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The only European director through the 1990s to gain the acclaim of American pornographers like Gerard Damiano, Anthony Spinelli and Alex deRenzy, Alberto Ferro was born in Algiers in 1936, the son of a diplomat.

Like Sweden's Berthe Milton, he moved constantly but unlike the owner of Private he never learned to settle down.

Ferro spent WWII in Frankfurt am Main and Belgrade before returning to Italy. He attended the Leo XIII Jesuit college in Milan. "I've been interested in sex since I was seven years old," Ferro says. "I've always loved sex and always masturbated." The priests expelled him. (From the 1988 book Porn Gold)

Alberto got kicked out of another school before his father sent him to the elite Montana Zugerberg International Institute in the mountains above Zurich. Enjoying the permissive atmosphere, he sold copies of Hugh Hefner's nude Marilyn Monroe calendar to fellow students.

After graduation, Alberto attended the Modern Philosophy School at the Sorbonne in Paris. He devoured the thought of existentialists like Sartre and Camus. "My philosophy is the philosophy of pleasure."

Alberto moved to the University of Milan in 1961. He admitted at the time to paying for fourteen abortions in the previous five years. "Fourteen mistakes out of two thousand ejaculations is not bad going." (Porn Gold)

On September 20, 1961, he read in the newspaper that a young man, with the same surname as one of his Milanese girlfriends, had been arrested in Genoa by the Italian police for carrying three suitcases of pornography bought in Monte Carlo. Alberto called his girlfriend who, in tears, said that the man arrested was her older brother Dino. Ferro suggested to Dino's lawyer, inexperienced in matters of "obscenity," a line of defense that Alberto had researched six years previously for his doctorate in Law thesis at Milan State University: Representation of licit sex cannot be considered illicit. After getting Dino out of jail, Ferro chased up the lad's source of porn to a tobacco shop in Brussels, Belgium.

A ne'er do well son of a diplomat, Alberto belonged to the Italian Diplomatic Corps in Austria. Able to speak five European languages, Ferro drove through customs with impugnity in a Mercedes with DC license plates. Operating out of his home in the Netherlands, he traveled around the world from 1962 to 1967 distributing explicit books and magazines.

Ferro almost got arrested for smuggling in 1967. So he put magazine publishing on hold to concentrate on shooting loops. In July 1967, while on holiday on the island of Elba, off the western coast of Italy, he made his first porn film starring himself and his girlfriend 'Laura.' Inspired by her almond-shaped eyes, he cast her as Madame Butterfly in a hardcore interpretation of Puccini's opera.

Alberto was so pleased with Golden Butterfly, he started his own 8mm porn production company based in Stockholm, AB BETA. He placed the following ad in a couple of Italian mens magazines: "Swedish film-production company seeks contacts with Italian collectors of 8mm films. Adults only. Request a catalogue by sending 1,000 lira to:…."

The orders poured in, allowing Ferro to finance new porn films. But first he had to flee Italy on the last day of March, 1968 to escape police. It was twelve years before he could return to his homeland.

Raising sufficient funds from his catalogue orders, he made five films in Stockholm, including Chains, Suzie LaBlonde and Blowup 69. Next Alberto flew to the Caribbean. He picked up women in discos that he used in his Tropical series of 8mm loops.

Back in Sweden, he received a visit from police warning him that their Italian peers had circulated details about his arrest warrant through the Interpol network. Worried, Ferro decided to change his name. He asked his carpenter, "Do you travel a lot?"

"No, I like Sweden too much. I sometimes go to Finland because that's where my wife comes from."

"What's your name?" asked Ferro.

"Lasse Braun."

"If you don't travel much, can I borrow your name? I'll pay you a fee for it." (Porn Gold)

They made a deal and Ferro became Lasse Braun. He moved to Copenhagen in Denmark where he churned out loops for Peter and Jens Theander.

Called the "Pope of Porn," Lasse sold millions of dollars worth of loops to American Reuben Sturman who began flying regularly to Denmark in 1969 to buy hardcore that included children, bondage and animals. (What Wild Ecstasy, p. 54)

They talked for the first time in 1970. Reuben was excited by his first sight of "double penetration," in Lasse's film Delphi in Greece. He wanted to buy US rights for that loop and others (50 eventually).

"The deal was incredible," recalls Braun. "Over the next four years, they made a million copies of each one of them. Fifty million copies in all. This was before Caballero even got started. For all those years, the top thirty or so short films were mine."

The loops probably grossed $2 billion in four years, far outpacing Deep Throat's gross of $100 million.

Shortly after the release of Behind the Green Door, Lasse Braun in Europe shot his first feature, the quasi-documentary French Blue, showcasing his protegee Brigitte Maier. In 1974, Blue became the first hardcore film to appear at the Cannes Film Festival. During the first two months of 1975, Lasse made his masterpiece Sensations with $250,000 from his American friend Reuben Sturman.

English pornographer Tuppy Owens appeared in the opening sequence of the movie. In 1992 she published the book "The Making of Sensations." Tuppy is best known for her Sex Maniacs Diary. Her research into porn has brought her into close contact with leading figures, including Harry Reems who did her up the ass in Blackfriars underpass under the watch of a City of London police constable.

"This film will be shown not only in my porno cinemas," she quotes Braun saying, "but will be in the major cinemas too. I like the idea of having it in both. I know that the hypocritical pricks who control countries normally try to keep pornography from the people. They want the people to work and be ignorant of sex. Ignorant of long, wild f---ing, and ashamed to masturbate. That is why my pornography shows aristocratic ladies being f---ed by truck drivers, and it cuts through class and makes the powerful look weak. For centuries power has controlled pornography; it is time that pornography controlled power instead. This is why there must not be any one thing about my film which you can call a gimmick."

Sensations became the first and only European porno to become a hit in America. And for good reason. Not only is it Alberto's best film, it is Europe's best porno.

Alberto Ferro's Scandinavian mistress Lykke came up with story of an innocent American girl named Margaret (played by Brigitte Maier) debauched by decadent Europeans. "Her nose is going pink in the cold, Alberto, and her light brown hair looks scruffy in the wind," Lykke told Ferro. "She's taking a year off to travel Europe…and is staying with her grandmother in a small bungalow on the outskirts of London.

"It often happens in late adolescence, when a young girl is suddenly lost and lonely, far from home…that to comfort herself…she'll begin playing with her own cunt and nipples…to produce every sensation possible…." (Making of Sensations)

Ferro worked on the script with his young French star Veronique. "For the Americans, we only write the action. The action itself will be hot and this is political expression; when they see that f---ing and eroticism need not be shameful and people can be free to f--- in films… This film will show the American people how innocent they and stupid they are - they will identify with Margaret, who must be played by an American, who learns in Europe about freedom.

"In Europe, people will understand different things about the film, but we are making it for the Americans and there must be plenty of kinky sex and close-up photography…."

Alberto flew to Cleveland in 1974 with Brigitte Maier to meet with Reuben Sturman. "There must be one facet of the film which will attract the rich, one that will attract the trendy, one for the middle class, one for the snobs, one for the anti-snobs, one for the workers, one for the women, one for the homosexuals…Jews, Gentiles, blacks…. They all rush to see the film because they want to see this specific sex scene which is relevant to their own fantasy. Then the lights come up in the cinema and they see that they are alll together. They all paid five dollars and sit side by side. This is a political statement of Lasse Braun." (Making of Sensations)

Writes Tuppy: "Alberto was desperate to convince Franklin [Sturman]…. Yet so far he showed little enthusiasm. He sat, expressionless, listening to Alberto enthusing and gesticulating over his film story. Franklin's strength was his silence; Alberto's was his gusts of vivid imagery, colored even brighter by his bizarre English and his forceful hand gestures."

Meanwhile Brigitte took off her clothes and sidled across the floor to Sturman who pressed a button, locking the room. Reuben puffed on his pipe and rocked in his chair as his dick grew in Brigitte's mouth.

While Alberto talked on, the little Jew gradually lost his composure. His eyes shut tight and his lips pushed forward. Maier sucked him in slow steady gulps. As the veins in his forehead swelled, he shot his spunk down the porn star's mouth.

"I'm prepared to let you have $50,000," Reuben told Alberto shortly afterward. "But this is dependent on many factors and we'll be discussing those with my attorney…" (Making of Sensations)

A group of Dutchmen gathered at a bar to discuss working as crew members on Lasse's film. Luke knew that their strength lay in making sex clearly visible and beautiful. Deep Throat was sloppy compared to Braun's work. A deep throat should be back lit and shiny, showing the profile of the lips and the whole cock plunging in and out.

Alberto's crew read the script how the American sucks on the cock of a businessman named David. Margaret tells him, "Don't spend it in my mouth."

So David walks over to some foreign models engaged in a sixty-nine and waves his erection over them. They lap it up before he chooses the Vietnamese to get it straight up the ass. Each time he pulls out, he can see on his cock covered with feces.

Martha, the sturdy black, watches the buggery openmouthed. "The turdy cock leaps from the turdy orifice," writes Tuppy, "to pale pink interior of mouth, is scraped along brilliant white teeth, and then disappears back up the dark brown passage once more….His cock pulsates and empties into her ass. The camera lingers to record the seeping out of chocolate sauce, hot and steaming, flowing down a pale yellowy-brown thigh." (Making of Sensations)

Tuppy Owens wrote to a friend about Ferro's directing style. "Alberto makes every gesture, every probing finger sharp and obvious. I'm surprised he hasn't used the sigmoidoscope to film right inside the cunt and anus…. He treats his actors with great respect. He instructs the f---ing like a friendly uncle, sometimes rushing forward to add a little saliva if your cunt is drying under the strong lights…" (Making of Sensations)

Ferro shot Sensations in the first two months of 1975, in Belgium, Holland and England. Most of the cast (Veronique Monet, Frederique Barral, Pierre Latour, Nicole Velna and 66-year old Jean Villroy) came courtesy of French beauty Sylvia Bourdon. Most of them had never appeared in a porno.

Ferro shot on Eastman Kodak stock which was edited in London.

Because Brigitte Maier was American, her voice was dubbed for the German version by Munich actress Uschi Wolff. She simulated many of the non-talking parts of the soundtrack by sucking a sugar cube close to the microphone.

Alberto believed that porn made a political statement, writes Tuppy. She remembered her time at the Cannes Film Festival in the summer of 1975 which screened Sensations. "These people - film moguls and town boys and girls - had suddenly been transformed. Would they now go into the streets and cheer the sexy posters, bow down to the prostitutes…press their faces against the windows of people's houses, and clap at them as they thrashed away at each other underneath cotton bedspreads? Would the women adopt a new attitude to wolf whistles and stop in the street to expose a breast and the triangle of curly hair at the top of their legs? Was the human race at last going to rejoice at sex?" (Making of Sensations)

In 1987, Ferro told the authors of the book Porn Gold: "I will never forget the international Cannes audience's reaction to Sensations. My film was screened for seven nights in a row at midnight. For about an hour before, the Olympia was already packed with people who wanted to be sure to get one of its 800 seats to see my movie. Outside every night, there were thousands of festivaliers, crowding the Rue d'Antibes, fighting to enter the Olympia through the inadequate police protection."

In 1992, Owens finally published her book The Making of Sensations. She wrote it 1976 but couldn't find a publisher.

Tuppy cites AIDS as the major difference between the present era and 1975. She remembers how "most of the cast and crew were complaining of little sores and spots around their private parts, and nobody knew what these were… Herpes… Had we known that we were giving each other…this incurable condition…we would never have acted as we did…"

Sensations became a cult movie, not as successful as Deep Throat or as critically acclaimed as The Devil in Miss Jones. "Sensations has not had any profound sociological, cinematographic or cultural influence. Nor did it form a core of artists and performers that went on to do more things together… After Deep Throat's success, the porno market was flooded with mediocre American films, the eighties saw yuppyism, a new puritanism, AIDS and antisex feminism…." (Making of Sensations)

Alberto never made another epic and Reuben Sturman eventually got jailed for cheating on his taxes.

Bill Margold and Jim Holliday rank Sensations as the best non-American porn film ever. "Lasse Braun is in the deRenzy mold," writes Holliday in the 8/86 edition of AVN, "an eccentric genius who shoots masterful sex films when he's in top form. Sensations demonstrates that there is nothing better than a great foreign film. I would rate this French film as the hottest foreign entry ever made, and even on a professional level, Sensations belongs in the all-time top five...so sumptuous that sex is an art.

"Braun's penchants give his pictures a singular tilt toward the kinky side of town. His characters are as interested in the psychological aspects and the interpersonal dynamics of sex as the mechanics and sensations of it. The individual's need to control is in conflict with his wish to let go, and out of this struggle comes much of the tension and drama in a Braun movie.

"Europeans seem to have a culturally derived attitude toward screen sex that gives their pictures a distinctive quality different from those made in America. When Braun came to this country [in the early '80s], he established his enterprise in New York, where porno styles seem more akin to those in Europe than the Los Angeles variety."

Bill Margold says "Sensations goes where Emmanuelle could only dream about. Sensations is loaded with beautiful people the least of which is Brigitte Maier, whose acting ability could fit in the space between her two front teeth with room left over for a Boy Scout troop. But Brigitte merely has to react to the splayed sights and sucking sounds of those around her until she becomes the main dish in a sexual feast."

"Foreign films have posed both problems and delights for American viewers," writes Holliday. "I've discovered that the public either loves or hates foreign films. The plus side presents the unique, sophisticated style of eroticism and the different feel (fewer monster shots)... The minus side focuses on issue of dubbing... Raincoaters also have problems with anything that is not 90 minutes of close-up genitalia raunch."

In 1976, Ferro made two films (Love Inferno and Body Love) for German porn distributor Manfred Metz, a friend of American David Friedman.

Then rival German pornographer Gerd Wasmund hired him to shoot a series of loops that became Sex Maniacs and Sin Dreamer. Alberto abandoned the production partway to move to America. His visa ran out days afterward and he was stuck in Malibu for several years.

In 1980, Braun returned to work with American Desire, shot in New York and Connecticut. Veronica Hart and Robert Bolla portray a young couple whose sexual excitement is dimming. They've lived together so long that Bolla lacks spontaneity in bed. Looking at his penis under the covers, Hart says, "He doesn't seem to be in the mood."

Bolla keeps watching TV.

"Poor thing. I think he's broken... Seems to be a case of sexual fadeout... I feel like an old married woman... It's gone. We don't have it anymore."

American Desire seeks to reveal American hangups and declining values but ends up vague.

Then in 1984, with porn filmmaking in decline, Ferro accepted an offer from the Dark Brothers, backed by Reuben Sturman, to knock out some videos. A 'friend' of Sturman's proposed allocating three days to make each one.

"The 'friend' said he would appoint a production manager who was the very best," Ferro told David Hebditch and Nick Anning, the authors of the 1988 book Porn Gold. "But it turned out that he was very confused, he didn't seem to have the accounts and didn't know what he was doing. So anyway, we started the production.

"The contract was for six pieces, made to a budget of $25,000 each. They paid me a separate fee in advance - the whole amount, everything I wanted. So, I wrote six screenplays for three cheap ones and three more elaborate ones - we had 14 days to make them in. I thought that was ok. So I said: 'Let's take the first seven days and make the three cheap ones, then we'll review the situation.'

"But when the three cheap ones were finished, we had used practically the whole budget. I said, 'God, why? They were all broken down, there would be six sex scenes, so many ejaculations and so on.'

"I wanted to stick to the contract so, in the end, he said, 'We have four days to make the last three videos.' I had to change all the screenplays, because the cheapest ones had now become the expensive ones and the last three become the cheapest.

"After I'd finished rewriting these things he said 'No, it's not four days, it's three.' I said, 'You're out of your mind. I can't do this.' So I start to change them again. When I'd finished that, he said: 'It's still impossible, it has to be done in two days.' He said either you call the backer and tell him we are out of budget, or you have to do it in two days.

"The problem was that someone had told them how much money I made and for them it was an enormous amount. But what can I say? What can I do? So we finally had two days. I'd shot four hours outside the day before and they f---ed up there - no sound. So we had to re-do that with the sound. A nightmare. Now I have twenty-eight hours to do three films plus the four hours before to re-do. That makes thirty-two hours. So it's less than eleven hours each. I had to make eighteen sex scenes in two days."

Lasse's efforts included Flasher and Young Nympho which starred English performer Paula Meadows.

"Back home, Lasse Braun has a reputation as long as both your arms," writes AFW in 1987. "He began making movies when you could spend $300,000 on a feature and still earn a profit. The adjustment to American video must have been difficult for him, as the typical feature now costs less than 10% of that figure and must be completed in two days at the most, preferably one. Braun's videos retain some of the mystery, manipulation intrigue and novelty of his films."

Young Nympho reveals a couple who wish to extend their sexual experiences. "Braun sets his scenes so well that we are excited even before the action starts.

"Temptations of the Flesh further explores the consequences of acting out one's fantasies.

"One of the pluses of a Braun movie or video is his sense of color. He has an unerring knack with combinations of color to enhance the images and make the ladies look good. He favors 'interesting' performers, those who look as though there might be something going on inside. Siobhan Hunter has been making frequent appearances in his videos, leading to speculation whether she might be to Braun what Brigitte Maier was in the mid-70s." (AFW)

A prominent New York prostitute and performer in live sex shows, Siobhan began as a member of the New York Rep Company of Perverse Players in several Lasse Braun videos. "…This long-legged, auburn-haired colleen quickly caught the eye of producers." (AFW 1/87)

Siobhan developed as an adult film actress under the guidance of Chuck Vincent and Henri Pachard. She appears in Divorce Court Expose, Hotel California and Rio Heat.

Lasse Braun's Hidden Fantasies "takes the experiment a step further into the area of power games, with Michael Gaunt instructing Kristare Barrington in the liberating aspects of yielding authority. Long full shots give a sense of one-to-one time; that is, one minute of reality gets a full minute on screen. This draws the viewer into the scene and makes the camera unobtrusive." (AFW)

In Flasher, "A demented Billy Dee runs around in the park, alternating shocking and delighting various ladies with his open raincoat."

Secret Mistress: "Robert Bullock stars as Steven, a young writer who shies away from the horny girls who surround him, determined to remain true to his secret love, Susan whom the others are never allowed to meet. The picture is crammed with volcanic sex, right up to the mindboggling orgy." (AFW 7/87)

After a three year hiatus, Lasse Braun produced 1990's Fantasy Nights with help from cameraman Alex deRenzy and director Henri Pachard. "Married to her friend from high school Jon Dough, her only lover, Victoria Paris dreams about acts she's never done. "...A wonderful erotic outing based on a woman's disillusionment when her real life fails to live up to her sexual fantasies and dreams. Plenty of varied and different sex... An intelligent, sophisticated and sexually timely taste of erotica." (AFW p.256)

Braun lives between Rome, Amsterdam and Los Angeles.