[FICTION][05/13/2026]Meet John Dough
by Larry Smith
There’s a big buzz right now in New York and Los Angeles. FET Productions has just released The Dirty Doings in Danville, a polyamorous romp through Middle America featuring some of the juiciest sex scenes ever filmed, and not just because the body parts on display are hot, hot, hot. In the eight years that this site of ours has been reviewing and reporting on the adult entertainment industry, we’ve never seen such an exuberant presentation of so many diverse sexual identities and preferences. Today, right at the time when the hordes of heartland hypocrites are moving to legislate gay, transgendered, S&M, interracial, golden showers, cuckolding, pegging—you name it—out of existence, director Radley McGhee’s new movie reveals the sultry, desperate, naked facts of life that the evangelicals and their fascist friends don’t want you to know about.
Yet even within the confines of the adult industry itself, or among the loyal filmgoers who have been supporting free expression in the cinema since the mid-20th century, The Dirty Doings in Danville represents a watershed of sorts. Back in the day, audiences were too fastened on simple straight fucking and, may it be said, were turned off and likely more than a little threatened by bisexual antics of one sort or another, at least involving men. Today, however, they’re flocking to this movie, or they soon will be, fired by the excitement of not knowing who’s going to be doing whom or how. As such, this raucous orgy of a film is culturally significant, not only for its fresh directions in plot and action, but also because it underscores a new maturity in the X-rated community. And, it brings a wit and a rhythm to its multifaceted narrative that is certainly a welcome improvement on the soulless mechanical porn that continues to populate the Internet. It’s as if that awful online stuff has sated its audiences, expended and exhausted their raw instincts, so that they’re finally open now to a far classier, far more human dynamic.
Take our word for it, that buzz in New York and Los Angeles won’t be confined for long to those or any other megalopolis. We believe that The Dirty Doings in Danville will soon be shaking rafters wherever movie theaters have rafters to shake. Oh, it’s going to play in Peoria which, after all, is only 123 miles from Danville, a 1-hour-51-minute drive in light traffic.
Radley McGhee is, of course, an old friend of this website and always a natural to participate in any Q&A concerning his work. Yet in this instance Radley had the suggestion that it might be interesting and informative for our readers if we were to first interview John Dough, male lead of The Dirty Doings in Danville.
It is a breakthrough role for John after a dozen or so impressively acrobatic performances in lesser movies. Of course we look forward to also talking again to Radley in the near future but his suggestion was a great one. John Dough is indeed a wonderfully engaging young gentleman with keen insights into his industry, this particular movie, and his own personal life—about which, as you’ll see, John is marvelously candid. We’re excited to be a part of his rise to stardom and we expect that the interview which you are about to read is only the first in a long succession of collaborations with us here on this site and on YouTube. We’re excited and we’re proud…
How did you get this role?
John Dough: You should check with Radley for a fuller insight but, based on some things he’s said to me, it seems he was very impressed by my performance in Saddle Up Cynthia, the film I did just before The Dirty Doings in Danville. He was looking for someone whose face would express a range of emotions, not just lust or deep sexy satisfactions, but even deeper emotions than that, deeper emotions and deep vulnerabilities. Like in the scene where I’m fucking Cynthia for the first time, Radley said my face looked simultaneously so savage and so wounded that he was thinking, gee, he’s just like a real person, and he told me, half-jokingly, that he was thinking how nice it would be to get behind while I was doing Cynthia so that he could saddle me up too. But don’t get me wrong, there was never any serious thing between us, there was never anything between us at all, sure as hell no quid pro quo. I mean, Radley is as straight as they come. He was totally professional in our relationship and I felt privileged to take direction from him during the shoot, like in the scene where I reach up into Jane Lane’s buttock. Radley cut from my finger up Jane’s ass to our two faces close together and, as the camera settled on my face, Radley whispered in my ear, ‘You’ve wanted this woman’s ass ever since the two of you were growing up together in suburbia and, now that it’s happening, now that it’s really finally happening, let me see the satisfaction it gives you.” Jane and I felt this bond, you see, since we both come from very modest circumstances, and we both kind of stood in awe of Radley, we still do, since unlike the two of us he was truly to the manor born. But now we were all together, rich and poor commingling in the magic land of anal penetration.
Do you often forge deep bonds with your co-stars?
John Dough: Yes, particularly when they’re relatively new to the industry. With people like that, I’m pretty good at creating a comfort zone, often by digging even deeper into their hesitancies and hidden trepidations. One woman on the set of… Well, I won’t say what film, but it was her first fucking scene ever, so for a rehearsal I invited her to dance naked for me and a couple of the technicians on the set. I didn’t touch her then, I responded to her dancing with affection and respect so that, when the time came to do the scene, it was like we were already old friends. Affection and respect are really important when you do these films. The hotter the scene, the more important that affection and respect become.
But that’s not quite the norm, is it?
John Dough: Hell no. Remember how I got pegged in Roughhouse in Reno? No one treated me with much affection and respect when the time came to do that scene.
How did you get into the adult entertainment business?
John Dough: I started with low-budget Internet videos and made some good friends that way. One thing led to another and soon I was off to New York to meet Thaddeus Himmel who at the time had a wild studio down on Franklin Street. It was my impression that maybe half of what was going on at his place really had nothing to do with money and everything to do with Thaddeus’ own personal delectations. He was a horny toad if ever there was one but he was pretty encouraging and on a couple of occasions paid me to do some girls just so he could watch. Thad couldn’t get enough action of one sort or another, which was a little scary at first but in this business you’ve got to tolerate diversity. As to why I chose this industry over some other, maybe everybody making these films has a different reason for doing so. Poverty in general can make people do very different things for very different reasons. Some people become criminals, some become very passive and dependent, some like me fall into something and stick with it because it just seems to sail you into a different and better life. Right now I have a great apartment in West L.A. and I eat at great restaurants all over town. And I travel for pleasure, which is something I never thought I would ever have the means to do. Unfortunately, my next scheduled trip was to have been to Maui but, you know, this climate change business is serious shit.
Tell us something about your personal background.
John Dough: I grew up not far from Sacramento in a garden apartment, one of about twenty such units set on a kind of promontory overlooking a little valley that led off to a trailer park two or three miles further down the slope. I never knew most of our neighbors by name but I did invent names for some of the ones I’d run into every other day or so. There was “Falldown,” a Cuban refugee I think he was, who was always falling down because he was always drunk. Then there was the guy I called “Harum Scarum,” a big blustery guy who I think was always beating his wife or pulling her hair or something like that, or at least that’s what the wife would tell my mother. I guess the two women knew each other fairly well. One day these punks knocked on our door wanting to see my father. They went away without incident when Mom told them that Dad had been gone for a few days, she didn’t know where, but I did recognize them as having connections to a local meth clinic. So naturally it got me to wondering if my father was also part of that action and, to tell you the truth, I’m still wondering. I also wondered how my mother managed to pay the rent and, honestly, I’m still wondering about that too. The super or landlord or whatever he was, he was pretty conspicuous around the units, so naturally I wondered if there was some sort of an arrangement between him and my mother.
To tell you the truth, there are a lot of things I’m still wondering about. Yes, a lot. I lost my virginity to a woman in those apartments whom I used to call “Sweet Meat” as I never knew her actual name either or the names of the two kids who lived with her. One day I walked past her unit on my way to my own and her door was open and when I peeked in I could see her lying naked on this ratty old sofa that she had facing the door. I lingered and looked and, when she saw me, she smiled and as I walked in I picked up on this rancid almost nauseating scent. I don’t know, it was weird but, as I walked in, that scent, foul as it was, it really got to me, it took me to a place I had never been before, and I got really aroused and so I let nature take its course and I really unloaded on her. It wasn’t until I finished that I realized that the two kids were in the next room, so they must have heard everything and maybe they had peeked in too and watched, I’ll never know Funny thing, right now at this moment that scent just makes me want to gag as I recall it but at the time it got me really excited.
I never graduated from high school but when I was eighteen I started auditing some classes at a local community college where I learned a lot about psychology, animal husbandry, and world literature. At one point, out of the blue, my father started calling me, I mean like every goddamn day, and to this day I don’t know what he was wanting from me. My dad was a car dealer by day and a musician by night and a drunk and speed freak 24/7. It was a given, something I knew and Mom knew without our ever having to discuss it, that he’d not be sharing any of his fairly meager earnings with anyone, least of all with me and Mom. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Buddy Boy, you’re white thrash, that’s what you are. White thrash!’ I felt a particular shame at that because there was no excuse for our being the way we were. I mean, we were what we were but no one ever made us that way, no one ever dragged us out of West Africa.
L.A. felt like paradise when I first got there. I started hanging out at Pershing Square where there was still some hustle action, not like in the old days, but enough that I could pay my rent and go on surviving unless I got AIDS or something, which obviously I never did.
So you were having a bisexual lifestyle long before you ever made The Dirty Doings in Danville?
John Dough: Yes, but you have to understand something. There are worlds, and I guess the world I grew up in is one of those worlds, where sex is just sex. Life is just suck and fuck, whoever you are and whomever you’re fucking and sucking or whoever happens to be fucking and sucking you. I don’t have distinctive memories of any of those Pershing Square guys except this one guy, a young German who bragged about being the grandson of genuine bona fide Nazis from Germany itself in the 1940s. He was too young and handsome to be a John but we did it with each other anyway. I told him a little white lie that I was a Jew and I acted like a Jew while we were doing it. He loved it. Man, he loved it! And I loved acting like a Jew, so much so that one day, maybe a month or two later, this guy on Venice Beach who was standing in front of The Schul By the Sea asked me as I was passing by if I was Jewish, he asked me that because they needed one more warm body to come into the synagogue and join them and make it kosher for them to start their praying and all. You see, they’ve got to have a certain number of Jews in attendance before they’re allowed to pray together, so when this guy, I guess he was the rabbi, asked me if I was Jewish, I said, ‘Sure I’m Jewish.’ So I went in and I put on one of those little beany caps they’re supposed to wear, and then off we all went, chanting huzzah and hallelujah and all like that. Back we all went to the ancient days, back to the ancient days of the Canaanites and the Philistines and the who-knows-who-else.
So John Dough was already an actor, right?
John Dough: You’re perceptive.
What do you think makes The Dirty Doings of Danville so important?
John Dough: I’d underscore two things. First is what you and I discussed offline and what you seemed particularly excited about, which is how The Dirty Doings in Danville brings together so many different sexual orientations and interests. Guys who would never normally tolerate the sight of other guys having sex with each other will now be entranced by the voluptuous montage that defines the mood and feel of this movie. The Dirty Doings in Danville will change the world as only great works of art can change the world. It will make people more tolerant, it will make them more sensitive to all the many ways in which sensuosity is visible and imaginable, it will make them savor not just the mechanical fucking—boring!—and obligatory cum shots—too boring for words!—but they, they being all kinds of people, will be seduced and compelled and humanized by the truly erotic—for example, the truly erotic as exemplified by Radley in the hot sudden astonishments of his characters as they yearn for it and really want it and just have to have it. You know what I’m talking about? It’s no longer just pornographic, it is truly and sustainably erotic. Am I making sense?
Here, I’d say, is another fundamental example of how the genius of Radley McGhee came to the fore. For example, take that scene where the Jamie Garrot character fucks the young butler (I don’t know that actor’s name). Even a homophobe will be aroused and maybe even thrilled by how Jane’s character gets involved, how she applies the jelly to the young butler’s anus and then lubes up Jamie’s penis. The look in their eyes, their smiles—the hunger in Jane’s eyes as she ponders what she is about to witness, and what the hapless butler is about to experience—the six eyes of the three characters register what I’d describe as a prepossessing delirium. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ass that’s about to get it, or a puss, or a mouth. It is the expectancy and the almost pathetic acquiescence of the young man that will captivate a diverse audience. It will haunt their dreams. It will haunt all dreams, all the dreams of humanity, because, simply enough. it is erotic for sure—let me emphasize that key word erotic one more time—a for-sure eroticism that will de-realize all sexual barriers and pummel resistant audiences into collective ecstasy. And the butler’s reaction to getting fucked? Well, Radley didn’t script it, he just told the young man to react naturally and the scene would be edited later if necessary. As it turned out, there was very little editing needed, practically none. Radley can make an actor comfortable and creative and committed even with a big thick dick up his ass.
‘De-realize,’ ‘prepossessing”… John, you have a spectacular vocabulary for someone who never graduated from high school.
John Dough: Thank you, I do take a certain amount of pride in it. Just because someone is born in a pigsty doesn’t mean he has to oink his way through life. Now I guess would be a right moment to once again thank Radley McGhee for helping elevate my game. I’ve learned so much from him.
What else were you going to say about why The Dirty Doings in Danville is so important?
John Dough: Formal integrity! Let me explain what I mean by that. When I say “formal integrity,” I mean there’s a lot more here than a story and a succession of action scenes. I mean that the whole thing is organized in a way to maximize the coherence of Radley’s vision and to tell the story—it doesn’t matter what the story is—as if Shakespeare or Dante were telling it. Have you read Dante, the Divine Comedy? It is a great long poem, the first part, the Inferno, being the most famous. Dante’s whole approach, what I call his formal integrity, had a direct impact on Radley’s work in The Dirty Doings in Danville or so it seems to me. I’m thinking of how Dante corrals his mighty epic into triads, groups of three. There are three parts to the whole poem, each part has 33 chapters, each chapter unfurls in groups of three lines of verse. Well, Radley does something very similar in his masterpiece.
Think about the three women who appear as a trio on three occasions, at the beginning and at the middle and at the end of the movie. Three women appearing three times and each time there are three distinct offerings, one from each of them. In the beginning, the motif is flowers, so one woman puts a daisy between her legs and the second woman puts a geranium in her mouth, and the third woman puts a sunflower up her ass. In the middle of the film, the motif is supplication so one woman begs on her knees and the second woman breathes ‘please, please, please’ as she masturbates and the third woman opens her thighs and begs, ‘give me the dick, give me the dick, give the dick.’ At the end, the motif is gratitude, so one woman kisses my feet and the second woman licks my testicles and the third woman hands me her panties as a souvenir. See what I mean? Threes are wild just like in Dante but, seven or eight-hundred years after Dante, I guess I’d say that Radley’s film is now more relevant. You know, what Radley is doing here is what the Communists in Russia used to call “decadent formalism.” But Communism collapsed. Communism just doesn’t work. But The Dirty Doings in Danville works, it works big-time.
And let me remind you and your readers that this whole Dante thing is only one example of how Radley expertly trained his compositional instincts on this material and made it sing like a sonata. There is formal integrity everywhere you look in this movie. Other films may do the same, especially French films, I guess, but not to the extraordinary extent that Radley does it here and certainly not as enjoyably. Even classic French movies like Celine and Julie Go Boating don’t measure up. I know, I’ve watched it, and I sure don’t think it measures up. It’s just a glorified chick flick, that’s all, full of the cutesy, cloying shtick-shit that defines the chick flick genre.
What’s next on your agenda?
John Dough: I mentioned climate change before and it just so happens that Radley has this idea for a panoramic depiction of a global sexual madness that is caused by a strange and unforeseeable quirk in climatic conditions. This premise allows for any number of hot scenes and sequences involving the whole gamut of humankind: kings and presidents having crazy sex with each other as well as with their subjects juxtaposed with mendicants doing each other in back alleys. I will play a global troubleshooter and Jane may be playing my sidekick whom I’m constantly shielding from the maddened men and women we meet. Toward the end, our roles reverse and Jane saves me from a mass rape in Botswana.
Radley says it’ll be a few weeks before he irons some kinks out of the plot and probably a few months before we start shooting. I’m really looking forward to it. The tentative title for the film is Hot Times. You see, there’s a double meaning to that: “Hot” times as in hot sex and “Hot” times as in global warming. Like I say, the title is still tentative but, talking to Radley, one thing that’s not tentative is his resolve to really make a difference with this project. That’s so important, you know, to make a difference. When you direct or act in these kinds of movies, you need to remain cognizant of your role in the larger community and of the social and political impacts of your work on that community.
What’s the strangest things that has ever happened to you while making a movie?
John Dough: I’m not going to say what picture I was working on or name the young actress who was involved. But what happened was, I was about to do a fuck scene with her when I looked into her face and, when I looked into her face, I fell in love. It was like a thunderbolt. I just fell in love. Her face was so full of pain, it was like a century or two of deprivation had beached her here on this movie set with her thighs open before me. The pain in her eyes, the frailty! I wanted to scoop her right up and transport us both back to a childhood time when we could hold hands and start all over again. I loved her so much at that moment, I felt so much for her that I did the scene with my eyes closed and in order to perform I pretended she was someone else. I’ve seen her a few times since then, although we didn’t say all that much to each other on those occasions. Maybe she loves me too, who knows! The frailty, you’ve got to understand the frailty.
Thank you, John. This has been great.
John Dough: Oh thank you!
LARRY SMITH’S story collections, A Shield of Paris and Floodlands, were published by Adelaide Books. His novella, Patrick Fitzmike and Mike Fitzpatrick, was published by Outpost 19. A Pushcart-nominated writer, Smith's stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Serving House Journal, Sequestrum, Exquisite Corpse, The Collagist, and [PANK], among numerous others. His poetry has appeared in Descant (Canada) and elimae, among others. Smith lives in New Jersey.