Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
While writing my recent review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book, I couldn’t help but notice some conspicuous omissions from the catalogue of pop culture and political events the writer referenced in the book. I could understand why he might overlook important events that took place outside the United States – Klosterman’s book is very U.S.-centred – but when I put it down I was surprised that he skipped right over one event that seemed germane to the decade, and prophetic for the ones that followed.
Luckily, anyone put out by the absence of the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape from The Nineties can rest easy, since Hulu and Disney+ recently started streaming Pam & Tommy, a miniseries anatomizing the story over eight episodes. Just over a quarter century since the tape made headlines, it’s become worth a quality cable retelling, with young stars like Lily James and Sebastian Stan in the cast and a serious message about sexism and double standards.
Based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article written by Amanda Chicago Lewis, it’s about Rand Gauthier, a carpenter who was hired to work on renovations to the couple’s Malibu mansion, and decided to get even by stealing a safe from Lee’s garage studio space after he was fired from the job and stiffed for his wages. Since Anderson and Lee declined to talk to Lewis or work with the producers of Pam & Tommy, the story spends a lot of time with Gauthier, played by Seth Rogen more as a comic fall guy – even a lovable loser – than a vengeful thief.
It goes without saying that there’s a factual gulf between the real events around the Pam and Tommy tape – to the extent that anyone can or will recall them truthfully – and the miniseries. But let’s focus on the item at the centre of the story: the tape.
Based on my research into the history of celebrity sex tapes – for which my browser history will probably be forever tainted – there has been simmering public interest in movie or video footage of celebrities in sexually explicit situations pretty much since the golden age of Hollywood. According to “Secrets and Thighs.” a 2003 feature published in the Village Voice when a Paris Hilton sex tape was all over the news, the public’s prurient interest in the carnal aspects of celebrity private lives goes back at least to the 19th century with hoaxes like Don Leon, a record of sexual conquests supposedly written by Lord Byron, and Teleny, a novel depicting gay sex rumoured to have been penned by Oscar Wilde.
The hoaxes hit moving pictures in earnest beginning in the ‘30s, with explicit footage advertised as featuring Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Barbara Streisand and many others. By the ‘70s, legitimate footage of actors as different as Sylvester Stallone and Spalding Gray acting in softcore porn early in their careers became well known – and did nothing to impede their careers.
The modern era of the celebrity sex tape really began, though, with Brat Pack actor Rob Lowe’s hotel home movie, made in 1988 with two women, one of them underage, at the Democratic National Convention. His public image took a brief hit, but he recovered in short order, and his career actually seems to have been enhanced by it; in a 2019 interview with the National Post he said that “it’s one of the reasons why I got sober. I woke up one day and I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I’m 29 years in and like people talk, but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
In February of 1995, Pamela Anderson – a Canadian-born Playboy model and actress starring in the self-parodying prime time hit Baywatch – and Tommy Lee – drummer for the past-their-prime hair metal band Motley Crue – got married on the beach in Cancun, Mexico after a four day romance. To commemorate the occasion, Lee filmed their honeymoon with a Hi-8 video recorder. As described by Lewis in her article, the tape is “a 54-minute home video, depicting about eight minutes of the sex Americans are most likely to sanction: white, straight, married and in love.”
This is at the heart of the moral calculus of Pam & Tommy – that there was nothing wrong with what Tommy Lee recorded with his wife. Lewis describes the tape as “a porno that appealed to people who didn’t usually watch pornos, a voyeuristic dive into the guileless intimacy between two tabloid darlings.” Even after the events that unfolded quickly after he stole the tape that effectively ruined his life, Gauthier describes the tape as “cute. They’re in love and a couple and they’re just having fun with each other, and I think that’s great…I’m jealous. I wish I had something like that.”
On the most basic level they’re right – there’s nothing wrong with healthy, even enthusiastic intimacy between two people in love, presumably indemnified from the condemnation of people who hold to more conventional morality by the fact that the couple in question were married. There is, however, something a little odd about Tommy Lee’s insistence on taping it, even if only as a small part of a record of their honeymoon.
And it’s easy enough to give him the benefit of the doubt that he deposited it in his safe – along with the white bikini Pam wore at the ceremony, part of his collection of guns and her most valuable jewellery – for safe-keeping, as a record of their love, and with the intention of saving it for their children, should they want to witness the beginning of their life as a family.
Okay, that last bit is actually pretty weird. But let’s overlook it for now; things get a lot weirder.
It’s not hard, however, to say that Gauthier’s theft of the tape, and his subsequent part in copying and distributing it for the world to see, was wrong. Except, of course, that the whole first episode of Pam & Tommy strives mightily to make Gauthier a sympathetic character, a victim of Tommy Lee’s bullying and punitive financial punishment of the workers he’d hired. The audience can’t help but want him to get revenge on Stan’s strutting, overbearing Tommy, which might have been understood as rough justice if not for the fact of the tape.
If the makers of Pam & Tommy had any intention of depicting Gauthier’s actions as unmistakably wrong, they undercut it with a failure of tone – by making most of the show an essentially comic story, especially when it ponders the actions of the men surrounding Pamela Anderson.
If Tommy’s supposed to be the villain, the subsequent seven episodes do nothing to amplify it, as they reveal him to be an often thoughtful, caring, concerned husband – albeit a bit of an idiot. There are plenty of other villains to choose from, like Milton Ingley, the owner of a sleazy porn studio, a friend of Gauthier who agrees that his revenge will be greater if he gets rich from the tape instead of just pawning the contents of the safe.
And then there’s Louis Peralto, a mobster with a long family history in the porn industry, who agrees to front Gauthier and Ingley the money necessary to manufacture the video and sell it anonymously through a website on the then-nascent internet. When Lee discovers the theft of the tape and its growing underground popularity, he sends bikers to find the thieves, so Ingley escapes to Amsterdam, to live off Peralto’s money and the profits that briefly pour in from the tape. Ultimately there’s Seth Warshavsky, the Seattle internet porn entrepreneur who would be the man who made the real money off of the tape that Lee filmed and Gauthier stole, cast for the story as an opportunistic demon.
Like most stories about real-life crime, it’s a tale full of fools and idiots, played for dark laughs by casting comic actors like Rogen along with Nick Offerman (Ingley) and Andrew Dice Clay (Peralto). Indeed, every man in the show is played for laughs, while every woman – and especially Lily James’ Pamela – is given dignity and gravitas and even the privilege of being a tragic figure. By the end of the series, Rogen’s Gauthier is allowed a sort of conditional redemption, apologizing ritually to nearly every woman he meets, from a Pam impersonator on Hollywood Boulevard to Pam herself to Erica Boyer, Gauthier’s porn-star ex-wife.
There’s no reason to believe that Gauthier redeemed himself this way in real life, at least according to Lewis’ original article; Rogen’s character is deputized to stand in for all men who objectify and exploit women, prompted by what’s understood as a baked-in character failing, a kind of y-chromosome specific original sin.
This didn’t go unnoticed by critics of Pam & Tommy; describing the series as “empathy tourism” on New York magazine’s Vulture.com site, Roxana Hadadi attacks what she calls its “misplaced forgiveness.” Both Pam and Gauthier are shown as victims of forces they can’t control, “and the way the series mirrors the pair in each other (the interest in Eastern religions, the way they’re pushed around by Lee) is a puzzling choice. Over and over, Anderson and Gauthier’s struggles are given equal weight, and both are presented as victims.”
But the real moral drama in Pam & Tommy should focus on Pam, and the unfortunate choice she’s forced to make after the tape has spread farther and wider than Gauthier or Ingley or anyone could have imagined. For most of the series we watch the couple struggle to understand why their private property became a public spectacle, and how it seems to leap ahead of their pitiful attempts to rein it back in.
While the basic facts of the law seem to favour them – the tape was their private property, stolen from them, and remains their intellectual property even when bootleg copies are sold in the parking lot of Tower Records and screened on the internet. But the law is not justice, so Pam ends up giving a painful, episode-long deposition to lawyers from Penthouse magazine, whose publisher wants to publish stills from the tape to punish Hugh Hefner, his enemy and Pam’s patron at Playboy.
Her husband’s response to the tape’s theft and viral spread is violence first, followed by lawsuits. The latter seems a legitimate strategy, but Anderson quickly learns that any clever lawyer can make theft irrelevant, and use situational morality to render her privacy – and by necessity her reputation – wholly subjective in value.
Stan’s Tommy keeps trying to placate his wife’s growing despair by pointing out that he is, after all, on the tape as well, but James’ Pamela responds reasonably that he really isn’t – “not like me.” And there really was no way that a sex tape – especially one made with someone who looked like Pamela Anderson – was going to harm the reputation of someone like Tommy Lee of Motley Crue. It really is one of the great benefits of living your life as a rich, famous idiot.
Once the tape was out, burden of proof that it was never meant to be a commercial product lay with the couple, and ultimately Anderson. When they lost their injunction against Penthouse, Lewis wrote in the Rolling Stone article that “since Anderson had posed nude several times and because the two discussed their sex life in interviews, Penthouse‘s lawyer argued that the couple had forfeited their privacy rights regarding the video’s content. And since Penthouse had received the tape from ‘a source,’ and no one from the magazine had been directly involved in the burglary, writing about its contents was fair game. Plus, because the footage included a scene of Anderson rolling a joint and she had told Star the previous year that she didn’t do drugs, the tape itself was legally considered ‘newsworthy.’”
As Lily James’ Pam says after she endures a grueling deposition by the Penthouse lawyer and still loses the injunction, the legal system had simply followed the public’s assumption that she was just “a slut,” and deserved everything that happened to her even if she’d been the victim of an obvious crime.
Gauthier was never charged or convicted of the theft he admitted to, mostly because the tape’s existence – and who was able to profit from it – became the real legal issue. At the very least, it was legally established that Pam and Tommy held copyright on their property, and, in the end they sign an agreement with Warshavsky, who gets to play wack-a-mole with bootleggers in exchange for profits from the sale of legitimate versions. This gives legitimacy to a lingering rumour that the couple had leaked the tape themselves – despite all evidence to the contrary.
At the end of Pam & Tommy, the tape ends up destroying their marriage, though they did attempt to reconcile a decade later. What the series doesn’t tell us is that another tape, made with singer Bret Michaels of the band Poison before the one with Lee, began circulating; in 2005 Anderson and Michaels authorized the release of a DVD version.
In the ‘90s, the only other sex tape as famous as Anderson and Lee’s was the one made by disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding and her husband Jeff Gillooly, which would be released legally by Penthouse. As a footnote, both Anderson and Harding would be contestants on Dancing with the Stars a decade later, when reality TV became a venue for both the famous and infamous, the talented and the talentless.
And in that decade celebrity sex tapes had become regular news; sex tapes were actually key to the creation of internet-based celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and they surface regularly in the careers of rappers, singers, TV journalists, models, former child stars, politicians and reality TV contestants. Whereas videos and photos once had to be either stolen or leaked, today they’re regularly hacked from cell phones, and the internet is awash in so many nude selfies and Tik Tok-style sex videos that celebrities of any scale are counseled to simply ignore their existence.
Which begs the lingering question: why do people film or photograph themselves nude or having sex? As someone who once worked at a one-hour photo developing shop, I can tell you that the practice isn’t exclusive to celebrities. As Lewis notes in the Rolling Stone story, the porn industry in the mid-90s was worth about $5 billion, though it’s always been difficult to establish its precise economic worth. Today it’s estimated to be valued at anywhere from $6 billion to $97 billion, figures that vary wildly since much of that money is made illegally, untaxed or below the table, and since bootlegging is rampant, even systemic.
Pam & Tommy gives us glimpses of the close proximity of the legitimate entertainment industry with porn, and the vast overlap between the two in places like Los Angeles. “Porn star” was the sort of item someone like Tommy Lee could add to his CV without harm; his bandmate Vince Neil actually filmed himself with real porn stars and released the results.
Even though she’s explicitly on Anderson’s side in her article, Amanda Lewis doesn’t hesitate to call the Pam and Tommy tape a “porno,” and the inference that a happy couple would make a porn tape, even if only for private enjoyment, hints at how normalized this sort of thing would have been a quarter century ago. Today a lot of water – and video – has gone under the bridge, and at least two generations with easy access to porn has made it the mirror they consult to judge what sex is supposed to look like.
There was a time when Pam & Tommy would have been presented as a cautionary tale about safeguarding your virtue and avoiding poor decisions. However, the series plays more like a period piece, shaking its head over how Pamela Anderson was the scapegoat for a society unable to hold male and female sexuality to the same standard.
It’s implied that we have come a long way, or at least long enough to note that, while a sex tape hobbled the budding career of Pam Anderson, it actually made the career of Kim Kardashian, estimated by Forbes recently to be worth $1.8 billion, which doesn’t even take into account all the other, lesser Kardashians. Given this lesson, it’s not surprising that so many people, young or old, famous or not, press “record” in the middle of intimate moments and potentially allow the world to watch what was once considered, at least for legal reasons, to be a private act.
