“I knew it was a crazy thing to go into, I knew it was reckless, I knew it was somewhat dangerous – I think it’s more dangerous now than when I thought about going into it – but that’s kinda why I did it. I knew it was the wrong choice, socially…I felt that I could deal with the stigma.”
Tierney is the subject of the documentary The Last Days of Joe Blow, directed by Richard Wolstencroft, to be screened at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. The documentary follows Tierney’s attempt to escape the industry, and while it is rumoured to feature some fairly hardcore scenes, it is more revealing of the psychology of porn acting and Tierney’s struggle out of it.
“I always felt like the documentary could be a good exit for me because that would bring me back into talking about the whole experience from an analytical standpoint, sharing what happened to me. I just felt so many people were curious about that world and everybody wants to play a porn star in a fictional movie, but nobody wants to go out and do it…I felt challenged by that. I want to play this role in real life and see what it’s like. When Rich offered me the documentary, I jumped at it because I knew it would help get me out of the business and I didn’t expect it to be as uncomfortable as it was. I wanted my life to be more together. I was really embarrassed my how low things had gotten; I was really struggling to survive.”
Featuring interviews with Ron Jeremy, William Margold and more, Wolstencroft intended to focus the documentary on the porn industry itself, but instead found Tierney battling through a dark era of his life, trying to escape a career that had turned him off having sex with beautiful women and getting paid for it.
“It’s a completely different animal to Hollywood and the mainstream world. It’s more exciting but there’s less rewards at the end. It’s kind of like drugs, and I hate to compare it to that – it’s fun, but it doesn’t leave you with much afterwards. I knew I wanted to get out of it and have a life that had a future, because I really didn’t see it as having much of a future. Porn doesn’t lead anywhere. You climb the top of the hill and there’s nowhere to go after that. Most careers lead into something else – that career does not lead into anything. There’s no health plan, there’s no pension, there’s no respect as you get older. It’s just a dead end. I kinda knew that going in but I didn’t realise it was gonna be so difficult getting out of it. It’s not so much getting out of it, but it’s rearranging your life so you’re not tempted to go back to it, because it’s easy money and stuff.
“After Rich left, I rearranged things and saved some money and got everything in order. I worked a solid six months and went on a couple of trips…I finished up strong and sent out a press release, I had money saved, but the real hard part – and what the documentary portrayed – is about six months to a year after I’m out of the business and I start running out of money and it’s starting to get really uncomfortable to be interviewed because I’m really not happy with what’s going on in my life and I’m struggling to find myself. I had initial plans and they didn’t work out so quickly.
“A lot of the girls move on to other kinds of sex work – stripping, featured dancing, escort or they just get married. For a lot of guys it’s hard to leave. You lose a lot of contacts when you go in, so you’ve got nothing to go back to. If anybody’s married, they can’t hang out with a guy that’s doing [porn]. You might get an email once and a while, and really I had to disconnect myself from a good portion of my acquaintances. I always kept in touch with my main ten friends, but they weren’t providing jobs for me. They weren’t business associates, they were just friends.”
Tierney mentions the top European models, and from my *research* I can attest that he worked with some beautiful women, but I wondered what was the weirdest thing – or person – he ever had to do on set.
“There was a point where I realised if you didn’t know how to set your limits, they’d come up with all kinds of crazy stuff. I remember we used to go to this bar all the time, this friend of mine who transitioned from a performer to a director, was making tonnes of money. We’d go to this bar and blow $300 every night and one night he comes in there with this midget. He goes, ‘Yeah I flew her in from somewhere in Midwest and met her online and she wants to do a bunch of scenes. You’re gonna work with her next week’. And I just said, ‘Nah I didn’t get into this business to do all that work’. She was a nice girl, but she was very aggressive at the bar,” he laughs, “and part of me says, ‘Eh, you should have done it’.”
While here for MUFF, Michael Tierney will also be involved in MUFF’s retrospective on his uncle Lawrence’s career. As his former manager, Michael built a close relationship with “Larry” and is currently working to build a website in honour of his legacy.
“He’s a legendary bad boy gangster actor and people love to hear stories about him. It’s kind of funny to have the documentary playing at the same time as that but maybe something kind of makes sense about that, I don’t know. Growing up in somebody like Lawrence Tierney’s shadow is a little intimidating because you wanna be an actor and you can’t be who he was, because there’s only one Lawrence Tierney. Going into porn was kind of my, ‘Eff You’ to the whole being somebody’s nephew. I’m gonna be Joe Blow and start with a new name and let’s see how I do on my own without any training wheels in a completely foreign territory. It’s kind of like growing marijuana on a family farm. You think you’re rebelling against everything that you were raised to do and then one day you wake up and realise you’re still farming so it’s time to get your act together and try to go legit and kill those marijuana plants.”
BY NICK TARAS
