Because every story from the (recent) past is rife for being dredged up again for the sake of a #MeToo-inspired slant, perhaps the tale of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape was already overdue for a “historical” revisit. Certainly more than Anna Delvey’s tale of all too recent connery was. And, despite Anderson’s known disapproval of the project (which perhaps led her to throw herself into the project of being Roxie Hart in Chicago), there’s no denying that the creator of the limited series that is Pam and Tommy, Robert Siegel, captures the essence of the era. As well as where Pam and Tommy fit into it in terms of being so uniquely fucked over due to the previously uncharted waters of the Internet (a word no longer as frequently capitalized with such reverence in the present epoch).
And yet, it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for Lee (Sebastian Stan, who mercifully ousted James Franco from the role), the very catalyst that served as the driving force which led to the illustrious sex tape of him and Pam being leaked. For if he had simply paid the proletariat—Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen)—for the work he did on the Lees’ house, none of this would have happened, and Pam might never have had to endure such shame as a result of Tommy’s stingy pettiness, paid back in full when Gauthier stole the safe containing the tape.
The series itself is drawn not just from real life, but a 2014 Rolling Stone article entitled, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape.” What’s more, Amanda Chicago Lewis, the author of the detailed deep-dive into the origins of how the tape came to light, reminds us that Gauthier was an electrician, not a carpenter. But perhaps that change in job title in the limited series lends a more martyr-oriented slant to Gauthier’s character. And yes, he was married to a porn star named Erica Boyer, born Amanda Gantt (played by Taylor Schilling), himself dabbling in the medium (even if seventy-five pornos is a bit more than “dabbling”) under the name Austin Moore. As the guy they called in when they needed, essentially, a small dick (another irony in that he would end up immortalizing Lee for having a huge one), Gauthier was no stranger to being demeaned and abused. Starting with the way his own father treated him.
So when Lee had the gall to refuse the payment of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of work he and his team had already done on what was to be Lee’s Fuck Palace with Pam, he decided he would at least get his tools back from the house, taking the general contractor along with him. Lee, unreasonable man that he was, responded by aiming a shotgun at them and screaming, “Get the fuck off my property!” Such is the hazard of dealing with an unemployed rich person posing as a drummer. As Lewis accurately describes it, “Lee made Gauthier feel small, and Gauthier had spent his entire life feeling small. Here was a guy who, on his eighteenth birthday, lost his virginity to a Vegas hooker. Here was an L.A. boy through and through, struggling to dissociate himself from his famous father, who starred in the original Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway and was Hymie the Robot on the sixties sitcom Get Smart.” The father issues are addressed in an all-too-brief flashback scene after Rand is triggered (pun intended) by Lee threatening to, as mentioned, shoot him, prompting Rand to piss his pants in a way he hadn’t since his father scolded him for leaving a designated area of the house and then walking in on him having a tryst with multiple women.
The point is, Pam and Tommy is almost as much of a “redemption” story for Gauthier as it is for Anderson. And that’s probably part of the reason why so many are offended at the show going on without Anderson’s consent, effectively repeating what was done to her with the release of the sex tape. Something Gauthier was determined to make happen after seeking retribution on Lee by stealing his safe from the house, a theft that wasn’t discovered by the Lees for months, and gave Gauthier plenty of time to get a jump-start on how to figure out distribution.
Like American Crime Story: Impeachment, another show that explores the 90s as a time that, despite being “très modern” was still not very kind to women, Pam and Tommy is filled with the sort of set decorating nuances that evoke the feeling of living in that era. Including the culture-obsessed nature of a backdrop like L.A., where a barrage of ads for music and films indicating the time period are manifest in the details: a poster of Madonna’s Bedtime Stories outside Tower Records, Tower Records itself, a Liar Liar poster outside of Grauman’s, a poster of The Fugees’ The Score at a bus stop. All of these seemingly insignificant pop culture “Easter eggs” are there to subtly get the viewer ingratiated into the 90s, when post-modern existence was at a new apex spurred by the onset of a twenty-four-hour news cycle and the sudden realization that literally anyone could be famous, and for doing so little. As long as it was something tawdry. America being America, that almost always means something sex-related. Which is why the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal sated so many appetites when the Pam and Tommy sex tape grew stale.
In contrast to American Crime Story: Impeachment, however, Pam wasn’t credited as a producer of the show like Monica Lewinsky (played by Beanie Feldstein), who clearly felt some form of catharsis in finally being able to present her version of events. In Lily James’ hands, the character of Anderson becomes a helpless observer of her own life as it turns into a car crash, which is probably close to what was happening as Pam found herself a victim of the then-novel distributing frontier that was the World Wide Web. An entity that a “technology geek” like Gauthier was aware of when he couldn’t find a float cup valve for his ex-wife at any local plumbing supply store, instead turning to a link he discovers on AltaVista (yes, AltaVista). When the employee finds out Rand is in California, he marvels at the effectiveness of his boss’ idea to put their Ohio-based outpost on the internet. Rand confirms, “I’ve been on the Web for over a year now, it’s amazing what you can find.” It’s then that Rand has his “Eureka!” moment and runs over to tell Milton “Uncle Miltie” Ingley (Nick Offerman) about how they can bypass the entire porn industry altogether and distribute the tape themselves.
Credited with being “partial to country music and Chambord” in the Rolling Stone article, as opposed to hookers and coke in the show, Uncle Miltie leads Gauthier to an array of seedy sources potentially willing to cash in on their find. To boot, because it was the 90s in L.A., of course Ron Jeremy was involved at some point, with Ingley reaching out to him first to ask if he could help sell their stolen product. In the show, Jeremy’s “cameo” comes in the form of Gauthier using his name to get through to a defected Miltie in Amsterdam. Jeremy also gets a quote in the Rolling Stone article (which came out before his many sexual assault allegations did) stating, “We passed. Porn was so strict and scary back in those days. If you’re fucking, you better believe you gotta have a release.” That’s the word that gets thrown around by every single distributor approached in Pam and Tommy when asking if Rand and Miltie had gotten one signed by the infamous couple.
Being that they clearly had not, that’s how the criminal underworld became involved. For Miltie went to Louis “Butchie” Peraino (Andrew Dice Clay), “the son of a capo in one of New York’s organized crime families, the Colombos… the Perainos were the Medicis of the adult world, having financed and distributed the classic 1972 film Deep Throat.” That was the only source in town willing to take a gamble on something as unknown as “the World Wide Web.” Because Miltie and Gauthier, even if they were going to “do it themselves,” still needed some capital to get the collective masturbation going, hence the financial involvement of Butchie.
Alas, Gauthier was paid back in pain after delivering so much pleasure to the perverse masses. After all, just because he was a trailblazer didn’t mean he was going to be “rightly” credited as one. Tellingly, Tower Records as a fixture of L.A. comes into full effect again when one of the cashiers there, in typical “philosophical record store employee” fashion, tells Rand, “David Bowie said, ‘Never be the first to do anything’—and he probably wasn’t the first to say it.” Because, in being the “first” to exploit the tape, Gauthier not only didn’t make a cent from it, but the entire tale became the stuff of Greek tragedy in that he “staked his livelihood on a video in the hopes that it would save him. Instead he watched his life fall apart as his greed destroyed nearly every shred of happiness he’d carved out for his adult self.” Pam and Tommy illustrates that reality as something like a “karmic balance” when, in fact, it’s just another reiteration of how capitalism fools the hoi polloi into believing they can “hit the big time”/“get rich quick” if they’re just willing to “get creative” (read: jettison any moral conscience).
The show is also eager to spotlight the same theme the article touches on, which is that, “The Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape taught us… that an unassuming individual could acquire a piece of content, offer it up to the internet and watch it ricochet around the planet. How, exactly, this footage traveled from a locked safe to screens and store shelves worldwide warns of everything that was coming in the next two decades, everything that would shift in technology and culture and celebrity. Before Kim Kardashian, before TMZ, before RedTube, before the Fappening, there was Pam and Tommy.” Yet, rather than being horrified by this prospect, many could still only see the dollar signs of what a sex tape could do in terms of garnering publicity. Which is why in the 00s, it became a running joke that leaking a sex tape and feigning dismay about it was the surefire way to reinvigorate any career.
But, obviously, the majority of celebrities and non-celebrities alike don’t feel too jazzed about the constant paranoia that comes with being “exposed” in some way thanks to the “wonders” of the internet. Lewis adds, “Everyone laughed derisively at the tacky rock star and his blonde bimbo when the tape came out, but over the next few decades we all faced the same loss of control. The tape’s slippery path into the public realm is a product of its unfortunate place at the fulcrum of two eras, before and after the internet came to dominate commerce and communication, and its popularity demonstrated what rules our new, hyper-connected world might demand. We all know that the funhouse mirror narrative of whatever gets recorded could end up defining us on the front page or in a government database…”
And little old “nobody” Rand Gauthier was instrumental to bringing that very relevant, very omnipresent notion to the forefront of our current dystopian landscape. Which just goes to show: always fucking pay the help. Because who knows? Maybe if Tommy had simply settled his debts, no one else would have thought to sell celebrity porn without their consent on the internet.
