Casting Debbie (1991, Joel M. Reed)

 

 

There has been, not one, but two biographies of New York exploitation filmmaker Joel M. Reed. 'Blood Sucking Freak: the life and films of the incredible Joel M. Reed' by a writer who was clearly fond of the old reprobate, and the 'Special Issue' of Bill Landis' Sleazoid Express, which was all about Joel (or 'Jowl' as Landis' thick NYC accent would often mangle Reed's first name into). The latter was a nonstop tirade of hatred against Reed by Landis, who once described his effort to me as 'a revealing biography of a venal, lying, non-human'.

Neither biography spends much time on Reed's career as a novelist (none at all in the case of the Landis one) and after reading Casting Debbie I can understand why. Whatever charm Reed's movies possessed didn't extend to his books. For the record Joel's lit career included forays into horror (Zombie Wall, Book of the Dead), conspiracy theory (Outrage: Hitler Didn't Die) and pseudonymously written porn... under the name Phillipa Iananacker he was the author of 'Private School Girls Go Hollywood'. An action thriller called 'The Shanghai Jew', adverted as 'coming soon' on Reed's now long gone website, appears though to have gone unpublished. Joel's only book to have had mass appeal was 'Trump: The Man, The Myth, The Scandal' Reed's 1990 attempt to air the dirty laundry of the future POTUS.

Casting Debbie was published two years after Joel's death, billed as 'a grindhouse classic novel' with claims to be set in the 1970s porno chic era, it is neither. In fact this is a retitling of 'The Story of Hollywood O' a book Reed anonymously wrote in 1991, then adopted the pen name Elena Smythe when it was republished in 2012. As the original title implies this is Joel's attempt to update The Story of O to an early 1990s Hollywood setting, where wannabe actress Debbie Edwards humiliatingly agrees to become a sex slave to powerful casting agent Chana Wellington in return for a chance of fame. That's basically it, plot wise, the bulk of the book consisting of Debbie crawling about on all fours, sucking toes, eating dog food and honing her oral sex techniques on Chana's smelly, grotesquely stereotyped Filipino gardener ("lick, lick, good lick").

The slave training theme inevitably echoes Reed's most famous film Bloodsucking Freaks, but played straight and bereft of that movie's gore and horror elements, Casting Debbie adds up to little much more than the rancid fantasies of a dirty old man with delusions of being a font of all Hollywood gossip. The book is pure Joel, the tall tales about famous people, the yammering about nailing virgins, the careless misogyny and suspect closeted homosexually. For a man who always came across as vocally heterosexual in interviews, Joel sure writes a heck of allot here about guy's dicks and giving blowjobs. In his Reed biography, Landis floated the idea that Reed was gay but that over the years Reed's sex drive had been replaced by a greater desire to scam people. A sentiment curiously echoed in Casting Debbie when Reed has Chana admit "I really have no interest in sex of any kind, I use it only as a means to bolster the bottom line".

In fairness, based on my minor interactions with him, Reed was never the monsterious, venal, lying, non-human that Bill Landis made him out to be. Joel just seemed to be a fairly harmless old sleazemonger, full of stories about a long gone New York that he epitomized...and he was remembered with genuine affection by people when he died...the same couldn't be said of Bill Landis. Even so, I don't think Reed did himself any favours with Casting Debbie, a book in which the main female character is repeatedly forced to say "I'm just a cunt to be used by my master. I'll spread my legs on command" isn't the greatest evidence of an author's good character.

However if you are looking revolting material on a par with Bloodsucking Freaks, Joel occasionally delivers the goods here. At one point Debbie has her virginity restored by having sheep's flesh grafted onto her private parts, all in order to please a TV executive who wants to screw her whilst imagining she is his virgin daughter. Later the sheep's flesh comes loose in the mouth of an oriental lady while she is eating Debbie's pussy. Suffice to say, Joel's ability to gross people out, far exceeded his ability to turn people on. For the most part here though, Joel just manages to make even BDSM look boring, and I suspect even Jeffrey Epstein would have dozed off reading this.

By far the best thing about the current incarnation of this book is the retro cover, whoever designed that did a superb job of making Casting Debbie look like something you'd see in a NYC dirty bookshop in the 1960s, raising expectations that this will be the literary equivalent of Joel's sexploitation movies 'Career Bed' and 'SEX by Advertisement', pity then that this book is instead like Joel posthumously mailed you one of his turds.