Gabriel Boyer

It’s 1982 and the adult videotape market is just beginning to surge. Stephen Sayadian is in the process of making his second feature film, with the usual complications of the b-movie director: the entire film had to be shot over the course of eleven days in a small studio in the heart of downtown L.A.; electricity was being illegally patched in to power the equipment; and extras were recruited from a nearby blood bank and methadone clinic. The film was Café Flesh, a post-apocalyptic cult pornographic science fiction dystopian satire designed and directed by Sayadian (under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”) and co-written by Sayadian and Jerry Stahl (credited as “Herbert W. Day”), most famous for his work on ALF, Thirtysomething, and Moonlighting, and later as the subject of the 1998 biopic Permanent Midnight.