Customer Reviews

Raw Talent: The Adult Film Industry As Seen by Its Most Famous Male Star

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jerry Butler dishes the dirt on his male and female co-stars. Between his snitching on their sexual proclivities, he does unload some useful and scary information that really makes guys like me forget about ever wanting to become a porn star! For instance, he asserts that 70% of the actors and actresses have some sort of disease. Some actresses, he states, are so "professional" that they'll cover up the penile sores during fellatio scenes so the camera can't see them. Gee...how nice of the gals. Overall, the book is highly readable in the same way passing a car crash is highly watchable. Butler's apparent honesty about the "glamour" of the x-rated movie world is both scary and poignant at the same time.

This book is somewhat self serving, but it is a step above other porn star biographies (such as Porn King by John C Holmes, or Inside Linda Lovelace, by Linda Lovelace.)
It chronicles the career of a porn star after the advent of video in the adult film industry.
Paul/Jerry talks about his fears while working in the industry, the stigma attached to the industry, and his constant search to find love.
It gives a unique view from inside the industry, but a lot of the "intimate" details he gives about specific stars in the industry seem like they could have been ommitted, because they are very opinionated and biased.
I would recommend this book, but if anyone really is interested in learning more about the adult film industry, I would also suggest "the X factory," "Sinema," as well as the films, "the Girl Next Door," "Wadd," "Sex, the Annabel Chong Story" and "Porn Star" (each of which gives a perspecitve on a different era of the adult entertainment industry.)

Jerry Butler's autobiography quotes him:"This is what I'd tell young people about porno: how you can die,or commit suicide,or become a drug addict,or how you can become even more lonely and insecure than you already are". This immature troubled young man couldn't make it as a hockey player due to his temper so tried his good looks in Hollywood to find that he was only good enough for X-rated sex movies. He became addicted to drugs. He was already highly sexual so sex was no problem until he ran into women he didn't like,gay men who annoyed him,etc. This book has a few typos & a lot left out- like what happened to him after 1990 ? It also has more than it's share of lies including certain facts regarding the size of his penis,how many films he made with Shauna Grant,how much drug intake he had,etc. He made no secret of how unhappy he is with the fact that women are more highly paid. He also made no secret of how much he couldn't hold on to a woman due to his emotional problems. His confused rambling didn't seem anything more than a sad story of a man who wrote a book to make money and commit career suicide at the same time. Jerry Butler wants to be a porn actor yet he despises all the ugliness that comes with it so he wrote a book that lets the world know the flaws of many female costars then cheated on his wife then published the book. Thirteen years later in 2003, we are left to wonder WHAT HAPPENED TO JERRY BUTLER ? Somehow we still want to know because he is intelligent & caring enough to realize just how messed up he is emotionally for doing porn. He agrees with Traci Lords & other porn stars= it is better to watch porn than to perform in it & take all the risks.

I was a big fan of Jerry Butler back in the eighties / early nineties. The guy had looks, skills and was popular with the ladies. At the same time, the man had moral and ethical issues about being in a business that renders the sex act to its lowest common denominator.
If you always wanted to know the gossip and the "deep in the down" about some of the women you spent your teens and early adulthood fantasizing over... buy Jerry's book! For me, it was great reading about Nina Hartley, Jeannie Pepper, Angel Kelly, Kay Parker, etc. in a non-porno context, finding out about what they thought, how they lived and what they wanted from the adult film business other than money.
Most importantly, although Jerry is no longer a supporter of the "porn industry", he isn't a basher either (like the hypocritical Tracy Lords).

Buy the book and relive those "golden days" of porn! Before silicone implants, bad bleach jobs, overwhelming tattoos and piercings and obnoxious Okie redneck performers became your standard porno fare!

Raw Talent is a nice juicy read BUT given the way Butler/Seiderman slammed a lot of his co-workers in the adult industry, I am not surprised that he is indeed now driving a city bus in Brooklyn!!!

While his occasional arrogance and tell-all tales are amusing, entertaining; one can also read between the lines and sense a man fast approaching a pre-midlife crisis with a sense of uncertainty as to what the next phase of his life should be post-adult filmdom.

I do, however, admire the honesty of one in a profession that so many folks openly slam...yet devour in private!!!

I think this is a great book and I couldn't put it down. I would have given it five stars however, there were too many typo's that should have been corrected considering that there were two co-authors. The update at the end left me a little disapointed since after all the soul searching I kind of hoped that Jerry and Lisa would "live happily ever after". However, in the update he does not mention Lisa Loring. So I had no idea what happened to them. I learned on the Internet that they got divorced and that Jerry is now re-married and is a bus driver in New York. I would really love to know any news about Jerry. If anyone knows anything can you please send me an email at jana_91@hotmail.com

I just finshed reading this book and while there is a fair amount of dirt on the porn industry, I thought there would be more. There is some good stuff in here (one part in which he descibes going down on a certain female porn star who isn't too clean made me so sick I had to put the book down for a moment). I felt that he was a lot harder on the women (no pun intended) than on his male counterparts. Also, there are a few things that
seem absolutely absurd (for instance, he was masturbating since the age of three?!!!). Still, a decent behind-the-scenes look
of the porn industry.

Well, what can I say. Being 31 years old, I grew up with this guy. I thought he was intense, uninhibited and added a comical element to the industry. Rent one of his movies and compare him to the other male actors around the same time period and see how boring they were compared to this guy. I will say this is no boring read and it is alot of fun to hear about all the people he worked with. Myself, like alot of other people out in the world have fantasized about what it would be like to work in the porn business, and this book is about as close as you can get without actually doing it. It is insightful to the ways of the porno industry, who is a skunk and who is not. He is very candid about sex and the risk of AIDS in the business and he is right to say those things.
However, the feel of the book is that he has an obvious chip on his shoulder and wants to get back at some in the industry with his somewhat vicious commentary. But if it is true, it is true, and if he did it just to sell books that is good too. Either way Paul (aka. Jerry Butler) if you read this review, I liked your book, and I've asked others to buy it and read it. You'll be surprised how fun they think it is.

I found the book to be most enjoyable during the parts where Jerry would talk about the women he performed with. Getting to read about what they were really like (good or bad) was nice. For his part, Jerry's part was ok, but the cream of it all is the dishing on the beauties!

This is an "as told to" biography of late 70's/80*s porn star Jerry Butler. I think this was put out in the late 80's and by that time Butler was more or less washed up as a porn star. He gets started in this by telling us his real name isn't Jerry Butler, it's Paul Seiderman. Also the very Aryan looking Butler is a Jew whose Grandfathers half Brother was Leon Trotsky. He then talks about his childhood which mainly consisted of youth league hockey and dry humping inanimate objects.

His adult life begins with him trying to make it as an actor and being sexually harrassed by homosexuals who had the power to get him parts. He soon thereafter moves into doing porn. He really critiques the female porn stars he worked with in a nasty way and he names names. A few examples are he says performing oral sex on one was like cleaning out a dirty birdcage with your tongue, another smells like a fishtail, one looks like Bozo the Clown, etc. There were few he didn't have something bad to say about. I think this book was Butlers way of giving the middle finger to everybody he had issues with in the porn industry. Overall this isn't that entertaining or interesting a book and Butler comes off as a shallow bitter person to me.