It’s hard to imagine the kind of person who would want to spend US$39.95 to download video footage of Jimi Hendrix supposedly having sex with two women in a hotel room.
But then, given the US$13 billion size of the US pornography market, the one thing that is certain is that such people exist.
Which is presumably why a Los Angeles-based porn company has decided to jump on to the new bandwagon of sexually explicit videos featuring dead superstars in compromising positions.
Vivid Entertainment Group, which presents itself as the world’s leading adult film company, has put together the 45-minute video, Jimi Hendrix the Sex Tape, which it is billing under the genre “sexual documentary.”
FOOTAGE
About a quarter of the video consists of 8mm footage, which Vivid says is genuine film of Hendrix dating from the late 1960s, in which he has dalliances with two “slender brunettes.”
A teaser posted on the firm’s Web site shows the guitarist — or a man resembling him — lying on a bed, his eyes closed, with the two women on top of him.
Vivid said it went to great lengths to confirm the authenticity of the film, which it bought from a sex-film distributor called Howie Klein.
In turn, Klein claims to have bought the footage from a collector who found it at a London auction a few years ago.
‘EXPERTS’
A private detective was brought in to check out the story, Vivid says, and “experts” in the field were consulted. The main “expert,” Cynthia Plaster Caster, has a truly unusual specialism.
An artist and self-described “recovering groupie,” she followed pop stars around in the 1960s and persuaded several — including Hendrix — to allow her to make plaster casts of their sexual organs.
“No doubt about it — that’s Jimi Hendrix, and I should know,” she says, as part of Vivid’s supporting evidence.
Whether that kind of expertise would hold up in a court of law is a moot point.
The Hendrix film arrives on the market at a time when doubts have already been sown about this new genre of sex expose — beyond-the-grave — amid claims of elaborate hoaxes.
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