Julie Strain – Interview

Julie Strain

An interview with Julie Strain
by William Ham

Six Feet Tall and Worth the Climb

You may not recognize the name, but Julie Strain cuts an unforgettable figure (in every respect of the word). Since becoming Penthouse‘s Pet of the Year in 1993, she’s become practically ubiquitous, the subject of dozens of pictorials, a comic-artist model, and an actress, and appearing in so many movies (A and B) that she rivals Shannon Tweed for the title of “Woman Most Likely To Turn Up On HBO After Midnight on Weekends.” And to top it off, she’s even written a book, a pictorial autobiography called Six Feet One and Worth the Climb (Heavy Metal Books), studded with ample evidence to back up the back-cover praise from the legendary Bettie Page: “It’s Julie who keeps the flame of pin-up beauty alive today!” She’s also a great, good-humored interview, as you shall see.

Boy, I’ve had the worst time calling you. For some reason, I couldn’t call anywhere in Massachusetts on my cell phone.

So are you driving around right now, jabbering into your phone like everyone else in L.A.?
Nope, actually I’m parked in front of the photo lab. I’ve taken up photography recently. I’ve gotten some photos published in Femme Fatale magazine, which I also write for, but they’re the first people to have published any of my stuff which is real exciting. Photography’s my drug. I’m working a lot this week – I’m either shooting or being shot.

You’re rapidly approaching late-night TV dominance, I must say. I can turn on HBO at three in the morning – which I often do – and more often than not, there you are.
Ah, so you’re the one.

In movies both big and small, too. On one channel, you’re on in Sorceress
Sorceress I or Sorceress II?

There was a Sorceress II? But you died – twice – in the first one!
Yeah, the second one has nothing to do with the first, except it’s about witches and the occult and cool stuff like that. Bizarre love scenes, you know, the usual (laughs).

And yet you can flip from that and there you are in, say, the third Naked Gun movie.
I love doing cameos in the big movies because you get to go, you work for a day, they treat you like a queen, you usually don’t have many lines so it’s not as stressful, you do the scene and make people happy. Usually for me that’s because I’m there as some sort of turning point in a scene – you bring someone in who’s six foot six in heels, you won’t be just the checkout girl (laughs). But I actually started out doing extra work, which I really loved, and to this day I kinda miss that work. To go and be part of a big project, but without being under the gun – just go out, have some free salad, coffee and a cigarette, then go back and say, “All right, time to get my picture taken with Warren Beatty now!” is a nice feeling. But then I got involved in the B-movies, and you crank out one of those in two or three weeks as opposed to the six months that bigger films usually take – that means we’ll be doing five to ten pages a day of dialogue or action where big movies do about a page a day. It’s ball-busting movie-making, but it’s very exciting at the same time, ’cause you only get one or two takes on any given scene, so you really have to know where your character’s coming from and what they’re saying even if you’re running through the forest head-butting people while you do it.

You must be referring to the Andy Sidaris movies you’ve made.
Yep! I just finished my fifth movie with him, called Return to Savage Beach.

I love his movies because they’re essentially all the same – topless DEA agents in hot tubs in search of some apocalyptic device which always seems to be in Hawaii…
Oh, sure, the only difference between them all is that he twists the bikini tops around a little in each one. I love his movies because they’re so campy, they don’t take themselves at all seriously. “Put on your bikini so we can blow up this boat!” “Here’s the satellite disc that’s gonna save the world!” Big boobs and dynamite – what else do you need? Except they make you go all the way down to Shreveport, Louisiana, ’cause they cheat and use that for Hawaii. The advantage of that is that there, everyone’s so excited to have a real live movie set in their town that they’ll let you use anything for free. “Use my house! My car! Put my son in it!” That way, we can make movies for a ridiculously low amount of money, whereas if you were to film in Beverly Hills, it would cost you $10,000 just to rent the motorcycle cops for the day. It’s ridiculous.

Going back to your extra days, you mentioned in your book that you were an extra in The Doors. Are you visible in that at all?
No, though I do yell out, “Play ‘Light My Fire,’ Jimmy!” I’m maybe one of three people who did that, but I did have a specific line. But there were so many people in it, and they were smoking it up, and believe it or not, I think the last twenty or so rows of people were actually cardboard cut-outs. I got so sick from the smoke that I left on the second day. That’s the only movie I ever walked out on.

Oliver Stone’s movie sets must be intense places to be, no matter what you’re doing…
Well, the fog they were using was not even the more expensive kind. It’s the kind that actually causes temporary brain damage, so when I walked out of there I couldn’t even say my ABC’s.

But you could still say, “‘Light My Fire,’ Jimmy!”
Hey, anything to get on-camera.

How many movies have you worked on at this point?
Probably about 92. That doesn’t count the, uh, Buck Naked Line Dancing videos or Naked Golf or anything. Fortunately, I don’t have to do those anymore to get my rent paid.

Any favorites out of those 92?
I have a couple – one is Fit to Kill, which was an Andy Sidaris picture with R.J. Moore, Roger Moore’s son, as the lead. It was kind of a 007 take-off and a lot of fun to make. Another is Dark Secrets, where I play a dominatrix and I have this love scene in the rain with Monique Parent which is one of the most beautiful love scenes I’ve ever done. It was four in the morning in the freezing cold, but you’ll never know that! Except when you see the fog coming out of my mouth every time I moan, of course! And Return to Savage Beach, the one I just finished, is a favorite too, mostly because my husband, who comes with me to the set every day anyway, got to be in the picture too. I’m married to Kevin Eastman, one of the creators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Jeez, I guess that means you don’t have to work at all anymore, huh?
Yeah, everything I do from now on is strictly gratuitous. But it’s great, because we’ve got several projects of our own, like our comics museum up in Northampton (Mass.), Words and Pictures – the Museum of Fine Sequential Art, which is just beautiful.

I understand you have one of the original Batmobiles there, don’t you?
It’s a Batmobile from the first movie, one of five that they built for it. There’s a guy at our gym, Mike Eisenberg, who collects that kind of memorabilia – I’ve done modeling for his wife, so we know each other well – and when he heard that we collect that kind of stuff, he told us about an auction where one of the Batmobiles was on the block. So we went and bid for it and David Copperfield actually got it, but Warner Brothers wouldn’t let him make Claudia Schiffer disappear in it, so he gave it back and we got it for the original, low, low price. Which could buy most people a house. The only drawback is that there’s only a five-gallon gas tank in it with all the other mechanical stuff in there, so you can only drive from one gas station to the next, but still look pretty cool doing it.

This may seem silly, but I have to ask – what’s Bob Guccione really like?
A wonderful guy. You hear a lot about how lecherous people in his position can be, but he’s never been like that to me – he used to have me over with his wife, a lovely woman who unfortunately passed away recently, and he’d sit in the kitchen and cook up a huge amount of pasta and serve it and we’d be all, “oh, great pasta, Bob – so, about my next centerfold…” I owe my career to him in a lot of ways, the Pet of the Year money and all the prizes really allowed me to get my foot in the door in this business and I’ll always be grateful to him for that. Also, he’s still publishing pictures of me at 35 so he’s got a heart for the old broads!

For information about her book or to join the Julie Strain Fan Club, write to Purrfect Productions, PO Box 430, Newbury Park, CA 91320 or call 1-800-642-8183.