of flesh Jenga, never quite getting everything lined up quite right for the cameras to capture.

This inability to match slots A, B, and C with tabs D, E, F, and G resulted in some of the funniest director-actor interaction ever likely to be heard. I was both impressed and alarmed by Annabel’s determination to get it right. At one point, she suffered somewhat of an injury in the attempt, and that’s when Carnal’s art director and I decided we’d already seen all we needed to see of the production. 

They finally did pull it off, judging from the final movie --- which, I have to confess, I’ve never been able to get all the way through in a single sitting. I always fast forward through the sex scenes and through Annabel’s indecipherable dialogue, which frankly doesn’t leave a whole lotta movie to watch.

As far as I know, Annabel only put on the costume twice, for the actual film shoot and for a Carnal Comics promotion we did at Golden Apple Comics in LA with several other stars, where Annabel wasn't even an announced guest. The signing was for our comics on Tiffany Million, Sarah-Jane Hamilton, Becky Sunshine, and Becky's friend Bonnie Michaels, aka Nightingale: Mistress of Dreams. 

I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure Annabel wasn't even invited. She apparently just heard about a big Carnal Comics party (we did a lot of promotion and attracted big crowds), threw on the costume, and showed up --

Nobody knew who Annabel was, only a few of her films had been released and the Sordid Stories comic wasn't even out yet. She didn't even have a copy of the video, it wasn't in stores yet, and none of the attendees knew why she was there and why she was dressed in a costume (Bonnie Michaels was dressed as Nightingale, but that had already run a few issues and she was nearly famous at comic-cons). Annabel only stayed a short while before leaving, she seemed very annoyed that 1) Nobody knew or cared who she was and 2) Nobody could understand her odd accent when she tried to explain about the movie.

(Artwork by Larry Nadolsky, colors by SS Crompton)

 

So anyway, Pink Stiletto comes out in 1994, renamed Sordid Stories with Pink Stiletto, as a video and comic book. And it does okay, but nothing like most of our other projects. A few years went by. And then, I’m hearing about Annabel a bunch. She does the 200-something man sex scene, which I guess was more like 75 guys who got back in line a few times. She’s on Jerry Springer's TV talk show and all kinds of television and radio programs, and she’s considered the biggest and best known celebrity in Singapore. 

Wait, what? The chatty little lady who lived in the overturned semi-truck full of debris? She DID tell me she was gonna become the most famous person ever to come out of her country. And I’ll be gobsmacked, she went right on ahead and did just that.

But her “fame” was clearly evolving as a kind of backhanded compliment: it came with ridicule that she invited and encouraged when she presented herself as creating what she claimed was feminist performance art. Her admittedly well-stated (if poorly enunciated) points about being so in control of her own body parts that she monetized them into fame and fortune are severely mitigated when she goes on to complain that she lost most of that fortune to con artists. 

And the more she talks about how much she lost, the harder it becomes to characterize the Annabel Chong narrative as any kind of success story. The fact that she lived to tell is about its only measure of success.

Of course, I’ve found that same scenario to be true of many I knew back when Carnal Comics was presenting porn creators and performers with a first-person platform (and selling over a million comics doing so). If you actually read many Carnal Comics, you read a lot of sad and dark tales. Savannah committed suicide while her comic was in mid-production, and that’s addressed in the comic script finished by her best friend and manager.

Even my Triple-X Cinema Cartoon History book, as reviewers like Maggie Thompson at Comics Buyer's Guide noted, grows more and more downbeat, especially once AIDS hits the scene, John Holmes dies, and Traci Lords drops the dime on herself that sends others to jail. A surprising number of porn people talked openly in their comic book autobiographies about their problems with addiction and exploitation. Part of the reason I walked away from Carnal in 2000 is that I finally realized that most real life porn stories don’t end well.

If it sounds like I didn’t like Annabel Chong, well, that’s not my intent. I neither liked nor disliked her. I never came close to understanding her, either the things she said or the stuff she did. And I’ll never be able to fathom the admiration so many people seem to have for her, especially her many women fans, but I certainly don’t begrudge her or them for it.

Now that it’s been many years, I’ve used my limited personal insight to conclude that the real Annabel Chong Story is akin to those of possibly brilliant but definitely damaged performers who were never mentally prepared for the spotlight. Like Larry “Wild Man” Fisher, Elliott Smith, and Wesley Willis.

Is the world better off somehow for having such unlikely outsider “art” to either enjoy or revile? Perhaps. Even probably. Are the artists somehow better for having created it, whether or not anyone else ever sees or enjoys their creations? Almost certainly. Does the artist end up worse off for having shared it with a world that barely comprehends? Also almost certainly.

I once did a lengthy taped interview with Annabel, back when I was still publishing Carnal Comics and had the intention of doing an autobiographical issue with her. I just recently digitized and uploaded the tape (click on above if you're curious), listening to our chat for the first time in around 25 years. I was reminded why I never actually made an Annabel Chong comic book, which just happens to dovetail into the same reason I walked away from Carnal Comics.

No, it wasn’t because I could barely understand her wonky accent (though, believe me, Annabel would drive a closed-captioner into an asylum). Nor was it because publication of the comic would make me just one more person to profit off Annabel's bizarre flesh parade without ever having to actually march in it myself.

It was because I was tired of telling stories with unhappy endings, even/especially the ones that haven’t happened yet ----