This mockumentary about John "The Wadd" Holmes is entertaining proportional to the degree one tolerates bull and exaggeration. It would have been better had it gone further over the top into the realm of low camp and MOMMY DEAREST silliness.
Instead we have a patently false portrait of the legendary porn figure as "conceived" by the team of Laurie and Alan Colberg, pornographers who made several Holmes vehicles. It also has writing credits but the chief concocter of misinformation is Holmes himself.
Laurien Dominique stars as a fictional character named Laurien Dominique, a very common porn practice which still is widely used today in the rare "storyline" XXX videos. No, she's not playing herself but as her on-screen credit reads, a Reporter for a magazine who's assignment is to come up with an interview with the great Wadd himself, or else.
She gets invited to his lavish mansion and estate (patently false, not his) but must go blindfolded so dear is privacy to the Great One. What follows is over an hour of self- glorification that really irritated me but certainly will entertain or even bamboozle others.
A moment of disclosure: the day after Holmes died I wrote his obituary published immediately in Variety newspaper, and recall phoning many of his friends and colleagues (e.g;, Ron Jeremy, Gloria Leonard, Paul Thomas) to get the info and proper flavor. I didn't get the cause of death correct - no one knew at that time that he had died of AIDS complications.
So when I watch SUPERSTAR I see rehashed and embellished many of the phony myths that surround the man, then and now. Film's structure is simple: flashbacks visualizing his many anecdotes related to Laurien (plus on his request one of her own) all made up out of whole cloth.
Examples: his $1,000 trip to Miami as a gigolo (myth was created that he was in constant demand as a sex surrogate wined & dined around the world) to service Amber Hunt while her hubby David Blair watches and takes photos; servicing two curious next door neighbors while visiting a friend in Boston; humping beautiful Nancy Hoffman as a 19-year- old producer's wife in a forerunner of Sean Michaels' current EVIL CUCKOLD video series; laying low weary from work out-of-town humping a surprised massage therapist played by the wonderful Laura Bourbon.
Nose to the grindstone Laurien won't let him hump her until their interview is completed, creating tease/sexual suspense relieved in the final reel. Along the way many stupid Holmes-isms are trotted out personally, his fan club pegged at 50,000 adoring whatever - I don't envision them as teenyboppers; his claim to have made 3000 films in a 10-year career, when the actual number would be 200 more or less (loops don't count); and numerous other boasts.
I recall in the late '80s when Abel Ferrara and Zoe Tamerlis/Lund were poised to film a biopic she had researched starring Chris Walken as Holmes, but which fell through at the last minute when Chris got cold feet (Abel told me a more colorful anecdote at the time), and that would have really been something.
John Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is famous for its theme and tag line: Don't print the truth, print the legend (I paraphrase). That is the driving force, besides making a quick buck, behind SUPERSTAR, a film that took, like much of porn from its beginnings till now, Andy Warhol's philosophy way too seriously.
