Finally caught up this morning with The Real Dirk Diggler: The John Holmes Story (actually a UK doco from 2000 originally titled XXXL: The John Holmes Story), which I’d recorded off Foxtel earlier in the week - covers most of the same territory as the great Wadd documentary from 1998, and revealed nothing really new about Holmes fascinatingly sordid and surprisingly complex life, but was still worthwhile for some of its great clips of old Sunset Strip motels and Pussycat adult cinemas, and some rare memorabilia and behind the scenes footage from one of Holmes’ Johnny Wadd porn film sets. Not to mention the interview footage of Holmes’ last significant partner, poor deluded Laurie Rose (aka ‘Anal Queen Misty Dawn’), who moments after telling us she never touched drugs points to the bathroom window of the old Hollywood house she lived in and refers to it as “a great room to freebase in”. She remains convinced that Holmes truly loved her, displays painful inner turmoil and denial when being confronted with hearing that he loved having ‘warm-up’ sex with his co-stars, and still believes he treated her like shit for “my own protection”.
