David Hurles Built Old Reliable Around Dangerous Ex-Convict Models—and Accepted Being Robbed as a Business Expense

Bizarre & Myths5/5 wildness

David Hurles Built Old Reliable Around Dangerous Ex-Convict Models—and Accepted Being Robbed as a Business Expense

David Hurles and Old Reliable Tape and Picture Company / 1970s–1980s

David Hurles's Old Reliable operation was unlike a conventional adult-film studio. Working largely alone from a San Francisco apartment and later in Los Angeles, he recruited men from the streets, through referrals, and from the margins of society—among them ex-convicts, drug addicts, hustlers, drifters, and men with histories of violence. Their appeal was not polish or conventional star quality but the sense of menace they projected: contemptuous attitudes, criminal bravado, anger, and the possibility that the performance might become genuinely unsafe. John Waters later celebrated this volatile aesthetic, describing Hurles's preferred subjects as 'psychos' and convicts. Hurles's own skill, according to accounts of his work, lay in managing men who could be unpredictable or dangerous well enough to complete a session without attacking him.