Newsflash: Documentarians, like reporters, often chase a subject pre-sold on what the story is going to be.
With Porn Star: The Legend Of Ron Jeremy, director Scott J. Gill gives an exhaustive treatise on how this works, born of 18 months looking for the dark side of Happy the porno dwarf.
Jeremy -- for those who don't keep up with this quadrant of pop culture -- is a nice Jewish boy from Long Island who followed the dictates of anatomy to become the most unlikely and busiest porn star in history.
"A fat, greasy, hairy guy" (as a frat-boy fan enthuses on-camera), he looks more like the manager of an adult video store than a porno star himself.
Jeremy's professional saving grace: A nine-and-three-quarter-inch appendage, which works as dependably as a Volvo. (It's also, as one porn actress observes, "kind of squishy, so it doesn't hurt.")
For whatever reason, this has made Jeremy (nicknamed The Hedgehog) the most pop-culture-friendly of adult movie actors, with some 55 non-porn roles (mostly death scenes) in films with actual Hollywood stars such as Mike Myers, Robert De Niro and Willem Dafoe.
The star of such classics as Nymphomercials, Dial 666 For Lust and Seymour Butts In Paradise, he's smart enough to know that nobody wants to hear a schlubby guy complain about a life of daily sex. He is an amiable guy, a joker, a clown who gets flown all over the place and plays the part of every straight guy's Walter Mitty-esque sex hero.
He must be secretly miserable.
That's the constant, pounding subtext of Porn Star, which follows Jeremy from his childhood as a wannabe actor and performer, to his frustrated stage career, to the dichotomy of adulation one minute and the tired loneliness the next of shlepping through an airport with his luggage in a garbage bag (did we mention, one of his many faults is that Jeremy is cheap?)
The filmmaker's quest seems almost subconsciously puritanical, born of the notion that no good time goes unpunished.
To this end, if this was a football game the director could be accused of "piling on" (We're told Jeremy is cheap, he's a slob, he's a foodaholic, he's a sociopath with loved ones, he's kidding himself about his serious film career).
This is not as annoying as it sounds because the critiquing by best friends/porn-hangers-on is often funny as hell. Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein gives insight after insight capped by the observation that Jeremy is "damaged and dysfunctional."
And octogenarian Al (Grandpa Munster) Lewis -- who nowadays expounds on oral sex on New York's X-rated cable channel -- gives a hilarious borsht-belt-soaked riff on the sheer awfulness of Jeremy's standup comedy.
And I don't know what goes on in your house, but in my experience, funny sex is best.
(This film is rated R)
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