Gloria Leonard: The Rialto Report interview – Podcast 16 (reprise)
The Rialto Report
Ashley West
4.8 • 531 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2014
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week The Rialto Report pays tribute to Gloria Leonard, who died last week, by reprising our 2013 interview with her.
This episode running time is 60 minutes.
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The Rialto Report interviewed Gloria Leonard in July 2013. Our intention was to speak for a couple of hours about the first half of her life in New York, and to return later in the year for a second interview which would cover her West Coast career.
We called her at her home in Hawaii and Gloria was in fine form. We spoke for over four hours about her upbringing in the Bronx, her life as a broker and a publicist for Johnny Carson, and her eventual move into adult films at the age of 35.
Along the way, she remembered her old friend Al Goldstein, working with Radley Metzger on The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Maraschino Cherry, her starring vehicle All About Gloria Leonard for Arthur Morowitz and Howie Farber at Distribpix, working for Carl Ruderman at High Society, her friendships with Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart, and Jamie Gillis, working with directors Gerard Damiano and Lenny Kirtman, fellow actors Bobby Astyr, Zebedy Colt and John Holmes, and her enduring love for Bobby Hollander.
We made tentative plans for the second interview, but unfortunately we never got around to it before the sad news of her passing last week.
Her death was covered by the New York Times here.
The post Gloria Leonard: The Rialto Report interview – Podcast 16 (reprise) appeared first on The Rialto Report.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gloria Leonard's career in the adult film industry defies any attempt at a brief introduction. |
| 0:17.0 | She started her career in the 1970s as an actress, appearing in films by the likes of Radley Metzka and Gerard Damiano, but was soon managing Men's Magazine High Society, presenting some of the first adult cable access television shows, and helping pioneer hugely commercial adventures, like phone sex lines and celebrity skin. She served on the boards of free speech and adult industry organizations |
| 0:40.1 | and traveled the country to appear on every chat show that was going |
| 0:43.4 | to discuss feminism and pornography. |
| 0:46.2 | What makes her achievements all the more remarkable |
| 0:48.2 | is that she was a 35-year-old single mother when she entered the industry, |
| 0:52.5 | whose previous work experience had included |
| 0:54.6 | doing PR for Johnny Carson, trading commodities on Wall Street, and writing some of the first |
| 0:59.8 | liner notes for electro records. Even Radley Metzger once commented that he would probably |
| 1:05.1 | be best remembered for the person who discovered Gloria Leonard. So how did a girl from the Bronx, |
| 1:10.6 | who was a teenager in the |
| 1:11.7 | 1950s, go on to become the grand dam of the adult film industry? How does she remember her |
| 1:16.8 | experiences? And what's she doing nowadays? On this episode of the reality report, Gloria |
| 1:21.8 | Leonard talks of a different age, when adult films tried to emulate Hollywood, and the difference |
| 1:26.7 | between pornography and erotica was just the lighting. |
| 1:30.3 | This is Ashley West. Stay tuned. You know you're selfish. |
| 1:46.0 | You know you're self-obsessed. |
| 1:48.0 | You know you're self-obsessed. |
| 1:52.0 | You know you're an egomaniac. |
| 1:55.0 | You know your magazine stinks. |
| 1:59.0 | You know you're not as bright as everyone thinks you are. |
| 2:03.9 | You know, you're not so talented. |
... |
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