The Rialto Report

When you think of adult video vixens in the 1980s, you may think of Ginger Lynn, Christy Canyon, or Traci Lords. But they weren’t the only fan favorites on the scene.

Take Tina Marie: she was like a Robert Crumb goddess come to life. She started out in men’s magazines and sex loops in the early 1980s, and quickly moved on to starring roles in feature films before stepping behind the camera to produce and direct adult movies with her husband Mark Carriere. 

It wasn’t the professional path Tina imagined for herself growing up as the daughter of a fundamentalist Samoan minister in New Zealand and Trinidad. And while it was a career that introduced Tina to many things she prizes to this day, it was a job that came at an existential price: how do you reconcile the idea of yourself that you grew up with – the dutiful daughter, the spiritual sister, the good girl – with the adult industry powerhouse you became?

In this first part of her story, Tina Marie talks about growing up as a preacher’s daughter, finding and starting to question her identity, getting her start in porn, and the wild party scene that wrapped around the adult industry. 

This podcast is 64 minutes long.

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Tina Marie





Laurie Smith with Tina Marie

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The post Tina Marie – Good Tina, Bad Tina – Part 1: Podcast 176 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

A look back at Ray's controversial life and work in his last years, in light of the investigation into the disappearance of several women.

After the death of his wife, Ray Horsch returned to the world of adult film.

A few years after first meeting Ray Horsch, I returned to his home in Philadelphia to film an interview with him.

It was there, and in subsequent visits, that I met a number of people who knew him: filmmakers, artists, a number of women who moved into his house for varying periods of time.

I also met his former wife Amy McHale with whom I corresponded for a while.

It was only this year, I learned that Amy had disappeared in 2016.

At the time of this recording, what happened to her remains unresolved, and her disappearance has become part of the wider investigation now involving Ray’s former Philadelphia home.

Ray Horsch talks about his life as a forger – of banknotes and Picasso etchings, being a wholesale manufacturer of illicit drugs, and becoming a fugitive from the law.

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation of Ray Horsch or his son Eugene, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the video or audio published by The Rialto Report is strictly prohibited.

When I first visited Ray Horsch at his home in Philadelphia to interview him, most of the conversation was about New York in the early 1970s. More specifically, Times Square. The adult movie theaters. The live sex shows. The people who worked in them. The strange, seedy ecosystem that flourished there long before Times Square became the Disney-fied tourist destination we know today.

Ray had been part of that world. And in talking about it, he also talked about himself – about performance, transgression, sex, violence, art, and the persona he had spent years constructing.

Listening now, the question running beneath much of it is one I could never have anticipated when I recorded it: Where did the performance end? And where did Ray begin?

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation of Ray Horsch or his son Eugene, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

You can listen to the first part of this series here.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the audio in this podcast is strictly prohibited.

This podcast is 35 minutes long.

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I first visited Ray at his home outside Philadelphia almost twenty years ago.

It wasn’t the house on West Chew Avenue that has since become the focus of the ongoing murder investigation. At the time, Ray lived in Chalfont, a quiet suburb some thirty miles north of the city. His was a large, comfortable three-bedroom house, with a big yard and an extensive basement.

I’d tracked him down because I’d started documenting the history of the beginnings of the adult film business in the 1960s and ’70s. On the face of it, Ray was a relatively minor figure in that story. He’d directed only one theatrically released adult film of note, back in 1973, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig.

But when I looked for him, in the early days of the internet, he was unusual in that he had his own website. And it was the way he described himself there that caught my attention.

It read: “Alternately an artist, filmmaker, composer, former Sesame Street program maker, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict, and all-out villain, Ray Horsch’s life has been as colorful and obsessive as his art.”

I had no idea how much—if any—of that was true at the time. But it certainly made me curious. So I contacted him.

Over the phone, Ray was polite, friendly, and humble, and he invited me down to Philadelphia to spend the day with him and talk about his life.

The first thing you noticed about Ray was how he looked. You couldn’t really notice anything else.

He was in his sixties at the time, with long black straggly hair and an intense, piercing stare. He dressed entirely in black. And to complete the effect, he sometimes wore an eye patch—which, as far as I could tell, served no practical purpose whatsoever. It simply made him look more menacing. For Ray, that was probably reason enough.

Because Ray enjoyed playing the villain.

You’ll hear that repeatedly in these conversations. He wanted to provoke. His appearance did it. His photographs did it. His writing and films did it. Shock wasn’t incidental to his work; it was central to the persona he had constructed around himself.

Ray maintained that all of this was performance—that he was an artist who wanted to challenge and disturb, not simply through the work he produced, but through the character he presented to the world. Privately, though, he insisted that this front was just that: a character. A game. A practical joke that he played on you, and on the world.

At the time, I took him at his word. Today, inevitably, that claim is harder to hear in quite the same way.

And yet the curious thing was that the Ray I encountered in person seemed at odds with the character he had created. He did look frightening. But he wasn’t frightening to talk to. Over the many hours we spent together, he came across as soft-spoken, thoughtful and patient. He was intelligent, articulate and self-aware. And over the years, I was able to verify many of the seemingly tall tales that he told me about his extraordinary past.

Today, however, I find myself thinking less about what Ray told me than about what he may have chosen not to tell me.

And that is one of the uncomfortable aspects about presenting these recordings now.

Knowing Ray does not mean that I know what happened at West Chew Avenue. Spending time with him does not give me any particular insight into the investigation that is continuing today. And I don’t want these conversations to be heard as though they contain some hidden solution waiting to be discovered.

They were interviews with a man talking about his life as he wanted me to understand it.

But I am also very conscious of something else: Ray spent much of his life seeking attention. He created an identity designed to provoke people, disturb them and make himself difficult to ignore. By putting his voice back into the world now, there is a danger that I allow that persona to dominate this story once again.

And it shouldn’t.

Because whatever eventually emerges from the investigation, at its center are real people. Women whose lives matter independently of Ray Horsch. People who are missing or may have been harmed. Families who are still living with uncertainty and waiting for answers. They are not supporting characters in the story of an outrageous man.

That is something I want to remain conscious of throughout this series.

So where these recordings are disturbing, I don’t want to include something simply because it shocks. And where they raise questions that I cannot answer, I don’t want to pretend that I can. What I can do is present the conversations as they happened, with the context we have now, and allow the distance between those two things to remain unresolved.

That first day, though, I knew nothing of what would come later.

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The post Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 2: Performance, Podcast 172 appeared first on The Rialto Report.