The first question is, of course, what the heck am I doing revisiting 52 Pick Up, John Frankenheimer's Elmore Leonard-based thriller from 1986. Well, to better battle the mild (I guess it must be mild, as it hasn't compelled me to break anything or anything) seasonal affective disorder that pays me a visit during the winter season (imagine!) I schedule marathon viewing sessions during my downtime, I schedule quasi-marathon viewings for my quasi downtime. It's pretty random. So the other day-and-a-half I watched the great Dragon Dynasty DVD of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, one of the most purely enjoyable martial arts movies ever made. Then, the very good Sony DVD of Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh, the viewing inspired by rereading an essay on Manny Farber by Kent Jones, in which Farber and partner Patricia Patterson rhapsodize on the film. Pialat's penultimate picture is staggeringly good, but I was a little disturbed that it bears only a halting resemblance to the picture Farber and Patterson describe. But this isn't the place to get into that. I'm not sure what made me pick 52 Pick Up; I vaguely recall a recent blog post about it somewhere, but can't find it. This film (it could be interpreted as a Frankenheimer stab at a Friedkin picture), in which three adult-industry-related lowlifes blackmail industrialist Roy Scheider via a very ugly and explicit snuff video of his girlfriend (Kelly Preston, no less!), is a more convincing sleazefest than most pictures of its ilk. Maybe one reason it's so convincing in its squalor is that it features more porn stars than, well, most porn movies of the day.

Let's have a look.

Most of the, um, talent appears during a party scene early on. While Kelly Preston sulks with girlfriend Vanity in a nook away from the main action, uber-sleazoid John Glover has got the video camera going and he's checking out the hot tub. A pre-hedgehogish Ron Jeremy (with the moustache, here appearing as Ron Jeremy Hyatt, Hyatt being his birth name) has to pretend to be annoyed at being videographed in a hot tub.

When I found old Ron in Vegas right before the 1998 AVN Awards, almost two decades after we had worked together on a project I won't name here (I'm saving it for the memoir), I re-introduced myself. "Oh, yeah, that was a good picture," he shrugged. I then told him I was now a film journalist, at Premiere. His eyes lit up. "Let me tell you what I've been doing lately," he said. Apparently he and Frankenheimer became big buddies after making this picture. (As Coreys Haim and Feldman could tell you, being big buddies with Ron Jeremy invariably involves Ron Jeremy introducing you to female porn stars.) Apparently Frankenheimer also put Ron in Ronin. I'm ashamed to say I've never bothered looking for Jeremy in Ronin.

The blurry lady in the sorta macrame top on the left side of this shot is the lovely and talented Sharon Mitchell, retired from performing, got a medical degree—she's a doctor now!—and is a leader in the adult industries STD-awareness-and-prevention efforts. Wowsers.

Here's Tom Byron, onetime paramour of Traci Lords and still an active performer. Boy oh boy did he piss off David Foster Wallace. I'm not telling tales out of school by saying that; just read the passages concerning Byron in Wallace's "Big Red Son," the opening essay of his collection Consider the Lobster. (A version of "Son" first appeared, retitled, shortened, and bowdlerized, in the Septmber 1998 issue of Premiere. It's a long story. Saving that for the memoirs, too.) Here's just one of Wallace's observations on Byron and his ilk: "Yes, this is it: What's so unbelievable is not the extent or relentlessness of porn people's egotism (Jasmine St. Claire's way of greeting a journalist is to offer him a personally autographed photo; Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affects the air of a Mafia don at the Sands bar's nightly porn parties, extendung his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance, etc., etc.). It's the obtuseness of it." I witnessed Byron's Godfather-esque posturings with Wallace (we got into Sands' party via the good graces of Scotty Schwartz, who hasn't spoken to me since the piece was printed, and I don't blame him, alas), and they were as puke-worthy as they sound.

And here's Amber Lynn, wearing that insouciant expression for which she was so well-loved. When I first moved to NYC in the mid-'80s my roomie, a fellow Jersey emigre, and myself, used to watch Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue on cable a lot. Partly to see if host Goldstein, then-publisher of Screw and all-around loose cannon, would bust a blood vessel during one of his tirades but also because we still couldn't believe that in New York there was free (albeit censored) porn on cable. One of the ubiquitous phone-sex ads featured the above pictured Ms. Lynn in an even more aggressive mode, asking you, the viewer, "Do you want Amber Lynn to suck your cock." To which my roommate would invariably respond, in a perfectly flat tone, "No. I want Amber Lynn to deliver my newspaper." That always cracked me up. Thanks, Stew!

Here's Mr. Jamie Gillis, emoting for John Glover. I'm pretty sure this is the only time Mr. Jamie Gillis and John Glover have ever been in the same room together. In the early '80s a pal of mine worked in the videotape duplication division of a porn production house, and every now and again he'd regale us with accounts of the really filthy and disgusting things one Mr. Jamie Gillis was getting up to in this film or that. How filthy and disgusting were they? Put it this way: recently, at Lupa, one of my very favorite Manhattan restaurants, I recognized Mr. Jamie Gillis among my fellow diners. I thought long and hard about notifying the management of his presence on the premises and strongly requesting his ejection from said premises. By the time I'd made up my mind to do it, he was on his way out. You got lucky once, Gillis. I better not see you at Lupa again.

I can't say I'm sure that's Ginger Lynn, soon to try to make the leap to mainstream that the aforementioned Traci Lords had, um, thrust upon her. She looks like Lynn, whose mainstream career was on/off (and who I hear is now back in porn doing, um, MILF material. Ugh.). Unlike Jeremy and Mitchell and A. Lynn, though, she's not credited, and I'd imagine she would have wanted to be. I dunno. To tell you the truth, I'm a little relieved that I did not recognize every putative porn person in this film. But to wrap things up, here's a non-porn bonus shot:

Recognize this actor? Here he plays the drug dealer who sells Glover the skag that he shoots up Scheider's wife Ann-Margret with. (Told you the movie was a sleazefest. Also, Touch of Evil much?") If you do recognize him, you're Michael Weldon, I bet; if his face rings a bell and you can't place it, what you're seeing in it is the performer's kin, most likely. For this is Blackie Dammett, the roue actor dad of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis.