The Biggest Penis in Porn Is Back From the Dead

Pornography has long struggled with legitimacy. Even in the modern world of the woke and the weird, porn struggles precisely because it crosses enough red lines that the left and the right alike would much rather pretend the industry doesn’t exist than acknowledge that its unholy combination of sexual revolution and capitalism just makes both sides of the aisle feel bad. As a result, the documentation of the porn industry’s history is sparse, despite porn’s prevalence and influence.

Porn drove the video revolution and remains a major player in the internet (by some estimates, 10% of the internet comprises pornography). But, though it earns more than Hollywood every year, our understanding of its history and social relevance is relatively limited. Where Linda Lovelace — perhaps the best known adult actor of her era — was mostly a one hit wonder, Johnny Wadd (screen name of John C. Holmes) was a major presence in the industry throughout this entire time period, spanning nearly two decades. Nearly anyone who was an adult in the 70s and 80s at least recognizes the guy’s name — he was the one with an outrageously, and famously, large penis.

Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Cass Paley
Written by: Rodger Jacobs
Interviews with: John C. Holmes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Larry Flynt, Ron Jeremy, Bunny Bleu, Al Goldstein
Running time: 103 minutes

Given this backdrop, it’s probably no big surprise that though newly available, Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes isn’t strictly speaking a new documentary. It dates back to 1998 – which means it’s from the same era as P.T. Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights. Anderson, who is interviewed in the film, takes Dirk Diggler’s story of rags to riches to crime and drugs via porn superstardom straight from Holmes.

So, despite being a big hit at SXSW that year and winning the Best Documentary prize, it has languished in obscurity ever since, only appearing in a limited, censored DVD release in 2002. The new version, available to buy or rent at Google Play, YouTube, or Fandango from December 12, is the full uncensored version that played at SXSW. Which is to say, we can all now see how gigantic Holmes really was without having to actually watch one of his movies.

Strangely enough, Holmes’ size is probably the least interesting part of his story. Wadd traces the life of Holmes through whatever can be reconstructed via interviews conducted with the people who knew him the best. That story comes down to Holmes leaving his semi-abusive home life as a teenager to find a new life in the city. At some point, someone discovered that Holmes had a gigantic penis, eventually leading Holmes to porn film sets where he asked for a job. Suspicious directors looked at this awkward, scrawny looking kid, wondering how he even got there, only to immediately change their tune when they asked him to strip and realized he was not lying about his endowment.

Though they got married before his porno career, Holmes’ first wife, oddly enough, was not involved in any of this, and Holmes was careful to keep her as segregated from his porn career as possible. The portrait of their marriage, told with extensive, anonymized interviews with the wife herself, is a fascinating study in its own right. The marriage lasted a lot longer than you’d think, becoming sexless yet still providing the framework for a sincere friendship that even survived Holmes bringing home a teenage girl that he was obviously grooming.

That Holmes was leading a life of crime was of a piece with a porn industry, which at that point, was also literally criminal. What does, indeed, take us aback, is the revelation that Holmes himself was apparently a police informant on his own co-workers. It becomes clear fairly quickly that Holmes had a tenuous grasp on reality, although given the life that he lived, this was probably inevitable. That Holmes would confuse himself with his long-running character Johnny Wadd also makes a lot of sense, considering that both of them claimed to be acting in pursuit of some higher purpose that inexplicably kept resulting in contrived scenarios that would involve him having sex with someone in front of a camera.

His era was a very different time in pornography compared to ours. The unit of sale was a feature film and directors had pretensions of making stories that would at the very least be coherent even if all the pornographic material was removed. Because of the industry’s illegality, the production process was more contrived and confused than regular filmmaking. It’s hard to tell, after a certain point, to what extent Holmes is deliberately lying and when he’s just getting confused having to keep track of his real life, his fictional characters, and whatever fabulations are — or were — being circulated for marketing reasons.

If Holmes has a decent excuse for being confused, I can’t say as much for director Cass Paley. Wadd is marred by some poor editing decisions — centrally, the lack of a clear chronology. Holmes’ career spans from 1969 to his death in 1988 and, while Wadd is generally presented in chronological order, there’s little sense of perspective about when various events in Holmes’ life happened relative to one another, let alone other ongoing historical events. Although these kinds of direct documentaries about the pornographic film industry are so rare there’s not really a set of genre standards to adhere to, Inside Deep Throat has a much clearer sense of perspective.

It’s also worth noting that though Wadd was only made ten years after Holmes’ death it used film from at least 27 years ago. And simply getting as much interview footage as possible from people who knew Holmes while they were still alive and willing to talk was, by necessity, the main priority. It is quite literally impossible to make anything like Wadd today if only because quite a few of these people died, and others are unlikely to tell the same story even if they agree to an interview at all. Holmes’ second wife, for example, tells a borderline absurd story about how kind and wonderful he was, which contrasts sharply with Holmes’ manager almost mockingly relaying the fact that Holmes discussed her almost exclusively in terms of disrespect.

There’s also a matter of emphasis. The Wonderland murders, a grisly, high profile case with which Holmes had direct involvement, is a topic of greater interest to the modern true crime crowd than yesteryear’s Holmes biopic documentary, so Wadd only really discusses the case in terms of how it was yet another bad decision in his life that escalated from his drug use, not who was killed or why. Likewise, the discussion of HIV is remarkably cavalier. It’s strange to think that Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis was such a big deal, implying as it did that HIV wasn’t a gay disease, yet a heterosexual porn star like Holmes didn’t make a similar impact. To be fair, Holmes did do exactly one gay film and the story is that it took them a whole day of fluffing to do just the single scene.

Did I mention that Holmes’ penis was so large he would have trouble drifting in and out of consciousness during his sex scenes because the erection drew so much blood out of the rest of his body? Funny little behind-the-scenes factoids like this are what Wadd is focused on rather than providing any broader historical perspective of the industry. It’s certainly an interesting story, but Wadd is a bit of a relic in its own right at this point. Too unconcerned with the moral questions to work as a polemic, too disinterested in the timeline to work as educational. Wadd is merely the story of a sad, strange, big man who deserves our pity but probably not much more.