By Stewart Tongue
YNOT – Bob Krotts, better known in the adult entertainment industry as Dirty Bob, has self-published a book of inside-the-industry vignettes and candid interviews with porn stars.
Naked Came the Pornstar offers 188 pages of text and behind-the-scenes photographs documenting Krotts’ lengthy tenure as a reviewer of adult content and founder of the X-Rated Critics Organization. Adult Video News founder Paul Fishbein and performer Ron Jeremy provided frontmatter.
The book draws on candid, reportedly unedited interviews with 19 well-known adult video performers. Often humorous, occasionally controversial and always intimate, the discussions took place early in performers’ careers, Krotts said. He also said his goal with the book is to offer a rare glimpse at stars before they became famous. Many went on to win adult industry awards — in fact, two won Best Actress awards, and one is noted in an edition of Guinness World Records as the most downloaded woman of all time.
Krotts originally intended for Naked Came the Pornstar to follow a format similar to Penelope Ashe’s infamous 1969 novel, Naked Came the Stranger. In that notorious volume, 24 different writers wrote a chapter each with the express intent of creating a controversial — and extremely poorly written — book that would sell despite its hideous prose. Krotts said he scrapped the idea of using other writers and instead pulled from his immense personal library of interviews and experiences. The result is a work that still features 19 distinctly different voices, yet maintains a more cohesive style.
“It still fits the original concept,” said Krotts. “It is a composite with each chapter featuring an intimate and revealing interview with a different performer. Since half of the interview is their voice, it’s quite like having a chapter by each new author.”
The book focuses on the Golden Age of Porn, when building a persona and branding the image of a porn star was a much slower, more arduous process than it is today.
“This was before Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites made it simple to keep their name, face and thoughts in the public,” Krotts said.
Naked Came the Pornstar is available in print and ebook formats on Amazon.com and other online booksellers.
