Shaun Costello

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Shaun Costello was a notorious cult porn director and actor in the 1970s and 1980s.

Costello directed such films as Forced Entry, Dominatrix Without Mercy, Water Power and Dracula Exotica. Costello's films are marked by their bizarre plots, rough and kinky sadomasochistic sex and black humour.

Costello, for better or worse shaped what we think of as a pornographic movie, paving the way for such directors as the Dark Brothers, Eon Mckai, and Rob Black (who remade Forced Entry).

Costello never worked under his real name. Instead he employed such pseudonyms as Helmut Richler, Warren Evans, Russ Carlson, Oscar Tripe, Amanda Barton and Jack Hammer. In fact Waterpower is credited to Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano and for years it was thought he did it. It was only after writers Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford revealed who he was in their magazine Metasex that Costello became known.

In 2005 Costello, in an attempt to correct misinformation about his involvement in Adult Films, discussed his career on the cult film website DVDManiacs. He got his start in the late sixties doing 16mm and 8mm loops for such people as Bob Wolfe and Ted Snyder. Eventually he moved into making his own loops with other contemporaries such as Harry Reems, Jamie Gillis, Georgina Spelvin and Fred Lincoln. In 1972 he made Forced Entry, one of the first feature length porn films. Forced Entry is a violent film about a Vietnam vet who stalks, rapes and murders women. The film stars Harry Reems under his loop Moniker of Tim Long. The film was very successful and led to his becoming the main supplier of porno films for the Gambino crime family. Among the movies were titles like Honeymoon Suite and Joe Rock Superstar.

These were called "one day wonders", hour long films produced for around $5,000 and shot in a single day. According to Costello, he usually thought up the stories on the subway ride downtown to the offices of the Gambino crime family, who financed them. These little story outlines were loosely improvised by the actors. By 1976 he was being given larger budgets and began writing screenplays. The first one of these was Passions of Carol, a porn take on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. An interesting sidenote: the sets were designed by gay icon Tom of Finland.

The same year brought about his most notorious film, Waterpower aka The Enema Bandit. The film came about as a result of a request from Robert DiBernardo, a Capo in the Gambino crime family, who ran that organization's vast porn interests. DiBernardo, who was shot by Sammy the Bull Gravano in 1986, had been informed that a porno movie, based on the true story of the Illinois Enema Bandit might turn a large profit. The year before, a man had been convicted on assault charges that stemmed from forcibly giving enemas to co-eds on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. Although DiBernardo welcomed the possible profits from such an endeavor, he was embarrassed by the subject matter. Costello claims that DiBernardo, known as "Dibi" in the underworld, told him, "Look, this is too kinky for me. I don't want to see it. I don't want to know about it. Just make the thing".

Costello, knowing that Waterpower would never be viewed by the powers that be, turned the film into a parody of Taxi Driver with Jamie Gillis in the Robert DeNiro role. The film bombed on initial release and as a result, the directing credit was changed by the Gambinos to Gerard Damiano, who had previously piloted porn blockbusters like The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat. The film still bombed and was eventually sold to Rueben Sturman who distributed it in Europe and Japan where the film found great success. Over the years it has become a cult classic with such fans as Quentin Tarantino.

By 1980 Costello was making big budget films for Ruben Sturman, such as Hot Dreams, Beauty and Dracula Exotica which are some of the finest examples of the so called "golden age" of Porn. In 1983 Costello, burned out after a sixteen years of living a "sex and drugs" lifestyle, retired from the Adult Film Industry. He moved on to a successful and award-winning career directing television commercials for New York based advertising agencies. Presently he is writing an autobiography of his life in the porn industry.