Stephen Sayadian
Stephen Sayadian (18 October 1953) is an American film director, who worked as an advertising creative director for Larry Flynt's magazine Hustler, but previously also contributed satirical articles to Mad Magazine and National Lampoon.
In the early 1980s, Sayadian also won cult notoriety with his satirical porn films, Night Dreams (1981), Café Flesh (1982) and Dr. Caligari (1989), which satirized pornography, its actors and its audience in an artistic way, rather than just excite viewers with nudity and sex scenes. They were released under the pseudonym Rinse Dream and became hits in the midnight movie circuit.
Frank Zappa
In April 1984, Sayadian collaborated with Frank Zappa on a photographic special in Hustler, to promote his album Thing-Fish. During the photo shoots, Annie Ample was a model and Sergio Albonico the photographer.
Interviewed for interviewmagazine.com (22 July 2024), Sayadian reflected: "Frank called me out of the blue and said, "I like what you do." What Frank didn’t know, even though we became dear friends, was that I was a Zappa fanatic in high school. I bought his Freak Out! album in 1967 when I was 13 or 14 and fell in love with everything he did. My room at my parents’ house was like a shrine to Zappa and a few other people, including Mitzi Gaynor. But anyway, I finally told him, "I think what you responded to when you saw my work and liked it was not so much the work itself but the sensibility, which I stole much of from you, just subverting everything you can in an entertaining way." [1]
Zappa's track Damp Ankles was inspired by Sayadian. Interviewed on KNON FM (Dallas, Texas) (18 August 1989), he explained: "There's this guy named Steve Sayadian who used to be an art director at Hustler, and Steve is a truly unique individual, you, I mean, this is one of those truly one-of-a-kind type guys. And before he went to work for Larry Flynt he worked as an orderly in a mental institution, and his job—I mean this is gonna sound like a science fiction story, but you want to know about "Damp Ankles," here it is—his job, he was like the scoutmaster in the pinhead hut. And the pinheads liked him. And he had this, you know, like stay overnight with them in the pinhead hut, and they would express their appreciation by licking his ankle. And so he had to start wearing this muffs on his ankles." [2] This same anecdote is also repeated during Den Simms, Eric Buxton and Rob Samler's They're Doing the Interview of the Century, Part 3, Society Pages (US), September 1990.
