The Publisher's Weekly review says it all: let me add that Luke Ford's "A History of X" must rank as the most poorly written and worst edited book ever published; I cannot recall ever having read a worse book all the way through (yet I did, in widely spaced sessions, read it all the way through -- I did not abandon it, which is one of two good things I can say about the book).
Aside from the author's lack of coherence and a pitiful grasp of syntax, there are numerous errors (Ford simply can't add; when he mentions the passage of time, it is enough to strain credulity). The errors (I am a professional editor by the way) are SO numerous, I started underlining them after the first two dozen pages to calm my rage. An extremely inept writer, Ford uses liberal doses of quotations that sometimes fill half the page (albeit, in different blocks on the same page) as he seemingly is unable to paraphrase or mold source material into his own voice. Ford will present a quote and not even try to interpret it or question its validity. For instance, he uses a quote saying that John C. "Johnny Wadd" Holmes (whose woebegone life inspired the film BOODIE NIGHTS) was a true bisexual who willingly engaged in homosexual acts in his gay films, a questionable assertion; I have read more than once that Holmes despised being reduced to making gay pornos and had "elevator trouble" on the sets.
Other examples of a questionable use of quotes come in his recap of the career of Russ Meyer, the most respected (by the mainstream; I don't know if that is true with industry insiders) pornographer ever to make a dirty movie. In his discussion of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS on pp. 106-7, Ford writes that critics "disagree" (note that he does not use the past tense) with Meyer's own assessment that B.V.D. is his best film. Yet, Leornard Maltin in his "1996 Movie & Video Guide" gives the film three out of four stars and notes that two "prominent critics" picked the film for their 10 best American films of the 1968-78 decade! In other words, this film (which I first saw in Boston 21 years ago as a midnight cult film that brought great guffaws of appreciation from the audience -- the theater was packed!) IS appreciated by the critics (that was why Ford's use of the present tense is important; I don't know if the film was dismissed critically in 1969, but he's flat wrong to say it currently is disdained; I've read that if Meyer's MUDHONEY, a steamy "Tobacco Road" style story had been shot in French, it would be considered a masterpiece; when discussing Meyer, he never mentions his inspirations such as Erskine Caldwell or the cultural background of Calvinistic guilt that the World War 2 G.I. generation confronted, and which likely was old hat by the explosion of hardcore; no analysis of the generation gap here). Ford backs his dismissal of Meyer's film with a quote calling B.V.D. an "atrocious film". (This is EXTREMELY questionable.) What is not discussed is that BVD was a big money-maker for 20th Century Fox, and its success was instrumental in that studio financing Meyer's filming of Harold Robbins' THE SEVEN MINUTES. In 1969-70, the Hollywood studios were reeling financially and the old guard was in shock, fighting a rearguard action against boards of directors and stockholders reacting to the astronomical success of EASY RIDER, which was made on the cheap as were Russ Meyer's profitable softcore movies, which is the reason why 20th Century Fox turned to him. This pivotal background is not discussed by Ford, who seemingly disdains Meyer. He also uses a quote of Meyer on the same page in which Meyer claims that the softcore pornography game was up for him as soon as hardcore became popular, but the fact is Meyer continued to make profitable films for seven years after DEEP THROAT was a national sensation in 1972. Ford's marshalling of quotes makes for a losing battle.
Ford's sense of style and pacing are atrocious: on that I think critics WILL agree. The poorness of this book may be attributable to the wholesale layoff of copy editors by publishers. On page 29, a paragraph relates, in the words of journalist cum pornographer Mike McGrady, how the spoof NAKED CAME THE STRANGER was conceived in a "gin mill," a memorable phrase of my father's G.I. generation. (The quote, about the alcholic consumption of alcohol by writers in that era, is no way relevant to the story, by the way.) However, the force of this turn of language is dissipated when the term gin mill is repeated in the quote in the next sentence (Ford's quotes do run-on, like my own sentences) and is completely obviated when Ford -- now in his own voice -- uses the same phrase gin mill without any irony or consciousness of style in the very next paragraph -- with only one sentence without the now worn-out phrase intervening between McGrady's voice and his own!
This book is a pure excercise in amateurishness in both style and contruction. There are hardly any transitions between the stories his material relates, and there is a lack of interconnecting material to elucdiate for us why two stories are placed next to each other. A HISTORY OF X seems to be a rough draft which never had seen the hands of an editor of any experience, published with little regard to quality (thus mimicking the very genre it chronicles). Sometimes, the material in adjacent paragraphs is not even related to each other.
Factual errors include attributing the production of BONNIE AND CLYDE to the post-1968 dropping of the ratings code (the film, a nominee for Best Picture of 1967, was shot in 1966 and its success, along with that of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, was instrumental in dooming the code) [p.31]. We are told that porn actress Kelly Nichols "did three mainstream films in the summer of 1983....A few years later, Nichols was Jessica Lange's stunt double in the remake of KING KONG" [p. 170]. In the planet I inhabit, as do most readers, the remake of KING KONG that introduced the world to Jessica Lange was released in 1976!!!! (Lange had already won the first of her two Oscars by the time KING KONG introduces her to the public on Planet Ford.)
Then, there is his inability to add: 1980 comes 10 years (rather than a decade, which one could allow) after 1969 [p. 30]. After running through a chronology of Linda Lovelace's life (born in 1950) which brings her up to the years 1969-70, two sentences later she moves to Florida and it is 1967 (what did she use; a time machine?) [p. 45]
I will give Ford credit for the chapter about the Mafia's involvement in the porno business; I was not aware of the extent of its control over the industry (a subject skirted by the film BOOGIE NIGHTS). However, I was irritated about Ford's handling of the Supreme Court's 1973 Miller decision, which applied community standards to porno and put the brake on the whole party until the skyrocketing sales of VCRs in the 1980s. While Miller is mentioned frequently, I never felt that Ford truly elucidated the deleterious effects the decision had on the development of the pornographic film industry or on the arts and entertainment industry in the US as a whole. The decision is just not given the WEIGHT it deserves in the text, though I must concede, this may be an honest matter of different interpretations.
My point is, though, there is precious little interpretation or application of authorial skill to the telling of this fascinating story. A HISTORY OF X is slapdash effort that should shame the publishing house, Prometheus Books.
"I'm a star," Dirk Diggler says in BOOGIE NIGHTS working off a riff in a Sly Stone song, but the only reason Ford's book gets a star is because amazon.com won't allow someone to give NO STARS. (Although they do alow an author to rate his own book; how tacky, but so is this whole sorry production.)
