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242 Telegkapit Rd. • (248) 361-9435

"Futat

Portly, hairy and Jewish, Ron Jeremy is
the porn industry's biggest star. In a new
documentary, his story comes to the big screen.

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

'm just a nice Jewish boy
with one vice," says Queens
native Ron Jeremy. "Twenty-
three years of porn films."
. Scott J. Gill's documentary Porn Star:
The Legend of Ron Jeremy, which opens
today at Landmark's Main Art Theatre
in Royal Oak, chronicles the life and
times of the unlikeliest Jew in the
world — and the unlikeliest porn star.
The 48-year-old Jeremy dotes on his
family. They dote on him. His
dad's a physicist. His late
mother, a former book editor,
flew missions for the OSS (the
precursor to the CIA) during
World War II. His brother's a
Harvard-educated executive.
Most everyone else in the
family has at least a master's
degree. Jeremy earned his spe-
cial education master's from
Queens College in part to
help his disabled mom.
He looks more like your
Uncle Moe than a sex god.
But while he's not so easy on
the eyes (he's nicknamed "the
Hedgehog" because he's short,
fat and hairy), he's been paid
huge sums to bed more gor-
geous women than James Bond. Along
the way, he's become a pop culture icon.
"If a shlub like me can get lucky,
there's hope for everyone else," he says.
Gill's hilarious film — in which
Jeremy fans jubilantly declare, "He's
Jewish!" — stands apart from other
movies on the porn biz that have
emerged in the past decade.
While the documentary Sex: The
Annabel Chong Story and Paul Thomas
Anderson's Boogie Nights revolve
around severely disturbed people,
Jeremy emerges as a nice guy whose
angst mostly stems from his struggle
to `go legit" in mainstream films.
At its core, the flick poses the ques-
tion, "How did a hammy kid from
Bayside become the most recognized
male figure in adult film?"
Answers begin to emerge when the
documentary shows home movies of

the young Jeremy (born Ron Jeremy
Hyatt) mugging for the camera while
opening Chanukah presents.
"He's always been a performer," sug-
gests his sister, the advertising execu-
tive. "From the time he was in ele-
mentary school, he always wanted to
be the center of attention."
Jeremy says he was "the middle child
craving universal acceptance and
approval." One day when he was in
grade school, he marched home and
informed his mother his classmates
said he couldn't be Jewish without

Porn Star
Ron Jeremy,
pictured, was
invited to
Ground Zero
late last year
and given a
tour of the
World Trade
Center site,
signing
autographs all
along the way.
"I've showed
that Jews are
good lovers,"
he has said.

becoming bar mitzvah.
She promptly enrolled him in
Hebrew school, though after his bar
mitzvah, he admits in the film, "I
went to synagogue just for the Oneg
Shabbat. It was, 'The rabbi, the cantor
— nice guys. Where's the danish?'"
At home he helped bathe and feed
his mother, who had battled
Parkinson's disease since Jeremy was 8.
"At one point," he recalls, "she could-
n't even lift up her head."
Mom was confined to a nursing
home by the time Jeremy stumbled into
porn, after chucking a career teaching
disabled kids to become an actor.
His girlfriend had submitted a pho-
tograph of the then-svelte, well-
endowed Jeremy to Playgirl magazine
in 1978; soon after, a porn director
offered him a movie deal.
Though initially reluctant, the starving

