CHATSWORTH, Calif. – Ron Sullivan, who directed adult films as Henri Pachard for more than 30 years, has died from complications of cancer. He was 69 years old.
Born June 4, 1939 in Kansas City, Mo., Sullivan became one of the most successful directors of porn’s Golden Age and a kingpin of the New York-based theatrical adult film industry in the late 1970s.
When theaters began to close in the mid-80s, he migrated to Los Angeles and carved out another successful career in video production. His list of titles runs into the hundreds and includes such classics as Babylon Pink, Outlaw Ladies, Public Affairs and Taboo, American Style.
"He was my friend, my mentor, my partner, my inspiration," award-winning director Paul Thomas told AVN. "He taught me everything I know about set-up, about plot, about pacing – I can't even say all the things I learned from Ron."
Sullivan's career in entertainment goes back to the mid-'60s. He worked as a stage manager in New York and Williamsburg, Va., before getting into the film business, according to his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Raven Touchstone.
Touchstone's and Sullivan's first collaboration was 1986's Blame It On Ginger, which won the award for Best Couples Sex Scene (Video) at the 1987 AVN Awards show. Sullivan had previously won AVN's first Best Director - Video award in 1985 for Long Hard Nights, and took home directorial awards again in 1988 for Talk Dirty to Me, Part V and in 1990 for The Nicole Stanton Story, Parts 1 & 2. He was also honored several times by the X-Rated Critics Association (XRCO), first in 1979 for Babylon Pink (his first full-length adult movie), then for Outlaw Ladies in 1981, Sexcapades in 1983, and Taboo American Style 1-4. He was one of the first inductees into both the AVN and XRCO Halls of Fame.
One of Sullivan's best-known early films was 1982's The Devil In Miss Jones 2.
"I met Ron in an office, just a standard theatrical office, and he hired me to do a remake of that famous film, The Devil In Miss Jones," recalled star Georgina Spelvin. "He got Jack Wrangler, a star of both gay and straight films, to play the Devil. To create his director's vision of hell, he used huge bursts of stage smoke made of dry ice blasted onto the set and made the crowded area a true hell. A delightful gay hair stylist was doing his best to give my character a lofty bouffant hairdo. Between each shot, he would drag me back to the dressing room to set, blow-dry and tease my poor wisps back into the shape of his vision... Nothing deterred Ron. He was an extraordinary director. I never saw him frown, I never heard a cross word out of his mouth. I never knew a director who had as much fun doing the films they did as Ron did; he was just great. It was a couple of films later – well, I was starving to death in Los Angeles at this time, and he called me one day and said, 'How are you doing, George?' And I said, 'Well, to tell you the truth, not very well. The rent's due and I'm flat busted.' He said, 'Will $200 help?' I said, 'Of course it will.' He said, 'It's in the mail,' and indeed, two days later, there was a check, which saved my butt that time... Henri is indeed one of a kind. Ron has been a good friend, a damned good friend for a very, very long time."
Devil 2, as Sullivan referred to it, was also his first collaboration with his son Jason, now a prolific cameraman and director in the industry, who thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but explained, "I wasn't allowed to be there for the sex scenes since I wasn't quite of age yet."
Sullivan lived and worked on both coasts between 1980 and '85, before settling in Los Angeles in 1986.
Sullivan flew frequently to San Francisco to make movies, during which period he became good friends with acclaimed director Alex deRenzy, with whom he later made the award-winning Hothouse Rose 1 & 2.
Touchstone also remembers the San Francisco days.
"I did a lot of art direction; I did wardrobe, costumed everything, wrote the movie and I would assist Ron in everything," she said. "I was like the second in command, and worked with talent and rehearsed them, did everything. So he would drive and I would fly, and I would meet the other kids – Randy Spears, or Rick Savage, all these kids – we'd meet at the Burbank airport and fly up to wherever we were going. They were really fun days. We were outlaws; we had this great familial sense with each other, and it seemed that everybody had their [emotional] baggage. It wasn't like today; it was a whole different thing. Everybody wanted to make a good movie and most of the kids – everybody that Ron used in all of these movies, for the most part, were all people who loved acting, like Randy Spears, Victoria Paris, Jeanna Fine – we did this thing called City of Sin and City of Sin: Street Angels with Jeanna."
Sullivan had what amounted to his personal troupe of performers, including some of the best-known names in the business.
"We'd say, 'Okay; who are we going to put in this movie?'" Touchstone explained. "We'd plan a movie and think about the cast before we wrote the role. See, the way we would work it is, Ron would say, 'Okay, we have to do a movie for so-and-so.' For a number of years here, we worked together on just about everything, and so he would come to where I was living, and we would sit outside and talk. We had an idea – he had an idea or I had an idea, either one, and we'd start talking about the story and he'd get this and then I'd pull this off of it and then he'd pull that off of it, and bouncing back and forth, putting the story together, putting the idea together, and then, 'Okay, we've got all this cast of characters; now who are we going to use here so that we can tailor the characters to these players?"
"What was so good was that Ron could get so much out of them," she continued. "We had Rachel Ryan in Kinky Business 2 – she loved performing. She was wonderful. We had Jerry Butler, a wonderful actor; Tommy Byron, who was wonderful in that movie. We used Herschel [Savage]. We had Rick Savage – all these really good players, who were very talented. Jamie Gillis, as far as acting goes, he was wonderful. He was the phantom in Phantom of the Cabaret; Keisha; Sharon Kane – I loved Sharon Kane, loved working with her, and Ron loved her. We used her a lot. Sharon Mitchell – all of the really good players. Nina Hartley, she was wonderful; she was in Talk Dirty To Me Part 6."
This author had the good fortune to be on Sullivan's set in 1995 when shooting the first volume of his series Venom. Always the innovator, Sullivan got the idea to hand the video camera to one of the actors, thereby creating the forerunner of what would become the popular POV genre.
"He would talk to them, and he would simply tell them exactly what he wanted them to do," Touchstone related. "Sometimes, in discussing the scene, the player, whether it was Joey Silvera or Jamie or whoever, would have a suggestion, and they would say whatever it was – 'What about if we do bla-bla-bla' – and Ron's stock line, if it was a good idea, was 'That's such a good idea, I'm going to take credit for it myself!' He was always willing to allow everybody to participate, to allow everybody to contribute to the best of their ability. His sets were always fun. They were relaxed, they were easy, and yet the work was intense, because he was getting the best out of everybody, but he always made it fun for everyone. Everybody loved working with him."
Even while undergoing treatment for cancer, Sullivan continued to direct and work on sets. His last movie was Hustler Video's Barely Legal Trouble Makers. An omnibus film designed to raise money to help him defray medical expenses, originally titled We Are the World XXX, was temporarily sidetracked because of disputes among its producers.
Sullivan is survived by Deloras, his wife of ten years, and two sons, Jason and Nate.
